Riviera Blues

by Jack Batten

  I phoned Jake Finney and said I’d be over in an hour to pick up the disk and the printout. Jake asked if I had time to watch a video. He had 3:10 to Yuma starring Van Heflin as a decent but courageous farmer. I expressed my regrets. When I hung up, I changed from my jeans to the pair of pressed cords and put on a dress shirt and tie with my sports jacket. Swotty was at the Negresco. I didn’t suppose it would be a jeans sort of place.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The guy wielding the blunt instrument missed his timing. He swung too soon. I caught a flash of something to my left, black and moving. I pulled my head to the right. The guy’s swing caught me in the hollow between the skull and neck. It stunned me, but not as much as I let on. I let on it knocked me cold. I collapsed on the carpet. My head and shoulders were in the Monarch’s corridor. My legs were in the room. I worried a little that the sports jacket and pressed cords were getting mussed.

  I kept my eyes shut. If whichever Clutch had socked me knew I was conscious, he would strike again. Someone did a clumsy job of shifting the upper half of my body into the room and closed the door. I continued my shut-eye policy.

  The guy started shuffling through drawers in the desk. I had no sense of anyone except the shuffler in the room. Why a single guy? Didn’t the Clutches operate as a team? I opened my eyes a slit. My left cheek rested on the rug below the corner of the bed. I was looking at a pair of trim Italian boots with a lot of raised stitching in about a size seven. No Clutch would choose such fey footwear. No Clutch was a size seven. I lifted my gaze.

  “For chrissake, Dan,” I said. I started to get off the floor. “A simple knock on the door would’ve gained you admittance.”

  Dan Renzi looked stricken. I was on my feet. Dan had parked his weapon on the desk chair. The back of my neck was numb, but the rest of me felt vigorous. Dan’s weapon looked like the handle to a hammer. He went for it.

  “Dan,” I said, “I’m probably more experienced at this sort of thing than you.”

  Dan chose an overhead chop with the hammer handle. That gave me time to throw a left jab before the hammer completed its trajectory. The jab popped Dan on the point of his chin. He staggered back. The hammer made contact with nothing except air.

  “That was only a jab, Dan,” I said. “Think of the damage a straight right would do.”

  Dan’s second try was a sweeping clout from the side. I stepped inside it. The handle clipped me on the upper left arm. I hit Dan in the nose with a straight right. Blood spurted out of Dan’s nostrils. He looked astonished.

  “Hey,” I said, “don’t bleed on the rug.”

  I guided Dan into the bathroom. He held his head back. His mouth was making raspy swallowing sounds. I ran cold water in the sink. Dan plopped down on the toilet seat. I soaked a white face cloth under the tap and pressed the cloth over his nose. It turned instantly pink.

  “Keep the cloth tight,” I told Dan.

  I went back into the bedroom. The hammer handle lay beside the balcony door. I put it in the closet. In the bathroom, the noise from Dan’s mouth suggested a small and terrified animal. I soaked the cloth again. Dan calmed down.

  “What was it, Dan?” I said. “Looking for the disk?”

  Dan nodded. His face was all scared eyes and pink cloth.

  “The bleeding ought to be stopped by now,” I said.

  Dan took the cloth a few cautious inches from his nose. There was no bleeding, but Dan’s chin and upper lip were crusted in drying blood.

  “Don’t make any sudden movements, Dan,” I said. “The nose could erupt again.”

  I filled the basin with cold water. Dan handed me the cloth. I wrung it out in the water.

  “The disk wouldn’t help you, Dan,” I said.

  It was cramped in the bathroom, me standing over the basin, Dan looking like a fallen warrior on the toilet seat, but I didn’t want to risk a recurrence of bleeding in the bedroom. The management might bill the Sun for the damage. Dan said nothing.

  “You think the disk will tell you how to get at the money,” I said to him. “It won’t. It shows where the money came from and how it got to Monaco. No more.”

