Riviera Blues. Jack Batten

Burton painting from his garter-belt series. And a big Graham Coughtry canvas of a pair of entwined lovers.

      “A fella could get horny just standing here,” I said.

      “Merde,” Mike said.

      I cleared my throat. “The shirts, Mike,” I said.

      “For sure,” Mike said. He seemed to be having trouble taking his eyes off the Graham Coughtry.

      There were doors on either side of the canopied bed. Mike mushed through the white carpet and opened the first door. A bathroom. He tried the second door and got lucky. It was a clothes closet. Shirts hung in it on hangers. So did a couple of sports jackets, a charcoal grey suit, and three or four pairs of slacks. The shirts, half a dozen of them, looked top quality, in silks and broadcloth and in elegant colour combinations.

      “Just look, my friend Crang,” Mike said. He had a wide grin on his face.

      “I’m looking.”

      What I read on Mike’s face was the expression of a guy who was flabbergasted to find shirts that supported his cockamamie story about the favour for Jamie Haddon.

      “I think Jamie will like for me to take all of these beautiful shirts,” Mike said.

      He arranged the shirts neatly over his arm, and the two of us left the bedroom. I turned the light out on all that female flesh.

      “Mission accomplished, Mike,” I said in the living room. I didn’t sit down. It might have encouraged Mike to remain on the premises.

      “You too, my friend Crang?” Mike asked. “You have done the job for the landlady?”

      Mike and I appeared to be operating from the same motive. I wanted him out of the apartment. He wanted me to leave first. I dug in.

      “Plenty more to do, Mike,” I said. “Read the meter. Check the pipes. Speak to Jamie’s upstairs neighbour.”

      Would Mike swallow that line? I didn’t think he had a choice, unless he was inclined to make a fuss.

      “Well, my friend Crang,” he said, “we meet again maybe.”

      “Wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll be in your corner of the world myself next week.”

      “For sure?”

      The hesitant sound in Mike’s voice said he hadn’t decided whether this was good news or bad news.

      “A holiday,” I said. “Near Villefranche for a few days, and after that, Cannes. Me and a swell lady.”

      “Oh, a holiday, my friend Crang.” Mike had decided. A holiday was okay. “You look me up for sure.”

      “Any place except the American bar of the Hôtel de Paris,” I said.

      I picked up Mike’s silver windbreaker from the armchair and folded it on top of the armload of shirts. I put my hand on Mike’s back. I may have been pushing him lightly as he went through the apartment door.

      CHAPTER SIX

      Whatever Mike Rolland came to fetch in Jamie Haddon’s apartment, it wasn’t shirts. Hell, the guy hadn’t been in the bedroom. Didn’t know where the light switch was. Hadn’t even taken in the erotic glories of the crotch collection.

      Whatever Mike came to fetch was probably in the den. Where the whistling had issued from. Where the desk lamp was switched on. Where Mike had apparently been poking around when I put in my unexpected appearance.

      I walked back down the hall to the den. Its decor was in a masculine motif, crimson and military wallpaper, soldiers marching, horses rearing. The rug was Indian, and the desk was black and sleek. Along one wall, there was a large-screened TV set, a VCR, a CD player, and a stack of CDs. One short shelf held eight or nine books. All dealt with the esoterica of computers. A computer sat beside the shiny black desk. The computer was called a NeXT in jaunty colours. Tidy-looking machine, as black as the desk.

      I went over to examine it at a closer range. On my way, behind the desk, I stepped on something that went crunch under my foot. It was a rectangular metal disk, a couple of inches wide, about three inches long, and not much thicker than a wafer. I picked it up. My foot hadn’t cracked it. An elephant’s foot wouldn’t have cracked it. The thing felt indestructible in my hand.

      I hefted it. Very light. It was black all over except for a silver band down the middle. I knew vaguely what it was, a disk that went into the computer. And a dozen more like it were scattered at my feet.

      I sat in the chair behind the black desk. Comfy. The chair was upholstered in soft red leather. Jamie kept a clean desk top, nothing on it except the lamp, a red touch-tone telephone, and a pair of pens mounted in a clear glass holder. The pens looked like they were used for ceremonial purposes only.

      I leaned out of the desk chair and scooped up the disks strewn on the floor. There were twelve of them, thirteen counting the one I’d stepped on. I turned over the first disk. It had a strip of paper taped across the bottom. On the paper someone had printed four words in neat block letters: “INVESTMENTS — STOCKS AND BONDS.”

      The printing was probably Jamie’s, and he probably kept a record of his dabblings on the stock market on it. With Pamela’s backing and his own salary he ought to have enough cash to take a modest flyer on the market.

      Each of the other disks had the same sort of neatly printed label. “Correspondence and letters,” I read on one. “Dictionary, thesaurus, quotations” on another. Well, okay, Jamie was hooked on self-improvement. Build up his word power. Stagger Pamela with his erudition.

      I riffled through the rest of the disks. Nothing set off alarm bells. All struck me as straightforward and aboveboard, the kind of stuff a computer guy, which Jamie apparently was, might store on his computer disks.

      So why were the disks scattered on the floor and not filed in the tray next to the NeXT where they clearly belonged? Jamie wouldn’t have left his disks in disarray.

      Pamela had been in the apartment after Jamie’s departure. If she had seen the disks on the floor, and she would have if she’d been thorough in her rummaging, she would have put them back in their proper place. Pamela’s motto had always been “tidying as you go is half the fun.”

      That left my new best friend, Mike Rolland of Monaco.

      Mike had been in Jamie’s library when I arrived, and he went out of the apartment wearing the face of a man unhappy with what he was leaving behind. Why was he unhappy? Because he’d been in the apartment on a search and hadn’t found the object of his search.

      That was a surmise on my part, but not a bad surmise. Another pretty fair surmise: he was looking for a computer disk, one that fit into the NeXT.

      I pulled open the drawers to Jamie’s desk. Time to launch my own search. The desk drawers didn’t hold much. Stacks of computer paper. The Toronto telephone directory. A guide book to Monaco. I flipped through it. The proper adjective wasn’t Monacan or Monesque. The book said it was Monégasque.

      I got down on my hands and knees and rubbed my hands across the bottoms of the drawers. No disk was taped to the undersides.

      I shook out the books in Jamie’s single-minded little library, removed the CDs from their plastic containers, lifted the pillows off the maroon leather sofa against the opposite wall and jammed my hand into its lining. No disk.

      I rolled up the Indian rug and rolled it down again. I unscrewed the base of the lamp and re-screwed it. I spent thirty minutes in the den. The room, I would’ve sworn, was clean of concealed disks.

      I gave the same treatment to the living room, the dining room, the undersized kitchen, and the bedroom that Dante Renzi must have once occupied. It was empty of Dante and his effects and of a disk. I had narrowed the search to Jamie’s bedroom. I made my way methodically through its closets, the two bedside tables, and a high bureau that held a few stray socks, some briefs in shocking shades, and nothing else. I pulled