“Relax, fella,” Annie said, “it’s of the banana family.”
“Got you,” I said.
Anne and I toasted ourselves with glasses of the red wine, and Annie said, “Want to feel my biceps, big guy?”
“You’ve only been gardening one day.”
Annie flexed her right arm.
“Should’ve seen me,” she said. “Turning over great shovel loads of earth. Carrying a tree. Actually it was helping carry a tree. Called a paperback maple, this one was. Looked like an innocent little thing, but those mothers are heavy. Takes four people to lift. Practically tears your arms out of the sockets.”
“What about the creative side? That’s what you’re in it for, right?”
“Still to come,” Annie said. “Kathleen’s drawing a plan for what she wants to do with our backyard. We’ll look it over in the next couple of weeks. And then—” Annie spread her arms wide “—we go wild.”
The friendly waiter brought our food. Annie’s Venezuelan arepas featured corn cakes. She said they were delicious. I felt the same way about my pollo. Everything on the plate tasted light, as if the chicken, rice and beans were floating over my taste buds. The plantain wasn’t bad, though the banana connection seemed a stretch.
“Made a crucial purchase this afternoon,” Annie said. “Something rare and vital. A VHS machine.”
“Is this retro week? I should get my rotary phone out of the closet?”
“Put a sock in it, sweetie. The VHS is going to be an essential working tool for the Edward Everett Horton book. Most of his movies, my problem with them, they haven’t reached DVD. Is that crazy or what? Especially when you consider the star of a bunch of his films is nobody less than Fred Astaire. You’d think the whole world would want to see Fred Astaire on DVD or Blu-ray or whatever technology.”
“No argument from me.”
We chewed happily, and Annie burbled further on the subject of Edward Everett Horton until Horton led back to Astaire who reminded her of another topic.
“Speaking of tap dancing,” she said, “what’s your next move in the hunt for Grace Nguyen and your seventy-five Gs?”
“Got Gloria on the case.”
“Oh goodie, the first thing you’ve done in the Grace thing I fully agree with.”
Gloria Allard was my part-time secretary. Nobody who worked for me was full-time. I shared Gloria with three other criminal lawyers. I had her services for a day and a half every week. Billings, filing, badgering clients delinquent on paying their bills. In a pinch, Gloria expedited tracing jobs that were beyond Maury’s range of effectiveness. The Highbury search was one of those. Annie loved Gloria. Everybody loved Gloria. She was a very even-keeled person.
“The stage of the game I’m at,” I said, “I’ve got the address where Grace is working at god knows what, and I’ve got the licence number on the car that takes her to the address and back. What Gloria’s going to do is find out who owns what. Check out the title to 32 Highbury. Trace the ownership of the Navigator SUV. Get all my ducks lined up.”
Annie chewed on her corn cakes, simultaneously looking at me as if I might have once again lost my moorings.
“What’s it matter who owns what?” she said. “All you have to do is follow the black SUV to Grace’s current residence and brace her for the seventy-five thousand.”
“I don’t think the situation’s that simple,” I said.
“I know you don’t. You can’t stand it when things aren’t complicated.”
“My lawyer’s training.”
I swallowed a bit of wine and said, “Shall I make the case for taking my investigation into Grace a step or two further?”
“If you insist,” Annie said.
“Suppose Grace is in there at the house on Highbury running some kind of scheme. Probably one with a crooked angle. A consequence of that, among many potential pieces of trouble, the agreement I worked out with the Crown in the grow op case could blow up.”
“You don’t think she’s still in the marijuana business? Really?”
I shook my head. “According to my sources, namely the Crown, the Highbury house showed no signs of grow op activity.”
“Whatever dumb thing it is these people do with condensation on the windows? None of those kind of signs?”
“Nothing in evidence,” I said. “And anyway, just one grow op house isn’t enough to earn bucks that would seriously lead Grace to take a chance on getting back in the dope business.”
“So what’s she doing in there five nights a week, sometimes six?”
