Take Five

by Batten, Jack;

  Everybody clapped politely. The interpreter nudged Elvis, indicating he and Trixi should step closer to Elizabeth. Elvis moved up, leading Trixi with him. Kisses followed all round, Elvis kissing Elizabeth, Elvis kissing Trixi, the two women kissing one another, Elvis laying another big smacker on Elizabeth.

  The interpreter joined Elvis who began to talk in Chinese. According to the interpreter, Elvis was inviting everyone in the room to visit Company of Fools at one of his houses in China. “But,” the interpreter said, quoting Elvis, “you must come under cover.”

  The gathering chuckled in a knowing fashion.

  Elvis handed Elizabeth a plain white envelope, no doubt containing the fourteen million in a cheque or some other paper form. Elizabeth smiled a very broad smile, and another round of kisses ensued.

  Isabel signalled us servers to get cracking.

  “Pour the champagne,” Becky said to me.

  Three of the Chinese guys had left the room, and returned carrying large suitcases. When they opened the suitcases, I could see rows of compartments just the right size to accommodate a ceramic figure in each compartment. The Chinese guys started packing the suitcases.

  Damn, the ceremony was whipping along too fast. Charles and the Levin gang would still be six or seven minutes from reaching the house. The Chinese contingent could be pulling away with the goods by the time the Levin people arrived. I had to stall the proceedings.

  I picked up a tray of full champagne glasses and limped across the library to the group that included the principal players. Elvis, Trixi, Elizabeth, Lou and the interpreter. All of them had their hands ready to reach for the champagne. But passing out the bubbly wasn’t what I had in mind. Instead, I tipped the tray, sending a glass spilling down the front of Elvis’s shirt and suit jacket. The glass had landed exactly as I had intended. Another glass tumbled over Elizabeth’s dress. That part I hadn’t intended. It was collateral damage. Collateral soakage, to be more accurate. Elizabeth let out a yiyi sound. She looked like a contestant in a wet T-shirt contest. The soaked fabric of her dress clung to every curve of her delicious upper body. She would have won the wet T-shirt contest by a landslide.

  Elvis fired a blur of angry Chinese at the interpreter who signalled his colleagues for help. They rushed forward with handkerchiefs to mop the boss’s shirtfront. Lou, who still didn’t seem to have noted that I was the careless waiter, began to perform a similar mopping job on Elizabeth’s dress. The commotion had brought proceedings to a general halt. That was okay by me. A delay in things until the museum people got to the house was what I had intended.

  I turned around to check who was where. Isabel was looking daggers at me. Becky wasn’t sure whether to laugh or show concern. Crazy Rocky was the one I worried about. I didn’t need to look far for him. He was lunging across the floor, his pistol out in plain sight.

  “I got you now, pal,” he said. He was talking to me, the gun pointed at my chest.

  “Rocky!” Lou said, his voice riding on its familiar combination of cool and authority. He’d put aside his mopping for the moment in favour of upbraiding Rocky. That meant his eyes fell on me for the first time that I was aware of. But Lou kept on addressing Rocky, the only guy in the room with a gun in his hand. “Not in here, Rocky, for god’s sake.”

  Rocky slowed his stride. “Just a knee, boss. Lemme cap the son of a bitch. Maybe two knees.”

  “Rocky,” Lou said in an even sharper voice than before. “Leave Crang till later. We got business first, you blockhead.”

  Rocky ignored his boss. He lowered his aim to knee level. My knee level. The guy was totally serious about capping me. He was nuts enough to do the job in front of all these witnesses.

  He cocked the revolver. He was a fraction of a second away from making me a customer for a wheelchair.

  To my left and Rocky’s right, I registered a swish of movement. Rocky turned his head slightly. He’d had a glimpse of whatever I’d seen. It was Becky. She had a champagne bottle in her hand, and she was pulling it back into smacking position. She swung it around, practically at blur speed, until it made a resounding connection with Rocky’s right hand. It hit square on his wounded pinky.

  Rocky let out a screech of pain. Then his eyes shut, and he slid to the floor. The guy looked like he’d fainted dead away.

