Booking In Page 28

  Petey laughed. “Not many of those tight-assed guys in Homicide ever admit somebody’s brighter than they are.”

  “That doesn’t bother Rolly.”

  When I put the phone down, I decided the coffee had overstimulated me. A switch to water was called for. I poured a glass and thought about one puzzle that still bothered me. Fletcher was no doubt the man who had killed Biscuit. Fletcher had also pulled sneaky stunts with the fake Reading Sonnets. In view of all of this messing around, how come the Reading Sonnets seemed to be in the possession of the other all-round heel in the case? Namely Brent Grantham.

  It was in Brent’s house that Arnie MacGillivray had come across the sonnets, the top page speckled with Biscuit’s blood. That page was still at Archie Brewster’s lab, but all the rest of the fake Reading Sonnets rested more or less securely in Brent Grantham’s home office. Not that I’d seen them there. I had only Arnie’s word for their whereabouts, but I had no reason to doubt Arnie. My thinking was that if anybody had possession of the sonnets, it ought to be Fletcher. So what happened? Had Brent somehow swiped them from Fletcher? But Brent had no personal swiping skills, and I couldn’t think of anyone who might pull the job for him. This was a conundrum that needed solving, not because it was key to pinning the murder on anyone — Fletcher was already fitted for that role — but because it was a loose end that annoyed me.

  I was still worrying at the Reading Sonnets dilemma when Monique and John emerged from the garden’s foliage, headed in the direction of the gateway. Monique held up her secateurs, a signal that she’d finished the day’s pruning. I got up from the dining room table and gave her and John a goodbye wave.

  It was close to one o’clock when they left. I’d begun to think about lunch, but before the thought got to the food-preparing stage, I heard somebody walking down the alleyway from the street. Another member of the gardening crew paying a visit? The visitor came into view. It was a guy, and he wasn’t a gardener. He was a prime murder suspect.

  None other than Fletcher Marshall.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Without saying a word, Fletcher stepped into the garden and stood facing me. He was on the garden side of the open windows, me on the dining room side, both of us at the same horizontal level, separated by a couple of yards of open space.

  “Well, Crang,” Fletcher said, his voice low-key.

  “Well, yourself, Fletcher,” I said. “What brings you here? Not that you’re unwelcome.”

  “I thought your gardening woman and the tall young man would never leave.”

  “The lovely Monique is the woman you’re speaking of.”

  Fletcher nodded but said nothing.

  “Do I gather you’ve been lurking outside my house, waiting for a private audience?” I said.

  Fletcher didn’t answer, but I took his silence for a yes. Fletcher’s mind seemed to be on other matters, serious matters from the unsmiling look on his face. He squared his shoulders and reached his hand into the pocket on the right side of the lightweight windbreaker he was wearing. He pulled out a pair of white gloves, the same kind worn by Biscuit, Maury, and everybody else in a situation where fingerprints mattered. Fletcher put the gloves on while I watched. Then he went into the left-hand pocket and produced a large pistol, which he pointed at me. The pistol had a suppressor attached to it. Professional as the gun and its accoutrements looked, Fletcher wasn’t handling them as if he were a natural with firearms. He’d probably never wielded a gun in his life until that moment.

  “I hope that cannon is just for fun, Fletcher,” I said.

  “It’s too late for your quips,” Fletcher said. His eyes looked weird, a little spacey and kind of startled, as if he were surprised at his own nerve.

  “Listen, Fletcher, I’ve just been thinking about you,” I said, speaking fast, which was always a personal strategy when my safety appeared to be under threat. “There’s this little problem I was having with the fake Reading Sonnets. It seems to me you’re the one who ought to have control of the document. It should be stored away in your safe or somewhere else secure. But information I’m privy to says they’re in Brent Grantham’s home office. You care to shed some light on this puzzle?”

  “Christ, you’re a persistent bugger, Crang.”

  “I’m sure you understand how little details can be irritating if they aren’t straightened out.”

