by Jack Batten
For the rest of the route to Fox’s office, I cut east to University Avenue then turned right, going straight south, past Mount Sinai Hospital and Toronto General and Sick Kids. Name your ailment, and University Avenue had the treatment centre. Cancer? Princess Margaret was the hospital for you.
I stopped at a fast food place near the corner of University and Dundas, and bought a medium-sized coffee to go. The coffee was so hot I knew I could never carry the cardboard cup as far as Fox’s office without baking my fingers. I took a handful of the restaurant’s paper napkins and wrapped them around the cup for extra protection.
Fox’s building was twelve storeys high. He had an office on the top floor. I rode up the elevator, got off, and walked halfway down the hall. The outer door to Fox’s office, which opened onto the main hall, was ajar. His inner office door was shut. That was a signal. When Fox shut his inner door, he didn’t want to be disturbed until he finished writing his address to the jury or his list of questions on a cross examination or whatever chore needed his uninterrupted concentration. When he was done, he would open the inner door, and make himself available.
I was a big fan of the twelfth floor in Fox’s building. Two doors led from the main hall out to the bare roof, which took up the twelfth’s rear quarter. This was the only downtown building I knew that offered an open-air view of the surrounding neighbourhood of high-rises and skyscrapers. The roof had a covering of pebbles and tar that got sticky in the summer sun. The idea for people venturing out there to do some sightseeing was to stick to the narrow wooden walkways that criss-crossed the pebbles and tar.
While I waited for Fox, I strolled across the first walkway that led to the edge of the roof. It was a spot where the surrounding wall reached no higher than my upper thighs. The wall’s miniscule height probably broke construction regulations, but I wasn’t in a mood to worry about that. I just liked the way the view bucked me up. I stood there, holding my coffee cup gingerly, looking out over the city, feeling like the king of all I surveyed.
I pried the lid off the coffee. Steam flowed out of the cup. The coffee had cooled. Though it would no longer scald, it still felt like it could raise a blister. I was thinking of trying a sip when I felt a motion behind me. I didn’t hear anything, not a footstep or any other identifiable sound. But I sensed somebody moving.
I turned halfway around to my left.
A guy in a Yankee baseball cap was about three strides back and coming at me fast. It was the guy I’d seen on Sussex Avenue and in Matt Cohen Park. This man’s chin jutted out. I knew the chin. I’d seen it in the lobby at the Heaven’s Philosophers building. The chin belonged to Freddie Chamblis.
Freddie Chamblis?! Dear god, he was the guy with all the muscles and the power. Sal Banfield said Freddie could crush Mike Tyson. I had no doubt Sal was right, and now the guy who could squeeze Mike Tyson had me in his sights.
At the moment I turned on the walkway, Freddie was pushing off on his left foot, his outstretched arms lunging at my shoulders. He looked like a guy hell bent on shoving me off the roof.
Off the roof!? The man had to be a maniac!
In the moments after I turned, Freddie’s left foot drove him forward. His right was in the air, prepping for the next push. His arms were closing in on my shoulders. In the instant I took in what was happening, I thought Freddie might be slanted marginally too far to his own left to catch me at an angle that would jack me over the little wall.
As Freddie came at me, I brought my right hand around on a line directed at his head. My right hand was holding the cup of coffee. When I turned, my right had the momentum to generate good speed toward Freddie as he prepared to smack me.
In mid-swing, I tilted the cup and let the hot coffee fly into Freddie’s face. The direction of my swing was perfect. The coffee splashed against Freddie’s cheeks, nose, and chin. His mouth opened as if he were screaming at the burning sensation of the hot liquid. I heard nothing. The scream was silent.
Freddie’s fists thudded into my left shoulder, but by then the combination of his off-kilter aim and his drenching in hot coffee had sapped the guy of most of his drive. I gave Freddie a small body check as he passed into my range. He shoved back at me. By then, neither of us could hold our balance.
I fell backward. My bum bounced on the wooden walkway. My upper back hit squarely on the pebbles and tar.
