Booking In Read online

  “I’m glad you asked.”

  “Because you’re a smartass who knows the answer.”

  “Hemingway lived there in the early 1920s when he was coming up to his mid-twenties. He had a reporter’s job at the Toronto Star.”

  “The guy who wrote novels is who you’re talking about? The Old Man and the Fish?”

  “Except he didn’t begin writing the novels until after he’d left the Star.”

  “What was he doing in a place like Toronto, him being American?”

  “Long story,” I said. “Hemingway was a Red Cross volunteer in the First World War. Afterward, in Paris, he spun his wartime experiences into a bunch of colourful stories he used to tell in bars around town. A woman from Toronto with some pull in newspaper circles was impressed by these Hemingway stories, and she lined him up for a reporter’s job at the Star. He moved here with his first wife, Hadley. Stayed four years, a lot of the time living in the building over there.”

  “It don’t look like much.”

  “Hemingway’s particular apartment consisted of a room with a Murphy bed and a balcony.”

  “So he got famous, and whoever owned the building across the street named it after him?”

  “The naming came decades later,” I said. “And for the record, the novel was The Old Man and the Sea.”

  “What’s with you lately,” he said, “all the stories about the old days in Toronto?”

  “Remember when we were kids, adults were always saying Toronto might be okay, but Montreal was the real glamour city of Canada? Montreal had colourful politicians, big events going on all the time. Not like dull, grey Toronto. I heard that all the time, but now I’m realizing it was mostly baloney. Toronto’s got a lot of great little pieces of history.”

  “All the stuff you’re talking about, when I was a teenager, it was mute for me.”

  “You mean it was moot.”

  “I mean I was sixteen and in the Guelph Reformatory.”

  “Which was dull and colourless, I imagine.”

  “Like it was supposed to be.”

  Across the street, a car that looked from the front like Charlie Watson’s green Mazda appeared at the top of the driveway. It signalled for a right turn.

  “That’s our tail job?” Maury said.

  “Lot of traffic between us and her,” I said. “If it’s her.”

  The Mazda gunned out of the driveway and shot north on Bathurst. It was Charlie at the wheel.

  “Woman thinks she’s in the Indy 500,” Maury said.

  He butted the Buick into the thick traffic coming south. Car horns blared, drivers jammed on their brakes, a kid in a flashy-looking convertible gave us the middle finger and a stream of adjectives that weren’t normally part of public discourse.

  Up ahead, Charlie’s Mazda was halfway across the Cedarvale bridge. Maury swung into the northbound lane, again alienating lines of our fellow motorists. Charlie turned right at a street that would take us into the upscale Forest Hill neighbourhood. We followed a few seconds later and settled down to a more sedate pace, trailing after the green Mazda through Forest Hill’s stately avenues.

  “Look at the mansions,” Maury said. “Brings back memories.”

  “I thought you only burgled hotel rooms.”

  “Now and again I diversified.”

  Charlie picked her way confidently through side streets, turning east onto Lonsdale Avenue and going four blocks to Avenue Road. Charlie hung a right at the stoplight and headed south in the Avenue Road traffic.

  Maury stayed three cars behind the Mazda. “I get the feeling your friend Charlie has gone this route a few times before,” he said.

  At the bottom of the long Avenue Road hill, coming up to the street just south of the train tracks, the Mazda signalled for a left turn. Maury tucked in behind Charlie, flashing his signal lights as she had done.

  “You might want to duck your head, Crang,” Maury said. “In case the broad looks in her rear-view mirror.”

  I slid down in my seat.

  “Buick’s got a lot of ducking space,” I said.

  Maury made the left turn behind Charlie, went one long block and turned right down a short block to the next cross street, where Charlie took a left. I poked my head into a viewing position. We were on the edge of Rosedale on a wide street lined with several appropriately grand homes, just like in Rosedale but not quite as imposing as the real thing. Charlie drove a half block before she pulled into a parking spot on the south side of the street.

  “Duck again,” Maury said. “I’m about to pass the Mazda.”

  A half-dozen car lengths beyond Charlie’s car, Maury stopped at another empty spot. It was roomy enough to accommodate the Buick.

  “She’s out of the car,” Maury said. “Looks like she’s carrying a couple bags from Pusateri’s. They’ll be eating good tonight.”

  Pusateri’s was a high-end grocery store on Bay Street.

  “Which side of the street is the boyfriend’s house on?” I said. “Can I take a look for myself?”

  “South side,” Maury said. “It’s all clear to do your own spotting. The woman’s out of sight already.”

  I turned in my seat and faced backward. There was no sign of Charlie.

  “Which house you figure she went in?” I asked Maury.

  “See that row of evergreens on the lawn back there? The first house on the other side of the row is what she aimed for.”

  Maury and I looked at one another.

  “Now what?” Maury said. “She’s gonna be staying long enough for the Pusateri dinner.”

  “We wait until it’s dark enough for me to nose around the house. See who’s in there besides Charlie. Get some identification of the boyfriend.”

  “That’s gonna be a couple of hours.”

  “As the expression goes, we’re already fully invested in the tail job.”

