I drove north up Bayview Avenue, past Lawrence Avenue, the very Waspy Granite Club on the left. Then turned right off Bayview where the real estate I was cruising through was once Windfields Farm, the headquarters for Taylor’s horse operation. When the market for Toronto suburban residences leaped in the 1960s, E.P. moved Windfields east into the country way out near Oshawa. He broke up the former horse property on Bayview to build developments of houses bordering on mansion size on very large lots. Now, E.P. having long since kicked the bucket, the houses were well into the process of redevelopment. The nouveau riche bought up the lots, tore down the mini-mansions and erected imposing castles of bleak grey stone.
The one architectural exception on the block I soon found myself negotiating was the Janetta home. Its lot was as large as the others. The house probably was too, but its élan disguised the vastness. The prime building materials were glass and weathered British Columbia redwood. Combining the two produced an overall architectural effect that, my opinion, rated adjectives like organic and integrated, maybe even wholesome. My list of adjectives was beginning to sound like a list of the sterling qualities of multi-grain bread. But the house looked stunning, and I liked the symbolism of all the glass. The owner may have been a mobster, but he had nothing to hide. The cheek of the guy.
I saw what Gloria meant about the fence. It was high and metal, and perched on every available surface were so many security cameras that nobody entering or leaving the place could avoid appearing on tape. The driveway had an impressive gate, but it was open. I drove in and parked behind a black Navigator SUV. It had the licence number that I Spy Griffith had given me. Ubiquitous was what this Navigator was. It turned up in all the wrong places. Parked next to it was a red Jaguar convertible with a canvas top. The shade of red belonged to the tomato family, and the canvas was light brown. One glance at the licence plate revealed the car’s owner. LIZ’S JAG, it read. If I were comparing my ponderous car to Elizabeth Janetta’s nifty little number, I’d say hers was Fred Astaire to my Peter Boyle doing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in Young Frankenstein.
Getting out of the Mercedes, I was aware of movement behind the glass where the living room was probably placed. But I didn’t stop to wonder who was doing the moving or why. More security, I supposed. I pushed a button beside the front door, heard chimes go off inside and waited.
A short, compact woman opened the door. She wore trim black slacks and a tailored green blouse. She deserved congratulations for carrying off the simple outfit so successfully at her age, which I figured to be about the same as Gloria Allard’s.
“May I help you?” she said. Her voice had a slight Scottish accent. Or was it Irish? I wasn’t good on accents.
“I’m hoping Ms. Janetta might be free to talk with me,” I said. “I haven’t an appointment, you’ll excuse me. But I’m a fan of her home’s architecture. May I come in?”
“Aren’t you just the pushy one,” the woman said.
“But good natured.”
The woman smiled, revealing pretty dimples and laugh lines around the eyes. Her hair was dark brown going gracefully to grey, and her eyes were as green as her blouse.
“You look presentable enough,” the woman said. “I’ll say that for you.”
I had on freshly washed jeans, a blue button-down shirt and a lightweight black jacket. I thanked her for the compliment and said, “My hope one day soon is to build something along the same lines as Ms. Janetta’s home.”
The woman with the dimples looked at her watch.
“Elizabeth swims her laps starting about now,” she said. “I’ll just see if she has a minute for you first.”
“Ms. Janetta might care for my card,” I said, taking one out of my wallet.
The woman reached for the card. “Wait here, if you would, good sir,” she said, not quite closing the door all the way.
I bounced a little on my toes and tried whistling the opening bars to “Take the ‘A’ Train.” It was harder than I thought.
The woman with the Scottish or Irish accent returned. She no longer had my card in her hand.
“Follow me, you lucky man,” she said. The woman definitely had a jolly streak. Would that be more likely Irish or Scottish? Maybe I’d find out one day.
