“In that case, why don’t we lunch at Splendido, Canoe, one of those restaurants neither of us can afford? Put on the dog?”
“Tell you what,” I said. “If something Wu says leads me to Nguyen, then later on after the dust settles, I’ll book us at Splendido, just you and me, old pals together.”
“You being the old pal who picks up the bill?”
“Champagne even.”
When I got to Harold’s at a few minutes before twelve, Fox had already ordered beers for himself and Wu. George Wu was a short guy with a lot of slicked-back black hair and a whimsical manner, though the wrinkles around his eyes were showing the wear and tear of recent years. His English was more relaxed than Grace’s. She talked in precise sentences, trying for an upper-class accent and coming reasonably close. Wu had made himself so at home with English that he’d worked up a variation of the slang from the stoner culture.
“Cool to see you again, dude,” he said to me.
“I can dig it, man,” I said.
“Crang, if I’ve got to sit here in silence,” Fox said, “at least you can make it less grating on the ears.”
“I hear you, gate,” I said.
“Hey, dog,” Wu said to me, pleased.
Fox grimaced. He knew perfectly well what I was up to. Currying favour with George, talking the same brand of speech dysfunction, getting on his sunny side, softening him up for the questions. The idea might work if I didn’t suffer a giggling fit first.
When the waiter came, Fox ordered another beer, I asked for coffee, and all of us settled for a different kind of omelet, plain for me, cheese and tomato for Fox, western for Wu, toast all round. Harold’s was the kind of restaurant where you could count on the omelets, a plain, busy, affable place.
“You don’t mind, my man,” I said to Wu, “I want to get in your head about Grace.”
“In Grace’s head through my head?” Wu said, a big grin on his face that made him look dopier than he really was.
“Let me ask you about Grace’s life apart from real estate,” I said.
“And apart from grow ops,” Wu said cheerily.
“What about ceramics?” I asked. “Was Grace into making clay bowls, kitchenware type of implements, coffee cups?”
“Hey, she gave you one of those damn mugs, bro?” Wu said. “Grace isn’t a generous person, you may have noticed. But, like, every birthday, I could count on a friggin’ coffee cup from her. I must have seven, eight of the mothers at home, one for every year since I met her. My wife has the same.”
“She make anything else besides coffee mugs?”
“Got a soup bowl once.”
“How about smaller pieces? Human-type figures?”
“Like, little soldiers you’re talking about?”
“Sure. Or a character with balloony trousers.”
“Nothing looked like that, dude.”
“Only larger pieces? Mugs and bowls?”
“Yeah, but, man, the handles on the cups were shaped like what you might call figures. My wife got a kick out of that. She had a handle on a mug, it looked like Brad Pitt. Pretty clever. It was, like, early Brad in Thelma & Louise.”
“This is good, George,” I said. “Did anybody ever tell you Grace was particularly talented at that kind of thing? An opinion from an expert perhaps?”
“Nobody said that, bro. But Grace was, like, obsessed about making ceramic cups, bowls, handles, that kind of shit.”
“As far as you know,” I said, “it didn’t get past the hobby stage?”
Wu shook his head. “Leastways I don’t think she made money out of selling them.”
The waiter brought our orders, and for a few minutes, the omelets took everybody’s attention.
“Let me try another approach,” I said to Wu. “Is there anybody besides you who’s been particularly close to Grace in the last three, four years? Somebody knows her better than other people do?”
“You wanna count her husband, yo?” Wu said.
“Grace’s married?” I said. I looked at Fox. He shrugged. It was the first he’d heard of a husband too. Not that he’d be more knowledgeable than me about Grace’s personal life, though I thought it was possible Wu might have dropped a confidential tidbit on Fox sometime in the past. Wu apparently hadn’t.
“The dude she married,” Wu said, “he’s got a zed in his name. Bulgarian, something like that. Romanian.”
“A husband, huh? I was told about a boyfriend, but not a husband.” I would have routinely asked Grace about her marital status when she retained me. I felt pretty sure I’d marked her down on my client’s file as single.
