by Jack Batten
“Well, hell, you might’s well lock the gate,” the rotund man said. “I’m only supposed to look after this here one for the vehicles.”
He pronounced it vee-hick-els.
I snapped the lock and waved to the rotund man.
“See you next year around the same time,” I said. My smile was as radiant as Wayne Newton’s. And as false.
“Where’d you say you two guys were from?” the rotund man asked. “Like, what company?”
The smile must have been too close to Wayne Newton’s.
“Didn’t say,” I said.
“Maybe I better take a look at who sent you people,” the rotund man said. He put the cigar back in his mouth, the keys in his pants pocket, and took a first step toward us. “I mean, what’s the kid doing with that there stool anyway?”
A horn honked behind us. The rotund man turned. A pickup truck had pulled behind the Cutlass, and back of the pickup a bright yellow Honda Civic was stopping. The pickup’s driver leaned out of the window. He was wearing a maroon and yellow Ace cap and a pair of wraparound sunglasses.
“You gonna jaw all morning, Wally?” he shouted. “Or you opening the fucking gate?”
Rotund Wally looked at the driver and back to us.
“Stay right there,” he said to James and me. “Just my duty, you understand, but I gotta check who you are.”
“No problem, Wally,” I said. The grin made my cheeks throb.
The driver in the pickup sounded another blast of his horn.
“Hold your water,” Wally said. He got the key ring from his pocket and unlocked the padlock on the truck gate.
“Soon as he moves his car,” I said to James, “we walk over to the Dart.”
Wally swung open the gate, secured it in place, and climbed back in the Cutlass.
“Now,” I said.
James and I stepped between the rear of the pickup truck and the front of the yellow Honda. I gave a friendly flick of my hand to the man behind the Honda’s wheel. He smiled back. Two more cars had joined the line waiting to get in the gate. James and I crossed the road and reached the Majestic parking lot. Rotund Wally had driven his Cutlass far enough into the Ace grounds to allow the following cars room to pull in and pass him. When he stepped from his driver’s seat, dust stirred by the wheels of the cars whirled around him. By the time James and I got to the Dart, Rotund Wally hadn’t spotted us.
“This is cutting it too fine, Crang,” Harry Hein said from the back seat. The briefcase sat on his lap and he’d worked his white handkerchief into a damp ball.
I turned the Dart out of the parking lot to the right. Rotund Wally, his hands swatting at the cloud of dust that enveloped him, was looking left. We drove downtown into the rising sun. My eyes ached, and the rest of my body felt the way it should, like it’d been up all night. No one spoke in the car until I turned off the Gardiner at Spadina.
“Now we’re all square, Crang?” Harry said.
“It’s a saw-off in the favour department, Harry,” I said.
Harry thought he’d need until Monday morning to sort out the data he’d lifted from Ace’s accounting department. I let him out of the car in front of his office, then drove James to Regent Park, where I handed the kid six twenties. He raised his eyebrows.
“Bonus for efficiency,” I said.
James walked away from the Dart without speaking. I went home and stood in the kitchen and drank a quart of milk from the carton.
20
IT WAS DARK and I answered the phone on the first ring. The small black clock on my bedside table read twenty past four. Annie moaned from under a pillow. She didn’t wake up. Answering on the first ring wasn’t bad for someone who’d devoted most of the previous early morning to breaking the laws against burglary. After I’d got back from Ace, I napped for a couple of hours and met Annie at the airport. In the afternoon, we’d wandered around the Saturday antiques market at Harbourfront and eaten dinner at a restaurant called Spinnakers. It was outdoors and had a view over to the Toronto Islands. I didn’t tell Annie about the undercover operation at Ace.
“This better not be a wrong number,” I said into the phone. I was whispering.
“Mr. Crang?” a woman’s voice said. I recognized Alice Brackley. She slurred her words. Both of them.
“What is it, Ms. Brackley?” I said. I was still whispering. Annie didn’t stir.
“I need t’see you,” she said. She shushed the “s.” “V’ry import’nt.”
“I don’t think La Serre is open at this hour, Ms. Brackley,” I said. “How about noon? Noon today? Sunday? That convenient?”
“Life er death,” she said on the phone.
“Whose?” I asked.
The silence on the line lasted long enough for me to suppose Alice Brackley might have gone for a fresh drink.
“V’ry import’nt.” She was still with the phone.
“What’s the address, Ms. Brackley?” I said, louder than a whisper. “I’ll come by your house around noon.”
“’At’s right,” she said.
The next sound from her end was the dial tone. I eased the receiver back on the hook.
“A client in extremis?” Annie said. Her voice was muffled.
“Sorry,” I said. I felt for her shoulder. “Tried not to wake you.”
“You almost made it,” Annie said. She snuggled her back against my chest. “Who called?”
“Alice Brackley,” I said. “She seemed to be keeping company with Rob Roy.”
“Poor thing,” Annie said. The snuggle was escalating in erotic degrees. “What’d she want?”
“An appointment.”
Annie rolled over on her back and put her arms around my neck.
She said, “I won’t keep you but a few moments.”
“We’ve got most of eight hours.”
