Keeper of the Flame Read online

  “An older man, this is the Sizemore I’m talking about” Kingsmill said, surprised at our swift reaction to the name. “Early seventies, grey-haired, oddly charming at times. You’re both aware of him?”

  “No criminal record,” Annie said, looking at her laptop screen. “This is according to the profile I put together on the guy. But the Toronto Stock Exchange suspended Sizemore twice. He got his ticket back both times. Comes from a well-to-do background. Went to Ridley College, the boys’ school over in St. Catharines. Some kid from the Weston family once whacked his head with a cricket bat by accident.”

  “You sure it wasn’t Upper Canada College and a kid from the Eaton family?”

  “No, no, Crang,” Gloria said. “The Westons. You know, the bakery, Loblaws, Holt Renfrew.”

  “Where did you find this nugget?”

  “A book of reminiscences by Ridley alumni. I thought it was a weird item about one of the Squeaky Fallis crowd. That’s why I made a note of it.”

  “Willie Sizemore’s shaping up as an all-round scamp,” I said.

  “He’s very convincing,” Kingsmill said. “Roger brought him around to the house when Sizemore was courting Roger’s eight million. Then the money vanished, something followed by Mr. Sizemore’s own disappearing act.”

  “This eight million,” I said, “Roger couldn’t have had money like that of his own just lying around.”

  Kingsmill squirmed in his chair. “That’s the problem,” he said.

  I paused a beat. “I’m guessing it was Flame’s money.”

  “Flame’s?” Gloria said. “You’re talking about the money Flame thought Roger Carnale was squirreling away for his future? Flame’s nest egg? That money?”

  “It’s what I feel most guilty about,” Kingsmill said. “I’m the one who wrote the documents we regularly sent to Flame. This was the paperwork that showed where his money was supposedly invested. For the last several months, they’ve been fraudulent, those documents. I concocted them on Roger’s instructions. They’re why I’m going to need a lawyer.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Just bear with me for a minute.”

  “There’s a legal way I can get out of this mess?”

  “Never mind the legal part for now,” I said. “Just answer a few questions. I need as clear a picture as I can get about the whole blackmail scheme.”

  Kingsmill gave a tentative nod.

  “This sum,” I said, “eight million, that’s an accurate total of legitimate Flame money? It shouldn’t be more? Ten million, say, or even higher?”

  “Eight million is correct,” Kingsmill said. “The money Flame earned has kept flowing in for a few years now. Roger thought he had a touch for investments, so it was he who moved Flame’s money around himself for a couple of years. He earned a little more than he lost, but we’re talking about tiny increments, far under what a legitmate investment house would have earned. The answer to your question is, yes, the total stood around eight million at the time the disaster struck. That was at the time of Roger’s fatal drink at the bar in First Canadian.”

  “Answer this for me,” I said. “When Roger lost the eight million to Willie Sizemore, it was then that, lo and behold, a blackmailer in the person of the Reverend Alton Douglas showed up asking the Flame Group for exactly eight million bucks?”

  “I had no part in conceiving the blackmail idea,” Kingsmill said, speaking quickly.

  “Holy Toledo!” Gloria said. “So Carnale was able to say to Flame, sorry, kid, but the money I’ve been investing for you all these years is needed to keep somebody from publicizing a bunch of lyics you wrote a long time ago that could ruin your career today.”

  “You didn’t know the Reverend Alton Douglas before all this unfolded?” I said to Kingsmill.

  “Never heard of him by name until Jerome reported to Roger about this Reverend Douglas approaching him at the Air Canada Centre for the eight million.”

  “But you put two and two together?”

  “It seemed obvious,” Kingsmill said. “Roger must have set up the blackmail scheme with this Reverend.”

  “Any idea how Roger latched on to the Reverend in the first place?”

  “The order of events is a little misty,” Kingsmill said. “But everything seems to have begun with a club that has a silly name, which I can’t quite remember now.”

  “Heaven’s Philosophers,” Gloria said. “The organization I mentioned on St. Clair. Except I don’t think they’d like it if you called them a club.”

  “Whatever they are,” Kingsmill said, “the people who belong to it don’t seem to be upstanding citizens exactly.”

  “That part we already know,” I said. I made hurry-up motions with both hands, urging Kingsmill to get on with the answer to my simple question. Did he know how Roger and the Reverend connected with one another?

  “As I understand it from Roger,” Kingsmill said, “it was his own messing around on the stock market with Flame’s substantial sum of money that got Sizemore’s attention in the first place. He arranged for someone else in the organization you mentioned, Heaven’s Philosophers, to bring him together with Roger. This intermediary person operated some sort of gambling outfit, which happened to be another interest of Roger’s. He was a fiend for card games. The intermediary’s name was Gabriel, a pleasant enough fellow, badly overweight but for all of that, he had a style you’d have to describe as cool.”

  “Georgie Gabriel,” I said. “Him we’re already dealing with.”

  “Georgie and his father are giving Crang a hand,” Gloria said to Kingsmill.

  “And I know you’re aware of this man Chamblis who makes the dirty movies in Roger’s living room,” Kingsmill said.

