Keeper of the Flame Page 21

  At first, I wasn’t clear who Wally was talking about. My client? Which one? Before I looked like a total fooI, I realized we were on the subject of Flame, hero to Wally’s two teenaged kids.

  “These are your daughters?”

  “My wife’s French.”

  “Fleur and Sandrine.”

  “The wife’s Babette but you don’t need to bother with her Facebook page. Just the two girls. There’ll be no trouble with that?”

  “I’ll speak to Flame’s mother today.”

  “You’re my guy on this, Crang.”

  Wally stood, and without another word, he walked away, carrying his large coffee, heading back to police headquarters.

  My cup was still half full. I leaned back in the booth and thought about the blunt object that had murdered the Reverend. Before the meeting with Wally, I was thinking that maybe one of Roger Carnale’s walking sticks was the murder weapon. Most of the sticks were probably wood, but there must be a few metal canes among his vast collection. But where did the leather fit in? I wouldn’t know the answer until I got a long look at the collection in Carnale’s office. No one was going to invite me to examine the sticks at my leisure. Getting in would necessitate a surreptitious entry to the Carnale mansion. I needed to bring Maury into the job. Talking to him might be a delicate operation all by itself, though, depending on how Sal framed her explanation to him of her adventures in the porn trade and my role in the adventures. Maury might think I’d betrayed him. Smooth relations with him might need a little fancy talking on my part.

  I finished my coffee, stood up, and started out of the Second Cup.

  “Sir,” a girl said behind me. “You forgot your envelope.”

  The girl was wearing a Second Cup uniform. She was busy wiping down the table Wally and I had sat at. From Wally’s side of the booth, the girl lifted the white envelope with the Forensics report in it.

  I took the envelope from the young woman, put it under my arm, and said thanks warmly. The fifty or sixty sheets of paper were still inside the envelope. Had Wally forgotten them or had he left me the whole package deliberately?

  Wally was a meticulous kind of guy. He didn’t forget things. I felt pretty sure he intended that I should have the report and make whatever use I could of all the specifics in it. Maybe it was a bonus for promising to get Flame to write something on his daughters’ Facebook pages. That made sense.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Mount Sinai Hospital was a ten-minute walk from Second Cup, west on College to University Avenue, then south a couple of blocks. The proximity gave me a chance to drop in on Freddie Chamblis, my would-be assassin. I’d written him off as the mastermind behind the blackmail plot. And I doubted he had any involvement in the Reverend’s murder. But what about his attempt to drop me off the roof?

  Freddie occupied a double room on the sixth floor. The room’s second bed was empty, and Freddie, in his bed, was encased in plaster down most of his left side. He was hooked to one machine that provided his nourishment and another that removed his waste. A nurse, her back to me, was fussing with the hookups. Looking over the nurse’s shoulder, Freddie spotted me standing in the doorway. His face went into terror mode. A lumpy sound came out of his throat.

  “Don’t even think about talking,” the nurse said to Freddie in a voice sharp and impatient. “Your oral surgeon spent an hour stitching that tongue. We don’t want to spoil his work, do we?”

  The nurse, noticing where Freddie’s eyes were focused, turned and saw me.

  “No visitors unless you’re a relative,” she said.

  She was middle-aged, and had deep black hair that didn’t owe its colour to nature. She seemed tired and crabby. Maybe just crabby.

  “I’m a half-brother,” I said, still comfortable with the lie.

  “Your mother married my patient’s father?”

  “That would make us stepbrothers,” I said. “With us, it’s the same mum but different dads.”

  The nurse frowned at me. What was this woman’s problem? I checked out Freddie again. Terror was still written all over his face. Maybe the patient’s attack of the jitters bothered the nurse.

  “I think if you check Freddie’s chart,” I said to the nurse, “things will clear up about my identity.”

  “You can’t just come barging into a patient’s room,” she said. “Especially one as badly injured as Mr. …”

  The nurse had forgotten Freddie’s name. She walked to the foot of the bed and flipped through the pages on the clipboard attached to the bed’s railing. My name was probably on the first page where the patient’s relatives were listed, but she went through the motions of studying each page.

  After two or three useless minutes, she flipped back to the first page.

  “Name?” she said to me.

  “Crang.”

  “You say you’re Mr. Chamblis’s stepbrother,” she said. “I’ll give you ten minutes, but under no circimstances is Mr. Chamblis to speak.”

  “It’s half-brother, but thank you.”

  “Thousands of dollars have gone into the tongue surgery.”

  “Got you.”

  The nurse patted Freddie’s good arm, the right one, and left the room.

  “Nice to see you looking so spry, Freddie,” I said.

  Freddie stared at me. His eyes were glassy, and fright still hung in the vicinity.

  “Just a couple of simple questions, Freddie,” I said. “Signals with your right arm ought to be okay for answers. First question, why did you try to kill me?”

  Freddie kept staring. He moved his right hand in a squeezing motion. The squeezing probably indicated Freddie’s state of hopelessness.

