Take Five Page 2

  I was walking east on Queen, aimed for Grace Nguyen’s condo on Lombard Street. No more than fifteen minutes from Osgoode Hall. Passing City Hall, I detoured to one of the long benches next to the ornamental pool on Nathan Phillips Square. I took off the gown and folded it into my briefcase, careful to minimize the wrinkle factor. Gownlessness liberated me, and I sat on the bench to ponder an approach to the Grace Nguyen crisis.

  In no time at all, my mind wandered to questions of a more abstract nature. Why did City Hall’s council chamber look so dorky? Was it the shape? Like an unopened clam? Across Bay Street to my right, Old City Hall seemed as always to be hunching in the shade of the newer building. More than just metaphorically. Did anybody ever call the old one dorky? Probably, but now it just looked ancient, distinguished and lovable.

  My cell trilled. Cheri Havlat, the screen read. Did I really want to speak to her? Cheri was one of the Sun’s crime reporters, a perky person a couple of years out of Ryerson journalism school. If crime reporters got any younger, I’d be dandling them on my knee. Cheri had been in the courtroom that morning, and I’d given her a quick interview about the fiasco over my absentee client. I told her Grace’s present whereabouts were a mystery to me. Talk about clichés, those were my actual words. “A mystery to me.” If I were Cheri, I’d be phoning me back too. Asking if I could produce something a smidge less lame than what I’d said. All right, I owed Cheri a livelier quote. I’d talk to her. Besides, I liked any chance at getting my name in the papers.

  “What can I do for you, Cheri?” I said into my cell.

  “Hey, Crang, good news.” Cheri was bubbly when she wanted a favour. “And I know you like to see your name in the paper.”

  Oh dear, was I that obvious?

  “My editors want me to go in depth on the story of Nguyen and Wu’s grow op,” Cheri said. “Tell the readers the nitty-gritty about the drug scheme, especially Nguyen’s part in it all. Which is where you come in.”

  “How deep in depth?”

  “Well, you know, juicy but not too many words. This is for Sun readers, remember.”

  “The lips-moving crowd.”

  “We don’t say that around here.”

  Were people who worked for employers of low accomplishment aware that their outfit stunk? Maybe they were, and just put a brave face on it. Or maybe they knew more than I did about the wonders they wrought. I never read the Sun except the crime news when I thought a case of mine might get a mention. Did that qualify me as an expert in Sun matters? Not even close.

  “What do you know about the case already?” I said to Cheri. “Wouldn’t want to repeat old news.”

  “Nguyen was in real estate sales, and so was Wu.”

  I got myself settled on the bench.

  “That was in their legitimate lives,” I said. “Wu bought and sold commercial properties, Grace did houses. That gave her an edge, her knowing the home-rental market, in the way they organized their grow op business.”

  “What’s she like, this Grace?” Cheri asked. “I’ve only seen pictures of her.”

  “Beautiful. First thing you notice is her good looks. Beyond that, she’s not what you’d call giving of herself in the social sense. Driven, ambitious to make big bucks any way she can. Tends to be abrupt. Shirty even. But when it comes to her line of business patter, she can be pretty much irresistible. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, that kind of thing. Charm the birds out of the trees.”

  “This is awesome, Crang. Now tell me how she used her talents for, like, illegal purposes.”

  I felt as if puffs of smoke were coming out of my ears. Jesus, I hated the way kids tossed around that word. Duke Ellington was awesome in every sense. The Eiffel Tower. Caravaggio. But nothing I’d said so far about the grow op case came near to awesome. And it never would. Had I already given Cheri my lecture on the subject? Would it be worth beating my gums again? It wouldn’t. That was my snap decision.

  “The process, Cheri,” I said, “began with Grace approaching people she heard of who wanted to rent their homes for two, three years, unfurnished. The way Grace put it to each of the homeowners, she had just the right tenants for their house. She’d say her people were a couple with good jobs. Their kids were honours students, behaved themselves, no drugs. All that, the perfect family.”

  “What was the catch?” Cheri asked.

