“This’s pretty tasty,” Maury said of the coffee. “What is it, something new from Folgers, some shit like that?”
“Just bought it the other day,” I said, hoping evasion would carry the day.
“Not some foreign shit?”
“Maury, you’ve got to enlighten me about the way you toss around the word ‘shit.’ Just now, the first time you said ‘shit’ it meant something positive. Folgers was ‘shit,’ but that was a good thing. The next sentence, ‘shit’ and foreign went together, and nothing was good about either. You’ll pardon me, but a person can get confused.”
“It’s all in the context,” Maury said. “What’s confusing about that?”
“I reasoned that out, but the reasoning out came in retrospect, if you follow me. When you said ‘shit,’ both times my immediate reaction was negative.”
“Follow you, my ass. It was only negative the second time. Anything foreign is negative shit. Practically anything. You remember Bobby Jaspar? Tenor saxophone player?”
“Very nice musician,” I said. “Was once married to Blossom Dearie.”
“Bobby was Belgian, but he wasn’t shit. He was one of the exceptions. Everything else not from North America is shit.” Maury turned to me, making sure I was taking in his lecture. “That’s not so hard to remember,” he said.
“True,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask me again about the origins of the coffee he was drinking.
“I’m used to working late hours from the old days,” Maury said. He’d moved along to another topic. “But not under these crappy conditions.”
“What’s so crappy about in here?”
“Hotel jobs like I did, I kept on the move every night. Going room to room. Good exercise when you think about it. Tonight, crissake, it’s all this sitting in a car getting a numb bum.”
Maury and I had been in the Mercedes in I Spy’s driveway for almost two hours. When we arrived sometime after one, I’d sneaked across Highbury to number 32, all the way up to the house, to check for the black Ford Navigator. The car was where I Spy said it would be, close to the front door. The house’s curtains were still pulled across the windows. Light showed around the edges of the curtains, but I wasn’t going to risk a search to see if any of the edges allowed enough room for me to peek in. I was playing it safe.
In the Mercedes, waiting for the Navigator to leave, Maury and I drank from the Thermos. Annie made the coffee after I told her my plans for the evening. A break and enter with Maury, I said. Annie shrugged. She didn’t say anything much, but her general demeanour told me she thought this was a stupid stunt on a par with the one at Grace’s condo. Still, she fixed up the Thermos of coffee and gave me a big hug. That must have counted for something.
Annie had put in another day of heavy lifting for the goddess of the gardens. One of the other slaves came home with Annie for dinner. She was a tall, fit blonde named Rita who looked like she spent time in a gym toning her muscles. When I left, Annie and Rita were pulling the cork on what they said was their final bottle of wine.
“I never used to drink anything on a night I was working hotels,” Maury said. “Not coffee, not booze, not anything.”
“Why was that?” I asked.
“Avoid having to take a leak when I’m in the middle of somebody’s room.”
“That would’ve been an adventure.”
“Adventures, oh shit, I had different kinds of those,” Maury said. “I ever tell you about the time I went into this famous Canadian actor’s suite? Was at the Windsor Arms Hotel behind Bloor and Bay, around that neighbourhood?”
“New one to me.”
“In the guy’s suite,” Maury said, “he had thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff. A watch, jewellery, a little cash. Jesus, he had a huge collection of sex toys. The guy’s libido must’ve never quit. Anyway, I took everything worthwhile in sight. Then a couple of weeks go by, and this guy, the famous actor, he turns up on Johnny Carson’s show talking about the burglary at the Windsor Arms up there in Toronto. I’m at home watching the show, and the actor said he lost one thing he really missed. I thought he was gonna say one of the fucking sex toys. But, no, he said he was broken-hearted about the burglar taking his Order of Canada medal. The guy was practically weeping in Johnny Carson’s arms. So what else could I do? I got the guy’s address, and mailed the medal back to him. I been waitin’ ever since for this famous actor to go on somebody else’s talk show, and thank the burglar with the heart of gold.”
Across the street, headlights beamed out of the long driveway.
“Here they come,” I said.
“About fucking time,” Maury said.
Both of us slid down in our seats. I Spy’s driveway was to the left of the spot where number 32’s driveway met the street. I Spy said the black Navigator would turn farther to our left and drive away. I Spy had that straight. The Navigator stopped at the street, paused, turned to his right, which was our left, and sped out of our sight down Highbury.
Maury and I got out of the Mercedes. We shut the car’s doors softly, not to cause undue racket in the still of the night. I led the way across Highbury and up the driveway. Both of us carried flashlights. I was wearing an all-black outfit. Black jeans, loose black shirt, black Nikes. Maury had asked why I hadn’t rubbed black shoe polish on my face. “Like a fucking commando,” he’d said. As far as I could make out, Maury wore his usual clothes, even a tie with a Windsor knot.
Neither of us turned on our flashlights until we reached the front door to the house.
“Shine your light on the lock, you don’t mind,” Maury said. I did as I was asked, and Maury leaned close to examine the lock.
“They got an Abloy on here,” he said.
“Is that bad news?” I asked.
“Very reliable lock,” Maury said. “Except when a guy like me comes along.”
