by Joan Smith
“It's from some kind of a locker,” Sean said.
“The Royal York connects underground to Union Station. There are baggage lockers there,” I told him. My heart quickened. “I arrived there by train from Montreal and used them. This looks like the right kind of key."
We went through the formality of checking out the apartment for signs of trespassing or Victor's return—both negative— before we went tearing down to Union Station. “The subway would be faster,” Sean mentioned. “It goes right to the station."
It always surprised me how quickly other people got their bearings in a strange city. We went to the bus stop to grab a bus to the subway. “How long have you been visiting here?” I asked him.
“A week now,” he said, which surprised me. In some unreasonable way I pictured him arriving just before we met at the Casa Loma.
As we jostled along on the bus to the subway I said, “I guess you ye seen all the sights by now then, huh?"
“I've been looking around,” he said vaguely. “I went up to the top of that tower, the CN Tower they call it. I saw the Parliament Buildings at Queen's Park, been out to Ontario Place and down to the Harbour Front. Oh, and the Eaton Centre, of course. We've got a mall a lot like it in North Platte, only a bit smaller."
Our time together had been nearly totally occupied with looking for Victor, but during the lulls, I'd been forming some plan of showing Sean the town after we found my uncle to reward him for his help. I felt gypped. I should have realized the Casa Loma wouldn't be the first item on a visitor's agenda.
“There's a lot more to see,” I said.
“I'd like to catch a Blue Jays game."
Next to fishing, baseball is the dullest thing I could think of.
Sean had already learned his way around the subway. He even had a pocketful of metal tokens. He negotiated the maze at the terminal without any difficulty at all, down escalators and up stairs, till we reached the bank of luggage lockers.
We both paid lip service to the idea that the hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been spent or invested, but I, for one, also had a firm idea it was resting in cubicle 87 and could hardly speak for the walloping of my heart.
Our key opened locker 87, and there sitting in the square cubicle was Victor's well-battered black violin case. Nothing else, just the case. Sean lifted it out with a wary look over his shoulder, looking for God only knows what, except that it seemed a climactic enough moment for some crook to jump out at us.
“His violin,” I said, bewildered.
“We'd better open this in some private place,” Sean suggested. His eyes were sparkling like fire crackers.
“Why, it's only his violin, isn't it?” He looked doubtful. “I'll take it to the ladies’ washroom,” I decided, and reached for it.
He didn't let go. “That's a little too private. I want you to be where I can keep an eye on you. For your safety, I mean,” he added hastily. He caught the swift rise of suspicion in my eyes. Why should he want to “keep an eye on me"? “There's something in it all right, but it doesn't feel like a violin.” He gave it a little shake, by the handle. I could hear a louder rattle than the violin made.
“Does it feel like a hundred and fifty thousand bucks?"
He gave a triumphant smile. “Sure does—wrapped in two bundles."
My impatience soared. I wanted to rip it open right then and there. “Couldn't we go up to your room?"
“My room?” he asked, frowning.
“Aren't you putting up at the Royal York?"
“Where'd you get that idea?"
“I don't know. You just seemed the Royal York type."
“What type is that?"
Safe, solid, middleclass was what I thought, but I said, “North Platte type."
Sean was hardly listening. He said, “There must be a quiet bar in a big hotel. One that's nice and dark, and not too well populated in the early afternoon."
“The Library Bar!"
“I see you know all the watering holes."
“A person has to drink."
We hurried up the stairs, through a maze of corridors to the red plush lobby of the Royal York, around corners into the Library Bar, which was as dark, private and as unpopulated as even a spy could hope for. There were only two tables occupied, both by unsuspicious touristy couples.
The waiter was at our table before we had the violin case arranged on the padded bench between us. Sean ordered two beers without asking me what I wanted.
“Light,” I added. Even light beer had more calories than I needed. I wanted to save my calories for chocolate cake.
