Читать книгу Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - Jack Batten - Страница 22

IT WAS DARK and I answered the phone on the first ring. The small black clock on my bedside table read twenty past four. Annie moaned from under a pillow. She didn’t wake up. Answering on the first ring wasn’t bad for someone who’d devoted most of the previous early morning to breaking the laws against burglary. After I’d got back from Ace, I napped for a couple of hours and met Annie at the airport. In the afternoon, we’d wandered around the Saturday antiques market at Harbourfront and eaten dinner at a restaurant called Spinnakers. It was outdoors and had a view over to the Toronto Islands. I didn’t tell Annie about the undercover operation at Ace.

“This better not be a wrong number,” I said into the phone. I was whispering.

“Mr. Crang?” a woman’s voice said. I recognized Alice Brackley. She slurred her words. Both of them.

“What is it, Ms. Brackley?” I said. I was still whispering. Annie didn’t stir.

“I need t’see you,” she said. She shushed the “s.” “V’ry import’nt.”

“I don’t think La Serre is open at this hour, Ms. Brackley,” I said. “How about noon? Noon today? Sunday? That convenient?”

“Life er death,” she said on the phone.

“Whose?” I asked.

The silence on the line lasted long enough for me to suppose Alice Brackley might have gone for a fresh drink.

“V’ry import’nt.” She was still with the phone.

“What’s the address, Ms. Brackley?” I said, louder than a whisper. “I’ll come by your house around noon.”

“’At’s right,” she said.

The next sound from her end was the dial tone. I eased the receiver back on the hook.

“A client in extremis?” Annie said. Her voice was muffled.

“Sorry,” I said. I felt for her shoulder. “Tried not to wake you.”

“You almost made it,” Annie said. She snuggled her back against my chest. “Who called?”

“Alice Brackley,” I said. “She seemed to be keeping company with Rob Roy.”

“Poor thing,” Annie said. The snuggle was escalating in erotic degrees. “What’d she want?”

“An appointment.”

Annie rolled over on her back and put her arms around my neck.

She said, “I won’t keep you but a few moments.”

“We’ve got most of eight hours.”

Annie and I surfaced from love and sleep a little after nine. The morning felt to me like wheat cakes. I made them from a box that said “jiffy” on the front. They came out lumpy, but Annie said they tasted just like the kind her mother used to whip up. I served the wheat cakes on the kitchen table with orange juice squeezed from real oranges by my own hand, slices of nut bread, some peach preserve I bought one Saturday morning at the St. Lawrence Market, and a pot of coffee. Annie said she was starved, and both of us ate without much talk.

“I’ve done it again,” Annie said after a while.

“Which it is that?”

“The one where I over-research.”

Annie went to the refrigerator and got out cream for her coffee. She was wearing a Boston Celtics sweatshirt of mine. It looked fetching with the silk panties. They weren’t mine.

“The piece on the critics has to run twenty minutes,” Annie said. “Absolutely not a second longer. What I’ve got is enough to keep the network humming for two hours. All golden stuff.”

Annie’s Friday in Manhattan had been full of surprises of the welcome variety. When she finished with Vincent Canby at the Times office, he offered to put her in touch with David Denby, the guy who writes movie reviews for New York magazine. Denby was free that afternoon. Annie interviewed him, and Denby directed her to a party Friday night where she met Molly Haskell, who does the Vogue reviews. Annie unloaded her Nagra and Haskell talked into it.

“The things she came up with were bang on,” Annie said in the kitchen.

“Which is the trouble.”

Annie said, “Every syllable I taped from Jay Scott and the New York people is terrific radio if I do say so myself.”

“You’re entitled.”

“I’ll be days in an editing room.”

I told Annie I’d drive her to the CBC Radio building.

“No rush,” she said. “I’ve checked. All the editing machines are booked until two o’clock.”

I said my appointment with Alice Brackley was for noon. “If an appointment,” I said, “is what I’ve got.”

“Poor thing.”

“That’s what you called her this morning.”

Annie leaned her elbows on the kitchen table and held the coffee cup between her hands. On the middle finger of her left hand she was wearing a ring with a rectangular piece of lapis lazuli.

“We’re getting to be buddies, Alice and me,” Annie said. “I seem to know more than maybe I should about her personal life and I like her. She’s nice, nothing more spectacular than that, nice and quite bright and quite good-looking and I like her. And, well, she’s got problems. I can’t forget the way she was at La Serre that first time all of us met. Alice sat there, partly scared of Grimaldi and partly attracted to him. Or that’s how it seems now, and it just strikes me as unfair.”

