Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. Jack Batten

      “Whatever you’re doing here, Crang,” Charles Grimaldi said when the door to the kitchen closed, “you’ve made a mistake.”

      Grimaldi sat in the chair on the other side of the antique table. His face was set in a glower and he had his hands laid flat on the table. Annie had been right about him. He was actually menacing. When I met him at La Serre, my eye had been taken with his shine and gleam. I hadn’t registered all of the menace.

      “Call Pete back in here,” I said. “He’d get a big kick out of why I’ve come calling. The whole family would.”

      “Your choice, Crang,” Grimaldi said. “Make your point fast or I tell Sol and Tony to throw your ass on the street.”

      “I’ve come to deal,” I said.

      “You haven’t got anything I’m interested in.”

      “The other day,” I said, “you were keen to find out the identity of my client. That’s where the deal starts.”

      “Wansborough,” Grimaldi said. “I know already.”

      “He wants his money back,” I said, “everything he put into Ace. Three hundred grand and change.”

      “That doesn’t sound like any kind of deal to me.”

      “What you receive in return, Charlie,” I said, “is the documentation I’m holding on activities at Ace that might give some people cause to feel concern. Your family for one group and the fraud squad for another.”

      My announcement didn’t precisely shatter Grimaldi.

      “You’re blowing smoke,” he said.

      “You’ve got the weigh-masters at the Metro dumps on the take,” I said. “That’s number one. You’re overbilling your customers. That’s number two. One and two combined are bringing in better than two million every month.”

      The snappy speech left me short on breath. Concise, I thought, succinctly worded and irrefutable. I was breathing hard but feeling triumphant.

      Grimaldi said, “You know, Crang, I don’t like dicking around with guys like you.”

      “Here’s the key word, Charlie,” I said. “Documentation.”

      “You done?”

      “Information on paper, Charlie. Invoices photocopied on the same machine you use to phony up the invoices that go out to your customers.” Grimaldi’s face gave away nothing. Same gleam, same menace.

      “The trade is,” I said, feeling marginally less triumphant, “my documents for Wansborough’s money.”

      “That reads like blackmail.”

      “It’s probably a field you’re familiar with, Charlie.”

      “Nobody calls me Charlie.”

      My trouble with Grimaldi was his reluctance to address the issues. He’d doped it out that Matthew Wansborough was my client. That probably wasn’t difficult, not after a week of reflection and a little adding of two and two on Grimaldi’s part. Besides, there was no reason for keeping Wansborough’s identity under cover any longer. The worrying point was that Grimaldi seemed not to be daunted by my insider information. I’d just finished telling him I could prove he was a crook. The news didn’t shake him. It didn’t even interest him.

      “Charles,” I said, “you following me? I got the evidence?”

      “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

      Was I handling this wrong?

      “Let me explain,” I said. “Invoices. Copies thereof. The ones with the same billing and same number that go out to all your customers on any given day. Remember now, Charles? That’s the scam I’m talking about. I walked into your office and took out the paper. I’m offering to deal it back.”

      I listened to myself and I heard babbling. The implacable expression on Grimaldi’s face was unhinging my tongue. If he was trying to stonewall me, he was succeeding. I’d come to threaten him into an arrangement, and now I was the guy whose nerves were turning shaky.

      Grimaldi slid his hands off the table and stood up from his chair.

      “Get the hell out of my house,” he said.

      “No deal?” I said. Dumb question.

      “Crang, the last couple weeks, you’ve been a pain in the ass,” Grimaldi said. “Not a big pain in the ass. A little pain. From what you’ve said the ten minutes in here, you sound like a guy looking to graduate to major pain in the ass. If I were you, I wouldn’t do it. That’s my advice. Smart people take my advice.”

      Grimaldi walked across the Persian rug to the door that led to the kitchen, opened it, and left me alone in the entrance hall.

      Bravo, I thought, what a performance.

      I went out to my car. Two Japanese gardeners had parked their truck behind me. I had to wait for the two to put down their rakes and hoes and move the truck before I could back out of the circular drive-way. The delay made me itchy. What was going through Charles Grimaldi’s head? Didn’t he believe I had the goods to prove he was a crook? He must. How else would I have been able to recite the nature of his crookedness? Did he want me out of the house in a hurry only because brother Pete was on the scene? Was that it? Would he deal later? Or did he have something else in mind? The gardeners spent five minutes shifting gears and stalling the truck until they moved it far enough to let me squeeze onto the street. I drove away.

      Strike while the iron is hot. That’s one motto I’d consider dropping from my escutcheon. In for a penny, in for a pound wasn’t looking so terrific either.

      28

      AT FOUR O’CLOCK I bought Annie a drink at the bar across the street from the CBC Radio building.

      “Down to thirty-two minutes and a bit,” she said, “and still cutting and splicing.”

      I was of two minds about mentioning my call on Grimaldi. Clam up on the failure or discuss it with Annie in the hope that talk might lead to a more inspired approach? The choice became academic. Annie was so high on coffee and work that the topic of my adventures on the Kingsway passed only fleetingly through the conversation. Annie was giving herself a thirty-minute break from editing the tapes of her interviews with the movie people. She planned to stick with them till twelve that night and Tuesday night.

      “Get another ten minutes out,” she said. Her voice made her sound wired. “Better than a rough edit but not quite finished product, and Wednesday morning I’ll play it for the show’s producer. With all fingers crossed.”

      I cheered Annie on in her endeavours and at four-thirty I drove back to my house. It was quiet when I shut the front door behind me. I went up the stairs, turned to the living room and walked into a rousing welcome from Tony Flanagan.

      He socked me on the jaw.

      I lost consciousness for a couple of seconds, long enough to hit the floor and settle. I raised my head. Sol Nash was sitting in my armchair and had his shiny black loafers propped on a leather footstool. Pamela gave me the footstool the first year we were married. She thought a lawyer was someone who needed to put up his feet in the evening and smoke a pipe. She bought me a rack of pipes. Tony Flanagan was standing between Sol and me with his fists raised to deliver another haymaker. Tony was wearing his straw hat. I was on my back on the floor. Of the three of us, I cut the least dignified figure.

      I said to Tony, “I thought we might have arrived at a non-aggression pact yesterday.”

      “This here’s business,” Tony said. “Get up.”

      “Are you going to hit me again?”

      “Unless Mr. Nash says never mind.”

      I rubbed my jaw. It hurt when it moved.