Take Five Page 3

  He gave the cell back to Maury.

  “That’s strange,” Kevin said. “The two years I’ve been here, today’s the first time she ever called me by my first name.”

  “Well,” I said, getting into the spirit of the fraud, “she’s probably giddy about the wedding.”

  “That’s no joke,” Kevin said. “Why’s an eighty-year-old spinster getting married in the first place?”

  “Kevin, my boy, I’ve married older in my time,” I said. Nice recovery, I thought.

  “And I wonder what’s happening with her sister in all this,” Kevin said.

  “Her sister?” I said, not recovering quite so adroitly. A sister? What else had Maury missed?

  “You must have heard about her,” Kevin said. “Miss Drake visits her at the seniors’ residence in York Mills every day.”

  “That sister, yeah,” Maury said, sliding into the conversation. “Very nice woman.”

  “Hard to tell what she is, a person like her with Alzheimer’s,” Kevin said.

  “All right, Judge,” Maury said to me, talking fast. He had my right arm in a grip like a vise. “Better not keep Emily waiting. Big day coming up.”

  Maury turned to Kevin. “Nice making your acquaintance, Kev.”

  “You too,” Kevin said, doubt still registering in his voice. “Go ahead, gentlemen, I suppose.”

  There was a bank of eight elevators beyond Kevin’s desk. One elevator was open and empty on the ground floor. I thought for a moment about the kind of judge-like aura I ought to project. A lot of judges, when they entered a courtroom, they tucked the left arm under the back of the gown and kicked into a swinging stride. I gave that a try, walking past Kevin and the security guys. It seemed to impress Kevin.

  “Have a good day, Judge,” he called in friendly tones.

  “You too, young man,” I said.

  Maury and I stepped into the elevator. He pressed the button for the fourteenth floor. The elevator doors closed.

  “Nice planning, Maury,” I said.

  “Couldn’t anticipate every damn thing that might happen,” Maury said. “Timing with the cell was perfect, you have to admit.”

  “Who was the woman with the summer cold?”

  “Girl works at a bar out my way,” Maury said. “I told her, reward for the favour, I’m having her over to my place for a shrimp dish I cook. Specialty of mine.”

  We rode to the fourteenth floor with no stops, got off and walked down the stairs to the eighth. We didn’t encounter anybody on the way.

  In front of apartment 808, Maury took a set of small picks out of his pocket.

  “Glad they don’t have electronic key cards in the damn building,” he said.

  “Your B and E skills don’t extend to more modern technology?”

  “I can do it,” Maury said, sounding defensive. “Just I’m slower.”

  In well under a minute, Maury unlocked the door and pushed it open. Maury and I, side by side, looked into the apartment. Both of us were surprised into temporary silence.

  “If there’s a clue in here,” I said after a few seconds, “it won’t take us long to find it.”

  5

  Grace’s apartment door opened into the living room. If I were describing the room’s decor for a home-furnishing magazine, I’d call it minimalist.

  In an isolated island in the middle of the otherwise empty room, there was a sofa and two armchairs. All three pieces were done in a dark blue satiny material. In front of the sofa there was a coffee table. Two small tables stood at either end of the sofa. The end tables held lamps with white shades. The coffee table held nothing. The rest of the room was empty, and the walls were blank, no pictures and few signs that any pictures had once hung there.

  Maury opened the drawers in the end tables.

  “Nothing in them,” he said. “Zero.”

  “We’re rolling right along,” I said. “But not in a productive direction.”

  To the left of the living room, an open door led to what I could see was a large kitchen with a centre island and a table big enough for a family of four to sit down to a meal and still have plenty of elbow room. A hall ran off the living room to the right. No doubt a bedroom and bathroom were down there.

  “You check out the kitchen,” I said to Maury. “Look in closets and drawers. I’ll do the bedroom end of the place.”

