by Marc Strange
“Tulley,” he says.
I should get contacts.
“What can I do for you, sir?” I ask politely.
“It’s … ah, most embarrassing. The … ah, memorial plaque, the bronze, rosewood frame, engraved —”
“Yes, I saw it. It’s very handsome.”
“It’s been defaced,” he says sadly. “Someone ruined it.”
“Where is it?”
He leads me back to the head table. The speaker’s lectern has an inner shelf where speeches and jokes and names to remember were kept, where Leo’s Hotelier of the Year Award is evidently still waiting to be picked up. The plaque has a big hole where Leo’s right eye used to be.
“Leave it,” I say. “Don’t touch it. Could be fingerprints.”
“Should I call the police?”
I leave him to decide that on his own time and give myself a mental smack on the head. I knew it. Happy-go-lucky, feeding my face, cavorting with the rich and semi-famous, forgetting what my job was. Where the hell is he? I’m crashing through a thicket of gowns and starched shirtfronts — “Excuse me, pardon me, let me through, please” — trying not to look like I’m panicked.
Finally. He looks safe enough, quite pleased with himself, in fact. Doesn’t look like he needs rescuing.
“Ah, Joseph,” he says. “There you are. Past my bedtime is it?”
“Car’s waiting, sir,” I say.
The ever-vigilant Connie Gagliardi has caught something in my face, or heard something in my tone. Maybe it’s the faint reek of dread still clinging to me.
“Hi there,” she says. “How’re ya doing, big guy?” It’s not an idle question.
“Just fine,” I say. “But it’s time we hit the road.”
Connie and Vivienne each take an arm and begin shepherding Leo toward the exit. I try not to bowl anyone out of our lane. There are smatterings of applause as we pass, a little bantering, an occasional mutter, genial farewells. Leo evidently has kissable cheeks.
The limo is waiting; our driver is holding the door. He has a moustache. He doesn’t have a stubby ponytail.
chapter four
We’re in a Yellow Cab, the first one in line at the taxi stand.
“What was wrong with the limo?” Vivienne wants to know.
“Joseph is overly cautious,” says Leo. “But I trust his instincts.”
That’s true enough. He didn’t protest or balk at being swung sideways, past the open limo door and into the back seat of a well-used Chevy. He’s tucked himself into the corner. I’m on one cheek in the middle, scanning through the rear window. Ms. Saunders is avoiding the imagined stains by sitting on the edge of her seat. Connie’s in front with our driver whose photo-ID declares him to be Josip Stanishevski. He looks like his photograph, and he drives like a cabby, and we’re out of there before the bon voyage crowd has stopped waving at the empty limousine.
“Did it break down?” Vivienne is trying not to be flustered.
Connie has the cellphone. She’s dialing Gritch for me.
“You should program the number,” she says. “You’d only have to push one button. Ringing … Here.”
She hands it back and I manage to find the flap where the sound comes out. “Gritch. We’re in a cab. We’ll be coming in through Olive’s. Check the street, check the lobby, post a Presbyterian, secure an elevator.”
“Somebody chasing you?”
“Make sure nobody’s waiting for us.”
“I’m on it,” he says.
“Seriously,” says Vivienne. “Are we in danger?”
“No, Ma’am,” I say. “I probably over-reacted to a change in chauffeurs. I’m sorry if you were startled.”
“Different driver?” Leo asks.
“Yes, sir.”
It’s ten blocks to the Lord Douglas. A high-revving Suzuki motorcycle zings by us and disappears down the street but I don’t spot anyone following us.
Gritch himself is there to open the cab door. Josip accepts two twenties with a smile. He was worth every penny. One of the Presbyterians, Roland is his name, a gentle soul, a bodybuilder, walks like he’s wearing armour plate under his blue suit, ushers the party to Olive’s front door. Gritch looks me up and down as I hit the sidewalk.
“Least you’re walking,” he says.
“I got spooked,” I say. “Gotta talk to the limo service, find out why they switched drivers.”
“I can do that.”
“Let’s get Leo upstairs first.”
