The Reluctant Detective

by Finley Martin

  When Anne looked at her watch, it was eleven-twenty. Cutter would have had plenty of time to search and leave, even if the commissionaire hadn’t intercepted him. She had ten minutes to make her rendezvous with whoever was picking up the money. So she left the dresser’s room and worked her way past a rehearsal area, brushed through a heavy curtain, and stumbled into total darkness. She felt her way along the curtain line, tripped on something, and fell across the valise which had tangled in her legs. When she fell, she caught a dim glimpse of light. She pushed ahead and walked onto the front of the stage. Stairs led to an aisle, through a pair of heavy oak doors, and into the red carpeted foyer of the theatre.

  The front of the foyer was enclosed by a spacious portico with broad colonnades which widened into arches at the ceiling. A glittering gift shop spread along the wall opposite. Between the foyer and the shop a wide hallway ran from the building’s main entrance to the coffee shop and the bistro where she was to leave the suitcase.

  Anne moved slowly through the shadowy cover of the portico and headed in the direction of the restaurant. At the last column she paused and studied the brightly lit area ahead. The end of another grand hallway met this one. In the corner they formed was a coffee shop. Next to it was a glassed-in courtyard rising two levels up to a glass ceiling. Potted trees and plants gave a semi-tropical appearance to the courtyard. A dozen café tables and chairs were half-filled with tourists nibbling at their lunches.

  Mavor’s Bistro stood in stark contrast to the brilliantly lit and loosely structured courtyard. The black glass which formed the front of the bistro was the same glass which formed the backdrop of the courtyard. Together they vaguely resembled a French sidewalk café.

  Anne carefully watched the small groups near the coffee nook for anyone she recognized – good or bad. She didn’t want to get involved in any conflict. Nor could she risk even an unwanted conversation this close to the crucial drop. Then she peeked round the corner and down the long corridor toward the art gallery, the reception hall, and the stage-door entrance where she had met the commissionaire. When she was convinced that the coast was clear, she strode into the courtyard and through the bistro’s black glass door.

  Anne felt almost a sense of relief inside the bistro. It was dark as a cocktail lounge. A couple of tables were occupied, and the atmosphere was quiet. The lively jump of Dave Brubeck’s jazz quartet filled the silence. The air conditioning was up, and the black glass front allowed her to watch people outside but prevented those outside from observing her.

  The bistro was shaped like a railway car, long and narrow. Doors opened at either end. The bar, kitchen, cash register, and washrooms lined one side. Booths and tables lined the other.

  Anne slid into the first booth. It was the only one marked reserved. The seats were plush, leather, and comfortable. She leaned back and stretched out. Her foot nudged the valise on the floor alongside her. She ordered iced tea and a smoked meat on rye, though she didn’t think she could eat it, and waited.

  At eleven-thirty, she slipped out of the booth and went to the washroom as the Client’s instructions had directed. She waited the required five minutes and returned to her seat. The waiter had brought her sandwich and tea. It sat on the table. The valise remained where she had left it.

  Something must have gone wrong, she thought. The case is still here. Maybe he was delayed in traffic or something. But that would be pretty sloppy work if that were true… and sloppiness doesn’t seem to be a trait of the Client. Now what do I do?

  Anne didn’t hear the gentle swish of the door when it opened behind her, but she did hear a couple of soft metallic clicks when Cutter flicked his wrist to open his butterfly knife. He pushed into the booth alongside her and shouldered her over. Anne felt his right hand slipping between her legs and looked down. She saw the glint of a steel blade. An involuntary whimper escaped from her mouth.

  “Make a sound or make a scene, and you’ll never make another, baby,” he said. “Shove that suitcase over here.”

  “You can’t get away with this,” she said. The words just spilled out of her mouth as if someone else had uttered them. She wanted to retract them. She didn’t believe them. But she said nothing.

  “Shut up and do it!” he growled.

