Crang Plays the Ace (8 page)

“I don't know which is more unbelievable,” she said. “Swimming in that brown water or you joining the Boy Scouts.”

“Everything was green and fresh back then,” I said.

“The water or you?”

The path passed through a small woods and emerged on to a huge expanse of gently rolling hills. Families gathered around the picnic tables that dotted the landscape, and in between, little kids kicked around soccer balls and their parents tossed Frisbees. We turned to the left and soon put the athletic action behind us. There was another small wooded section on the edge of the park down the steep hill from the Ontario Science Centre. Not many picnickers bothered to hike that far. Annie and I arranged our goodies under a maple tree and I opened the first bottle of wine. While we gave it a proper savouring, I told Annie the story of my latest poking into Ace's operations and of the break-in at my office.

I said, “I think the two are linked or my name isn't Sam Spade.”

“It isn't,” Annie said, “and what did the police say when you reported the break-in?”

Before I could answer, she said, “Oh, forgetful me, you're the independent fellow who goes it alone when crime strikes.”

“I think it might be someone telling me to back off,” I said. “I haven't exactly made myself invisible to Ace. The truck driver I popped could have taken my licence number or the guy on the Leslie weigh scale might have done the same and passed it on.”

“If the break-in was intended to discourage you,” Annie said, “then the breakers-in have made the miscalculation of their lives.”

Two squirrels scrambled through the branches of the maple tree over our picnic. Their blue-black fur was mangy, but they bounced around like the Flying Wallendsas.

“I have a client,” I said to Annie. “I owe it to him not to bring the cops in until I know where he figures in the picture. That makes a difference.” “Give me a break.”

“It doesn't make a difference?”

“I'm objecting strictly as a matter of form, okay?” Annie reached out her empty plastic glass and I made like the sommelier. She went on, “I know, O light of my life, you're determined to stick your face into whatever nastiness this Ace Disposal thing may represent until someone takes a poke at it. Correction, second poke. We can't leave out your scuffle with the bearded gentleman. Duty to the client and all those other noble sentiments, I appreciate their truth in the legal profession. But honestly, Crang, maybe you're using them as a cover. You just like playing the gallant snoop, which is okay except I think you've got Sir Galahad and Inspector Clouseau so mixed up you might do yourself real harm.”

An emotion of the awkward sort covered the picnic. The sound of traffic on Eglinton drifted in from the far distance and the chatter of the two squirrels filled the middle distance.

I said, “I liked the part where you said, ‘O light of my life.'”

“Who, me?” Annie said in a mock-innocent voice. She drew her left hand across her breast and cocked her head like a silent-movie heroine.

I leaned toward her. She met me halfway. We closed our eyes and kissed. It was a chaste kiss, nothing touching except lips, but it lingered long enough for something to go ping in the region of my solar plexus.

Annie opened her eyes.

“Nice,” she said.

“Want to do something unspeakable?” I said. “Or shall we just make love?”

“Given your propensities, the food would spoil before we were sated. Do I mean that or satiated?”

“Spoil the food?” I said. “I could never face the Daniels again.”

“Nor I.”

We ate and drank and giggled, and after a couple of hours, we drove to the Carlton Cineplex and had cappuccino and watched a new French movie. Philippe Noiret played a police inspector who looked like he was bearing the weight of most of the universe's secrets.

“I think I'll find a mirror and practise my worldly expression,” I said to Annie when we came out.

“You want to be Philippe Noiret when you grow up.”

“You guess all my ambitions.”

Alex and Ian, my downstairs tenants, had invited us for dinner. They wrapped a whole salmon in silver foil and put it on their stand-up barbecue that comes with more attachments than the Kennedy Space Center would know what to do with. While we waited for the salmon to cook, we sat on the patio and drank margaritas and took turns shooing away the tenants' slobbering Irish setter. His name is Genêt. Ian told funny stories about his early life as a devotee of leather and motorcycles and a club where the jukebox played Village People hits. By midnight we were full of salmon and asparagus and white wine and Alex was doing his impressions of Prince Charles chatting up Joan Collins. Annie succumbed to another fit of giggles, and after I steered her upstairs, we left a trail of clothes in a path that led to my bed. Annie lost her giggles and we made love until both of us were sated. Or satiated.

