Читать книгу Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - Jack Batten - Страница 29

DRIVING THE VOLKS down from the sixth level of the car park made me feel like Mario Andretti at the Monaco Grand Prix. All loops and turns and not much straightaway. I jiggered the car through the traffic on Yorkville, past the outdoor cafés where morning tourists were taking their espressos, and turned south at Avenue Road. The documents from Harry Hein’s office were locked out of sight in the trunk of the car, and my destination was Charles Grimaldi’s office at Ace Disposal. Strike while the iron is hot.

I had the weapons to deal with Grimaldi. I’d offer him my data on Ace’s double fraud in exchange for a refund of Matthew Wansborough’s investment in the company plus interest, dividends, and other business charges. It was an offer Grimaldi couldn’t turn down. Or so my immaculate reasoning went. Getting Wansborough’s money in hand was priority number one. Next I’d tend to the other chores. Ferreting out Alice Brackley’s killer, blowing the whistle on Grimaldi, covering my own hide.

The truck gate leading into Ace’s property was open and I drove through, raising a jaunty arm to the man in the guard’s booth. It was Wally, the rotund gent who’d lost track of James and me in the dust of Saturday morning. Wally didn’t wave back. I parked the car beside the Ace office building and stepped out.

“Can’t leave your car there, mister,” Wally called from his booth. “And you gotta check in with me.”

Wally didn’t recognize me from our first encounter.

“Back in a flash,” I shouted.

My voice must have triggered Wally’s memory.

“I know you,” he called.

His voice had a quiver, the sound of a man done an injustice, and he came striding out of his booth.

“You’re the guy mighta got me in deep shit,” he said.

“Hold that thought, Wally,” I said.

I sprinted around the corner of the building, through the door, and down the centre hall toward Grimaldi’s office. Secretaries, accounting people, and other workers at their tasks gave me funny looks, but nobody made a move to halt my sprint. I reached Grimaldi’s door. It was open. I braced myself for the grand confrontation and stepped into the office.

It was empty. The desk was clear except for an organized pile of unopened mail in the centre, letters on top, fat envelopes, circulars, and magazines underneath. No indication of Charles Grimaldi’s presence on the premises. Quel anticlimax.

“May I help you, sir?” a soft voice asked behind me.

The voice belonged to a tall young woman with black hair to her shoulders and a clingy mauve dress that accentuated lots of breast and thigh.

“I’m Mr. Grimaldi’s secretary,” she said.

Lucky him, I thought, but I said, “Mr. Grimaldi around?”

“Did you have an appointment? There’s nothing in his book.”

“No,” I said, “but he’s bound to welcome me with open arms.”

“Mr. Grimaldi won’t be in until this afternoon.”

“I’ll catch him at his house.”

“Sir, I didn’t say he was at home.”

“Cagey you,” I said and went back down the hall, not sprinting. I’d try Grimaldi’s house. The iron was still hot enough for striking.

Wally the guard was standing beside the Volks looking aggrieved.

“You mighta got me in deep shit,” he said to me.

“You did hold that thought.”

“It’s true,” Wally said. His security man’s outfit smelled of cigar smoke. “Comin’ out of the office the way you and the kid did, early in the morning, the kid with the stool.”

“Mr. Grimaldi would be glad to know you spotted me.”

“That’s the part woulda got me in deep shit.”

“You mean you haven’t mentioned my visit to anybody?”

“Hell, no,” Wally said. “Think I want to lose this job? I been scared since Saturday one of the people inside was gonna say something’s stolen from the office. I’d catch some of the blame, sure as I’m standin’ here.”

“Relax, Wally,” I said. “The coast is clear.”

“Who the hell are you, mister?”

“Zorro without the mask.”

“Fuck off.”

I took Wally’s advice. I drove up to Dundas Street, stopped at a phone booth to look up Grimaldi’s address, and followed Dundas east until it met Bloor. As Alice Brackley had mentioned, Charles Grimaldi lived in the Kingsway, and Bloor was the route into the neighbourhood. It was a short hop from the Ace offices.

The Kingsway is the oasis for rich folks in the west end. It lacks the age, tradition, and grandeur of Rosedale, but the money is everywhere in evidence. Most of the houses are products of the overstuffed school of architecture. They’re ponderous and weighty. Stockbroker baronial. Charles Grimaldi’s home sat along the line of mansions backing on a ravine that separated the Kingsway from the rest of the city to the east. The property had a stone wall across the front and a driveway that looped in a semicircle to the front door and returned to the street. The house, a dour mix of Tudor and French château, was set fifty or sixty feet back and was shielded by two towering oak trees that kept the lawn in permanent shade. There were three cars in the driveway, a bright red Porsche with the sporty fin at the rear, a Lincoln Continental in black, and Sol Nash’s pinkmobile. I parked behind the Cadillac and walked up to the front door.

