by Jack Batten
One more foursome played through the eighteenth before Matthew Wansborough came into view. The eighteenth hole at Royal Ontario is a long par four, about 440 yards, made longer by its steep upward slope. Good golfers have trouble reaching the green in two. Wansborough wasn’t a good golfer. He had a short, choppy swing. He was wearing red-and-green-plaid trousers, and the flaps on the pockets of his white golf shirt had trim of the same material. Wansborough shanked his third shot into a bunker to the left of the green. He needed two whacks at the ball with his wedge before he blasted out. He three-putted. An eight. It might have been my fault. Wansborough gave me a long look before he stepped into the bunker. The sight seemed to unsettle his concentration. Maybe it was my jeans.
Wansborough picked his ball out of the cup and walked to the back of the green where I was standing.
“Good heavens, man,” he said in a low, harsh voice, “you’re not dressed.”
I said, “Any guy got up like Sir Harry Lauder isn’t in the best position to pass judgment on taste in clothes.”
Wansborough made a snorting noise and looked over to the other men in his foursome. One was putting out and the other two waited at the edge of the path that led to the clubhouse. The man who was putting was large and meaty and wore rimless glasses. I took him for our Mr. Thompson the banker.
“You damned well cost me strokes on this hole, Crang,” Wansborough whispered at me. He was annoyed.
“I’ve got news that might cost you more,” I said.
“Couldn’t it wait until business hours?” Wansborough asked.
“Right now,” I said, “I’m on business hours.”
The man in the rimless glasses called over to Wansborough. “The last hole gave these boys the nassau, Matthew,” he said. He had a scorecard in one hand and was making notations on it with a stubby pencil. “We owe them, um, nine dollars apiece.” The way he said it, it might have been his bank’s reserve fund.
“You fellows go on ahead,” Wansborough called back.
The banker and the other two men gave Wansborough looks that asked why he was spending time on someone who plainly belonged below stairs.
“I’ll be right along,” Wansborough said. “Order me a gin and tonic.”
“Better make it a double,” I said to Wansborough.
“Whatever are you talking about, Crang?”
“The kind of news I have,” I said, “is usually followed by a double.”
Wansborough steered me along the path from the eighteenth green. Where it branched toward the clubhouse, he turned us in the direction of the parking lot. We sat on one of the white benches among the snapdragons.
“Now,” Wansborough said. His right leg jiggled. He couldn’t wait to join his cronies at the nineteenth hole.
“This is about your cousin.”
“My lord, Crang, is that all?” Wansborough said. “If something came out of your meeting with Alice, you could have phoned my office tomorrow.”
The man was aggravating me.
“Something came out of the meeting,” I said. “Alice’s death.”
Wansborough’s leg lost its jiggle.
“Your sense of drama is appalling,” he said.
I gave him an edited version of my early-morning call from Alice and my visit to the scene of her murder. Wansborough looked straight at me most of the time I talked. Toward the end, his gaze drifted away, and when I finished, he spoke in a slow, thoughtful voice.
He said, “We have four spaces left in the family plot at Mount Pleasant.”
The guy knew how to home in on the core of a situation.
I said, “We’ve got more immediate concerns, Mr. Wansborough.”
“Alice’s funeral is immediate to me,” Wansborough said. “Her mother is a widow. She’ll be on to me about arrangements.”
“Somebody else might be on to you,” I said. “The cops.”
Wansborough made a hmm sound.
He said, “It’s my duty of course to tell the police whatever I know that might assist them in their inquiries.”
“For the record,” I said, “it’s better that you don’t know anything.”
Wansborough straightened into his indignant posture.
“I know,” he said, “that it was my misfortune to have been persuaded by my cousin to invest a good deal of family money in a company that is in unsavoury hands. Now my cousin is dead and my investment remains in the same unsavoury hands.”
“Why not keep that summary to yourself for a few days,” I said. “Rushing off to the cops isn’t going to get back your investment in Ace.”
