Take Five

by Batten, Jack;

  “Crang, this is going to take away half the fun for me, man. Can’t I just show off for you a little bit?”

  “Fifty-dollar medical phrases would be wasted on me, Wally. I already know you’re the superhero of the crime lab. Save the good stuff for a fresh audience. People in the courtroom’ll be dazzled when the Crown puts you in the witness box.”

  Wally gave an aw-shucks shake of his head.

  “Whatever,” he said. “In non-technical words of one syllable where that’s possible, the victim and the assailant were standing so they were facing one another on a street or a driveway. Pavement underfoot anyway.”

  “Not in a woods? Not in the place Grace ended up?”

  “The guy dragged her there, that’s clear enough. But it comes later.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t be so impatient, Crang. Throws me off my rhythm.”

  I held my hands up in surrender.

  “The two of them are having an argument,” Wally said. “Face to face. Grace is pointed a little to her own left. So when the assailant gets angry, Grace is more directly in the path of the assailant’s right fist when he lets fly with a punch. Did I mention this assailant was taller than Grace?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, he was. Grace was five feet, five inches. The guy was damn near six feet. Maybe an inch over but no more. The height difference meant Grace was looking up. Not a lot but enough to matter. The guy fires his punch. It’s part straight right, but it necessarily follows a somewhat downward path on account of his superior height. The punch lands square.”

  “On what?”

  “The nose,” Wally said. “That’s the fatal detail. The fist drives into Grace’s nose, and her fate is sealed.”

  “This is dramatic stuff, Wally. And tragic.”

  “Since you don’t want medical terms and anatomical exactness, I’ll just tell you a bone from Grace’s nose got knocked loose and drilled into her brain. At that moment, Grace’s time on this earth came to an end.”

  “Complete fluke.”

  “Mike Tyson himself couldn’t have planned the punch. One million boxers throwing one million punches would have no hope of duplicating a blow like this one. An accident totally. The assailant must’ve freaked.”

  Wally stopped the explanation long enough to ask if I wanted to split a second glass of red wine with him. “I got to take it easy on the alcohol,” he said. “Keep my mind clear for tonight’s Tafelmusik concert.”

  “For what?”

  “At that big church right over here.” The church Wally was pointing at was on the south side of Bloor a block east of where we were sitting. “You know about Tafelmusik?”

  “Chamber group, I think maybe? Never heard them play myself.”

  “Started up performing right here in the Annex about thirty years ago,” Wally said. “Fairly small orchestra, but it specializes in baroque music. Mozart, Handel, plus a lot of period composers nobody ever hears much of today if it weren’t for Tafelmusik.”

  “You’re going to tell me it’s world class.”

  “I wasn’t,” Wally said. “But it is.”

  “And it’s a product of the good old Annex?”

  “No reason not to be proud of Tafelmusik.”

  “I imagine not,” I said. “And it’s okay with me about splitting the second glass of wine.”

  “So, to resume with my explanation, the result is Grace is dead,” Wally said. “She’s lying on a street or a driveway. I think driveway myself. I told the detectives on the case they should look carefully on that long drive up to the house at number 32. Haven’t found anything so far. No blood or other traces of the victim.”

  “After the punch, the assailant drags the body into the woods?”

  “Lot of evidence of that. Heels of Grace’s feet making a sort of path through the dirt and twigs and other lower-level flora. The guy gripped her under the arms and just yanked her along.”

  “In a panic?”

  “Definitely in no condition to think things through, this guy.”

  Wally took a healthy swallow of wine from his half glass.

  “Everything I can read about the situation in the available evidence,” he said, “points to haste and carelessness. Guy couldn’t put his head around what he’d got himself into. What a terrible thing he’d done.”

  I had a sip from my own glass, and thought about Wally’s breakdown of the killing.

  “One more thing you’ll want to know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The deceased, Grace, she was pregnant.”

  The news came as a mini-bombshell, but I couldn’t think of any influence it had on Grace’s work for Elizabeth Janetta.

