Booking In Read online

  “Ever heard of this Margaret Fairley broad?” Maury said, sounding brighter.

  “She was a Coleridge specialist,” I said. “I read that in a book about the neighbourhood. And she edited a communist magazine.”

  “That was what got the park named after her?”

  I shook my head.

  “Margaret lived in a house on this block where we’re sitting.” I said. “Everybody thought she was a generous neighbour.”

  Maury’s expression told me he wasn’t convinced. Since I knew there would be no persuading him, both of us went amiably quiet for a few minutes.

  Then Maury looked at his watch. “Time we got to the gig,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  Fletcher Marshall’s store was on the north side of College, across the street from the oldest functioning fire station in the city. The store took up the ground floor of a two-storey detached building. It had large windows on either side of the front door, both currently featuring handsome book displays. Canadiana was the centrepiece of one, and the other was given over to old books about nineteenth-century classical composers. On the right side of the building as we faced it, there was another door opening off the street. The sign in the door window announced that it led upstairs to the office of “Hamilton Carruthers RAIC, Architect, Environmental Design.”

  “Don’t just stand there rubbernecking,” Fletcher said, waiting for Maury and me at the bookstore’s open door.

  Fletcher was very tall, erect, and craggy-faced, in his early sixties but looking younger and fitter. In temperament, Fletcher was a flinty kind of guy, a direct speaker, always confident in his opinions. Today, a rarity in my experience of him, he gave off waves of agitation. Fletcher was jumpy.

  I introduced him to Maury.

  “Your talents are known to me, Mr. Samuels,” Fletcher said.

  “They’re getting rusty.”

  “I won’t be asking you to practise them, merely to assess somebody else’s exhibition of similar talents.”

  “Show me what you got.”

  Fletcher’s store had few of the smells a person expects in an antiquarian bookstore, especially one that has been in operation for more than twenty years. No hints of dust or mildew offended the nostrils. Fletcher had a scrupulous attitude toward his store and its contents. Thousands of books lined the shelves in the large main room, and each one gave the impression it had an attentive and loving owner.

  Fletcher led Maury and me into a smaller room in the middle of the store. A couple of tables were pushed against one wall, each desk stacked with books. Among the stacks, there were two orderly piles of large-sized envelopes. Everything indicated that this room constituted the store’s shipping department. Against one wall stood the safe that was apparently at the centre of Fletcher’s grief. The safe, its door shut, showed no signs that anybody had messed with it.

  “Digital lock,” Maury said, giving the safe his preliminary inspection.

  “That’s a problem?” Fletcher said.

  “Just an observation.”

  “Very well,” Fletcher said. “Suppose I just tell you what I expect from you gentlemen this morning.”

  Maury didn’t let Fletcher get any further. “You want me to take a run at the safe. See if I can open it. If I can, you’re hoping I can tell you what type of skill it took for the guy who cracked it last night. Maybe even take a guess at which particular guy, out of everybody I know in the burglary business in the city, was likely to have done the job. That about it?”

  Fletcher looked offended that Maury had read him so accurately. He took a moment to organize his next step.

  “Am I asking too much?” Fletcher said.

  “Maybe not,” Maury said. He pulled on the white gloves from the briefcase Sal had prepared for him, then turned back to the safe.

  Even though it was digital and therefore presumably modernized in every respect, the safe still had the cumbersome look of an old-time object. In height, it came up to Maury’s waist. It wasn’t particularly wide, but it ran deep in length and appeared to have plenty of storage room inside. The lock apparatus sat separately on top of the storage section and seemed to be attached to the lower part by a series of internal wires. On the lock apparatus’s face, there were rows of numbers on the right side, three numbers across and four down, and on the left side, there was a large dial.

  “What’d the safe look like when you came in here at whatever time this morning?” Maury said to Fletcher. “Closed up like this?

  “No,” Fletcher said. “The safe door was open, and the safe itself was empty. I’m the one who locked it up again.”

  “You locked it up so that I could try opening it myself?”

  “I imagined the whole procedure for the reason you just analyzed a minute ago. Maybe you can identify the type of person who broke in.”

  Maury examined the safe’s face some more. “The dial works clockwise?” He asked Fletcher.

  “Don’t all safes work clockwise?”

  “Fletcher, “I said. “Maury’s the expert you hired. Just answer the questions. Never mind the editorials.”

  “Clockwise, yes,” Fletcher said.

  Maury put his right hand on the dial and paused. He looked like he was psyching himself for action.

  “The way you’re touching the dial,” Fletcher said to Maury, “I get the idea you intend to turn it counterclockwise. I already told you it goes clockwise.”

  Maury spoke without turning around. “Crang, tell your friend the next time he opens his mouth, I’m out the door.”

  “You heard the man, Fletcher,” I said.

  “I’m just a little apprehensive….” Fletcher said, his voice trailing off.

  Maury bent over and picked up Sal’s black briefcase. For an instant I thought he was about to ditch the job. But all he did was reach into the briefcase and take out a medium-sized rubber mallet.

