The Hemingway Caper. Eric Wright

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The Hemingway Caper - Eric  Wright A Joe Barley Mystery

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      THE HEMINGWAY CAPER

      THE HEMINGWAY CAPER

      ERIC WRIGHT

      A Castle Street Mystery

      Copyright © Eric Wright, 2003

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

      Editor: Barry Jowett

      Copy-editor: Rachel Sheer

      Design: Jennifer Scott

      Printer: Webcom

       National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

      Wright, Eric

      The Hemingway caper / Eric Wright.

      ISBN 1-55002-451-5

      I. Title.

      PS8595.R58H44 2003 C813’.54 C2003-901650-1 PR9199.3.W66H44 2003

      1 2 3 4 5 07 06 05 04 03

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

      Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

       J. Kirk Howard, President

      Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

       www.dundurn.com

Dundurn Press Dundurn Press Dundurn Press
8 Market Street 73 Lime Walk 2250 Military Road
Suite 200 Headington, Oxford, Tonawanda NY
Toronto, Ontario, Canada England U.S.A. 14150
M5E 1M6 OX3 7AD

      For Joe Kertes,

      who encourages this kind of thing

       chapter one

      “The rain began again as I turned onto Harbord Street and brought the car to a stop in front of Poppy’s bar.”

      No.

       “The rain began again as I turned onto Harbord Street and stopped in front of Poppy’s bar. “

      Better.

       “The rain began and I turned onto Harbord Street and jammed my foot down hard on the brake and switched off the ignition and the headlights. It was warm in the car and soon I could not see through the steamed-up windows, not even the lighted sign for Poppy’s bar. The rain came down harder and drummed on the roof of the car and the drops fell like individual stones in the pools along the gutter.”

      Okay, except for those stones. Take out “individual”.

       “I stepped on the brake pedal in front of Poppy’s bar...”

      (The brake pedal in front of Poppy’s bar? Shit.)

       “In front of Poppy’s bar I stepped on the brake pedal. I switched off the wipers but it did not make any difference except to the sound inside the car. “

      Now I’ve lost it again.

      You see what I’m trying to do? Maybe not. It’s a riff, I think. (The word isn’t in my processor’s memory, but I think that’s what it is.) On Hemingway. Would you have known that if I hadn’t told you? So far I think I’ve got enough “and”s in there but the rhythm isn’t quite right, so you might not have guessed what I was up to. I would have to go into parody to be sure you would recognize it, and parody is another thing.

      My name is Joe Barley. I’m employed by a detective agency on a part-time basis for some of their simpler assignments, like watching people suspected of insurance fraud who claim to be incapacitated after an accident. My job is to get pictures of these villains hang-gliding, or hot-dogging on the ski slopes.

      At present I’m on a very old-fashioned assignment. A suspicious wife has hired the agency to collect evidence of her husband’s adultery. What she’ll do with it I don’t know, because she doesn’t need it these days to get a divorce. She is probably just satisfying herself that her suspicions are justified.

      I’ve been watching this guy every Tuesday and Thursday night for three weeks, and so far it certainly seems like a simple case of a bit on the side. His name is Jason Tyler, a book dealer, specializing in rare and second-hand books. He has a shop on College Street that occupies two floors of an old house. His wife thinks he is having an affair because he recently joined a health club to work out twice a week. She suspects that on Tuesdays and Thursdays he actually comes home damp from another kind of work-out, so she has hired the agency to find out.

      It’s a clever front he’s constructed. He really does go to a health club to pedal away for half an hour and have a shower. Then he spends an hour in a rented room on the second floor of a small commercial property on Harbord.

      Tonight was typical. I was sitting in my car as he arrived in his yellow Volvo, parked in the alley, and entered the side door of this building, the tenants’ entrance, making his presence on the second floor known by switching on the light and lowering the blinds. A little later, the shadows of him and a lady appeared behind the blind, embracing in silhouette. After a bit of this, the light went out, the blind was raised, and twenty minutes or so later, the light came back on, the blind was lowered, and the silhouettes again embraced. (I’ve figured out that they must make love by streetlight). Then, the window blind was raised and I caught a glimpse of them in a quick, unscreened embrace before the light went out again and the two of them re-appeared at the side door for a hasty peck as they went their separate ways.

      I

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