  Lou reacted first. He snapped his fingers at Spike and one other bodyguard.

  “Drag that moron out of here,” he said, pointing to Rocky. Then Lou turned back to the soaked Elizabeth while the bodyguards carted Rocky away.

  Elvis had taken off his sopping shirt, and a guy in his posse who had removed his own shirt handed the dry replacement to his boss. The rest of the guests were staring at the strange events, knocking back champagne and babbling noisily to one another. For the moment, nobody seemed to give a damn about me. Even Lou was ignoring me. But that would last only until he finished drying off Elizabeth.

  Becky, standing beside me, looked as pleased as punch.

  “Even if Isabel fires me,” she said, “I’m glad I whacked that guy.”

  “Becky,” I said, “you saved my bacon.”

  “You think he was actually gonna pull the trigger?”

  “Haven’t a doubt.”

  “Well,” Becky said, “the least I could do was keep him from harming you. That’s the main thing.”

  “Really? I’m very flattered.”

  “You’re exactly like someone who means the world to me.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My dad.”

  “Oh.”

  What kind of afternoon was I having? Almost got my knee capped. Lost the feeling in one leg. An attractive young woman said she saw me not as Crang the gallant man of action but as a second-line father figure.

  And on the floor, right in front of me, Chinese guys were filling suitcases with fourteen million dollars’ worth of ceramic figures they’d heisted from the rightful Canadian owners. For a moment I had too much on my mind to decide what to do next.

  38

  The library door, which had been half open the last time I looked, swung all the way in, banging against one of the Chinese guys with a suitcase. Through the door charged Charles and what I took to be the ladies of the Levin board.

  “Grab the guy with the suitcase,” I shouted at Charles.

  Simultaneously, Elizabeth let out a sound somewhere between a shriek and a cry of distress.

  “Melissa?” she said. “What are you doing here?!”

  Charles put an arm lock on the Chinese guy with the suitcase while a tall, slender woman stepped out from the crowd of Levin ladies. She had a pronounced take-charge manner and was without question Melissa Novak. She even looked like a younger Lauren Bacall.

  “Elizabeth,” she said, “don’t bother to resign from the board. We’ve already voted to kick you off.”

  Melissa glanced down at the two Chinese guys packing Company of Fools figures into their padded suitcases.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Melissa said. “Who are you people?”

  Lou turned his head from Elizabeth’s soaked dress. “Who the hell are you, lady?” he said to Melissa, one authority figure to another.

  “A representative of the museum that owns these figures,” Melissa said. “Got that, buster? And who the hell are you?”

  “I own the house you just trespassed into.”

  “Then you better watch your step,” Melissa said, “or your wife’ll be off to the hoosegow.”

  The interpreter, taking all of this in, fired a blue streak of Chinese at Elvis and Trixi. The longer the interpreter talked, the more steely Elvis seemed to get. When the interpreter finished, Elvis snapped off a bunch of sharp-sounding orders to his guys. Taking their cues from Elvis, the guys turned steely themselves. They were snappy about unloading the suitcases. They put the figures back on the display table and hurried out of the library with the empty cases.

  The interpreter turned to Elizabeth.

  “Mr. Wang want me to t
ell you, deal off,” the interpreter said. “Thanking you and goodbye from Elvis and Trixi.”

  Elizabeth hadn’t said another word since Melissa’s arrival stunned her into a state close to catatonic. Lou was giving her wet white dress the final drying touches with his handkerchief and a couple more hankies his bodyguards had contributed to the operation. All the while, Elizabeth had been holding the envelope from Elvis up in the air, keeping it safe from the danger of further champagne spraying.

  Elvis, Trixi, the interpreter and the last remnants of the Chinese contingent began their swift troop march toward the library door. As Trixi passed Elizabeth, she reached up and plucked the envelope from Elizabeth’s hand. Elizabeth still made no sound. The Chinese kept speed marching until they disappeared down the hall, gone with empty suitcases and fourteen million bucks.

  “Ladies,” Melissa said to the Levin women, “prepare the Company figures for transport back to their rightful home.”

