Riviera Blues

by Jack Batten

  “Listen, it’s too bad you came all this way, Mike. Cats closed in Toronto, I’m not sure, a year back.”

  “No problem. Cats is opening in the city of Winnipeg, Canada, on Friday … where is Winnipeg, my friend Crang?”

  “Keep going west, Mike. Can’t miss it.”

  “I fly there tomorrow. This will make twelve times I have seen Cats. I love the songs. I love all musical shows. Everywhere there is a new show, I go. Or if I have not seen a show for a long time, I just go. Les Miserables is my best. I have been five times in three cities each time. Paris, London, and New York City. Incredible, you agree?”

  “Took the adjective right out of my mouth.”

  I had Mike tagged for a fanatic.

  “What else do you do, Mike?” I asked.

  “I shoot.”

  Was he also a hit man?

  “Pheasant is my favourite.”

  A sportsman.

  “Very big birds, but fast. Zip, zip, they go by. You need the good eye, my friend Crang.”

  “I guess.”

  “Last month I was in Scotland for the pheasant. Eight guns was on the shoot. In two days, we kill ninety-eight pheasant. Thirty-six were mine.”

  “The good eye.”

  “For sure,” Mike said. His voice came close to rattling the windows in the apartment.

  “When I asked just now what you did, what I meant was, this is a very Canadian question, Mike, what’s your business?”

  “Oh, I see. Lot of businesses. I have business in Antibes that sells cars. I have business in Nice sells houses and apartments. Real estate, yes? And in Monaco, my business is boats. That was how Jamie became my good friend.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Pardon?” he said with a French inflection.

  “What’s the connection between selling boats and Jamie?”

  “He bought one from me.”

  “Little sailboat you’re talking about? Something to catch the light breezes?”

  “That is funny. No, no, Jamie bought from me a Hatteras. Sixty feet.”

  I drew a blank on the Hatteras, but the sixty feet caught my attention. That made it sound more like an aircraft carrier than a punt.

  I said, “This is Jamie Haddon we’re discussing, young blond guy?”

  “For sure.”

  “He bought a sixty-foot boat?”

  “Hatteras.”

  “Cash money Jamie paid?”

  “What else? Two guys go with the boat, crew. One guy is the captain. Other guy we call the mate, but he serves the drinks, you know, different things you ask him.”

  “Big cash money, I’m getting the impression.”

  “Very big. For sure.”

  Mike stretched the “very” into two long syllables.

  “Well, this is gratifying to us here in Toronto to hear how splendidly Jamie’s doing overseas.”

  “Jamie be big man in Monaco, you wait, and Monaco, honest to God, this is a place where we got a lot of big men.”

  “He’s only been there twelve days.”

  “Spend the money, you get to be big man fast.”

  “Really spreading it around, is he?”

  “You know the American bar at the Hôtel de Paris?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “This is where I meet Jamie. Most beautiful bar in entire world. Jamie, the night I meet him, he buys drinks for everyone. For me, for this Spanish guy who is a count, for an American guy with his wife who is in the music business. Own a record company, I think. Jamie says to all these rich guys, your money no good here. They love him, new young guy in Monaco, handsome, lot of charm. Everybody think Jamie the greatest.”

  “A vodka on the rocks, how much would that set me back at the American bar of the Hôtel de Paris?”

  Mike shook his head.

  “You have to ask,” he said, “you never go there.”

  “I’m curious. Polish vodka.”

  “Thirty dollars, probably.”

  “You’re right. I don’t qualify.”

  “Can I ask you, my friend Crang,” Mike said, “why you drop in? In this apartment?”

  “Request of the landlady,” I said. “She wants me to keep an eye on the place.”

  While Mike digested my improvised answer, I grabbed the initiative.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Me?”

  “Why are you here?”

  Mike didn’t miss a beat.

  “Shirts,” he said, broadcasting the word with so much power I thought I felt the wind of his voice ruffle my hair.

  “You looking for something in silver, Mike?” I said.

