I finished off the orange juice and turned my attention to the excellent raisin bun and the raspberry jam on top of it.
“When does your career in the dirt and earth get launched?” I asked.
“You may want to clear off the property in the next five minutes,” Annie said. “Kathleen and her other slaves are picking me up at eight-thirty for a job out in the Beach somewhere. First, Kathleen’s hanging here long enough to figure out who’ll work on our garden and what they’ll do. Actual work won’t happen for two, three weeks.”
“Slaves?”
“What Kathleen calls her group,” Annie said. “But she smiles when she says it.”
I tidied away my dishes and walked up to Bloor. On the way, I fished my Pocket Street Atlas out of the car’s glove compartment. At the Second Cup on Bloor, I bought a large coffee and carried it south on Spadina Avenue half a block to my office in a building I suspected was made on the cheap. The giveaway that a cheapskate was behind the construction came from the floors. They shimmied and quivered. My floor was the fifth, and walking down the hall from the elevator to the office, I felt the familiar shifting underfoot. Would my lease cover damage wrought by shimmies and quivers? It’s the sort of thing a regular lawyer ought to know. I didn’t.
Inside my office, the decor was simple but fetching. Three Matisse posters hung on the walls, each poster showing scenes of Nice with plenty of the great man’s blue on display. The blue had its soothing effect on me when clients grew unruly. Even the misbehaving clients had been known to fall calm under the influence of Matisse’s blue. Or so I told myself.
My desk was an old rolltop. I’d pushed it up against the wall opposite the one with whichever Matisse poster was my current favourite. I kept the three posters on an informal rotation schedule. When I had clients in the office, I turned my swivel chair around and faced into the room, my legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. I felt like Clarence Darrow.
I drank some coffee. Compared to the Kenyan brand at Judge Keough’s office, the Second Cup product came up short on potency. I turned the pages of my road map and found Highbury in the west end. It twisted through an upscale neighbourhood called the Kingsway. I got the impression from the map that number 32 and the other houses on the even-numbered side backed on a park forming around the Humber River. A close and personal on-site observation was called for. That afternoon wouldn’t be too soon.
Continuing in my investigative mode, I turned on my MacBook and brought up the massive file in Regina v. Wu and Nguyen. The thousands of pages under my fingers presented the Crown’s case against Wu and my client in its entirety. The handy-dandy section titles put me in instant touch with the list of addresses of the seventy-three grow houses. All addresses were in alphabetical order according to street names.
I hit the H’s. Havelock Avenue was followed by Hyland Street. Alphabetically, Highbury Road should have fit in between the two. But Highbury was missing. I checked the rest of the H’s in case it had been misplaced. It hadn’t. It wasn’t there. I’d swear I saw it on a list somewhere in the evidence.
I drank a little more coffee and thought about Highbury’s absence. Looking out the window might help the ratiocinative process. My view was due north, but between my window and the northern horizon was a massive condo building. It had the effect of bullying the skyline. All I could see from my window were the condo’s balconies. Totally boring, but in the moment of visual boredom, a memory from Regina v. Wu and Nguyen stirred. If I wasn’t mistaken, the addresses of the grow op houses were recorded on a less obvious second list among the pages of evidence.
The cops busted Grace and Wu’s grow houses in every part of the city and in adjacent suburbs and exurbs. A wide geographical spread, and thus many police forces had a hand in the busting operations. The Toronto Police Services, York Regional Police, Ontario Provincial Police, the Mounties, cops from Peel County to the west and Durham County on the east. All of them got into the act for takedowns, each force to its own bailiwick.
The less obvious second list divided the raided grow houses according to the police forces that handled the raids. Statistically speaking, the list was useful for the prosecution only as a way of singling out the forces for their individual pats on the back. Nothing legally strategic about the list. But it existed. I’d read the damned thing once upon a time.
Back on the computer, I scrolled through the case files until my eyes felt like they might fall out of my head. The second list was eluding me, a state of affairs that was irritating but not yet fatal.
Someone rapped sharply on the door, a one-knuckle knock I recognized.
