Crang Mysteries 6-Book Bundle. Jack Batten
something to the cops when he was arrested. To wit: “The driver deserved it. He was just looking to get laid.” Clever. I jockeyed around with the crown attorney on the case for a month and we made a deal. She reduced the charge from robbery to assault with intent and I pleaded my kid guilty. Not bad considering my kid had a record, nothing violent before the waltz in the garage but a record. He’d been in jail for the month and was coming up for sentencing.
I phoned Mrs. Turkin. At her end, the television was on in the background. More like the foreground.
“We been worried sick about James, Mr. Crang,” she said. She had to talk up over Family Feud.
I said, “He may go to jail, Mrs. Turkin.”
“What we done for that boy, there wasn’t nothing more we could,” she said. Even talking up, her voice was whiny.
“How long he goes to jail,” I said, “may depend on you and your husband.”
“He got the marks in school,” she said. “We never made him quit or nothing.”
I said, “The judge is going to sentence James on Monday morning, Mrs. Turkin. I’d like you or your husband to be in court.”
“What?” The whine was gone.
“Judges are usually impressed favourably, Mrs. Turkin, when the parents of a boy James’ age take the trouble to appear for sentencing.”
She had put her hand over the receiver and was shouting at someone else. The shouting lasted ten seconds.
“We can’t get off work, neither of us,” Mrs. Turkin said to me.
I said, “It could make a difference of months in the sentence, Mrs. Turkin.”
“Me and my husband got jobs to think of and that’s more than James can say.”
She hung up.
The pizzas were beginning to bubble in the oven and Bill Evans was halfway through “Sometime Ago.”
I made another phone call and got Tom Catalano’s wife at home. She said Tom was still at the office. Her tone was in the small gap between patience and resignation. I dialled the night line at McIntosh, Brown & Crabtree, and someone said he’d dig Catalano out of the library.
“This wouldn’t be a prodigal son call?” Catalano said when he knew it was me.
Years earlier, I’d worked my eighteen months as an articling student at McIntosh, Brown. Catalano kept wanting me back.
“I don’t get it, Crang, whatever it is that makes you stick it out in the criminal courts,” he said on the phone. “It’s grubby stuff and fundamentally boring. Come down here and I’ll guarantee you a Supreme Court civil trial first time out of the box.”
“I’d flunk the dress code you got down there,” I said.
“I’ll hand you the kind of cases they write up in the Dominion Law Reports,” Catalano said. “That ever happen with the clients you got smelling up your waiting room?”
“Haven’t got a waiting room,” I said. “Anyway, one point in favour of my clients, so far none of them have been serious enough to consort with the guys who wear black suits and leave their associates in the trunks of cars out at the airport.”
“Meaning?”
I told Catalano about Matthew Wansborough and Ace Disposal and the Grimaldis, father and sons. He was silent for about three beats and asked if I had told Wansborough my news. I said no and asked him if Wansborough was likely to get himself involved in something shifty and keep it from his lawyers. Catalano said, was the Pope Jewish? He said a newspaper reporter’s unprinted allegations weren’t much to go on. I said Ray Griffin impressed me as sound on his research. Catalano said he’d hold off on reporting to Wansborough, and in the meantime, I should find out what I could about the Grimaldis and Ace and do it about as soon as yesterday.
“Listen,” Catalano said when we were through with Wansborough’s troubles, “one of our juniors came to work this morning in corduroy pants and a tweed jacket. We let him walk around that way all day.”
I said, “Tell me when he shows up in a windbreaker from his bowling league.”
I called my answering service again and told them I wouldn’t be in the office next day. I phoned my secretary and told her the same thing. Part-time secretary. In a practice like mine, paperwork is minimal, mostly a matter of reports to the Legal Aid Society on cases they send me, a few letters, subpoenas. Mrs. Reid is a proper lady in her early sixties who will forever be Mrs. Reid to me and I will be Mr. Crang to her. She comes in two or three days a week to type things and file other things. On days when she doesn’t come in and I’m not around, the office is unmanned. And unwomanned.
I ate the pizzas at the table in the kitchen, and afterwards I poured another vodka and watched television. Barbara Frum on The Journal was carrying on a four-way interview with an economist in Halifax, the Minister of Finance in the Toronto studio, a union man in Hamilton, and a former provincial premier in Regina. The subject was interest rates. After a while, the camera-switching made me forget whether I was being enlightened.
I flicked off the set and turned out the lights. Across the street, three gentlemen who looked in need of fresh barbering were sitting at one of the tables under a light in the park passing around a bottle in a brown paper bag. Maybe they weren’t winos. Maybe they were free and questing spirits come to commune with the shade of Goldwin Smith. I went to the bedroom at the back of the apartment and slept straight through for eight hours.
4
I WAS DRINKING my second cup of coffee, and when it got to be eight-twenty, I turned on the radio in the kitchen. The radio was set at the CBC station. The morning show was in its third hour and time had come for Annie B. Cooke to do her movie reviews. I never miss Annie B. Cooke.
The show’s host introduced her, and after he and she had engaged in fifteen seconds of what passed for witty badinage at eight-twenty in the morning, Annie B. Cooke waded into a movie about Tarzan. I gathered it was a movie that its makers intended to be taken seriously. Ms. Cooke wasn’t having any of that.
“The movie reveals how Tarzan was raised in semi-dark Africa by a bunch of guys dressed in costumes left over from Planet of the Apes,” she said in a voice that was a match for Debra Winger’s, “how Tarzan grew up and shopped at a jungle emporium for a loincloth by Giorgio Armani, and how he was taken to London, where he freaked out when he discovered his former jungle colleagues locked in cages at the zoo. The movie is pompous and makes you yearn for the good old days of Johnny Weissmuller.”
The host chuckled, and Annie B. Cooke praised a French movie with Lino Ventura, trashed a directing job by Paul Mazursky, and recommended a comedy that Carl Reiner had written the script for. The host thanked her and it was over to the weatherman to size up the prospects for more July heat wave.
I turned down the radio and poured a third coffee. When five minutes had gone by on the clock on the stove, I picked up the phone and dialled a number I knew by heart.
“You have a nimble way with a phrase,” I said when Annie answered at the other end.
“Aren’t you the loyal listener,” she said. She sounded out of breath. It takes her five minutes to walk rapidly out of the CBC Cabbagetown studio where the morning show comes from, half a block north and two blocks east to her flat on the third floor of a renovated house. Renovated is the only way houses come in Cabbagetown these days. Annie always walks rapidly after her morning reviews, something about the adrenalin pump of working live radio.
“Listening to you,” I said, “it beats going to the dud movies.”
“Hang in there, Crang,” Annie said. “Next month, the Roxy’s running an Anita Ekberg retrospective.”
“Just my speed.”
“We’ll go to