  The bedroom had a queen-sized bed. Its mattress was bare of blankets and sheets. The six pillows stacked on the mattress weren’t enclosed in pillowcases. Definitely a pattern emerging. Furniture but none of the furnishings. I slid open the drawer in the bedside table on the left side. It was empty. I walked around to the bedside table on the right side and opened the drawer. Empty. Another emerging pattern. The closet, almost large enough to qualify as a walk-in, was bare. Nothing on the shelves. No clothes hanging on the clothes rack. Not even hangers for clothes to hang on.

  The bathroom was reached by way of a door off the bedroom. I stepped in. It was as barren as the other rooms. No toiletries, nothing in the medicine cabinet, nothing in the toothbrush rack, nothing in the drawer under the sink.

  Above the toilet, shelves ran up four levels. I could see that the three lower shelves held nothing on them. The top shelf was above my head. I reached up my hand and ran it around the shelf. My hand hit pay dirt, if pay dirt could be defined as a stack of magazines.

  I stood on the toilet seat to make sure I didn’t miss any. It looked like five magazines altogether. I carried them back to the living room and sat in one of the satiny chairs.

  “What’ve you got?” Maury asked.

  “Magazines. What about you?”

  “Nothing. None of the stuff you see in movies about people who skip a joint. Sour milk in the fridge, stale crackers in the cupboard. Nothing like that.”

  I went through the magazines. Maybe Grace or whoever cleaned out the apartment forgot that the magazines were on the shelf. They got left behind. I shuffled through the stack. Chatelaine, three Vogues, and a Flare. Another magazine fell out of the bundle onto the floor. It had been stuck in the pages of one of the fat Vogues. The sixth magazine was something slimmer, the January issue of a full-colour monthly called Ceramics Monthly. The title made up in specificity what it lacked in inspiration.

  “None of these magazines is dated later than February this year,” I said.

  “That must’ve been when Grace beat it out of here,” Maury said. “Five, six months ago.”

  I flipped through Ceramics Monthly, taking my time.

  “The other magazines seem like Grace’s kind of reading,” I said. “But what’s with the ceramics?”

  “Bowls and jugs, you’re talking about?” Maury said. “Along those lines?”

  I stopped flipping the pages.

  “And pots,” I said. “Sex pots.”

  I held the magazine open for Maury to take a look. The article I wanted him to see was illustrated with colour photographs of ceramic pieces in the shapes of penises and nude women with their legs spread.

  “Jesus,” Maury said, “you never know where you’re gonna come across dirty pictures these days.”

  “According to the article,” I said, “these ceramics were done in the sixteenth century.”

  “Doesn’t matter how old,” Maury said, “they look disgusting.”

  “Maury, are you going fuddy-duddy in your advancing age?”

  “I like porn as much as the next guy, but it belongs in Penthouse. Normal places like that. On the Internet.”

  “You’re right, Internet-porn videos seem to be the new norm.”

  “Google ‘nude girls’ and you get a couple thousand movies of females screwing guys or females screwing other females.”

  I leafed through the rest of Ceramics Monthly. The other articles seemed conventional. No more eroticism, just pretty vases, cups, saucers, flower bowls. I turned the pages, taking my time, studying every article. Something had caught my eye, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I leafed some more. Some
thing was wrong. Or maybe something was right and I didn’t recognize what it was. After three or four minutes with no reward, I tossed the magazine onto the coffee table with the other five.

  “You see any reason we should hang around here much longer?” Maury said.

  “What, you worried Kevin downstairs might be putting two and two together?”

  Maury shrugged. “Just planning ahead.”

  “Another plan? What’s it this time?”

  “Not another plan. Just a variation on the original.”

  “Give me the variation.”

  “When we leave,” Maury said, “we oughta go by way of the underground garage. I checked it out this morning. No problem.”

  “Way things have developed so far,” I said, “there could be a squad of cops down there waiting for us with drawn weapons.”

  “You don’t like my plan, just say so.”

  “Maury,” I said, “your plotting is better than anything I might have thought up. Of course, I lack the subculture mindset.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Just for reassurance,” I said, “I’ll give the kitchen a second look, you take a turn on the bedroom and bathroom.”