  “There were no families, perfect or otherwise,” I said. “Grace made them up. She invented the families, and forged signatures for these phantom people on the leasing documents. She got her hands on seventy-three houses that way.”

  “Those were the houses where the grow ops got started?” Cheri asked.

  “Yeah, marijuana farms. That was Wu’s side of the enterprise.”

  I told Cheri about Wu putting a couple of guys in each house to grow marijuana. Everybody called these guys farmers. Wu supplied the farmers with marijuana seedlings and all the grow equipment. Humidifiers, coolers, planters, ventilating systems, lights with super-high-wattage bulbs to grow the crops in the planters. Explaining all of this to Cheri, I had to slow down to fill her in on the role of each piece of equipment. It was background stuff, as detailed as I could make it. I told Cheri how the farmers did other things around the houses like mowing the lawns to keep each place looking respectable. Whatever they could do to make it less likely the neighbours would get nosy or complain.

  “Awesome scheme,” Cheri said.

  “I bet you don’t put that word in any of your stories,” I said. “Awesome.”

  “Of course not,” Cheri said. “This one old guy on the copy desk just edits it out anyway.”

  I was thinking of asking the age of the geezer editor. But the air all of a sudden got very noisy around me. A class of kids had arrived at the ornamental pool. Eight-year-olds by their looks. Three teachers acted as shepherds. One wore a hijab. The kids were screaming and yelling.

  “Crang,” Cheri said on the phone, “are you still there?”

  “Talk louder, Cheri,” I said.

  “Just tell me how Grace and Wu got caught,” Cheri shouted.

  “Their own people’s bungles mostly,” I said. “A couple of farmers in one house let the condensation from the high temperatures inside build on the windows. That bothered a neighbour, and he phoned the cops. Another house, a guy at Toronto Hydro noticed the hydro bill was way up. Growing pot uses a lot of power. So the cops raided the two houses, and that was when a pretty sharp drug detective picked up something that broke the case open.”

  The kids playing around the ornamental swimming pool in front of me had taken off their shoes and were paddling in the water. That brought a robust woman security guard to the scene. She told the kids the pool was for looking at, not playing in. The hijabed teacher said the guard was ruining the kids’ fun. Voices were raised.

  “Crang, you hearing me?” Cheri said. “What’d the sharp detective come up with?”

  “What he noticed,” I said, “was Grace’s name on both leases, the one for the house with the condensation and the other with the sky-high hydro bill. Cops put wiretaps on Grace’s phone, then on Wu’s.”

  The security guard and the teacher with the hijab were getting into it at the pool. An obscenity flew through the air. I was pretty sure it came from the teacher. The guys at her mosque would go ballistic if they knew about this.

  Cheri was still on the phone. “It was a pretty clever scheme Grace and the other guy thought up.”

  “Clever but doomed,” I said. “Four years after the wiretaps, we were in court.”

  Cheri thanked me, and before another awesome could pass her lips, I clicked off. As soon as I did, the cell chirped again. I checked the screen and answered.

  “Maury,” I said, “I’m on my way.”

  “From the sound of wherever the hell you are,” Maury said, “you’re coming by way of a friggin’ war zone.”

  “It’s a debate over water rights,” I said. “I’m thinking of offering my lawyerly wisdom.”

&n
bsp; “I need you here,” Maury said. “You’re gonna love what I got.”

  3

  Maury was pissed off.

  “Goddammit, Crang, you didn’t get my message about the gown?” he said. “You’re sabotaging my strategy.”

  We were standing in a delivery alley across Lombard Street from Grace’s condo. Not exactly skulking, but not making ourselves obvious either.

  “A strategy is always good, Maury,” I said, “but you didn’t mention one on the phone.”

  “The gown, man. Where’s the gown?”

  “In my briefcase.”

  “Well, put the thing on. It’s what’ll make the plan work.”

