Keeper of the Flame Read online

  “Good bet there, sweetie,” I said. “But bear in mind, I’m merely at the information gathering stage.”

  “I wish no ill to the man with the stroke,” Annie said, “but you’re skirting dangerous territory.”

  “That’s the trick,” I said. “I stay on the edges, getting all the dope that’s available, then make my move on behalf of the client who is paying me.”

  “Do I gather you weren’t actually in the Reverend’s presence today?”

  “Not that anybody would notice,” I said.

  “You know, sweetie,” Annie said, “it’d be a comfort to me if you spoke to Reverend Alton Douglas before we go to New York. Get it out of the way. Put my mind at ease for when I’m not around to keep an eye on you.”

  “That’s exactly my intention,” I said. “I’ll have a sit-down with him after church on Sunday.”

  “He gives sermons? This part is on the up and up?”

  “Just like ordinary clergymen, which proves my point,” I said. “The guy’s harmless.”

  “Maybe this isn’t going to be the disaster I’ve been thinking it’ll be.”

  “My opinion entirely.”

  Annie stood up. “I’m going back to the speech,” she said.

  “After two glasses of Chardonnay? Won’t your memory be impaired?”

  Annie shook her head. “I’m just going to read it out loud for timing. The aim is not to exceed twelve minutes.”

  “That’s the same way a defence lawyer thinks in a jury address,” I said. “Nothing to be gained from boring the folks with too many words.”

  Annie carried her glass to the office. I transferred some of each salad on to a dinner plate, and started to eat.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I head Annie say from her office, “courage is not a quality…”

  Courage? Edward Everett Horton?

  This was sounding like a speech I needed to hear.

  Chapter Eleven

  Early Friday afternoon, waiting for Gloria to get to the office, I got launched on a research project. If I was representing Flame in a legal matter, shouldn’t I get myself halfway up to speed on the kind of music he was famous for? It might help in making strategic decisions. On the other hand, the music stood a better chance of boring the pants off me.

  I Googled hip hop. In no time, I was semi-immersed in Jay-Z. Naturally, he pronounced his name the American way. Jay-Zee. It sounded sleek. Pronounce it the Canadian way, Jay-Zed, it was about as sleek as Diefenbaker. I read on my screen that Jay-Z was a singing, composing, and producing hip hop billionaire. He was married to Beyoncé, though the latest rumours on the couple suggested that they were separated. Her I knew a thing or two about. She was the one who sang “At Last” to Obama and Michelle when they danced at the inaugural ball in 2009. That was as close as I could place Jay-Z to a real song.

  I played a YouTube video of Jay-Z singing his anthem, “Empire State of Mind.” Macho guy Jay-Z rapped while Alicia Keys sang the soprano part. His style was insistent, like a kid saying, “Pay attention to me!” What he sang was more a chant than a melody. The guy was arrogant. Just like Sinatra, except not one ounce as musical.

  I checked out more Jay-Z YouTubes. Did he write love songs? I played a number of his titled “99 Problems.” It seemed to make the point that whatever problems Jay-Z had, a girlfriend wasn’t among them. Only he referred to them as “bitches.” Jay-Z was no latter day Cole Porter. I played a little more of the number. Girlfriends were also “hoes” with “pussies.” Jay-Z’s concept of romance reached dimensions unknown to square parties like me.

  I stood up from my computer, stretched my arms, and sat down again, turning to the business of checking out Flame. I learned right off the bat, listening to the first Flame YouTube, that Flame’s voice was the opposite of Jay-Z’s — a baritone rather than a tenor. On recordings and YouTubes, Flame worked to the usual staccato background of beats and vocal groups. Almost all his numbers were love songs. Nothing profound that I could hear, lyrically speaking, but the words took a more generous attitude to women than Jay-Z’s “pussy.” “Tender” and “soft” kept turning up when Flame sang of his girlfriends. He got “crushes” on women and asked them to be “huggable.” He came across as the earnest guy where Jay-Z played the cynic. Did that make Flame unique? I couldn’t tell. Jay-Z was my only source of comparison so far, and I wasn’t in the mood for sounding out Kanye West or any of the other hip hop guys I had sort-of heard of.