  “I sold the sonnets to that fool Grantham,” Fletcher said, practically spitting his words. “Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

  “Sold them, huh?” I said. “With all those blood spots on the pages, their value might drop a bunch. Damaged goods, as it were.”

  “Brent Grantham, I can assure you, was happy to pay top dollar.”

  “I understand why,” I said. “The guy recently put himself back in the chips.”

  “As always, Crang, you seem to know a great deal about the Grantham family’s finances,” Fletcher said, sounding authentically interested in whatever inside dope I had at my fingertips.

  “Let me enlighten you, Fletcher,” I said. “A smooth-talking dude from Jamaica named Cedric Hollyworth scammed Brent out of almost the total ten million bucks his mother gave him. Cedric thought he’d safely hidden the money on a small Bahamian isle. But I steered Brent to the isle, him and his accounting people, and they came away with a goodly chunk of the money. Not quite the entire ten million, but enough to cheer up our Brent.”

  Fletcher started to speak, checked himself, blinked at me, hesitated some more, then finally spoke. “In my view, Crang, if you had minded your own damn business throughout recent events, perhaps I’d never have been forced into the action I’m going to take.”

  “But Fletcher, old pal,” I said, “you’re the guy who roped me into the business with the swiped documents in the first place.”

  “My miscalculation. Now I’m paying for it.”

  “You’re paying for it?” I said. “I’m the one who’s at the wrong end of the gun.”

  Through this part of the conversation, Fletcher didn’t seem to be gripping his gun as tightly as he had been or aiming it as directly. I was working on the thesis that as long as I kept him involved in my asinine chatter, his concentration on the business of shooting me would fade, at least marginally. This was assuming Fletcher was entirely serious about firing the gun. Part of me still thought the guy would come to his senses before he reached the full-blown murderous stage.

  “A crucial point, Fletcher,” I said, “I’m certain your part in the unfortunate death of Freddie Biscuit can be easily negotiated. All you need to do is plead self-defence if charges against you are brought to court. Chances are excellent you won’t serve a lick of jail time. Possibly a year of home confinement. You can do that standing on your head, as the jailhouse saying goes.”

  “You’re leaving out a key element in my own plan, Crang,” Fletcher said.

  “You have a plan?”

  “Foolproof, in my opinion.”

  “And I’m part of the plan?”

  “You’re the key element I’m talking about.”

  “Well, I definitely feel all excited.”

  “First, I shoot you dead.”

  As he spoke, Fletcher’s interest in his gun made a full comeback. He gripped the handle tighter and steadied its aim at me.

  “Wait a minute, Fletcher,” I said. “Don’t I get some say in how I perform my part of the plan?”

  Fletcher gave a smile that radiated malevolence. The guy was clearly a little nuts. Or maybe entirely deranged. On the other hand, of the two of us, he was the one with the gun in his hand. I needed to keep on with my delaying routines until I came up with a way of getting at the damn weapon.

  “Could we just rethink your recent history with violence,” I said. “Your unfortunate bashing of Biscuit appears to have been an act of passion.”

  “That little son of a bitch!” Fl
etcher burst out. “He truly thought it was amusing to steal the Reading Sonnets from my safe and then put them back. He smiled about it when he came into the store that night and found me already there. How did he think I’d react to the insult of him holding in his hands my copy of the Reading Sonnets? Think of the humiliation I felt, Crang. You wonder why I lashed out at the nasty little freak?”

  “You were wearing your working clothes at that point?”

  “What do you care about the clothes I had on? Damnit, Crang, your nosiness is supremely off-putting.”

  “And then you hustled away in your car, changed back into the good clothes you wore to the Kalburn Poetry Prize, the light-blue suit and the purple tie. You took a phone call in the car from Ham about the body he found. Right after that, you called me to meet you back at the store.”

  “Crang,” Fletcher said, “you know what I say to all of that?”

  “Give me a minute, and I may have an answer.”

  “What I say is simple.”

  “Really?”

  “I say so fucking what?”

  Fletcher practically shouted his last line.