  Dan took a minute to process what I’d said. “Jamie’s dead,” he said finally. He sounded beaten. He wasn’t putting on a performance.

  “That may be the least of your worries,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got your own hide to look out for,” I said. “The people from the trust company will discover how you helped Jamie loot their till.”

  “Me?” Dan said. The innocence was back in his voice. He was performing again.

  “Wash your face,” I said. “We’ll talk in the bedroom.”

  I sat in the chair at the desk and waited for Dan. When he came into the room, he held himself in a gingerly way. He perched on the bed.

  “You don’t know what’s on the disk,” I said.

  “I’m not very good with computers, Mr. Crang.”

  “That gets you points with me, Dan,” I said, “but not with Cayuga & Granark.”

  “I just went along on Jamie’s instructions,” Dan said. His impersonation of a wide-eyed waif would have deceived anyone who hadn’t seen it before.

  “Jamie needed someone to knock C&G’s main computer out of business at eleven o’clock last March fourteenth,” I said. “How did he tell you to do it?”

  Dan touched his hand carefully to his nose. The nose had begun to swell. Dan winced at the touch. “You seem to know a lot,” he whimpered.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “What’s the answer to my question?”

  “I set a fire.”

  “Jesus, Dan, they could get you on arson as well as theft.”

  “It was just a quick little flash.” Dan spoke defensively. “Crossing some wires, that was all. Not a real fire”

  “Where was this?” I asked. “In the trust company’s computer centre?”

  Dan shook his head. “In a place under the street. There’s a system of wires down there connected to the computer. Jamie rehearsed me for weeks. Day after day, we went down there. He showed me how to cross some particular wires, wait four minutes, and put the wires back the way they were. I could have done it practically in my sleep.”

  “Jamie must have been pleased by the way you executed at your end.”

  “Well, the computer went down, and Jamie got the five million out,” Dan said. “For all the good it’s doing either of us now.”

  “Five million?”

  “The money Jamie switched to that bank in Monaco.”

  “Ah, Dan, how can I begin to tell you.”

  “What’s wrong?” Dan was indignant.

  “The amount Jamie redirected to the Banco di Napoli was twenty-three million.”

  Dan reacted like I’d smacked him across the forehead with a two-by-four.

  “Jamie lied to me?” he said.

  I spread my hands, palms up. “No honour among thieves.”

  Dan thought for a moment. “But if I’d known it was that much ...”

  “Yeah.” I nodded my head. “You wouldn’t have needed to consider blackmailing Jamie into calling off the heavy spending. You wouldn’t have snitched the disk from the safety-deposit box. You wouldn’t have set off the whole merry chase after that dratted disk.”

  “Oh, God.” Dan was shaken, and it was no act. “I was afraid Jamie would go through the entire five million in a couple of years.”

  “Twenty-three million could have seen the two of you in clover for the best part of a century,” I said. “But Jamie must have had other ideas.”

  “He never told me.”

  “There’s more bad news, Dan.”

  “Do you think I’ll go to jail?” he asked.

  “That’s probably the good news,” I said. “If C&G starts criminal proceedings against you, the story of t
he theft will come out in the press. The second-last thing Cayuga & Granark wants is that kind of publicity.”

  “The second-last thing?”

  “The last is to lose the twenty-three million.”

  “Well, they won’t,” Dan said. He sounded grumpy. “Not all of it anyway.”

  “You want the bad news, Dan?”

  “Not really, but go ahead.”

  “Jamie’s death wasn’t an accident,” I said. I shifted in my chair to face the balcony. “Someone pushed him out of this room,” I said. I pointed at the balcony.

  Dan got off the bed very slowly. He walked past me to the balcony doors. His legs moved like they were on automatic pilot. He opened the doors. Sounds of traffic came into the room. Dan looked at the balcony as if it might tell him how Jamie had gone over.

  “Take my word for it, Dan,” I said.

  “Miss Cooke told me Jamie fell,” Dan said. There was a tremble in his voice. It sounded genuine, but with Dan, there were no guarantees. “She didn’t say it was from this hotel,” he said. He shut the balcony doors.