As soon as the waiter left, Sean unfastened the clasps and slowly lifted the lid of the case. It was crushed gold velvet inside, to cushion the Guarneri. My rundown Adidas looked extremely out of place in such an elegant setting. That's what was in the case. Wads of paper were squashed into balls to fill up the two ends to prevent the shoes from rattling around in there.
“Well I'll be a son of a stockbroker,” Sean breathed, staring at the shoes. “A pair of dirty old shoes. Not even Victor's size. He must have plucked’ them from somebody's garbage."
“No, he plucked them from my locker at the Casa Loma. I used to put them on at noon sometimes and walk around the grounds a bit for exercise. He must have taken them yesterday when he dropped in to see me. He used the employees’ washroom, close to the lockers."
“What's all this garbage?” Sean asked, and began pulling out the wadded papers. There were a few copies of the Casa Loma tour booklet, also taken from the locker probably, but most of the space was filled with paper towels from the wash room. That's when he filled the case all right, while he was in the john.
When the waiter approached, Sean discreetly closed the lid. We sipped the beer in silence, too stunned to talk. It takes a few minutes to accept such a bizarre thing as either a violin or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars changing into a pair of old Adidas.
Sean ran his hand through his hair. “This has got to be the worst exchange since Jack sold his mother's cow for a handful of beans."
“Maybe we should plant them and grow an Adidas tree,” I said lamely. You say some pretty dumb things when you're baffled, but I don't think he heard me.
His eyes were narrowed, which gave his face a crafty, shifty look. “It looks as if Victor lost his nerve,” he said.
“I don't get it. You think he was afraid to give the concert? That he ducked out for fear the critics would think he wasn't playing well? You're wrong. He'd been practicing his fingers off. I'm not an expert, but he sounded pretty good to me."
“I was thinking about something else—the money. I thought that's what was in the case. Maybe somebody else was supposed to think so too. Maybe Victor was supposed to exchange the money for—something—some object he was going to buy. Maybe he planned to pull a fast one, give the guy a case full of old running shoes and lost his nerve."
“That's a lot of maybes,” I snorted. “Maybe you're suggesting my uncle is a crook, too. Well he isn't!"
“Then how do you account for the contents of this case?” he demanded, eyes flashing, as he thumped the case with his flat palm.
“I don't account for them. It's not my job. It's a job for the police, and the police station is my next stop.” Though [spoke firmly, I felt a strange reluctance. I'd been swift to defend Victor, but Sean's idea caused a seed of suspicion to sprout in me. I didn't believe Sean's version of the story, but some slightly larcenous trick wasn't entirely beyond Victor.
“He said he was on his way to Roy Thomson Hall yesterday when he stopped in to see you?” he asked. His eyes were bright, alert not only with suspicion but with intelligence. He reminded me of a squirrel, fidgety, eager to be darting off somewhere.
“Yes, but the manager said he didn't go. He obviously came here instead—to the lockers at Union Station.” I gnawed at this puzzle a while till I came up with a cockeyed notion. “Do you think he might have been taking the money somewhere and thought somebody was
following him? So he took it out at the Casa Loma and hid it and stuffed the case with papers and running shoes?"
I was pleased with this piece of invention. Its greatest charm was that it gave us a new place to look for the money. Or violin—depending on what Victor originally had in the case. At least it was something to explore.
“But why check the case at Union Station?” he countered.
“Why not? Whoever was following him would think he'd checked the money and stop following him. It would be pretty hard to crack one of those lockers open without getting caught. But how did anyone know he borrowed all that money and had it in cash? Sean, maybe it's the key someone's been searching for ever since!” I exclaimed. I smiled widely at this stroke of genius.
Sean gave me a jaundiced look. “We decided it was something bigger that was being searched for."
"You decided. A key could be hidden in a cupboard or under a sofa cushion."
“He didn't pull off the sofa cushions. He pulled the sofas out from the wall and looked behind them. Both at the apartment and at the cottage. And under the beds—nobody would hide a key under a bed,” he said firmly. “Under a mattress, maybe..."