“I’m here, Sam,” I said. Sam was my neighbour across the hall. He opened the door.
“You want a coffee, Crang?” he said. “It’s just perking.”
In guarantees of satisfaction, Sam’s coffee ranked midway between Second Cup and Kenyan. I’d settle for that.
“Perfect timing, Sam,” I said.
Sam Feldman was in the massage business. He kept his office spic and span. He called his outfit An Easy Touch, and he received his clients dressed in spotless white trousers and an immaculate white sweatshirt. At the end of the massage, when the clients retired to the little dressing room to put their clothes on, Sam donned a single-breasted blue blazer to bid the clients a formal adieu. Sam had excellent manners.
“I think the taste came out just right,” he said, handing me coffee in a white mug with “Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella” printed in crimson lettering around the lip. Sam was a tall, muscular guy with very strong hands.
“You look like a storm cloud’s hanging over your head,” he said to me.
“That’s called intense concentration.”
“I’ll give you a massage for relaxation,” Sam said. “On the house. A client just postponed his appointment.”
“Maybe if I find the answer to my quest in the next couple of minutes,” I said. My fingers were still typing on the computer keyboard.
I paused long enough to sip some coffee. “Not bad at all,” I said of the brew.
I was shooting past some useless passages on the computer screen. But I kept on the move, and in not much more than a minute, the passage suddenly wasn’t useless. It was the list. There it was, the list of the houses divided according to the police departments that raided the indicated addresses.
“I don’t know how this happened, Sam,” I said, “but I may have found the pot at the end of the rainbow.”
“You could explain that to me maybe. I’m a sucker for stories about rainbows.”
“Hold on, Sam.”
According to the list, York Regional Police busted more houses than any other police force on the case. But they didn’t nail the house on Highbury. The name wasn’t on their list. But then I didn’t expect to find it there. Highbury was a City of Toronto address. It should be on the Toronto Police Services list. But it wasn’t there either. It wasn’t on the list of any of the other police forces. Not the OPP, nor the RCMP. Highbury appeared nowhere on the arrest lists.
“I didn’t just imagine the name, Sam,” I said.
“What name?”
“Highbury Avenue.”
“You’re a very observant person, Crang,” Sam said. “I’m betting on you, even if I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I gave Sam a précis of my problem.
“So what’re you going to do?” Sam asked. He worried about his friends, a naive sort of guy, but it was impossible not to warm to Sam.
“Appeal to a higher authority.”
“I never took you for a religious man.”
“Not that higher authority,” I said. “I’m talking about the federal Crown attorney.”
I finished my coffee, shooed Sam out of the office and walked down the hall to the elevator.
9
Somebody left a copy of the morning’s Sun on the streetcar.
I was riding the Spadina car south to King Street. Elderly ladies filled every space, standing room
only. Spadina was the route into the heart of old Chinatown where the shops carried exotic root vegetables and seaweed. The dream of such delights was what enticed the aged shoppers. The ladies probably knew an illicit dealer in shark fin soup.
The abandoned Sun was tucked into the space under a window in the row of single seats. An ancient shopper with a crotchety expression occupied the seat. I knew enough about riding the Spadina car not to reach over her to get at the newspaper. She’d chop off my arm and boil it for the shark fin soup. I stood in the aisle, holding on to a pole for us standees, biding my time.
At the Dundas Street stop, which was action central for the shopping crowd, the stampede of elderly persons to the door threatened to carry me with the tide. I held on to the pole, teeth gritted, arm braced, feet trampled on. It was life out on the edge riding the Spadina line. All the old parties bailed off the car.
I took the seat the crotchety woman had vacated and leafed through the Sun, looking for Cheri Havlat’s article about Grace Nguyen. It came up on page eight, the story taking the entire sheet. The headline read “Gone Grace.” The Sun loved alliteration.
I speed-read down the story’s columns, looking for quotes from me. I searched in vain. Cheri used all the material I’d given her about the great grow op plot. Her story was thorough, but it gave the impression the writer, young Cheri, was herself the source of all inside information. How about credit where credit was due, huh, Cheri?
