Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. Jack Batten

      I DROVE ANNIE out to the airport Friday morning. Her appointment with Vincent Canby for the CBC radio item on movie critics was set for Canby’s office at the New York Times that afternoon. Annie was excited but a shade weary. Alice Brackley hadn’t left her place until almost two.

      “You may be right about a romance between Alice and Mr. Grim-aldi,” Annie said in the car.

      “It was Wansborough who raised the possibility,” I said. “Actually Wansborough’s wife. No, scratch that, it was Wansborough’s wife’s friends. Two of them. Separate occasions.”

      “You finished?”

      “Run with it.”

      “Okay, Alice didn’t give names, not Grimaldi’s anyway,” Annie said. “But she made it clear she was involved with a man no one she knew would consider appropriate. Certainly not her family.”

      “Don’t see Alice making a guy like Grimaldi the centrepiece at a Wansborough-Brackley gathering.”

      “I thought Wasp families were supposed to be loosening up these days.”

      “From my small intercourse with clan Wansborough,” I said, “I’d judge a pound of gelignite wouldn’t loosen them up.”

      “Well, she’s obviously troubled by the relationship.”

      “What’d Alice want from you?” I asked. “Just a sympathetic ear?”

      “Seemed so,” Annie said. “I guess she doesn’t feel her friends would understand the situation and I made a safe alternative.”

      “Yet she stopped short of telling you that Grimaldi is the forbidden love she holds in her breast?”

      “My, aren’t we poetic,” Annie said. “No, she didn’t say Grimaldi was her beau, but I think it’s possible to read between the lines. The whole time she was talking, God knows it was hours and hours, I automatically read the name Grimaldi into the script.”

      “Alice make a pretty deep dent in the Cutty Sark?”

      “Drank half the bottle.”

      “Half doesn’t look right on the expense account.”

      “The whole thing?”

      “Call it twenty bucks.”

      “Good golly, what a prince you are.”

      “What was this other line of chatter Alice was pursuing?” I said. “The one about trusting me?”

      “That was the early part of the evening, before you came by,” Annie said. “Alice wondered about legal advice, something she said she needed before she made a decision that had to do with her work.”

      “Elliptical talker, that Alice.”

      “She’s feeling her way.”

      “Slowly.”

      “Well, I sympathize,” Annie said. “She’s got a romantic crisis, a business crisis, maybe a drinking crisis. Lot to balance at one time.”

      “Did you draw the conclusion the crises were linked?”

      “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Annie said. “The talk about the love affair seemed to flow naturally from the talk about the job decision.”

      “Doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to say that Grimaldi might be common to both.”

      “And he could drive a girl to drink.”

      Annie had the Nagra tape recorder on her lap, and a stuffed shoulder bag sat on the floor of the Volks. She planned to stay overnight in New York and come back on the noon plane Saturday.

      “You keeping out of trouble tonight, buster?” she said.

      “There’s a nurse I wouldn’t mind looking up.”

      “Not that kind of trouble,” Annie said. “You haven’t mentioned what you’re up to on the Ace front.”

      “Loose lips sink ships,” I said.

      “You’re holding out on me, Crang.”

      “Just waiting until fresh developments turn up,” I said. There was no sense in alarming Annie with my plans for that evening at the moment when she was leaving town. Crang, the fount of wisdom and cowardice.

      I was going to the airport by way of Highway 427. I turned off it onto the crisscross of roads that led to the two airport terminals. Annie was flying American Airlines. Terminal One.

      Annie said she’d be higher than a kite when she got back next day. Manhattan did that to her.

      “The air must be thinner down there,” she said.

      “Rarefied,” I said.

      I pulled the car into a gap between two taxis in front of the American Airlines entrance. Annie kissed me on the lips, got out of the car, and swung down the sidewalk, the Nagra in her right hand and the bag over her left shoulder. I watched until she disappeared through the pneumatic doors. Lady had a great ass.

      Back downtown, I laid on arrangements for the evening. Harry Hein was a trifle sticky. I told him on the phone I’d pick him up at his office at twelve-thirty. The nighttime twelve-thirty, I said. He wanted to know how he should explain the nocturnal absence to his wife. An all-night poker game, I suggested. Harry said he didn’t play poker. I told him to invent. Harry fretted on the phone. Chartered accountants aren’t accustomed to inventing.

      James Turkin took my call with aplomb. I bet he didn’t know he possessed aplomb. He was speaking from the Home Hardware store where he worked and looted. Twelve-fifteen at the corner of Gerrard and Sackville, I said, and he said he’d see me. Brevity and aplomb, that was my James.

      Later in the afternoon, I walked over to the Sheraton Centre on Queen Street and rented a black Dodge Dart from the Avis outlet in the hotel. Compared with my Volks, it felt as broad as William the Refrigerator Perry. I parked it in back of the house and whiled away the evening. Heating tomato sauce from a jar and eating it on fettuccine from a package took care of a half-hour. I watched Miami Vice and the local news, and just about the time a sensible lawyer would hit the hay, I went down the stairs and drove away in the Dodge Dart.

      James was standing in front of the same variety store on Gerrard. I leaned across and opened the passenger door, and he climbed in to the back seat. He had his cloth liquor bag and a kitchen stool. The stool had chip marks in its white paint but looked sturdy and about two feet high.

      “A stool?” I said.

      “You’ll see,” James said. He didn’t talk while we drove over to pick up Harry Hein outside his office on Bay Street.

      Harry was nervous. He got in the front seat, carrying a small briefcase, and acknowledged James when I introduced the two. One sweating man and one teenager. My team.

      “Crang,” Harry said, “you know how many years I can get in prison for this?”

      “Look at it another way, Harry,” I said. “With me defending you, you’ll have a lawyer who’s truly involved in the case.”

      I drove down University Avenue and out the Gardiner.

      “This is crazy anyway,” Harry said. “The amount of time I’m going to put in on these people’s books, I can’t do any kind of systematic analysis.”

      “You got till Ace’s morning shift comes on, Harry.”

      “They work Saturdays?”

      “Not till after the sun comes up.”

      I passed the old Seaway Hotel and crossed from the Gardiner onto the Queen E.

      “Car smells new,” James said from the back seat. He wasn’t nervous. “ You trade the Volks for this thing?”

      “Rented