I lay where I had settled, my eyes staring up to the sky. After a moment, I lowered my sightline back to roof level.
Freddie was nowhere in sight.
Jesus, did he go over the guard wall?
I tracked in my mind Freddie’s possible path, and waited for the noises he would make if he had taken a flight downward. He would scream as he fell. His body would go boink if he bounced off the roof of a parked car. Pedestrians would yell and shout. Ambulances would arrive with sirens at top volume.
I lay on my back and considered the possible sounds.
It took a handful of seconds to realize I wasn’t hearing anything in the way of distinctive noises. No screams, no boinks, no shouts or sirens.
I straightened up from the walkway, out of the tar and pebbles. When I got upright, I needed a moment for some dizziness to settle. My head cleared, and I looked over the edge of the wall, not allowing much of me to show. I didn’t want witnesses to spot me from the street. They might get the idea I was the guy who tossed Freddie to his death. It was self-defence, but who was to know that?
The street came into view down below. It was Centre Street. I walked it regularly on my way to and from the courthouse. The street looked the way it always looked. No body lay on the pavement or on the sidewalk or on the roof of a car.
Where was Freddie?
I got out of my crouch and leaned further over the wall. The first piece of news I registered was that Freddie wasn’t dead. He hadn’t gone splat on the street. One storey directly below me, the eleventh floor had a wide balcony with a yellow canvas covering. Freddie had plunged through the centre of the covering. He and a piece of ripped yellow canvas lay on the balcony’s floor. Freddie was on his right side. His left arm wasn’t moving. It was twisted at an angle that wasn’t usual for an arm. A lot of Freddie’s other bodily parts looked like they might be busted. But he wasn’t dead. The mean bastard had lived through the experience.
I knew he was alive because his eyes were open and blinking madly in all directions. Some of his other parts were fluttering, the ones that weren’t fractured or otherwise out of commission.
As I leaned over the wall, watching in something like amazement and relief, Freddie stopped blinking his eyes. He fixed his gaze upward. I leaned a little further over the wall, studying the direction of Freddie’s eyes. What was he staring at?
It took me a whole five seconds to wise up that Freddie was eyeballing me. He probably couldn’t fathom how a guy like me — smaller, lighter, and not as destructively inclined as someone in the enforcer racket — had got the better of him, him being a prince of assassins.
I stared back until I heard a small commotion from the balcony. Whatever was happening, whoever was coming on to the scene, involved the balcony door. The door was out of my range of vision. I waited a bit longer.
Three women emerged one by one on to the balcony. They surrounded Freddie. One flapped her arms in what I assumed was shock. All three women let out whoops of surprise. None of the three did anything that indicated they had medical training. One pulled out her cellphone. Her voice carried up to me as she asked for an ambulance. Cops and fire engines would also no doubt answer the call. The woman on the cell didn’t seem certain of the building’s address. She worked that out with the operator. The other two women were kneeling on either side of Freddie. Both were murmuring at him. He didn’t seem capable of speech, not yet anyway.
It was past time for me to beat a retreat. Any moment now, the women would look up at the torn awning over their heads. If I stoo
d there gawking, they’d take note of me.
I turned and picked up the empty coffee cup and the napkins I’d used for protection against the coffee’s heat. I shoved the paper stuff into my pockets. The roof looked tidy except for small splashes of spilled coffee. Nothing I could do about them.
I trotted down the hall. Fox’s inner door was still closed. I gave one rap, and threw it open. Fox wasn’t alone. Another guy sat across the desk from him. I knew the other guy: Archie Brewster. He was in his mid-sixties, balding, chubby, and amiable, a wizard neurological technician. A dozen years earlier, he made himself incredibly rich by inventing a device for use in brain surgery. With the windfall, Archie built his own lab where he did DNA tests and indulged in other forensic messing-around. Since the place was only semi-legal, Archie operated it more or less under the radar. Criminal lawyers like Fox and even me on occasion made up most of his clientele.