Sol Nash answered my knock and didn’t blink his charcoal eyes when he found me on the doorstep.

“Yeah?” he said. A man of few words.

“I’m a Miss Manners representative,” I said. “We go door to door offering lessons in etiquette.”

Nash didn’t shut the door. Nor did he open it any wider.

“Just a little sample of what we provide,” I said, “you might have essayed something more gracious for me in the line of greetings.”

“Mr. Grimaldi phone you to come out?” Nash asked.

“I came on my very own initiative. But I have a proposal that ought to fascinate your boss.”

Nash favoured economy in all things. Few words and decisive actions. He pulled the door inward just enough to allow me to enter and pointed at a chair where I gathered he wanted me to sit.

“Wait,” he said.

Nash sat in a chair on the other side of a walnut antique table from my chair. The chairs and table were set against the wall in a long entrance hall that began three steps down from the front door. On the floor of the hall there was a Persian rug that had a lot of greens and purples in it. No pictures hung on the walls and the only natural light came from two slit windows on either side of the front door. It wasn’t a room designed to cheer Grimaldi’s visitors.

Behind another door at the far end of the hall, voices were raised in louder than conversational tones. The voices were masculine, and after a while, I decided there were a mere two of them. I couldn’t make out the words, but there was no mistaking the emotion. Anger.

A copy of the Sun lay on the table between me and Sol Nash. I flipped through it. “Heiress Slain in Negligee.” Page three. The headline touched all the bases. Money, murder, and sex. But it wasn’t as catchy as Annie’s version. And it was inaccurate, unless Alice was wearing a negligee under the quilted dressing gown. I didn’t consider discussing the subject with Sol.

Fifteen minutes went by. I was reading Allan Fotheringham’s column on the Sun’s deep-think page when the door at the end of the hall opened and banged against the wall. Charles Grimaldi was first out of the room. He had on a pair of white flannels and a white V-neck tennis sweater without a shirt. The man behind him had a face that was an older and blurred version of Charles’. His skin was dark and his features coarse. He was wearing a suit that matched the colour of the Lincoln Continental outside. From his looks and style, I took him to be one of the other Grimaldi brothers, Peter the Second or John. Neither he nor Charles appeared to be in the mood for fun.

Both men gave me the once-over. Peter or John spoke first.

“This guy one of your people?” he said, nodding in my direction but questioning Charles.

“He’s a lawyer, Pete,” Charles said.

Aha, it was the senior member of the second-generation Grimaldis, the brother who ran the laundries in Hamilton.

“He don’t look like a lawyer to me,” Pete said. “Monday morning and he’s dressed like some guy works in your yard.”

“I didn’t say he was a lawyer of mine,” Charles said.

Sol Nash was standing and looking respectful. I stayed in my chair.

“What’s your name, lawyer?” Pete asked me. He was in a foul mood and my presence wasn’t soothing it.

“Crang,” I said, “and it’s a thrill to meet another Grimaldi.”

“Never mind, Pete,” Charles said. “What I got with Crang, it’s private.”

“Another private,” Pete said, close to a shout. His voice bounced around the entrance hall. “Everything’s private with you. Pop tells me to come over and ask, how come Charles’s living in this big house, drives a fancy little red car a movie star belongs in, throws money around like Rockefeller? I ask and whatta you tell me? Business is good. Shit, you think I’m going back to Pop with that? And this broad at your office, she’s in the papers, dead. I ask, what about it? You say must’ve been some crazy drug-addict burglar. I don’t like all this. Pop won’t like it. And here’s this lawyer coming to your house. What about him? Yeah, I know. Private, you say.”

My head swivelled from Pete to Charles. Here was a juicy piece of news. Pete and the rest of the Grimaldi clan weren’t privy to Charles’ operations at Ace. They thought he was running the company on the up-and-up as I guess he was expected to. Of the four people in the room—Nash, me, the two Grimaldis—Pete was the only fellow in the dark.

Charles stayed calm under his brother’s outburst. He put his arm on the sleeve of Pete’s black suit jacket and spoke soft words. Pete was sweating and agitated. He kept swivelling his shoulders. But Charles persisted, and control in the room passed to his side.

“Go back in the kitchen,” he said to Pete. “Nice new coffee machine back there. Solly’ll make you a cup. I settle with the lawyer here, and you and me talk some more. Quiet, I mean. We’re brothers, Pete. You and me aren’t saying goodbye till I make you happy about everything.”

