Riviera Blues. Jack Batten

lived on Ardwold Gate. I drove over in my white Volks Beetle convertible with the dent in the passenger side. Ardwold Gate is a cul-de-sac that curls behind Casa Loma at the top of the steep hill on Spadina Road. The houses on the street are a jumble of architectural styles, most of them ersatz. Georgian. Spanish. Edwardian. They have nothing in common except price, a couple of million per house. It takes big money to get ersatz just right.

      The Cartwright place was built of heavy grey stone and filled a double lot. I gave the polished brass knocker on the front door a solid thump. A hefty woman in her fifties opened the door almost immediately. She had on a severe black dress and spoke with a Hungarian accent. She verified that I was Mr. Crang and ushered me into the living room.

      It was a room that had chic stamped all over it. Walls painted terra cotta. Furniture covered in pale grey fabric. Oils and watercolours by Canadians who worked in contemporary realism. I looked out through the French doors. There was a tennis court at the back. It had a red clay surface. Not many of them left in the city.

      “How have you been?”

      Pamela spoke from the living-room entrance behind me.

      I turned around. “Since when?” I asked. “The whole last ten years?”

      “You’re looking well.”

      “That makes two of us.”

      Pamela had blond hair cut short and flipped to the right. She had eyes that looked out through a brown mist, a slightly stuck-out upper lip, and a figure that was slender all the way down. She was wearing a white silk blouse and cream-coloured trousers with many pleats in front. There were three or four thin gold bracelets on her left wrist and a thick gold wedding band on the appropriate finger. I would wager the blond hair still didn’t need much help from a bottle.

      “Please have a seat.” A small wave of Pamela’s hand told me I was to sit in one of the wing chairs. She sat on a sofa opposite me. In between us, there was a marble-topped coffee table with a bowl coloured a deep inky blue on it.

      “Thank you for coming,” Pamela said.

      “Glad to oblige.”

      “I hope it didn’t interfere with your work schedule.” Pamela was perched on the edge of the sofa, her legs crossed at the ankles. “I know how important your practice is to you.”

      “You going to keep on like we’re diplomats exchanging bows or are you going to get down to why I’ve been summoned?”

      “Shut up, Crang,” Pamela said. “This isn’t particularly easy, and I want to get through it my own way.”

      There was a cigarette box on the coffee table near the inky-blue bowl. Pamela reached over and lifted off the top. The box was light green. It looked like wood to me, studded with pieces of white glass. Pamela put the lid on the table. It made a sharp clink against the marble. The box wasn’t wood. It was some kind of metal, and I was probably wrong about the white pieces too. They were probably antique ivory.

      “Do you mind?” Pamela asked. She was lighting her cigarette from a lighter that matched the box.

      “I didn’t before,” I said. For sensuous smoking, Pamela was in a class with Simone Signoret in Room at the Top.

      “I want to talk to you about Jamie Haddon.”

      “I already got my marching orders on him from the top guy.”

      “There are some facts about this mysterious trip of Jamie’s to Monaco that Daddy doesn’t know. And will never know, as far as that goes.”

      “You’re going to tell me, and it doesn’t leave this room.”

      “Goodness,” Pamela said, “aren’t we a very clever criminal lawyer.”

      When Pamela and I were married, I used to let her sarcasm fly by. No call to change old habits.

      “What’s the mystery about Jamie’s trip to Monaco?” I asked.

      “To start with,” Pamela said, “I’m not paying for it.”

      I gave Pamela my uncomprehending look. “Did I miss a step?”

      “For the past year, I’ve paid for practically everything Jamie has. Everything that’s any good. His suits, the apartment, rental on the Jag he’s so fond of …”

      “Why did you —?” I started to ask. And stopped. I recognized the step I’d missed.

      “I was having an affair with Jamie,” Pamela said. “Am having an affair with Jamie. At least I think I still am.”

      “You’re cheating? Oh, my. On Archie?”

      “Why the shock?” Pamela blew smoke out both nostrils in matching streams. “I cheated on you, for heaven’s sake.”

      “This conversation isn’t turning out to be a ton of fun.”

      “If it makes you any less scandalized, Jamie has been the only time I’ve betrayed Archie.”

      “It wasn’t Archie I was thinking of.”

      “Betrayed. God, I sound like Mata Hari or someone.”

      “There was the Swedish guy in Sardinia.”

      “What Swedish guy in Sardinia?”

      “How soon they forget.”

      “Oh, him.”

      Pamela pushed out her cigarette dead centre in the deep inky-blue thing. It wasn’t a bowl. It was an ashtray. Nothing in the damn room was what I thought it was.

      “You amaze me, Crang,” Pamela said. “That was a million years ago, the Swede. Not much on talk, now that I think about it, but he had an absolutely heavenly body.”

      “Nice to hear you didn’t betray me with just any old chap.”

      “Stop saying betrayed.”

      “That was only my first time.”

      “I must have been terribly naive when we were married. To have told you about the Swedish man, I mean.”

      “You said you hadn’t committed adultery before. You wanted me to forgive you.”

      “Remind me what you answered.”

      “I said I forgave you. But I had my fingers crossed when I said it. Didn’t count.”

      “That was wise of you, because I’m sorry to say there were one or two ‘any old chaps,’ as you put it.”

      “That you had affairs with when you were my wife?”

      “Only towards the end,” Pamela said. “And none of them was a friend of yours.”

      “That doesn’t narrow the field much. I hardly had any friends in those days.”

      “And now you have one very close friend.” Pamela did little arching numbers with her eyebrows, like a bad imitation of Groucho Marx.

      “Annie,” I said. “Annie B. Cooke. Why can’t anybody in your family come right out and say her name?”

      “I know her name, and I’m grateful to her.”

      “That has an ominous ring,” I said, “coming from you.”

      “Nothing ominous. I heard the people on the radio in the morning say they envied your friend’s trip to the Riviera. Pardon, Annie’s trip. And I guessed she wouldn’t be going alone. That’s why I’m grateful to her. I phoned a friend with a rather good job at Air Canada and got the rest, about the two of you leaving Monday.”

      The hefty woman in the black dress was halfway across the pale grey broadloom before I realized she had entered the room. She must have mastered the servant’s art of stealth. She set a large lacquered wood tray on the marble in front of Pamela. The tray held a teapot, matching cups and saucers in a pretty tangerine