  Anne let her hand feel about under the table. She grabbed the handle and slid the case toward the outside of the booth. Cutter grabbed it; the knife disappeared; he stood up and reached for the door.

  Anne heard the great crash before she saw what caused it. The sharpness of it cut through her fear and brought her to her senses again. She turned her head in time to see Cutter stagger backward and about to go down. His hand let go the valise in order to keep himself from falling flat. He clutched for a corner of a booth. Behind him through the door came Constable Timmons in plain clothes. A trickle of blood had begun to dribble from a gash on Cutter’s temple where the edge of the door had caught him. Timmons rushed forward. Cutter recovered and hurled himself toward Timmons head low enough to catch him square in the belly. The force of it drove Timmons into a booth, Cutter on top of him. Constable Doiron in uniform with another officer burst through the other door as Cutter pummelled Timmons who was trapped between the table and the seat of the booth, unable to swing freely, and unable to gain a footing.

  Doiron pulled a pepper spray canister from her belt, levelled it a few feet from Cutter’s face, and pulled the trigger. Cutter stood erect like a cranky bear and lumbered towards her, his arms stretched out to interfere with the spray and to grapple her, but it took only those few seconds for Timmons to leap up, grab Cutter from behind, twist him off balance, and pin him face down on the floor.

  Timmons handcuffed Cutter, stood up, took a breath, and looked around. Anne was gone. So was the valise.

  “Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!”

  32

  Anne raced up the stairs from the Confed Centre’s courtyard to the plaza above it. Her eyes had not yet adjusted from the intimate lighting of the bistro to the glare of the noonday sun. For too many precious seconds she couldn’t clearly see who or what was around her, but she heard the throaty growl of several Harley motorcycles, and that riveted her attention. She cupped one hand over her eyes and stared toward the menacing sound. She expected to see Cutter’s friend, Sean McGee, and other thugs astride their black machines, cloaked in black leathers, circling the Confed Centre like vultures spiralling down to feed on a dead carcass. But when her eyes became accustomed to the light, she realized that the rumbling of engines came only from a pack of tourists, probably retirees, riding stock bikes with sidecars, and heavily loaded with luggage. They thundered up Grafton Street, past the war memorial, past Province House, and disappeared just beyond the Provincial Archives.

  Several flights of stone steps brought Anne to a grassy divide between the Confed Centre and Province House, where the legislature sits. She looked desperately for Dit’s van, but couldn’t spot it. Her car was in the parking lot on the next street, and she was frantic when she reached it. Seconds later she jammed it in gear, tore out of the lot, and headed in a direction which would quickly get her out of the line of sight of anyone in pursuit.

  A few blocks away she pulled over and called Dit on her cell phone.

  “Where are you?” There was a remnant of frenzy in her voice

  “About five, six blocks from the Confed Centre.”

  “What are you doing there? The drop was never made. He never showed up.” Anne’s voice could barely disguise the anger welling up inside her. Dit was letting her down. He should have been in position at the Confed Centre to pick up the signal, and now he had wandered off somewhere. He could have blown the entire plan. That would have been irresponsible and unforgivable, she thought, especially when he knew how much she depended upon him to do this job.

  “I don’t know what happened on your end, but I picked up a signal moving just after eleven-thirty and followed it here.�
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  “How could that happen?” she demanded.

  “How do I know? You sound… angry.”

  “I’m… not. It’s just that… where are you anyway?”

  “MacLauchlan’s Motel on Grafton.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “Looking forward to it… but drop the attitude somewhere between there and here. The van can’t hold that many passengers.”

  Anne laid the valise on the front seat and opened it. It was filled with dozens of old newspapers. She closed it and examined the case. There was no bullet hole. Then it became clear. It hadn’t been a simple drop. The Client – or his agent – had switched packages, and he had done it while she’d been in the washroom.

  Anne pulled into the parking lot at MacLauchlan’s Motel. She located Dit’s van and hopped into his front seat.