  At that moment I noticed a gentle wavering in a large piece of foliage in the middle of the garden several yards behind Fletcher. It couldn’t be a breeze that had generated the wavering. There hadn’t been a touch of wind in the garden all day. The small motion in the greenery out there had some other cause, something different from wind.

  Then I got it. The cause had to be Pony. With the distraction of Fletcher and his gun, I’d forgotten Pony. He was still out there. He hadn’t finished weeding. Fletcher must have arrived on the street after Pony, Monique, and John had begun their tasks. When Monique and John left, Fletcher figured the coast was clear. He thought only two people were working in the garden. He was wrong. Pony was still weeding and tending to the greenery. The numbers now gave me a two-to-one manpower edge over Fletcher, but it also presented problems. How was I going to steer things in order to save my own ass and not leave Pony under threat of getting a bullet fired in his direction? And where specifically was Pony? I knew he was among the foliage, but I hadn’t laid eyes on him yet, and it was no doubt probable he hadn’t a clue that Fletcher and his gun were on the premises.

  I cleared my throat noisily. “Let me just make an essential point,” I said to Fletcher. “Smacking Biscuit to death was an act of uncontrollable passion. We’re all agreed about that. But shooting me doesn’t fit into the same category. You don’t appear to be losing your emotions over my good self at the moment. No act of passion that I can think of would be involved if you should shoot me.”

  “Quite right, Crang. Your murder is part of a very deliberate act on my part.”

  “Glad we got that cleared up.”

  “You’ll notice the gloves on my hands and the type of gun in my hand?”

  “Notice the gun? Fletcher, I recognize the thing. It was once on Brent Grantham’s wall, some kind of Beretta. You bought the gun from Brent? And the suppressor along with it?”

  “I stole it from him when I was in his house doing the sale of the Reading Sonnets. That’s the point. It’s his gun with his fingerprints on it. Similar with the suppressor. I’m wearing gloves to make sure none of my prints are found on the gun. I shoot you, throw the gun down beside your body, Brent is arrested for the murder, you and your meddling are dead and gone. That leaves me in the clear.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  “No more waiting, Crang,” Fletcher said.

  “What about Charlie?”

  “What about her?”

  “You already spilled the beans to her about whacking Biscuit.”

  Fletcher looked like I’d hurt his feelings. Or more likely it was Charlie who’d hurt his feelings.

  “I resent your using a vulgar phrase like ‘spilling the beans,’ Crang,” he said. “My conversations with Charlie were part of a profound exploration of my feelings spoken in the deepest confidence.”

  “Not so deep from Charlie’s point of view.”

  Fletcher had faltered again, the Beretta drooping in his hand, now aimed more at the ground than at me.

  “Charlie presents a problem,” Fletcher said, his gaze shifting away from my face, directed slightly upward, more toward the dining room in back of me. “But I think I can solve it,” he said as if speaking to himself.

  I sneaked a peek beyond Fletcher’s shoulder and spotted Pony just as he emerged from the greenery. He looked at ease, carrying the hori-hori in his right hand and waving to me with his left. He looked as if he might be about to speak. I lifted a finger to my lips in a shushing gesture. Pony stared at me, frowned, shrugged, and kept silent.

  I wasn’t finished with the gestures. For the next one, I raised my arms in the universal signal of a guy who was the victim of a holdup by a villain with a gun.

  Pony shrugged again, more elaborately this time.

  “Crang,” Fletcher said, abruptly breaking out of his moment of thought about Charlie. “Why are you holding your arms up in the air?”

  “In reaction to your gun, Fletcher,” I said, speaking even more loudly than I had been. “It’s what guys do in TV shows. You say, ‘Hoist ’em!’ And that’s what I do. I’ve hoisted ’em.”

  “I haven’t told you to do any such thing, and besides, I would never use the word ‘hoist’ in that context.”

  Pony had caught the mention of a gun. At least that seemed a real possibility, judging by the concerned expression on his face. The angle of vision from Pony’s position meant he couldn’t see Fletcher’s Beretta, but given the way Fletcher and I were standing, Fletcher with his arm pointed straight out at waist level and me with my arms lifted in the air, Pony might gather that a weapon was part of the tableau.