  “How much pregnant, Wally?” I asked.

  “Not a whole lot in terms of time. Around two months.”

  “Her husband doesn’t appear to be aware of a pregnancy.”

  “Really,” Wally said. He stood up. “Now I got to be on my way,” he said. “Tafelmusik, you know.”

  “You go all the way home, wherever that is, grab something to eat, and come back to practically the same spot? That’s a gruelling timetable, Wally.”

  “Not a problem. We live up the street right here on Brunswick.”

  “You’re an Annex person?”

  I felt a sense of dismay. I think my jaw dropped. The dismay must have been on full display because Wally picked up on it. And promptly misinterpreted it.

  “Hey, listen,” he said, full of concern, “did I let you down on this Grace thing? You’re suddenly looking a little flat. You need more from me?”

  “Not for a second am I disappointed, Wally.” I was scrambling to cover my tracks. “On autopsies, you’re aces by me. Nobody better at interpreting the messages a dead body leaves behind.”

  Wally seemed mollified. He gathered his things and left the patio. I watched him turn up Brunswick and stride deeper into his neighbourhood. Into the Annex.

  After a few minutes of contemplation, I paid the bill and walked home. Wally had gone north. I went south. First thing I did in the house was phone Annie in New York.

  “We should call off the war we’re waging with the Annex,” I said. “It’s a sure loser.”

  “But they’re our mortal enemy, sweetie.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “What I’m surmising from observations, people in the Annex haven’t noticed they’re even in a skirmish with the pitiful crowd below Bloor.”

  Annie listened patiently, adding nothing to the chat except a couple of uh-huhs. It finally came through to me she had other fish to fry, conversationally speaking. She said she’d just received by email the goddess of the garden’s plan for our backyard.

  “Fabulous, Crang, honestly. With our garden, Kathleen’s emphasizing structural plants.”

  “Right away, you’ve got me stumped.”

  “Structural means trees and shrubs. All of them native.”

  “A patriotic garden?”

  “That’s a way of explaining it, I suppose,” Annie said. “It’s only natural to grow things native to the region in whatever region a person lives. Kathleen’s allowing us one Japanese maple.”

  “The Japanese maple is native? Despite the name.”

  “Honey, think of it this way, we’re going to be thrilled having such beauty at our back door.”

  “You can tell all this just from a drawing?”

  “Ah, but Crang,” Annie said, “I’ve been in Kathleen’s own garden. I’ve walked through it with her, a garden that reflects what she’s making for us. It’s a work of art, her place. Ours’ll be the same, except on a lot smaller scale. Magnificent, you’ll say about ours.”

  “Magnificent?” I said. “That’s something I can relate to.”

  After Annie told me that the goddess and her slaves would install our garden the following Tuesday, I hung up and made a dinner out of leftover chili. I read more William Boyd and was just dozing off when damn Rocky snapped me awake. Not the physical Rocky, but a memory f
rom Rocky. The son of a bitch never answered my question about how he broke into our house the night before.

  I went downstairs and toured the place, switching on all the lights as I proceeded. No windows were broken or even seemed tampered with. I got the flashlight and shone it up close at the lock on the front door. The light didn’t reveal scratches or anything else I might interpret as an indicator of lock picking. I went into the dining room to do the same check on the door into the garden. When I put my hand on the inside doorknob and turned it, the door opened without me touching the lock. The damn door hadn’t been locked. I hadn’t touched it after I got home that afternoon from the meeting with Wally. Had I left it unlocked the whole time since yesterday? Unlocked last night, all day today, right up until this moment? I felt pretty certain the pitiful answer was yes. Rocky hadn’t needed to break in. He could just walk in. I’d practically ushered Rocky into the house. This was a serious goof. Now, as I locked the door, I was thinking metaphors about locking barn doors after the horses had left.

  I got back in bed, and took a long time to fall asleep.

