Booking In Read online

  “That might be a relative term,” I said.

  Maury got up and walked across the room to the MacGillivrays. Whatever line of patter he fed them worked in a hurry. They were on their feet in two minutes, trailing Maury to our table.

  “Hey, good lookin’,” Artie, the tall, muscular brother said to Sal.

  “Hey, yourself,” Sal said, batting her eyes at Artie.

  Artie pulled up a chair beside Sal. Arnie stayed on his feet, his eyes locked on me. He recognized my face from somewhere but hadn’t figured out where yet.

  “It was last night, Arnie,” I said. “You and I were on the same tail job, you might say.”

  Arnie looked from me to Maury and back again to me. He still hadn’t taken a chair.

  “Sit down, Arnie,” his brother said. “We’re supposed to be meeting this beautiful young lady.”

  Sal gave Artie a big smile. “I’m Sal.”

  Artie, who looked like he’d already knocked back a few Blue Plaids, reached over and held Sal’s hand. “I’m Artie, and you’re gonna be glad we’re getting together.”

  Arnie hesitated some more before he decided to sit. “What’s happening here?” he asked me.

  “A little friendly conversation with you and Artie,” I said.

  Artie’s attention switched to me. “How do you know my name?”

  “We met last night,” I said. “But not face to face. Your stomach met my elbow.”

  Artie’s face went into a scowl. “You’re the son of a bitch that whacked me when I wasn’t looking.”

  “That’s revisionist history, Artie. You were too busy strangling me to take a peek at who I was.”

  “Screw you. I owe you one.”

  “I’d call us even.”

  “Comes the day, man. My fist is gonna catch you big time.”

  Artie was prepared to continue with the threats, but Arnie held up his hand to quiet him.

  “You followed us here?” Arnie said to me. “What’s all this? You want to know about the people in the house with the swimming pool?”

  “That,” I said, “among other details.”

  “The job at the guy by the name of Grantham’s house?” Arnie said. “Me and Artie are off it. Just like I told you I was gonna do last night, I went to the Hickey woman right after I saw you, and I said to her as long as she wasn’t playing straight with us, hiring you on the same job we were already doing business on, then screw her.”

  “Good move, Arnie,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d still like to talk some more about this job you’re no longer involved with.”

  Arnie got a wily look. “What’s in it for me and Artie?”

  “How about I buy you and your brother a glass of whatever you favour in this establishment?”

  “Old Kilt,” Artie broke in.

  “If that’s your preference,” I said. “Whatever Old Kilt is.”

  “The house Scotch,” Artie said. “It’ll blow your head off.”

  I signalled the red-haired waitress.

  Arnie leaned across the table in my direction. “Her name’s Missy. She don’t like nobody calling her Red.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  I ordered two Old Kilts, scrupulous to address the waitress as Missy.

  “Doubles,” Artie said. “No ice.”

  “I like a man who can handle his drink,” Sal said to Artie.

  “You’re lookin’ at one,” Artie said. “I never get drunk. Hardly.”

  Missy brought the two double shots of Old Kilt. Artie took a deep swallow. Arnie settled for a sip. His expression had progressed from wily to wary.

  “Let’s think of this as a little friendly sharing of information,” I said to Arnie.

  Artie piped up again. “You’re trying to get the letters the Hickey dame sent us after?”

  “Can’t you ever shut up, Artie?” Arnie said.

  Artie took another deep swallow of his Old Kilt. “My brother and me are fantastic at burglaries,” he said to Sal.

  “I’m impressed,” Sal said.

  “For chrissake, Artie, keep your mouth closed!” Arnie said.

  “We’re all friends here, except for me and this dickhead,” Artie said. The dickhead he had referred to was me. I took the insult like a champ.

  “You bet, Artie,” Sal said, doing her eye-batting thing again. “All friends apart from the, uh, dickhead.”

  Arnie dropped his chin on his chest, looking like a man surrendering to the odds against him.

  “How were you supposed to identify the letters, Arnie?” I asked. “One letter can look like any other letter when you’re burgling a house that’s new to you.”

  “The letters are supposed to be in cardboard boxes, all different colours,” Arnie said, sounding weary but perking up a little as he got into describing the details. “Six different colours is what the Hickey woman told us. Blue, red, green, I forget what else.”

  “All the letters were either addressed to Hickey, the Toronto novelist, or were copies of letters Hickey sent to people in New York?”

  “Not that I know who this Hickey was supposed to be exactly. Just some kind of famous writer from a long time ago. He’s dead, but the letters still count for big money.”

  “What do the different colours on the cardboard boxes mean?”

  “That part I understand,” Arnie said. “The colour tells which people wrote the letters in that box. The Hickey woman said she organized things very careful, so nobody’d mistake the value of what’s in the boxes.”

  “And you signed on to burgle the boxes from the house I saw you sizing up?”

  “Yeah, but we had a problem, because since we been on the job the last few days, the guy has hardly ever left the house, not for long, anyway. He’s like the next thing to a recluse, this guy. I couldn’t figure when he’d be going out. Some days it got useless hanging around.”

  “This is Brent Grantham you’re talking about?”