“Grace kept secrets,” Wu said. “But I know about the marriage because, dog, I was at the wedding. Me and the wife, that’s all who attended. Back a few years when we were still flying high.”
“Any kids?” I asked.
“Whoa, man, it’d be a crime against children if Grace gave birth,” Wu said. “She’s not a person who softens up. You must’ve noticed it yourself. But like I said about secretive, that was Grace. What I know is she and her husband live in a condo downtown. Lombard, dude, you know where I’m talking about?”
“Not anymore they don’t live there,” I said.
Fox ordered his third beer. Wu asked for a coffee, and I got my cup refilled.
Wu didn’t show any interest in Grace’s change of address. He had shifted along to other attributes of Grace’s.
“For a chick, Grace’s a heavy intellectual type of person,” Wu said to me. “Like, she’s artistic and cereal.”
“Cereal?” I asked, looking at Fox.
“I think you’ll find George means cerebral.”
I turned back to Wu. “How about the opposite of close friends of Grace’s? Is there anybody in particular you know of she hasn’t been getting along with? Somebody who might mean her harm, if you dig me?”
“Her enemy, dude, is my enemy,” Wu said. “She and I are as one in the mind of the evil man.”
I could sense Fox rolling his eyes.
“Are you speaking metaphorically, George?” I asked. “Or is
this a real flesh-and-blood bad guy out there you’re talking about?”
“I never personally met the dude,” Wu said. “But he walks this earth, let me tell you, man. He sent his henchmen to do the dirty on me and Grace.”
“Narrow this down, George,” I said. “You’re talking about the grow op business?”
“The evil empire was supposed to market our product.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Vietnamese grow farmers of any substantial size didn’t deal their own marijuana to the users. They weren’t set up for the retail trade. Strictly wholesale as far as big marijuana growers like Grace and Wu were concerned. They sold their crops to an outfit that had the marketing machinery already in place. These were the dealers, and they made the biggest profit of all, bigger bucks than the farmers ever realized. The dealers paid low and sold high. And the farmers were the saps who exposed themselves to most of the risks. When the cops took down grow operations and busted the farmers, they rarely nabbed the people with the drug apparatus. The drug guys were too smart at keeping low profiles and staying anonymous. Nobody ever caught them on wiretaps.
“What went wrong between you and the drug people?” I asked Wu. “I imagine it involved money.”
“You talking about the money Grace and me never saw, yo?” Wu said. “Like, man, that kind of grief? What happened was . . . It was a case of . . .”
Wu couldn’t find the English word. Or words.
Then he burst out. “They erectioned us!”
Fox and I looked at one another.
Five seconds of silence went by before a smile broke across Fox’s face.
“Think penis, Crang,” he said.
I thought penis.
“Got it,” I said. I turned to Wu. “The drug people stiffed you.”
“Stiffed! You’re on it, dude,” Wu said. “The cops busted Grace and m
e, and the evil drug king wouldn’t pay us anymore after that. They had all our dope, but they still owed us millions of dollars, man. They didn’t pay us, and they never will. They left us high and dry, dude.”
“Grace never mentioned that,” I said. “Even if she had, it wouldn’t help us get lighter sentences for you guys from Judge Keough.”
Fox laughed and said, “I can see it now, us whining to Keough about our clients deserving a break. He asks, on what grounds? We say, the poor people got cheated out of their illegal profits by other bad guys. It’d be like the boy who murdered his parents then begged for mercy because he was now an orphan.”
“George here never revealed to you this duplicity among thieves?” I asked Fox.
“First I’ve heard of it.”
I went back to Wu with questions. “You and Grace would have received an original down payment from the dealers? Something that got the arrangement on track long before they crossed you up?”
He nodded a grim and weary yes.
“How else,” I went on, “could Grace have afforded the condo?”