  “Not to mention from this very room,” I said. “Annie was showing caution.”

  Dan hadn’t gone back to his perch on the bed. “Why would someone kill Jamie?” he asked. He stood between the balcony and my chair.

  “People were getting overwrought about the disk,” I said. “About the way it wouldn’t stay in one place.”

  “People?” Dan had a wary look. “What people?”

  “Mike Rolland heads the list,” I said. “He’s my candidate for Jamie’s murderer.”

  “Those men who work for him have killer written all over their faces.”

  “On the other hand, Dan,” I said, “where were you this morning?”

  “Oh, come on, Mr. Crang.” Dan flapped his arms. “Jamie was my best friend. Despite everything.”

  “You weren’t at L’Hôtel de Paris when I called an hour after Jamie hit the sidewalk.”

  “I just happened to be out. Big deal.”

  “And you rang back here from a pay phone. That might’ve been from some place close by this hotel after you called L’Hôtel de Paris and picked up the message I left for you.”

  “All right, I admit I was out looking for Jamie,” Dan said. “Why shouldn’t I be? I hadn’t seen him for two entire days. And when we talked on the phone last night, we had a fight.”

  “About the disk?”

  “What else would we fight about?”

  “I can think of other topics.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Jamie planning to ditch you,” I said. “He needed you for a job, taking out C&G’s computer. Which you did. Very nicely too, Dan. But from then on in, never mind the fantasy about drifting around the world, I can see Jamie, the kind of guy he was, putting you on the dispensable list.”

  Dan sagged onto the bed. “Jamie could be cruel.”

  “Did he talk to you about calling it quits?”

  “He said on the phone he’d give me five hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Just to go away and keep your mouth shut?”

  “Well, I’d have to keep my mouth shut, wouldn’t I?” Dan stirred, indignant. “Otherwise I’d be putting myself in trouble.”

  “Hey, now we’re getting somewhere. This is progress.”

  “Closer to disaster, if you ask me.”

  “Let’s go back to this morning,” I said. “You went scouting for Jamie, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Have any luck?”

  “Stop doing this to me, Mr. Crang.” Dan was working himself into a huff. “How would I even know Jamie was way over in Cannes?”

  “By following him.”

  “Maybe I would have followed him, except I never discovered where he’d got to. He made a big issue last night of not telling me what hotel he was at. Or even what city.”

  I gave Dan my seeker of truth look. He held my eyes without turning away.

  “You believe me, don’t you?” he said.

  “You don’t have a terrific track record for staying on the level.”

  “I wouldn’t lie when it involves murder.”

  “Okay, I think I believe you.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “One thing I should advise you.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t think of a neater way of phrasing this, Dan, but don’t leave the country.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because Jamie was the one whose name the bank account is in,” Dan said. “I can’t afford to pay the bill at L’Hôtel de Paris.”

  “You’ve got a problem, Dan.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I rode the train to Jake Finney’s apartment in Beaulieu, picked up the disk, and caught a return train to Nice. The Negresco was a ten-minute walk through back streets from the station. I went at it by way of the Rue de Rivoli. The hotel floated above the sidewalk, white and florid. Annie and the tourist brochures called the Negresco’s architecture belle epoque. I called it intense glitz.

  A clerk at the reception desk said Mr. Whetherhill and party were in the bar. Party? I hoped it didn’t include strangers, particularly Luphkin strangers. That might queer the pitch I had in mind.

  The bar opened a few paces to the right of the front entrance hall. It was two storeys high. The walls and pillars were of gleaming dark wood. There was lots of polished brass and decorative touches in maroon. It might have been a redoubt for the heads of the Fortune 500. I posed in the doorway trying to look like a guy between sessions with Donald Trump and T. Boone Pickens.