  He turned back to the safe, holding the mallet in his left hand. With his right hand, Maury gave the dial a quick, hard, counterclockwise twist. That was followed without pause by a smart whack on top of the safe with the rubber mallet. Then, just as smartly, Maury turned the dial in the correct direction, which was to say, clockwise. After that, he paused, more for dramatic effect, I thought, than anything else. He pulled gently on the dial, and very slowly, the door swung open.

  For several moments neither Fletcher nor I spoke. Personally, I was struck a little dumb by how effortlessly Maury had finessed the safe.

  “Very impressive, Mr. Samuels,” Fletcher said. “Please tell us how you did that.”

  Maury turned around, not a touch of self-congratulation in his expression. “Inside here,” he said, indicating the apparatus on the top of the safe, “there’s a pin that locks a sliding bolt. When I gave the dial a counterclockwise turn, it freed up the pin to move. Then I smacked the mallet on top of the safe, and that moved the pin for no more than a split second. So when I turned the dial clockwise, the pin was down, the sliding bolt moved, and the dial turned the whole way around, which, as you guys can see, opened the safe.”

  “Totally diabolical, Maury,” I said when he finished his explan­ation. “Who taught you the trick?”

  “Freddie Biscuit showed me a couple months ago,” Maury said. “It was just him and me shooting the breeze about robbing in general, me the burglar, Biscuit the ace safecracker. He told me about the mallet gimmick on a certain kind of digital safe. All theoretical, you understand.”

  I remembered Freddie Biscuit from the help he’d given me with a client a year earlier. He was very small, not more than five feet tall, sensible and conscientious, loved to drink Johnny Walker Black.

  “Biscuit,” I said, “a very agreeable guy.”

  “Best person on safes I ever saw,” Maury said.

  “Does this mean we have our man?” Fletcher said. He sounded excited but caut
ious. “The one who robbed my safe? Could it be this Biscuit person?”

  “Not a chance,” Maury said. “But if you want, I can ask Biscuit what he’s heard on the street. Biscuit’s a guy, he keeps himself up to speed on that kind of thing.”

  “You think the job on my safe was done by a professional?”

  “I’m leaning that way.”

  “No matter who opened the safe,” I said, “the other factor we’ve got to consider is how the guy got into the store. I assume the doors were locked?”

  “Dear lord, of course they were,” Fletcher said.

  “How many keys to the store you got in circulation?”

  “None in what you call circulation, Crang,” Fletcher said. “I personally have two keys. One on the key ring I carry at all times, the other in a drawer at home. The same goes for my assistant. Charlie has two keys. We’re meticulous about security.”

  “How long has he been your assistant?”

  “She has been with me the last four years. Charlie is short for Charlotte. Charlotte Watson. I’d trust her with my life.”

  “Charlie. The woman I see sometimes when Annie and I drop by the store? She runs the computer side, if I’m not mistaken, always sitting at a keyboard?”

  Fletcher nodded. “And she deals with the telephone clients.”

  “What about the other people I sometimes see behind the counter?”

  “Part-timers. They come and go.”

  “Comings and goings I understand, but how do they get into the store?”

  “They work either when Charlie’s on duty or I am. We let them in and lock up behind them when we close. And Crang, you can stop asking questions about keys. There are just four, and none of them has ever gone missing. So stop speculating about last night’s burglar getting into the store with a key.”

  I looked at Maury. “Any more questions we need to ask?”

  “Definitely one,” Maury said to me. “What we have to check is did the guy breaking in leave any signs of how he got past the locks on the front door or the back.”

  Both of us looked at Fletcher.

  “Nothing’s broken, if that’s what you mean. There’s no indication of somebody smashing their way in.”

  “There’s more subtle stuff I got to take a good look at, mainly the locks on the doors.”

  I said to Fletcher, “I notice you got a chain lock on the front door. You or Charlie put that on every night before you leave?”

  “Correct,” Fletcher said. “We lock and chain the front door and leave by the back. There’s an alley out there.”

  “That where you park your car?” I asked.

  Fletcher shook his head. “There’s no parking allowed in the alley. I have a regular city permit to park on the streets in the neighbourhood.”

  “The guy upstairs,” Maury said. “I haven’t spotted any way he could get directly into the store from his place. There’s nothing I’m missing, right?”

  “As you also no doubt noticed, his name is Hamilton Carruthers,” Fletcher said. “And no, Ham’s access to his office is up the stairway from the street, and that’s all.”

  “Where’s Ham now?” I asked. “I haven’t heard any sounds from above.”

  “He’s not up there,” Fletcher said.

  “Maury and I might want to talk to him.”

  “That probably won’t be for a day or two.”

  “The guy’s vamoosed?” Maury said.

  “Not as you mean it,” Fletcher said. “Ham came in here an hour ago to tell me he’s fed up sleeping in his office. He’s taking his wife on what he called a makeup overnight in Niagara on the Lake. I hope it works out. She’s a lovely girl.”