  Maury and I settled down to wait out Charlie and the boyfriend. Conversation in the Buick was desultory.

  “You present Fletcher with the surprise yet?” Maury said.

  “I got many potential surprises for Fletcher,” I said. “Which one you got in mind?”

  “The mouthwash, toothpaste, all that sweet-smelling crap.”

  “Oh, that surprise.”

  “So?” Maury sounded impatient.

  “I’m hanging on to the goods until the right opportunity presents itself.”

  Maury shifted around in his seat.

  “You’re restless already?” I said. “We only just started the stakeout.”

  “I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast.”

  I patted Maury on the shoulder. “Go over to Yonge Street and have something to eat,” I said. “I’ll stay here and watch the houses. Make sure nobody leaves. Then we’ll switch.”

  Maury got out of the car and walked the half block to Yonge Street where there were plenty of restaurants. I sat and watched in the general direction of the boyfriend’s house. Nobody went in or came out. After a while, I got out of the car and walked back to the row of evergreens with a surreptitious survey of the house in mind. The place was detached, narrow, three storeys, and built of stone. The only aesthetic detail that stood out was the paint job on the wood trim around the windows. It was done in a yellow that screamed of bad taste. Otherwise there was nothing much to look at, no hint of people moving past the windows, no sign of activity.

  Maury came back after an hour. I went over to Yonge and had coffee and a hamburger in an overpriced diner. The coffee was weak, but the hamburger tasted just right.

  When I came out of the diner, the sun was close to disappearing in the far horizon. I strolled south a little way on Yonge to a large park, roomy enough for tennis courts and an open rink where kids were playing ball hockey on the cement floor. A paved alley ran along the park’s north edge
leading from Yonge Street to a long row of garages. The garages, I reasoned, must belong to the homeowners on the south side of the street that Maury and I were parked on. One of the homes was where Charlie was doing her visiting.

  I walked down the alley. The garages were on my left and the backyards of the houses on my right. Up ahead, from the angle I was at in the alley, there appeared to be a small public walkway between two houses that led from the street past the alley and into the park. The walkway was probably for the benefit of dog walkers and other locals out for an amble in the park. None of them, neither dogs nor locals, were currently in evidence. I turned around and walked back to Yonge and on up to Maury’s car.

  “I got a plan,” I said.

  “Does it involve my talents?” Maury said.

  “Only that you stay alert.”

  “Sitting around all this time, and I don’t even get to pick a lock?” Maury sounded grouchy.

  “This is only stage one.”

  I took the iPhone out of my jacket pocket and punched in Maury’s number. Maury’s phone rang. He answered.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said into his phone.

  “Both of us leave our phones open,” I said. “That way I can keep in touch with you, and you can hear what I’m doing.”

  “Which is what?”

  “It’s just about dark enough that I can poke around the back of the house Charlie’s in.”

  “While I watch in case she comes out the front?”

  “If she does, you let me know on the open phone line.”

  “Sounds pretty frigging harmless, this whole deal.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Different times in the past, things have been known to go awry for you and me on stakeouts.”

  “Too true.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Though the sun had set a few minutes earlier, the night was far from closed in, and there was still plenty of light for snooping. I walked up the sidewalk until I reached the public pathway leading to the park. The pathway ran between the house with the screaming yellow trim and a squat brick bungalow on the pathway’s west side. Nobody was walking their dog right then, and the people out on the sidewalk, most of them pointed toward Yonge Street and its dining spots, were too occupied with their own expeditions to pay attention to me. I turned into the pathway, sauntering down it as if I knew what I was doing and where I was going.

  The backyard fence on the yellow-trimmed house stood ten or twelve feet tall, about the height that municipal by-laws required for a homeowner with a swimming pool on the premises. The fence’s planking, high as it stood, was staggered at angles that left tiny vertical gaps for me to peek through with one eye. Beyond the fence, the yard was brightly lit from rows of mounted spotlights that reached higher than the fence.

  I pressed my right eye against a gap in the planking and adjusted my sight to whatever was on the other side. The first thing I took in was a swimming pool in the background. That was followed instantly by a view in the foreground of Charlie Watson. She was staring right at me, and, holy Jesus, the woman was starkers. Entirely nude.

  I pulled back, blinked, and readjusted my sightline. In a millisecond I pressed my right eye back in the gap. The reviewing corrected two perceptions. Charlie might have been looking at where I was peeking, but she couldn’t see me. It was too dim at my spot in the alley for that. Charlie wasn’t naked either. She had on a minuscule bikini in a shade that approximated tanned skin. I felt a flash of disappointment. For a moment the whole Charlie show had been sizzling stuff.

  I eased my head back again from my leering spot.

  Leering? Was that what I was doing? Leering at Charlie? Yes, I was. No use denying it.

  Was it proper, if I was honest about it, to be leering at Charlie that way? No, it definitely was not proper.

  On the other hand, I could make the case that what I was doing was less leering and more fact-finding. I needed to pin down the identity of Charlie’s boyfriend. It could be that he and Charlie had had major involvement in the looting of Fletcher’s safe, and if some harmless appreciation of Charlie’s surprisingly fulsome figure came into the fact-finding process, then there was no helping it. I needed to leer.