“That’s the whole problem,” I said. “I’ve no idea about her activities, her intentions, her financial status. Especially the latter. Can she pay me the seventy-five grand? Where’s her money?”
“I don’t quite trust your reasoning,” Annie said. “But I can’t think of an argument against doing whatever it is you’re thinking of doing. Common sense tells me you shouldn’t. But since when does common sense come into the picture if you’ve made up your mind otherwise?”
“I think it’s helpful to nose around before I ask Grace for my money.”
“It’s not ask her for the payment, honey. It’s demand the payment. You’ve done the work. Remember?”
“That’s the step after the next step. I nose around, then I get the money. That’s my order of attack.”
Annie had nothing more to add.
Both of us ordered an espresso. I paid, we agreed retired Major Street people knew what they were talking about when they recommended restaurants, and we walked home to watch a VHS of a 1937 Fred Astaire movie called Shall We Dance.
“This is out of the chronological order of the Horton movies we’ve watched so far,” Annie said. “But who cares?”
Not me. The movie had a couple of great songs. “They All Laughed” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” It had Astaire, Ginger Rogers, a bunch of terrific character actors including the one-and-only Edward Everett Horton. He was a tall, slightly hunched-over guy. In the movie, he looked like a fussbudget and said “oh dear” a lot.
“He does befuddled better than anyone,” Annie said.
Befuddled?
At the moment, on the Grace Nguyen case, I could relate to that.
12
When I arrived at my office next morning, Gloria Allard was already there. She’d gone across the hall for two cups of Sam Feldman’s coffee.
“Sam just poured it,” Gloria said. “It’s the way you like it. Hot. Practically scalding.”
Gloria looked like the woman with the long shiny white hair in the Eileen Fisher dress ad. She had the same hair as the ad woman, and wore clothes the same way, loose and billowy. Gloria was close to sixty, but her face was without wrinkles. I was pretty sure she had a great figure, even if I couldn’t see much of it under the white top and the blue skirt she had on this morning, both loose, both billowy. It was her standard everyday uniform.
I drank some coffee. It was almost as hot as Gloria described. “You know,” I said to her, “I should rig my own coffee setup in here.”
“You probably owe Sam a couple hundred free cups, the rate you drink his coffee.”
“That’s not counting the cups I mooch for my clients.”
“When you get your own setup, what brand of coffee are you going to be offering? I got an idea, if you need one.”
“I have an idea too,” I said.
“Kenyan,” Gloria said.
“You took the word out of my mouth,” I said.
“What about Maury?” Gloria said.
“If he knows it’s Kenyan, he’ll say, ‘Goddamn foreign shit.’”
“What he’ll say,” Gloria said, “he’ll say, ‘What’s wrong with Maxwell House?’”
“We won’t tell Maury it’s Kenyan.”
“I’m on board with that.”
“Done,” I said. “Now, let’s get down to the other business.”
“Plenty of it,” Gloria said, opening her slim, black leather briefcase. “An
d all of it revelatory. Of what exactly, I’m not sure. But I have a feeling you’ll be intrigued.”
“Go ahead,” I said, “intrigue me.”
“First, the Highbury house,” Gloria said, leafing through a pad of paper from her briefcase. The paper was yellow and legal sized. The sheets were covered in Gloria’s small, neat handwriting in black ink. In combination, the paper and ink made an old-fashioned and reassuring sight.
“A little under four years ago,” Gloria said, “the property was transferred from the estate of Edward Ronald Spencer to Elizabeth Anne Janetta. All cash deal, no mortgages. Million and a half dollars on the button. And there’s nothing on title since the sale. No more transactions. The property remains in the hands of the aforementioned Ms. Janetta.”
“It happens I’m aware of a Mr. Janetta.”
“Sit on that for a minute, my man,” Gloria said. “Next, we turn to the vehicle, to wit a 2010 Ford Navigator SUV. Black in colour, and it’s registered in the name of, ta da, Elizabeth Anne Janetta.”
“I love consistency.”
“Nothing owing on the car either as far as I can tell.”
