I know where he figures in the picture. That makes a difference.” “Give me a break.”
“It doesn’t make a difference?”
“I’m objecting strictly as a matter of form, okay?” Annie reached out her empty plastic glass and I made like the sommelier. She went on, “I know, O light of my life, you’re determined to stick your face into whatever nastiness this Ace Disposal thing may represent until someone takes a poke at it. Correction, second poke. We can’t leave out your scuffle with the bearded gentleman. Duty to the client and all those other noble sentiments, I appreciate their truth in the legal profession. But honestly, Crang, maybe you’re using them as a cover. You just like playing the gallant snoop, which is okay except I think you’ve got Sir Galahad and Inspector Clouseau so mixed up you might do yourself real harm.”
An emotion of the awkward sort covered the picnic. The sound of traffic on Eglinton drifted in from the far distance and the chatter of the two squirrels filled the middle distance.
I said, “I liked the part where you said, ‘O light of my life.’”
“Who, me?” Annie said in a mock-innocent voice. She drew her left hand across her breast and cocked her head like a silent-movie heroine.
I leaned toward her. She met me halfway. We closed our eyes and kissed. It was a chaste kiss, nothing touching except lips, but it lingered long enough for something to go ping in the region of my solar plexus.
Annie opened her eyes.
“Nice,” she said.
“Want to do something unspeakable?” I said. “Or shall we just make love?”
“Given your propensities, the food would spoil before we were sated. Do I mean that or satiated?”
“Spoil the food?” I said. “I could never face the Daniels again.”
“Nor I.”
We ate and drank and giggled, and after a couple of hours, we drove to the Carlton Cineplex and had cappuccino and watched a new French movie. Philippe Noiret played a police inspector who looked like he was bearing the weight of most of the universe’s secrets.
“I think I’ll find a mirror and practise my worldly expression,” I said to Annie when we came out.
“You want to be Philippe Noiret when you grow up.”
“You guess all my ambitions.”
Alex and Ian, my downstairs tenants, had invited us for dinner. They wrapped a whole salmon in silver foil and put it on their stand-up barbecue that comes with more attachments than the Kennedy Space Center would know what to do with. While we waited for the salmon to cook, we sat on the patio and drank margaritas and took turns shooing away the tenants’ slobbering Irish setter. His name is Genêt. Ian told funny stories about his early life as a devotee of leather and motorcycles and a club where the jukebox played Village People hits. By midnight we were full of salmon and asparagus and white wine and Alex was doing his impressions of Prince Charles chatting up Joan Collins. Annie succumbed to another fit of giggles, and after I steered her upstairs, we left a trail of clothes in a path that led to my bed. Annie lost her giggles and we made love until both of us were sated. Or satiated.
I tiptoed out at ten o’clock next morning to buy some croissants hot from the ovens of a bakery on Queen. I picked up a Sunday Sun on the way back. Annie turned to the entertainment section, and while I squeezed the orange juice and plugged in the coffee, she read her article on Alberti.
“Oh gawd,” Annie said, “nobody’s going to mistake me for Pauline Kael.”
I said, “I’ll take the original Annie B. Cooke any morning.”
“Just don’t read this thing while I’m watching.”
I didn’t. Annie took her juice and coffee and croissants into the living room. I sat in the kitchen and read. When I finished, I picked up my cup of coffee and crowded into the living room chair beside Annie.
“Fresh information for your everyday interested reader like me,” I said, “and the writing flows.”
Annie was quiet for a couple of seconds.
“You’re not just bucking up my spirits?” she asked.
“Would I lie about things like that?”
Another pause.
“Probably not,” Annie said.
I drove her home at five o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening shifting the heaps of files and books on my office floor back to their proper homes. I didn’t want Mrs. Reid, my part-time secretary, to deal with the mess. Never ask the help to do a job you wouldn’t do yourself. It was one of my mottoes. I tried to think if I had other mottoes. By eleven o’clock when I fell asleep in bed with the Whitney Balliett collection, I hadn’t come up with any.
11
TEN HOURS LATER, I walked out the front door wearing my lightweight grey suit. It was James Turkin’s sentencing day, the kid who’d done the number on the cab driver in the underground garage. The sentencing would be held in one of the courtrooms in Old City Hall, and I didn’t need to wear my counsel’s gown for the occasion. As Toronto buildings go, Old City Hall is dowdy and lovable. It’s made of red sandstone and sits in its old maid’s pride on Queen Street at Bay. It made do very nicely as Toronto’s city hall from 1890 till 1966 when a new civic building, spectacular but a trifle short on humanity, went up on the other side of Bay and the politicians and bureaucrats moved in. Since the move, Old City Hall has been given over to the Provincial Courts. They’re the lowest on the rung of courts and the busiest in criminal cases. Provincial Court judges hear all the messy low-life stuff, and the lawyers who appear before them don’t require gowns. I had on a shirt with fine vertical grey stripes and a plain maroon tie. I set my face in an expression to match my wardrobe. Sincere.
I walked the fifteen minutes it took to get from my front door to Old City Hall. A breeze was blowing up from the lake and there was a hint of fish in the air. I knew James Turkin would be in the holding cells in the basement on the northeast corner of Old City Hall. He would have been brought in in a yellow police van that morning from the West End Detention Centre with a bunch of other guys who couldn’t make bail and were waiting out the time until their day in court in the gracious custody of the Province of Ontario. I rapped on the thick wooden door to the holding cells, and it was opened almost immediately by a policeman who was holding a plastic cup of steaming coffee in his right hand.
“You got a villain in here, Crang?” the cop asked.
He knew me from many villains past. His name was Moriarty, and he was built like a linebacker who’d gone to seed, six four and close to three hundred pounds. There were dark sweat stains radiating from the armpits of his blue policeman’s shirt and grumpiness radiating from his flushed policeman’s face.
“Warm enough for you, Moriarty?” I asked.
“Which is yours?” Moriarty turned to pick up a clipboard on a chair inside the door. He spilled a small stream of coffee on his shirt.
“Shit,” he said without much expression.
“Kid