Annie and I surfaced from love and sleep a little after nine. The morning felt to me like wheat cakes. I made them from a box that said “jiffy” on the front. They came out lumpy, but Annie said they tasted just like the kind her mother used to whip up. I served the wheat cakes on the kitchen table with orange juice squeezed from real oranges by my own hand, slices of nut bread, some peach preserve I bought one Saturday morning at the St. Lawrence Market, and a pot of coffee. Annie said she was starved, and both of us ate without much talk.
“I’ve done it again,” Annie said after a while.
“Which it is that?”
“The one where I over-research.”
Annie went to the refrigerator and got out cream for her coffee. She was wearing a Boston Celtics sweatshirt of mine. It looked fetching with the silk panties. They weren’t mine.
“The piece on the critics has to run twenty minutes,” Annie said. “Absolutely not a second longer. What I’ve got is enough to keep the network humming for two hours. All golden stuff.”
Annie’s Friday in Manhattan had been full of surprises of the welcome variety. When she finished with Vincent Canby at the Times office, he offered to put her in touch with David Denby, the guy who writes movie reviews for New York magazine. Denby was free that afternoon. Annie interviewed him, and Denby directed her to a party Friday night where she met Molly Haskell, who does the Vogue reviews. Annie unloaded her Nagra and Haskell talked into it.
“The things she came up with were bang on,” Annie said in the kitchen.
“Which is the trouble.”
Annie said, “Every syllable I taped from Jay Scott and the New York people is terrific radio if I do say so myself.”
“You’re entitled.”
“I’ll be days in an editing room.”
I told Annie I’d drive her to the CBC Radio building.
“No rush,” she said. “I’ve checked. All the editing machines are booked until two o’clock.”
I said my appointment with Alice Brackley was for noon. “If an appointment,” I said, “is what I’ve got.”
“Poor thing.”
“That’s what you called her this mo
rning.”
Annie leaned her elbows on the kitchen table and held the coffee cup between her hands. On the middle finger of her left hand she was wearing a ring with a rectangular piece of lapis lazuli.
“We’re getting to be buddies, Alice and me,” Annie said. “I seem to know more than maybe I should about her personal life and I like her. She’s nice, nothing more spectacular than that, nice and quite bright and quite good-looking and I like her. And, well, she’s got problems. I can’t forget the way she was at La Serre that first time all of us met. Alice sat there, partly scared of Grimaldi and partly attracted to him. Or that’s how it seems now, and it just strikes me as unfair.”
“Very important is how she put it on the phone,” I said.
Annie’s coffee cup was three-quarters empty. I picked up the pot. Annie spread her fingers over the top of the cup.
“No more,” she said. “I’m going to be practically injecting caffeine at the CBC.”
I rinsed the dishes in the sink, put the peach preserve in the refrigerator, and took a new cup of coffee back to the kitchen table.
“Alice’s call this morning,” Annie said, “was it the first you’ve heard from the Ace people in the last few days?”
“They haven’t come knocking on my door,” I said. “But you might say I knocked on theirs.”
“Anybody home?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “no.”
“That didn’t stop you.”
Annie’s tone was bantering. But with another question or two, she would push me into telling her things she would not approve of. I knew the conversation was headed in that direction and Annie knew it. That would end the bantering.
“You remember Harry Hein?” I said.
“Your accountant client,” Annie said. “But wait a sec, I’m not finished with Ace.”
“None of us is, not you or me or Harry,” I said. “I was able to put my hands on some Ace documents. Harry’s analyzing them with his accountant’s eye and maybe we’ll see what sort of chicanery Ace is involved in.”
Annie said, “You phrased that circumspectly.”
“Circumspection and I are well acquainted.”
Annie leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms over her head. She made small groaning noises and gave the Boston Celtics shirt an interesting workout. The shirt had number 33 on the other side. Larry Bird’s number. Annie brought her hands back to her lap.
“Okay,” she said. “You mind getting some more of that peach jam out of the fridge and another piece of the nice bread?”
While Annie chewed on her bread and preserve, I looked through the telephone book.
“Ms. Brackley?” Annie asked.
“There’s an A. Brackley on one of the streets that run off Avenue Road north of the Four Seasons,” I said. “Must be her. Only seven Brackleys in the listings.”
Annie said, “Is the means by which you put your hands on the Ace documents likely to get you in trouble?”
“How accurately you remember my circumspect phrasing.”
“Must be practice.”
“Not now it isn’t going to get me in trouble.”
Annie reached for a paper napkin and wiped the preserve off her hands. She put a clean hand on the back of mine and squeezed gently. I turned my hand over and squeezed hers.
“Phone Alice,” Annie said.
I dialled the number from the phone book and let it ring ten times. No one picked up the phone on the other end.
Annie said, “You thought she’d been drinking.”
I put the receiver down.
“She’d packed away enough to make her lose the tremor in her voice,” I said.
“She’s probably sleeping it off,” Annie said.
“Maybe.”
“That sounds like a dubious maybe.”
“Another thing she said on the phone this morning,” I said, “was life or death.”
“Was she being dramatic?”
“Possible.”
“That’s one dubious maybe and a very shaky possible.”
I said, “I’ll go by her house.”
