“Doesn’t CQC ever get fooled?” I asked.
“Yeah, sometimes. There was a big scandal with this guy Chuck Swinburne back in 2005. Basically, what happened is one year an AF 15 with a score of 8.8 came up for sale at Heritage, one of the big online auction houses. Heritage puts up these crazy high quality scans up on their website. So that comic sold. A few years go by, and another AF 15 comes up for sale at auction. Only this one is graded 9.2. But some dudes online figure out by looking at the scans that it’s the same comic. Because these old comics, you can tell. Just the position of the staples or a little wrinkle or a crease or something. And so: how’d the same comic get a better score like that? Turns out it had been restored with micro-trimming.”
“What?” Dean said.
“Just trimming the edges of the comic by a tiny little amount,” Peter said. “Shaving off tiny bits to make the edges straighter and smoother. It can make that little difference that’s worth a lot of money. Anyway, it was such a good job it had fooled CQC. So the book got traced back to Swinburne and it was a big scandal. CQC offered to re-grade all the books he’d ever submitted for free. And Swinburne is out of the hobby now. If he went to a convention he’d get attacked.”
“Can I just say that’s nuts?” I said.
“Yeah,” Peter said. “It’s kind of nuts.”
“First, who wants comic books if you can’t even look at them?” I said. “Second, what the hell is 0.2 quality difference worth? Especially if you can’t take them out of the box? Why does it matter so much if it’s restored?”
“Look man,” Peter said. “Your guess is as good as mine. But the money involved has really gone up with CQC now. With the trust that they’ve been able to bring to the hobby, a lot more people are participating. But they aren’t making more vintage comics. So prices go up.”
“CQC makes a lot of money?” Dean asked.
“Presumably.” Peter said. “But it’s a private company, so who knows?”
“Okay,” Dean said.
Dean opened his briefcase and took out the empty box.
“Recognize this?” he asked.
Peter flipped it around in his hands.
“Yeah, where’s the comic?”
“We found it empty in Brucie’s room.”
“Empty?” Peter asked.
“Yeah,” Dean said. “We don’t know where the comic is, or who stole it.”
“Stole it?” Peter said. “You said you found the empty box in Brucie’s room?”
“Yeah,” Dean said.
“Well, why would they leave the box behind if they stole it? It loses a lot of its value.”
“You could report it stolen though, right?” I said. “If you kept a record of the CQC number?”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “But even so, I don’t understand why a thief would leave the box behind. Why wouldn’t he just take the comic out of the box when he got home? I think Brucie must have taken it out himself.”
“But why would he do that?” Dean asked.
“Hold on,” Peter said. “Let me check something.”
Peter shooed the red-haired clerk away from the computer and logged onto the CQC website. In a moment he’d pulled up the grading notes of the comic Brucie had bought.
“See, this is interesting,” Peter said. “Look.”
He turned the monitor so we could see what he was looking at: a scan of a type-written document with three columns of point-form notes.
“Looks like one guy graded it 9.0, one 9.2 and one 8.8.”
“Is that usual?” Dean asked.
“No,” Peter said. “It’s not unheard of, but it’s not usual, no.”
“So how much is the price spread on this comic?” Dean asked. “How much difference does 0.2 make?”
“On this comic?” Peter asked. “I would say if a 9.0 is $9,000, an 8.8 is around $2,000, and a 9.2 would be $20,000. At least.”
“Holy shit,” Dean said. “So if he resubmits it, and the average goes up …”
“He’d make at least ten grand,” Peter confirmed. “To tell you the truth, now that I think of it, I was thinking of resubmitting this one myself, before Brucie bought it. There’s a risk of course. It could go down instead of up.”
“You might want to give it a little helping,” the red haired clerk laughed.
“Helping?” Dean said. “Like restoration?”
“Well,” Peter said, “there are things you can do that don’t count as restoration. Pressing is a good example. You basically iron the wrinkles out of the comic. Some people online say that counts as restoration, but CQC doesn’t. I mean, how could it? If I put a comic underneath a heavy book, am I restoring it? Of course not.”
“Brucie never told you he was going to resubmit it, though, right?” Dean asked.
“No, he said it was for his dad. I remember that.”
“And he obviously didn’t resubmit it through this store?”
“No. No way.”
“Hmm,” Dean said. “Okay. One last thing: does CQC keep a record of who submits what comic?”
“Well,” Peter said, “it’s not available to the public. And as you can see, it’s not on the grading notes. But yeah, I bet they’ve got something somewhere. Which account it was submitted through, anyway.”
“Can you guess what I’m going to ask you next?” Dean said, smiling a little.
“You want to know the account this comic was originally submitted through?”
“Yes sir.”
“For Jay,” Peter said. “Anything.”
“Thanks Peter,” Dean said. He set his business card down. “We really appreciate it.”
We stopped at Starbucks on our way back to the subway. Dean got an unsweetened iced coffee and I got a pumpkin spice latte.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Dean said as we ambled south.
We were coming up on the edge of Sherwood Park, part of the same network of parks and ravines where Brucie had died. From here, you could take wooded trails all the way down to the lake.