  Once more, I nudged my right eye into the gap in the fence. Charlie’s bikini, more light brown than flesh-coloured, hardly yielded the full monty, but it showed off a lot of skin. I took my time, giving her the once-over. Charlie had a terrific shape. The bikini bottom, now that I checked it out more thoroughly, looked like it was probably a thong.

  As I watched, Charlie turned around to face the swimming pool, her back to me.

  Zowee! The bottom really was a thong!

  And Charlie had a great set of buns.

  Stepping to the edge of the pool, she raised her arms, rose up on her tiptoes, and working in something close to slow motion, she performed a perfect parabola of a dive. Charlie looked like a regular Olympian knifing into the water.

  Up on the porch, someone broke into loud claps. This must be the boyfriend. He was tall, dressed in a loose white shirt and billowy white trousers. He had a lot of dark hair and would probably be described by most women as dishy. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. That was about all I could be sure about from my view through the slit in the fence.

  Charlie broke the water’s surface, and as soon as she heard the clapping, she waved at her admiring boyfriend. He clapped some more. I reset my eye at the gap in the fence to try for a better angle on the guy. But just as I got myself in place, I felt two arms wrap around my shoulders.

  “You’re a dirty old man,” the owner of the arms said from behind in a low, husky voice. His left arm slid into a tight circling of my neck. Even if I’d wanted to say something, I couldn’t. The guy’s left arm was squeezing my voice box into silence.

  Whoever he was — an irate neighbour was my intuitive thought — he was strong and about a half foot taller them me. He had all the physical edge over the puny opposition I was putting up, but he made one goof. His left arm was doing the strangling work, leaving the right arm only loosely wrapped around my right shoulder. My right arm had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I pulled it back and jammed it into the guy’s stomach.

  My aim was dead on, catching the neighbour, or whoever he was, squarely in the diaphragm. I felt my elbow sink in a couple of inches. The guy made a soft oomph sound in my right ear. It was the sound of air leaking out of his system. His left arm went loose on my neck, and I felt his body sliding down my back.

  I was breathing freely again. My assailant wasn’t so lucky. His breaths came in small, uneven gasps. I turned around for a look at the guy. He was on his hands and knees, head hanging down as if he were searching for oxygen somewhere on the alley’s paved surface.

  I felt victorious.

  But not for long.

  Another guy was standing across from me. He wasn’t as tall as the first guy, but the gun in his hand gave him a big edge.

  “Just hold it right there, asshole,” the second guy said. He packed a lot of weight, especially around the middle. His face was round and red, the face of a drinker. He had dark hair, though not much of it, and a bushy moustache.

  “I don’t think this is a situation that calls for a weapon,” I said, trying for a conciliatory tone.

  “How do you know I’m not the law?” the fat guy said.

  “Only if you happen to be Wyatt Earp.”

  A puzzled look crossed the guy’s face.

  I pointed at the gun in his hand. “Toronto cops don’t carry Colt revolvers.”

  The guy raised the gun and looked at it as if he were seeing it for the first time. It had a revolving chamber holding six bullets and a barrel almost a half-foot long. Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers had packed Colts when they shot it out with the Clanton family at the O.K. Corral. That was where I got my insider handgun dope, from the movie of the big battle
to the death starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.

  “Whatever,” the fat guy said, “I could still blow a hole in your knee.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Listen, you dumbass,” the fat guy said, “I ask the questions, not you.”

  “Ask away.” Even with the gun in his hand, Fatso didn’t much terrify me. He hardly came across as a natural-born tough guy.

  “How come you’re snooping around the house over there?” he said.

  “Where the woman in the bikini is swimming?”

  “That’s where we seen you looking between the boards.”

  “You happen to work for the man who owns the house?”

  “No, I fucking don’t.” The fat guy’s face was turning crimson with impatience. “I’m not gonna tell you again to quit asking me questions. You better start answering mine.”

  “I’ll level with you,” I said, “in hopes you’ll reply in kind.”

  The fat guy frowned. He didn’t say anything but motioned impatiently with the Colt.

  “I’m here on an assignment,” I said. “You follow what I’m telling you, an assignment I’m being paid to carry out?”

  The fat guy looked puzzled. “Somebody sent you to sneak around the house behind the big fence?”

  “I can’t reveal my employer’s identity on this particular project.”

  The fat guy hesitated, apparently giving some thought to my revelation.

  “That bitch!” he said in a sudden burst.

  “Which bitch?”

  “The Hickey bitch! She’s the only bitch mixed up in this thing.”

  “Acey, you’re talking about? Anita Carman in the long version?”

  “This broad by the last name of Hickey hired us to do a job at this house, me and Artie.”

  Both of us looked down at the guy on the ground, still gasping for breath, though his struggles seemed calmer than they had been.

  “This is Artie?” I said, speaking to the fat guy but pointing to the tall guy on his hands and knees.

  “He’s Artie, yeah.”