The Laughing Falcon
Page 1
A Life on Trial: The Case of Robert Frisbee
“This is as good as it gets, the real goods from an ultimate insider.”
– Jack Batten, Books in Canada
Needles
“Deverell has a narrative style so lean that scenes and characters seem to explode on the page. He makes the evil of his plot breathtaking and his surprises like shattering glass.”
– Philadelphia Bulletin
High Crimes
“Deverell’s lean mean style gives off sparks. A thriller of the first rank.”
— Publishers Weekly
Mecca
“Here is another world-class thriller, fresh, bright and topical.”
— Globe and Mail
The Dance of Shiva
“The most gripping courtroom drama since Anatomy of a Murder.”
– Globe and Mail
Platinum Blues
“A fast, credible and very funny novel.”
—The Sunday Times,London UK
Mindfield
“Deverell has a fine eye for evil, and a remarkable sense of place.”
— Globe and Mail
Kill All the Lawyers
“An indiscreet and entertaining mystery that will add to the author’s reputation as one of Canada’s finest mystery writers”
— The Gazette
Street Legal: The Betrayal
“Deverell injects more electricity into his novels than anyone currently writing in Canada – perhaps anywhere… The dialogue crackles, the characters live and breathe, and the pacing positively propels.”
– London Free Press
Trial of Passion
“A ripsnortingly good thriller.”
– Regina Leader-Post
Slander
“Slander is simply excellent: a story that just yanks you along.”
– Globe and Mail
BOOKS BY WILLIAM DEVERELL
FICTION
Needles
High Crimes
Mecca
The Dance of Shiva
Platinum Blues
Mindfield Kill All the Lawyers
Street Legal: The Betrayal
Trial of Passion
Slander
The Laughing Falcon
Mind Games
NON-FICTION
A Life on Trial (previously published as Fatal Cruise)
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - The Torrid Zone
Chapter 2 - Hymns to a Dying Planet
Chapter 3 - The Treasure of Savage River
Chapter 4 - Dead Mice in the Beer
Chapter 5 - No Time For Sorrow
Chapter 6 - Do Not Trust Archbishop Mora
Chapter 7 - The Darkside of the Moon
Chapter 8 - Various Views From the Edge of the Precipice
Chapter 9 - Prisoner of Love
Chapter 10 - The Lost Mission of Harry Wilder
Chapter 11 - The Full Guaco
Chapter 12 - Gamma Ray Burster
Chapter 13 - No Time For Sorrow
Chapter 14 - Our Man in Panama
Chapter 15 - Return to the House of Heartbreak
Author’s Note
Copyright
For the Sierra Legal Defence Fund
Dear Jacques,
Midtown Manhattan looks like a painted whore in December, the weather would freeze a polar bear’s nuts, and the Rangers just lost their fourth straight. What depresses me more is the thought of you lolling around in the tropical sunshine while I break my ass up here.
But I’m doing too well to kill myself. It turns out getting disbarred was the best thing that could have happened, career-wise. I just signed up this big horse for the Bruins, the agency flourishes, and life is fat – and now suddenly your whining letter lands on my desk. No, Jacques, I do not intend to advance you a “small tiding of faith” until your latest poems get published. Your mooching has inspired me with a more breathtaking idea, which doesn’t require you to suffer the mortifying shame of indebtedness to your oldest, dearest friend. When you sent me that last batch of verses, asking me to try to flog them, I started thinking – why not a literary sideline? So I have decided that instead of you having to grovel, I will personally advance you a couple of grand against royalties for the smash best-seller you are about to write.
I’m not talking poetry, which doesn’t sell even if you’re Shakespeare and you’ve been dead for five hundred years. This may hurt, Jacques, but I never thought you were much of a poet anyway. In fact I found the shit you mailed me too depressing to read. Hymns to a Dying Planet? But you can turn out a phrase, and my idea is to have you rip off an old-fashioned thriller that I’ll flog to publishers as the work of a triple agent hiding in the tropics. Put the right ingredients in and the big houses will be flocking to the doorstep of the R. B. Rubinstein Agency, waving fistfuls of dead presidents.
