“I better rent another car,” I said. “The Mercedes is becoming a familiar presence on Highbury. Might stir questions among the people we’re tailing.”
Annie sat up very straight in her chair.
“Borrow Charles’s car,” she said. Her tone had escalated from triumphant to jubilant.
“Charles who drives the red Jeep?”
“He told me if we need to cart things around for the new garden, the Jeep would be far more practical than the Mercedes. He said we could borrow it any time.”
“But,” I said, “tonight we won’t be doing garden errands.”
“It all hinges on where you put the italics,” Annie said. “Myself, I put them on the ‘any time’ in Charles’s invitation. Charles said we could borrow the Jeep any time.”
“Sure you’re not a Jesuit?” I said. “That’s as fine a piece of sophistry as I’ve heard in a while.”
Annie let the remark float past.
“I’ll nip up to Charles’s place and get the Jeep’s keys,” she said, sliding from the chair. “And while I’m at it, I’ll pick up some Japanese takeout for dinner.”
“From which restaurant? There’s only about a dozen sushi places every block.”
“One on the north side that took over from the Thai joint last month?” Annie said. “That one. Good reports on it from the street’s retired persons squad.”
Annie shot out the front door.
I sipped some Sancerre and wondered whether I’d lost control of events. Not really, I thought. Or was I just rationalizing a sticky situation? In my version, rationalized or not, Annie had merely speeded the timetable. Since I intended to confront Grace anyway, what was the difference between sooner and later? The answer was, not much, though having headstrong Annie along on the mission might unduly stir things.
I went upstairs and changed into an outfit appropriate for a stakeout. How about a loose pair of summer pants and the same in a shirt? I had both. I got out the old Nikes, which no longer smelled of my visit to the garden shed. Before I left the room, I opened the little table on my side of the bed, and took out the clay figure. As I hefted it in the palm of my hand, it felt and looked just as enigmatic as it had when I’d first held it. What would the figure have turned into if Grace had finished her shaping and given it the kiln treatment?
21
The Jeep was a bouncy little thing. Maybe too bouncy. I was used to driving the big old Mercedes, which was wider, longer, heavier and more earthbound. By comparison, the Jeep felt awfully damn frisky. That might lead to trouble. The last thing I wanted was to return damaged goods to good neighbour Charles. I hardly knew the guy.
I whipped along Highbury Road past I Spy Griffith’s driveway, past the property at number 32 and farther along Highbury until I came to the first cross street. It was called Bramble Crescent. I cut a brisk left onto Bramble, continued a half block, then whipped through a U-turn and coasted back to the corner of Bramble and Highbury. I parked the car, nose out, and snapped off the lights.
“Well,” Annie said, “that was an exhilarating experience.”
“The driving, you mean?”
“For a few minutes there, I thought Danica Patrick was at the controls.”
“How do you happen to know a woman named Danica Patrick is a race car driver?”
“Sometimes when you leave the Globe open at the sports pages, I find myself paying attention to what’s written in there.”
“Maybe we could discuss the sports results regularly? Preferably basketball?”
“Sorry, sweetie pie, I won’t be paying that much attention.”
I settled a little in my seat.
“Our position right here on the corner ought to do for the stakeout,” I said. “Navigator comes out of the driveway back there, it’ll turn to its right, and drive past where we’re parked.”
“How can you be sure it won’t turn in the other direction?”
“According to I Spy,” I said, “it always comes this way. My limited experience leads to the same conclusion.”
“Think it’ll be long before that happens?”
I looked at my watch. Ten minutes past two. “Probably an hour,” I said.
“Want to snoggle while we’re waiting?” Annie said. She rubbed her hand up and down my thigh with a luxurious touch.
“Annie, we’re on a business mission here.”
“Aw, come on,” she said. She put her face close to mine, her lips puckered.
Beyond her head, car lights shone from 32 Highbury’s driveway.
“Duck,” I said. “They’re coming already.”
Both of us crouched in the front seats below the level of the car windows, waiting for the Navigator’s lights to swing past.
Thirty seconds ticked by, but no lights lit up the road or the Jeep.
What was taking them so long? I lifted my head for a view out the window. Nothing in sight. No Navigator and no other vehicle.
“Rats,” I said. “They’ve gone the other way.”
I started the Jeep, switched on the lights and started off down Highbury at a cautious rate.
“Shouldn’t you speed it up?” Annie asked. “Drive more like Danica?”
Annie had a driver’s licence, but didn’t drive often. Her style behind the wheel tended to be damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
“Streets around here are twisty,” I said. “I might surprise myself and run too close to the Navigator.”
Just one car besides us seemed to be out and about in the whole visible neighbourhood. It was somewhere in the blocks up ahead of us. All I could see of it were the car’s headlights flashing against the upper reaches of the trees when the wheels bounced over the speed bumps that dotted the roads. The bouncing, flashing car had to be the Navigator. I figured it was heading on the route that led past the Old Mill and out to Bloor Street. If it wasn’t the Navigator, our tail job was kaput.
We pulled around the curved road outside the subway station. No car was stopped for the Bloor red light.
“We lost them?” Annie asked. “So soon?”
