by Ted Wood
Cooper stood back and his partner gave the prisoner a little shove up the steps. I turned and went ahead of them, stooping slightly so that I could rub Sam's neck as I told him what a good dog he was. I didn't let myself think what might have happened if I hadn't left him here tonight.
The detectives didn't say anything but I could tell they were no longer interested in me as a prime suspect. It would have been possible, I guess, for me to have set up this whole thing as a charade to prove my innocence. But policemen know that people don't play clever tricks like that. Most of the lying and cheating is done after the fact and is clumsier than this.
So we had a quiet little talk in Louise's front parlor. I brought out the envelope and note I'd been sent. They took it, giving me a receipt. And then came the hard decision for me to make, whether or not to lie.
"Is this the guy who clobbered you in that apartment?" Cooper was patient but insistent. "I know they all look alike to most guys, but you were in the East, you should know."
I struggled with the urge to lie. The prisoner had said nothing, done nothing, simply stood as if rooted to the spot. He might not be the man who had jumped me, but I know the Bail Reform Act. If I didn't say he was, he would be charged with Break and Enter and would be sprung before the arrest report had been typed. He could return, this time not trying to get into the house. Instead he might just toss a Molotov cocktail at the front door.
"He could be the other guy's brother," I said. They were both too experienced to buy that and I didn't bother trying any harder. "The clothes are wrong. The one who hit me was wearing a dark doublebreasted suit. It's unlikely he's been home and changed before he came here."
Cooper picked up a pear from the bowl of fruit Lou keeps on the side table. He went to bite it then turned to me and held it up as if asking permission. I waved and he bit the end off, sensuously. "I know what's on your mind. Him or his friends may be back to carry on where he left off. Right?"
"That's what I'm thinking," I said quietly. "My sister and her kids live here."
"Yeah, well, of course, we won't be able to get him bail overnight because he doesn't understand English and he wouldn't know about showing up for his court appearance." Cooper took another bite of the pear, filling his whole mouth, talking around the edges of his pleasure.
"Yeah, so we'll keep him in until the morning, when we can get the interpreter in to see him. Meantime, I'll get the scout cars to come by here and keep an eye on things. And you can stay."
It was the line I'd been waiting for. I nodded acceptance, as if giving them credit for seeing the light at last. "Good. I guess they're awake upstairs now, I'll go up and tell them not to worry, I'm staying here."
Hooper waved his forefinger at me. "You're free, but you're not clear. Don't leave town, we'll be in touch again before this thing is sorted out."
I thanked them and then took Sam outside as we showed them to the car, the prisoner walking awkwardly between them, paying no attention to anyone. They put him in the back, face down on the seat and got into the car, closing the doors quietly. "Don't leave town," Hooper told me, mock-serious, and wagged a finger as he drove off.
I took Sam around the house, telling him "Seek." He ran through the alley, probing under the verandah, checking the garbage cans, but he found nobody. "Good boy," I told him and headed back inside. It was obvious where the man had entered. Louise had a clothes dryer in the basement. The vent went out through the glass of one of the windows. He had removed the outside cap, shoved the pipe away from the window inside, then reached down to open it. I was very thoughtful as I ordered Sam through the house, making sure that there was no more problem. Not for the first time since leaving Murphy's Harbour, I wished for the comforting weight of my gun. I'm a Marine Corps style scrapper and know lots of tricks you don't learn in the Boy Scouts, but up against a qualified kung fu exponent, I was next to useless.
Louise had come downstairs while I was in the basement. She had plugged in the kettle and was standing, not watching it, pretending that she wasn't scared. "What happened here?" she asked quietly.
"We had a prowler. Sam pinned him and the detectives came and locked him up." I tried to make light of it but couldn't. This was her house not mine. I had no right to bring her or the kids into any kind of danger. "I'm sorry, Lou. If I'd known the case would have blown up into this type of situation, I'd have stayed in a motel."
She looked at me, the way our mother used to. "Is it all over now, was that the only person involved?"
I shook my head. "I don't think it was. I think you and the kids should leave here for a few days, until this business has settled down."
"Oh, great." She reached for the tea caddy and pulled out a couple of tea bags. "That's just peachy. You come visiting for a couple of days and the next thing I know we've got men breaking into the house, presumably to get even with you." She stood very straight and tall, proud as a lioness defending her cubs. "How do I know this is going to end here? How do I know these people won't come back after you've gone home?"
She hadn't raised her voice, but her questions were all the more worrying for being pitched in such a reasonable tone.
I tried to soothe her. "Look, we've got the guy in custody. In the morning the detectives will talk to him, through an interpreter. They'll find out who sent him and this whole thing will be over." It wouldn't be that simple, even if we could keep the guy in custody long enough to give it a whirl; I knew that but I lied. I was sick with worry about Lou and her kids and I didn't want it to show.
She wasn't convinced, but she's not a person who worries over nothing. She did what our Mother would have done in a time of crisis. She made tea and we sat and talked about it. First of all she threw cold water on the idea that there were Chinese people involved. "I've heard you say yourself, when you worked in Toronto, the Chinese people are the most law-abiding in the country. Now you're suggesting they're trying to attack me because they're mad at you. It makes no sense." Her voice was calm but her eyes were cold blue sparks.
