Booking In Read online

  Other Crang Mysteries

  Crang Plays the Ace

  Straight No Chaser

  Blood Count

  Riviera Blues

  Take Five

  Keeper of the Flame

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Other Crang Mysteries

  Copyright

  Cover

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  For Marjorie

  Chapter One

  Fletcher Marshall’s phone call woke me at seven o’clock on a July Monday morning that already felt sultry.

  “This hour of the day, Fletcher,” I said, “whatever you got, it better be good.”

  “A little patience, please, Crang. Just let me tell you about the grief I’m enduring down here.”

  “At your store?”

  “Of course at my store. Where else?”

  Fletcher was a guy with the smarts to run one of the last remaining antiquarian bookstores in the city, but he wasn’t someone whose personality I warmed to. On the other hand, a few weeks earlier, he’d arranged a very large favour for Annie B. Cooke, the woman in my life. Given the favour, Annie asked if I could please find it in my heart to end the animosity toward Fletcher, or at least mute it. I was trying but not always succeeding.

  “If my call disturbed Annie’s sleep,” Fletcher said, “tell her I apologize.”

  “The lovely Ms. C is away doing an interview for the book job you put her onto.”

  “Oh my, yes,” Fletcher said. “The recommendation I gave Annie will mean more money from one writing assignment than she’ll ever see in the rest of her working life.”

  “This is noble of you, Fletcher. But if we don’t get to the part about your grief in a hurry, I’m going to hang up and see about falling back to sleep.”

  “I need you to come to the store,” Fletcher said, his delivery more brisk. “Right away.”

  “Seven o’clock in the morning isn’t my prime time.”

  “And bring that burglar friend of yours.”

  “Maury Samuels?” I said. “Maury’s retired from the B and E profession. Keep that in mind.”

  “For the fix I’m in, it’s the man’s past years of expertise I require.”

  “Why don’t you and I try dealing with this fix you’re complaining about while we’re on the phone?”

  “Somebody broke into my safe at the store,” Fletcher said. “They cracked the combination and took the entire contents. This is a practically brand-new safe, I might add.”

  “Fletcher, I’m a lawyer,” I said. “It’s the cops you should be summoning.”

  “I don’t want word of this to get out in any form,” Fletcher said. “No police, no media, none of that right now.”

  I fought back the feeling that I was putting way too much effort into a conversation so early in the day.

  “Let’s go through this one more time, Fletcher,” I said. “Why is it, in the wide world of lawbreakers and enforcers, you chose to ring me?”

  “Frankly, Crang, you’re the first person I thought of who might have the contacts to help me.”

  “You’re giving me the real goods when you say you haven’t notified the police about the break-in?”

  “I thought I made that clear.”

  “And you don’t have one of those electronic gizmos that rings simultaneously at your own house and the nearest cop division when somebody makes an illicit entry into your place of business?”

  “Call me old-world.”

  “Like your store is.”

  “Precisely.”

  “For one reason or another, largely dealing with insurance,” I said, “you’ll need to contact the law sooner rather than later.”

  “Not before you and your burglar friend inspect the scene of the crime.”

  “Maybe I’m beginning to understand your strategy, Fletcher,” I said. “But how do you plan to account for the delay in talking to the cops when they realize they were the last people you invited to the party?”

  “Very easy, Crang,” Fletcher said. “We’re closed on Mondays. I’ll tell the police I didn’t discover the break-in until I stopped by the store later in the day.”

  I took a few seconds to process everything Fletcher had told me.

  “If you have no alarm,” I said, “then I take it you didn’t discover the break-in until you got to the store a few minutes ago.”

  “Wrong,” Fletcher said with more than a touch of asperity. “I’ve been here since 3:30 a.m.”

  “I’m guessing the predawn arrival isn’t your normal business practice.”

  “Hardly normal, for god’s sake, Crang. I was alerted to the break-in by the architect who rents the office over the store. He’s been sleeping on a couch in his waiting room the last couple of weeks because he’s got marital troubles at home. In the middle of last night, he heard loud bangs in my place. He decided the noise was suspicious and rang me at my apartment.”

  “Is your secret secure with this architect?”

  “He agreed to hold back from the police the part about him waking me up to report the break-in, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It buys you time.”

  “Much of which you’re wasting,” Fletcher said. “All I’m asking of you and your burglar colleague is professional advice.”