  “Shirts for Jamie,” Mike said. “He tell me, long as you be in Canada, why not you please stop at my apartment and get me some more shirts.”

  “The sort of chips Jamie seems to be in,” I said, “he could probably buy out every Hugo Boss outlet along the Mediterranean.”

  Mike shifted his shoulders in what I took to be a shrug native to Monaco. It was less Gallic than Annie’s, less Anglo than mine.

  “Jamie’s favourites,” Mike said. His eyes were steady on my face. “He wants his favourite shirts he left behind. Funny guy, Jamie.”

  As a liar, Mike had a flawless delivery. But the shirt story didn’t hold water. Didn’t wash either.

  “Well, Mike,” I said, “Why don’t I give you a hand?”

  “Huh?”

  “Round up the favourites.”

  “Oh, for sure.”

  We went down the darkened hall off the living room, Mike in front. The hall branched to the right at the far end. There were two rooms opening off the stretch we were in, one room on either side. I poked my head into the room on the right.

  “No, no, my friend Crang.” Mike spoke quickly as well as loudly. “That is not the room for the shirts.”

  Mike was right. A lamp was on in the room, and in the seconds I had for a fast glance, I’d say the room was Jamie’s den.

  Mike ran his hand up and down the wall inside the room on the left side of the hall. He found the overhead light switch and turned it on. The room was a bedroom. A hell of a bedroom.

  The bed was king-sized, set high off the floor. It had a frilly white canopy. The carpeting was white too. Mike and I stood in it up to our ankles. The walls were painted off-white, but what counted were the pictures that hung on the walls. Two Robert Markle drawings that concentrated on female crotches. A Dennis Burton painting from his garter-belt series. And a big Graham Coughtry canvas of a pair of entwined lovers.

  “A fella could get horny just standing here,” I said.

  “Merde,” Mike said.

  I cleared my throat. “The shirts, Mike,” I said.

  “For sure,” Mike said. He seemed to be having trouble taking his eyes off the Graham Coughtry.

  There were doors on either side of the canopied bed. Mike mushed through the white carpet and opened the first door. A bathroom. He tried the second door and got lucky. It was a clothes closet. Shirts hung in it on hangers. So did a couple of sports jackets, a charcoal grey suit, and three or four pairs of slacks. The shirts, half a dozen of them, looked top quality, in silks and broadcloth and in elegant colour combinations.

  “Just look, my friend Crang,” Mike said. He had a wide grin on his face.

  “I’m looking.”

  What I read on Mike’s face was the expression of a guy who was flabbergasted to find shirts that supported his cockamamie story about the favour for Jamie Haddon.

  “I think Jamie will like for me to take all of these beautiful shirts,” Mike said.

  He arranged the shirts neatly over his arm, and the two of us left the bedroom. I turned the light out on all that female flesh.

  “Mission accomplished, Mike,” I said in the l
iving room. I didn’t sit down. It might have encouraged Mike to remain on the premises.

  “You too, my friend Crang?” Mike asked. “You have done the job for the landlady?”

  Mike and I appeared to be operating from the same motive. I wanted him out of the apartment. He wanted me to leave first. I dug in.

  “Plenty more to do, Mike,” I said. “Read the meter. Check the pipes. Speak to Jamie’s upstairs neighbour.”

  Would Mike swallow that line? I didn’t think he had a choice, unless he was inclined to make a fuss.

  “Well, my friend Crang,” he said, “we meet again maybe.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll be in your corner of the world myself next week.”

  “For sure?”

  The hesitant sound in Mike’s voice said he hadn’t decided whether this was good news or bad news.

  “A holiday,” I said. “Near Villefranche for a few days, and after that, Cannes. Me and a swell lady.”

  “Oh, a holiday, my friend Crang.” Mike had decided. A holiday was okay. “You look me up for sure.”

  “Any place except the American bar of the Hôtel de Paris,” I said.