“Very important is how she put it on the phone,” I said.

Annie’s coffee cup was three-quarters empty. I picked up the pot. Annie spread her fingers over the top of the cup.

“No more,” she said. “I’m going to be practically injecting caffeine at the CBC.”

I rinsed the dishes in the sink, put the peach preserve in the refrigerator, and took a new cup of coffee back to the kitchen table.

“Alice’s call this morning,” Annie said, “was it the first you’ve heard from the Ace people in the last few days?”

“They haven’t come knocking on my door,” I said. “But you might say I knocked on theirs.”

“Anybody home?”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “no.”

“That didn’t stop you.”

Annie’s tone was bantering. But with another question or two, she would push me into telling her things she would not approve of. I knew the conversation was headed in that direction and Annie knew it. That would end the bantering.

“You remember Harry Hein?” I said.

“Your accountant client,” Annie said. “But wait a sec, I’m not finished with Ace.”

“None of us is, not you or me or Harry,” I said. “I was able to put my hands on some Ace documents. Harry’s analyzing them with his accountant’s eye and maybe we’ll see what sort of chicanery Ace is involved in.”

Annie said, “You phrased that circumspectly.”

“Circumspection and I are well acquainted.”

Annie leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms over her head. She made small groaning noises and gave the Boston Celtics shirt an interesting workout. The shirt had number 33 on the other side. Larry Bird’s number. Annie brought her hands back to her lap.

“Okay,” she said. “You mind getting some more of that peach jam out of the fridge and another piece of the nice bread?”

While Annie chewed on her bread and preserve, I looked through the telephone book.

“Ms. Brackley?” Annie asked.

“There’s an A. Brackley on one of the streets that run off Avenue Road north of the Four Seasons,” I said. “Must be her. Only seven Brackleys in the listings.”

Annie said, “Is the means by which you put your hands on the Ace documents likely to get you in trouble?”

“How accurately you remember my circumspect phrasing.”

“Must be practice.”

“Not now it isn’t going to get me in trouble.”

Annie reached for a paper napkin and wiped the preserve off her hands. She put a clean hand on the back of mine and squeezed gently. I turned my hand over and squeezed hers.

“Phone Alice,” Annie said.

I dialled the number from the phone book and let it ring ten times. No one picked up the phone on the other end.

Annie said, “You thought she’d been drinking.”

I put the receiver down.

“She’d packed away enough to make her lose the tremor in her voice,” I said.

“She’s probably sleeping it off,” Annie said.

“Maybe.”

“That sounds like a dubious maybe.”

“Another thing she said on the phone this morning,” I said, “was life or death.”

“Was she being dramatic?”

“Possible.”

“That’s one dubious maybe and a very shaky possible.”

I said, “I’ll go by her house.”

Annie went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. When she came out, she was wearing a towel. It was wrapped around her wet hair.

“Don’t think I’m slow,” she said, “but is there a connection between your possession of those Ace documents you were talking about and Alice Brackley’s case of nerves?”

“I was pondering that one.”

“How’d the pondering come out?”

“The connection’s too remote,” I said.

“But not utterly beyond question?” Annie said.

“First place,” I said, “it’d take luck and some fast figuring by a very clever person for anyone at Ace to realize I have some of their documents. Copies of documents, to get specific.”

Annie was rubbing her hair with the towel.

“Second place,” I said, “it hasn’t been established yet, not in black and white, that the documents prove anything crooked on Ace’s part.”

“That’s Harry Hein’s role?”

“Right.”

“So how come Alice got herself tanked and phoned you out of business hours?”

“Alice is the weak link maybe,” I said. I’d almost finished a third cup of coffee. “The rest of the gang at Ace, Grimaldi and the guy with the nose and the others, dirty stuff is old hat to them. But if the company is cheating at the Metro dumps and Alice knows it, she’s more likely to run scared when someone comes poking into the operation.”

“Namely you.”

“Yeah,” I said. I put my empty cup on the table. “Me namely.”

Annie shook her hair. It was damp and sleek, and she was standing naked in the kitchen.

“Love your outfit,” I said.

“Really?” she said. She vamped like Marilyn Monroe. “This old thing?”

I showered and shaved, then got dressed in the bedroom, where Annie had settled on the bed. She had on my terry cloth bathrobe and was surrounded by the Nagra, her interview tapes, and a notebook. She said she was going to play the tapes and make notes on passages that could be edited out when she got to the CBC.

“Tell Alice hello from me,” Annie said.

I said I would.