We went across the foyer into a large, bright room furnished in chairs and couches just few enough in number to make the room feel uncluttered and airy. The furniture featured black coverings and cushions. Was the woman leading me the housekeeper? Or one of the family? On the whole, I thought she probably fit the housekeeper role. She kept on moving past the black furniture, me behind her, finally concluding the journey in a reasonably spacious office. It too featured black chairs, cushions and a shiny black desk. I sat in what looked like a director’s chair. It was amazingly comfy.
As if all the black called for a little balance, the walls were hung in watercolours in shades of yellow, orange and light blue. All had a kind of playful charm. Behind the desk hung something completely different. In form, it looked like a certificate of graduation from an institution of higher learning, but it announced itself as a notice that Elizabeth Anne Janetta was a member of the board of directors of the Levin Museum. The Levin? The name rang a bell. Faintly.
I was busy digesting this information from the vantage point of my comfy chair when Ms. Janetta herself arrived in the office. I recognized the blond hair and the athletic but delicate superstructure from the photograph Gloria had shown me. Ms. Janetta had on a white bathrobe, uncinched at the waist, hanging open, and under it, a one-piece black bathing suit. Her figure in the bathing suit was lush, almost all of it revealed by the fit of the suit, not leaving much that a guy’s imagination needed to work on. I stood up to greet her. She reached out a hand, and I shook it firmly. The hand was slim and warm.
“Please sit down, Mr. Crang,” Ms. Janetta said. She took a seat in another black director’s chair. “You happened to be driving by?”
“Not quite, Ms. Janetta,” I said. “I’ve made a point of passing the house three or four times in the last month. Scouting it, you might say. This visit is spur of the moment. I felt something like a compulsion to introduce myself to the owner of such a striking home.”
“Our housekeeper said you’re building a place yourself.”
I patted myself on the back for getting it right about the dimpled woman’s place in the household.
“Still in the planning stages,” I said to Ms. Janetta. “But I know of a property I’m thinking of putting something on, and when I do, I’ll use your house as my architect’s model.”
As I talked, I noticed for the first time that we weren’t alone. A man was standing in the doorway from the living room to the office. He cut a formidable figure, tall, big body, probably lifted a lot of weights judging by the bulging muscles under the T-shirt he had on. He kept his hands crossed at his waistline. The guy was definitely one of the help, not a Janetta. In his left hand, he held what I felt certain was my card.
“The property you’re talking about, Mr. Crang,” Elizabeth Janetta was saying, “is it in the Bridle Path near here?”
“I wish,” I said. “No, it’s out in the west end.”
“There’re nice places in that part of the city.”
“In the district they call the Kingsway. Do you know it?”
Ms. Janetta crossed her legs. With her, that was maximum provocation of a sexual sort. “Everybody knows the Kingsway,” she said.
“On a street called Highbury,” I said.
Ms. Janetta didn’t flinch or do anything else overt. No looking over at the help in the doorway, no flushing or blushing. But there was a definite shift in the air around us. Her eyes did something funny, as if they had lost focus for an instant. It wasn’t much, the changing atmosphere and the eye thing, but I felt pretty certain my mention of Highbury had caught Ms. Janetta way off balance.
“I don’t think I know the street,” she said.
“What I like about it,” I said, “the lot out there is extra large. J
ust needs several trees taken out, and of course, I’ll have the present house levelled.”
“That’s very ambitious of you.”
“All I need to do is buy the property.”
Elizabeth Janetta uncrossed her legs. It was very hard to keep my eyes meeting her eyes. She said, “How does the present owner feel about that?”
“Something of a mystery there, Ms. Janetta,” I said. “The house appears to be unoccupied.”
“Really?”
“No one answers when I knock on the door.”
“Perhaps the owner is on holiday.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I intend to persevere.”
Ms. Janetta seemed to give that some thought, then she stood up abruptly but gracefully.
“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Crang,” she said. “Fitness calls. I like to keep in shape.”
“And all of us are the better for your fitness, Ms. Janetta.”
“Good luck with your house plans,” she said.
Ms. Janetta walked back through the living room, turning toward a door that led to the backyard. I could see a swimming pool out there, about fifty metres long. There were no slides in it, no beach balls, no toys. It was a working pool for serious swimmers.