  I picked up Mike’s silver windbreaker from the armchair and folded it on top of the armload of shirts. I put my hand on Mike’s back. I may have been pushing him lightly as he went through the apartment door.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Whatever Mike Rolland came to fetch in Jamie Haddon’s apartment, it wasn’t shirts. Hell, the guy hadn’t been in the bedroom. Didn’t know where the light switch was. Hadn’t even taken in the erotic glories of the crotch collection.

  Whatever Mike came to fetch was probably in the den. Where the whistling had issued from. Where the desk lamp was switched on. Where Mike had apparently been poking around when I put in my unexpected appearance.

  I walked back down the hall to the den. Its decor was in a masculine motif, crimson and military wallpaper, soldiers marching, horses rearing. The rug was Indian, and the desk was black and sleek. Along one wall, there was a large-screened TV set, a VCR, a CD player, and a stack of CDs. One short shelf held eight or nine books. All dealt with the esoterica of computers. A computer sat beside the shiny black desk. The computer was called a NeXT in jaunty colours. Tidy-looking machine, as black as the desk.

  I went over to examine it at a closer range. On my way, behind the desk, I stepped on something that went crunch under my foot. It was a rectangular metal disk, a couple of inches wide, about three inches long, and not much thicker than a wafer. I picked it up. My foot hadn’t cracked it. An elephant’s foot wouldn’t have cracked it. The thing felt indestructible in my hand.

  I hefted it. Very light. It was black all over except for a silver band down the middle. I knew vaguely what it was, a disk that went into the computer. And a dozen more like it were scattered at my feet.

  I sat in the chair behind the black desk. Comfy. The chair was upholstered in soft red leather. Jamie kept a clean desk top, nothing on it except the lamp, a red touch-tone telephone, and a pair of pens mounted in a clear glass holder. The pens looked like they were used for ceremonial purposes only.

  I leaned out of the desk chair and scooped up the disks strewn on the floor. There were twelve of them, thirteen counting the one I’d stepped on. I turned over the first disk. It had a strip of paper taped across the bottom. On the paper someone had printed four words in neat block letters: “INVESTMENTS — STOCKS AND BONDS.”

  The printing was probably Jamie’s, and he probably kept a record of his dabblings on the stock market on it. With Pamela’s backing and his own salary he ought to have enough cash to take a modest flyer on the market.

  Each of the other disks had the same sort of neatly printed label. “Correspondence and letters,” I read on one. “Dictionary, thesaurus, quotations” on another. Well, okay, Jamie was hooked on self-improvement. Build up his word power. Stagger Pamela with his erudition.

  I riffled through the rest of the disks. Nothing set off alarm bells. All struck me as straightforward and aboveboard, the kind of stuff a computer guy, which Jamie apparently was, might store on his computer disks.

  So why were the disks scattered on the floor and not filed in the tray next to the NeXT where they clearly belonged? Jamie wouldn’t have left his disks in disarray.

  Pamela had been in the apartment after Jamie’s departure. If she had seen the disks on the floor, and she would have if she’d been thorough in her rummaging, she would have put them back in their proper place. Pamela’s motto had always been “tidying as you go is half the fun.”

  That left my new best friend, Mike Rolland of Monaco.

  Mike had been in Jamie’s library when I arrived, and he went out of the apartment wearing the face of a man unhappy with what he was leaving behind. Why was he unhappy? Because he’d been in the apartment on a search and hadn’t found the object of his search.

  That was a surmise on my part, but not a bad surmise. Another pretty fair surmise: he was looking for a computer disk, one that fit into the NeXT.

  I pulled open the drawers to Jamie’s desk. Time to launch my own search. The desk drawers didn’t hold much. Stacks of computer paper. The Toronto telephone directory. A guide book to Monaco. I flipped through it. The proper adjective wasn’t Monacan or Monesque. The book said it was Monégasque.

  I got down on my hands and knees and rubbed my hands across the bottoms of the drawers. No disk was taped to the undersides.

  I shook out the books in Jamie’s single-minded little library, removed the CDs from their plastic containers, lifted the pillows off the maroon leather sofa against the opposite wall and jammed my hand into its lining. No disk.