I tiptoed out at ten o'clock next morning to buy some croissants hot from the ovens of a bakery on Queen. I picked up a
Sunday Sun
on the way back. Annie turned to the entertainment section, and while I squeezed the orange juice and plugged in the coffee, she read her article on Alberti.

“Oh gawd,” Annie said, “nobody's going to mistake me for Pauline Kael.”

I said, “I'll take the original Annie B. Cooke any morning.”

“Just don't read this thing while I'm watching.”

I didn't. Annie took her juice and coffee and croissants into the living room. I sat in the kitchen and read. When I finished, I picked up my cup of coffee and crowded into the living room chair beside Annie.

“Fresh information for your everyday interested reader like me,” I said, “and the writing flows.”

Annie was quiet for a couple of seconds.

“You're not just bucking up my spirits?” she asked.

“Would I lie about things like that?”

Another pause.

“Probably not,” Annie said.

I drove her home at five o'clock and spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening shifting the heaps of files and books on my office floor back to their proper homes. I didn't want Mrs. Reid, my part-time secretary, to deal with the mess. Never ask the help to do a job you wouldn't do yourself. It was one of my mottoes. I tried to think if I had other mottoes. By eleven o'clock when I fell asleep in bed with the Whitney Balliett collection, I hadn't come up with any.

11

T
EN HOURS LATER
, I walked out the front door wearing my lightweight grey suit. It was James Turkin's sentencing day, the kid who'd done the number on the cab driver in the underground garage. The sentencing would be held in one of the courtrooms in Old City Hall, and I didn't need to wear my counsel's gown for the occasion. As Toronto buildings go, Old City Hall is dowdy and lovable. It's made of red sandstone and sits in its old maid's pride on Queen Street at Bay. It made do very nicely as Toronto's city hall from 1890 till 1966 when a new civic building, spectacular but a trifle short on humanity, went up on the other side of Bay and the politicians and bureaucrats moved in. Since the move, Old City Hall has been given over to the Provincial Courts. They're the lowest on the rung of courts and the busiest in criminal cases. Provincial Court judges hear all the messy low-life stuff, and the lawyers who appear before them don't require gowns. I had on a shirt with fine vertical grey stripes and a plain maroon tie. I set my face in an expression to match my wardrobe. Sincere.

I walked the fifteen minutes it took to get from my front door to Old City Hall. A breeze was blowing up from the lake and there was a hint of fish in the air. I knew James Turkin would be in the holding cells in the basement on the northeast corner of Old City Hall. He would have been brought in in a yellow police van that morning from the West End Detention Centre with a bunch of other guys who couldn't make bail and were waiting out the time until their day in court in the gracious custody of the Province of Ontario. I rapped on the thick wooden door to the holding cells, and it was opened almost immediately by a policeman who was holding a plastic cup of steaming coffee in his right hand.

“You got a villain in here, Crang?” the cop asked.

He knew me from many villains past. His name was Moriarty, and he was built like a linebacker who'd gone to seed, six four and close to three hundred pounds. There were dark sweat stains radiating from the armpits of his blue policeman's shirt and grumpiness radiating from his flushed policeman's face.

“Warm enough for you, Moriarty?” I asked.

“Which is yours?” Moriarty turned to pick up a clipboard on a chair inside the door. He spilled a small stream of coffee on his shirt.

“Shit,” he said without much expression.

“Kid named Turkin,” I said.

“Black or white?” Moriarty asked. “Got most of the niggers in number one cell. Rest of them are in two.”

“A whiter shade of pale,” I said.

A young cop with a moustache standing behind Moriarty laughed.

“What's with you?” Moriarty asked him.

