Читать книгу Booking In - Jack Batten - Страница 13

Thursday morning, I was sitting in my office reading a book titled A Long Way from the Armstrong Beer Parlour: A Life in Rare Books, a collection of essays by Richard Landon. The book was the gift that Ms. Berrigan had pressed on me, and from what I had read so far, it was a treasure.

My office was on the third floor of a badly aging commercial high-rise on the west side of Spadina Avenue, half a block south of Bloor. For a view, the office looked across bustling Spadina to a dandy little parkette on the opposite corner. On most summer days I left the office door open and jacked up the front window. The place had feeble air conditioning, and the combination of open door and jacked-up window gave me a hope of catching the cross breeze. As for physical space, I’d recently smartened up the office. I painted the walls a pleasing shade the manufacturer called Reading Room Red. The furniture was likewise new, made of a medium-brown wood with comfortable built-in cushions, and on one wall I hung a Matisse poster of a woman in a dress of many colours, all bright, a view of the blue Mediterranean through the window behind her.

“Literary Forgery and Mystifications” was the title of the chapter I was reading in the Landon book. I’d already learned from the book’s introduction that Landon had been with the Fisher from 1967 until his death in 2011, the last thirty of those years as the Fisher’s head person. It was Landon who had led the way in making the Fisher into the great library it came to be. He did what it took in gathering the papers of important Canadian writers and wooing donors for their collections of obscure works of prose and poetry from all countries and sources. The papers and several hundred thousand books were stored on the Fisher’s shelves. Reading the essays of the man responsible for much of this massive collection, I decided that Richard Landon had known more than anyone I’d ever heard of about books and the people who wrote them.

I was deep into his stories from the “Literary Forgery” chapter when someone tapped on the frame of my office’s open door. I looked up from the essay, not happy to be deflected from Richard Landon’s anecdotes, and recognized the woman in the doorway. She was Fletcher Marshall’s assistant, Charlotte Watson, known to everybody as Charlie.

“My apologies, Mr. Crang,” she said, sounding tentative. “I don’t have an appointment.”

“You might notice my client chairs are empty,” I said. I marked my place in the Landon book, stood up from my chair, and made welcoming gestures.

Charlie Watson was a smallish woman, at least in height, short and trim, but she had a figure that included plenty of bosom. She was probably in her midthirties but looked younger. Charlie had honey-brown hair, green eyes, and a pert nose. Her clothes were casual, a plain black shirt and tight black jeans, the kind of thing to wear if you spent your days heaving books around.

“Coffee?” I said. “Fresh-made, sugar and cream on offer.”

“Black would be nice,” Charlie said. She had a pleasant alto, though it hadn’t yet lost its tentative tone.

I held out a client chair for Charlie, poured her a cup of coffee from the Cuisinart coffeemaker on the table beside the window, and returned to my own chair on the business side of the desk.

“You’re wondering why I’m here,” she said.

“At a guess,” I said, “I’d say it’s about the break-in at your boss’s store.”

“Fletcher said you’d want to talk to me.”

“And you prefer to hold our chat out of Fletcher’s earshot.”

“The thing is, my boss is a sensitive man.”

“About what?”

“Pardon?”

“A guy’s not usually sensitive in the abstract,” I said. “His sensitivity is likely to be generated by a specific source in his everyday life.”

“Well, all right, in Fletcher’s case right now, it’s money more than anything else.”

“Quite a lot of it?”

“You do get right down to business, Mr. Crang.”

“Saves time.”

“In money, I’d say the total value of the store.”

“Is this your way of saying Fletcher’s business is on the rocks?”

“Totally, unless he stops doing stupid things.”

“How stupid are the things he’s doing?”

“Fletcher would kill me if he knew what I’m telling you.”

“You haven’t told me much yet.”

Charlie wriggled a little in her chair. It was a movement not without its charm. “I get the impression he’s in hock up to his eyeballs,” she said.

“To whom?”

