Booking In Read online

Ham picked up the receiver and tapped out three digits. They had to be 911.

  “Police,” he said in answer, I judged, to an operator’s question about who Ham needed help from. “Oh, wait, an ambulance too. Maybe the man isn’t dead yet, but I doubt it. He could never have survived whatever happened to him. Also a fire engine, probably.”

  Ham paused while the operator spoke. Then he said, “I’m Hamilton Carruthers, but I’m downstairs right now in the bookstore under my office where I’m sleeping for the time being.”

  Ham’s voice was amazingly steady for a guy reporting a murder. “That’s the address where I’m phoning from, yeah,” he said.

  Then another pause.

  “What makes me think he’s dead?” Ham said. “His face is a terrible mess. It’s so awful. The blood, the things broken in his face… Oh god.”

  Now Ham sounded like he was falling to pieces. The steadiness had vanished from his voice. I couldn’t blame the guy.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” Ham said into the phone. He started to cough.

  “Don’t vomit on the crime scene?” Ham said, no doubt repeating what the operator had told him. “I’ll have to get out of here fast!”

  Ham slammed the phone on the counter. Then he bolted for the rear door. As his footsteps hit the alley, I rose out of my hiding place and followed Ham’s route down the hallway.

  Oh man, I thought, don’t let Ham barf right outside the door. I needed enough time, unobserved by him, to get out of the store and back to Sal’s Miata. It wouldn’t do me, or anybody else, much good if I were nailed at the scene of a murder, especially since I was engaged with the deceased in a break-and-enter at the time of the killing. What an ugly mess this whole damn episode had turned into.

  Standing just inside the back door, I could hear Ham throwing up. He was noisy about it, and the throwing-up sounds seemed a dangerously short distance away. I risked a quick look out the door. From my angle, I couldn’t see any sign of Ham. No sound of him barfing either for the moment.

  Then there were more throwing-up sounds. He must have been hurling the last food left in his stomach, and he was doing it in the small space between Fletcher’s store and the building to the east. The space wasn’t an alleyway, strictly speaking, more of a dumping ground for pop cans, old newspapers, and, as of this minute, fresh vomit. Now I could see Ham. He was partway into the space, bent over, his back to me, spitting out the remains of his sickness.

  I slipped out of the bookstore’s door and headed down the alley. I was making a break for it, and my chances felt good. Partway to the street, I risked a glance behind me. Ham was still bent over, his back tilting forwards, spitting and hocking a little as if to clear his throat.

  I got into Sal’s Miata, started it, and pulled away from the curb. All was silent, including the engine and all mechanical parts of the little vehicle. Even to my nervous ears, the Miata gave off hardly anything in the way of motor noises. I coasted away. Nobody was out on the sidewalk, no cars moving on the streets. In the very near background, a siren started up. It probably belonged to a fire engine from the station on the south side of College. The fire guys must have tuned into Ham’s call and decided to answer it since they were so close to the scene of the reported murder. All the fire engine needed to do was pull out of the station, make a u-turn on College, and stop in front of the store. That was okay by me. In no time, I would be long gone north on the street that led away from Fletcher’s place.

  I worked my way across Harbord on to the street next to Central Tech, the school a couple of blocks west of my house. I pulled to a stop outside Central Tech’s back entrance.

  I sat in the car, thinking about what had happened in the last fifteen minutes. I wondered about phoning Maury with the news of his friend’s death. That was going to be a hard one. I had a lot to think about. I stayed in the car, doing the thinking, trying to make some decisions. I was losing track of time. It seemed to be going by in a hurry.

  Then my phone rang.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Fletcher was calling. I let the phone ring three times while I organized myself into the right voice to handle a call in the middle of the night. Fletcher was probably reporting a murder that I already knew more about than practically anybody except the murderer.

  I answered the phone before its fourth ring. “What’s it this time, Fletcher?” I said.

  “I need your help at the store!” Fletcher said in a voice that was very excited for a normally calm and collected guy like him. “This is a crisis, and it requires a lawyer.”

  “Another break-in?”

  “No, a body.”

  “Whose?” I was keeping my side of the conversation terse and straight to the point. It was the best way to avoid giving away clues as to my own involvement in what had happened.

  “How could I possibly know that?” Fletcher sounded more like his ornery self. “All I’ve got is a phone call from Ham Carruthers. He says there’s a body in the store, and he’s already summoned the police. So please, Crang, goddamnit, this is the point of my call, meet me at the store without delay.”

  “Ham saw the dead person?”

  “Of course he did, or I wouldn’t be phoning you.”

  “He couldn’t identify the body?”

  Fletcher paused. “I don’t think I asked, but that’s irrelevant right now anyway. Just get down to the damn store.”

  “On my way,” I said.

  “Wait, I’ll pick you up. I’m out in my car anyway.”

  “Coming from your house?”

  “That’s beside the point. What’s your address? Somewhere in the Annex, am I correct?”

  “Never mind, I happen to have access to a car at the moment.”

  “Very well.”

  Fletcher hung up.

