by Jack Batten
“He had an ally.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Pamela said, “that weasel Renzi.”
“He’s the boy,” I said.
“To whom are they referring?” Swotty asked Trum.
“A kid Jamie recruited,” I said. “Name of Dante Renzi. Jamie drilled him in the art of crossing wires.”
“That’s how they took out the computer?” Trum asked.
“It was tidier than dynamite.”
“This man Renzi,” Swotty said, “he shares the guilt in Jamie Haddon’s crime.”
I said, “C&G would be out of its mind to start any legal action against Dan.”
Trum nodded.
Swotty said, “That decision will be left to our lawyers, Crang.”
Trum converted his nod into a dive at his martini.
I talked some more. I doubled back to Jamie and the optical disk and explained how he had saved it as a possible guide to future computer heists. When I couldn’t think of anything left to say on the technical side of the robbery, I stopped. No one else spoke. I drank a little of my vodka.
Archie made a honking noise. “Well, Crang, you deserve congratulations,” he said. It was a fight for Archie to keep condescension out of his voice, but he lost. “I know I speak for all of us at the table in expressing our, um, gratitude.”
“Thanks, Arch.”
Archie’s eyes polled the others for reaction. It was minimal. He was on his own speaking for the table.
“Yes,” he said, still sounding expansive, “quite remarkable. Absolutely.”
I drank from my vodka. It wasn’t Wyborowa, but it wasn’t French domestic. French domestic was as wimpy as Canadian domestic. The Negresco’s vodka tasted bracingly Norwegian.
“Okay, gang,” I said, “if you’ll keep Jamie’s mechanical manipulations on hold, the next explanation is about motive and other skeletons in the closet.”
“You have done enough, Crang,” Swotty said. “Archie voiced our appreciation. If you will excuse us, we have family concerns to discuss.”
“Swell,” I said, “family fits right into the subject I’m coming to.”
“My secretary will set up something for when you and I are back in Toronto,” Swotty said. His words had a ring that was meant to dispatch me on my way. “A lunch at the Concord perhaps.”
“The last time we ate there,” I said, “you gave me a mission under false pretenses.”
Swotty made a movement that was probably called bristling. “I’ll ask you to retract that statement, Crang.”
“Half a false pretense,” I said. “You were worried that the postcard might indicate Jamie was somehow off the rails. You levelled with me that far. But you neglected to bring me up to speed on your deeper fear.”
“Which was what?” Pamela asked.
“ErnMax,” I said. “The squad your father enrolled at C&G to run the ErnMax account was small, elite, secret, and included Jamie. It wouldn’t have been great for business if one of the squad, Jamie, was out of the country for three months doing an imitation of a loose cannon.”
“That’s another thing, the three months,” Pamela said. “Why did Jamie make a point of saying he’d go back to Toronto in three months?”
“Pure smokescreen,” I said. “Jamie used it as a cover for easing his way out of the city without raising any special questions. Just a young guy on a well-deserved sabbatical.”
“He never intended to go back?” Trum asked.
“Not him, nor the twenty-three million.”
“Jamie and Dan Renzi, the two of them on their own,” Pamela said in a small flattened voice.
The other three gave Pamela uncomprehending looks. She paid them no attention. Her eyes were stuck on me.
“Jamie ditched Dan too,” I said, speaking to her. “If that’s any consolation.”
“Not much.”
“Okay, Crang.” Trum’s voice came riding in. “We follow what you’re saying about Haddon’s theft. But, Jesus, we could’ve hauled him back to Canada. There are laws, pal, and even if there aren’t, there could be other ways.”
I shook my head at Trum. “Jamie knew he had two lines of protection against you guys. One, the only evidence of his theft was on the disk. And he had it squirrelled away. Or so he thought. And, the second protection, Jamie knew that C&G didn’t come to the table with clean hands.”
“You have stepped beyond the pale, Crang.” Swotty’s voice cracked over the table at me.