One of those ingredients is blood. I want a body count. I want a two-fisted hero, not some whining patsy crippled with sorrow and woe like the schnockered poet who’s right now reading this letter. I’m thinking more James Bondish – maybe he’s hiding out in the tropics, only he can foil Dr. Zork’s plan to take over the world, and Zork is trying to blip him off.
I looked up the rules. You throw in a big red herring near the start. You invent a twist that comes at you like a slapshot. You create a kick-ass hero and a ravishing heroine with whom you ultimately engage in explicit sex. And you pay me my standard commission, no reduction for failed poets.
Are the girls still going topless at the far end of the beach? Someone better put a stop to that, some poor schlemiel could get a heart attack.
Give me an outline, a chapter.
Rocky.
THE TORRID ZONE
– 1 –
Maggie Schneider stirred from a dream of balmy breezes on a tropical shore. She fought for the dream and lost it as she squinted out her window at the brittle crust on roofs and frozen front lawns. The sky was a murky mat, spewing snow that the wind whirled into white cyclones, setting them dancing on the street below.
Beyond, across the river, smoke was pumping from the chunky buildings of downtown Saskatoon: a pleasant-enough city were it not twenty degrees below zero and fifty-two degrees above the equator (much closer to the Arctic Circle).
As full wakefulness came, Maggie remembered with a jolt she would be serving just one more day and night under the tyrannical reign of this Saskatchewan winter, and then …
Costa Rica! Two weeks she would spend in a lush land where tires do not freeze square, where the tears brought on by the biting winds don’t freeze on your face.
An agent at Hub City Travel (“Escape from those winter blahs with our ticket to paradise”) had shown her a brochure: a mist-thick waterfall, a hummingbird in a poinciana, a breast-shaped boat-filled bay and its sweeping crescent of sandy beach. Seduced by these promises, she had signed on for four days and three nights in an exotic jungle retreat: the Eco-Rico Lodge. “A wilderness experience you’ll never forget,” though you are not likely to forget the thousand-dollar price tag, either.
She had found the tiny country in her atlas – squeezed between Panama and Nicaragua along a mountainous isthmus connecting the two American continents, with the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea lapping lovingly at its shores. Central America! Tropical jungle! Non-stop hot days and warm nights: two glorious weeks to inspire a novelof romance.
There, in the sticky heat of the tangled rain forest, Fiona (sassy, bright, and self-reliant) will find romance with Jacques (suave, cosmopolitan) in a seething epic to be called The Torrid Zone.
She powered herself to her feet, trott
ed to the shower, stood under it for several luxurious minutes. Maybe she would find a grass shack in Costa Rica; maybe she would never come back. She had paid her penance, surviving twenty-nine Saskatchewan winters. Her needs were simple: a pen and a pad and a pina colada. Maybe throw in Jacques.
In the meantime, Maggie must gird herself for the office Christmas party at CSKN-TV (“Voice of the Wheatlands, Your Channel Ten Eye to the Universe”). Her job as copywriter was the career equivalent of a temporary filling; she had not spent six years in university and authored an applauded thesis on the satirical constructs of Jane Austen to rhapsodize about sports equipment and bargains at the Bay.
Maggie had faith she could make a full-time living from her writing – if she broke out of the mould, those assembly-line paperbacks from which Primrose Books makes its millions. Maggie Schneider (alias Nancy Ward, her WASPish pen name) would give Primrose Books a full-lipped goodbye kiss when The Torrid Zone was published in hardcover by the highest bidder. She had a track record: her first three Primrose romances under its Ecstasy imprint had sold well enough, and she had actually found her way onto supermarket shelves on her fourth try, mastering all the euphemisms for body parts conjoining in the act of love.