“Right on, bro,” Wu said. “The wife and I bought a big place in Markham. A frigging mansion, man. But we hadda let it go on account of we didn’t have enough to pay the upkeep. The evil mastermind left us broke when he wouldn’t pay up.”
“Now for the million-dollar question,” I said.
“More like ten million,” Wu said.
“Who was the drug guy that stiffed you?” I asked. “His name?”
I expected at this stage in our conversation Wu would clam up. He might not want to be known as the guy who ratted out a big-name drug boss. Not that I intended to use the name as anything other than an aid in my analysis of Grace’s situation. But big-time crime guys had ears in unexpected places, and Wu might be scared silly of the consequences of his own loose lips. That was what I thought.
I thought wrong.
“Lou Janetta, dude,” Wu said.
“That’s who you dealt with?” I said. Why wasn’t I surprised?
“Like I said, not him personally,” Wu said. “But his people came around, they said, don’t worry about getting a fair dollar because the Janetta organization goes, like, first cabin all the way. Dude, I heard that so many times. Now I could puke, the way things ended.”
Fox spoke up. “Crang, you’re taking the revelation about this guy Janetta with remarkable calm.”
“Probably because I’m running into his name a lot this past week. His name, his house, his reputation, his wife. Can’t be a coincidence, coming up against Janetta at every turn. He must fit into the story in some major way.”
“His wife? You’re running into the mob guy’s wife?”
“Once seen, never to be banished from the mind.”
“A real babe?”
“You bet.”
Fox laughed. “Well now, how’s the lovely Annie these days?” he asked.
“Unfair insinuation, Fox,” I said. “On the subject of Elizabeth Janetta, I’m speaking purely as a dispassionate connoisseur of female beauty.”
“Glad to hear it,” Fox said. He swallowed the last of his beer. “What else can George help you with?”
I turned my attention back to Wu. “Who did the negotiating with Janetta’s people? Just you? Or you and Grace both?”
“Mostly Grace,” Wu said. “Dude, everybody seems to think I was, like, the mastermind of the grow op thing, beginning to end. You and Fox probably still think that. But it really was Grace who came to me in the first place, man. And it was her got me into bed. Like, physically in bed, dude. That’s when she brought up the idea of the grow houses, right there in bed. Told me how we could set up our pot business. Man, that woman ended up costing me a ton. I almost lost my marriage, and now I’m headed to the big house.”
Wu was beginning to look like a guy who’d just run a marathon. Depleted, his dopey grin no long in sight. But he wasn’t finished talking.
“Thing you reminded me of, dude,” he said to me. “Talking about Janetta’s wife, there was one time Grace mentioned the wife to me. It was some kind of big deal to her. To Grace.”
“In what connection?” I asked.
“Same thing you and I were talking about earlier. Ceramics,” Wu answered. “Grace said she went to some gallery, museum, whatever, where they showed bowls and all that, and she saw Janetta’s wife there.”
“How did she know the woman was Elizabeth Janetta?”
“Because there was a little photograph of her on the wall with her name underneath it,” Wu said. “Dude, the Janetta babe is on the board of this museum.”
“Did Grace just happen to notice Ms. Janetta? Or did you get the impression from Grace that this was a little more? In other words, was it an accidental encounter? Or a planned meeting maybe? Did Grace have a real conversation with Elizabeth Janetta?”
“Lot of questions all at once, dude.”
“Just give me your impressions, George,” I said. “The connection between the two happened at a ceramics museum, right?”
“The Lubin Museum,” Wu said. “I remember that.”
“Levin Museum?”
“Right on, dude,” Wu said. “Grace used to go there all the time.”
“You’re doing great, George,” I said.
“All I asked Grace when she told me about meeting the wife was, did Grace bring up the subject of the money the Janetta woman’s weasel husband owed us?”
“So the meeting took place after your deal with Janetta had gone south?”
“Right again, bro,” Wu answered. “But Grace said she didn’t talk money with the wife. She said they just discussed ceramics. When I heard that, I lost interest in the whole subject of Janetta’s wife. I could care less about ceramics and all that shit. I had other things on my mind. You dig it, dude?”