But Leo has no intention of going upstairs in a hurry. He’s bought a round for the house, he’s greeted people he hasn’t seen in a while, and he has the sumptuous Olive May wrapped in a big hug. He looks right at home.
“I’d forgotten what a great place this is,” he says.
“I’ve got an elevator waiting, sir,” I say.
“Let’s stick around for a nightcap, shall we?” he says. “Olive’s going to play my favourite tune.”
“Which one is that, sugar?”
“Any number you sing will automatically become my favourite,” says Leo.
He commandeers a table near the bandstand, Vivienne returns from the powder room with her aplomb adjusted, Olive May and her bass player, the stalwart Jimmy Hinds, ease their way into a medley of Cole Porter perennials, and Connie Gagliardi is tugging my coat.
“Everything okay, big guy?” she asks.
“Looks like,” I say. “For now, anyway.”
“What spooked you?”
“Missing ponytail. Could’ve been a shift change. Probably a logical explanation. Maybe he had a haircut. Maybe he lost his rubber band. I didn’t need to find out.”
“I mean before that. When you came looking for us.”
“Bad practical joke.” I notice that I’ve started whispering out of the side of my mouth, bending closer. “Someone defaced Leo’s award.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” she says. “Graffiti, bad words, what?”
“A hole. Right through the eye.”
“Wow. Nasty.”
“Solid bronze. Must’ve used a drill press.”
“Or a .44 Magnum,” says Connie Gagliardi the nascent war correspondent. I worry about her. I’m going to buy her some Kevlar for Christmas. Maybe sooner than that.
Gritch returns from wherever he’s been. “Who’s got a .44 Magnum?”
“Dirty Harry,” she says.
“You find out anything?” I ask.
“Limo service says the guy hasn’t checked in yet. Name’s —” he looks at a piece of paper. “— Starr. Dimitar Starr. Reliable driver, supposedly, been there five months.”
“Maurice booked the limo,” I say. “Check with him. See if we’ve used this outfit before.”
Olive swings into “You’re the Tops.”
“Look at him,” I say. “We’ll never get him out of here.”
Leo and Vivienne are sipping brandy while Olive sings to them. Ms. Saunders has adopted the tolerant air of a slumming duchess but Leo is in his element. He’s enjoying himself. For the first time tonight he looks relaxed. I’d been aware of a constant hum of tension all evening but assumed that I was the one generating it. I can see now that attending the ceremony required an act of courage on Leo’s part.
Vivienne has demurred on the offer of a further nightcap in Leo’s lair and I’m escorting her to a taxi. I could have given Gritch the chore, but after insisting that Leo stay inside, he asked me as a personal favour to make sure his date was sent safely on her way. Andrew has signalled up a slightly spiffier vehicle than Josip’s cab and is holding the door.
“Do you tango, Mr. Grundy?” Vivienne asks.
“Not according to Ms. Gagliardi,” I say.
She sniffs at the name. Her night hasn’t unfolded as smoothly as it might have. She gives me a thin-lipped smile and takes the fifty-dollar bill. Cab fare.
Andrew looks me up and down. “That’s a splendid suit,” he says.
“Hope it likes mothballs,” I say.
A l
arge man is weaving across the street in my direction.
“Didn’t waste any time, did she?” he yells at the departing taxi.
“Who would that be, sir?” I ask.
“My slut wife,” he says. “You the new one? Hope you’ve got lots of money. She likes money.”
He’s on my sidewalk now, close enough to breathe bourbon on my face.
“I assume you’re referring to Ms. Saunders,” I say.
“Shit!” he says with disgust. “Saunders already, is it? Christ!”
“Excuse me, sir,” I say, “I have to get back to work.”
He takes a lazy loopy swing at me, well off the mark, not worth blocking, and sits down heavily on the curb.
“Would you like me to get you a cab, sir?”
“I don’t need you to get me shit,” he says.
“Perhaps not, sir, but I can’t leave you sitting on the curb, the police will take notice. Why don’t you head on home?”
He snuffles. “Why don’t you just piss off!”