“Hey, Crang!” Fox said. “The door was shut for a reason.”
“The cops ought to be heading up here in five minutes,” I said. “We need to beat it.”
Without a hint of hesitation, allowing no time for second thoughts, Fox grabbed two briefcases from the floor, and began stuffing the papers from the top of his desk into the cases. Archie had a slim briefcase of his own. He put some documents in it, looking at me with a half-smile on his face. He seemed to be enjoying the experience, even if he hadn’t any idea what kind of pickle I was in.
“These police,” Fox said to me, “they’re calling for a reason that might be inconvenient?”
“More than inconvenience where I’m concerned.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Fox snapped shut the bulging briefcases, handed one to me, and carried the other himself. “Don’t want to leave stuff lying around that might get clients in trouble,” Fox said. He led the way out the door, Archie and I following.
In the hall, Fox punched a button for the elevator.
“You want to give me the short version of what’s up?” he asked, looking at me as we waited.
“I helped Squeaky’s pal Freddie Chamblis fall off the roof,” I said.
“That’ll be a mess.”
“The way things worked out,” I said, “it could have been a lot worse.”
“What? Freddie happened to be wearing a parachute?”
The elevator arrived. It was empty. The three of us got on, and Fox pressed the indicator for the building’s parking garage in the basement. “We’ll get my car,” he said.
“Freddie landed on the balcony one floor below.”
“Nice aim, Crang,” Fox said. “Those balconies run down the side of the building almost the entire length, eleventh floor to the second, but I imagine it takes a certain skill to dump a guy in one of them.”
“The whole deal was self-defence on my part.”
“If that’s your story, stick to it.”
“Sticking to it shouldn’t become an issue,” I said. “If we get out of here without a cop busting me, I don’t plan to tell anybody what happened.”
“How about the victim? Aren’t you concerned Freddie might talk?”
“First, Freddie is not anybody’s victim. Second, he knows he’ll only get himself jammed up if he tries to pin his injuries on me. He’s not that dumb.”
Fox nodded. “Anybody who hangs around with Squeaky is, by definition, a person who rates low on the scale of human values.”
“You ever acted for Freddie?”
Fox shook his head. “The time I defended Squeaky, the one I mentioned in my email the other day, that was when Freddie started hanging around. He spent his time with Squeaky and me whether I liked it or not. The fact was I didn’t take to him any more than I took to Squeaky.”
“Let’s just clear the building,” I said. “Then we’ll talk about the situation.”
Archie spoke for the first time. “I love it when you get in a scrape, Crang,” he said. He was still wearing the half-smile. “It’s pretty damn entertaining.”
The elevator stopped at the ground floor.
“I didn’t press for the ground floor,” Fox said, looking surprised.
The elevator doors slid open. Two uniformed cops stood waiting in the lobby. One male, one female.
“You going up?” the female cop asked us. She seemed pleasant. Neither she nor her partner had their guns drawn.
Fox shook his head at the female cop’s question. “To the parking garage.”
“Sorry then,” she said, “we need this elevator.”
Archie, Fox, and I stepped off. Fox put a firm hand on my shoulder, positioning me so that I faced the cops as they got on the elevator. All the cop gear strapped to their waists — guns, flashlights, batons, other stuff — made creaking noises as they moved.
“Which floor is it, Bobby?” the woman cop asked her partner.
“Eleven,” Bobby said.
The female cop reached for the button.
“Wait a minute, Grace,” Bobby said. He turned to Fox, Archie, and me. “Which floor were you guys just on?”
“Twelve,” Fox said. He still had the guiding hand on my shoulder.
“You hear any noise coming from down below?” Bobby asked. “From the eleventh?”
“The way this building’s constructed,” Fox said, “it’d have to be a bomb going off before you’d hear anything a floor away.”
Bobby turned to me. “How about you?”
“We were together,” I said, indicating Fox and Archie as the other parties I was talking about. “It was a business meeting. We were concentrating on what was in front of us.”