At the bottom of the page, my name jumped out at me. My name always jumped when I saw it in print. It was in the article’s final line, the one that wrapped up the story. “‘Ms. Nguyen’s present whereabouts are a mystery to me,’ said Mr. Crang, Ms. Nguyen’s defence lawyer.”
I tried to remember, did I tell Cheri I was giving her the in-depth information to make up for the feeble quote of Monday morning? Maybe not. But whatever I’d said, I landed in print sounding like a cliché machine. I made a mental note to self-edit all quotes before I let them loose on the press.
At King Street, I transferred to the King car heading east. The piece in the Sun was illustrated with the only photograph I’d ever seen of Grace in print or on television. The Sun ran it with every mention of the case. I felt conflicted each time I saw it.
The photo caught her on the night of her and Wu’s arrest four years earlier. It showed a bunch of drug cops in the act of hustling Grace into the station at 53 Division. In the picture, she had turned her head and was staring full face into the camera. Her expression was freighted with vulnerability.
I’d told Judge Keough that Grace was unreadable. That was true ninety-nine and ninety-nine hundredths percent of the time. The Sun photo represented the exception, the one time she let her guard slide. In that moment, she looked less like a beautiful but distant woman and more like a desperate teenager. It was a look that made me want to give her a hug. All the rest of the time, it was a struggle to work up positive feelings for Grace. She could be abrasive. That was on her good days. On her bad days, she was evasive and schemy. I wondered what was going on in her head. More than once, I had to remind her I was the one guy on her side. I was her lawyer, for Pete’s sake. Whenever I made my little speech, the best reaction I could hope for was one of Grace’s no-expression expressions.
I went into an office tower of glass and steel at King and York and took an elevator to the federal Crown’s offices on the forty-fourth floor. The feds ran tight security, but a young woman Crown I’d had a case with a couple of years earlier recognized me as she was passing through the waiting room. She buzzed me in. Her name was Kate, and she had a mouth on her.
“If it isn’t the lawyer who lost his client,” she said.
“Cruel shot, Kate.”
“But don’t you think it’s got a ring to it?”
“Yeah, a Swedish ring. It sounds like the kind of title crime novelists over there put on their books.”
I told Kate I wanted to see Dora Andreopoulos, the co-Crown on the Grace and Wu prosecution. Kate led me down a hall past small, cramped cubicles with open doors. We reached Dora’s office. Cramped quarters, open door.
“Look who it is,” Dora said, “the lawyer who lost his client.”
“Second time I’ve heard that one in thirty seconds, Dora,” I said. “The line’s now officially stale.”
Kate left, and Dora told me to have a seat.
“Easier said than done,” I said, looking around the crowded little office. The two clients’ chairs were stacked with files. So was most of the floor space. Dora told me to shove aside the papers on one of the clients’ chairs.
“So, Crang,” she said, “what’s with the surprise visit?”
Dora was a short, dark woman with an angelic smile. During the Grace–Wu negotiations, she took a six-month leave to have a baby boy. The joke among the Crowns was that the case discussions were dragging out so long Dora’s kid would grow to adulthood and finish law school before we wound up. Crown humour tended to be cute. Defence humour leaned to the ribald. Crowns were Bob Newhart; defence counsel were George Carlin.
“Highbury Road,” I said.
“Oh, that,” Dora said. “I wondered if you’d get around to Highbury.”
“What’s to get around to on Highbury Road?”
“Not much really. But why ask now? The case is over. Your client’s going to prison as soon as you bring her in. Highbury has no bearing on anything.”
“Tell me one thing?” I said, a question mark in my voice. “I didn’t just dream Highbury? It exists? It has a role in the case?”
“Half and half,” Dora said. “No, you didn’t imagine it. But, also no, it has no relevance to the case.”
“Definitely I could use some background to what you’re telling me.”
“As long as you promise this isn’t going to come back and bite me in the ass.”