“Ms. Janetta must be rolling in dough.”
“She married a bundle,” Gloria said. “That much I know.”
“The Janetta who occurs to me is Luigi Janetta, crime figure.”
“That’s Elizabeth’s guy,” Gloria said. “They got hitched nine years ago. No kids so far.”
“Maybe the Highbury house and the Navigator are Luigi’s. He puts them in wifey’s name for tax reasons.”
“That’s one possibility,” Gloria said. “He much prefers Lou, by the way. Sounds more Metro Toronto and less Calabrian Hills than Luigi.”
“Where did you get the Lou Janetta material?”
“I Googled him.”
“Of course,” I said. “Doesn’t everybody Google everybody else?”
“For a guy who avoids publicity like the plague, the way Janetta does,” Gloria said, “he’s got a hundred thousand Google items.”
“I seem to remember a libel action a few years back. He sued a newspaper for something like putting his name and ‘racketeer’ in the same paragraph.”
“You’re close. It was a magazine trying to take some of the market away from Toronto Life. Did a lot of sensational coverage of the Toronto scene. This one article they carried, it named the names of people they identified as Toronto mob figures. Janetta was in the group. Money laundering. Drug trafficking. Loansharking. All the standbys. The story said Janetta was a kingpin. He sued, and it was all settled out of court pretty fast. The magazine apologized, and took back everything it said about Lou. A little money changed hands. And the magazine folded.”
“Wow, victory couldn’t have been more complete.”
“As for the missus, Elizabeth Janetta, I’ve got material here,” Gloria said. When she turned the pages in her yellow pad, she gave each sheet a snap. All business, that was Gloria.
“Elizabeth’d be a woman with a large crooked nose?” I said. “Wart on the nose, a hair in the wart?”
“Geez, Crang, you think in stereotypes,” Gloria said. “Inaccurate stereotypes I might say. The real Ms. Janetta happens to be a looker. Grade-A-certified gorgeous.”
Gloria handed me a colour printout of an Internet photo. It showed a blond woman in a black evening gown barely held up by two thin straps. She wasn’t posing for the picture. She didn’t seem aware it was being taken.
“This was last year at some annual Italian-Canadian ball,” Gloria said. “Two things in reference to the photo. You’ll note there’s no Mr. Janetta in it even though he was at the ball. And, two, I’m sure Ms. Janetta was alarmed when she found out the camera caught her.”
“She’s classy,” I said, studying the photo longer than I needed to. “Bet that’s her real blond hair, and she’s got the high cheekbones and the fresh look. Healthy and tanned. Probably plays tennis.”
“A third thing about the photo, the Janettas didn’t attend this year’s Italian-Canadian ball.”
“Once photographed, twice shy.”
“I don’t know if the picture actually appeared anywhere except on the Internet,” Gloria said. “It didn’t turn up in any magazine or newspaper as far as I could tell.”
I drank the rest of my coffee, and debated whether to hit up Sam for a refill. I decided against it. The next cup of coffee poured in the office would come from my very own machine.
“What about the Janetta family home?” I said to Gloria. “We know they don’t live at 32 Highbury. Nobody does. So where’s the homestead?”
“Up Bridle Path way,” Gloria said. She turned a couple of sheets of the yellow paper, doing it with the usual snap. “Very chic place, architecturally speaking. I drove by first thing this morning. They have about an acre just off Bayview Avenue, the part south of York Mills. Got a high metal fence around the property, but you can still get an appreciation of the architecture through the bars.”
“Is it in Ms. Janetta’s name the way the other stuff is?”
Gloria shook her head. “A numbered company owns it. I haven’t gone behind the numbers. You want, I’ll look deeper.”
I thought about it. “Probably no need,” I said. “Let’s stick with Ms. Janetta for now. What was she before she married the mob?”
“Alleged mob,” Gloria said.
“Point taken.”
“Her surname was Kieran, the family being a wing of the Baldwins,” Gloria said, a touch of glee in her voice. “Can you believe it? I’m talking the ultimate FOOF Baldwins, the ones who go way back in our proud province.”