“That’s the trouble. I haven’t a clue what he owes or who he owes it to, but from his attitude around the store, all the worrying and penny-pinching he does, moaning and groaning, complaining about getting a decent night’s sleep, the man is a wreck.”

I shook my head a little. “You know I’ve seen Fletcher a little bit lately, Charlie?”

“That’s partly why I chose to come here.”

“Fletcher strikes me as just the same unyielding guy as ever.”

“I was pretty sure you’d say that,” Charlie said. “But if you were in my shoes, working alongside Fletcher practically every day, you’d know the man is definitely in some kind of trouble. Almost for sure financial.”

“In the store the other day,” I said, “the place looked kind of swell. Fresh paint job, for starters. New digital safe. Pretty spiffy item.”

Charlie shook her head, “That stuff’s all the tip of the iceberg.”

“We’re not talking big bucks?”

“Something like fifteen thousand all told, paint job and everything, that’d be my guess.”

“Too few dollars to qualify as a major worry?”

“Just enough to spruce up the building. That’s how Fletcher phrased what it cost. The new look, the painting, plus replacing the old counters in the front room. And the most expensive thing, that stupid damn safe.”

“You don’t see a need for the safe?”

“It used to be that we’d put anything we had of a unique value, which was never much you’d call pricey anyway, in a locked cabinet under the main counter. Nothing went wrong with that system. Then Fletcher switched from the cabinet to the idiotic safe, and look what happened.”

“A break-in.”

“The first one since I’ve worked there, which is almost four years, I’ve never heard Fletcher speak of a previous one.” Charlie’s voice rose a couple of decibels, and her face flushed pink with what I took to be anger at the uselessness of it all.

“On the other hand,” I said, “I don’t imagine the store has ever before been minding anything as valuable as the Walter Hickey letters and the forged poems.”

“That’s true,” Charlie said. “But we’ve never had a robbery before. I’m just saying.”

“Let’s get back to Fletcher’s supposed heavy new debt,” I said. “You got a theory about that? Is he a gambler? Made some bad business deals? What?”

“Not cards or dice or any of that. Fletcher’s got a kind of puritan streak in that particular area.”

“But?”

“But he seems to have been shaky businesswise the last couple of years. It’s just a feeling I have. The whole antiquarian book industry has gone through tough times for a whole decade. Businesses closed like mad. Fletcher had to let two full-time employees go. He kept me, and we weathered the whole downturn thing.”

“So here you are, still in business. What’s your worry?”

“I think it might’ve come at a cost I didn’t really appreciate until now. Maybe Fletcher’s overextended. That’s not a business term I really understand. All I sense for sure is that Fletcher’s worried crazy.”

“On the other hand, the forged poems and the Hickey letters, he must have been pumped about getting his hands on them?”

“Especially Meg Grantham’s item,” Charlie said. “He got excited over it like I’ve hardly ever seen him over anything else. The way he acted, those poems were his salvation.”

“And now they’ve vanished.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, sitting up in her chair, looking indignant. “But you’re the man who’s going to get them back.”

“It’s what I’m good at.”

Charlie smiled in a manner that some might call seraphic.

“Let’s just sum up here,” I said. “Fletcher’s been hit with a double whammy. He’s deep in hock to somebody, according to you, and he’s lost the two sets of valuable documents put in his trust by clients, the clients being Meg and the Hickey woman. Now I enter the picture.”

Charlie nodded, agreeing with my simple statement. She said, “Fletcher’s more frantic than you probably imagined from your meeting with him.”

“That’s why you’re slipping me these bits of inside information about his probable debt to a person you can’t name? It’s all about his delicate emotional state? You want me to go easy on Fletcher, the guy who hired me?”

“Not exactly that.” Charlie put her coffee mug on the desk and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “It’s more that I want to encourage you to locate the missing documents as soon as you can, for Fletcher’s sake.”

“Your wish is that I see about fingering the thief?”

“Exactly.”

“In that category,” I said, lingering over what I was about to say, “what about yourself, for instance?”

“Me?”

“I imagine you have access to the safe.”