  Five minutes later, we reassembled in the living room. Both of us had come up empty.

  “Now can we leave?” Maury said. “A rule of mine in the old days, the minute I knew I was done in a hotel room, win or lose, I cleared out of there.”

  “Something’s bugging me,” I said.

  I turned the pages of Ceramics Monthly one more quick and fruitless time. Then I put all six magazines back on the top shelf in the main bathroom.

  “You convinced?” Maury said. “There’s no clues in the entire apartment.”

  I nodded my head, agreeing but not happy about it.

  Maury opened the front door and looked up and down the silent hall. “All clear out here,” he said. “Let’s move.”

  I stepped into the doorway. Then I stopped. “Wait a minute, Maury. I saw a clue, dammit. Shut the door.”

  I went into the large bathroom and got the magazines.

  “Look at this,” I said to Maury. I sorted through all six, pointing to the right-hand bottom-front corner of each. “See that?” I said.

  “See what? All I see’s the covers of six magazines.”

  “Look closer,” I said. “The first five have no subscriber’s sticker in the corner. The sixth is different. It’s got a sticker.”

  “The magazine with a dick for a teapot’s got the sticker?”

  “Deftly phrased, Maury,” I said. “Grace bought the other magazines in a store. Or somebody bought them for her. Doesn’t matter. What matters is she subscribed to Ceramics Monthly. Mailman brought it.”

  I was holding the sticker in Maury’s face.

  “OK, I see it, man,” Maury said. “It’s got her name and the address of this apartment on there. So what?”

  “Quite a lot,” I said. “Potentially anyway. If Grace wanted to keep her subscription active, she’d have had to give the magazine her new address.”

  Maury got it. “You’re gonna phone the magazine and ask for the new address.”

  “Well, not me. The person on the phone in the subscription department might notice I’m not female and probably not someone named Grace Nguyen. But you’ve got the general idea. I’ll ask somebody to make the call for me.”

  “Is this a genuine clue?”

  “In my opinion as an experienced seeker after clues, this is the real goods.”

  Maury opened the apartment door. The hall was still empty. We walked down nine flights of stairs to the parking garage in the condo’s basement. There were no signs of cops with or without drawn weapons. Maury led the way through the garage to a staircase that took us up a separate flight of stairs and out a door that opened on to the street beyond sight of the condo’s front door. We crossed Lombard and walked west.

  In my right hand, I clutched Grace’s copy of Ceramics Monthly.

  6

  When I got home, Annie was standing in our front yard talking to a short woman with a pretty, heart-shaped face. Annie B. Cooke and I were live-in companions. I couldn’t account for the other woman. The front yard was the size of a postage stamp.

  “Hey, sweetie,” Annie said when she saw me.

  We kissed lightly on the lips.

  “This is Kathleen,” Annie said, indicating Ms. Heart Shape. “Kathleen’s our new garden designer.”

  “A position that was vacant until now,” I said.

  “The place is a mess,” Kathleen said. “Front and back.”

  “Reassuring to know garden design is a straight-talk business,” I said.

  “There’s a reason I’m telling you this,” Kathleen said, smiling winningly as she laid on the bad news. “When you get my bill, I want you to remember what a piece of doodoo I started with.”

  Kathleen began to wave her arms in many directions and drop Latin phrases into the conversation. I assumed the Latin covered plant names. Since she was addressing them and the arm waves to Annie, I drifted beyond the conversation and into the house.

  I changed into jeans, an ancient pair of sandals and a black Dallas Mavericks T-shirt. It had Dirk Nowitzki’s number. Forty-one. Downstairs, I mixed a martini. Straight up, twist of lemon, three ounces of Polish potato vodka, a soupçon of vermouth. It had been a day of unpleasant surprises. On the other hand, I still had a chance of landing on my feet. I sat with the martini at the dining room table. It had a view through the very large rear window into the backyard. I sipped my drink and surveyed Annie’s and my kingdom. Was the garden really doodoo?