I can see Andrew signalling to a taxi and coming forward to take charge of the situation. He can handle it from here.
Olive has finished her set and retreated to her private corner banquette. Connie and Leo are missing.
“They went up, sugar,” Olive says to me. “Two minutes ago. With Gritch and the Impeccable Bulk.”
“I told them to wait.”
“Leo was feeling mellow. I think he wanted to show your girlfriend his mansion in the sky.”
“I used to be good at this job,” I say.
“You’re still good, Joey darlin’, but you need to loosen your tie.”
Olive tugs one end of the bow and unbuttons my collar.
“There. Now you look like Frankie Sinatra. With muscles.” She gives me one of her throaty chuckles.
“I’d better get up there,” I say.
The evening has given me a bellyache. I could use a cold beer and a quiet place to sit. Someone went to a lot of trouble to mess up Leo’s memento. That is worrisome. Not that Leo sets much store by such things and would probably have stuffed the plaque in a closet, but I wouldn’t want him to see it in its present condition. And the missing limo driver is gnawing at me as well. One way or another I need to find out what that was all about. At least Leo had a pleasant interlude in Olive’s. By now he’s probably helping Raquel serve canapés, pouring champagne.…
Wrong.
Connie is waiting as the elevator doors open and her expression tells me more than I want to know.
“Joe,” she says.
Leo is sitting on the floor with one leg bent under him. He’s leaning against the wall. His eyes are closed. Gritch is on the phone. Roland is standing in the kitchen doorway.
I cross the room and look past the young man. Raquel is lying on the kitchen floor. Her canapés are scattered. Her shiny plates and glasses are smashed. Her blood is pooled under her.
“I just checked for a pulse, Joe,” Roland says. “Didn’t touch anything else.”
“Oh, Jesus Lord,” I say.
“Cops are on the way,” says Gritch.
Connie is sitting with Leo.
“My fault,” he says. “My fault. All mine.”
“Fire stairs?” I ask Gritch.
“Locked,” he says.
“There’s a blood smear on the key pad,” says Roland.
“Got a pencil?” Roland hands me a ballpoint pen and I use the button end to punch in the security code and open the fire door. Seventeen flights of steel stairs straight down, poorly lit. And faintly echoing.
“Could be somebody going down,” I tell Gritch. “See if we’ve got a man on the ground floor who can get around to the back.”
“You chasing?”
“If my knee holds out.”
Not an idle concern. Since tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in my left knee over a year ago, I’ve been careful not to make the joint do more than it wants to. Fore and aft it’s working fine, but thumping down an endless metal stairwell is a heavier workout than it’s ready for.
I can’t hear the echoes any longer. If there was anyone they’re probably on the street by now. Whoever it is, I’ll never catch them anyway. What the hell, it’s something to do. Christ! She’s dead. Raquel is dead. Lying on the kitchen floor.
By the time I get to street level my knee is throbbing, my shirt is sticking, and I needn’t have bothered. The street is deserted, no squealing tires, no fading footsteps, nothing to do but make the long hike around to the side entrance. No more stairs tonight if I can help it.
At the corner I meet Todd, another of Rachel’s hirees, clean-cut, competent, and confused.
“Joe? Who am I supposed to be looking for?”
“Todd, I have absolutely no idea. Nobody ran past you?”
“Not a soul.”
“Okay. There’ll be police showing up pretty soon. Give Gritch a call, he’s up in the penthouse, he’ll have to come down and escort them. Go ahead. I think I’ll take a look down the block.”
“What’s going on?”
I don’t really want to tell him. “Call Gritch.”
The backside of the Lord Douglas runs north-south. Across the street is the parking garage with a skywalk to the mezzanine directly overhead. To my left are the hotel’s loading docks, dumpsters, service entrances, and at the far end, the fenced construction site where the War-burton building once stood and where a huge hole in the ground has been waiting for Leo and his son Lenny to work out who will own what percentage of whatever they decide to build there some day. Leo has a controlling interest in the property but the hotel’s costly renovations have forced him to hold off on a start date.