“I bet you he resubmitted that bad boy,” I said. “That’s why he checked the grading scores before he bought it. We know he had money trouble.”
“Well, if he resubmitted it, we should be able to figure out where,” Dean said. “Check the bank statements and the credit card statements again. If nothing comes up, start making calls.”
“You got it boss,” I said. “What do we do now?”
“Let’s go to the rippers,” he said.
14
But first we went to Jack Astors and sat on the patio overlooking Dundas Square. Dean drank virgin Caesars and I had Bud Light Lime. We chatted about basketball, both of us complaining about the lockout, while the sun went down. During the conversation Dean’s phone buzzed and he picked it up and looked at it. His expression was very casual as he set it back down again. It’s not an excuse, but when I grabbed it to read what it said, I wasn’t expecting to see anything personal.
Hey sexy turtle, when do I get to suck u off??
I dropped the phone as if I’d been scalded.
“Dude,” Dean said,”what the fuck?”
“Sorry man!” I said. “I didn’t know.
“Well, what did you think it was?”
“I don’t know, I said.
And it’s true, I hadn’t known. I do that all the time, look at people’s e-mails, their texts, whatever. I’m a curious guy. But what alarmed me was my memory of Dean’s face when he’d seen that text. The blank look. Like he was looking at a grocery list or a note from his boss. I knew they’d been married a few years, and she’d had his kid, and romance doesn’t last forever. I know that one better than anybody. But there was something off about it, something that worried me.
“Sexy turtle?” I said, trying to change the subject.
Dean smiled.
“Peep not through keyholes,” he said, “lest ye be vexed.”
“Hey,” I said, “you know, we don’t have t
o go to the strippers tonight.”
“No, tonight’s a good night. Work is finally under control.”
“Okay,” I said.
The Brass Rail was in a little mini red-light area, just north of Zanzibar’s (another strip club) and a sex toy emporium. Pictures of women, bronzed and pneumatic, were all over the front entrance. The bouncer nodded us through and we checked in our coats with the girls.
“Is Tanya on tonight?” Dean asked.
“Ten pm” the girl said with a bright smile. “But she’s in the Upper Rail.”
I always feel this big urge to flirt with the coat check girls, the waitresses, and the bartender in strip clubs. Everyone but the strippers.
“All right,” Dean said.
We had to pay an extra ten bucks each, and then we climbed the purple carpeted stairs into the dark with the deep bass thudding all around us. We passed through another door into the Upper Rail. It was mostly empty. Just one table of dudes in suits and then a few pervs up on perverts row. An Asian girl was bending over and gripping her ankles on the stage, surrounding by mirrors, so that every square inch of her skin was on display. She slowly traced her hands up her legs. AC/DC was blaring over the sound system.
We sat down. Every few minutes a girl would wander up and sit in my lap, and I’d flirt with them, until they finally asked me whether I wanted a dance. When I said no, they’d leave. Only one or two bothered making a pass at Dean. He had a polite way of looking at them that was completely absent of desire.
Mostly we watched the baseball game, which was on the TV above the stage. One girl after another got up and danced, with the sleazy announcer saying things to the effect of: “Give it up for Jessica!”
Dean and I had pretty much run out of things to say to each other and private investigating is thirsty work. By ten o’clock I was pretty drunk, while Dean was stone sober, drinking coke and ignoring the dirty looks from the waitresses.
Around 9:45 I noticed someone new at the bar. Something about him wasn’t quite right. He was a black guy, slender, with cornrows, wearing a plain black turtleneck and jeans. Often I caught him looking at us like he could tell we didn’t belong.
A little bit before ten, a girl came and sat in my lap. She was older than me, I guess, good body, tight, with freckles on her nose. We were talking about a lot of different things, California mostly, where she’d lived for some time. Her name, she said, was Chantelle.
“Who’s that dude at the bar?” I asked her at one point. “Does he work here?”
“No,” Chantelle said. “He hangs out with one of the girls here.”
“A boyfriend?” I asked.
“No,” Chantelle said, “it’s complicated.”
And then the dirtbag announcer (I swear to god, it is the same guy at every strip club in the world) came over the announcing system, booming out in his weird robotic voice, “Gentlemen, let me hear you put your hands together for the lovely and beautiful Tanya, give it up for Tanya!”
And she came down the stairs carefully in her big red heels, dressed only in her bra and panties. She was something, I’ll give you that much. Black hair all the way down her black. Blue eyes that filled up her face. She looked young, really young, but not under-aged or anything. Her body was unnaturally perfect, like it had been filled up with air in all the right places. Big, but nothing was sagging. She wasn’t athletic, lithe or lean; it was more like she was spare, like there were parts of her that just weren’t there.
When she danced, it was without any enthusiasm. Still, she didn’t seem to be sulking so much as lazy. Just showing off the goods at a leisurely pace, like she knew that was all she had to do, and wasn’t going to do anything else. Just spin back and forth in front of the mirror, tracing her hands all over the body, staring off somewhere with a composed, vacant look on her face.
She didn’t look like the other Tanya, the one from before, and I felt a sensation of relief wash through me. That surprised me; I hadn’t realized I was how worried about Dean until that moment. I looked at him to smile, to make some joke, and when I saw him all that tension clamped back down on my shoulders.