  Freddie was right to feel hopeless. There was no way hand signals could answer the question I’d just asked. I looked around the room. A copy of Maclean’s, with Justin Trudeau on the cover, sat on a chair beside the room’s empty bed. I picked up the magazine, flattened Wally Crawford’s envelope against it, and lay the combination of magazine and envelope on the right side of Freddie’s bed. I put my pen in his right hand.

  “You better not be left-handed, Freddie,” I said.

  Freddie shook his head, the first demonstration that his brain was functioning.

  “To repeat,” I said, “why did you try to kill me?”

  Freddie went immediately to work with the pen. In answer to my first question, he wrote two words.

  “Not kill.”

  “You thought I’d survive a fall from the twelfth floor?”

  “Land on balcony,” Freddie wrote. His handwriting was small and tidy.

  “You were aiming to drop me on the balcony one floor down?” I said.

  Freddie nodded.

  “So I was supposed to end up in the same shape you’re in right now?”

  “Teach u lesson,” Freddie wrote.

  “A lesson about what?”

  “Stay away from blackmail.”

  “You’re the guy running the blackmailing of my client Flame?”

  “No!”

  “I like the exclamation point, Freddie,” I said. “It indicates sincerity.”

  “Paid to teach u lesson.”

  “Paid? Who paid you?”

  Freddie didn’t hesitate with his reply. I thought he’d dodge a straight answer to a question like that, but his crash to the balcony must have knocked the prevarication out of his system.

  “Carnale,” he wrote.

  “Roger Carnale wanted you to warn me off?”

  Freddie nodded.

  “He left it up to you to choose the place and means of doing the warning?”

  Another nod.

  “But not kill me?”

  Freddie got busy again with the pen.

  “Fuking no.”

  “Your spelling’s disappointing, Freddie.”

&
nbsp; “Fuk u,” he wrote again.

  “How much did Carnale pay you?”

  “Ten Gs.”

  “That’s all I’m worth?” I said. “The same sum you pay to rent Carnale’s living room for a week’s porno shoot?”

  Freddie did a mini-shrug with his right shoulder.

  “What about the Reverend?” I said. “Did you whack him on the head?”

  “No!” Freddie wrote, exclamation point once again included.

  “Carnale maybe?” I said. “You think he killed the Reverend?”

  “No idea,” Freddie wrote. His handwriting was getting a little ragged.

  “Your right hand must be tired,” I said.

  “Like a bitch,” Freddie wrote.

  “You didn’t have to answer that one, Freddie,” I said. “It was just me thinking out loud.”

  The crabby nurse walked into the room.

  “Time’s up,” she said.

  I looked at my watch. I still had three minutes left.

  “Say goodbye to your stepbrother, Mr. Crang,” the nurse said.

  Couldn’t the damn woman get my lies straight?

  “See you soon, half-brother Freddie,” I said.

  Freddie made panicky motions with his right hand. I interpreted them to mean he wouldn’t mind if I never again showed my face in his hospital room. Maybe I didn’t need to ask Freddie any more questions. By my calculations, he had dropped all the way off my list of sure-fire blackmail suspects. Roger Carnale had taken over the top of the list. The guy was blackmailing his own client? It sounded nuts, but there had to be a halfway logical explanation for such a turn of events. I needed to have another chat with Arthur Kingsmill the accountant.

  As for Freddie, the guy I’d fingered for most of the crimes, he was pretty much in the clear. He had pulled nothing heinous lately other than his try at dropping me on to the balcony. That was a rotten thing for the guy to do, but I was inclined to believe his answers to my questions. He was too terrified to tell me anything except the truth.

  I collected Wally Crawford’s envelope from Freddie’s bed, and nodded farewell to the nurse, whose stern facial expression looked like it was cast in stone. Poor Freddie. Maybe it was punishment enough that he’d spend the next week with Nurse Crabby for company.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  My next call was on Flame’s mother. I was riding a hot streak with interviews, and I figured Alice Desmond would be super co-operative. When I reached Palmerston Avenue, walking over from Mount Sinai, Alice was sitting in one of the wicker chairs on her front porch.

  “Hey, Crang,” she said, a genuine smile on her face. “You back for another cup of coffee?”

  “I’m here for favours,” I said. “Two of them.”

  “I’m happy to do what I can, seeing as it’s you.” Alice had a book in her lap, one of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels. “You got the interests of my son at heart, am I right about that?”

  “Flame’s the good guy in whatever’s going on,” I said.

  Alice told me to have a seat. I liked the feel of the wicker chair. I could have sat there all day chatting with Alice about Harry Bosch and his affection for Art Pepper records. But it was better to get straight to business.

  “The premise I’m working on goes like this,” I said. “If I can prove who killed the Reverend Alton Douglas, the solution ought to get me the second blackmailer. From there, I’ll be closer to recovering the eight million dollars.”

  “That’s your premise?”

  “You think it sounds too ambitious?

  “I’m wondering, where do I fit into a case of murder and blackmail?”

  I got out Wally Crawford’s card with his daughters’ contact information, and handed it to Alice.

  “You’ll see from the card Wally Crawford is a police detective,” I said. “The two names on there belong to his daughters. He wants Flame to send his own personal salutations to each of the girls’ Facebook pages.”