  Me, a fifty-year-old white guy who grew up on rhapsodic Bill Evans records, I’m hardly hip hop’s target audience. My interests could branch out from jazz, but it would be more in the direction of something orderly, Bach for instance, rather than something unruly by people with names like Snoop Dogg.

  Another Flame YouTube came up on my screen. It joined Flame’s name with Billy Strayhorn’s. What was this? Billy Strayhorn was from my world of music. He’d been Duke Ellington’s right-hand man for years, a composer of memorable songs. I punched up the YouTube. The film quality was terrible, but the sound was clear, and I had no trouble recognizing the baritone voice. It belonged to my client.

  Flame was singing Billy Strayhorn’s great ballad “Lush Life.” The song went back almost eighty years, all the way to a time when “gay” meant light-hearted and carefree. How did the kid come across it? His version sounded like the one Johnny Hartman recorded with John Coltrane in the early 1970s. That was the definitive interpretation of “Lush Life.” Flame singing the song was a revelation, the young guy doing justice to a tune that was a standard by my definition.

  I played the YouTube again, this time concentrating on the visual. It showed Flame as he sang the song, a very young Flame in a tuxedo, and the figure of this boyish version of the man was superimposed over four people acting out the song’s lyrics. Three males and one female gathered around a table, all of them dressed in evening wear, tuxs for the men, though they were really boys, and a long gown for the girl. The four of them held champagne flutes in their hands, and they affected a languid air. As an actor, Flame was absolutely convincing in his world-weary pose.

  This was all surprising, Flame’s voice and his play-acting. Just his choice of “Lush Life” as a song to perform was persuasive for me. I turned off the MacBook, and leaned back in my chair, feeling warm and fuzzy about representing the guy.

  Five minutes later, Gloria came through the door carrying her familiar red leather bag and smiling her familiar smile. She began the ritual of unpacking the bag. Then she stopped to give me closer inspection.

  “You’re looking blissed out,” she said.

  “I think I’m a little crazy for our client.”

  “Flame?”

  “Don’t get the wrong idea.”

  “I haven’t got any ideas.”

  “Put it this way, kiddo. Listening to some of his music, I feel more involved in acting on behalf of Flame’s interests.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Gloria said. “Now what’s with the coffee? I don’t smell anything brewing.”

  I got out of my chair, and took charge of the coffee-making. In ten minutes, I set full cups in front of each of us.

  “Okay, shoot,” I said to Gloria,“tell me what I don’t already know about the Reverend Al.”

  Gloria opened her iPad and began scrolling through the pages.

  “Not much on him personally,” Gloria said. “I concentrated more on Heaven’s Philosophers and the origin of the building they’re in.”

  “You still got a little about the Reverend?”

  “His annual income is sixty-two thousand bucks plus a clothing allowance.”

  “Not bad for a disgraced clergyman,” I said. “Who’s his employer?”

  “A numbered company,” Gloria said. “The same one that owns the church building.”

  “No names that go with the numbers?”

  “For pete’
s sake, Crang,” Gloria said. “Give me a little more time.”

  I held up my hands in a peace gesture.

  “Care to hear the background of the church’s building?” Gloria said. “Probably doesn’t pertain to your problem, but it’s kind of entertaining.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, “Entertain me.”

  “Another conceivably unorthodox religious bunch put the place up twelve years ago,” Gloria said. “It went by the name Steady for Jesus. Apparently made up of stout Protestants who regretted the way Anglicans and Presbyterians and such like were drifting. So they formed their own church.”

  “This group later morphed into Heaven’s Philosophers?”