“The way Jamie looked at it,” I said, “the way the RCMP fraud squad might look at it, the team at C&G has been facilitating a crime of its own. Hiding assets. They run the machinery that’s stockpiling the Luphkin millions in a Swiss bank account. In other words, out of reach of legitimate Canadian taxes.”
“At this very moment, Crang,” Swotty said, “our counsel are preparing a memo of law regarding the legality of each step the trust company has taken offshore on behalf of our clients.”
Trum grinned at me. “That’d be the distinguished Fraser duo.”
“I don’t know, John,” I said to Swotty. “About five years down the line, I can see your lawyers arguing in front of the Supreme Court of Canada. And losing.”
“Did you call me John?”
“I’m not ready for the leap all the way to Swotty.”
“If you speak of ErnMax outside this circle, Crang,” Swotty said, “I’ll see to it you are dealt with.”
“Does this mean lunch at the Concord is definitely off?”
“You have had a warning.”
“Maybe the damage is already done. Maybe Jamie Haddon’s theft has made a blip in international banking that the justice people in Canada are charting.”
“Impossible and irrelevant,” Swotty said. He could have been right. What did I know about international banking? Hardly anything, but I liked the idea of throwing a small scare into Swotty.
“One point I am determined on,” Swotty said, crisp and level, “I do not wish further mention of Jamie Haddon in my presence.”
Pamela’s eyes were on mine. “I told Daddy your theory about Jamie and his attitude to the family.”
“More than theory,” I said.
“Did no one heed the request I just finished making?” Swotty said. He looked more baffled than angry.
“Sit still for this much, John,” I said. “Your cousin Jamie was a lot of things. Impatient. Clever. Sneaky. And, get this, resentful. He’d built up a snootful of anger over the Whetherhills and their superior ways. So he nursed the idea of taking the family down a peg and getting rich into the bargain. Package deal.”
“That’s all I was to him?” Pamela said. “Part of a package?”
“How about the icing on the cake?” I said.
“Far-fetched, Crang.” Swotty smacked the palm of his right hand on the tabletop. “The boy was nothing more than a Haddon through and through. I should have recognized he was second-rate long ago and treated him accordingly. In any event, he’s dead now and best forgotten.”
“Not just dead,” I said. “Murdered.”
“Oh, now, Crang.” Archie leaned forward. “I talked on the phone not an hour ago to the inspector in charge of the investigation. The death was accidental. A fall from a building.”
“The inspector was a guy named Farinaud?”
“He struck me as extremely thorough.”
“Bet he even knew where Strathroy is.”
“As a matter of fact, that impressed me.”
“Where Jamie’s concerned,” I said, “the inspector has a gap in his knowledge big enough to drive a Renault through. What Farinaud doesn’t know is that Jamie made an assisted tumble from my room at the Monarch Hotel.”
Something close to a sob came from Pamela’s throat. The others stayed quiet and waiting.
I said, “We all know Jamie was too sma
rt to fall off a seventh-floor balcony all by himself. And he was too stuck on his own all-round charm to jump. Somebody pushed him. That’s murder.”
The silence lasted almost a minute. Swotty broke it.
“Summon that waiter,” he snapped at Archie. Swotty’s glass was empty.
Archie caught the waiter’s eye on his first try. The man had a knack. Silence took over again. I tried a reassuring smile on Pamela. She stared right through it. The waiter distributed drinks all round. Trum nipped at his martini and glanced toward Swotty. Swotty blinked. It may have been a signal.
“Okay, Crang,” Trum said, “if you’re right about the murder, how come you haven’t passed on what you think you know to this French cop?”
“I’m not sure who the person was in my hotel room with Jamie, the person who did the pushing. Minus that piece of the story, Inspector Farinaud might get it in his head I was the person. And who could blame him?”
“Yeah,” Trum said, “that’d be sticky.”