  “Sandrine and Fleur?”

  “French names. Their mother’s Babette.”

  “That’s one of my favours?” Alice sounded reluctant.

  “You can’t do it?”

  “Won’t take me two minutes to get it done,” Alice said. “But, man, I was hoping for something a little more, you know, mysterious? Cloak and dagger? Me playing the femme fatale or some such?”

  “Let me explain about Wally Crawford,” I said.

  “Father of Sandrine and Fleur.”

  “And a homicide detective who’s already done me the good deed of providing evidence pointing to the nature of the weapon that murdered the Reverend.”

  “My son sending a little something to Fleur and Sandrine is payback for this piece of evidence you’re talking about?”

  “It is.”

  “That makes the first favour sound more worthwhile,” Alice said. “What’s Number Two?”

  “Some time tonight, I intend to put my hands on what I’m pretty sure is the object that killed the Reverend. When I do, I’m taking it to somebody who’s in the private forensics business. The forensics guy, he’ll compare the instrument with the information I got from Wally Crawford. If he gets a match, I’m pointed at the killer.”

  Alice straightened in her chair. She had excellent posture anyway. The straightening up made her look formidable.

  “This catches your fancy?” I asked.

  “The forensics guy you’re talking about, who would that be?”

  “Man named Archie Brewster.”

  Alice smiled. “I thought so.”

  “You know Archie?”

  “I know about him. Anybody who’s been around hospitals in the city as long as I have knows about Archie Brewster. The man’s a legend. But I never met him. I’d give him a real friendly handshake if I did.”

  “Was it your hospital where Wally did his original neurological work?” I asked. “Where he was when he discovered the little gizmo that made him the big bucks?”

  Alice shook her head. “Women’s College was his. But everybody in every hospital admired Archie, him opening his own little laboratory. Archie stood up to the big boys, made himself into a legend like I said.”

  “So you underdstand what I’m trying to get done here?”

  “I got enough of a grip on the things you’re up to and where Archie fits into the whole deal.”

  “What about how Archie does business? You’re aware of that? The way he accepts payment? The only way? This is where we get to the reason I’m sitting on your porch right now. The second favour.”

  “If he doesn’t get paid in normal cash money,” Alice said, “what other form of remuneration is there?”

  “Bottles of wine,” I said. “That’s how he’s paid. It doesn’t have to be a lot of bottles. Doesn’t even have to be expensive wine. Just as long as it’s something that pleases him. Or surprises him. Both at the same time would knock his socks off. Especially if it’s hard to buy.”

  Alice looked into my eyes for a couple of beats.

  “My man,” she said in a triumphant voice, “talking about wine, you have come to the right place.”

  Alice stood up. “Follow me,” she said.

  We went into the front hall and turned at the first door on the right. Alice switched on some lights, and we made our way down the stairs to the basement.

  It was spic and span. The furnace and a new looking washer-dryer were down there. So were rows of cardboard boxes in the size that held wine and liquor. The boxes lined one wall, all laid on the side, about twenty of them. On an old carpenter’s table next to the boxes, two fat wine bottles stood upright. Each had a label with a large-sized ace of spades.

  “Armand de Brignac champagne,” I said, sounding a little breathless even to myself.

  “But you knew I had these,” Alice said. She didn’t
sound like she was accusing me of anything. “That’s why you came here.”

  “But so many bottles. I had no idea.”

  “With rap people, when they give presents, it’s important they out-gift the last person.”

  “It was Jerome who first mentioned what was in your basement,” I said. “The bottles of Ace of Spades. But he didn’t mention the volume.”

  “The reason there’s so many is we’re not either of us drinkers, my son and me.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Last year, when word about the movie came from Roger Carnale, my boy and me opened a bottle to celebrate at dinnertime. Three hours later, when we called it a night, the bottle was still half-full.”

  “If you can let me have a couple of bottles at market price,” I said, “they’ll dazzle Archie, no question.”

  “Two bottles? Market price? Listen here, I’m giving you a case. Only way I’m gonna get rid of this stuff is handing it off to worthy causes. This here, Crang, what you’re doing, it qualifies.”

  After I protested, the protests sounding more pro forma by the second, I lugged a case up the stairs to the front porch.

  “Something about champagne,” Alice said, “it weighs a ton.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said, feeling sweat prickling my arms and back.

  “One detail you might clear up for me, Crang,” Alice said. “Archie charges no regular fee for his services? Just the wine?”

  “His lab doesn’t have whatever official seal a place like that is supposed to get,” I said. “That means lawyers who pay money for Archie’s services, they can’t charge it to Legal Aid or even to clients in some cases. So Archie does it free, except for the gifts of wine. Money’s nothing to him anyway. Only reason he keeps the lab, it’s because he loves the work.”

  “Man’s a generous legend.”

  Alice and I chatted while I recovered from the climb up the basement stairs. I felt like I’d just done a couple of events in the decathlon. I asked Alice about the Michael Connelly book beside her. She said it was her first, and she was loving Harry Bosch. I recommended a couple other titles in the Bosch series.