“I dig, George,” I said. “You’ve been a big help. Anything more occur to you? About Grace’s connection to the Janetta couple?”
“Haven’t really seen much of Grace since the big score of our lives fell in the dumper. A painful story, dude.”
“Perfectly understandable, George,” I said, feeling pretty certain I’d worked Wu for everything he knew.
After a few moments when nobody said anything, I turned to Fox.
“Fox, old pal,” I said, “I think we’re getting closer to lunch at Splendido.”
“On you,” Fox said.
“How could I possibly forget that part?”
19
Back in my office, I was in an expectant mood. The man at the bargain appliance store on Bloor promised his guys would deliver a mini-refrigerator that afternoon, sometime between two and four-thirty. On the stroll from Harold’s to the office, I bought a pint of milk and a small box of sugar cubes. I’d already stocked up with four mugs from the gift shop at the AGO. The mugs were in cobalt blue. By the end of the afternoon, I’d be in the full-service coffee business. I planned to present my neighbour Sam Feldman with the ceremonial first cup.
Someone knocked on the office door. It wasn’t Sam’s familiar knock.
“C’mon in,” I said, a breezy tone in my voice. I thought the fridge guys must have arrived early. I rose to greet my new appliance.
The door opened to reveal the most dapper gent I’d come across since I last watched George Clooney in one of the Oceans movies. I had the immediate and overwhelming sense this visual paragon was Lou Janetta.
“You’re Crang?” the man said. “The lawyer?”
“The guy with his name on the door, that’s me,” I said, getting out of my chair. “And might you be Luigi Janetta, better known as Lou?”
“How do you know my name?” he said. The question was asked in a pleasant enough tone.
“The fame of your home’s architecture precedes you,” I answered.
Janetta was a shade under six feet, a little shorter than me. He had a slim build, handsome features, a light suntan and black hair. The hair fell in natural waves, the kind a barber had no need to encou
rage. He wore a white linen double-breasted suit and a dark blue silk shirt with a matching handkerchief in the appropriate jacket pocket. He did without a tie, and kept the shirt’s top two buttons undone. A modest glimpse of black chest hair showed at the top of the shirt.
Dashing Lou stepped into the room followed by the all-too-familiar figure of my adversary, Rocky. Good thing for me Rocky wasn’t aware of my adversarial feelings. The closer he got, the bigger and meaner he loomed. He had on jeans and an unadorned white T-shirt, the better to show off the rippling muscles. The guy probably went about 220 pounds, not an ounce of it fat. Rocky’s nose, flattened at the tip, announced that he might have done a little fighting in a ring. Or maybe in a cage like those guys on television who fight in their bare feet.
“This’s my associate, Rocky Galenti,” Janetta said, making the introductions with a gesture that was both suave and abrupt.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “have a seat.”
Janetta sat in one of my three clients’ chairs. Rocky stayed on his feet, standing just behind Janetta, his arms crossed in front of him in the same way he’d stood in the Janetta living room when I visited the madam of the house.
“Rocky and I have met,” I said to Janetta. “After a fashion.”
“You went to see my wife,” Janetta said, “when I wasn’t there.”
“In point of fact, it was your physical house I called on,” I said. “It would have been my pleasure to meet you if you’d been on the premises.”
“Nobody told me about you dropping into my place until I overheard the housekeeper mention your name.”
“That so?” I said. Strange things were happening to my vocal system, all the rigid lines I was spewing, “physical house” and “on the premises.” Janetta had me in a wary state of mind. His line of palaver wasn’t quite an interrogation, but it was much more than just shooting the breeze.
“My wife never said anything about it,” Janetta said. The sound in his voice was neutral but scary. That seemed to be his habitual conversational position.
“Would you gentlemen care for a cup of coffee?” I said. “I can offer a delicious brand from Kenya?”
“Never mind the coffee,” Janetta said.
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