  “Who else would I be talking about?”

  Missy arrived at the table with a second round of Old Kilt for the McGillivray boys. Doubles again.

  “Artie’s getting antsy,” Sal said to me.

  “We won’t be long now,” I said.

  “You wanna say so long to this joint?” Artie said to Sal, slurring the esses as he spoke. He rolled his eyes at Sal, the rolling eyes edging just ahead of the slurred esses.

  At the same time, Maury was having trouble with his temper. He looked like a man with smoke steaming out of his ears. I knew I’d better hustle along my fact-finding mission before he blew a gasket at the lascivious Artie.

  “This was strictly a burglary Acey Hickey wanted you to pull?” I said to Arnie McGillivray. “No rough stuff called for?”

  “Ours was gonna be an ordinary break-in when everybody’s out of the house. We couldn’t take a chance on running into the guy who owns the house and maybe smacking him around, because Artie’s already got two assault convictions. Another one, and he’d go inside for a serious number.”

  “So you quit the job last night?”

  “Told her about running into you outside the guy’s house,” Arnie said. “That freaked her, I’m telling you.”

  “But no names mentioned?”

  “I don’t know anybody’s frigging name! Not yours or anybody else’s at this goddamn table!”

  “And Ms. Hickey mentioned no other party she’s aware of who may be hunting down the letters in the boxes?”

  “No,” Arnie said. “But she said if me and Artie are off the job, she’s gonna try and hire someone who’ll take the letters and give the Grantham guy some whacks while he’s at it.”

  “No more Mister Nice Guy in the burglar role?”

  “I told you already she didn’t mention names.”

  “That’s it,” Maury said,
breaking into the conversation. “You got enough, Crang.”

  Maury took Sal by one arm and eased her to her feet.

  “Hey!” Artie said. “That’s my girl!”

  “One more word out of you, buddy, and I’m gonna smack your stupid kisser!”

  “Who is this old fella?” Artie said to Sal. “Your gramps or something?”

  I got up, went over to the bar, and paid our bill with my Visa card. The double Old Kilts were surprisingly pricey. I tossed a ten-dollar bill on top of the Visa slip, a tip for Missy.

  “Let me tell you, sweetheart,” Artie was saying to Sal back at the table, “you’re missing something maximum in me.”

  Artie’s esses were now long slurs, and he was swaying on his feet.

  “Sit the hell down, Artie,” Arnie ordered his brother. Arnie had long since given up any fretting over the collapse of his dealings with Acey Hickey, but he seemed content enough with his second double Old Kilt.

  I had Sal by one arm, Maury held on to the other, Biscuit brought up the rear, and we breezed past the Mel Gibson portrait and out to the street.

  “That was exhilarating,” Sal said.

  “That was goddamn humiliating,” Maury said.

  “Listen, Maury,” Sal said, “it’s not like I ever want to do something like it again.”

  “Not as long as I got a part in the situation.”

  “But I have to say,” Sal said, “my little act got Crang the answers he wanted to his questions.”

  “Just remember who it was that brought those two jackasses over to the table in the first place,” Maury said.

  Biscuit piped up. “It was teamwork that paid off,” he said.

  The rest of us turned and looked at Biscuit.

  “Everybody working together got us the information Crang was looking for,” he said in his quiet voice.

  Sal leaned down and lifted Biscuit in a large, enveloping hug. “You’re a sweetheart, little man,” she said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was fifteen minutes early for my Monday morning appointment in Ish Standwin’s paper shop. When I arrived, two young guys in their late twenties were negotiating with a clerk for the purchase of pens. The young guys were smartly turned out in dark suits, navy blue for one, charcoal grey for the other. The clerk looked chic in her high-necked black dress with a small antique broach pinned to the breast. The number I heard her quote for one pen was “high eight hundreds.”

  The trip out to the store had gone faster than I’d expected, a ride on the Bloor subway, westbound, then an easy stroll from the High Park station into Bloor West Village. The walk took me past a pleasing mix of high-end shops and old-timey businesses that had held on through the upward sweep of the neighbourhood’s prosperity. Next door to Standwin’s, a scrubbed-looking Polish restaurant advertised its schnitzel, sweet waffles, and old-country beers.

  “You understand,” the navy-blue-suited kid was saying to the clerk, “these are investment purchases Kieran and I are making.”

  “Mont Blanc can always be counted on for that,” the clerk said. “But for instance, if you want to stretch your investment level, you might consider the Krone Limited Edition Brown Cognac instrument. It’s going for four thousand dollars in today’s market. Or thereabouts.”

  Kieran looked at his friend, his eyes wide, the thrill written across his face. “Like, dude, is this fun for real or what!”

  The friend, giving off a giddy vibe, high-fived Kieran.

  I turned away, and at the same time a tall guy about forty wearing a gorgeous tweed jacket came out of a room at the back of the store.

  “You must be the marvellous Mr. Crang,” the tall guy said to me, grinning a large welcoming grin.

  “Only Annie ever applies an adjective like that to me,” I said.

  “She’s one of our favourite people, and she’s got great taste.”

  “If she loves me as much as she loves your notebooks, I’m doing all right.”