  The matter of the architect now apparently put to rest as far as Fletcher was concerned, he closed the safe door and reset the combination. He turned and waved for Maury and me to follow him down a short hall toward the back door. In the hall, a step or two from the door, a couple of dozen books, all fat reference volumes, as far as I could tell, lay scattered across the floor.

  “These books were what Ham must have heard in the night,” Fletcher said. “They were stacked in two neat piles, but it’s close to pitch black in the hall with the lights out. Whoever intruded probably knocked the piles over. That would have made for some very loud bangs.”

  “Bumping into the books would most likely have happened on the way in,” I said. “I’m supposing Ham up there needed a few minutes of deep thought before he phoned you. You answered the call. Then what? You took how long to get dressed and drive over here?”

  “I live in one of the waterfront condos near Spadina,” Fletcher said, closing his eyes in concentration. “I was still half asleep. Not feeling very efficient after being awoken like that. I must have needed ten minutes to get organized and another ten or fifteen to drive to the store.”

  I looked at Maury.

  “A half hour altogether?” Maury said. “Man, in a half hour, a burglar with a little experience could have ransacked the National Mint and made a getaway.”

  “Okay,” I said, “you figure the timing part’s settled, Maury?”

  Maury nodded. “Now I wanna have a look at the back door.”

  “Gentleman,” Fletcher said, “I’ve already satisfied myself that no breakage was necessary for the robber to get in the back way.”

  “Just let me see the friggin’ thing,” Maury said.

  Fletcher opened the back door. Beyond it, there was an alleyway that ran behind the College Street shops and restaurants, ending in north-south streets at either end.

  Maury hovered over the lock on the outside of the door. He murmured to himself and squatted down until he was eye level with the lock. It was bright enough in the alley, but Maury took a magnifying glass and a miniature flashlight out of his black briefcase and used both for a more intense and better-illuminated examination of the lock at very close range. After three or four minutes of squatting, Maury straightened up and then went through a stretching routine until he felt nimble enough to repeat the squatting and the close eyeballing of the lock.

  “This is clean as a whistle,” Maury finally said.

  “May I ask that you be less cryptic?” Fletcher said.

  “You got a nice Abloy on here,” Maury said. He was standing erect now. “Very good security with a lock like an Abloy. High-class Swedish product. Whoever came through here last night didn’t leave a mark on this particular Abloy, not a scratch when he picked it, which is what he would have had to do. But there’s no giveaways I can see that the Abloy was opened in the last weeks or probably ever by somebody without a key.”

  “You seem unnecessarily impressed.”

  “This would have to be a super talented person at work.”

  “I suppose I should feel complimented.”

  I said to Maury, “Biscuit might be worth consulting for ideas about guys who could have done the job on the safe and on this door we’re looking at.”

  Maury said, “I’ll set up a lunch with him for you and me in the next couple days.”

  I turned to Fletcher. “But first,” I said to him, “I know Maury will agree we have a significant question to ask you.”

  “Very friggin’ significant,” Maury said.

  In tandem, Maury and I stepped closer to Fletcher.

  “Anything within reason,” Fletcher said, giving Maury and me nervous looks.

  “Just tell us, Fletcher,” I said, “what in the name of sweet Jesus was in the safe?”

  Chapter Five

  For lunch, Maury and Fletcher ordered what were in all respects hamburgers. I asked for something that was really a grilled vegetable sandwich. These descriptions weren’t how the menu listed our dishes. The restaurant was a French place Fletcher took us to a block west of his store, and everything on the menu had a French name. In truth, it was more a Frenchified lingo
than the real thing, but the language was easy enough to interpret. Each of us also ordered a glass of wine, white for me, red for other two.

  “Do you gentlemen care to take notes, written or digital?” Fletcher said.

  “No bother,” I said. “With Maury and me, the kind of material you’re going to lay out for us has a tendency to stick.”

  Fletcher didn’t look happy with this note of informality, but he pitched in anyway.

  “Before I get down to specifics,” he said, “what I’m going to tell you must remain confidential until I say otherwise. Tell no one the information I’m about to impart.”

  Maury and I looked at one another, then back at Fletcher.

  “Not always possible, Fletcher,” I said. “But we’ll do our best to keep mum on whatever you say.”

  “If you hire us, man,” Maury said, “you got to give us a little rope.”

  Fletcher spread his hands on the table, palms down. “Very well,” he said. “But I don’t want to be left hanging in an embarrassing position.”

  “That’ll work for us, Fletcher,” I said. “Now, what is it we’re going to be confidential about?”

  Fletcher cleared his throat. “In the safe,” he said, “there were two sets of papers from two different clients of mine. Both sets were stolen last night.”

  He glanced from me to Maury and back again to me. Neither of us spoke.

  “One set is quite well known, the Walter Hickey papers.” Fletcher paused and did the double-glance routine again. “You’re aware of who Walter Hickey was?”

  “A novel of his was on a Canadian literature course I took thirty years ago in my second or third year of university,” I said. “The Man With the Arctic Face. Not Hickey’s best book, but I see it in Indigo to this day. They got whole rows of all his novels in a special softcover edition. Hickey still sells — the great Canadian novelist of his generation.”