I smiled a smug, superior smile. “You're slipping, Sean. Better run home and read another Sherlock Holmes book. I thought you'd have picked up on something else before now.
“What's that?” A smile of anticipation lifted his moustache.
“If Victor hid the money at Casa Loma, it must still be there,” I pointed out. “And I even know more or less where it must be,” I added triumphantly. But I still had that one niggling doubt that all we'd find was his old violin.
“In your locker?"
“No, I don't have a lock for it, but it must be somewhere in that general area. There are dozens of possibilities."
He pulled a bill from his pocket, picked up the violin case and we ran off with our beer half drunk, leaving too large a tip.
CHAPTER 7
During the cab drive to the Casa Loma, I was hardly aware of the towers of glass and concrete and steel rising around us. The city looked like a gigantic hall of mirrors, with sun glinting everywhere, reflecting from the buildings.
“They're going to wonder why I'm not at work when I'm unworried enough about Victor to be out running around the city,” I told him.
“Couldn't you have left something important in your locker? That's the area we want to snoop around."
“You're a real good liar, Sean,” I said.
He ignored the ambivalence in this praise. “I have many accomplishments,” he said modestly.
“You'd think a hardware salesman would be more reliable. Salt of the earth, I always took them for. I often wished they could speak English. Whenever I've been in a hardware store, the men talk about two-b'fours and ratchets and jigsaws. How come you never talk about two-b'fours?"
“I'm on holiday. A man likes to forget ratchets and jigsaws once a year. Will we have to pay to get in?"
“Of course not.” But the question made me aware that Sean was spending a lot of money on my problem. And a clerk in a hardware store couldn't make much. “Listen, Sean, I don't want you to get all uptight and macho, but I want to repay you for all the expense you've been put to on my account. There've been taxis and meals and drinks and the trip to Victor's cottage...” As the total began to tally up, I saw the tab was becoming quite high.
His easy smile showed me he wasn't quite broke yet. “I'll bill you, okay?"
He was too quaint to be comfortable talking money, but the man hasn't been born who'll turn down a home-cooked meal. I don't know how to cook and have no desire to learn, but I knew a caterer who would bring food to the apartment. Victor used them when his company menu was beyond Rhoda Gardiner.
“All right, but tonight dinner's at my place."
He looked uncomfortable; more than uncomfortable, he looked extremely reluctant. My pride felt the unpleasant sting of rejection. “Thanks for the offer, but I'm not really into bean sprouts and tofu,” he said apologetically.
“What? Oh, you mean because I'm a vegetarian. Actually since I've been living with Victor, I've had to recant a little. I can't expect Rhoda to make two meals, so I just close my eyes and eat meat."
Relief rose like the sun on his face. “Oh, you mean you were lying. Thank God! It's a date then. Are you a good cook?"
“I bake a few beans,” I said airily.
We stopped for a minute outside the castle to admire it like all the tourists. It stands high atop a hill in palatial grounds, an unlikely gray stone structure with a tiled roof. When he had it built, Sir Henry Pellatt scoured Europe and had added every feature he could think of. There are battlements and minarets, a port cochère, gothic arches—a regular hodgepodge of grandeur, more suited to the banks of the Rhine than the heart of Toronto.
The interior is also bizarre, anachronistic and grand. The Great Hall has dark wainscoting for eight or nine feet up the wall, a fireplace, pictures and amour and stag horns. There's a billiard room, breakfast room, dining room, and one called The Oak Room (to name a few), and below ground level the magnificence continues with a temperature-controlled wine cellar, an eight-hundred-foot-long tunnel to the stables that are another mansion in themselves. Why horses need stalls of Spanish mahogany and walls of glazed tile is not included in our spiel, but it certainly impresses the patrons.
Tours were in progress when we arrived, and a new one was forming. I told the ticket taker who knew me that I just had to pick up something from my locker and took Sean's hand, pulling him in with me. I didn't have to answer a single question about Victor or anything else. None of the higher ups were around, so I led Sean to the locker area, and we began looking for the money, or failing that, Victor's violin. We agreed it must be in a bag or box.