I tried to soothe her. "I know what I've told you. And it's true. The Canadian Chinese population have always been great. Look at Mr. Luck, the guy who ran the restaurant in Coppercliff. His eldest son is a doctor, his daughter is a dentist, his other son is over at IBM showing them how to build computers. They're the typical people we're used to here. They work hard and they succeed and they're honest as the day is long."
"Exactly," Louise said. She shrugged deeper into her soft housecoat. It wasn't cold and I could see she was afraid, looking for reassurance wherever she could get it.
"Yes, exactly," I agreed. "But funny things are happening these days. The makeup of the Chinese population is changing. There's a whole bunch of newcomers from Hong Kong. And it's already been shown that there's a fair proportion of grifters among them. You read the newspapers. What about that guy found with his throat cut in Chinatown, that big square down on Spadina Avenue. The murderer was never caught. And you've heard the same whispers everybody's heard, about enforcement things going down in the Chinese population. Times have changed, and the losers are the majority of Chinese people, the good ones."
She looked at me soberly and set down her tea cup. "You think you can put a stop to this business?" I nodded and she went on, looking for the definite answer. "You can do it before you head back up north?"
I nodded again. If it became necessary I would quit at the Harbour and stay with her and the children until this business was ended. "I promise," I told her.
"Okay then," she said softly. "We'll do what you ask."
We talked about that while we drank tea. The children would stay with their father and his girlfriend. She was doing her best to be nice to them, hoping to get the guy to marry her. The kids had been over there before. Louise would stay with a girlfriend from the advertising agency. I would stay here with Sam to help keep the house safe, and I would carry on with the investigation until we had wrapped the case up.
"Some crummy line of work yo
u picked for yourself, big brother," she said.
"I know. But somebody's got to do it and I'm not much good at anything else."
She smiled a tight little smile and said, "Okay. Just make sure to water the begonias for me." Then she walked away without looking back.
I set Sam to guard the downstairs and went on up to the landing above. There I sat with my back to the wall and my legs along the top step and slept until first light. Nobody disturbed me.
I went to bed before anyone else was awake and got up when I heard Louise moving. Sam was on guard downstairs but nobody else had attempted to come in. I took him outside for a quick check around the yard, then spent a few minutes roughhousing with him, putting him through his attack paces a couple of times to make sure he remembered all I'd taught him.
He had, and I took him back into the house for breakfast, scratching behind his torn ear, the memento of his biggest-ever battle.
At eight o'clock I phoned Fullwell and gave him all the news. He was beat but insisted on coming up to talk things over. It didn't take long. The police had all the information I had. They had warned me to wait in town. Bonded Security had warned me not to work on the case any more. "The only thing you can do and stay legal is watch game shows on TV," Fullwell said.
"Except for one thing. That Chinese guy will be in court. It might be interesting to see what happens there, who comes to bail him out." I stood up and grabbed my windbreaker. "You go home and sleep. I'll check the court."
Chapter 16
I left Sam on duty and drove to the old City Hall.
It has twenty-six courts, most of them dealing with city and provincial offenses, the petty stuff that makes money for most cities and helps make policemen so unpopular: parking, speeding, drinking infractions, everything except federal offenses. They're handled out of court twenty-six, so I went straight to it and checked the calendar. There was a Yin Chang on it. Bingo!
They don't list the offenses any more, but Chinese people don't get into trouble often enough for this to be a different man. I peeked inside but he wasn't there. Only the bit players, witnesses, families, and weary policemen were sitting in court. The accused were either on bail, stretching their legs in the last moments of sure freedom, or standing in the bullpen below the court, waiting to be brought out when their name was called. I didn't wait. Instead, to fill the last few minutes I went down and got a cup of the lousy coffee they sell at the stand inside the back door. It tasted like old times, not good, just old times.
An elderly sergeant was on duty in the court and when he came out to shut the door I squeezed by him and sat at the back of the room. Three lawyers were sitting at the table in front of the magistrate. I didn't recognize any of them. We rose for the magistrate and sat while a number of remands were arranged. Two of the lawyers left after this and the hearings began. It was the same old snake dance I'd attended so many times, high drama for the people charged, boring to the police and legal staff.
And then they called Yin Chang. He was brought up the stairs under the courtroom from the bullpen below. I got a good look at him. In daylight he did not seem very menacing. Not to the average North American, anyway. We equate menace with size and demeanor. This skinny little immigrant in his shiny suit and the soiled white shirt looked harmless as a flea.
The Crown Attorney asked for a remand, on the grounds that the arresting officers were in High Court on a homicide trial. That might have impressed some magistrates. This one only sniffed and asked about bail for the accused. I was hoping that the homicide men had informed the Crown of the facts but they hadn't. He commented that it seemed like a fairly minor episode. The householder had found him cowering in fear from the family dog. Everybody laughed, except me. I was wondering why nobody was making a proper presentation to the court, giving an idea of why the man was inside. Then I wised up. The homicide guys had guessed I would be in court. They were giving me the opportunity to do some of their work for them by following Chang for the rest of the day. This evening they would drop by my place and pick my brains, taking the precaution of warning me I had been a bad boy to follow up, that this was not my bailiwick. Like hell it wasn't.
