Crang Mysteries 6-Book Bundle. Jack Batten

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      19

      ANNIE DIDN’T THINK I’d used my most mature judgment.

      “This is a case,” she said, “damn near terminal, of you losing your marbles.”

      “It seemed a good idea at the time, the part about swiping the saxophone back. It still does if it weren’t for the dead person.”

      “You have to call the police. Come on, this is murder.”

      It’d taken me a half-hour to tell the story of the stolen saxophone, my expedition with James, Fenk on the sitting-room floor. Start to finish, it was good for no more than ten minutes, but Annie interrupted with many variations on “say that again” and “you did what?” The food and wine got in the way too. Annie made us a platter of tuna-salad sandwiches with olives and tomato slices and gherkins, and she opened a bottle of white Dao. It was an early supper or a light dinner, whatever meal came at six-thirty before we went off to the premiere of Harp Manley’s movie. I ate my half of the platter and more. Annie’s appetite was on hold.

      “So?” she said. “You want my opinion? There’s the phone over on the table.”

      “One point emerges, I think. I’m in kind of deep.”

      “Take the sun ten years to reach you, that deep.”

      I expected Annie to be upset. She wasn’t. She was mad, which was better than upset. Mad is closer to rational analysis. I needed a little of that, as long as it didn’t include a call to the cops.

      “The police,” Annie said, “solve murders. They get paid for it. You, what you get paid for, the way you explained it to me one or two hundred times, you come along later, after the murder. You say to the judge, oh, no, it wasn’t my client who did the murder. Or it wasn’t murder. Or some such.”

      “Yeah, well, events seem to have got out of the normal sequence.”

      “No kidding.”

      “Another factor, kind of crucial, the cops’ idea of solving Fenk’s murder, they’ll charge Dave Goddard.”

      “And you.”

      “It went through my mind.”

      “And that JD sidekick of yours.”

      “James Turkin is delinquent, no question there, but juvenile, no. If you ever meet him, Annie, you wouldn’t think of the word.”

      “If I ever meet him, I’ll kick his ass.”

      Annie’s temper had just about run the course. We were sitting at the butcher-block table in the window of her apartment. The chairs were bentwood knockoffs, and Annie had been perching on the edge of hers. She poured wine into both glasses and eased back in her chair.

      “I’m scared for you,” she said.

      “Feeling nervous myself.”

      “I don’t suppose that means you’re going to do anything sensible.”

      “There’re beginning to be facts, you think about it, that dovetail.”

      “For instance? The voices you and your pet criminal heard in the hotel sitting room? I don’t care about accents or timbre, that could’ve been practically anybody.”

      “Theoretically, yeah. But we know Fenk had some kind of contact with Trevor and two Vietnamese guys. There names were on his desk, and whoever offed him took the paper with the names when he or they left.”

      “‘Offed’ gives me the creeps.”

      “I used it to show you I was macho and unafraid.”

      “Didn’t work.”

      “Whoever murdered Fenk left the room with the paper with the names on it.”

      “Better. And the person or persons probably left with the briefcase too.”

      “Now you’re getting into it,” I said. “And another conjunction of facts: Trevor must be acquainted with Fenk from booking his movie into Cam Charles’s festival, and Trevor for sure knows some Vietnamese guys who are his clients.”

      “Hm.”

      “Does that, the hm, mean I should go on?”

      “Hmmm.”

      “I produce for your perusal the contents of one brown envelope.”

      It was the envelope that Cam’s delivery kid dropped off at my place. I’d left the two separate sheets at home, the one with Fenk’s record and the other with the four Vietnamese names. The movie info was still in the envelope.

      “These,” I said to Annie, “are the six movies Trevor’s got the responsibility for. Signing up the people, contracts, nitty-gritty details. What I wonder, Fenk’s one movie and five others I never heard of, do they link together somehow?”

      Annie pushed the platter to my side of the table and organized the movie material in six piles. The platter had three-quarters of a tuna sandwich on it. I ate the three-quarters.

      “I only recognize the titles,” Annie said, lifting the papers, reading, putting them down. “And that’s just from seeing them earlier in the program Cam’s ladies handed out at the Park Plaza.”

      Annie got up from the table and went to the corner of the living room she calls her office. It has a white wicker desk and chair, a bookcase full of movie tomes, a typewriter, and the cursed answering machine, and on the wall there’s a poster from The Man with Two Brains. I gave Annie the poster. The Man with Two Brains is my favourite Steve Martin movie. Annie came back with a program that had a glossy cover in silver and blue.

      “Give me five minutes,” she said. She looked at the title of one of the movies and began flipping through the program. It was the program for the Alternate Film Festival. “Another thing I was wondering,” I said. “All the movies, you see in the credits ‘best boy’, usually right next to ‘grip’ and ‘gaffer’. You got any idea what a best boy does?”

      “Five minutes,” Annie said, “of silence.”

      I occupied myself with the Dao and the view out the window of Annie’s corner of Cabbagetown. The sky was still overcast. Might rain. A leaf fell from a tree in front of the house across the street. I wasn’t a whiz at marking time.

      “Well, I don’t know.” Annie gave the program an impatient shove. “If these’ve got something the same about them, it beats me. Different themes, different producers, sounds like different techniques.”

      “You tried, kid. It was just a thought.”

      “California, but so what?”

      “So what, what? Where’s California come in?”

      “That’s where the six movies were made, but so were probably six hundred other movies this year.”

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