It wasn’t that his eyes were bugging out of his head or anything like that. If you didn’t know Dean, like I knew him, you might not have realized anything was wrong. There was very little expression on his face at all. It was how still he was. You couldn’t even see him breathing. Hand in front of his mouth, elbow propped on the table, eyes forward. As if all his attention was covering onto a single point.
Shit, shit shit, I thought.
I turned my attention back to Chantelle and we talked back and forth for the next three songs. I kept asking her questions she wouldn’t answer and she would laugh, and I kept saying: “No, but seriously. Seriously.”
“Give it up for Tanya, that was Tanya gentlemen! She’ll be available for private dances in just a few minutes.”
Dean didn’t wait. He just stood up and walked over to the bar, right where she would be coming out. The man with the cornrows started at him. Dean didn’t notice. He was dialed in.
“Wow,” Chantelle said. “Looks like your friend really took a shine to her.”
“He’s a romantic at heart,” I said. “In fact, he’s just coming out of a very bad relationship. Sensitive guy.”
“Oh really,” Chantelle said. “Because he’s wearing a wedding ring.”
“It’s a tragic, tragic story,” I said, shaking my head. “We lost a lot of good men out there.”
“He married a man?
“You know what I mean,” I said.
A moment later Tanya came out of the back and Dean walked up to her. She looked at him briefly for a moment, seemed to incline her head in a yeah, whatever gesture of distant assent, but then her eyes opened wider with fear and I knew that Dean had dropped Brucie’s name.
Dean was talking to Tanya, opening up a notebook.
The guy with the cornrows came over.
Tanya was backing away.
“Can we go back for a dance?” I asked.
“Sure!” Chantelle said, and we stood up and headed to the back of the room. Behind me I heard Dean cry out. I took one glance over my shoulder, making sure they weren’t killing him or anything. Dean was shouting “I’ll go, I’ll go!” and they didn’t seem too rough. The dude with cornrows was staring at me, but not coming over.
“Uh oh,” Chantelle said. “Looks like your friend got a little too romantic.”
We went to the back room, and she laid on me, rubbing her back on my chest, for twenty bucks every three minutes.
“What’s the deal with that girl?” I asked.
“Oh, her,” Chantelle said. “She’s Russian or something and she works for this shady escort agency. That guy, Desean, is like her bodyguard. He speaks Russian to her.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah, he’s a total gangster. Your buddy is lucky he didn’t get the shit kicked out of him.”
She turned around and put her tits in my face and showered me with her sweet-smelling hair.
“I don’t even know why she comes here. I think it’s just advertising for the escort business. She’s super expensive.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “Did you ever hire her?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Every Saturday night.”
She turned around again and made these fake moaning noises. I was getting hard anyway.
“So she runs around with a lot of rich guys?” I asked.
“Hockey players,” she said.
“No way,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” she said.
“Like who? “ I asked.
“Mikhail Novosi,” she said.
I laughed.
“How do you know? Did she tell you?”
“No, his sleazeball agent is always in here, trying to get girls for parties. He’s Russian too.”
The music changed.
“Want another dance?” she asked.
“Got any more stories about crazy Russi
an call girls?”
“Fresh out,” she said.
“Well then I’m good.” I said.
I paid her and then I left. Desean stared at me as I made my way to the stairs. I found Dean waiting a little down the street.
“Thanks for the help in there buddy,” Dean said. “Where the fuck were you?”
“Getting a lap dance,” I said. “But don’t worry. I figured out who the murderer is.”
“Who?” he asked.
“Mikhail Novosi.”
15
The next morning I felt down. It was about the stripper, Chantelle. I couldn’t help but feel that back in the day, I’d have closed that deal. It wasn’t just that I was fat. I’d never been much of a looker, but I would have just kept at it. I just didn’t seem to want it as much anymore. I felt old, basically. Too old for the way that I used to do things, but I didn’t know any other way.
Mr. Burke left home around 11:30 and went to Lucien for lunch with two fairly attractive women. I got some pictures but when it seemed clear that it was a business meeting, I went to Hero Burger for lunch and blew my diet.
While I was eating, my Blackberry rang. It was Dean.
“Hey buddy,” he said. “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Old,” I said.
“Peter from Paradise Comics e-mailed me. I forwarded it to you. Did you see that?”
“I’ve been working on another case,” I said.
“The comic Brucie bought was originally submitted at some place called Over the Boards Collectibles in Mississauga. It mostly sells sports collectibles by the looks of things. Can you check out its website?”
“Okay,” I said. “But I got work to do too you know.”
“Hey man,” Dean said. “You’re the one that gets to bill for this. Besides, things are a little nuts here right now. The whole firm is tense because of Jay’s situation with the OSC. Things will be better once that blows over.”
“I was meaning to ask you about that,” I said.
“It’s just bullshit,” Dean said. “It will go away. Also, I’m going to text you the details for Tanya’s escort service. I got them from Rob’s buddy. See if you can’t set something up with Tanya.”
“Now that’s my kind of disbursement,” I said.
The Black Box: A novel Page 6