  Annie and I bought the house six months earlier. It was a two-and-a-half-storey semi-detached on the east side of Major Street. The address placed us in a neighbourhood that had waited decades, probably a century, to be named. Just about every other corner of Toronto got a name before us. Ours, Harbord Village, was homely but logical enough, taken from Harbord Street, a main east-west route that passed through the neighbourhood a block south from Annie and me. All of us Harbord Villagers lived below Bloor Street, the southern boundary of the ancient and envied neighbourhood called the Annex.

  Annex homeowners were a proud and smug bunch. They flew into a rage if any of us on Major and environs referred to ourselves as the South Annex. It was actually real estate agents who liked to throw the term around. They thought anything with Annex in the title was worth another fifty grand on the selling price. They probably had it right.

  It was our first house together, Annie’s and mine. We’d been romantic partners for fifteen years but not under the same roof. Finally we took the big step and amalgamated. “Two mature people making a mutually beneficial decision,” Annie said. Besides that, we loved one another. With Annie, what wasn’t to love? She was petite, what my grandmother would have called no bigger than a minute. Her hair was raven, her eyes large and green, and she had a knockout figure. Currently it was knocking out the eyes of every guy who lived on Major Street.

  Major was a narrow street of houses just like ours, built a century and a half ago as cottages for the working class. Now it was trendy as hell, whether or not anybody fell for the South Annex label. Most people who bought on the street spent a fortune renovating like crazy. We were lucky. The people who owned the house before us had remodelled to their taste, which happened to dovetail with our taste. A lot of professors lived on Major, people who taught at the University of Toronto a couple of blocks to the east. The rest of the population included some artsy types, some doctors and scientists at the big hospitals downtown on University Avenue, two or three actors, and as of recently, one criminal lawyer.

  Annie and Kathleen had moved their discussion to the backyard. Kathleen’s arms were still waving, but they seemed to radiate more enthusiasm than they had in the front. I thought I spotted bursts of joy from old Kathleen. She must have found larger possibilities in the back garden. Good for her. Good for Annie and me.

  Annie came through the door fr
om the backyard into the dining room.

  “Hmm,” she said, looking at the martini in front of me, “getting an early start, are we? I bought a package of almonds this afternoon if you want some sustenance with the martini.”

  “Prescient of you.”

  “I’m going to drive Kathleen home. Not far. She lives up around Bathurst and Dupont. In the Annex.”

  Annie gave a mock-awed emphasis to “Annex.” Everybody on Major did that.

  “Where’s Kathleen’s own car?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t drive. Kathleen’s a bit eccentric.”

  “If she lives so close, she could walk.”

  “Honey—” Annie sounded like a teacher with a thick student “—don’t you keep up to date? This is the Kathleen Stibbards. The goddess of the garden. Clients always drive her home. And pick her up. It’s part of the hiring ritual.”

  “She’s giving you a chance to size her up?”

  Annie shook her head. “Other way around. She’s sizing us up. See if we’re people who’ll appreciate her work.”

  Annie grabbed her handbag off the table and left. I went into the kitchen for the almonds. Great, the nuts hadn’t been opened yet. Fresh as the day they were packed in cellophane. I sat at the table alternating sips of martini with nibbles of almond. Yummy.

  Annie returned, bringing a breath of fresh air and a whiff of scent. Chloe, if I remembered correctly.

  “Want one of these?” I asked, holding up my drink.

  “I’ve got a bottle of Veuve Clicquot chilling in the fridge,” Annie said. “To celebrate today’s big cash inflow.”

  “You actually bought eighty-dollar champagne?” I asked.

  Annie nodded. “Tonight we go first class.”

  “Ah, yeah.”

  “What?” Annie said, picking up the downer note in my voice.

  “We can still drink the champagne,” I said. “It’ll just lack the sense of occasion.”

  Annie’s smile dropped away. “You didn’t get the seventy-five thousand from Grace whatchamacallher?”

  “Nguyen. Doesn’t matter you not remembering her last name. The judge doesn’t either. Or her first name. And, no, I’m not yet in pocket with the cash.”