Booking In Page 9

  “And you are?” I said, holding out my hand for a friendly shake.

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “At what?”

  “I’m Arnie.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “Arnie and Artie. It has a nonthreatening ring for a couple of tough guys.”

  Arnie shifted the Colt from his right hand to his left, and we shook.

  “So this Hickey broad hires us,” Arnie said, “and then she hires you too. Is that fair?”

  As Arnie was still clasping my hand, his eyes looked over my shoulder and widened in what seemed to be alarm.

  I turned around, facing the pathway running from the street. Maury was standing over there, mostly concealed in the gloom but visible enough to show he was holding a cell phone over his head.

  “All right, you bozos,” he said in a raised voice. “I already dialled 911. You got about two minutes to clear out of this private property.”

  Arnie jammed the Colt into his belt at the back under the light windbreaker he was wearing. He turned in the alleyway and took a couple of steps in the direction of Yonge.

  “Wait a minute, Arnie,” I said.

  Arnie turned back.

  “You’re forgetting something.”

  “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Bloody Artie.”

  He yanked Artie to his feet, and the two of them stumbled down the paved alleyway.

  I walked the other way over to Maury.

  “You liked my performance?” Maury said.

  He and I headed out to the street on the way to the Buick.

  “Very nice, your performance was,” I said. “But the timing could have been better. The guy with the gun, Arnie, he was about to open up about why Acey Hickey hired him and Artie to case the house where Charlie’s visiting her boyfriend.”

  “Wait, for chrissake. That’s too much information all at once.”

  “Charlie for sure is in the house right here,” I said as we passed the house in question. I checked its number and jotted it in my iPhone.

  “I heard you on the phone,” Maury said. “Something you said to the two guys about a bikini.”

  “The woman has underappreciated physical assets.”

  “That’s Charlie?”

  “Right.”

  “What about the guys with the guns?”

  “Arnie and Artie. But just one gun that I saw.”

  “The two are from the subculture?”

  “They were definitely up to no good. Acey Hickey is who they work for, at least on this job. Arnie — he was the one with the Colt — he had the idea Acey had hired me too.”

  “You’re talking about the daughter of the writer who had the fight with Norman Mailer?”

  “Correct.”

  “She’s got guys on Charlie’s tail?”

  “More likely their target is Charlie’s boyfriend. But one or the other.”

  “Makes no frigging sense.”

  We reached Maury’s car. I climbed into the driver’s seat and started googling on my iPhone.

  “You mind if we park here for five minutes?” I said. “I’m no good googling in a moving vehicle.”

  I typed in the address of the house where Charlie was visiting her boyfriend. A flock of entries came up. None of them provided a name to go with that address. But I zipped through several until I spotted one that included the address on the street where we were parked plus another address on the same street but with a number that placed it deep in Rosedale. That address came with an owner’s name. I recognized the name. The owner was Meg Grantham.

  I googled Meg’s name, looking for Grantham family information. Not far into the search I came up with a photograph of Meg and her two sons. The photo was dated two years earlier, but it wasn’t hard to identify one of the two, the taller, older son, as the guy I’d seen a few minutes earlier standing on the porch applauding Charlie’s dive into the swimming pool. This was Brent Grantham.

  “Bingo,” I said.

  “What’s happening?” Maury said.

  I told him what I’d found on Google.

  “Is this the health food son you’re talking about?” Maury said. “Or the other one?”

  “The son who calls himself an entrepreneur.”

  “So what that means, hypothetically,” Maury said, “this Grantham dude, he maybe hooked up with Charlie to swipe the dude’s own mother’s old poems from the store owned by Charlie’s boss.”

  “Meanwhile, a couple of rounders working for the owner of the other goods lifted from Charlie’s boss’s store are hovering around the house where Charlie hangs out with the Grantham heir.”

  “The rounders you’re talking about are Arnie and Artie?”

  “The very same.”

  Maury and I sat in silence for a minute or two.

  “What you got on your hands,” Maury said, “is a large-sized screwup.”

  “More than hypothetically.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Annie, making Sunday breakfast, held up a small box of fresh blueberries for me to admire.

  “You ever seen such beauties as these?” she said.

  “These are the real thing?”

  “That’s the lesson I’m trying to teach you, my love,” Annie said. “Nothing fat and tasteless like the frozen Welch’s product. The little berries right here I bought from the Wednesday farmers’ market over on Howland Avenue. They’re wild and they have true flavour.”

  “Did you ever imagine as a kid that we’d grow up to worship blueberries?”

  “Something to be said for adulthood, my man.”

  Annie dumped the little berries into her pancake mix, poured it in a large frying pan, and cooked two pancakes each for both of us. We covered them in a maple syrup made by a guy with an orchard of maple trees up in Caledon, no doubt organic.

  Annie and I murmured contentedly as we ate. When we finished, I poured cups of coffee, and we sat reading the Sunday New York Times, which was delivered by the same guy who delivered the Globe the rest of the week.

  “I was thinking about a step you might take in this job you’re on for Fletcher,” Annie said. She put down the Style section she was looking at. I’d been working on Sport.

