Crang Mysteries 6-Book Bundle. Jack Batten

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СКАЧАТЬ what you mean, Cam. Bourgeois.”

      “I’ll meet you at ten.”

      “Sorry. Place doesn’t open till eleven.”

      “All right. Eleven then.”

      Cam hung up, and I got another orange out of the refrigerator. Had Cam slammed down his receiver? Slamming the phone is a wasted gesture. All the guy on the other end hears, the slammee, is a click. Interesting metaphysical question. Slam at one end, click at the other. If Bishop Berkeley had lived in the age of the telephone, he would have dissected it. I pressed a fourth orange and had myself a full glass.

      I hadn’t phoned Trevor Dalgleish. I hadn’t done anything constructive. I hadn’t thought up any more angles to pursue in the quest of Fenk’s killer. I hadn’t slept much. Dave Goddard woke me at four-thirty with his call from Ralph’s Muskoka cottage. I asked Dave a question I’d overlooked earlier. Where was he on Saturday afternoon when Fenk was expiring in the Silverdore sitting room? In bed at the Cameron, Dave said, all afternoon, all alone. Terrific alibi, I said, and tossed and turned until the sun came up.

      Cam Charles’s phone call and the orange juice gave me a kick-start on the day. I sliced two raisin buns into halves and put them in the oven to toast. The day was overcast, and in the living room, no sunbeams warmed the sofa. I made more orange juice and buttered the raisin buns. “A potential problem,” Cam said on the phone. Little did he know. Or did he? My mouth was full of raisin bun. I stopped in mid-chew, and in my head I heard the tumblers click into place.

      “Something,” I’d asked Cam, “to do with the late Raymond Fenk?”

      Uh-oh.

      I got the Wyborowa out of the freezer and poured two fingers into the orange juice. How did I know Fenk was dead? How did I know? Is that why Cam hesitated before he said his problem didn’t concern Fenk’s murder? The vodka in the orange juice wasn’t making me feel much better about my gaffe. What was the drink called? Orange blossom? No, screwdriver. One right answer for the morning.

      At ten, I flashed the radio around the dial to on-the-hour newscasts. None mentioned a murdered person in a midtown hotel. I walked down to Queen Street and bought a Sunday Star. Raymond Fenk didn’t make the front page or any of the pages after it. He was dead, and nobody seemed to know except Cam Charles, me, and, undoubtedly, the police. It must have been the cops who told Cam. That’d be natural, given Fenk’s presence in town for Cam’s film festival. The cops hadn’t phoned my place. No one had informed me of Fenk’s death, not cops, radio, or press. This is a fine mess you’ve got us into, Stanley. I cleaned the breakfast dishes and sauntered up Beverley Street to the AGO.

      Cam was facing the entrance to the gallery, and his reflection came back at him in the bright glass of the doors. He had on a brown and grey tweed jacket and chocolate-brown slacks, with a crimson foulard at his throat. Sunday-slumming attire for your prominent criminal barrister. He didn’t see me walking up the stone steps behind him.

      “You want to look at the show while we talk, Cam?” I said to the back of the tweed jacket. “It’s Harold Town, kind of stuff that’ll bump us out of the mundane.”

      Cam turned from his image in the glass.

      “There you are, Crang,” he said. “At last.”

      Imperious bastard. It was two minutes past eleven.

      “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d prefer to do this sitting down.”

      “They got benches in there,” I said. “In front of the paintings.”

      There was a small congregation of people at the ticket counter. I bought admissions for two. That was seven bucks I’d have to charge to my client. Who was my client? Dave Goddard? I’d swallow the seven.

      The Harold Town retrospective was on the second floor in the Sam and Ayala Zacks Wing. Sam and Ayala were a wealthy couple who had more taste than the guy who put Gumby Goes to Heaven on University Avenue. Cam said nothing on the way up the stairs. In the first room, where the Towns were hung, there was so much colour on the walls they gave me the sensation they were in motion. I stopped at the door. Straight ahead, dead centre, was a collage that looked like an abstract slice of ancient Babylon. There was another painting, mostly reds, of a toy horse, and one of a strange enormous seal—the kind that kings and potentates used to slap on their written pronouncements— against a midnight curtain. Cam made a beeline for a bench that had a black leather covering and no back. I sat beside him.

      “What’s shaking, Cam?”

      “Two points, and that’s one more than I had before I phoned you this morning. The first, really the second but never mind, is this— you’re in a bind, Crang, you know that?”

      “Well, I’m pretty good at identifying binds, Cam. This current one, I’ve got no doubt, you’re wondering how come I knew Raymond Fenk was recently departed, not as in on his way back to Los Angeles but as in dead.”

      Cam looked wonderfully pleased with himself. I didn’t take it as a comment on my present predicament. Cam always looked wonderfully pleased with himself. Maybe it was his barbering. Up close, on the black leather bench, studying Cam’s head, I had never seen a man shaved, trimmed, shampooed, and cologned to such perfection. Beside him, I felt shabby. That was worse than feeling in a bind.

      Cam said, “You know what’s your trouble, Crang? Always has been? Don’t answer. You don’t want to know, but I’m going to tell you. You’re impetuous, irreverent, and too much of a smartass.”

      Cam kept on looking pleased with himself.

      I said, “We got to the part yet about what my trouble is?”

      “My call two hours ago, the purpose was to ask you, to retain you actually, if you’d carry out a little job, something in the, shall we say, quasi-legal line. I still want you to do the little job, but now I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”

      “Because of the, shall we also say, previously mentioned bind?”

      “I don’t care how you know about Fenk’s murder. I’m not even going to inquire about your embarrassing display with the man at the Park Plaza press conference. I don’t think any of that is relevant to my problem. But the fact is you know about Fenk and his murder and you shouldn’t, and I’m going to use that information for my own purposes.”

      “For pressuring me into taking on the little quasi-legal job.”

      “Correct.”

      “Maybe I would’ve said yes anyway.”

      “Maybe you would have.”

      “Just so we clear the decks, Cam, satisfy my own curiosity, how’d you find out about Fenk’s murder?”

      “Stuffy Kernohan’s first call was to me. As soon as he saw Fenk was connected with my film festival, after the body was found, by whom I don’t know, Stuffy rang me at home, and we agreed he’d low-play the announcement to the press. I don’t need that kind of publicity on the day the festival opens. Later in the week perhaps, but not right on top of the opening. Stuffy understood. He owed me one.”

      Stuffy Kernohan? Should I know him? The Silverdore’s manager? СКАЧАТЬ