He turned on his own flashlight and beamed it around the door and over to the window closest to where we were standing.
“Looks like there’s no security system,” Maury said. “The kind that calls the cops and a private outfit at the same time.”
“Maybe they got something inside they wouldn’t want the cops to see,” I said.
“Probably,” Maury said. “Private security companies aren’t worth shit anyway.”
“Really?”
“I mean ‘shit’ in the negative sense,” Maury said.
“I deduced that.”
“Keep your light on the lock,” Maury said. Maury spoke in a commanding voice when he put himself in charge of events.
He performed some sleight of hand with his picks, and in a couple of minutes, he swung open the door.
We stepped over the threshold, shining our flashlights ahead of us.
“What’s with this Grace dame?” Maury said. “Everyplace she goes, it’s got no furniture.”
He was right. The very large room on the other side of the foyer was mostly bare. But grouped over by the far wall, there were three large and significant pieces of working equipment. Maury and I walked over to check out the pieces. The first was a table with a chipped surface that held several small tools arranged in orderly rows. There were small artist’s brushes on the table and many containers of enamel. To the right of the table, a silver tank dominated everything within range. It was enormous and sleek. Closer to the wall, there was a supersize pail that appeared to be filled with scraps left over from whatever enterprise was being carried out on the table and in the silver tank. Underfoot, as we moved around the arrangement of table, tank and pail, there was some faint crunching.
“Smells like cement in here,” Maury said.
“To be exact,” I said, “I think it’s clay we’re sniffing. It’s what we’re probably walking on too.”
“Like for pottery, that’s what you’re talking about?”
“The silver tank right there is a kiln,” I said. “The little I know about pottery, the last step for a potter, or close to the last step, he sticks the pot he’s shaped o
ut of the clay into a kiln at a very high temperature.”
“How do you know that Jesus big thing’s a kiln?”
“It says so,” I said. I shined my flashlight beam on the side of the tank where it carried the manufacturer’s name plus a word in big letters, “KILN.”
“What about all the crap on the table?” Maury asked. “Those brushes and all the little tubes?”
“To paint the decorations on the pots or whatever it is they’re making in here,” I said. “Just as a guess though, it’s probably not pots or anything else big they’re making. It looks like the place is scaled for smaller work.”
“This is what you came to see?” Maury said.
“Let’s just say we might be getting closer to answers.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Maury said. “I gotta check the back door.”
“What for?” I asked.
“Here’s another rule of the business,” Maury said. “You should have two places of ingress and whatever the hell the other thing is.”
“Egress,” I said.
“For getting out in an emergency.”
Maury disappeared down a hall to the back of the house.
Shining the flashlight over the tools on the table, I picked up some of them one by one. They must have been used for shaping clay. They were impressive little things, delicate in appearance but strong and firm and probably unbreakable. Shaping the clay? Yes, almost certainly, but where was the clay? I pointed the beam along the wall behind me. There it was, the grey clay, in rows and rows of thick plastic bags. Some of the bags were open and spilling out at the top; the rest were still waiting for the summons to usefulness.
I turned my light and my attention to the big refuse can. There was some scrunched-up newspaper in there. There were a few small pieces of solid clay of no particular shape. The pieces had the look of leftover chunks. Rejects, I’d say. Somebody was working with clay, and when the work didn’t come out right, the person threw it in the major-sized garbage pail. It was a theory, but was I certain what I was talking about? Not nearly.
I held the flashlight in my right hand, and with my left I messed around in the pail’s debris. The left hand found something solid. It was a larger piece of clay that might have a shape of some possibly identifiable sort. The bottom of the thing kind of resembled a pair of fat legs, the top half was lumpy and indeterminate. It was an unfinished piece, and looked to me quite a bit bigger than the size of the metal soldiers I used to play with when I was a little kid. As far as I could make out in the beam from my flashlight, the figure I was turning over in my hand was much heavier than a toy soldier and not nearly as specific. On the other hand, the object was too incomplete for me to make any judgment about. What it most looked like at the moment was a lump that a figure was waiting to emerge from.
Then the cell vibrated in my pocket.
Whoever was phoning me at three-thirty in the morning must have something very important to report. Or it was a wrong number.
I chose to answer.
“Crang,” I said in a low voice.
“The Navigator is coming back!” a man said, speaking in a rush close to panic. “It’s two seconds from reaching the driveway!”
“Mr. Griffith, that you?” I said. “I Spy?”
“Yes,” he said. “The car’s making its turn to the house now!”
At the same moment, I saw the headlights shining through the trees at the front of the house.
I switched off my flashlight. Closed the cell. And turned toward the darkness Maury had disappeared into.
“Maury,” I said in a low voice I hoped had carrying power. “Put your flashlight out. The people in the Navigator are back.”
“Then get the fuck down here,” Maury’s voice answered. He sounded calm. He must have been caught in this sort of jam before. Surprised in the act of burglarizing a room.
I bumped into a wall, lost my bearings in the dark, stumbled once, then found the hall and hustled down a short flight of stairs.
Maury was standing at the back door, holding it open.
“Another Abloy,” he said, nodding at the lock on the door.