“So what?” Charlie said. Her initial tentativeness had given way to something more like irritation. Maybe a touch of panic tossed in, too, if I was reading the emotions crossing her face accurately. “I mean, really, that has nothing to do with anything.”

“Did Fletcher tell you the safe’s combination?”

“Yes, of course,” Charlie said. “But, really, Mr. Crang, I didn’t come here to be cross-examined this way.”

“You could get in and out of the safe at any time?”

“You actually suspect me of taking the letters and the poems?”

“It’s a matter of elimination, Charlie.” I softened down my tone from what it had been for the preceding couple of minutes. “You have a key to the store, and you can work the safe’s combination. That doesn’t automatically make you a suspect, but if I can rule you out as the burglar, I’m narrowing the list of suspects by one significant possibility.”

“I suppose.”

“Where were you Sunday night?”

Charlie took a sip of her coffee and looked defiant. “I was at my boyfriend’s house that night,” she said.

“A sleepover? You were there until morning?”

“Until my boyfriend served coffee in bed.”

“The two of you didn’t slip out together during the night?”

“My god.” Charlie looked as close as anybody could get to flabbergasted. “Now you’re trying to implicate my boyfriend as well as me?”

“I pride myself on a thorough job.”

“Well, you can forget about me and him.”

“The boyfriend will back up your story?”

“Damned straight he will.”

“And you figure the sleepover at the boyfriend’s place puts you out of the running as the thief?”

Charlie flipped her hands. “A person can’t be in two places at once.”

“I’ll need a name. Who’s the boyfriend?”

“He and I are going for discretion,” Charlie said after a few moments of fiddling with her coffee mug. “There might be issues with other people about our relationship if word got around.”

“I’m the guy your employer’s hired to put a finger on the burglar. That would make me a person you might normally be expected to confide in, and yet you don’t want me to know your gentleman host’s identity?”

“If it gets really necessary, I’ll tell you. Only you.”

I got up and poured myself another half cup of coffee. I held up the Cuisinart in Charlie’s direction. She shook her head.

“Before you leave,” I said, “I’ve got a name to try out on you. Christopher Thorne-Wainwright?”

“What about him?”

“Who is he?”

Charlie gave me a look that packed a trace of scorn. “You don’t know much about the antiquarian book business, do you?”

“My sweetie and I visit Fletcher’s store a dozen or so times a year.”

“I suppose I should give you marks for that.”

“So Mr. Thorne-Wainwright’s in your business?”

“How did the name come up in the first place?”

“It was mentioned during my inquiries.”

Charlie waited for me to say more. I kept quiet, and the silence dragged out.

“Oh, all right,” Charlie said. “What’s the harm? Christopher Thorne-Wainwright is a private dealer in antiquarian books. He and Fletcher are mortal enemies. I can’t tell you much about the rivalry, because it mostly happened before my time in the store, but Fletcher’s told me stories about him and Thorne-Wainwright getting it on over various deals that almost always went right for Fletcher and wrong for Thorne-Wainwright.”

“He was a competitor in retail operations, this Thorne-Wainwright?”

“He used to be. Had quite a good antiquarian bookstore, is what I understand. But he wasn’t much of a businessman. For example, when book collectors died, and their heirs got rid of the dead person’s books, nine times out of ten, Fletcher beat old Thorne-Wainwright to the punch.”

“Pouncing on dead peoples’ collections is an important part of the trade with antiquarian people?”

“For plenty of reasons. We’re hired to evaluate the collections for different kinds of tax deductions or for sales of the collections to libraries. Or in some cases we buy the collections for ourselves.”

“Fletcher and other dealers usually outfoxed Thorne-Wainwright?”

“Especially Fletcher. That’s the way he tells it, anyway.”

“And Thorne-Wainwright was ultimately driven out of business?”

“He gave up his store, but he’s stayed active, dealing in books out of his apartment. This has been for the last few years, so I assume he’s keeping afloat.”

Charlie put her coffee cup down on my desk and gave signals that she was preparing to take her leave.