  “You’re bringing it up on account of the scoop I laid on you last night, about Charlie and Meg Grantham’s eldest being a pair? Possibly up to something rascally?”

  “I’m sure it was fun for you, Charlie in the thong and all that, but I’m approaching the problem more scientifically.”

  “That figures,” I said. “You’re our house’s number one deep thinker.”

  “I think you need to call on my friend Ish Standwin.”

  “That’s the guy with the shop where you buy your notebooks and pens and everything else nondigital?”

  “Listen to me, honeybun, Ish says his business is getting strong­er than just a niche market.”

  “That means he fits in somehow for me and the Fletcher case?”

  “The thing is, Ish deals in every sort of paper. I’m talking expensive velum, parchment made from calf skin, that kind of high-end product.”

  “You think he can do a consulting job for me?”

  “Your burglar buddies swiped back the faked edition of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems, right? The fakes of the poems that are possibly fakes of the fakes?”

  “Correct.”

  “Now they’re in your possession.”

  “Under lock and key in my bedroom bureau.”

  I got up and poured two more cups of coffee.

  “Back to Ish,” I said.

  “Very nice man,” she said. “He isn’t a scientist when it comes to paper, not the kind of expert who can date a page down to a specific year. But he can you give enough of a ballpark figure to make a judgment on the particular version of the Barrett poems tha
t have undergone the double swiping.”

  “Dating the poems is what Meg Grantham hired Fletcher to do. He’s the only official appraiser in the picture at the moment.”

  “And look where that’s got Meg.”

  “Has she said anything about the heist at Fletcher’s store?”

  “Not a whisper to me.”

  “Son of a gun, I wonder if Fletcher’s even told her.”

  Annie had a look on her face that indicated scoffing. “Honest to god, Crang, you’ve hired on for some looney kind of job this time.”

  “Just because Fletcher didn’t reveal the theft of the poetry collection from his safe to his client?”

  “I’m sure Meg would prefer him to be more forthcoming.”

  “That would only be if the collection was permanently stolen.”

  Annie nodded tentatively. “I’ll sort of concede the point. Fletcher hired you to reclaim the collection before Meg got wind of the safecracking that went on behind the scenes.”

  “And I’ve delivered the goods.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Okay, I haven’t in fact handed the poems back to Fletcher, but it was my associates who recovered the poems, even though they weren’t strictly working under my supervisory guidance.”

  “Or even your knowledge.”

  “True.”

  “What I’m trying to tell you is that as long as the poems continue to be in your possession, it could be helpful to your overall situation to find out if they are what Meg hopes they are, even before Fletcher performs his job of possible verification.”

  “Thereby putting me one step ahead of Fletcher.”

  “Right.”

  “In case Fletcher turns out to be less than totally reliable.”

  “Perish the thought, I would hope. But like the complete professional you are, you want to touch all the bases.”

  “I agree,” I said. “And you think Ish is my man?”

  “Closest thing to a paper expert I know of.”

  “Ish?” I said. “What kind of name is that?”

  “You’re thinking he’s got a background in India? Something along those lines?”

  “I hadn’t narrowed it down.”

  “He’s Ishmael, and he’s a child of seventies-hippie parents.”

  “Then his name comes from Herman Melville.”

  “‘Call me Ishmael.’”

  “It could have been a whole lot worse. Since his parents were Moby Dick fans, they could have named their son Queequeg.”

  “Ish’s store, for your information, is out in Bloor Village.”

  “I’ll phone him tomorrow.”

  “That job’s already done,” Anne said. “I told him to expect you before noon.”

  I smiled at her. “Confident little person, aren’t you.”

  “Would you want me any other way?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  That afternoon, after Annie left for another overnight interview session at Meg Grantham’s summer house, I was rereading the chapter in Richard Landon’s book about literary forgeries when Maury phoned.

  “I’m picking you up in ten minutes,” he said.

  “To go where?”

  “A bar out in Parkdale.”

  Maury hung up.

  I pushed redial on my phone.

  “What?” Maury answered abruptly.

  “It occur to you for one second I might not feel like a drive to Parkdale?”

  “You want to talk to the MacGillivray brothers or not?”

  “I don’t believe I’m acquainted with brothers named Mac-Gillivray.”

  “The two guys I scared off last night before they hammered you.”

  “Just for the sake of accuracy, I had matters pretty much in hand before you intervened.”

  “I bet you didn’t know they were brothers.”

  “Nor that they’re named MacGillivray.”

  “From Peterborough.”

  “You’re a gusher of information, Maury.”

  “Me and Biscuit, mostly Biscuit. We’ve been on the phones all day. You understand how it goes. Biscuit knows of a guy who walks around with an old-fashioned Colt in his belt. Another friend of his says, oh yeah, the Colt guy works with his brother. The brother’s not too swift at anything except punching people out, but the Colt guy, the overweight brother, is dynamite at picking house locks and such. Somebody else remembers the two of them got here a year ago from Peterborough. So on, so forth. You follow me?”