Sean, being taller, stood on his toes and felt along the tops of the lockers while I scavenged through them and the cupboards built in along the sides of the room. The guides had a little kitchenette here, with crockery and supplies. It took me five minutes to feel every bag and open every canister.
“You might have a look in the men's john after you're through there,” I told Sean. “If he hid it in the waste towel basket hoping to retrieve it later, we're out of luck. It'd be emptied and thrown out by now."
He darted along to the men's room, while I finished my fruitless search of the employees’ room. When I joined Sean in the hall, he was still empty-handed too.
“The towel basket hadn't been emptied—it was damned near overflowing. I emptied it on the floor and went through it towel by towel. I had to scrub myself raw after in case of germs,” he complained. “I even looked inside all the water tanks on top of the toilets—The Godfather, remember? It wasn't there in an oilskin bag, either."
“I figured you'd have told me if you found it."
“It wasn't in the new paper towel dispenser. There aren't that many places to look in a can. What's down this way?” He glanced along the long, dimly lit hall that runs to the rear of the castle.
“I don't know. I've never been down there.” It proved to be a back door into the place which required a quick search of the bushes outside, also without luck.
“Any more bright ideas?” he asked, becoming impatient.
“He took a scoot up to the Music Room, but he couldn't have left it there in such a public place. There would have been hundreds of people through it. The last tour was on its way through yesterday when he was here. Do you want to look anyway?”
“It'll save coming back later."
One of the guides was just ushering her group through the Music Room. We hung behind after she left, but the public nature of the room left little hope of a find here. The Steinway grand was roped off to keep tourists from trying to play it. There were other instruments set artfully around the room as well: a harp, a cello, a violin propped on its case on the piano. We both had the brilliant idea at the same time that the violin was Victor's, but when we hopped the rope and took a look, we saw it was just the
same old instrument that had been there forever. It was nothing like Victor's. I'd seen the room a few dozen times, and nothing was disarranged. The heavy brocade drapes had solidified to a texture not unlike concrete. The long case clock by the door still said seven-fifteen, as it did throughout the day.
We exchanged a disappointed look and left. The afternoon was well advanced when we left the castle. “It's a dead end,” I said. Despair was pushing at the back of my mind, or maybe desperation is what I mean. “I'm going back to the apartment and just wait in case Victor phones or comes home. Sean, you don't really think anything horrible has happened to him, do you?"
Sean was looking down the road for a cab. He took my hand and we began walking along, both scanning the road. I felt tears smarting my eyes and was stricken with a terrible fear that my uncle really was dead. Before much longer, I'd be arranging a funeral for him. He'd want a neon funeral, if there is such a thing. Oh, I wasn't fool enough not to know his death was possible before, but it had seemed only remotely possible. I always thought his disappearance was a gag, a gimmick cooked up by my uncle, but as I looked back over the accumulating evidence, that looked less likely all the time.
Close to twenty-four hours had passed since his disappearance, and there was still no word from him. The apartment had been searched, the cottage had been searched, and there was this bizarre business of a loan for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. Why did Victor need so much money? It was no gimmick. He could have hired a revolution for less. And there was the violin case with my Adidas in it that jostled against Sean's knee as we walked along. What had Victor done with his Guarneri? That was as confusing as all the rest.
“At least we know he was safe at Union Station yesterday. Pretty hard for anybody to kidnap him at Union Station, or the hotel where he mailed himself the key. They're both busy spots,” Sean said to reassure me, but I wasn't reassured. A crowd could conceal quite effectively.
Another of my unfounded images popped into my head. Victor with a gun nuzzled against his spine, a jacket over the weapon to conceal it from onlookers. Had he fallen afoul of the mob? Were the loan sharks after him? The thought was so upsetting that I shook it away. Sean suddenly stopped walking and turned toward me. He wore a Eureka! look. “I wonder if he would have caught a train since he was at the station!” he exclaimed.