Pete was still swivelling the shoulders, but his anger had been banked. Sol Nash crossed the hall to a door in the opposite wall, and when he opened it, sunlight streamed in and I could see a white kitchen at the end of another short hall. The lure of the bright, sunny room ended Pete’s struggle and he followed Sol out of the entrance hall.

“Whatever you’re doing here, Crang,” Charles Grimaldi said when the door to the kitchen closed, “you’ve made a mistake.”

Grimaldi sat in the chair on the other side of the antique table. His face was set in a glower and he had his hands laid flat on the table. Annie had been right about him. He was actually menacing. When I met him at La Serre, my eye had been taken with his shine and gleam. I hadn’t registered all of the menace.

“Call Pete back in here,” I said. “He’d get a big kick out of why I’ve come calling. The whole family would.”

“Your choice, Crang,” Grimaldi said. “Make your point fast or I tell Sol and Tony to throw your ass on the street.”

“I’ve come to deal,” I said.

“You haven’t got anything I’m interested in.”

“The other day,” I said, “you were keen to find out the identity of my client. That’s where the deal starts.”

“Wansborough,” Grimaldi said. “I know already.”

“He wants his money back,” I said, “everything he put into Ace. Three hundred grand and change.”

“That doesn’t sound like any kind of deal to me.”

“What you receive in return, Charlie,” I said, “is the documentation I’m holding on activities at Ace that might give some people cause to feel concern. Your family for one group and the fraud squad for another.”

My announcement didn’t precisely shatter Grimaldi.

“You’re blowing smoke,” he said.

“You’ve got the weigh-masters at the Metro dumps on the take,” I said. “That’s number one. You’re overbilling your customers. That’s number two. One and two combined are bringing in better than two million every month.”

The snappy speech left me short on breath. Concise, I thought, succinctly worded and irrefutable. I was breathing hard but feeling triumphant.

Grimaldi said, “You know, Crang, I don’t like dicking around with guys like you.”

“Here’s the key word, Charlie,” I said. “Documentation.”

“You done?”

“Information on paper, Charlie. Invoices photocopied on the same machine you use to phony up the invoices that go out to your customers.” Grimaldi’s face gave away nothing. Same gleam, same menace.

“The trade is,” I said, feeling marginally less triumphant, “my documents for Wansborough’s money.”

“That reads like blackmail.”

“It’s probably a field you’re familiar with, Charlie.”

“Nobody calls me Charlie.”

My trouble with Grimaldi was his reluctance to address the issues. He’d doped it out that Matthew Wansborough was my client. That probably wasn’t difficult, not after a week of reflection and a little adding of two and two on Grimaldi’s part. Besides, there was no reason for keeping Wansborough’s identity under cover any longer. The worrying point was that Grimaldi seemed not to be daunted by my insider information. I’d just finished telling him I could prove he was a crook. The news didn’t shake him. It didn’t even interest him.

“Charles,” I said, “you following me? I got the evidence?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Was I handling this wrong?

“Let me explain,” I said. “Invoices. Copies thereof. The ones with the same billing and same number that go out to all your customers on any given day. Remember now, Charles? That’s the scam I’m talking about. I walked into your office and took out the paper. I’m offering to deal it back.”

I listened to myself and I heard babbling. The implacable expression on Grimaldi’s face was unhinging my tongue. If he was trying to stonewall me, he was succeeding. I’d come to threaten him into an arrangement, and now I was the guy whose nerves were turning shaky.

Grimaldi slid his hands off the table and stood up from his chair.

“Get the hell out of my house,” he said.

“No deal?” I said. Dumb question.

“Crang, the last couple weeks, you’ve been a pain in the ass,” Grimaldi said. “Not a big pain in the ass. A little pain. From what you’ve said the ten minutes in here, you sound like a guy looking to graduate to major pain in the ass. If I were you, I wouldn’t do it. That’s my advice. Smart people take my advice.”

Grimaldi walked across the Persian rug to the door that led to the kitchen, opened it, and left me alone in the entrance hall.

Bravo, I thought, what a performance.

I went out to my car. Two Japanese gardeners had parked their truck behind me. I had to wait for the two to put down their rakes and hoes and move the truck before I could back out of the circular drive-way. The delay made me itchy. What was going through Charles Grimaldi’s head? Didn’t he believe I had the goods to prove he was a crook? He must. How else would I have been able to recite the nature of his crookedness? Did he want me out of the house in a hurry only because brother Pete was on the scene? Was that it? Would he deal later? Or did he have something else in mind? The gardeners spent five minutes shifting gears and stalling the truck until they moved it far enough to let me squeeze onto the street. I drove away.

Strike while the iron is hot. That’s one motto I’d consider dropping from my escutcheon. In for a penny, in for a pound wasn’t looking so terrific either.