  “Sorry,” she said. “He pulled a switch without me knowing.”

  “We’ll talk about that later. Right now we have a problem.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “The signal led me here. There’s his car.” He pointed to a brown Sonata. “Looks like a rental. The driver got out, took a valise with him, and went into the motel office a couple of minutes ago. He hasn’t come out… and the needle’s acting funny… and the audio signal is getting raspy. I’ve got a feeling that something’s not right.”

  “I’ll check it out,” she said, jumping out and trotting inside to the reception desk. She interrupted the male desk clerk who was registering a guest. “Excuse me, please, my uncle just came in with a medium-size light brown leather valise. Did you see which way he went?”

  “Pedway to the annex.” He spoke coldly without looking up from the computer terminal. His left arm lifted and pointed left and down.

  “Did he register yet?”

  “Not yet,” he said to Anne. “And Jimmy will help you with your luggage, Sir,” he said to his customer, and his face blossomed with a bright professional smile.

  Anne ran back to the van.

  “Dit, there’s an underground corridor that links this building with the motel’s annex across the street. He took that. He must be there.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “How far is the beeper from here?”

  “It doesn’t give distance. Just direction. But we’ll see,” he said and drove out of the lot and across the street and into the lot of the annex.

  “He’s not here either. The signal’s weaker, and I’m not getting a clear audio tone. I’m thinking that he changed cars.”

  “What are we going to do? We can’t let him get away.”

  “This is where it doesn’t get simple,” he said.

  Anne’s mind was churning out a fistful of questions she needed answers to, but she chose not to ask Dit any of them. In fact, the grave tone in Dit’s voice convinced her that it were better if she said nothing at all for the moment.

  Dit drove about for three or four minutes, his eyes regularly dropping from the road to the needle on his receiver and back again. He wore a set of earphones plugged into the device. Anne kept silent while he drove down one block, then another, then another and then another, saying nothing until, at one point, Anne felt that she would burst.

  “You’re driving in circles! Why can’t you find him?”

  “I’m driving in a grid,” he corrected. “Don’t get excited. I hope to find him by tracking the strongest signal.”

  “Hope to find him? What does that mean?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “And what do you mean by strongest signal. It points to where he is, doesn’t it?”

  “It does if you’re close behind. If not, then the signal bounces off nearby buildings. You get echoes… reflections. Strong and weak ones. The strong ones are likely the truer ones. Seems like he’s north or west of here. That could be a signal bounce, though. But time is a factor, too. The further off he gets, the weaker the signal overall, and we’ve got a two- to five-mile signal range at best.”

  Dit turned the car onto the Charlottetown bypass and sped up. Anne couldn’t keep quiet. She erupted again. “We’re not going north or west. We’re going east!”

  “I can’t acquire a strong signal downtown. Too many buildings. I’m heading for the airport. It may not be the right direction, but it has the highest elevation. It’ll give us our best shot. Maybe our only one.”

  Road construction and heavier midday traffic slowed their movement up the highway to the airport. It sprawled across a hilltop northeast of the city. Dit’s van pulled off the bypass road and followed a secondary road along a high chain-link fence bordering a runway. He pulled over and adjusted the volume and sensitivity. Then he took off the headphones and set them on top of the console.

  “The signal’s clearer but weak and getting weaker. There’s no hope of crossing town and picking it up on the other side. He’s moving too fast. Best I can tell is that he’s heading west-northwest. What do you want to do?”

  “There’s no way we can track him?”

  “Not unless this Chrysler grows wings.”

  “What if we just head in that direction? Wouldn’t we pick up the signal eventually?”

  “Possible, but unlikely. Any hills would block the signal, and there’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t cross the bridge to New Brunswick or Nova Scotia.”

  “Sometimes… like now… I have to believe in the success of hopeless causes. Let’s try. I can’t give up now.”

  Dit looked out the window at the flat green plains surrounding the airport. Long grasses swayed in the steady breeze, and late spring flowers were colouring the ditches and shoulders of the roadways.