“The man made a funny,” the young cop said. “See, there used to be a rock group—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Moriarty cut him off. He looked at me. “Fucking heat.”

“Turkin,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah.” Moriarty put his coffee on the flattened green cushion that covered his chair. Drops ran down the edges of the cup and made a wet ring on the cushion. Moriarty would be delighted when he noticed. He flipped through the pages on the clipboard.

“Turkin, Turkin,” he said. “Over there, number two cell, and don't mess around. I already had five of you lawyers in here this morning.”

I stepped through the door and Moriarty slammed it behind me. Inside, the air was ripe.

“Like a rose garden this morning.”

“One of those assholes threw up,” Moriarty said.

I crossed the ten or twelve feet to number two cell. It was a space no larger than twenty feet square, all bars on the side facing into the room. Twenty or twenty-five men leaned against the back wall or sat on benches on the other side of the bars. Nobody talked. James Turkin was easy to spot. He had the looks of an earlier James: sulky and white-faced, with light brown wavy hair and a wiry body, he was a throwback to James Dean.

He saw me and stepped close to the bars. I said hello. He stared at me. It wasn't the stare of some of the wackos I get for clients. There was a flavour of the cool to James Turkin rather than a suggestion of the catatonic.

“Your parents aren't coming down,” I said.

“Figures.”

“When you go upstairs, I want to say something to the judge that will make him look kindly on you.”

The kid shrugged.

“Otherwise it's the reformatory.”

“I thought about it already,” he said in his flat voice.

“Maybe you thought the wrong things. I know you've got some brains. The pre-sentence report says you passed grade twelve.”

“Big deal.”

“Says you were brilliant in maths.”

“So?”

Behind me, I could hear Moriarty cursing the spilled coffee on his green cushion.

“This may not interest you, Jimmy,” I said, “but for the hell of it, I'll tell you I've acted for a thousand guys in the same situation as yours and I think I know how to help you in front of the judge this morning.” “James.”

“Never Jimmy?”

“James,” the kid said. “And I don't give a shit who you acted for.”

His eyes looked into mine without a blink.

I said, “You got any suggestions about what you'd like me to tell the judge?”

“Such as?”

“Ambitions,” I said. “What do you have in mind as a sequel to your splendid career hitting on cab drivers?”

“I want to be a real good break-and-enter man.”

I contemplated smacking the kid's chalky kisser.

“Why?” I asked instead.

“Computers suck.”

Maybe we'd established a basis for communication.

I said, “I'm not keen on the age of electronics myself.”

James Turkin leaned closer to the bars and his voice dropped to the confidential level. Lower volume, same monotone, more voluble.

“Any creep can screw money out of a computer if they know how to punch into it,” he said. “All these fourteen-year-old kids at school, the ones with the glasses, those wimps, they got their systems worked out. I did it myself. So what's the deal? But, like, one night this spring, I figured my way into the Canadian Tire store up Yonge Street, right past the alarm, no noise, no tipoff, nothing. I walked around in there a couple hours. Nobody knew. It was a total high.”

“What did you take out when you left?” I asked.

“VCR for my sister.”

“That's all?”

“All I could think she needed.”

What was I dealing with? The Pale Pimpernel?

“I felt real raced up,” Turkin said. “Getting in that store, not anybody could do it. It's what I'm meant for, break and enter.”

“If you're such a smarty,” I said, “how come you mixed in this little contretemps in the underground garage that's going to send you to the slammer, barring an act of God?”

“It was the girl's idea, the one who brought the cab down the garage,” the kid said. His voice had lost the zest it displayed during his celebration of the art of breaking and entering. “Not my idea,” he said. “I helped her out because we were—involved.”

“You were what?”

“I was banging her.”

The kid wasn't a hopeless cause, just had a slightly twisted sense of chivalry.

“Upstairs,” I said, “call the judge ‘sir' when he speaks to you and stand up straight in the prisoners' box. Small details help.”

“I got excellent posture.”

It was true. “See you in court,” I said and turned away.