  32

  The first thing I couldn’t help noticing about Biscuit the safecracking guy was that he belonged among the little people. He was sitting in the front passenger seat of Maury’s big old Cadillac when the two of them pulled up to my house at the appointed hour of 10:30 p.m. Friday. Biscuit’s head barely cleared the dashboard.

  I got in the back, carrying a liquor store brown paper bag. It held a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label.

  “Crang, this here’s Biscuit,” Maury said. “Biscuit, want you to meet Crang the mouthpiece.”

  Biscuit stretched to reach his hand over the back of his seat, and we shook hands. My hand came near to lapping his a couple of times.

  “You’re thinking about the size of my hand,” Biscuit said to me. “I’m right?”

  “No offence intended,” I said.

  “None taken,” Biscuit said.

  Biscuit was a dapper little guy from what I was able to make out in the Caddie’s semi-gloom. Tidy moustache, full head of dark hair combed just so. He had on a dark jacket, light-coloured shirt and striped tie. The colours I couldn’t be sure about.

  “It was my size determined my path in life,” Biscuit said.

  “Biscuit’s of the subculture,” Maury said. “Goes without saying.”

  “I knew I preferred the subculture over the dominant culture from when I was a child,” Biscuit said, addressing his remarks to me.

  “What’s your choice gonna be if you’re in reform school at age fifteen?” Maury said.

  “Really, Maury, a little respect,” Biscuit said, sounding the soul of patience. “Let me tell the gentleman my life story the way I want to tell it.”

  “Reader’s Digest version, for crissake,” Maury said. “Otherwise I’m turning on my CD player. Got beboppers on there, drown you out. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.”

  “As a child,” Biscuit said, “I was very good at arithmetic.”

  “The couple of years you went to school,” Maury said.

  “It’s true, Mr. Crang,” Biscuit said, “my formal education was brief, but I gravitated to anything mechanical. If it involved numbers, I had the answers.”

  “What inclined you to the subculture, if I may ask?” I said.

  “It was genetic.”

  “His old man made a grand tour of the country’s prisons,” Maury said. “An inside view at every stop.”

  “As Maury implies,” Biscuit said, “my acquaintanceship with my father the bank robber was fleeting. But his example taught me a lesson. Namely, if you join the subculture, choose an activity that promises the least exposure to risk of apprehension. That’s especially significant for someone of my stature, unfitted by nature for muscular undertakings.”

  “Very sensible,” I said.

  “My career as what is referred to in popular argot as a safecracker reflects my mechanical bent. But it also grew out of my desire to avoid incarceration. Safecracking is largely carried on behind the scenes and out of sight of the authorities.”

  I said, “Have you been successful at staying out of the law’s grasp?”

  “Largely.”

  “Tell Crang about out west,” Maury said.

  “I did a nickel in the B.C. pen,” Biscuit said. “Quite a taxing interlude in my life, but the experience provided me with another valuable lesson.”

  “Which was?”

  “Never venture far from home. Don’t go where you’re unfamiliar with the terrain and the methods of police enforcement.”

  “Toronto’s your natural stomping grounds?”

  “Should never have left.”

  Maury said, “Enough autobiography, Biscuit.”

  Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers blasted from the speakers. They weren’t bad. Sounded to me like Horace Silver on piano, Lee Morgan on trumpet. I didn’t know the tenor saxophone. They played us all the way to Highbury Road.

  Maury turned the music off and coasted past number 32. No police cars were in evidence. The yellow crime scene tape had been taken down.

  “You tell the peeping guy we’re gonna be out here?” Maury said to me.

  “I Spy’s been feeling hard done by lately,” I said. “But, yeah, I let him know. He ought to be in place at one of his windows.”

  Maury made two right turns and steered down a hill that ended on the edge of a park behind the backyards of the Highbury houses. He pulled the car into a relatively isolated area, and all of us got out. Biscuit was just about five feet. He carried in one hand the kind of black bag doctors on calls are never seen without. Everything about Biscuit was stylish except for the rubber boots on his feet. I hadn’t a doubt he normally wore shined oxfords.

