Booking In
Page 30
“Bullet alert!” Annie hollered.
I headed into the garden. Annie was about halfway back, standing in front of the Kentucky Coffee Tree with her hand pointing at the tree’s trunk about five feet above ground.
“Ta-da!” she said.
“Aren’t you just the intrepid bullet finder?” I said.
“That is I.”
I leaned in closer. The bullet had penetrated almost fully into the trunk. Since both the bullet and the trunk were shaded dark, the bullet was close to invisible.
“This qualifies as key evidence,” I said.
“We need to report it to Myrna’s husband,” Annie said. “I understand the legal reasons for that, but we’ll insist that the actual removal of the bullet has to be carried out by somebody from the gardening crew.”
“Pony would be a just choice.”
“A person with the expertise to slide the thing out with minimum damage to the tree.”
Annie and I went back to the dining room. I made the phone call to Rolly while Annie rang Pony. When we were done, a meeting in the garden with all parties present was arranged for the next day.
Then I mixed martinis.
“I can’t tell you how glad I am to unload this case,” I said to Annie.
“I’ll drink to that,” Annie said.
We touched glasses and took sips of our martinis.
“It was an oddball as murder cases go,” I said, “when you consider the cast of characters involved.”
“Booksellers and rich people?”
“Yeah, them.”
“Murder and other crimes aren’t as common among such types?”
“In my experience.”
“So what does that portend for your future choices in clients?”
“You’re asking do I henceforth turn away such people as booksellers and rich people who seek out my help?”
“Rich people in particular.”
I shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t be averse to moneyed clients.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.”
“Which reminds me of something. I should get out a bill to Meg Grantham for twenty large.”
“Of course,” Annie said. “I was forgetting she made a deal with you.”
“I’ll give a chunk to Pony.”
“Without whom you might have been drilled by Fletcher.”
Both of us sipped our drinks and thought about the possibility of me taking a bullet. It wasn’t a happy thought.
“Speaking of Meg,” Annie said, “she asked me about your availability before I left her place this morning.”
“As a client,” I said, “Meg would have one irresistible quality.”
“Deep pockets?”
“The deepest by far among my own clients.”
“The thing is,” Annie said, “she wouldn’t be the client. She would pay the bills, no question, but the legal problem you would be asked to investigate is not hers.”
“Then whose?”
“Let’s have another martini.”
I went up to the kitchen and made the drinks. After I took Annie’s down to her, I went back to the kitchen and prepared a plate of crackers with pieces of gravlax on them topped with dill and mustard sauce, plus tiny lemon slices on the side.
“Yummy,” Annie said about the combination.
“Would I nail it if I’m thinking one of Meg’s sons is who you’re talking about?” I said. “The person who needs legal help?”
Annie, her mouth full of cracker and gravlax, nodded a yes.
“That’s who the client would be?” I said.
Annie nodded again.
“You’re being so circumspect about this whole deal, it must be Brent who wants my services.”
Annie gave yet another nod.
“No way,” I said. “I’ve had my fill of that creep.”
“Crang, my darling,” Annie said, her mouth now cleared of hors d’oeuvres, “Meg took me aside and passed on Brent’s plea. Brent believes you’re the only one who can get his money back.”
“What money? He just finished recovering his fortune. How could he have lost it again so fast?”
“Not all of it,” Annie said. “Just one third of what was left. A little under two million, Meg said. Or maybe a little more.”
“Jesus, I saw him a couple of days ago. The guy was euphoric. He was set to establish his business in the Caribbean. And I have to say it looked to me like he had a legitimate operation under way.”
“He apparently got double-crossed to the tune of the two million or more bucks.”
“Who was the double-crosser?”
“I wrote her name down in my notebook,” Annie said. “It’s in my handbag on the hall chair.”
“It was a woman?”
“Apparently a graduate of a big-time Ivy League business school.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus. Shay Burton?”
“You already know her?”
“Brent hired her off the Internet. She’s the one who set up the financial part of the operation. It took her a week, working night and day, is what Brent said. She looked like a night-and-day type of worker.”
“What does a woman like that look like?”
“In Shay’s case, like Hillary Clinton.”
“A pantsuit person?”
“Exactly.”
“The word from Brent by way of Meg, Ms. Shay Burton is suddenly untraceable.”
“As is two million dollars?”
“Gone with the wind,” Annie said. “And Brent is convinced the only one who can track her is you, just the way it was you who steered Brent to the Jamaican guy who swiped the whole ten million and stashed it somewhere.”
“On an isle in the Bahamas.”
“Brent apparently sang your praises to Meg.”
“But I merely passed the word along to Brent about the isle. It was Meg’s accountants who uncovered the location.”
“But Brent doesn’t know that,” Annie said.
“And I bet I’m right in assuming Meg doesn’t want him to know.”
“Correct,” Annie said. “She needs it to be kept secret that her people are keeping their sharp eyes on Brent’s financial transactions.”
“This is in the interests of maintaining peace in the family.”