Wansborough looked down at his golf shoes. They were two-toned, black and white, and had little black tassels. Wansborough’s strict dress rules got a holiday on the golf course.
He said, “What are you suggesting?”
“Silence.”
“You’re an exasperating man, Mr. Crang.”
“Passive silence.”
Wansborough got off another hmm.
I said, “Don’t go to the cops with the suspicions about Charles Grimaldi.”
Wansborough started to say there were more than suspicions. But his heart wasn’t in the objection, and he allowed me to talk over him.
“You’re in violation of no laws,” I said. “Police come to you with specific questions, fair enough, you answer. But I’m betting that’ll be a couple of days. Until then, you concentrate on organizing Alice’s place in the family plot.”
Wansborough got his spacey look, the one that signalled deep contemplation.
He said, “Approaching the police would seem an unnecessary public fuss.”
“Alice is going to be on the front pages tomorrow,” I said. “No sense your name joining hers.”
“There’s something in what you say.”
“Done.” I stood up before Wansborough did more slow-motion thinking. “I’ll get back to you within forty-eight hours.”
Wansborough didn’t stand up.
He said, “Mr. Crang, you haven’t been entirely forthcoming about the nature of my cousin’s death.”
“Not much to be forthcoming about,” I said. “Someone whapped her. With a fist, I’d say. Must have been a man. Guy with a heft behind his punch. Someone built along your lines.”
“That last remark is personally offensive,” Wansborough said with his old snap.
“I could get more offensive and ask where you were early this morning.”
Wansborough rose from the bench. I’d been wrong about his height. He had two or three inches on me.
“I’ll await your report,” he said. “Wednesday morning is your limit.”
“All I want,” I said.
“It had better be all you need,” Wansborough said. “If you have no satisfactory solution, I’ll instruct Mr. Catalano to arrange other means of resolving this disgraceful business.”
“Resolve,” I said, “is a word that takes in plenty of territory.”
“When I retained you last week, Mr. Crang,” Wansborough said, “I was seeking information. I wanted to know why Ace Disposal was showing an inordinate profit and why Charles Grimaldi and my cousin were reluctant to furnish me with financial details. Those questions have now become irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. What I wish, Mr. Crang, is the return of my investment. By one means or another, I intend to be clear of Ace as soon as that can be managed.”
“Plain speaking. Mr. Wansborough,” I said.
“If there’s nothing more, Mr. Crang,” Wansborough said, “we’ll excuse one another.”
Wansborough had become more stiff and formal. At his best, he was as yielding as the Tin Man. I’d hurt him with the crack about his whereabouts at the time of Alice’s murder. A mild apology might be in order. Wansborough didn’t strike me as a prime suspect in the killing. My thinking was, whoever knocked her off had a more direct link into Ace.
Before I could say my sorrys, Wansborough spoke from three inches over my head.
“Last evening, Mr. Crang,”
he said, “we had friends in for two tables of bridge and a cold supper. I spent the remainder of the night in bed at my wife’s side. What transpired in our bedroom is none of your concern.”
24
TIME for another phone call.
I made it from a booth outside a Mr. Donut in a down-atthe-heels shopping plaza on Bayview Avenue south of Royal Ontario. A woman answered and called Papa Anderson to the phone. I didn’t ask after his health. I knew it was rotten. I asked after wide Tony the boxer. Papa Anderson started training boxers around Toronto when Little Arthur King was drawing fifteen thousand customers to the Gardens. That was the 1940s. These days, Papa sits at home with lung cancer.
“Guy you’re talkin’ about,” Papa said, “sounds to me like Tony Flanagan.”
A couple of years earlier, Papa went on, a fight manager named Curly Snider hired him at a day rate to teach Tony Flanagan ring refinements. The lessons didn’t take. Tony was a natural brawler. But he had guts, Papa said, and he wasn’t a bad kid once you got past the bravado. Papa didn’t say bravado. He said bullshit.
“The kid gets main events down east,” Papa said. “They bring him in, Truro, Sackville, them five-hundred-dollar towns, Tony’s the opponent, fights whichever’s the local comer. Name looks good on the posters, y’know, Irish from Toronto. He doesn’t lose all the time, Tony. The kid stands up.”