  Fletcher was right. I was stalling on any agreement to give him a hand with his break-in, which had trouble written all over it. But I knew my answer was inevitable. It was the big favour he’d done Annie that was the difference-maker. A friend of Fletcher’s, a woman named Meg Grantham, wanted somebody to ghost her memoirs. She had asked Fletcher to recommend a woman writer from among the contacts he’d made in the Toronto journalism community through his bookstore. Fletcher chose Annie, and when he brought Annie and Meg together, the two women hit it off like gangbusters. Meg wanted the book to tell the story of how she got to be so rich, worth in the neighbourhood of three billion bucks.
According to Canadian Business magazine, she ranked in the top five wealthiest women in Canada, number one if you counted only self-made Canadian woman success stories. Right off the bat, Meg paid Annie fifty grand just to get started on the memoirs.

  “I’ll see you at ten,” I said to Fletcher. “It’ll take me until then to get Maury in gear. Or if you’ll settle for just me, I can be there in a half hour.”

  “I envision it as a team concept,” Fletcher said. “You and the burglar.”

  “You’ll have to pay Maury,” I said. “These days he’s billing himself as a consultant.”

  Fletcher didn’t hesitate. “I’ll expect you people not a minute past ten,” he said.

  Then he hung up.

  Chapter Two

  I had a shower and put on jeans and a new dark-blue shirt Annie bought me at Banana Republic. Downstairs, I squeezed four oranges, drank the juice, and fixed two poached eggs on toast. I made enough coffee for two cups of Sumatra blend, poured one, and sat drinking it at the dining room table, looking out at our garden through the windows that spanned the back of the first floor. The view never failed to please.

  Annie and I lived in a two-storey semi-detached brick house on the east side of a street named Major. Major’s location positioned us in a neighbourhood called Harbord Village, which was close to the geographical dead centre of Metropolitan Toronto. Harbord Village bordered the Annex to the north, the Annex being as trendy as neighbourhoods could get in the city these days. Our village was not so voguish as the Annex, not so pricey, but we were gaining a little every year.

  When Annie and I bought the house three years earlier, it had already passed through the renovation stage. It shone with new major appliances, a fully equipped kitchen, and a second-floor bathroom that came close to spa quality. But the backyard was a neglected wilderness of weeds. We brought in a garden designer renowned among her clients as the GG, short for Garden Goddess. Our GG and her crew converted the backyard into a dense para­dise of berms and foliage, Japanese maples, a ginkgo tree, and plants in shades that ran to purples and deep reds.

  While I was busy sipping my Sumatra and admiring the view, two women and a man, each trim and fit, walked into the yard from the side alley carrying the tools of the gardening trade. They were members of the GG’s crew, arriving for a maintenance visit. The gorgeous blonde in the lead was Lee, the outfit’s straw boss. The tall, slim, muscular guy behind Lee was Pony, and third came the serene Larissa. All were whizzes at weeding, planting, and placing plants and trees with the exactitude the GG required. As the three moved deeper into the yard, they were swallowed by the foliage, vanishing among greenery so thick that an entire army of gardeners could work out of sight back there without me in the dining room having the smallest awareness of their presence.

  My iPhone read eight on the button; time to rouse Maury Samuels, hotel burglar now at rest from his old profession. Maury lived out in the sticks, somewhere near the borders of Scarborough. He’d need time to hustle downtown. I punched in his number on my cell’s call list.

  “Crang, you darling man, you’re an early starter today,” a voice answered. The voice belonged to Maury’s girlfriend, Sal Banfield.

  “You’re having a sleepover at the old guy’s place?” I said.

  “Other way around,” Sal said. “He stayed at my apartment last night. I’d hand him his cell, but at the moment he’s using the facilities.”

  “Hey, nice,” I said. “It’s convenient he’s at your place for what’s happening this morning.” Sal’s apartment was on St. George Street, four blocks from Major. “I got a paying gig for Maury if he can get himself over here in the next hour.”

  There was silence from Sal’s end.

  “Don’t sweat it, Sal,” I said. “Maury’s fee is going to be honestly earned. He’ll be helping a legitimate merchant solve a puzzle.”

  Sal made scoffing noises. It was a sound that came to her naturally. Sal’s family was old Toronto money. She had grown up in a mansion in Rosedale, and she spoke with a light honk in her voice, a condition endemic to Rosedale women. Sal was lovely and twenty-five, making her more of an age to be Maury’s granddaughter than his girlfriend. Neither of them seemed to mind the gap in years. When they met a year earlier, Sal was working on her doctorate in American literature at the University of Toronto. She was still at it, writing her thesis on the novels of Richard Russo.

  “You’ve been known in the past to get my guy in tight spots,” Sal said.

  “Not this time.”

  “Cross your heart?”

  “Consider it crossed.”

  Sal’s end went quiet again. Then she cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get Maury moving in your direction.”

  “Thanks, Sal.”