  “Yes,” Gloria said, “but he’s not giving Crang a hand.”

  “What about Reverend Douglas?” I said to Kingsmill.

  “The best I can do in fitting him into the picture comes from inference,” Kingsmill said, sounding very earnest about his answer. “Gabriel the gambler often came by Roger’s house on evenings when the two of them were going to play cards somewhere. On a couple of those occasions, one or the other of them, Roger or Gabriel, mentioned someone named ‘the Reverend’ in passing. It didn’t mean anything to me then, but now I have to ask myself, who else could they be referring to except the Reverend Alton Douglas?”

  “Now deceased,” I said.

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “So, at the time Roger got his open sesame into the Heaven’s Philosophers gang through Sizemore and Georgie, he was meeting practially everyone in the organization. And it would’t be out of the ordinary for him to come across the Reverend.”

  “I suppose not,” Kingsmill said.

  “Now move forward a bit in time, Arthur,” I said. “After you realized Roger had cooked up something with the Reverend, you helped Roger rig the books to look as if the Flame Group had paid out eight million dollars to cover the blackmail?”

  “Yes, but those papers were useless after the Reverend Douglas was killed. I ripped them up.”

  “But you prepared the same kind of documents,” I said, “when the supposed second blackmailer came along?”

  Kingsmill shook his head, and made gestures with his hands that said I wasn’t to proceed so peremptorily. “By then,” Kingsmill said, “the whole enterprise had become ridiculous. Roger was in a panic. He didn’t want to waste this great idea of his for covering up the loss of Flame’s investment money. He made a list of people he could pay to pretend they were blackmailers. I told him all he was planning was stupid and dangerous, and in the end, he decided that the non-existent blackmailer would be hidden behind an anonymous numbered company. That’s the way he expressed the situation to Flame and Jerome, a few days ago. So now, as far as they’re concerned. the eight million has gone to an unknown blackmailer.”

  “A numbered company is always a
safe fallback position,” I said.

  “It probably is,” Kingsmill said. “But I want you to know I refused to draw the fake documents that said as much.”

  “You put your foot down?”

  “Which has made Roger very unhappy with me.”

  “I can imagine,” Gloria said.

  “As soon as he gets back from California,” Kingsmill said, “Roger and I are supposed to have a special meeting.”

  “He expects you to provide the bogus documents or else …” I said.

  “Or else what?” Gloria said.

  “Or else I’m out of my job with the Flame Group,” Kingsmill said.

  I had finished my Middle Eastern meal, and took my time about cleaning my hands with the paper napkins the guy in the food wagon had given me. I flipped the balled up napkins into the wastepaper basket.

  I turned to Kingsmill. “Maybe if things can be arranged to break the right way, you won’t have to think about drawing up another set of phony documents.”

  “There’s only one way that could happen,” Kingsmill said, sounding doubtful. “We’d have to recover the eight million dollars.”

  “That’s the part I think I can arrange,” I said. “What I’m going to try, my basic idea, is to keep everything in house. That way, neither the police nor the courts will need to get into the act.”

  “I’m not following you,” Kingsmill said.

  “At this stage, you don’t need to,” I said, standing up. “Leave things to Gloria and me.”

  Kingsmill paused, and looked at me as I stood on my feet, looking in the direction of the door.

  “You want me to be on my way for now?” he said.

  “Gloria and I have telephone calls to make,” I said. “They’re at least partly in your interest.”

  Kingsmill brightened a little. Gloria patted him on the back, and Kingsmill finally propelled himself out the door and down the hall.

  “Phone calls?” Gloria said to me.

  “Damn right.”

  Chapter Forty

  “I’m calling Jackie Gabriel,” I said to Gloria in the office. “You get in touch with Jerome on the Coast. Check if Roger’s still there. If so, find out when he’s coming back home.”

  Gloria picked up her cellphone, and went out in the hall to make her call. I did my phoning from my chair in the office, and a swift few minutes later, Gloria and I sat at the desk exchanging the results.

  Gloria went first. “Carnale’s still in talks with the movie people. Jerome and Flame are sticking right alongside him. They’re winding things up Wednesday morning. Depending on what happens, Jerome and Flame may or may not head back to New York. No matter what, Carnale will be on a plane home. Gets into Pearson at 7:30 tomorow night.”

  “Things are clicking right along,” I said, rubbing my hands together.

  “What about you and Jackie Gabriel?”

  “Got a meeting set up with him tomorrow morning,” I said. “In the atrium of the cardiac wing at Toronto General.”

  “I thought you’d milked Jackie dry.”

  “Not concerning the eight million.”

  Gloria threw her hands up in the air. “Lord, Crang, everything concerns the blinking eight million,” she said.

  I poured myself half a cup of coffee.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said to Gloria, “Arthur Kingsmill, is he more a guy on the up and up than otherwise?”

  “He completely unloaded to us this afternoon, don’t you think? Open and honest in all his answers?”

  “I agree,” I said. “But does this mean we can trust him? In your opinion?”

  “He seems like a good accountant who’s learned a hard lesson,” Gloria said. “Why? You’ve got something in mind for him?”