“One more question,” I said. “I assume from what you’ve already said that you and Fletcher are on good terms?”

Charlie smiled for the first time since she’d arrived. “Currently we are,” she said, “and actually I owe that in very large part to your Annie.”

“This wouldn’t be connected to Fletcher’s curious romancing practices, would it?”

Charlie nodded vigorously. “I was in the line as Fletcher’s target just in front of Annie.”

“The line? Does that mean there was somebody else before you?”

“Three or four before me,” Charlie said. “Fletcher’s been on the prowl ever since the girlfriend he had for decades dropped him about a year ago and moved into a retirement home up on Lake Simcoe. She’s older than Fletcher by maybe ten or twelve years, and she discovered in her advancing age that she was really only interested in one thing.”

“The one thing wasn’t Fletcher?”

Charlie shook her head. “Scrabble.”

“Scrabble’s a senior citizen passion?”

“When Minnie’s not playing with friends who visit her — Minnie Mueller’s the old girlfriend’s name — she’s playing against people on her computer.”

“Fletcher’s never been interested in Scrabble?”

“He tried, but he never won a single game against Minnie.”

“That could be discouraging.”

“Drove him bats.”

“So, to fill the gap left in his life by the departing Minnie, he goes around whispering sweet nothings to the nearest female?”

“About cheekbones and ears and breasts.”

“While the women inhale his halitosis?”

“Yes,” Charlie said, taking time over her words. “His breath problem. That’s a tough one to bear, if you’re the girl. The worst moments — god, this is kind of hilarious when I think about it. I mean, working together, I inhale a lot of his bad breath, but the worst moments are what he calls the Midnight Manoeuvres. This is when he and I go back to the store after dinner, sometimes way after dinner, like beyond midnight, which is where Fletcher gets the name from. We restack books, do a bunch of things we didn’t have time to finish during the day. And the whole time, when we’re working till two or three in the morning, Fletcher’s breath gets stinkier and stinkier.”

“The breath thing can be easily cured, I understand.”

“All the girls he approaches have warm feelings about him for different reasons. They may not want him for a boyfriend, but they don’t want to hurt his feelings by telling him about the halitosis, never mind advising him about how he can lick it.”

“It would take a diplomatic touch, no doubt.”

“Or a blunt-speaking person.”

“No women have been up to the job?”

Charlie shook her head. “Why don’t you do it?” she said, wearing a large smile.

“Me?” I said. “You think I should tip off Fletcher about his unbearable breath?”

“God knows you’re blunt.”

“Fletcher and I already don’t much like one another.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to lose.”

“True.”

“In fact,” Charlie said, “him being your client at the moment, it might be useful for you in the long run to help him get rid of a problem he doesn’t know he has. He’ll be grateful and therefore more co-operative or whatever you need him to be.”

Charlie stood up, all set to depart.

“‘See Crang for pure breath,’” I said. “I can put that on my business card right after the barrister and solicitor part.”

“It makes a catchy slogan,” Charlie said, the smile still on her face.

She shook my hand and went out through the open door and down the hall to the elevator.

I walked over to the window and looked across Spadina. The cute parkette on the other side was named after Matt Cohen, the deceased novelist who had once lived a couple of blocks farther north on Spadina. A lot of writers had lived in the neighbourhood. Many still did. Margaret Atwood sightings were frequent in and around the Annex.

Down below, Charlie Watson emerged from the building and turned south. She had a no-nonsense walk, all purposeful. But what had been the reason for her visit to me? The stuff about Fletcher’s sensitivity had the feel of baloney. I got the faint impression she was trying to pry information out of me about the big break-in. Not that our conversation had ended up going in her favour. Maybe she really wanted to enlist me as a halitosis-breaker on behalf of Fletcher.

Nah, it couldn’t be that.

Could it?

But, kind of ridiculous as it sounded, maybe it’d be useful to my own purposes if I tipped Fletcher off about the halitosis thing. I do him a favour, and he reciprocates. Something like that might work to my benefit.