“What kind of business?” Bobby said.
“Two of us are criminal lawyers,” I said.
Bobby got a sneery expression. “Push eleven,” he said to Grace.
The elevator doors closed.
“What was that all about, the thing where you steered me with the hands on my shoulders?” I asked Fox. “Is this your new affectionate side?”
“Take a look at the back of your lovely old seersucker.”
I took off my jacket. The back was freshly decorated with pebbles and tar.
“The police officers might have wondered,” Fox said.
I let my shoulders slump. “You mind dropping me off at my house?” I said to Fox.
“That’s my plan,” Fox said. “But we’ll stop at Archie’s first. It’s closer.”
Archie got in the back of Fox’s car. I sat up front.
“How’s business?” I said to Archie, talking over my shoulder. I wasn’t especially interested in Archie’s answer. I was talking more to ease my case of jittery nerves.
“Business is just right,” Archie said.“How about you, Crang? You worried about the guy who went off the roof?”
I turned to look at Archie. He still wore the half-smile, looking more amused than alarmed by the events I’d described.
“Nothing a good martini won’t fix,” I said.
Fox looked at his watch. “Kind of early for a drink. Not even 11:30.”
“The morning I’ve put in,” I said to Fox, “you don’t think I deserve a martini?”
“Crang makes a very good point, Fox,” Archie said. “Why don’t you step on the gas and get us all where we’re going.”
Fox stepped on the gas.
Chapter Thirty
When Fox pulled up in front of my house, I invited him in for a drink. He said he’d give it a pass. He needed to get home and finish his paperwork. The mention of paperwork reminded me why I’d called on Fox in the first place. I reached into my seersucker jacket pocket and handed him my notes about Georgie Gabriel. Fox drove away, and I went inside to assemble the ingredients for the martini I deserved.
I poured the vodka, making the kind of martini I once heard a guy describe as a silver bullet. It ran to five ounces of
vodka. I carried the glass to a chair in the dining room facing into the garden. My shoulders felt sore where I’d crashed on the tar and pebble roof. I flexed the muscles in the upper back, trying to loosen them up, and wondered what in heaven’s name Freddie Chamblis’s attack had been all about. That might take some thought. I raised my glass and took a generous swallow. A feeling of warmth spread across my chest. This was a silver bullet that hit the spot.
I sipped some more, and developed thoughts about Freddie. The guy had been stalking me from early morning. That was obvious. He waited for me outside the house, and stayed on my tail all the way to the twelfth floor of Fox’s building. He must have been looking for the right place to give me the business. The roof made sense because he could toss me over, and everybody would assume I had been alone out there, and got a little too frisky with the roof’s edge. They’d say I miscalculated, and fell twelve storeys to the street.
All of that was plausible enough, but the tougher question came next. Why? Why did Freddie set out to knock me off? Why kill me of all people?
I drank more of the silver bullet, and sorted through the puzzles. I’d been thinking for days that Freddie was probably the Reverend’s partner in the first attempt at blackmail, the one that the Reverend bailed out of. The way I reasoned things, Freddie bumped off the Reverend, which left him all alone to get on with the business of taking the Flame Group for the eight million. So Freddie was left sitting pretty, collecting all the blackmail money for himself. That seemed to make sense. But apparently he wasn’t sitting pretty enough for his own complete satisfaction.
The fly in the ointment, as Freddie probably saw things, was me. He got the idea I might pull something that would separate him from the eight million. Chances were pretty good that Wally Crawford was already nosing through the Heaven’s Philosophers people, asking questions about the Reverend’s murder. Freddie might have found out it was me who pointed Wally in Freddie’s direction as the suspected killer. That was one piece of damage I’d done the guy, and he probably wondered what other problems I might cause if I kept messing around with murder and blackmail and the Reverend. Freddie didn’t know what I might pull. Hell, I didn’t know either. The bottom line was that Freddie needed to put a stop to whatever he imagined I might discover. That was why he tried to heave me into Centre Street.