  “About the gun, Fletcher,” I said.

  “You’re wasting time, Crang. Don’t you think I can tell you’re just up to more stonewalling?”

  “What I have to say is in the interests of safety.”

  “Why should I give a flying fuck about your safety?”

  “You don’t know much about guns, am I right, Fletcher?”

  “Point the gun, pull the trigger,” he said. “Nothing more to know.”

  “Hold on, Fletcher. There’s one other procedure you should be aware of.”

  “Enough of your fakery, Crang,” Fletcher said. He raised the gun until his arm was straight out, pointed at my chest. “I’m pulling the trigger.”

  Behind Fletcher, still about six or seven yards back, Pony was making his way through the plants. His progress was steady but hardly swift. He was lifting his feet high at each step, avoiding any plants that might make cracking noises under his feet. He still had the hori-hori in his right hand. Was Pony right-handed? I assumed so. What did I really know about Pony? He’d come to Toronto from Liverpool, spoke like a more cultured Beatle, and was a sweet guy. That about exhausted my store of Pony knowledge. Except for one other thing: I knew he was hell on wheels with the hori-hori.

  “Cocking the gun before you fire, Fletcher!” I said, speaking fast and loud and improvising like the desperate man I was. “You need to know about that before you shoot! The thing could explode!”

  Fletcher hesitated. He raised the gun to take a closer look at its working parts. He hadn’t the faintest idea what he was looking for. Neither did I, but I had the motivation of various kinds of distress.

  “That’s the way to do it, Fletcher,” I said. “Make sure the gun’s cocked before you fire. You’ve probably seen this in old John Wayne movies, the Duke cocking, then firing. Otherwise the gun might blow up all by itself.”

  I took a small step closer to Fletcher.

  “Don’t even think of attempting anything foolish!” Fletcher said.

  He waved the gun at me, then studied it again. At the same time, he turned slightly to his left. That adjustment pointed
the gun more into the garden than directly at me.

  Fletcher’s fingers fiddled with the trigger. I had no idea what was going through his mind, but it seemed possible my talk about John Wayne’s gun exploding had spooked him a tad.

  Fletcher fiddled some more. Pony was stuck in one spot, close enough to Fletcher that his slightest movement would likely catch Fletcher’s eye. Pony looked like he was unsure when to step closer and how exactly to attack Fletcher after he’d completed the steps. My position was just as ambiguous. I was holding steady, waiting for a chance to make my own advance on Fletcher, calculating when to let fly with a punch at some part of his anatomy. But I still felt nervous about the damn gun. A bullet would beat a punch every time.

  Then came the sudden sound of a crack and a small flash of light, both discharging out of the Beretta’s barrel. Fletcher’s fiddling with the gun had pulled the trigger, no doubt without Fletcher’s intending to fire. A bullet whizzed at the speed of light past Pony’s head and buried itself somewhere in the foliage behind him.

  “Shit!” Pony said, not a shout of alarm, more a marvelling observation.

  Fletcher’s head swivelled around. From my view of him, mostly in profile, Fletcher was amazed in about equal parts by the sound of the bullet leaving the gun and by Pony’s unexpected presence in the garden. Fletcher looked as if he were frozen in place.

  But Pony was moving.

  So was I.

  I was closer to Fletcher than Pony was. I reached out and chopped at the back of Fletcher’s neck, expecting the blow to knock him to the ground. It didn’t. Fletcher was taller than I was, and my blow caught him at the wrong angle. Fletcher just shook a little, then straightened up and raised his right hand, the one with the gun in it. He made a half turn toward me, rattled enough by my punch to check whether another blow might be on the way.

  With Fletcher’s attention switched to me, Pony covered the yards between him and Fletcher in three giant strides. He held his hori-hori in swinging position and came at Fletcher head-on. Something warned Fletcher that Pony was making his move. He turned his head away from me, ducked slightly, adjusted his hold on the gun, and faced around in Pony’s direction.