The covered walkway along the fence has grilled portholes for sidewalk superintendents to check on progress. Since the hole was excavated there hasn’t been much to look at. The giant crane which stood idle and wasting money for three months has long since been relocated to a going concern and now, except for sporadic pumping sessions to get rid of rainwater, the site is essentially abandoned and resembles an immense square-sided bomb crater with a wide ramping slope at the far end.
And something or someone, in motion, near the top.
I can’t see much through the narrow grill. Just a shadow, a shadow that shouldn’t be there, moving with some purpose, lifting something, or hiding something, or shifting a piece of machinery.
My new size thirteen dancing pumps have given me a blister on my right heel and my left knee feels like it’s swelling up. Whoever is down there isn’t going to wait around for me to creep along. I was never much of a creeper anyway. Not a great runner either.
The truck entrance is around the corner, wide chain-link gates, padlocks, and numerous signs insisting upon hardhats and safety shoes and absolving Streiner Construction of liability for injuries incurred by unauthorized visitors who are correspondingly threatened with criminal prosecution for unlawful entry.
The gate is ajar, the chain hangs loose.
I can hear him now; he’s near the top of the ramp. He’ll have to get by me if he wants to leave.
I’m ready for just about anything except the sudden appearance of a motorcycle roaring up the ramp, scattering a roostertail of mud and gravel and heading straight for me. I make the mistake of trying to haul the rider off his saddle as he powers by and get knocked off my feet by a flying elbow to the side of my head.
As I’m rolling down the muddy ramp I can hear the bike bouncing over the curb and howling away in the general direction of Stanley Park. I stagger almost to the bottom, shaking my head to clear it and manipulating the jaw sideways. Both actions are painful. I don’t think anything’s broken but I’ve taken left hooks from professionals that hurt less. Han Chuen Chu’s creation will need dry-cleaning.
Almost pitch black down here. There’s a half-moon and scattered street lamps visible, and on the far side of the pit the north side of the hotel shows a few lighted windows, but precious little illumination makes it all the way down. The
floor of the excavation has the look of a giant child’s construction project abandoned in favour of a trip to the circus. Random, bound stooks of rebar jutting from truncated concrete pilings, meandering trenches, massive stacks of pipe and lumber, plywood walkways to nowhere in particular. All of it without apparent plan or purpose.
The south edge of the pit rises like a cliff face and above the rim the Lord Douglas looms like a second mountain range. Leo’s aerie is a faint glow high above. And, if I trace a line directly down from the penthouse, a plunge of probably twenty stories in total, I arrive at the dead man impaled on jutting rebar on top of a piling.
In the darkness I can’t make out features or details except that he’s lost a shoe, and his blood is staining the concrete.
chapter five
The detectives who catch the case are both men, Geoff Mooney and “Looch” Pazzano. Mooney is the senior guy, about fifty, mournful features, bags under his eyes, quiet and careful the way he moves around. His partner is in his thirties, a bruiser, bristly black hair, thick neck, small feet. There are two uniforms in the room as well — first officers on the scene. One is a woman. She’s Asian, possibly Chinese, I’ll know soon enough. Her partner is a guy I met some years back. His name will come to me. I’m not thinking very straight right now. The four cops have taken over the living room and the kitchen. We’re all in the elevator foyer. Leo is sitting beside Connie. He’s looking straight ahead, his eyes reaching for somewhere else he’d rather be.
“That’s a good-looking bruise,” Gritch says.
“I hope he broke his elbow.” I’m still a bit woozy. “At least I think it was his elbow, might have been a handlebar.”
Gritch is keeping his voice down. Roland is behind him, leaning over his shoulder to catch the words.
“Knew something was up as soon as the elevator got here,” Gritch says. “The armchair was on its side. I told Leo to hold it. The living room was trashed, the TV, the French doors. Roland checked down the hall, I went across to the kitchen.”
“Nothing down the hall,” Roland says. “Bedrooms, bathrooms, nothing.”
“Whatever happened, happened in there,” Gritch says.
Mooney comes out of the living room and looks in my direction. He comes over.