“Promise,” I said. “All I’m doing is tying up loose ends.”
Dora hesitated. I could imagine her thinking over the baloney I’d just fed her about loose ends. Wondering whether I was up to monkey business and whether it really mattered. From the ho-hum look on her face, she must have decided it was ancient history not worth fussing over.
“Okay,” Dora said, “Highbury was our mistake, the cops’ and the Crown’s. The wiretap people heard Nguyen mention the address many, many times on the phone. In these conversations, she wasn’t talking precisely about Highbury being a grow house. But at that point, we were close to the end of building our case. Everybody was in a big rush to finish things, and the cops figured with reasonably good motivation that Highbury was yet another grow house. They raided it.”
“And found what?” I asked.
“Zip, zilch, nada,” Dora said. “The place was clean of anything indicating the presence of marijuana ever. No equipment, no plants, no evidence that anybody had so much as smoked a joint in the entire history of the place.”
“So you dropped Highbury?”
“Like a hot potato.”
“Where did I see the address?” I asked. “What list was Highbury on?”
“This is why I thought you’d be upset,” Dora said. “In the Crown’s office, we jumped the gun just as fast as the drug cops did who raided Highbury in the first place. We included the address in a supplementary list of grow houses we sent you even before we really knew the result of the raid. Then we cancelled the list with Highbury on it as soon as the police told us the place was clean. It happened very fast, all in one week practically, Highbury on and off the list. We were hoping you’d never notice.”
“This was what, three, four years ago, all the action with Highbury on and off, there and not there?”
Dora thought for a moment. “About that, yeah.”
“Three, four years it took me to wonder about Highbury. Slow but steady, that’s my game.”
“Another part of it you may not like,” Dora said, “the overall number of grow houses.”
“Seventy-three is the official figure.”
“Should be
seventy-two,” Dora said. “We forgot to change the total when we dropped Highbury.”
“I’m still not sore.”
“Crang, you’re a pal,” Dora said. She leaned back in her chair, looking like somebody who had a load, however slight, off her shoulders. “As you might gather from the mess in here, I’ve got new cases to worry about. After four years, I’m out from under Nguyen and Wu. I’m happy never to hear the name Highbury Road again.”
“With Highbury, kiddo,” I said, “I’m just getting started.”
10
My car was a Mercedes four-door sedan, brown in colour and referred to by guys in foreign-car repair shops as a 304X. I had no idea what the designation meant. A mechanic named Angelo sold me the car for eight thousand bucks a few years earlier. Angelo said it was a 1983 model and had been in the hands of a little old gent who used the vehicle only to drive to shul. When I got behind the wheel of my big, bulky, powerful Mercedes, I felt as safe as houses.
I drove west on Dupont through the south end of the Italian district and past the north end of the Portuguese neighbourhood. At Jane Street, I turned south to Bloor West, which put me in the grasp of the west end’s Anglo stronghold. I got off Bloor on the road next to the Old Mill subway station. On the other side of the station, I passed the Old Mill itself, a low-slung and aging but stout building in an English countryside style. It was split into bars, dining rooms and reception halls, much favoured for wedding receptions and for serious small-group jazz in the main lounge. I took Annie there a month earlier. A stalwart on the Toronto jazz scene named Bernie Senensky played lyrical piano that night. Annie and I had two glasses of wine each, a couple of helpings of sliders and salad, and two sets of melodic Senensky piano. All for seventy reasonable bucks.
Beyond the Old Mill, the Kingsway turned hilly, the streets got winding, and the Mercedes got lost. I stopped for a reorienting
study of my road guide, and a few blocks later, I was gliding through Highbury Road’s twists and turns. The neighbourhood was clean, prosperous and faithfully tended. Many architects and contractors had left their influences behind, but most of the houses ran to brick and stone, a centre-hall plan and a lot of tidy landscaping. It didn’t look as if anybody like Annie’s garden goddess had been let loose on the lawns and flower beds. They were too tight-assed in conception and design to be the GG’s work, unless I’d misunderstood Annie’s description of her creative gardening mind.
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