I felt someone’s light touch on my arm. “This way, Mr. Crang,” the housekeeper said. Just as she spoke, I was watching Elizabeth Janetta as she dropped the white robe and raised her arms to dive into the pool. It was a sight to make a man groan.
I followed Ms. Dimples to the front door. The muscular help trailed along, studying my card.
“Hang in there, sport,” I said to him. “You’ll have it memorized in no time.”
14
On the way from the Janetta place to my office, I pulled onto a side street off Bayview long enough to text Gloria. I asked her to dig up whatever she could find about the Levin Museum. The bell that the Levin’s name rang for me still tolled faintly. But persistently. The texting done, I detoured to the Loblaws at Dupont and Christie to buy one package of Kenyan coffee and another of number two coffee filters.
Back in my own neighbourhood, I circled around our block twice, looking for a parking space. I found none, and headed back up to Bloor, went east a few long blocks all the way to Huron, south to Washington, back to Major and around one more time until, fifteen minutes after I’d reached the neighbourhood, I finally found room to park on Brunswick a block west of Major. Nobody thought about parking cars when the houses in the neighbourhood were built. For one thing, none of the working people who bought the houses could afford a car. For another, cars weren’t such a big deal a century or more ago when the houses went up. The result was that only a couple of homes on our block had garages today, and the rest of us battled over street parking spaces. We paid the city one hundred and ninety bucks a year for a permit and the privilege of entering into the parking fray. I figured it was the inability to park one’s car that would sound the death knell of Toronto, maybe of all cities everywhere. Drivers would be stuck in their cars for days without end, hunting desperately for a place to ditch the car, going mad from the frustration of never being able to get out from behind the steering wheel.
I locked the car and walked back along Bloor to a crowded little store that sold discounted appliances. Toasters, blenders, items like that. I picked out a Cuisinart coffee maker. The literature on the box said it made four cups at a time, but the clerk said it was actually no good for more than three cups. I bought it despite the false advertising. Before I lugged all my packages to the office, I got a tiny table on the patio at By the Way, a Bohemian sort of restaurant on Bloor at Brunswick. Or maybe it was just casual. I ate a vegetarian sandwich and ambled back to the fifth floor on Spadina.
Gloria Allard was still there.
“Not still here,” she said. “I went out and did the research on the Levin Museum. Now I’m back to write a memo.”
“Forget the memo,” I said. “Just talk me through it while I set up the office’s brand new coffee machine.”
“Did you see the dame married to the mob?”
“Did I ever.”
“And?” Gloria said. She was getting her notes lined up.
“She certainly does things to a bathing suit.”
“I can imagine. Are we talking bikini?”
“A form-fitting one-piece.”
“Must have been thrilling for you,” Gloria said.
I put the new coffee maker on a little table that sometimes held a vase into which I sometimes put flowers.
“Looks nice, doesn’t it?” I said.
Gloria was studying her notes some more. She raised her head. “Are we still on the subject of Ms. Janetta’s figure?”
“I could wax lyrical. But, no, the coffee maker.”
“It’s well designed and appears functional,” Gloria said, giving the Cuisinart a study. “But where’s a spoon for measuring the coffee into the maker? How about milk and sugar? Not to mention cups? We always depend on Sam for cups. It’s a slippery slope you put yourself on, Crang.”
“A miniature fridge to keep the milk from going bad, yeah, I’ll need one of those too. Not that I use milk. Or that you do. Or Maury. But the fridge’ll be nice for clients who aren’t so fastidious about coffee purity.”
“You’re beginning to sound like a TV food show host.”
“Grace Nguyen’s a milk-with-her-coffee person, now that I think about it.”
“Which brings us back to the case,” Gloria said. “You asked me to dig around for the bathing beauty’s pursuits in her spare time, one of them being her position on the Levin Museum’s board.”
“I know the name, but I’ve forgotten where it is.”
“How can you forget?” Gloria said. “Pay attention, Crang. It’s the one on College, shows only one kind of art. Guess what the kind is.”