  Gloria waved both arms in a gesture that let me know I’d wandered way off track. “Different personnel entirely. Steady for Jesus was funded 100 percent by Stewart Sclanders. That name ring a bell?”

  “Sclanders Lumber?”

  “You got it in one,” Gloria said. “Sclanders is still Canada’s number one supplier of two-by-fours and whatever in wood products. Young Stewart is third generation and the scion of the family fortune.”

  “Steady for Jesus was his hobby?”

  Gloria shook her head. “It was his commitment until he fell hard for a lovely girl named Julie Fineberg.”

  “Love trumped all?

  “Stewart converted to Judaism, married Julie, and left Steady for Jesus to wither on the financial vine.”

  “That’s the end of those guys?”

  “More or less,” Gloria said. “The Steady for Jesus property sat vacant until three years ago when the numbered company I mentioned scooped it up at a bargain price and began operations.”

  “What’s with them financially?”

  “The question gets us right to the crooked flim-flammery.”

  “You base this on what?”

  “First, a question of my own. You’ve been out to the Heaven’s Philosophers? The physical operation?”

  “Studied it intimately.”

  “Do I gather there are three other businesses on the premises in addition to the religious component?”

  “After a fashion, yeah, three others.”

  “In the last taxation year,” Gloria said, her eyes on the iPad screen, “the numbered company shows income of four-point-four million bucks from an international travel agency, six million from a dining lounge, and five million from an IT centre.”

  “Jesus, the gall,” I said. “The international travel agency consists of a guy and his computer. The dining lounge is good for a cup of coffee and a week-old doughnut. And the IT centre features a kid and a computer with an over-sized screen. Where’d you get these numbers?”

  “Don’t you want to know how much income the church shows all by itself?”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-nine million,” Gloria said. “And where I got the numbers was from their income tax returns.”

  “But if it’s a numbered company, ipso facto its tax records aren’t public.”

  “Right, for ordinary people,” Gloria said. “But I’ve mentioned my friend Nikki to you from time to time?”

  “She comes to town from the Maritimes and stays with you for a couple of weeks every summer, your oldest friend since school days.”

  “Since good old Allenby Public School up on Avenue Road,” Gloria said. “Nikki, I once told you this, she moved down to Prince Edward Island because of a guy from there she was seeing. The guy didn’t last, but her job in the Revenue Canada offices did. Nikki’s department — now, get this — it’s called the Taxpayer Relief Intake Centre. That’s the one where taxpayers go begging permission to pay late because of serious physical or mental illness and, please, can they be excused from paying a penalty on top of the tax.”

  “A department like that really exists?”

  “Nikki works night and day to keep up with the sob stories.”

  “But she still has time to poke around for her old pal Gloria?”

  “Her job gives her access to the entire country’s tax records,” Gloria said. “That’s where I got the Reverend Al’s annual salary, clothing allowance included, and all the financial figures for the so-called church.”

  “Not that I’m not grateful,” I said, “but isn’t Nikki risking her livelihood?”

  “Nikki kind of relished it when I asked the favour,” Gloria said. “She said people at Revenue Canada are forever in one another’s pockets. Nobody blinks an eye when somebody from another department asks for numbers that might be none of their business.”

  “Huh.”

  “Huh? Is that all you can say?” Gloria said. “Think of the implications in these clearly made-up income numbers the people at Heaven’s Philosophers are bandying about.”

  “What it means, “I said, “they must have a money-laundering scheme going on.”

  “That’s what Nikki thinks.”

  “Don’t tell me she’s going to get Revenue Canada involved?”

  “Nikki’s merely a dispassionate observer giving her oldest friend a helping hand,” Gloria said. “Honestly, Crang, relax and show some gratitude for the gifts I’m laying on you.”

  Gloria was right. I was the guy who didn’t think twice about invading the Reverend Al’s inner sanctum. So why should I come over all moralistic about somebody else, Nikki in this case, playing fast and loose with confidential government documents? It was all in the interests of aiding my client Flame, who happened to be the good guy in whatever was going on. He could possibly turn out not totally good in the long run, but he was likely better than everybody else.