The magistrate and Crown agreed on bail of two thousand dollars, a fair sum given the Crown's view of the case. If the man was a vagrant, he would have to stay inside, if he wasn't, he would be able to find the money somewhere.
The interpreter was called. He explained it all to Chang who stood without moving or speaking. Then, just as they were about to send him back down the stairs to the holding pen, a young woman stood up in the front of the court. "I would like to pay the money," she said, and although I could not see her face, every hair on my head tingled. It was Cy Straight's secretary.
In a tiny voice she asked where she could pay the bail. They told her and she turned away, heading for the door and the bail office. I got up and followed, not making it obvious, waiting until she was out of the door of the courtroom before I left. I caught up with her as she clipclopped over the old stone tiles. "Hi," I breezed. "Fancy meeting you here."
She turned, saw me and looked away again, quickening her pace as if she could shake me off. I walked alongside her. "Hi, remember me, Reid Bennett, we met yesterday?"
She stopped now and smiled an apologetic smile, as formalized as a boxer's handshake. "Of course. Pardon me. I was rushing."
"To the bail office to spring Yin Chang," I said, smiling just as wide. Anybody looking at us would have assumed we were sharing some joke and that she was waiting for me to deliver the punchline.
Her smile grew fixed but did not leave her face. "You were in the courtroom?"
"It was only fair," I said. "He was in my house last night."
Her smile flickered as a light bulb does when the current cuts in and out. A Caucasian girl would have gasped. "That's just an allegation," she said slowly.
"To the court, maybe. Not to me. It was my house and it was my police dog who pinned him. So I've got a special interest in the case. I wondered who retained Mr. Straight to spring him."
Now her smile grew wider, more natural. "Oh, but you know I can't tell you that. That is a legal confidence."
"It's a legal coincidence too." I beamed. People passing would never have sensed the tension that was building between us like lightning waiting to strike. "I came to see Mr. Straight because of his connection with some other bad people. Next thing I know my house is raided and Mr. Straight is paying the bail of the guy who did it."
"He is a lawyer. He has many clients. Not all of them are ethical." She allowed the smile to fade down to a polite creasing of the cheeks. I was starting to become a pain. Any ideas I might have harbored of getting to know her better were out the window. This was turning into a freeze.
"Then I will have to go and sit in his office all day again, all night if necessary, and ask him why he has such bad clients, and why he is so quick to come down and bail them out."
"He will have you thrown out of his office," she said.
"What makes you so confident?"
She turned and began walking again, towards the bail office.
"He told me, never to allow you to see him again."
"Just like that? How often does he lay down those kinds of rules?" I was still smiling, though my jaw was aching with the effort. "And what prompted him to say it? I guess he just walked in this morning and said, 'Don't let that man in again,' and you didn't say 'which man' because you knew intuitively that he meant me."
"He told me last night," she said angrily. And the words stopped me like a bullet.
"How?" I asked. "You left the office with me, and he was heading out of town. How did he tell you anything?"
She stopped now and turned to face me. "You are causing me a great deal of irritation, Mr. Bennett. If you don't leave me alone, I'm going to call a policeman."
"I'll head back and wait at your office, then," I said. This was the one building in town where it would not do to get into a shouting match with anybody. Besides,
I really wanted to get back in front of Straight. He had to be the missing link between the broken heads at Bonded Security and the money that came to me at home, and the death of Tony. A couple of questions was all I wanted to ask him.
And then the most curious event of the whole night and day happened. The girl stopped walking away and turned back to me, even walking a half step my way. "I must ask you very politely not to do that," she said.
I nodded, a reasonable man, ready to do anything that made sense. "Can I ask you why not?"
She took another half step towards me and the brightness in the corners of her eyes washed away any professionalism I had. "Because this man Yin Chang is not my employer's client. He's my brother."
Chapter 17
I said nothing for about fifteen seconds. Then I said softly. "I'm sorry that your brother has brought you this shame." She nodded but didn't speak. She was a Western girl, but six thousand years of Chinese upbringing don't disappear in one lifetime. She had already lost all the face she could spare and she was resenting my knowing and my presence both. I didn't think I could make any amends for it but I wanted to try. It was my best chance for getting a word in private with Yin Chang. Maybe he could shed some light on what was going on, but I would have to get on her good side first.
Then she said, "Mr. Bennett, you must excuse me. I have to go and pay the money."
"When you do, he is your responsibility. If somebody makes him do something bad and he doesn't come back to court, you will lose your two thousand dollars."
"I work for a lawyer, thank you. I understand simple points of law just as well as any policeman," she said, icily.
"I appreciate that. And I appreciate your feelings about my staying here. But I have to ask you to let me speak to your brother. Once I find who sent him to my house in the night I will be able to help him stay out of prison for good."