“Even for a slick criminal lawyer like me.”
Trum checked with Swotty. Another blink and maybe a slight inclination of the snowy head.
“But probably,” Trum said to me, “you’ve developed something nifty about this mysterious guy in the room.”
“Person in the room, Trum. I said person.”
“Whatever.”
“Could have been somebody sitting at this table.”
“Hey now, old buddy.” Trum put a touch of indignation in the words.
“Leaving you aside, Trum,” I said, “everybody here had a good reason to see Jamie out of the way permanently.” I looked at Pamela. “Sorry, but that includes you.”
“I didn’t kill Jamie,” Pamela said in her very small voice.
“I don’t think you did,” I said. “On balance, it was more likely Mike Rolland.”
Swotty put a hand on Trum’s arm. “Is that a name familiar to us?” he asked.
Trum shook his head.
“He was another friend of Jamie’s, apparently,” Pamela said.
“The two of them had plenty in common,” I said. “Mike Rolland is another guy who enjoys money and isn’t choosy about how he acquires it. That character defect may have led to Jamie’s death. He and Mike quarrelled over the disk and the twenty-three million it represented.”
Trum said, “Let’s suppose this Rolland’s the guy —”
“The killer,” I said. “He or the professionals he employs.”
“— all right, the killer. Are you going to let the thing slide or what?”
“It depends on you people.”
“What people?”
“The might and power behind Cayuga & Granark.”
Swotty moved his hands impatiently. “You do not seriously contemplate that the trust company will associate itself with a murder?”
“Not a murder,” I said. “A solution.”
Swotty made a sound somewhere back in his throat. It conveyed derision. He was good at it.
Trum’s finger beat a rhythm on the tabletop. “May I suggest, sir,” he said to Swotty, “that we hear Crang out. I mean, he isn’t going to shut up anyway, and we might learn something from him that’ll benefit C&G in the long run.”
“Here’s my proposal,” I said. “I go to Farinaud with what I know about Jamie, about the disk, about Mike Rolland insinuating himself into Jamie’s recent life. But I don’t go alone.”
“Sure,” Trum said, “you want somebody from Cayuga & Granark along to vouch for the stuff about Jamie’s theft.”
“You’d do fine, Trum.”
“Jesus, that’s not asking much.”
“It’s a hard case to make against Mike Rolland,” I said, “and I don’t know how good the French police are when it gets past the stage of filling out forms. But the only way to bring the killing home to Rolland is by investigation, pulling people in for questioning, putting together times and places. That’s police work.”
“And you’re thinking it’ll take C&G to get the cops off the dime,” Trum said.
“More than they’ll listen to little old me.”
Trum went back to his martini. He had no more questions to ask, and the making of decisions wasn’t in his domain.
“The ball has landed on your side of the court, John,” I said to Swotty.
Swotty knitted his fingers together and rested his hands on the table. His head was cocked at an angle.
“You and I regard the world from vastly different perspectives, Crang,” he said. “Yours is from the practice of criminal law, mine from a lifetime in business and banking.”
“If this is a preamble to no,” I said, “you can skip right along to the denouement.”
“I may surprise you,” Swotty said. He shifted himself further over the table. “Naturally,” he said, “I wish to be cautious.”
“A lifetime in business and banking does that to a guy.”
“Fair but cautious,” he went on. “Therefore I have a counter-proposal. I submit we bring in Canadian counsel. I’ll grant that you may have strong reasons for suspecting this Rolland person in Jamie Haddon’s death. But I don’t think I am mistaken in saying we need legal guidance of a specialized and friendly sort. And I promise you, Crang, if our counsel see a way clear to pursuing your approach, I will put the full co-operation of the trust company at your disposal.”
Trum spoke quickly on Swotty’s heels. “You can’t ask fairer than that,” he said to me. “Get an opinion from home before the bunch of us mix it up with the gendarmes.”