“Hey!” I said. The faint tinkling of the memory bell was suddenly loud enough to break an eardrum. “Is that the ceramics place?”
“Four floors of nothing except pots and vases and cups and mugs.”
“So,” I said, feeling something close to euphoric, “what we have is Grace Nguyen subscribing to a ceramics magazine and Elizabeth Janetta sitting on the board of a ceramics museum.”
“Not enough to support a case for any proposition you might be contemplating.”
“No,” I said, “but more than enough to build hopes on.”
Gloria rolled her eyes in a give-me-a-break look.
“Who’s Levin of the Levin Museum when he’s at home?” I asked.
“Crang, old pal, you’ve based your question on two false assumptions,” Gloria said. “Levin’s dead, and when Levin was alive, she was a woman named Victoria.”
I thought about the implications of the Levin Museum. Whatever they were, did any of them reach into Grace’s life? My first-hand knowledge of the museum and its workings was just about zero. The place was only a fifteen-minute walk from Annie’s and my house, but neither of us had ever passed through its portals. Ceramics weren’t our cup of tea, so to speak.
“You got more about the museum’s background?” I asked Gloria.
“Quite interesting,” she said. “Victoria Levin’s husband was Mr. Steel in these parts. He made large sums of money in the building boom of thirty years ago. Then he kicked the bucket, and not long after that, in the 1990s, the widow Levin spent fifty million of her inheritance on the museum.”
“How public-spirited of her,” I said.
“There’s more,” Gloria said. “While she was at it, Ms. Levin made a kind of feminist statement. She saw to it that the board of directors was then and forever entirely female. All employees at the museum have to be women too, except for volunteers. Men are allowed to do the nonpaying grunt jobs.”
“That’s cute,” I said.
“But,” Gloria said, “the place’s feminism isn’t as pure as they’d like you to think.”
“Are you showing your catty side?”
“Just about all of the women on the
board got there because their husbands kicked in with big donations in the wives’ names.”
“Not necessarily the case with Elizabeth Janetta,” I said. “You pointed out this morning she brought some inherited money into the marriage.”
“Yeah, she may get a pass,” Gloria said. “Her donation, wherever the money came from, added up to half a million.”
“Generous enough to be serious,” I said. “I’m putting a trip to the Levin on my agenda.”
“What else’ve you got in mind?”
“An immediate return visit to Highbury,” I said. I studied the coffee maker on its stand. “And I’m going to complete the conversion of the office into a coffee bar.”
“Mini-fridges you can get for a song at Walmart.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’ve gone through life so far without setting foot in a Walmart. Not a McDonald’s either or a Tim Hortons. No chance I’ll break my streak now.”
“A life without a coffee and a Timbits from Timmie’s? Crang, for heaven’s sake, where’s your Canadian pride?”
“Never been in a Red Lobster either.”
“What’s all this denial of pleasure and convenience get you?” Gloria asked.
“Not far in practical terms. Means I have to scratch around to find a little fridge. But my god, girl, imagine how virtuous I feel.”
“You’re actually talking about virtue?” Gloria said. “You, the guy who recently gained entry to a private residence by way of subterfuge and impersonation?”
“That was business,” I said. “Not crossing the threshold of a Tim Hortons belongs in the category of moral crusade.”
Gloria did another of her oh-how-bogus-can-you-get gestures. “Back to the Janetta family and whatever nonsense it’s involved in,” she said, “what’s your next move?”
“A piece of midnight creeping out on Highbury,” I said. “It’ll be a whole lot more about business than moral crusade.”
15
It was a few minutes before three in the morning. Maury and I were sitting in the front seat of my car drinking Kenyan coffee out of plastic cups. We poured the coffee from a large Thermos. The car was parked in I Spy Griffith’s driveway, facing at an angle across the street from the grounds of 32 Highbury. I’d called I Spy for parking privileges that afternoon. On the phone, I Spy sounded thrilled at the prospect of being within observing distance of whatever action might occur.
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