  The tall guy confirmed he was Ish Standwin. We shook hands, and he showed me into the small, crowded office he’d just emerged from. He sat in an ergonomic chair on his side of the desk. I sat on an ordinary but elegant straight-backed chair opposite him.

  “I made it clear to Annie,” Ish said, “that I don’t bring a whole lot of science to assessing the age of paper.”

  “Understood.”

  “But I’ll do my best to help you with a validation.”

  “Or the opposite of a validation.”

  “Always a chance of that, I suppose.”

  “Okay, getting down to business, Annie’s given you the background to my dilemma?”

  Ish took a deep breath before he began. “What you have in your possession,” he said, “is a copy of a nineteenth century poem that’s supposed to be a forgery done years after the true original. Roughly this is the background?”

  I nodded and went into my all too familiar story of the messing around with the poetry Elizabeth Barrett Browning published for real in 1850. Another version of the same poems, dated 1847 and called the Reading Sonnets, turned up in multiple copies in 1894. These were not revealed as forgeries until the 1930s, having in the meantime earned much in money and reputation for the two collectors responsible for the forging operation. Since then, these very forgeries had acquired fame and value as just that, phony Elizabeth Barrett Browning originals.

  “The document I’m going to show you,” I said to Ish, “has been sold to a collector employing my client as one of the 1894 forgeries that, to the astonishment of the rare book community, has just recently surfaced.”

  “And you doubt the claim?”

  “I’m suspicious,” I said. “But you’re the guy whose opinion counts.”

  “With me, Mr. Crang, what you’re going to get this morning is mostly an intuitive judgment.”

  “Beats my own total ignorance.”

  I opened the briefcase I’d brought with me, and drew from inside the alleged forged copy of the Reading Sonnets that would soon belong to Meg Grantham. I’d given up the white gloves as a now bothersome precaution. Bare-handed, I passed the document to Ish.

  He touched and lifted the papers, using gentle caution, spending about ten minutes turning the pages one by one. Every little while he’d glance up at me, a pained expression on his face. I got the impression I shouldn’t expect a positive verdict. Ish had soon swept through the entire booklet.

  “Is this a joke?” he said, looking me in the eye.

  “It’s that bad?”

  Ish made a wiping motion with his right hand. “Sorry, sorry, Mr. Crang. That was extreme. On the face of it, this is a very good piece of work. I mean in the sense that it’s persuasive to the ordinary person looking at it, the person who wants to believe it’s authentic. It works at that level, which is probably all that counts with the people behind the document. But honestly, when even partly trained experts examine these poems up close, then …” Ish’s voice trailed off, and his glance returned to the pages.

  “The paper is that much of a giveaway?” I said.

  “It’s not the paper, really, though just off the top of my head, I’d say the paper on these pages is far too light for a typical late-nineteenth-century document.”

  “So the paper’s likely questionable,” I said. “What else puts the poems in a bad light as far as you’re concerned?”

  “The ink,” Ish said. “I know ink very well. I’m interested in ink. I study it. I think I can be relied on for an opinion about ink.”

  “No question, I’m sure.”

  “This, on these documents, is a black ink so strong and consistent that if anybody had put the documents up for sale in 1894, he would have been celebrated as a genius just for the ink alone.”

  “Pretty distinctive? The ink?”

  “It actually was conceived and brought on for sale a
bout ten years ago.”

  “That recent?”

  Ish nodded. “And it instantly became hugely popular. Anybody who works with a pen salivates over this particular ink. I can’t keep the store in stock with the ink. Personally, I love Midnight Special.”

  “That’s what it’s named?”

  “Mostly colloquially.”

  “After the blues tune, I’m assuming.”

  “You know it? The Leadbelly recording was very popular.”

  “Blues isn’t my field, but I’m aware of a few songs.”

  “The point is, everybody in the ink business knows, respects, and immediately recognizes Midnight Special,” Ish said, rearranging himself in his ergonomic chair. “It is definite evidence of a crime of some sort to find it in a document that claims its origin in the late nineteenth century.”

  “The timing of the ink on the poems is out by a century and a half,” I said. “Right, okay, I’m definitely persuaded.”

  “Now then,” Ish said, touching the poems lightly with his long fingers, “let’s move along.”

  “There’s more?”

  “As much doubt as the ink casts on the legitimacy of these poems, something worse is the final insult.”

  “‘Insult’ doesn’t sound reassuring.”

  “At one point near the end of the document, the person doing the forging, the man with the pen in his hand, he apparently ran out of ink just as he got halfway through the forty-third sonnet.”

  “The one everybody knows.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Right there, he’s no longer working with Midnight Special?”

  “Not for the rest of the sonnet.”

  “He switched to a different ink?”

  “And a different pen for just those lines.”

  “But in your mind, it was a gross offence?”

  “A BIC Cristal!” Ish said, coming down hard on the words, disgust ringing in his voice. “He used a BIC Cristal pen!”

  “This is a sacrilege in the pen-and-ink world?”

  “The BIC Cristal ballpoint pen wasn’t invented until 1949!”

  “Worse than sacrilege.”