With her latest, best-selling author Nancy Ward breaks new ground … Yes, it must be a different book: a sweeping adventure, sinuous in style, resonating with danger and desire, plumbing the elusive essence of love (though, never having been gripped by that apparently indispensable life experience, Maggie was not sure if she would recognize it if it landed on her head).
Creative Writing 403: The serious writer is intrigued by the unknown, and is driven to explore it. But where? Down what misty byway? Does it take one gently by the hand, or do its pitiless arrows wound the heart? Do stars glow fiercely and violins soar as they do for Fiona?
Towelling off before the mirror, Maggie sought to reassure herself she would not be the object of pitying stares on the beach with her broomstick figure. At almost six feet, with her hair clipped short, she looked vaguely androgynous. As a girl, Maggie had endured much schoolyard humour: the Giraffe, Maggie Flamingo – or often Maggie Klutz, because she was awkward at times.
Her mother kept insisting she had a poor self-image, that she had no idea how “ravaging” she looked, just like one of those swan-necked supermodels. She meant ravishing: Mrs. Malaprop.
From the stairs to her office, Maggie could survey the main studio, where Connie Veregin was fussing with a clove-spiked ham: spiffy food ideas for the holidays on The Happy Homemaker Show. She made her way past the cages where they kept the artists to a large glassed-in cubicle where sat her desk, her computer, and Brod Kipling, a friendly gasbag who bought twenty minutes a week. “Auto World on Eighth Street East: we have the wheels, you make the deals.”
Brod wanted a different image for the Christmas push. “Instead of my ugly mug, I was thinking about using a hockey star. Saskatchewan boy, like Hit Man Hogan on the Ducks.”
“That would cost scads. You’d be better off spending it on more air time. You’ve no idea how telegenic you are.” She bit her tongue.
“You think so? I’ve been getting some feedback from my wife. She says I can’t do the soft sell; it just don’t sound like the real me.”
“Ever thought a more sincere approach might work better?”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Hi, folks, my name is Brod Kipling, and I’m a used car dealer. Now, I know most of you have heard the fancy expression ‘pre-owned vehicles,’ but I talk straight, and I give the straight goods – there, you come across as honest; that’s what you have to overcome: the common belief car salesmen are a little shady.”
“Okay, write me up something sincere like that.”
Maggie hated this job.
Just before seven, Maggie joined the CSKN staff in the main studio, where everyone was waiting for the news to wrap and the party to get underway. “And that does it for Friday, December eleventh,” said Roland Davidson, the agonizingly handsome news anchor. His gaffe seemed to go unnoticed: right day, wrong date. It was the twelfth.
He turned to Frieda Lisieux for some hour-ending happy talk. “Going to any Christmas parties this weekend, Frieda?”
She hesitated, as if unsure how to answer. The weather–person, if she held to previous form, would party with gusto as soon as the news-sports-and-weather team uttered its final banality to the wasteland.
“I think I’ll just curl up with a good book,” Frieda chirruped. Maggie almost gagged: first, you have to learn to read.
“Good way to stay out of trouble.” Roland turned to Art Wolsely, whose wavy toupee seemed unusually lopsided this evening. “Big game for the Blades tonight. Going to be there?”
“Yep, I sure am –”
Roland, glancing at the clock, sliced Art off. “Have a good weekend and, folks, please drive safely.” His words flowed like warm corn syrup down a stack of pancakes.
Credits roll, voices off, a wide shot of the Eye on the City team smiling fondly at each other, their lips moving soundlessly, Roland tidying his stack of news copy. An arm chops the air, the harsh lights dim, and Frieda explodes. “What do you mean, good way to stay out of trouble? You make it sound like I have a reputation.”
“At least you didn’t get a fucking cork stuffed down your throat halfway through a sentence.” Art Wolsely snapped off his clip-on tie and made his way to The Happy Homemaker set and its self-help bar.