  The women got busy with their assignment while Melissa made a survey of the room. Her eyes landed on me.

  “Mr. Crang?”

  I nodded.

  “One more service, if you please,” Melissa said. “Where is Hugette Jennings?”

  I’d already noted Hugette slumped on the crimson-and-gold armchair on the other side of the room. If it was possible for a six-foot woman to look forlorn, Hugette had managed the feat. She appeared even more drained of hope than Elizabeth. Tears trickled down both cheeks. She stared, unspeaking, at Melissa.

  “You, young lady, are fired,” Melissa said. “And when I’m finished with your reputation, you’ll never work in the ceramics world again. In any capacity.”

  By the end of Melissa’s short dressing-down, the room had fallen silent and almost empty. Lou’s pals and their wives had already beat it. The Chinese were gone. Isabel now led Becky and the other catering kids in the direction of the kitchen. Melissa, the Levin ladies and Charles hiked away with the Company of Fools figures. Charles gave me a jaunty wave of departure, followed by the dreaded thumbs-up.

  Only Lou, Elizabeth, Hugette and I were left in the library, aside from Spike and two other members of Lou’s bodyguard squad. They stood, unmoving and alert, in the room’s far distances.

  “Crang,” Lou said to me, “one thing I’ll say about you, you got a lot of balls, still hanging around here.”

  “Some clients think it’s my most winning characteristic.”

  A cranky expression took over Lou’s face. He said, “You aren’t out of this house in two minutes, I’m telling my guys to finish the job Rocky started.”

  “Lou,” I said, “you need my help.”

  Lou came as close to blowing his top as I’d so far seen. “What the fuck you talking about?” he said.

  “You still got a killing on your hands, and I know the only way to resolve it,” I said.

  Lou seemed to have nothing to say to that, at least for the moment. He was a quick thinker, and maybe he’d anticipated some of what was to come. He and I both knew his wife could soon be dealing with the law if things didn’t break right for her. Lou had no doubt figured out in the last few minutes that Elizabeth had messed around with stolen ceramic figures, the figures that had until a few minutes ago been sitting in his very own library. That was one of Lou’s problems, but not the only possible source of trouble.

  “Grace Nguyen’s the dead victim in the story,” I said, “and the person who caused her death was young Hugette here.”

  All eyes turned to Hugette in the ugly chair. Up until then, her weeping had included no histrionic carryings-on. Now she dropped her head into her hands and let out a terrible wail.

  I waited until she quieted by a decibel or two. “But I’ve got the inside dope to make the argument she couldn’t have intended to kill Grace.”

  Hugette lifted her head and looked at me. “It was an accident!” she said, her voice so loud it seemed to echo off the walls.

  “Where in hell are you getting the so-called inside information, Crang?” Lou said. “What makes you think the dame here didn’t do a deliberate killing? You can’t be dumb enough to take her word for it. Everybody caught in a murder, for crissake, everybody says they didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “Hugette and Crang are right, sweetheart.” Elizabeth spoke up for the first time, her voice not much above a whisper. “It really was an accident.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Lou asked his wife.

  “I was there,” Elizabeth said. “I was out at Highbury that night.”

  While the rest of us considered what Elizabeth had just said, she wore the look of someone who wasn’t through with the personal revelations.

  “Grace threatened us,” Elizabeth said. “All we needed from her was one more of the copies she’d made of the Company figures, but she refused to give it to us. She had finished it, the one with the giraffe face, but she said unless we paid her another half a million dollars, she was keeping it.”

  Hugette spoke up. “She said she needed more money because she was pregnant. Right away, I knew she was lying.”

  “Afraid not, Hugette,” I said. “Grace really was pregnant.”

  “Come on, Crang, how’d you find out a thing like that?” Lou said, clearly not enjoying any of what he was hearing.

  “From one of the very few people in a position to provide intimate information about Grace,” I said. “From the coroner who did her autopsy.”

  Hugette slumped a little in the awful chair.