I looked east and west. About a dozen cars were in sight on Bloor. Most seemed to be eastbound, coming from the suburbs into the city. A few stragglers were driving the other way. One of the vehicles going east, a couple of long blocks away from us and headed for a curve in the road that would put it out of our sight range any minute now, was dark coloured and SUV shaped.
“Don’t know whether it’s a Navigator way up there,” I said.
“Could be a Model T for all I know about cars,” Annie said.
“Listen, kiddo, if you’ve got a particular talent in tail job situations, what might it be?”
“Intuition is what I bring to the table,” Annie said.
“Has intuition got a message right now about the black car?”
“Intuition is mute on the subject,” Annie said. “But reason says the car up there has the best chance of anything on the road of being our Navigator. Simple matter of percentages. More cars going east. Ergo, more eastbound cars could be the one we care about.”
I turned left onto Bloor with the green light, and zipped in pursuit of the flock of cars that included the suspect vehicle. The little red Jeep performed like a speedy marvel. At the stoplight on Bloor at Jane, just before Bloor turned into the neighbourhood known as Bloor West Village, we caught up to the car that looked like a Navigator. It was stopped at the red light in the middle lane of three. I positioned us in the curb lane and one car length behind.
“That’s not just a Navigator,” I said. “It’s our Navigator.”
“How can you tell?” Annie said. “The city’s full of cars that look exactly like the one right there. Black, SUV, sitting up like that, so damned haughty the way they’re built.”
I looked at Annie. “You finished?”
“What?”
“The licence plate tells me it’s ours.”
“Oh.”
The Navigator took the Jane green light and stayed o
n Bloor for a couple dozen blocks. It wasn’t hard to follow its trail. The traffic was not too heavy and not too light, just right for us in our cute wee Jeep to lay a car or two behind the target vehicle without attracting the attention of Rocky or Grace. At least, as far as I could tell, the Jeep wasn’t rousing suspicions.
Then, a block or two east of Lansdowne Avenue, everything about the situation changed, beginning with the Bloor traffic.
“What’s this?” Annie said. “Where did the traffic jam come from all of a sudden? And what’s with all the people out there?”
Our Jeep’s pace fell from slow to dead halt, lined behind cars stopped up ahead for as far as we could see. The sidewalk on the south side of Bloor seemed as busy as on a noon-hour shopping day. Almost all of the people out there were guys in their twenties and thirties. They seemed in high spirits and maybe a little drunk. Some might be a whole lot drunk.
I looked up at the sign on a building on the south side.
“Here’s the answer to all questions,” I said to Annie, pointing at the sign.
“The Duke of Lancashire?” she said, reading the name in lights. “That’s a strip club, have I got the right place?”
“Explains why everybody on the street looks so jolly.”
“Your friend Fox took that famous case in the Supreme Court, the one made it okay for girls in strip clubs to take off every stitch of their clothes.”
“They don’t have to leave on the little pieces of fabric between their legs.”
“Gross,” Annie said.
The Jeep was moving forward in the traffic at not even a snail’s pace. Cars seemed to be looking for parking places. Even at this hour, patrons were flocking into the Lancashire. Here and there, women appeared among the guys on the sidewalk. The women looked like strippers on a break between pole dances. The clothes they had on were highly informal, and the girls tended to be busty and wear their hair long, all the better, I imagined, for whirling in the air when they danced with the pole.
“They offer sexual favours in there?” Annie asked. “I mean apart from the opportunities to ogle boobs and private parts, no doubt shaved. What about actual sexual contact?”
“Lap dances,” I said. “Which adds up to the same result as sexual favours. Naked girl sits in a guy’s lap squirming around until the guy experiences, you know, a moment of sensation. Or so I understand.”
“Never mind what you understand,” Annie said. “Did you notice where the Navigator went?”
“It was two cars in front of us until we ran into this mess,” I said. “All these drivers trying to ditch their cars, I lost track of our people.”
“I did too,” Annie said, reaching for the door handle on her side. “But my intuition suggests a possibility. I’m going to take a look around. Don’t jerk the car forward when I open the door. I’m getting out.”
“Hold on a minute,” I said. “Those people on the street don’t look like safe company for a nice girl like you.”
“We’ve lost the Navigator anyway. What’s the harm in me taking a look for it and its passengers somewhere around here? You and the Jeep are going to be stuck in this traffic for God knows how long.”
“You don’t know what the Navigator people look like. You’ve never even met Grace.”
“Yeah, but now I know the car’s licence number. And besides, I got a hunch about what’s going on.”
“A hunch? That the same as an intuition?”
“I’m betting our friend Rocky is stopping to get his ashes hauled,” Annie said.
“Language like that, maybe you’re not such a nice girl after all.”
Annie got out of the Jeep, turned back to the side window and said, “Park on the next street up, and wait for me. This shouldn’t take long.”
I needed about ten minutes to turn on to the side street Annie pointed out and slide into a parking space another car was in the act of pulling away from.
I got out of the Jeep, and when I looked back down the side street, the first thing I saw was Annie coming toward me lickety-split.
“In the parking lot,” she said, out of breath. “Somebody who’s got to be Grace is sitting in the passenger seat.”