Roland was engaged now with the station manager, who was saying something about him “screwing up again” – obviously over the date miscue. Maggie wondered if his career was littered with a history of similar fox paws (as her mother would put it), offences for which he had been sentenced to Saskatoon.
He caught her eye: a wan smile. Maggie felt … what? Fiona felt a curiously erotic tingling. Not quite; more a sensation of prickles. She smiled back, remembered not to slouch. He had not spoken more than ten words to her in the three weeks since he transferred from the network’s Montreal station. He was said to be married, but no one had seen his wife; maybe she had remained behind.
Frieda Lisieux, like a nectar-laden flower, had gathered several hummingbirds about her while drifting casually toward the sprig of mistletoe above the control room door. What lucky fellow would deposit his pollen on the stigma of her poinciana tonight? The personnel director, maybe, or the comptroller or one of the lusty camera operators?
Maggie sensed liaisons were subtly being made, and felt lonely. She fled to a haven behind the Christmas tree, lit with strands of chili lights, red and green, tiny flaccid penises.
“We’ve never been formally introduced. Roland Davidson.”
Startled, she whirled in a half-circle, losing her balance and nearly knocking the drink from his hand. I’m Maggie Klutz, such a pleasure to meet you. Recovering, determined not to appear shy, she offered a firm, unwavering grip.
“Margaret Schneider. Maggie.”
He held her hand for slightly longer than etiquette required. An unruly lock of hair had come unstuck, curling down his forehead and spoiling his perfectly-in-place image; she wanted to brush it back.
She erupted in mindless chatter, like Frieda filling the space between news and commercials. Yes, she was in advertising, she had been with the station three years but writing fiction was her passion, she had published four paperbacks, though they were maybe not his cup of tea, and she was taking holidays starting tomorrow, off to Costa Rica on some horrible late-arriving flight. An amiable discussion about her fear of flying was followed by this:
“Would you be interested in getting together, Maggie, if you have some time later?”
“You mean tonight?” Why was he seeking this social engagement?
To that unasked question came an improbable answer: “When our eyes met, I … I don’t know, I felt a kind of connection.”
That seemed to come from the outer limits of corniness; she wondered if he was joking. “I can’t stay up late.”
The
y met at a dark downtown lounge. A “quick one,” Maggie had stressed, blushing then, concerned he might read an improper innuendo in the phrase. The quick one had turned into two; his were doubles.
She tried to persuade herself she was not playing the role of Christmas party pickup. I felt a kind of connection. Well, sometimes it happened: one suddenly, mysteriously, clicked with another person. She had written often enough about the blinding flash that mesmerizes her heroines but had felt nothing remotely so profound with Roland.
What were the rules of engagement here? No affairs with married men, she told herself. He had mentioned, with a weary shrug, some “personal problems.” Was he separated? Did not that bring a liaison within permissible bounds?
“So tell me about these problems.”
“I think my wife and I are splitting up.”
“You think.”
“I … I’m not ready to talk about it. Too crowded here.” He looked searchingly through the lenses of her spectacles. “Do you have a place where we could talk?”
“Yes, but … I’m not sure about this.”
“Why don’t you take those glasses off for a second?”
She took them from her face, and he blurred around the edges.
“Your eyes are very attractive.”
“I can’t use contacts. If you’re not five feet in front of me, I can hardly make you out.”
“We could always get closer than that.”
She put her glasses back on. “Is your wife at home?”
“She’s not expecting me till late.”
“Kids?”
He hesitated. “Two boys.”
“Did you do this a lot in Montreal?”
“What?”
“Fool around on your wife.”
“Is that what you think this is?”
“That’s what I know this is.”
– 2 –
Maggie braved the wind tunnel between her mother’s house and the neighbour’s, entering by the back door. Beverley was in the kitchen rolling dough for cinnamon buns; she was still shapely at fifty-six, though tending to a thickness of hip. Maggie inherited her skinny genes from her father.