“Trumball will brief his father and brother by phone this afternoon,” Swotty said.
“Give them a couple of days to get a junior looking up the law on murder and other stuff over here,” Trum chimed in. He and Swotty were working as smoothly as Torvill and Dean.
The ice cubes had melted in my glass. It held about an inch of diluted Norwegian vodka. That would still make it punchier than most undiluted vodkas. I looked at the inch and considered the barrel Swotty had me over. He knew I was unlikely to approach Farinaud without backup from C&G. Too risky for my own legal position. But maybe I had him over a barrel too. He couldn’t be absolutely certain I wouldn’t try anything wild on my own. Drop hints to Farinaud, involve the trust company, drag the good name of Ernest Luphkin into the disgrace of public print. I drank the diluted vodka and decided I had nothing to lose in going along with Swotty’s deal.
“Okay,” I said.
“This means you buy it?” Trum asked.
“Jamie Haddon was killed,” I said. “He wasn’t exactly Albert Schweitzer, but somebody ought to pay for the killing.”
There was a murmur of approval. It came from Pamela. The men waited close-mouthed for me to finish.
“If it takes assistance from the other Frasers,” I said, “I’ll put myself on hold until they report in.”
“Very sensible, Crang,” Swotty said.
“But no stalling,” I said. “Right, guys?”
“We’ll touch base in the next couple of days,” Trum said.
I picked up my empty glass and gave it a little shake.
“Don’t bother yourself about paying, Crang,” Archie said in a lofty tone. “I’ll see your drinks go on our bill.”
“Thanks, Arch.”
I got up and left. Nobody has to tell me when I’ve overstayed my welcome.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Annie and I ate an early dinner Thursday at a place near Cannes’s old town called La Pizza. The old town had a name, Le Suquet. It slanted up the side of a hill that overlooked the rest of Cannes from the west. La Pizza was as homey as an old shoe.
Annie hurried at her food. She was booked for an advance screening of a movie from Quebec. She thought it had prospects of being the festival’s sleeper hit. When she left, I ate my meal and finished hers. One more p
iece of pizza and I might turn into an anchovy.
In the lobby of the Monarch, I bought postcards for Ian and Alex and the dog. I settled on one with a cooked lobster for Ian, a soccer player with impressive thighs for Alex, and a poodle for Genet. I took the cards up to the room.
I needed elaborate preparations before beginning the writing labours. I hung my jacket in the closet. Sat at the desk. Rolled up the sleeve of my writing arm. Poised the ballpoint pen over the poodle card.
“Dear Genet,” I printed, “you would meet many wonderful companions in the south of France, though you might be chagrined at their personal hab ...”
I put the pen down and looked at what I had written.
Companion.
“Ho, boy,” I said out loud.
Companion. Friend. Pal. Mate.
“Ho, boy.”
I got up from the desk and stepped onto the room’s balcony. The door leading off the balcony next to mine was open. I called through it. “Yo, Mr. Terrill, you at home?”
The noise of heavy shoes clopping on the carpet came from inside. Colin Terrill appeared at the door. He had on his white shorts and a singlet in red and white stripes. His right hand was wrapped around a bottle of beer. The hand covered the label.
“G’day, mate,” he said. He had a big Down Under smile.
“The very term I wish to inquire about,” I said.
“What then?”
“Mate.”
Terrill hooked one shoe on his balcony railing and gave me a questioning look. The shoe was the leather equivalent of a Dutch wooden clog.
“The other morning,” I said, “the morning when the guy went splat down there on the sidewalk, you invited me and my mate to go to the hotel bar for a drink —”
“A shout.”
“My point is you didn’t mean mate as a partner in marriage, wife, female companion.”
“Nah,” Terrill said. “‘Course not.”
“Who did you mean?”
“I had in mind the bloke you were in there talking to yesterday. But I made a mistake.”
“Maybe not.”
“It wasn’t you who was talking to the other bloke.”