“That’s a very professional observation, Maury,” I said. “But now we got a different problem. You know, escape?”
Both of us stepped on to the flagstones of the back patio. I looked around while Maury did some tricky thing about relocking the door behind us. We could hear the door at the front of the house swinging open and banging hard against the foyer wall. A man’s angry voice said something, but the only word that reached my ears was a loud and insistent “Fuck!”
“We can’t run across the lawn,” I whispered to Maury. “They’d spot us.”
“Got no choice, Crang.”
“Let’s try the garden shed,” I said, pointing at it behind me. “Oughta be a couple of hiding places in there.”
I was closest to the shed door. When I pushed it open, it swung as smoothly and silently as it had when I visited the place earlier. I moved to the right and ducked down below the window on that side. Maury did the same on the left side.
“Oh, no, shit,” I whispered.
“Crang, shut the fuck up,” Maury whispered back.
“Shit,” I said. “That’s what I’m in. Manure over my ankles.”
“Relax, pal,” Maury said in a comradely whisper. “This probably won’t last long.”
For a guy crouched almost shin deep in animal excrement, the time in the shed had already stretched too long.
16
Hunkered down in the Highbury shed the way I was, my nose hovered about a foot and a half above the manure. In such a tight space, the stench just about knocked me out. I tried shifting position by an inch or two. My shoes generated faint sucking noises in the muck. The change in posture made no difference in the strength of the stink. It was growing more powerful by the second.
I heard the back door to the house open. Then footsteps on the patio.
“Nobody’s out here,” an angry male voice said. It was the same voice we’d heard at the front door a minute or two earlier. Whoever the guy was, he was in a foul mood.
“You’re the only one seen a light,” Mr. Angry said, apparently to someone with him. “I never.”
“You were too busy bitching about everything else,” said a voice I knew only too well. The voice belonged to my client. Elusive Grace Nguyen. “I saw a light moving in the house when we were coming back up the driveway,” she said.
“If a light was turned on in the house,” the guy said, “I woulda caught it.”
How many people were out there? Just Mr. Angry and Grace? This wasn’t a Monday night. I Spy said another man often showed up at Highbury, usually on Mondays. So he probably wasn’t out there, though one never knew.
“Look in the shed,” Grace said. It sounded like she was directing operations, though the angry guy seemed to think he was in charge.
Footsteps crossed the patio. The steps belonged to the angry guy. I squatted down, even closer to the manure. I was holding my breath.
The door to the garden shed swung open.
“Oh, Jesus,” the angry guy’s voice said. “It stinks in there.”
He shut the door without spending time on anything like a real check of the shed’s interior.
“This is fucking ridiculous, Grace,” he said. “Get your stuff out of the can, wherever the hell you left whatever the hell it is.”
“My makeup kit,” Grace said. “It’s upstairs in the powder room.”
“Why don’t you carry a purse like a normal broad?”
“Because I’m taking precautions.” Grace’s voice was fainter than when she first spoke. She’d probably turned to go into the house.
The guy with the angry voice was still on the patio. I could hear his footsteps. They sounded as if he was walking in a direction away from the shed toward the long stretch of lawn in the yard. I risked a quick look out the window.
At first, my body didn’t like the idea. My legs and ba
ck felt as if they were glued in place. They resisted movement. But I levered myself a foot or so upward. I thought I heard my bones cracking. I intuited two inches of space would be enough for my peek from the window. I peeked. The angry guy had his back to me at an angle to my left. He was about six or seven yards away. But his back and his all-round contours told me who he was. He was the muscular gent from the Janetta house when I called on the lovely Elizabeth. I ducked back down. My legs and back were screaming in agony.
A few minutes of silence went by. They felt like a few hours. The angry guy stayed on the patio until the back door opened.
“All right, Rocky, we can go now,” Grace’s voice said.
Rocky?! I could hardly believe the guy’s name was so appropriate. Rocky suited him, all muscles and wrath. What else was someone like that going to be named except Rocky?
Maury and I didn’t budge. We heard Rocky go back in the house, slam the back door and head out the front door. The Navigator’s motor revved a couple of times. That was the way a guy named Rocky would drive. Lot of revving of engines, though with the Navigator, the revving had a muted quality. The sound of the engine soon faded down the driveway. Things at 32 Highbury became once again still and quiet.
Maury stood up from his crouching position.
“Give me a hand, if you would, Maury,” I said.
“Depends,” Maury said. “Forget it if your hand’s covered in fucking manure.”
“My pedal extremities are the problem,” I said. “They’re what soaked up the stinky stuff.”
Maury yanked me to a standing position. Both of us stretched and groaned on the patio’s flagstones. My back and legs loosened up, but the odour coming off my shoes, socks and the bottoms of my jeans wasn’t going anywhere except with me.
The two of us walked back to the Mercedes in I Spy Griffith’s driveway, Maury striding, me squishing. I Spy stood in the second-floor window at the far right end. He had a big smile on his face, and he was giving me the damned double thumbs-up. I answered him with an ordinary wave of my hand. That ought to be enough to convey gratitude for the heads-up cell call.
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