  “I’ll be standing outside my house in ten minutes.”

  When Maury’s Buick pulled up, Biscuit was riding in the passenger seat. I climbed in the back, where I found Sal Banfield looking bountiful in a low-cut, sleeveless dark-green blouse and black jeans as tight as paint. The skimpiness of the blouse showed off Sal’s amazingly trim and fit upper body, a condition she owed to her Zumba sessions four mornings a week at the Jewish Community Centre a couple of buildings up the street from my office. The sessions featured ferocious repetitions of dance moves from salsa, samba, hip-hop, and mambo, plus a share of squats and lunges tossed into the mix.

  “What’s this?” I said, looking at Sal in the Buick. “Take-a-girlfriend-to-work day?”

  “I’ve always wanted to watch you slick guys operate at close range.”

  “Sal thinks she can help us,” Maury said from up front.

  “These guys you want to talk to, the MacGillivray brothers,” Sal said to me, “they’ll come over to our table just to get a look down my blouse.”

  “It’ll probably work,” Maury said. “Not that I approve.”

  “I don’t suppose boyfriends are supposed to approve,” Biscuit said.

  “Always a man of few words you are, Biscuit,” Sal said. “But right on the money every time.”

  “Last time I was talking to you, Sal,” I said, “you were blaming me for getting Maury into troublesome situations.”

  “Now you think I’m doing the same thing?”

  “I’m just raising the possibility.”

  “As long as I’m with you guys, I’ll have some control over the situation.”

  “Calling on your feminine wiles?”

  “Something like that.”

  Maury picked a route through the back streets down to Harbord, then weaved his way several blocks west to a skuzzy section of Lansdowne Avenue south of Dundas.

  “Overdue for gentrification around here,” I said.

  “If that happens,” Maury said, “where the hell are rounders supposed to go for a friendly drink with their own kind?”

  “The MacGillivrays hang out in this neck of the woods?” I asked.

  “Hardly ever miss a weeknight or a Sunday afternoon in the place we’re headed for,” Biscuit said. “So I’m told.”

  Maury parked on a side street, and we walked back to a bar on Lansdowne called Plaid Pants. Inside, it was a large room with the architectural élan of a barn. Its décor featured a Scottish theme. Small arrangements of dusty thistles sat in jars on the tables. A set of bagpipes was propped on a ledge behind the bar, and the waitresses were decked out in plaid skirts and scarlet tops. A large portrait of Mel Gibson in Braveheart dominated the wall near the door we’d come in.

  We took a table near the bar, letting Sal choose the seat that gave her maximum exposure to the other patrons. Most of them were men. They lined the length of the bar and filled about half the room’s tables.

  “What’ll you have, gentlemen and lady?” a waitress asked. She had flaming red hair and an air of fatigue.

  Sal went for white wine, the rest of us settled for whatever beer was on tap.

  “Blue Plaid,” the waitress said.

  “That’s the brand name?” I said.

  “It’s a craft beer the owner’s son makes,” the waitress said. “Ve
ry popular with our customers.”

  Everybody agreed on Blue Plaid.

  “With hair like that, they call you Red around here?” Maury said to the waitress, doing his best in his grouchy mood to approximate charm.

  “Oddly enough, they do,” the waitress said.

  I could sense Maury itching to tell her to can the sarcasm.

  “Could you tell me, Red,” Maury said, still trying for a chummy note, “are the MacGillivray brothers in yet? Arnie and Artie?”

  “At the table by the door,” the waitress said, acid dripping from her tone. “You walked right past them.”

  The waitress left to get the drinks.

  Maury’s back was to the table by the door.

  “Don’t turn around, Maury,” Sal said. “The two guys are giving me the once-over. One of them’s pretty bulky, going bald, got a big moustache. The other’s probably younger, tall guy, looks like he works out a lot.”

  “The first sounds like Arnie, the other must be Artie,” Maury said. “You got a view of them, Crang?”

  “Over there underneath Mel Gibson, it’s the right pair of guys,” I said. “This is nice detecting, Biscuit.”

  “From what I hear,” Biscuit said, “the MacGillivrays were into a little of everything in Peterborough. Burglary, extortion, some minor rough stuff. The younger one did time, but not the older. After Artie got out of the can from his second or third bit, Arnie moved them down here. It had gotten so that every time there was a crime in Peterborough, the cops knocked on their door.”

  Biscuit stopped talking when Red the waitress brought our drinks. Red left, and all of us sipped the beverages. The Blue Plaid wasn’t bad.

  “You ought to make a move, Maury,” Sal said. “The younger one of those two guys is foaming at the mouth.”

  “Over you?”

  “If I say so myself.”

  Maury turned to me. “I’ll invite them over,” he said, “but from then on, you steer the conversation.”

  “What if they recognize you from last night?”

  “It was too dark for that. Just let me hustle the two of them to our table, and you can get what you need out of both.”

  “Mostly that’ll be from Arnie,” Biscuit said. “The way I understand it, he’s the brains of the pair.”