  “I want him to draw up documents that wouldn’t improve the present state of his relations with his boss.”

  “You could always get an outside accountant to do the job.”

  “That would only be spreading the mess around.”

  “Which,” Gloria said, “should be avoided.”

  “Correct.”

  “My opinion, Arthur can be trusted.”

  “That’s mine too.”

  “Gotta scoot,” Gloria said, her laptop and cellphone packed. “My movie club’s going to the new Steven Soderbergh at the Varsity.”

  “Nothing but girls in this club of yours?”

  “Of course all girls.”

  “That’s how you meet hot guys? At the movies with the movie club?”

  “Are you kidding? We’re serious about films. Guys would ruin everything.”

  Gloria kissed me on the forehead, and left. I had one more phone call to make. It was to Maury Samuels.

  “You got yourself locked up in another cathedral, Crang?” he said when he came on the line.

  “I hope you’re free for a couple hours tonight, Maury. It’s a house.”

  “You’re forgetting, Crang, I only did hotels my whole career. Never went near a private residence.”

  “Even big ones? This house I’m talking about is what most people call a mansion.”

  “You wouldn’t be referring to the place in the Beach where some asshole makes porn movies?”

  I hesitated. Had Sal revealed to Maury something about her adventures in the skin trade?

  Maury was still talking, “The house on a hill with a lot of trees? Just above the lake? Got a swimming pool in the backyard?”

  “How come you know so much about a place I only just mentioned to you a matter of seconds ago?”

  “I followed Sal there one afternoon.” Maury’s voice showed no particular emotion. Not jealousy or anger. “I saw some suspicious characters going into the place. That muscle guy, Freddie Chamblis, for one. A bunch of other guys of the same type, they were on the scene at this mansion.”

  “You were wondering what Sal was doing in company like that?”

  “She told me the whole story last night.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m cool with it,” Maury said. “For crissake, Crang, what else am I gonna be? An older guy like me with a beautiful young thing like Sal? I get a big kick just hanging out with her. She says she feels the same about me.”

  “So this period of complete understanding you’ve entered into with Sal,” I said, “does it mean you’ll come with me on a prowl tonight at the mansion? I need to pick up one vital piece of evidence.”

  “A guy calls himself Lex, you know who I mean?”

  “He’s actually a chauffeur named Anin.”

  “He’s somebody I got a bone to pick with. So this break-in tonight, you figure it might produce whatever it takes to nail Lex for something crooked?”

  “The way I see the situation at the moment,” I said, “Lex should go down alongside the man he chauffeurs for.”

  “Pick me up at midnight outside the Woodbine subway station.”

  Maury hung up.

  I sorted through the papers on my desk. There didn’t seem to be anything more that required my attention. I left the office and walked home. What I needed was a nap. Or a martini.

  I ended up having both.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Twenty minutes past midnight, Maury and I were standing on the sidewalk a half block from Roger Carnale’s mansion. The only lights in the big house came from the second floor at the far end.

  “Those are Lex’s quarters,” I said. “Where the room’s all lit up.”

  “There’s nobody else in the house you know of who might be tucked away, sound asleep?”

  “The only other regular resident is Roger Carnale. Tonight, he’s thousands of miles from here.”

  “Lex could have a broad in there with him.”

  “True,” I said. “He seems to fancy himself a chick magnet.”

  “I
f a woman’s spending the night, she better watch herself. Sal says he’s what you might call overeager in the sex department.”

  I looked at Maury. “Sal told you about her offensive Lex experience?”

  Maury didn’t say anything, but he appered to be simmering at whatever thoughts he had of Lex. Both of us spent the next few minutes giving Roger’s mansion a careful study.

  “We could get on to the property from the rear,” I said. “I noticed there’s a porch off the living room. We could hoist ourselves from the porch on to the roof. Probably an open window up there.”

  Maury turned to me. “For crissake, Crang, you think this is To Catch a Thief? I don’t do roofs.”

  “Then how do we make our entrance?”

  “You never heard of the front door?”

  We walked down the sidewalk to the Carnale porch.

  “What if the door’s on an inside chain?” I whispered.

  “I disabled the chain.”

  “You did this when?”

  “The time I followed Sal, I unscrewed the chain. It was part of me taking a look at the house’s general security,” Maury said. “I was on what they call a busman’s holiday.”

  “But you were anticipating a future break-in?”

  “I was thinking I might want to sabotage the porn operation they got in there. You could say I had Sal’s best interests in mind.”

  “Very noble, Maury.”

  “The house’s general security is shit, by the way.”

  Maury reached into his jacket pocket and took out a ring holding several picks. The third pick he tried on the lock sprung open the door. We stepped into the entrance hall. The inside chain was no longer hooked to the frame on the wall. It hung loose, looking forlorn and useless.

  “If we get separated inside here,” Maury said to me, “meet me back at the car. Whatever happens, the first of us who gets to the car waits for the other guy. Understand me?”

  “Seems straightforward.”

  Maury led the way across the entrance hall to the door that opened on the stairs to the second floor.