  The very nice Harris tweed sports coat Maury wore was in many shades of brown. He had on dark grey flannels with discreet pleats. He wore a light brown shirt and a darker brown wool tie with a Windsor knot. People think of criminals as guys in black suits, white shirts and big cufflinks. But those were mob guys. Maury was never mob. When I met him, he was just a big, good-looking man with a lot of wavy hair who liked to watch trials in his spare time. Maury introduced himself to me back then, saying, “I’m a member of the subculture.” It was a significant distinction from mob person. Though, as I told Judge Keough, I never acted for Maury himself, my practice tended to run to subculture people. I shied away from mob guys, and they from me. Certainly no gangster kingpins had beaten down my door begging me to represent them in major prosecutions. Not my thing.

  Before his retirement, Maury was an independent burglar, the kind who went into rooms in luxury hotels late at night when the customers were sound asleep, their baubles and valuables strewn on tables and bureaus. Maury had been caught at his labours only the one time when Keough sentenced him. He put in decades more of successful B and E work, not quitting until he got older and less adroit, apt to awaken the dozing schmoes in the beds. Maury turned sixty-five a year or two ago.

  “Here’s the picture, Crang,” Maury said. “The condo’s manager with the French title says Grace hasn’t been around for five, six months that he remembers.”

  “The concierge?”

  “Yeah, that guy. He says Grace and her boyfriend both moved out.”

  “Boyfriend?” I said. “Grace never mentioned one of those.”

  “The concierge says her bills still get paid every month, condo fees, taxes, so on, so forth. And somebody picks up the mail.”

  “Meaning she hasn’t vanished altogether.”

  “The strategy I’m talking about,” Maury said, “we want to have a look through her apartment, am I right?”

  “It’s all we’ve got to work with at the moment.”

  “Maybe we pick up a clue, correct?”

  “Clues are helpful.”

  Maury looked to either side as if he was checking the neighbourhood for eavesdroppers. There was nobody within thirty feet. He lowered his voice anyway.

  “Crang, they guard this place like Fort Knox.”

  “Isn’t there a Canadian version of that simile? The place where we keep our gold?”

  “Just a goddamn figure of speech,” Maury said. “Anyway, to get into the condo building, the concierge needs to give everybody the okay. You know, let people past security and through to the elevators.”

  “Do I really want to know where my gown fits into your plan?”

  “You’re going too fast. I got more analysis here.”

  “Analyze away, Maury.”

  Maury rubbed his hands together. “The concierge, the guy I been talking to about Nguyen, we can’t pull the gown idea on him. He’d be suspicious after me asking him the Nguyen questions.”

  “When’s he go off duty?”

  “That’s the point. Noon he leaves, and a guy named Kevin takes over.” Maury looked at his watch. “We got fifteen minutes to wait for Kevin.”

  “Now tell me what the thing you call the gown idea adds up to.”

  “This is the beauty part, Crang,” Maury said. “We go in, you wearing your gown, and I tell Kevin you’re a judge, I’m your clerk, and we’re here for a meeting with the broad in apartment 1409. We’re gonna explain to her, at her request, what happens next week when you marry her and her boyfriend, you being a judge.”

  Was Maury crazy? Me pretending I was a judge? What kind of wacko idea was that? On the other hand, I needed to find Grace, the sooner the better, and this might be as good an opening gambit as any.

  “I spent the last hour setting it up,” Maury was saying. “Got the broad’s name in 1409. Emily Drake. I know where she goes every day, where she works it must be. She happens to be there at this minute, miles away in York Mills. Everything’s breaking just right, Crang. This Emily woman’s out of the way.”

  “Nice to know that part’s taken care of,” I said.

  “Crang, listen to me,” he said, speaking with great enthusiasm. “All you have to do is look superior the way a judge does. I’ll take care of the chatter with Kevin. Get him to let us past security. We ride all the way up to the fourteenth floor in case Kevin happens to be watching the elevator indicator, him making sure we’re going where we said. Unlikely he’d do that, but you never know. Then we take the stairs down to Nguyen’s floor, number 808.”

  I let a couple of beats go by. “Maury,” I said, “it’s a cockamamie plan.”

  “I know it is, for crissake,” Maury said. “But are you in?”

  “I’m in,” I said. “Now I’m going to tell you why.”

  Maury looked at his watch. “This gonna take long?”

  “Edited version,” I said. “I just want you to know the whole story. I don’t want to be holding anything out on you.”