  “These are to accommodate the terrain,” Biscuit said, pointing to the rubber boots. They were red, and looked like Biscuit had bought them in the children’s department.

  Maury led us in single file up a rough path. It wasn’t muddy enough to call for rubber boots, but Biscuit seemed happy with his choice in footwear. The path ended in number 32’s backyard.

  “Somebody’s been taking this route into the place the last weeks,” Maury said. “Enough times to make the path.”

  “I’m betting it was the third guy,” I said. “The one who came Monday nights only.”

  Maury picked the lock on the back door, and the three of us assembled in front of the safe. It sat in what once must have been a cupboard on the short staircase up to the kitchen. The safe was black, squarish in shape, old and cumbersome looking. Biscuit opened his bag. He took out a flashlight, a small notebook and a doctor’s stethoscope. He handed me the flashlight.

  “If you would oblige me, Mr. Crang,” he said. “Hold the light on the safe’s dials.”

  “My debut at safecracking,” I said.

  “Won’t be much of a lesson in this one, if I’ve read it correctly.”

  Biscuit leafed through his notebook. From the wear of the book’s cover and rumpled condition of the pages, I’d say he had given it the leafing treatment several hundred times before.

  “What I deduce,” Biscuit said, “this safe’s combination is what we call in the profession a tryout job. Manufacturer that made the safe sold it with a combination they already set. The reason being so the purchaser could go in there and set his own combination. But most people never got around to doing that. Manufacturer’s combination stayed operative. I got a list in my notebook here of every manufacturer’s tryout number. I’m betting it’ll work this time. That’s judging from the looks of this old safe.”

  Biscuit spun the dials, the stethoscope pressed to the safe in the close vicinity of the dial spinning. Biscuit had pretty hands, his motions with them dainty and precise. I could imagine his style holding a cup of tea, his pinky figure crooked in the air separate from the other fingers. He nodded as he spun the dials and listened through the stethoscope to the tumbling of the combination numbers. Or at least that was how I pictured th
e internal process. Biscuit was all silence and concentration.

  “I believe my supposition was correct,” he said, turning to speak to me.

  He pulled at the safe’s door. It swung open.

  “Shine the flashlight upward a trifle, Mr. Crang,” Biscuit said.

  I did what I was told. The flashlight’s beam aimed directly into the safe’s interior.

  “Oh my,” Biscuit said, “this is unfortunate.”

  The safe was empty.

  “Win some, Crang, lose some,” Maury said behind me.

  “What did you expect to find?” Biscuit said.

  I felt too deflated to answer right away. I’d allowed my optimism to outpace reality, and now I was paying the penalty. Or something clichéish like that. My hopes were dashed.

  “Some porcelain figures,” I said. “That’s what I was expecting. Relatively small figures.”

  Biscuit ducked his head partway into the safe, the top of his head brushing the safe’s ceiling. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “something very like small porcelain figures might have been in here recently. I’m supposing that from the state of the light dust on the safe’s bottom level.”

  “Could be it’s a case of we got here a day late,” Maury said.

  “Thanks, guys,” I said. “I’m beginning to cheer up.”

  “You’re on the right track, it might appear, Mr. Crang,” Biscuit said.

  “Okay, gentlemen, enough with the optimism,” I said.

  My cellphone went off in my pocket.

  “I trust this’s not bad news,” Biscuit said. He got very speedy about tidying up his work, stowing his implements of the trade in the doctor’s bag.

  I checked the cell’s screen and answered.

  “Yes, I Spy,” I said into the phone.

  “Did I understand you correctly, Crang?” I Spy sounded crisp. “You are going into 32 tonight with your other friends?”

  “We’re in, I Spy,” I said. “Just preparing to take our leave. Empty-handed.”

  “How could it be you’re in there?” I Spy sounded outraged. “I’ve not budged from my post in two hours. Haven’t seen a thing over at 32.”