Papa said Tony trained at a gym on the Danforth. “Place’s got some swank lately, I hear,” he said. “Barbells, machines, kind of shit tightens up a boxer’s muscles. Marty’s it’s called, used to be a real nice rathole.”
I thanked Papa and said I’d drop by soon and talk. Papa said sure, as long as I didn’t make it next year.
I drove down Bayview and took the cutoff to Danforth Avenue. Past Broadview, Danforth blossoms into a corner of Athens. The restaurants and travel agencies and produce stores are Greek and so is the lettering on the top half of the street signs. Greeks own the businesses, but not many live in the neighbourhood. They got prosperous and moved out to the suburbs. Yuppies are buying up the roomy old turn-of-the-century brick houses. They’re installing rock gardens on the front lawns, parking BMWs in the driveways, and striking a truce with the last of the working folk who’ve stayed on in the Danforth family homesteads.
Marty’s Gym was in the fifth block east of Broadview. I parked on a side street outside a house that had been done over with metallic grey shutters and brick painted a raspberry shade. The gym was on the second floor over Koustopolos Video. Fifty per cent off on Irene Pappas movies. A double flight of stairs covered in worn linoleum led up to a large space, more loft than room, that smelled of sweat and last week’s socks. There were peeling George Chuvalo posters on the wall and a hand-lettered sign that admonished patrons to mind their language and their valuables. A ring with thick ropes dominated the space, though it was getting competition from a silver Nautilus in one corner. The young man whose biceps were locked into the machine seemed more intent on attaining Mr. Universe’s title than Thomas Hit-Man Hearns’. The other men at work, nine or ten of them, were pursuing more boxerly activities. Skipping rope, punching bags, shadowboxing, breathing through the nose.
Tony Flanagan stood out in the surroundings. He was the only white boxer and the bulkiest. The rest, skinny and black, were lightweights and welters, quick, bouncy kids. Tony was dogged and stolid and was administering vicious damage to a heavy bag. A grey-haired black man with a moustache like Count Basie’s was holding the bag in place and offering encouraging words. Tony didn’t need encouragement. His fists hit deep and solid into the bag. I admired from the sidelines until five minutes went by and the black man pulled the bag away.
“Enough, man,” he said.
I stepped into Tony’s line of vision. He took ten seconds to make the connection.
“Reggie,” he said to the black man, “get that guy outta here.”
The black man put his hand lightly on my arm. “Hey, mister, Tony say leave, best be you split.”
I said, “Papa Anderson, you hear the name, Tony, Papa Anderson told me where to find you.”
Tony frowned.
He said, “How’s an asshole like you get off talkin’ to Papa?”
“He trained me, too,” I said.
The black man looked from me to Tony, took his hand off my arm, and began to peel away the small gloves that Tony wore to punch the heavy bag.
“College fighting, Tony,” I said. “Not like you.”
Sweat stood off Tony’s face in hot little beads. He had on a grey T-shirt, purple boxing shorts, and black boots laced up to his shins. The T-shirt was dark at the armpits.
The black man said to Tony, “Can’t stand around, man.”
“I’ll wait till you finish, Tony,” I said. “All I’m asking is talk.”
“You know Papa?” Tony said. He needed time to compute the information.
“Since I was nineteen.”
The black man prodded at Tony.
“You want, stick around,” Tony said. “I might talk to you. Might not.”
“I’m a spellbinding conversationalist.”
“Might put my fist in your face like Mr. Nash wanted me.”
“Take my chances.”
Tony skipped rope. He lay on a bench and caught a medicine ball that Reggie the black man tossed onto his stomach. He threw punches at the air in front of a floor-length mirror while Reggie chanted beside him.
“Jab, hook, jab, hook, bap, bap, bap.” Reggie’s voice had a light Caribbean lilt. “Upstairs, downstairs, chigga, chigga, chigga.”