  “You have to understand the pressure, Lou,” Elizabeth said. “We all stood to profit enormously from the deal, me, Hugette, Rocky, Grace herself, and then, out there in the Highbury driveway, Grace was saying she’d pull the plug on everything.”

  “Rocky, he’s in this everyplace I look,” Lou said. “The guy’s turned into somebody way more trouble than he’s worth.”

  “The reason I hired him, Lou,” Elizabeth said, “I needed someone big and mean to protect the girls.”

  “Forget Rocky for a minute, you two,” I said. I aimed a question at Elizabeth. “What happened out there at the house with Grace? You and she and Hugette were arguing about her demand for more money. What came next?”

  “Not so much an argument,” Elizabeth said. “But, anyway, what happened after that was Hugette suddenly swung her fist at Grace.”

  “I’d never punched anyone in my life before,” Hugette said, her voice on the edge of hysteria.

  “Grace fell over,” Elizabeth said. “At first, I thought it was a joke. Grace was faking. I might’ve even laughed. But then I realized she was dead, the way she looked, her nose and eyes, the mess of her face.”

  “So you and Hugette dragged Grace’s body into the woods?” I said.

  “From the driveway, yeah,” Elizabeth said. “Then we went back into the house. We found the giraffe figure right away in Grace’s makeup kit. Grace had finished it. So we packed it up, and left Highbury.”

  “A couple more questions,” I said. “Why was Hugette out there that particular night?”

  “The times she came to Highbury,” Elizabeth said, “they were when Grace had finished one or two figures. Hugette picked them up, usually on Mondays, and hid them in a secret place in her office at the Levin. Waiting for when we switched Grace’s copies for the originals.”

  “A switch that took place this morning?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Elizabeth said. “At 4 a.m. Hugette is a very efficient person. She brought the originals down to me waiting in the Levin’s parking lot.”

  I thought for a minute about how things might have turned out if I’d waited longer at Bartello’s and intercepted Elizabeth in the parking lot. No, I thought, that was a mug’s game, all the what-ifs. I was going to stick to present realities. Always a good philosophy.

  I had a couple more questions for Elizabeth.

  “Why did you send Isabel to pick up Grace at Highbury that night when you knew Grace was already dead?” I said.

  “That damn Isabel’s been t
alking to you,” Elizabeth said. It came out like the accusation it was. Elizabeth seemed to be recovering her fighting spirit.

  “Everybody’s been talking to me,” I said. “Including you. So answer the question.”

  “It was like a piece of misdirection, getting Isabel to drive out there,” Elizabeth said. “So if the cops should get into it, and one of them asked me what I knew, I could say I knew nothing. I’d tell the cop I even sent my housekeeper to drive Grace long after she died.”

  “Cynical,” I said.

  “I call it smart,” Lou said.

  I said to Elizabeth, “It was the same thing when you and Hugette asked Rocky if he killed Grace? A piece of misdirection?”

  “If you want to look at it that way,” Elizabeth said.

  I shrugged and turned to Hugette. I wanted to get her ready for what was to come in her life. “I’m guessing you haven’t had a doctor look at your hand,” I said. “Underneath the glove, your right hand’s probably a mess.”

  “How could I have gone to a doctor?” Hugette said, her voice rising, the wail threatening to make a return. “I’d have to tell him how it happened. But I didn’t mean to kill Grace. I just lost my mind for a second. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “We’ll get to that part,” I said. “But first you’ll need to get the hand examined right away. X-rays, photos of the outside of the hand, the whole deal. They’ll be part of what your lawyer’ll take to the Crown.”

  “What are you talking about, Crang?” Lou said.

  “A lawyer’s got to make a deal for Hugette by Monday. Promise the Crown a guilty plea in return for a reduced charge. Plead to manslaughter probably.”

  “Oh, I get it, smart guy,” Lou said. “This is the part where you say you’ll take the case, and, by the way, your fee’s a million bucks.”

  “The fee would be a long way short of a million, Lou,” I said. “But I’m not going to be the lawyer in the case anyway. I’m going to recommend someone you should hire.”

  “What, out of the blue, you’re turning modest?”