Annie went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. When she came out, she was wearing a towel. It was wrapped around her wet hair.
“Don’t think I’m slow,” she said, “but is there a connection between your possession of those Ace documents you were talking about and Alice Brackley’s case of nerves?”
“I was pondering that one.”
“How’d the pondering come out?”
“The connection’s too remote,” I said.
“But not utterly beyond question?” Annie said.
“First place,” I said, “it’d take luck and some fast figuring by a very clever person for anyone at Ace to realize I have some of their documents. Copies of documents, to get specific.”
Annie was rubbing her hair with the towel.
“Second place,” I said, “it hasn’t been established yet, not in black and white, that the documents prove anything crooked on Ace’s part.”
“That’s Harry Hein’s role?”
“Right.”
“So how come Alice got herself tanked and phoned you out of business hours?”
“Alice is the weak link maybe,” I said. I’d almost finished a third cup of coffee. “The rest of the gang at Ace, Grimaldi and the guy with the nose and the others, dirty stuff is old hat to them. But if the company is cheating at the Metro dumps and Alice knows it, she’s more likely to run scared when someone comes poking into the operation.”
“Namely you.”
“Yeah,” I said. I put my empty cup on the table. “Me namely.”
Annie shook her hair. It was damp and sleek, and she was standing naked in the kitchen.
“Love your outfit,” I said.
“Really?” she said. She vamped like Marilyn Monroe. “This old thing?”
I showered and shaved, then got dressed in the bedroom, where Annie had settled on the bed. She had on my terry cloth bathrobe and was surrounded by the Nagra, her interview tapes, and a notebook. She said she was going to play the tapes and make notes on passages that could be edited out when she got to the CBC.
“Tell Alice hello from me,” Annie said.
I said I would.
21
SOMEBODY HAD ORGANIZED an anti-nuke demonstration outside the provincial legislature. I drove up University Avenue straight toward the legislative building and swung the Volks around Queen’s Park Crescent. The demonstration had drawn a small turnout, not more than a couple of hundred people. A young man carried a sign that read “Arms Are For Hugging,” and a folk trio sang a ragged version of “Blowing in the Wind” from the steps of the legislative building. A sunny Sunday in July didn’t strike me as prime time for a rally against nuclear disarmament. Schedule the same event for a brisk Saturday in October and two or three thousand concerned Torontonians would show up. They might even find some politicians on the premises.
I crossed Bloor and began watching for Alice Brackley’s street on the left. Her neighbourhood was in the eastern Annex, where the battle against encroaching developers was being waged in the front lines. A handful of condominiums and some tacky reno jobs had insinuated themselves among the Annex’s dignified old homes, but the residents were showing stubborn resistance. The streets remained green and the houses had a proud, cared-for look. Alice Brackley’s street ran one-way into Avenue Road. I went a block north and parked under a chestnut tree. It appeared to be in sturdy health.
I walked around the corner to the Brackley house. It was on the north side of the street, a narrow and elegant two-storey townhouse built of red brick that had been recently sandblasted. Two brass lamps were mounted on either side of the front door, and the bricked-over yard had four large wooden tubs overflowing with deep red impatiens. Except for two kids six or seven houses down from the Brackley place leaning on their bikes and absorbed in their talk, the street was deserted.
No one responded to my first ring
of the bell at Alice’s front door. Two more rings and a rap of the knuckles didn’t rouse any action. I looked through the small window in the middle of the door. The window had leaded panes, and I couldn’t see much past the entrance hall. It had a floor tiled in black and white and no sign of life.
There was a walkway between the Brackley house and the house on the west that went to the back. I followed the walk and opened a high gate to a bricked-in backyard. Lady had something against green grass. There were more wooden tubs of flowers, geraniums this time, and a set-up of white lawn chairs and tables. A sliding glass door led from the yard into the house. The door was open, and someone had punched a hole in the glass next to the latch. The hole was big enough to reach a hand through, and the glass was sprinkled on the brick outside the door. I stepped over the glass and through the door into the living room.
Alice Brackley was in the living room. She was lying on the broadloom, face up, with her neck twisted at a very uncomfortable angle. In my limited experience, only dead people assumed Alice Brackley’s posture.
I stood where I was and listened for noises in the house. A couple of minutes went by, and the strain of listening produced a small pain in my forehead. The only sound was of traffic moving on Avenue Road. If anyone was in the house, he was the sultan of stealth.
I turned and went back out through the sliding door and over the broken glass into the yard. A pair of monarch butterflies zigged and zagged among the geraniums. I sat in one of the white lawn chairs. The idea was to organize my thoughts and control my emotions. It might take a while. After three or four minutes, I realized that a phrase was running through my head. In for a penny, it went, in for a pound. Where had that come from? It made a perverse kind of sense. I’d been retained by Matthew Wansborough to look into possible dubious operations at Ace Disposal, and in the course of my investigations, admittedly of the ad lib variety, I’d committed a crime or two. It was too late to knock off the case even if someone—to wit, Alice Brackley—seemed to have been murdered. I got out of the lawn chair and stepped over the glass and through the door. In for a penny, it went in my head, in for a pound.