“And encouraging Brent to think of himself as an investment wizard when he is, in fact, a first-class dink with money, born to let his pockets be picked.”
“Besides that,” Annie said, “you don’t care for his personality?”
“The guy tests my patience.”
“What about the lure of this particular case?”
I took another hit of martini. “How in hell,” I said, “did Shay Burton slip away with the two million? Brent was sitting in the same room with her for the best part of a week. He watched her moves day and night, and still she evidently conned him.”
“And then, also evidently, vanished.”
“Not bad, as puzzles go. In fact, definitely intriguing.”
“But not appealing enough for you to hire on with Brent?”
I shook my head, though I realized I wasn’t putting much emotion into the shake. How did I balance the factors that went into a decision? I’d love to know how Shay pulled her con. On the other hand, I’d need to spend time with one of my least favourite people in the world. It would probably mean lunches at the Concord Club, home of wretched sauces, in the company of a guy with whom I had zero in common.
Somebody rang the doorbell. I looked at my watch. It was just after seven.
“Probably Jehovah’s Witnesses,” I said.
“Or Seventh-Day Adventists,” Annie said.
“All my favourite conversationalists.”
“You answer the door,” Annie said. “I’ll ge
t going with omelettes and a salad.”
I went to the door and opened it.
Brent Grantham was standing on the porch, a broad smile stretching across his face, a cardboard box, apparently heavy, balanced in his arms.
“Crang, old buddy!” he said.
I let a beat go by, mostly to adjust to the presence of the odious Brent standing on the threshold of my very own home.
“You going to invite me in, pal?” Brent said. “This box weighs a ton.”
“I hear Shay gave you the slip.”
“Word’s getting around already?”
“News of a financial heist always travels fast.”
“Well, listen,” Brent said, “you want to guess what’s in the box?”
“Wine from your mother’s cellar would be a good answer.”
“Take a look,” Brent said, his smile reaching to his face’s extreme edges. “You’ll really, ah, dig it.”
I folded back one of the box’s two closed flaps. A CD sat on top of many more CDs. The title of the one on top was Some Other Time. I knew what it was. I owned the CD. It was a Bill Evans trio session recorded at a home studio in the Black Forest in Germany in the summer of 1968 but not released until the spring of 2016. I had played the CD dozens of times.
I pushed through the rest of the CDs in Brent’s box. All were Bill Evans recordings, from every period in his career, the mid-1950s to his death in September 1980.
“Nice gesture, Brent,” I said. “But I got all of these.”
Brent shifted the box in his arms. “They aren’t for you, Crang,” he said. “But Jesus, I’d like to get the load out of my arms.”
“Who are they for if not me?”
“For myself, you idiot,” Brent said. Holding the weighty box was making him testy. “I’m going to listen to every one of these CDs. Twenty-one of the mothers. I can be a changed man. I’ll develop into a William Evans fan.”
“Just plain Bill Evans will do.”
“We can have discussions about his music.”
“This is in between times when I hunt down your friend Shay Burton.”
“That too, sure,” Brent said. “But the music’s the thing. Bill Evans is gonna bring us together.”
I stood on the porch looking at the photograph of Bill Evans in profile on the cover of the Some Other Time CD. I loved that photograph.
I stepped back and swung the door open.
“Come in, Brent,” I said. “I’m not sure for how long, but step in anyway.”
Other Crang Mysteries
Keeper of the Flame
Jack Batten
Crang is a smart-talking criminal lawyer who doesn’t mind chasing down unorthodox cases. That makes him just the guy to represent a famous hip-hop performer who’s on the wrong end of a blackmail scheme. It doesn’t strike Crang as a confounding case, but in no time, he finds himself confronting an organized gang that deals in porn, stock swindles, and murder. Things get so messy that Crang decides he’ll have to bend the law to make things right. It’s a dilemma that would cause other lawyers to back away, but not Crang, the nervy attorney with the fast mouth.
Blood Count
Jack Batten
At the height of the AIDS crisis in the early nineties, a close friend of Crang’s, Alex Corcoran, loses his partner, Ian, to the disease. After Ian’s death, Crang is enlisted by Alex to find the man who infected Ian. Crang searches for the man to prevent Alex from getting himself in trouble. However, when Alex is murdered, Crang owes it to his friends to find their killers.
The case, which explores the gay scene in Toronto at a time when LGBT culture was still very much a hidden world and open persecution was commonplace, ends up involving a cabinet minister afraid of being exposed.
A clever political mystery, Blood Count is also an emotional and moving story of a couple whose lives are devastated by AIDS and a community damaged by the prejudices of the world around them.
Copyright © Jack Batten, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover image: © 123RF/ Ilya Andriyanov
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Batten, Jack, 1932-, author
Booking in / Jack Batten.
(A Crang mystery)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-3691-7 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3692-4 (PDF).--
ISBN 978-1-4597-3693-1 (EPUB)
I. Title. II. Series: Batten, Jack, 1932- . Crang mystery.
PS8553.A833B66 2017 C813’.54 C2017-901850-7
C2017-901851-5
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Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.
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