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I NEEDED THREE CALLS from the phone in Harry Hein’s office to locate James Turkin, the fledgling break-and-enter man. Calls number one and two were to his mother. She hung up the first time. I rang back and applied the old Crang persuasion.

I said, “Mrs. Turkin, I’d hate to feel obliged to ask James’ probation officer to visit you and your husband.”

She said she thought James was living with his married sister in Regent Park. She didn’t know the address. Did she know the married sister’s name? “My own daughter?” Mrs. Turkin said. Her voice squawked. “I should think I know,” she said. “We’re close-knit.” Yeah, like J. R. Ewing and clan. The married sister’s last name was Gruber.

The phone book showed a Gruber on Sackville Street, and I dialled the number. The woman who answered said James would be back from work at five-thirty. The woman had a pleasant voice. Was I a friend of James? His lawyer, I told her. She thought that was wonderful and looked forward to meeting me. I didn’t ask what James was working at.

Regent Park lies south of Gerrard and east of Parliament. It’s a housing development for low-income and welfare families that sprawls over several discouraging blocks. Not long after the end of the Second War, bulldozers went into the area and levelled the one-storey houses and shanties where Toronto’s poor Irish made their corner of the city. A planned community went in in its place. The plan produced brick low-rises and fourplexes done in institutional squares and rectangles. Grassy patches define the areas between the buildings, and there’s a battered recreational centre for kids. Regent Park has never been a neighbourhood calculated to produce tomorrow’s stalwart citizens.

At six o’clock I parked on Gerrard and walked down Sackville to a two-storey building that was split into four apartments. Two little boys were playing with a G.I. Joe on the scarred brown lawn in the front of the building. The G.I. Joe was short one arm. Both little boys were Vietnamese. A card with the Gruber name was inserted in a slot under the apartment mailbox on the lower left. I pushed the buzzer and James Turkin answered the door.

“Am I in trouble?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“My sister told me you phoned.”

James stood inside the door and held it open about a foot. The perfect host.

“I’m here to talk business,” I said. “Your business.”

James kept his deadpan expression in place.

“Invite the gentleman in, James,” a woman said from behind Turkin. I recognized the pleasant voice from the phone.

James opened the door and stepped back. He was wearing a short-sleeved red shirt with the words “Home Hardware” sewn in yellow across the breast pocket.

The woman inside had a smile to match her voice.

“You must be Mr. Crang,” she said. “I’m James’ sister, Emily Gruber.” We shook hands.

“Would you care for some refreshment, Mr. Crang?” Emily Gruber asked.

Odds were Emily didn’t run a Polish-vodka household.

“I’ve two things cold in the fridge,” she said. “Beer or Diet Pepsi?”

Best definition I’d heard of the space between a rock and a hard place.

Emily weighed fifty pounds more than was healthy. The skirt of her white dress ballooned over her stomach and rode up at the hem to show an inch of beige slip. Her brown hair was held back from her face with bobby pins that glinted in the light. Her face was chubby and full of eager welcome. She appeared to have cornered the social graces in the Turkin family. Lucky her.

“Beer would suit if somebody’s joining me,” I said.

“Oh, my husband’s the only drinker in the family, Mr. Crang,” Emily said. The smile made dimples in the fat of her cheeks. “James doesn’t indulge and I don’t like the taste.”

James had taken up position in an armchair that was covered in a purple and orange floral pattern. The front door opened directly into the living room. On the wall over a fireplace there was a painting of a nineteenth-century sailing ship crashing against a craggy shore. The fireplace was occupied by an electric heater. Next to it stood a television set with a VCR. New, and courtesy of Canadian Tire. Emily left the room down a hall to the right and I sat on the sofa. It was covered in yellow corduroy.

I said to James, “You moved fast on the job market.”

“A hardware store,” he said. “I got my reasons.”

“Dare I ask?”

James shrugged.

“I need to put together a good kit,” he said. “Blank keys, saw blades, a real good screwdriver, stuff like that. Hardware store’s the best place to swipe from.”

“Sensible career-planning.”

“You gonna tell my probation officer?”

I said, “Would it divert you from the break-and-enter business if I did?”

“It’s what I got a vocation for,” James said. “I can tell.”

“A vocation. My, my.”

Emily Gruber returned with my beer. She had poured it into a tall glass and it was on a tray beside a smaller glass of Diet Pepsi. She offered my beer with a little bow and did the same with the soft drink for James.

“My husband likes his supper soon as he comes in from the plant, Mr. Crang,” Emily said. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you want anything.”

She waited until I tasted the beer.

“Very refreshing, Mrs. Gruber,” I said.

Emily dimpled her face and went back to the kitchen.

“So?” James Turkin said. “You telling the probation officer or what?”

I said, “The proposition I’ve got for you, I don’t think your probation officer wants to hear about.”

“Yeah? For me? What kind of proposition?”

“I hire you to open a few doors that the owner prefers to keep shut.”

“You want me to get inside a place and steal stuff?” James asked. His voice lost some of its flatness. It sounded as close as James Turkin could approach to incredulity.

“Just get inside,” I said. “No stealing.”

James contemplated his Pepsi.

“You trying to set me up?” he said.

“Paying job, James,” I said. “One hundred dollars for a night’s employment. I’ll lead you to the building, you apply your arts to guide another gentleman and me past its locks and alarms.”

“It’s against the law.”

“Exactly why I thought of you.”

James wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and rubbed the hand against the front of his Home Hardware shirt. It left a small, damp smear.

“One hundred dollars?” he said.

“Cash money,” I said. I’d finished half of the beer. It tasted like Lifebuoy.

“When?” James asked.

“It has to be after midnight,” I said, “and it has to be soon, probably tomorrow night.”

“I’d want to look at the place first, whatever it is, an office building you’re talking about?”

“Small office in the suburbs,” I said. “Got a fence around it, gate with a padlock I think. Don’t know about the door into the building. I haven’t been that close.”

“I need to see everything,” James said. He put the glass of Pepsi on an end table beside the chair with the floral pattern and shoved himself forward to the edge of the chair. “Wire fence, padlock, all that, I got to see for myself.”

“Case the joint.”

“Huh?” James obviously hadn’t seen enough Edward G. Robinson movies.

“I’ll drive you out after dark tonight,” I said. “What’s good? Ten o’clock?”

James and I arranged to meet up the street at the corner of Gerrard and Sackville. I told him I’d be in a white Volks convertible.

“What’s this deal about?” James asked.

“It’s about one hundred dollars,” I said. “That’s all you need to know.”

Emily Gruber came into the living room from the kitchen. She had put on a frilly blue apron over her white dress and was carrying an unopened bottle of beer and a bottle opener. The beer was Miller Lite. Could have fooled me. I declined the second beer, and after a friendly handshake, she instructed James to see me to the door.

“How did your sister acquire the good manners?” I asked James when we were on the porch.

He said, “Emily’s weird, all right.”

I drove home and ate two ham sandwiches with a shot of vodka. Was I corrupting a teenager’s morals? Hardly. James Turkin’s morals had found their home in a nether region long before I appeared on his scene. If he was hell-bent on a life of crime, better he should perform in a worthy cause. Getting Harry Hein and me into Ace Disposal’s offices qualified as a worthy cause in my book. Nothing I or a probation officer could say would dissuade James from exploring the career option of breaking and entering. It would take a couple of stretches in prison to cure him of his predilections, and in the meantime, as long as he was operating under my thoughtful supervision, he had a better chance of avoiding arrest. I poured another shot of vodka and admired my gift for rationalizing awkward moral dilemmas.

Me and Immanuel Kant.