  The Whetherhill party was seated at something that resembled a conference table near the centre of the room. It was a party of four with no strangers on hand, but one mild surprise: Trum Fraser. He, Swotty, Pamela, and Archie were clustered at one end of the table. Swotty was holding forth. He looked grim. Pamela had put on five years since Tuesday morning. Archie’s manner said he was right on top of his game. Trum seemed to be making an effort to keep a shit-eating grin off his face. I crossed the room to their table.

  “The reason I have summoned you all together,” I said, “is the matter of the mysterious crime in our midst.”

  Swotty swivelled his head up. His expression would have looked good on a polar ice cap. “What in heavens is Crang talking about?” he asked Trum.

  “It might be, sir, that he thinks he’s Hercule Poirot,” Trum answered.

  Archie came briskly to his feet. “Do sit down,” he said. He slid out a chair at the end of the table opposite Swotty. Trum was on his right, Pamela on his left. Pamela blew a plume of smoke in the air. She regarded me from infinitely sad eyes.

  “Allow me to order you a drink, Crang,” Archie said. He was playing the genial compeer for all he was worth. I smiled my thanks to Archie’s offer. Archie made hand motions at a waiter.

  I spoke to Trum, “Somebody unlock the chain to your desk back home?”

  Swotty answered. “Trumball has demonstrated great initiative during these last trying days,” he said. “The trust company is in his debt.”

  Trum winked at me. “I gave you credit for the phone tip, old buddy.”

  “It’s what makes you unique, Trum,” I said, “that little pinch of generosity.”

  Archie’s signals brought a waiter in a white jacket to the table. Trum had a martini in front of him. The other drinks were amber-coloured. I asked for vodka on the rocks.

  “You will be interested to hear this, Crang,” Swotty said. “The trust company has recovered the best part of twenty-two million dollars.”

  Trum had a sheaf of much-thumbed papers at his elbow. He read from the paper on top. “Twenty-one million, nine hundred and eighty-six thousand, three hundred and fifty-four dollars, fourteen cents, in the bank account.�
�

  “How much for a Hatteras that’s only been once around the harbour?” I asked.

  “Our guys are grabbing it this afternoon,” Trum answered.

  The waiter served my vodka with a small flourish. I went into my jacket pocket for the disk and printout, and flipped them onto the tabletop. The gesture was more Travis McGee than Hercule Poirot. “Everybody want to listen up?” I said. I tapped a finger on the disk. “This is the inside poop on how ErnMax’s money got from downtown Toronto to uptown Monte Carlo.”

  “I think not,” Swotty said. “The trust company’s computer department is preparing all the explanation I care to hear.”

  “Let Crang have his moment, Daddy,” Pamela said. Her voice was strained. “He’s earned it.”

  “Is that so, my dear?” Swotty’s tone was gelid. “I hardly think you’re the one to make the choice of topics in this gathering.”

  Pamela looked at me. “I told Daddy about Jamie and me last night,” she said. Her eyes were rimmed in pink. “The whole godawful story.”

  “Yes,” Archie said, “and Pamela and I had our own fruitful talk.”

  “Good for you, Arch,” I said.

  “Go ahead, Crang,” Pamela said, almost a whisper.

  I didn’t wait for Swotty to butt in. “Give Jamie this,” I started, “it was a cute scheme.” Swotty stiffened in his chair, but said nothing. I described the way Jamie had plugged his NeXT into Cayuga & Granark’s computer, the way he had used his insider’s knowledge of the ErnMax account to pick up the first three entry codes, the way his computer expertise helped him dope out the fourth code, the way he had diverted the funds to the Banco di Napoli.

  Swotty wore one of his chilly glares through the recital. Pamela allowed a small smile to come and go. Maybe, skunk that Jamie had been, Pamela couldn’t help admiring the nervy nature of this theft. Archie appeared to be floundering on the procedural stuff about entry codes. Trum looked like he was waiting to pounce. I finished the explanation.

  “One omission, Crang,” Trum said. He poked a finger at me. “How’d Haddon put the main computer out of whack bang on at eleven o’clock that morning?”