“Alone?”
“Attractive woman? Dark, slim, kind of tragic looking?”
“First time anybody’s called her tragic,” I said. “But it must be Grace if it’s the right Navigator, and the woman’s Vietnamese.”
“She is, and, yes, she’s alone,” Annie said. She climbed into the Jeep. “I’ve no doubts Rocky’s in the club for the purpose previously stated.”
“Ashes hauling?” I said.
Annie nodded. “I’ll wait here,” she said, “resting on my laurels.”
I walked up the sidewalk to the lot behind the club. The Navigator was easy to spot at the far end of the second row of cars. I got myself at an angle to see the woman in the car’s front passenger window without attracting her attention to me. No doubt at all, the woman was my client. Grace hadn’t changed in any way in the couple of weeks since I last saw her. If she was under some new stress, she didn’t show the cracks.
I studied her and the car for another minute, making sure she was alone. It was awkward in the packed lot to get a straight line on the whole car and its human contents. But I couldn’t waste more time reconnoitering. Who knew how long Rocky would take for an act of sexual congress, if that’s what he was bent on? I had to quit stalling. Suppose Rocky happened to be a premature ejaculator.
22
Grace spotted me before I reached the Navigator’s door. She paused for just a flash, long enough to give me a baleful look, as if she was saying to herself, oh, damn, does this guy have to show up now, of all lousy times?
She rolled the window on the passenger side halfway down.
“Have patience, Mr. Crang,” she said. “I’ll go to court with you when it’s time.”
“Time expired a couple of weeks ago, Grace.”
“I needed space for myself. That was why I couldn’t meet you.”
“Might be tough to sell that one to Judge Keough.”
Grace looked to her left in the direction of the Lancashire’s back door. “The man with me will be back very soon. You don’t want him to see you.”
“Rocky engaging in, ah, sex inside?”
“He is totally a pig,” Grace said. “He does this because he thinks he’s humiliating me.”
“Is he?”
“Just makes me impatient.” Grace looked my way more intently. “Tell me, Mr. Crang, how do you know Rocky’s name?”
“He and I traded punches the other day,” I said. “You’ll notice I’m still standing.”
Grace gave me another expression conveying her profound wish that I get lost.
“I’m your lawyer, Grace,” I said. “It’s my job to see you through the sentencing process without anything else going wrong. That’s my concern.”
“Why might I think collecting the rest of your fee is your real concern, Mr. Crang?”
“Now that you mention it . . .”
“I have your seventy-five thousand dollars,” Grace said. “It’s put aside. Ready for delivery to you. Just wait a week. Mr. Crang, I’m in the process of looking after all my responsibilities, to you and to others.”
“George Wu says you’re married, Grace,” I said. “To a Bulgarian or a Romanian.”
Grace gave one of her rare smiles.
“George gets things wrong,” she said.
“You’re not married?”
“My husband is Hungarian,” Grace said. “A lovely man.”
Grace’s mood turned into something that was, for her, practically goo-goo.
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Your Hungarian husband got a role in what you’re doing on Highbury?”
The goo-goo mood fled as swiftly as it had arrived.
“How do you know about Highbury?” Grace said. “And how did you find me in the parking lot of this awful place?”
“All part of the ser
vice, Grace. Now, please, a few answers to my questions.”
“Following me around is part of the service I don’t appreciate.”
Grace flicked another look toward the Lancashire door, then turned back to the half-open window. “Trust me, Mr. Crang, I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m sure you do, but you’ve got to trust me too. As long as I’m your lawyer, you and I have to honour the agreement I made with the Crown and the court. If I allow you to get into some kind of trouble that messes up the agreement, I won’t be carrying out my duty to the court.”
Grace wasn’t looking at me. She kept staring straight ahead, as if she could outwait the bothersome presence I represented.
“Or my duty to you,” I said.
No response.
“Help me here,” I said. “What’s going on with you and Rocky and Highbury?”
Grace gave no sign she would answer any time soon.
“Sorry, Grace,” I said, “but you’re forcing me to wheel up the heavy artillery.”
I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out the clay half-figure from the Highbury waste pail.
“Tell me about this,” I said.
Grace looked at what was in my hand. Her eyes went a little narrow, and her mouth shaped an “Oh.” For once in the years I’d known her, Grace was showing distress in my presence.
She took a moment to get her thoughts together.
“You were the man in the house the night I saw the lights,” she said.
“That was me,” I said. “Now, what’s this little clay piece?”
“Mr. Crang,” Grace said, “you’ve no idea the trouble you could cause me.”
“Trouble is what you’re paying me to keep you out of.”
Grace ran her tongue over her upper lip, taking more time to think about her next lines. When she spoke, it was to ask a question. “I’m your client, Mr. Crang,” she said, “and as your client, you must take orders from me, do I understand our roles correctly?”
“It’s more a case of you telling me the facts as you see them, and I provide you with advice.”
“In this particular case,” Grace said, “I’m not asking for advice. I’m telling you to stay away from me until we appear in court together. I’ll be there, fully co-operative. I’ll pay your bill, and serve my time in prison. You can’t ask for more.”
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