  I rolled up the Indian rug and rolled it down again. I unscrewed the base of the lamp and re-screwed it. I spent thirty minutes in the den. The room, I would’ve sworn, was clean of concealed disks.

  I gave the same treatment to the living room, the dining room, the undersized kitchen, and the bedroom that Dante Renzi must have once occupied. It was empty of Dante and his effects and of a disk. I had narrowed the search to Jamie’s bedroom. I made my way methodically through its closets, the two bedside tables, and a high bureau that held a few stray socks, some briefs in shocking shades, and nothing else. I pulled the drawers out of the bureau and turned them over. I patted the thick white carpeting for unnatural lumps. Nothing. I stuck my hand under the mattress. Nothing.

  Had I exhausted all possibilities? All potential places of secrecy? Was there an ingenious hidey-hole somewhere in the apartment? Inspiration failed me.

  I sat on the bed. It had a white satin spread. The pillows had satin covers. Seven pillows, one in mauve, two in silver, one in apple green … seven pillows? What practices did Pamela and Jamie get up to in bed?

  I stretched out on the satin spread and dropped my head on a white satin pillow. From where my head was positioned, I was staring at the Dennis Burton garter-belt painting. The woman in the garter belt was bending to one side. She showed a lot of haunch.

  I stared some more. And noted a flaw. Either the woman was bending at a very tricky angle or the painting was hanging crooked on the wall.

  I skidded off the satin and walked over to the painting. The garter belt was black, the haunch was pink, and the painting was tilting an inch too much to the right.

  I straightened it and stepped back.

  Nah. I’d made it worse, a couple of inches too far left.

  I put my fingers under the bottom of the frame and started to ease the picture back into line.

  On the back of the painting, at the bottom, the fingers of my right hand were touching something that definitely wasn’t frame.

  I unhooked the painting and turned it over.

  Paydirt.

  Layers of Scotch tape held something that looked remarkably like a disk to the back of the frame. I peeled off the Scotch tape. It was a d
isk under there, and it had a label with the familiar neat printing.

  “Operation Freeload.”

  I rehung the lady in the garter belt and backed off two steps. She looked straight to me.

  In the den, a small liquor cabinet nestled into the panelled wall beside the desk. Bottles, glasses, an ice-making machine. Jamie kept Russian vodka on hand. Or Pamela kept it for him. Stolichnaya. I built a drink on the rocks, raised the glass in a toast to my own perspicacity, and sat in the chair behind the NeXT.

  As a rule, I’ll take the quill pen over the computer any day. That isn’t a smart attitude in my profession and getting less smart awfully fast. Somewhere around fifty percent of my clients are charged with crimes of fraud, and lately too many of the people who beat a path to my door are accused of perpetrating their frauds with the accursed computer. I have to refer them to computer-friendly lawyers. It’s embarrassing, especially when the computer-friendly lawyers don’t send any quill-pen felons my way.

  I had a stiff swallow of Stolichnaya and thought, what the hell. Take a flyer. Fire up the NeXT. Stick “Operation Freeload” into the thing. Maybe divine its contents. Solve the mystery right out of the box. Why not? What was the worst that could happen? I considered the question, but I didn’t know what the worst could be.

  A button on the NeXT’s keyboard was labelled “Power.” A logical starting place. I pressed it, and the machine went into a mild convulsion of drones and quavers. When the dust cleared and silence reigned again, a box in the computer’s screen, black letters on an off-white background, seemed to require the answers to two questions. Name and Password.

  Name.

  Well, not mine.

  Jamie’s.

  I typed “Jamie” into the indicated space.

  Password?

  I typed in “Freeload.” It was worth a try.

  Did the NeXT like what I’d fed it? I couldn’t tell. Maybe it needed to chew on a disk. I looked around for an appropriate slot and found one on another black box that seemed to be a partner to the main computer. I slid in “Operation Freeload.” The disk disappeared into the slot, making a polite slurping sound in the process, and right away, the screen blipped up a bunch of lines.