Читать книгу Keeper of the Flame - Jack Batten - Страница 9

When I got back to the office, Gloria was setting up a new coffee maker. It was a replacement for the older model that the moving guys broke during my shift in quarters from the fifth floor to the third.

“Goodie,” I said. “A fresh source of caffeine.”

“It’s a De’Longhi,” Gloria said. “Not absolutely top-of-the-line, but quite fine.”

Gloria was my part-time researcher, bookkeeper, and all-round smoother of troubled waters. Part-time because I shared her services with two other criminal lawyers. Gloria was sixtyish, ten years older than me. She was tall, with silver hair that she grew long and free. She liked to wear baggy blouses and long, flowing skirts. I suspected a spectacular figure lurked under the billowy garments, but I’d never know unless we were invited to the same swim party.

Gloria and I admired the sleekness of the De’Longhi for a minute or two. Then I went down the hall to the washroom and filled my office jug with water for the coffeemaker.

When I came back, Gloria was examining a package of coffee I’d bought earlier.

“‘Kicking Horse’?” she said, reading from the label. “‘Hoodoo Jo blend? Made in Canada’?”

“Not made in Canada, if you look closer,” I said. “Blended in Canada.”

“Were you feeling nationalistic when you bought this?”

“There’s a lot to be said for throwing one’s business Canada’s way.”

When I got the coffee machine started, I sat down to discuss lawyerly matters. Gloria was sitting in one of the client’s chairs, her iPad in front of her hooked up to a portable keyboard. The whole apparatus, iPad plus keyboard, probably weighed no more than a few ounces, which was a lot less than the thick file of hard copy documents in her hands. The digital age had its advantages.

“This one,” Gloria said, raising the file in the air, “you put back in the cabinet and forgot to bill the client.”

“It wasn’t tucked in there too long, I trust?”

“Month maybe,” Gloria said. “It’s the murder case where the Crown dropped the charges a day into the trial.”

“Yeah, my client was the nice girl from Sobey’s meat department,” I said. “It started out murder one. I got it reduced to manslaughter a couple months before trial. Then the Crown threw up their hands. One of my better results this year.”

“All the more reason for being generous to yourself on the fees,” Gloria said.

The coffee machine burbled to its conclusion. I got up and poured coffee into my two best mugs, both deep Matisse blue in colour and purchased at the Levin Ceramics Museum. Gloria and I took our coffee the same way — black, no sugar.

“Hmm,” Gloria said, sipping and savouring. “It’s surprisingly fabulous, Crang.”

“More specific, if you don’t mind?”

“Hardy, an oaky taste, and a touch mysterious. That good enough for you?”

“Label says it’s organic and fair trade.”

“Okay, okay! It makes me feel on the side of the angels as well as caffeinated,” Gloria said impatiently. “Now can we get to the fee for the Sobey’s meat girl?”

I sipped some more of the Hoodoo Jo, confirmed it was damn good, and said to Gloria, “Forget about the fee thing for a minute while I tell you about the juicy new file we got.”

“Okay,” she said. “Juicy always thrills me.”

I told Gloria all about Flame and the Reverend Alton Douglas’s machinations. She jotted notes in her iPad, and held back whatever comments she had until I finished.

“You kind of skated over what this person Flame wrote in his songs that was so almighty horrible,” Gloria said as soon as I stopped talking.

“Homophobically ugly, racially horrific, and so on, accept my word for it,” I said. “The point is, Flame’s people think the song lyrics are bad enough to take the Reverend Douglas’s intentions very seriously.”

I got the pages with the lyrics out of my jacket pocket, neatly folded, and handed them to Gloria.

“Read them if you want,” I said. “But if I were you, I’d give the whole thing a pass.”

Gloria took the pages, not wasting so much as a glance at the words on them. “Why don’t I just open a file,” she said. “Put these pages in the file for future reference.”

“Which may not be necessary,” I said.

“So,” Gloria said after she’d filed the pages, “the alleged bad guy is a church minister?”

“Seems that way.”

“So what you’ll want from me is everything I can find out about Reverend Alton Douglas,” Gloria said as she typed. “Background, financial situation, all that. And the building where his church is on St. Clair, if it really is a church. Who owns it, so on, so forth? And what in god’s name, if you’ll pardon the phrase, are Heaven’s Philosophers? I’ll see what gives with them.”

Gloria stopped and looked at me.

“That ought to do it,” I said.

“I’ll get on things as soon as I leave here,” Gloria said. “But first, suppose you take a look at this butcher-girl file and tell me how much to bill her.”

She handed me the file, and while I flipped through the notes and documents inside it, and wrote numbers on a separate sheet of paper, Gloria tapped on her iPad.

After a few minutes, she said, “It appears your minister guy got kicked out of the Catholic Church.”

“You mean it’s Father Alton I’m dealing with?” I said. “I assumed he was a plain old fundamentalist Christian fanatic.”

“Maybe he is now, but a Catholic priest is how he started.”

“What was it, doing terrible things with little boys got him in trouble?”

“Just the opposite,” Gloria said. “His sexual contacts appear to have been with mature ladies of the parish.”

“All of this, you got in fifteen minutes?”

“Tricks of the Google trade.”

“Nice start, kiddo.”

“An old photograph of him is in here. He’s about late thirties at the time. Actually comes across as kind of cute.”

Gloria turned her iPad around to give me a peek at the screen.

“Got the collar on and his numbered St. Michael’s sweater over the religious blouse, whatever they call it,” I said. “Juggling a football in his hands. Athletic guy. Nice big smile. Probably knew how to sing the ‘Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra’ lullaby.”

Gloria switched off her iPad. She packed it and the keyboard in her red leather handbag.

“Friday afternoon,” she said, “I’ll come back here and shed more light on the Reverend and his establishment, though I think we both smell fishy things already. In the meantime, how about the nice butcher girl?”

I shoved the file across the desk to Gloria who gave a quick look at the sheet of paper I’d written the numbers on.

“This is a ridiculously tiny fee,” she said. “You realize that?”

“It’s what she can afford,” I said. “But I know I’ll be charging the Flame people a ridiculously enormous fee, which is what they can afford.”

“Crang,” Gloria said, shaking her head a little, “this isn’t the billing system that helps big businesses stay big.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”