  I waited while a gaggle of chatty middle-aged ladies passed us coming from the health club farther along Lombard.

  “This entire pain-in-the-ass situation about Grace,” I said, “goes back to the deal I made with her four years ago. When I took her case, we agreed she would pay me a big advance out front.”

  “The advance is the problem we’re working on?”

  I shook my head. “She paid it without a whimper.”

  “So what’re we sweating about?”

  “From the time Grace came to me, her head was set on pleading guilty. It was the same with George Wu and his lawyer. But first, before I signed on to the guilty pleas, I looked at the case from all the angles, spent months on the thing, fine-tooth combed it, and there was no doubt the cops had her and Wu cold. No wiggle room for the defence, not a reasonable doubt to be found. So, from the start, Grace and Wu resigned themselves to doing the time. Maybe both of them’ve got some of the drug money stashed away in the Bahamas, Liechtenstein, some dodgy place like that. I don’t know. Don’t care. Got nothing to do with my job.”

  “What’s the part that went wrong?”

  “I spent the past four years negotiating with the Crown about Grace’s plea, the sentence, the whole deal. Felt like I took a thousand meetings. At the end of all this, according to our agreement from the beginning, Grace would pay me the balance of my fee before she went behind bars.”

  “I was right? It is all about the money?”

  “Which she agreed to bring me this morning,” I said.

  “It’s always the money in deals like this.”

  “Maury, how do I know?” I said. “I’ve never been in a deal like this before.”

  “How much?”

  “Seventy-five big ones,” I said.

  “Seventy-five grand?”

  “In round numbers.”

  “She owes you this money, and we need to find her?”

  “In a nutshell.”

  Maury looked at his watch again. “My plan is synchronized.”

  “With whom?” I asked.

  “Tell you later,” Maury said. “Put the gown on. The way I organized it, we gotta walk through the front door of the building over there at 12:01. Exactly.”

  4

  Maury and I crossed Lombard, me giving my gown a flourish, and arrived in the condo’s lobby right on the minu
te. The condo building was relatively up to date in style, eight or nine years old at the most. The lobby had marble floors and several nice framed prints of ye olde Toronto on the walls. The reception desk was made of wood polished to a dark glow. Flanking the desk on either side, trying to look casual about it, were two muscular guys in tan trousers and dark grey blazers. Security, for sure. Behind the desk stood a tall reddish-haired kid with a metal clip on the lapel of his blazer, which was also dark grey. “Kevin Walker,” read the name on the clip.

  “Kevin, nice to meet you,” Maury said in a big voice, reaching out to shake the kid’s hand. As he spoke, Maury nodded in my direction. “This gentleman is a judge of the Superior Court of Ontario, Kevin,” he said. “I’m his clerk. The judge is going to marry Emily Drake next week. Reason we’re here today, Emily wants the judge to brief her on what’ll happen at the ceremony.”

  Kevin looked at me, more puzzled than dazzled. He had the expression of someone who faced an inexplicable quandary. I couldn’t blame him.

  “I don’t really know about this,” he said, his glance flicking between Maury and me.

  “Just give Emily a ring on your phone, Kevin,” Maury said. “She’ll set things straight.”

  “I guess I can do that,” Kevin said. He reached for the house phone. “But I should tell you she’s hardly ever in at this hour.”

  Maury was holding his own cell in his hand. The cell rang. He clicked it open and waited a beat while the person on the other end said something.

  “Emily!” Maury said enthusiastically into the cell. “We’re downstairs right now, talking to young Kevin.”

  Kevin took the house phone from his ear. I could hear it ringing at the other end.

  “Hey, Emily,” Maury said to his cell, “that’s a heck of a cold you got. Makes your voice very husky . . . Yeah, one of those summer colds, I understand . . . Hang on, I’ll let you make husky sounds at Kevin here.”

  Maury handed his cell to Kevin. “Good afternoon, Miss Drake,” Kevin said. He listened for a minute or two, then said, “Yes, if you say so, Miss Drake. I’ll send them up. Thank you, Miss Drake.”