  Before I could put the phone down, Sal piped up again. “How’s Annie enduring Auntie Meg’s intensity?”

  “Meg Grantham’s your aunt?”

  “Not a real aunt, as in the sister of my father or my mother. She’s just a neighbour and a very old friend of the family. Daddy invested money in Auntie Meg when her company was just getting started doing what it does, health care systems or whatever. Daddy made a pisspot of money out of his investment.”

  “You think Ms. Grantham’s intense?”

  “Goes with the territory is what I think. Auntie Meg is kind of permanently whipped up, like twenty-four/seven intense. Mummy says she’s been like that since way before she scored the billions.”

  “I’m told it’s all of her own earning, those billions.”

  “That’s probably what keeps her hyper. The money didn’t come from some rich guy, not divorce money or inherited money. Auntie Meg is proud of that.”

  “And who can blame her?”

  “Totally not me.”

  When Sal and I ended our conversation, I sipped my second cup of Sumatra and wondered to myself whether beginning the week with a safecracking incident was a sign of good business to come.

  Or the opposite.

  Chapter Three

  Maury was still an attractive guy to women who were into the rough-hewn look. The lines that bracketed his jaw were deeper than they’d been a dozen years earlier, his hair had gone silver, but his posture was still erect, his eyes clear, his voice sardonic. This morning he had on a lightweight suit in a shade that was usually called “wheat” in fashion magazines. His shirt was dark blue in a shade like mine. The shirt and the suit bore more wrinkles than Maury usually permitted.

  “You ought to keep a change of clothes at Sal’s place,” I said. We were walking south on Major, on our way by foot to Fletcher Marshall’s store a few blocks away on College Street.

  “I look that bad?” Maury said, his head turned down to study his suit.

  “It’s more a case of you establishing a reputation all these years for fastidious attire. Which you’re not showing this morning.”

  Maury made a grunting sound. He brushed at his jacket with his left hand, as if he could banish the wrinkles. In his right hand he was carrying a black bag more suited to a medical doctor than a former second-storey man.

  “What’s with the bag?” I said.

  “For carrying break-in equipment.”

  “You’re coming out of retirement?”

  “Consultation purposes only. This is an idea Sal came up with a while ago for something to do with what she calls my idle hours. Advise businesses on how to avoid guys who made their living the way I used to.”

  “Stuff for show-and-tell, that’s what’s in the black bag?”

  “Sal put a stethoscope in there, a pair of tight white gloves for handling evidence. I got a tablet-type computer thing from Apple. I’m equipped, man.”

  “Impresses the heck out of me.”

  “Some of it’s bullshit. Back in the day, I was strictly a guy who got through the doors. I could pick a lock with the best in the busine
ss. But cracking open safes, I knew a lot theoretically, but that was never a strong point with me.”

  Maury and I had reached Harbord Street. We walked a block west to Brunswick, waited for the light to change, then crossed Harbord. We kept going farther south down Brunswick past the lovely old three-storey Victorian houses. The sun was hard and bright, the air not nearly as humid as it had seemed when Fletcher’s phone call started my day. I felt light-hearted, just a guy out for a stroll in his own neighbourhood with a friend who was revisiting his history in burglary.

  “The way I always understood it,” I said, “you were the guy who went into hotel suites in the middle of the night, the guests asleep in there, and when you left the suite, it was with the guests’ valuables.”

  “It was my role.”

  “Sounds risky.”

  “It was a career I trained for.” Maury sounded indignant. “I was the sneak thief, the guy in the Bally shoes that never squeaked, the friggin’ burglar.”

  “Very dangerous enterprise, I would still have to say.”

  “How many times I got to tell you I never got caught? Not once in thirty years.”

  “I recall you saying.”

  “Only time I was ever busted on a break-and-enter, a Holiday Inn out on Eglinton Avenue right here in the city, I wasn’t the guy who went into the hotel room.”

  “You were waiting in the car out in the parking lot while your partner handled the burglary duties inside. The trouble was, the husband of the couple in the room woke up, and bad things ensued. You told me about this calamity when we first met.”

  “The cops took me downtown, me and my partner, a guy name of Abbey Marcoux, that bungled the entry.”

  “Convicted at trial, confirmed on appeal. I read the appeal judgment.”

  “Two years in the can up in Kingston.”

  Maury’s face took on a morose look. He slowed his walking pace while I waited patiently for him to rally from his small sad reverie.

  We had reached a park on Brunswick just above College. The park was small, green, and nicely looked after. I motioned Maury to a bench facing the park. It was twenty minutes to ten, and we were only five minutes away from Fletcher Marshall’s store. There was time to dally. We sat on a bench beside a sign reading “Margaret Fairley Park.”