  “It’s still a pretty grand day to tour the countryside,” he said, trying out a confident, resigned tone, “and maybe later we can find a nice restaurant to celebrate, or a bluesy bar to drink our troubles into oblivion.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  33

  “I’ve got one,” Jacqui shouted. She hauled back the pole and line. A one-pound trout dangled from the hook. She cranked the reel a few turns. The fish’s tail slapped the water. She cranked a few more turns and leaned back. The trout jumped and bounced onto the end of the dock and into her lap. “Delia! Help me!”

  “God luv a duck, I never saw a young girl as helpless as this one!” she muttered under her breath.

  “Help! I don’t know what to do with it!” She lifted the pole above her head and the thrashing fish lifted up and swung in complete circles around her before Delia could grab the line and trap the fish between her firm hand and the planks of the dock.

  “There! I think we’ve tamed the old thing. I’ll hold it down, and you work the hook out.”

  “I can’t. I’ll hurt it.”

  “It won’t hurt. They’ve got no feelings there.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Let me show you,” she said, grabbing the shank of the hook and backing the barbed end out of the fish’s mouth. “There!” She kept a firm hand around the trout and added, “Are we keeping it for supper or tossing it back?”

  “Toss it back,” she said after a momentary but deliberate rationalization.

  Delia dropped the fish into the brown waters and watched it swim away.

  “That was only a couple of mouthfuls anyway,” she said. A couple of right tasty mouthfuls, she thought.

  “Have you had enough of fishin’, then?”

  “Oh no, Aunt Delia. This is fun.” She threw the hook into the water, fed out some line, and watched the bobber drift downstream.

  Ben’s Lake was hardly a lake at all, even by PEI standards. It had been a free-flowing stream that scarcely anyone took notice of until someone dammed it up. The dam was high enough to create a thirty-yard width to the stream. The creek that fed it ran through the fold between two hills. The length of it disappeared around
a bend a hundred yards behind the dam and gave the illusion that it was much longer than it was.

  The illusion of a lake was enough for Jacqui, though, and for the tourists who came with their tents and trailers, now erected or parked in the meadow beyond the road and behind a thick stand of white pines. The lake had been stocked with fish. A few short docks reached into it. A canteen stood nearby, and benches were scattered about. For these, Delia was especially grateful.

  She wasn’t used to teenagers any more. The busyness of them was trying, and so was the boredom with which they punctuated it. She hadn’t remembered being so when she was young, but she allowed that she probably had been. It was so long ago.

  Jacqui, on the other hand, was like those yearlings up at Calder’s Stables. Jacqui had the same eyes as they did, wide and bright and eager enough to run toward almost everything they fancied, and they fancied almost everything.

  Delia couldn’t explain why she had agreed to accept Jacqui into her home for the week. She was seventy-five, a young seventy-five she would say to anyone who asked, but one troubled with arthritis. And carrying the pain of that old person’s curse, she was always pleased to find a comfortable interval between benches and chairs, and car seats and doorsteps, to rest on.

  Delia thought back to Anne’s phone call, just a few days after poor Billy’s funeral. She would have said no to her request to put the girl up, but there was something in her voice that welled up from desperation. Anne hadn’t said so, but Delia firmly believed that she was facing some crisis in her life. Christian charity wouldn’t abide Delia saying no to her, and that was that.

  It wasn’t so bad, though. Sure, Jacqui was wearing her out, but the girl was also making her remember what it was like to be young, even if she couldn’t recapture what it felt like. When was the last time she had baited a hook, she wondered. Forty, fifty years ago? No doubt even longer. Delia watched Jacqui fidgeting on the edge of the dock: she stood up; then she sat; she cast out, reeled in, and cast out again; she squatted on a post and gawked into the water; she jerked the line and muttered at the inactivity of her bobber, as if enthusiasm by itself would tempt fish onto her hook.