  That was a little odd, I thought, Fletcher evasive about where he was? Did he have a new girlfriend? Was the bag of anti-halitosis treatments working its cure? And, goddamnit, Annie and I didn’t live in the bloody Annex. Our house was in Harbord Village. People were always making that mistake. It was irritating.

  I checked the time on my phone. It wouldn’t be smart to arrive too soon at the scene of the crime. I rumpled my hair a little and pulled my shirt out at the waist. The look I was going for was that of a guy who had been in a rush getting dressed and didn’t take the time to run a comb through his hair.

  I drove at a pace not much above coasting over the short distance back to the store’s neighbourhood, coming at it from the side at the opposite end of the alley behind the store from the one where I had parked a half hour earlier when I was still functioning as Biscuit’s wheelman. A police car was pulled across the alley entrance. Two cops were leaning against their patrol car. They watched as I parked in back of their car, straightening up when they saw me opening the Miata’s door on the driver’s side.

  I was halfway out of the car when I realized I was still wearing the white gloves. The gloves would be sure to catch the cops’ attention. They’d ask questions. I told myself not to panic, and as I straightened up, I slipped my gloved hands into the pockets of the light windbreaker I was wearing. I was going for a casual posture, the hands in the pockets.

  “Sorry, sir, you can’t go down here,” one cop said to me. He was young, still with acne on his face, but large and muscular. “If that’s what you had in mind.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” I said. “My client owns the bookstore down there. He got me out of bed to come to what he says is the scene of a murder.”

  The two cops looked at one another, the pimpled young guy giving the impression he was taking charge, even though the other cop, a woman, looked older. Maybe it was a sexist thing that was going on, the kid cop asserting himself over his female partner.

  “How’s your client know it’s a murder?” the pimply cop said. “Me and my partner aren’t even sure of that.”


  “My client was phoned by the tenant of the space over the store,” I said. “The way I understand it, the tenant’s the one who found the body and called it in.”

  Down the alley, at the end where I had sat in the Miata a little earlier, there was a sudden commotion of new arrivals. Four people in white outfits, two of them carrying heavy-duty medical equipment, were rushing up to the bookstore’s back door. Behind them, held back by three uniformed cops, were Fletcher and Ham Carruthers. I stepped into the space at the back of the cop car, a movement that caught Fletcher’s attention. He made hand signals that I interpreted as telling me to stay where I was. The two guys, Fletcher and Ham, disappeared from sight, pointed toward College Street. They reappeared a minute or two later on the street that ran north and south at my end of the alley.

  “Thank you being so prompt, Crang,” Fletcher said when we regrouped ourselves at the Miata, out of the hearing of the two cops.

  “What more can you two tell me?” I said. I stood there, still with my hands jammed in the windbreaker pockets, continuing the gloves coverup. “Anybody identified the dead person?”

  “Not that we know of,” Fletcher said.

  “Man or woman?” I said, speaking to Ham.

  “A man, but oh my god, his face was so broken up, I could never have told you who he was, even if I’d been a friend or relative or somebody who’d known him all his life. It was absolutely horrible.”

  “What did you hear that made you check downstairs in the first place?”

  “Well, it wasn’t like the noise of books hitting the floor the way it happened that time when I heard the burglars downstairs,” Ham said. “I only caught a faint kind of sound this time. But what happened, I was watching TV, one of the Bourne movies, Matt Damon running through most of Paris, and then I heard this slight noise, something simple like a door opening. So I looked out my back window, and I saw a bright light coming into the alley from the bookstore. At first I didn’t think too much about it. I thought it was just Fletcher on one of his late-night sessions in the store.”

  “A Midnight Manoeuvre?” I said.

  Fletcher gave me a sharp look.

  “Charlie told me that’s what you called them,” I said.

  “That woman is quite the chatterbox,” Fletcher said, giving a vague nod.

  “Anyway,” Ham said, “I looked again a couple of minutes later. The lights were still on, and that was when I thought I should just take a look from up close. Something might be wrong. Or maybe nothing was wrong, but Fletcher was down there and might be able to use help. I was feeling really restless and wouldn’t have minded some kind of distraction.”

  “And you headed straight downstairs?”

  “Yeah, but I never thought I’d find a dead person.”

  “You think it was a break-in gone wrong?” Fletcher asked me.

  “We need a whole lot more information before we settle on that,” I said.

  “I suppose,” Fletcher said.

  He was dressed in a smart blue summer-weight suit and a light-green dress shirt without a tie. The tie was stuffed into the pocket on the right side of his suit jacket. It had a lot of purple in it. Whatever Fletcher had been doing earlier that night, it had called for smart dressing. The clothes had a faint sense of dishevellment, and his hair wasn’t as slicked back as it usually was, but Fletcher still looked like a guy who’d been out on the town. Maybe on a date. Maybe with a new girlfriend.

  “It was so awful, I couldn’t stop throwing up,” Ham said. His face was the shade of white you saw on very sick people, and his hands were still shaking.

  “People from the Homicide Squad ought to be on their way by now,” I said. “We won’t know the story of what went on in the store until they size things up. That’ll probably take a lot of hours.”