After thirty minutes of labours, Tony put a towel around his neck and went into a room that said “Men” on the door. I didn’t see any women on the premises. Two black lightweights wearing head protectors as formidable as space helmets flitted around the ring tossing punches at one another in blurs. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. By the time I was beginning to grow impatient, Tony emerged from Men looking fresh and sleek. His hair was damp and his straw hat sat on top of it.
I resumed my Papa Anderson pitch. Tony brushed past me at a swift clip and made an abrupt gesture with his hand. The gesture said to follow him and it struck me as a trifle smug. I followed.
We crossed Danforth to a restaurant called the Willow. It had Stevie Wonder on the sound system and plants hanging from the ceiling. The guys leaning on the bar that ran along one wall looked more Waylon Jennings and hubcap decor. If the neighbourhood was a mix of yuppie and working class, the Willow had a foot in both camps. The menu was Tex-Mex.
“So what about you and Papa?” Tony said. There was no mistaking the tone in his voice. Smug.
I said, “Papa trained pros, but he used to pick up walking-around money at the university. He coached the boxing team in the winters.” Tony and I sat at a table in the Willow’s window. I went on, “I made the team, middleweight, and whatever I learned, it came from Papa. I got to the intercollegiate finals one year. Lost the decision to a left-hander from Queen’s. The guy had this incredible reach. Jabbed me silly.”
“Yeah,” Tony said, pushing, “what else?”
“Not much,” I said. “I liked Papa. Who doesn’t? He must have seen something in me, and we’ve kept in touch ever since.”
Tony spoke in a tumble of words. He said, “Nights when Papa’s guys are on the card down the St. Lawrence Market, you’re there, right? At the fights?” Tony looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. Better, the tiger that swallowed the crow.
“You astound me, Tony,” I said. “Is mind reading your sideline?”
“I asked Papa on the phone,” Tony said. “You think you’re dealin’ with some kind of dummy. Shit, listen to this, at Marty’s they got a pay phone in the dressing room. I’m back there, I call up Papa and ask about this lawyer comes into the gym, wants to talk to me. I got you figured out, man.”
Chalk up one for Tony.
The waitress brought menus and Tony ordered without consulting it. Mexican black-bean soup, something called
Tijuana tamales, and Tony wanted a plate of nachos while he waited.
“The training table has changed since my day,” I said.
“What I’m eatin’?” Tony said. Indignation had replaced smugness. “I got a good constitution.”
I asked the waitress for a vodka and soda, and Tony asked me what I wanted with him.
“To save your hide,” I said. Even to me, the line rang of insincerity, but I hadn’t dreamed up a more convincing script. “You’re up to your ear in fraud. Could be there’s no way out of that. But the murder, it’s where we might make room for negotiation.”
“The fuck you talkin’ about?” Tony said.
It was barely possible to get a reading among the collection of scar tissue, unhealed bruises, and broken veins that made up Tony’s face, but he seemed to be registering disbelief that was genuine.
“What murder?” he said. “I don’t do murder.”
“Alice Brackley’s.”
“She’s dead? I seen her Friday walkin’ around.”
“I saw her this morning lying down. Someone swatted her out with one punch.”
“You sayin’ it was me?” Tony said. “I never punched a lady in my life. It goes against my religion. Not hard anyways.”
“The blow Alice took broke her neck.”
Tony said, “Jesus, that’s tough. Nice broad, Mrs. Brackley. I used to run into her a little around the office out there.”
“How much else do you run into, Tony?” I said. “Payoffs to the weigh-masters at the city dumps? You want to talk about that?”
“What do I know?” Tony made himself busy with the black-bean soup. A thick island of sour cream floated on its surface. “Mr. Nash says drive the dumps, drive the office, drive downtown, I drive. Rest of the time, I sit in the car waitin’.”
“Mister innocence.”
Tony stopped slurping his soup.
“What is it they call you guys?” He said. “Shylocks?”
“Shysters.”
“Yeah, right, shylock’s a guy puts money on the street.”
“Shyster puts words in people’s mouths.”