  “Sorry, Gloria,” I said. “I got to keep my eye on the ball.”

  “What does your eye see?” Gloria said. “Besides a ball?”

  “The guys at the church rake in millions in illegitimate enterprises of a kind unknown for the time being,” I said. “Then they scrub the money clean by declaring it as income in barely existent businesses headquartered in the church building.”

  “Nikki reads the situation the same general way.”

  “These guys are probably raking in ten times the figures they show on the tax returns. The numbers are just for the tax people’s benefit. My opinion, they’re hiding tens of millions more in laundered money.”

  “Nikki thinks the bad guys will likely bail out in a couple of years,” Gloria said. “The fraud involved is too out front to keep pulling it off indefinitely.”

  I gave Gloria a long look that I meant to be thoughtful and meaningful.

  “What’s with the dippy expression, Crang?” she said.

  “The question is this,” I said. “Are the eight million dollars the Reverend Al’s trying to squeeze out of the Flame people part of the Heaven’s Philosophers operation? Are they bucks that’ll undergo the usual money laundering process?”

  “Sounds to me like a good guess.”

  “That would mean Heaven’s Philosophers are involved in the blackmail, and I need to pin down the names of the guys behind the church.”

  “You keep saying names,” Gloria said. “And I keep saying I haven’t had the time to uncover any.”

  “No fear,” I said.

  I got out my iPhone and clicked a few times until I pulled up the names of the eleven guys I took off the computer in the Reverend Al’s office.

  “See what you can find out about these guys,” I said. “Hold on a second and I’ll send them to your iPad.”

  “And what are you going to be doing while I run down the list of rascals?” Gloria said.

  “Chatting with a guy who’s got a contact inside Heaven’s Philosophers,” I said, completing the business with my iPhone.

  I seemed to be on a roll.

  Chapter Twelve

  Maury picked me up outside the Kennedy subway station Saturday morning. In a few blocks, we were driving north and east through
Scarborough. Or maybe it was North York. Clusters of high rises, built in the last twenty years in an uninspired style, alternated with streets of houses that had been around since the early 1950s. The houses were mostly bungalows on large lots. In a few places, the bungalows gave way to the tear-down treatment, replaced by giant, mock-Tudor residences that muscled up to the lot lines on either side. They looked like houses that natural-born bullies would go for.

  Maury parked outside one of the old bungalows. It was surrounded by mature but healthy trees that must have been planted at the same time the houses went up. The effect was kind of charming.

  “Jackie’s lived here fifty years,” Maury said.

  “Here being where exactly? North York?”

  “Markham,” Maury said. “Everybody else on the block moved in from China the last few years. Jackie’s the last holdout from the old days.”

  Maury rang the bell, and a short, cheerful-looking woman in her seventies answered the door with a warm smile. She gave Maury a kiss on the cheek and shook my hand firmly. Maury introduced her as Irene Gabriel.

  “Jackie loves company these days,” Irene said.

  Jackie was sitting in the living room, watching television with the sound on mute. The screen showed five guys and a dealer playing cards. Poker, I thought. Jackie, also in his seventies, had his left foot tilted over on its side at an unnatural angle, and his mouth took a slight leftward slant. Otherwise he seemed free of visible stroke indications.

  “You want to hear about my kid and these Heaven’s Philosophers?” Jackie said to me. His speech, as Maury had warned, sounded clumsy, but the words were entirely decipherable.

  “And about where the Reverend Alton Douglas might fit into the picture,” I said.

  “When he was our priest out this way,” Jackie said, “Father Al got a raw deal.”

  “Couldn’t keep his hands off the ladies of the congregation?”

  “Off one broad,” Jackie said. “It was only one woman Al got tangled with, but what a broad.”

  “Hot stuff?”