  “So what’ll we do in the meantime?” Fletcher asked.

  “We wait.”

  “Wait?”

  “You two guys are the only two witnesses at the moment,” I said, speaking to Fletcher. “Ham discovered the victim, and you, Fletcher, you’re the best bet at identifying the dead guy in there, and maybe coming up with an explanation for what he might be doing in the store in the middle of the night.”

  “But what if I can’t answer those questions? Now that I think about it, I’m positive I have no such answers.”

  “I’m just telling you the situation from the cop perspective.”

  “And until then what happens?”

  “I told you.”

  “We wait?”

  “With cops,” I said, “there’s always waiting.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I didn’t get home from the murder scene until seven thirty. Annie was up and had made coffee. She poured me a cup. We sat in the dining room. The garden looked at its most gorgeous in the early morning sun.

  “You know what hurts the most?” I said to Annie. “Physically, I mean?”

  “What?”

  “My arms.”

  I explained to Annie that I’d had to conceal my hands in the windbreaker pockets at an awkward angle to keep anybody from getting a glimpse of the gloves I had on. I never seemed to find a chance to slip them off until a couple of hours into my time in the constant company of Fletcher and Ham and a dozen cops, including two guys from the Homicide Squad. In the course of describing the glove dilemma to Annie, I gave her most of the details I knew about Biscuit’s murder.

  “How infinitely sad,” Annie said. “I never met the man and can’t say I approved of the way he made his living, but I know you thought highly of some things about him, the way he carried himself.”

  “The thing is, Biscuit hasn’t been identified as the dead man yet. Professional burglars like he was don’t carry identification while they’re on the job, and nobody at the crime scene, not Fletcher, not Ham, none of the cops, have the faintest idea who he is.”

  “When is that likely to end?”

  “Fingerprints,” I said. “The cops’ll get a comparison of the body’s fingerprints with Biscuit’s from when he did time out in B.C.”

  “Oh my, I guess you couldn’t have come forward in the ID process at the scene of the crime.”

  “I didn’t have a chance to anyway,” I said. “Thank god for that. Otherwise, if the cops had allowed me into the scene of the crime, I would have had a choice between lying or telling the truth. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Either answer would have got me in trouble immediately or eventually.”

  “But, wait a sec, you were there because Fletcher called you to be his legal representative, and I’m assuming Fletcher was asked to look at the body and possibly identify him. So how come you didn’t accompany Fletcher into the store where the body was lying?”

  “The cops kept me out.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “Fletcher wasn’t charged with a crime. That meant, strictly speaking, he wasn’t entitled to legal representation at this early stage of the investigation.”

  “Does that make sense to you?”

  “Not really. The homicide cops kept me out mostly because they chose to act like hardasses. They also said they didn’t want unnecessary people trampling the crime scene.”

  “Did you resist?”

  “Tokenly.”

  “I get it,” Annie said. “You’d be walking into the rock-and-hard-place situation.”

  “Exactly.”

  I poured myself another cup of coffee.

  “What you need is a decent breakfast in your stomach,” Annie said. “Then a little nap.”

  I thought about food. It seemed an agreeable idea. “Whatever you prescribe,” I said.

  “I prescribe scrambled eggs,” Annie said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll switch to my chef mode.”

  I eased back in my chair, slipping into the circle of soft sun coming through the back wind
ow. I had almost dozed off by the time Annie began to serve the food. Orange juice, scrambled eggs, multigrain toast, slices of tomatoes, more coffee.

  “The murder took place while you were sitting in Sal’s sporty little car,” Annie said as we ate.

  “Just yards away.”

  “That’s gruesome to contemplate.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Especially to contemplate right now when I’m still eating my scrambled eggs.”

  “Sorry, sweetie, that was insensitive of me.”

  “No, it’s therapeutic. I need to talk the whole thing out of my system, and who else besides you could I do that with?”

  “Maury.”

  “But that would be a different conversation.”

  “He doesn’t know Biscuit’s dead?”

  “I phoned him from the Miata on my way home.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “Stoically. He’s going to get in touch with Biscuit’s son in Vancouver.”

  Annie looked up from her food. “You never mentioned a son before.”

  I told her about the relationship between Biscuit and the accountant named John Carter, ending with Maury letting me know he would persuade the son to come to Toronto and identify the battered body of his father.

  “Will the identification of Biscuit bring the case closer to you personally?” Annie asked me. “Is somebody apt to put you and Biscuit together?”

  “It depends on how sharp Fletcher is,” I said.

  “How so? What’s Fletcher know?”

  “Early on in the case,” I said, “right at the beginning, during a general discussion of safecracking Maury and I had with Fletcher at his store, we mentioned Biscuit as the ace of the profession.”

  “By name?”

  I nodded. “A name that’s hard to forget. If Fletcher puts two and two together, then he’ll hook me into the case.”

  “Are you worried about that?”

  “Not much. Fletcher I can handle, though I’m betting he’ll try something dodgy if he guesses right about Biscuit and me being friendly.”