“Fine Old Ontario Family Baldwins? We’re talking Robert Baldwin himself?”
Gloria nodded. “What was he called when we studied him in Canadian-history class?”
“The Father of Responsible Government. Do schoolchildren get taught that stuff anymore?”
“Mine didn’t,” Gloria said.
“Kids today,” I said, “they’d probably laugh at the idea of ‘responsible’ and ‘government’ appearing in the same sentence.”
“Cynical bunch, kids today,” Gloria said. “Anyway, getting back to Ms. Janetta, a tiny share of the Baldwin-Kieran money trickled far enough down the generations to reach her.”
“What’s your idea of tiny?”
“No more than a couple million.”
“I wouldn’t mind a sum that minuscule in my bank account.”
“Elizabeth sounds like she might have been the family wild child in her youth,” Gloria said. “Got kicked out of Havergal College. Never quite finished her English course at Trinity where all good FOOF children still go.”
“What’s she do with her time now, besides lend her married name to properties her husband probably owns?”
“Not a whole lot I’ve discovered so far. Not involved in the usual ladies’ committees. Not the ROM, the AGO. But then I really didn’t expect our lady to be among that crowd.”
“Probably not what mob wives do.”
“Want me to expand on Lou himself?” Gloria said, flipping her pages. She looked up at me, smiling a teasing smile. “Give me your stereotypical version of Mr. Janetta,” she said. “The physical Lou. What’s he look like?”
“Short and rotund. Swarthy. Uses a lot of Brylcreem. Needs to shave three times a day or else his face goes all blue.”
“So in your version Elizabeth wouldn’t have married him for his looks?”
“You asked for the stereotype. Not reality.”
“Needless to say,” Gloria said, “there’s no photo I could find of Lou. But the magazine article I told you about described him as ‘dashing’ in one place and ‘movie-star handsome’ in another.”
“There goes that stereotype.”
Gloria bent her silver head over the yellow pad, flipping pages.
“Lou ever been busted?” I asked.
“Charged with a crime twice in his life, convicted of neither. One was for dealing cocaine, the other a bunch of gobb
ledygook that boiled down to money laundering. In both, the Crown withdrew the charges before anything reached the courtroom. Lou was in his twenties back then. Hasn’t been a whisper of a charge since.”
I made a snorting noise. “No wonder Lou’s libel lawyer made mincemeat out of the magazine.”
Gloria snapped her yellow note pages a couple of times until the pad was closed. “That’s pretty much all I’ve got on the Janettas,” she said. “So what’s next with you? You’re going to call on the dashing Mr. Janetta?”
I shook my head. “On the lovely Ms. Janetta.”
“Want to see those looks in the flesh? So to speak.”
“I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear your trivialization of my investigative purposes.”
“Be my guest, Crang.”
“Ms. Janetta’s the one attached to Highbury,” I said. “On paper, she is. If I press her, I can make some yards whether she denies her attachment or admits it. She says she never heard of Highbury, then I thank her and take my questions to Lou. On the other hand, if she tells me, yeah, so what if she owns the place, then I commence my interrogation.”
“The straight-on approach, huh?” Gloria said. “I can see maybe that’ll work. When do you plan on carrying out this astounding display of forensics?”
“My motto, strike while the iron is hot.”
13
Legal representation for the two or three of the ritzier clients in my stable of accused persons had sometimes taken me through the prosperous neighbourhood in the northeast suburbs known as the Bridle Path. So I already knew that a high percentage of the houses up there were teardowns.
Going way back to the years right after the Second World War, E.P. Taylor owned most of the Bridle Path acreage. E.P. was everybody’s favourite Canadian tycoon. He looked the part, portly and genial, a pair of qualities Toronto expected to find in its fabulously rich guys. And E.P. had his grasping hand in the kind of investments ordinary folks could understand. Beer companies, grocery store chains, racehorses. Northern Dancer was his, Kentucky Derby winner, greatest racehorse in Canadian history.
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