where his church is on St. Clair, if it really is a church. Who owns it, so on, so forth? And what in god’s name, if you’ll pardon the phrase, are Heaven’s Philosophers? I’ll see what gives with them.”
Gloria stopped and looked at me.
“That ought to do it,” I said.
“I’ll get on things as soon as I leave here,” Gloria said. “But first, suppose you take a look at this butcher-girl file and tell me how much to bill her.”
She handed me the file, and while I flipped through the notes and documents inside it, and wrote numbers on a separate sheet of paper, Gloria tapped on her iPad.
After a few minutes, she said, “It appears your minister guy got kicked out of the Catholic Church.”
“You mean it’s Father Alton I’m dealing with?” I said. “I assumed he was a plain old fundamentalist Christian fanatic.”
“Maybe he is now, but a Catholic priest is how he started.”
“What was it, doing terrible things with little boys got him in trouble?”
“Just the opposite,” Gloria said. “His sexual contacts appear to have been with mature ladies of the parish.”
“All of this, you got in fifteen minutes?”
“Tricks of the Google trade.”
“Nice start, kiddo.”
“An old photograph of him is in here. He’s about late thirties at the time. Actually comes across as kind of cute.”
Gloria turned her iPad around to give me a peek at the screen.
“Got the collar on and his numbered St. Michael’s sweater over the religious blouse, whatever they call it,” I said. “Juggling a football in his hands. Athletic guy. Nice big smile. Probably knew how to sing the ‘Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra’ lullaby.”
Gloria switched off her iPad. She packed it and the keyboard in her red leather handbag.
“Friday afternoon,” she said, “I’ll come back here and shed more light on the Reverend and his establishment, though I think we both smell fishy things already. In the meantime, how about the nice butcher girl?”
I shoved the file across the desk to Gloria who gave a quick look at the sheet of paper I’d written the numbers on.
“This is a ridiculously tiny fee,” she said. “You realize that?”
“It’s what she can afford,” I said. “But I know I’ll be charging the Flame people a ridiculously enormous fee, which is what they can afford.”
“Crang,” Gloria said, shaking her head a little, “this isn’t the billing system that helps big businesses stay big.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Chapter Six
Annie and I lived in a house on a north-south street called Major, two blocks due west of my office. Like just about all the other houses on Major, ours was three storeys of brick, narrow and semi-detached. Major ran south from Bloor, in a neighbourhood named, prosaically, Harbord Village. The name came from Harbord Street, the main east-west street to the south. Lately, Harbord had been attracting a lot of trade in upscale dining establishments. I was still throwing most of my eating-out business to the older restaurants on Bloor.
When I got home around seven, Annie was sitting at the dining room table, staring at our garden through the floor-to-ceiling window. A novel by someone named Jane Gardam lay open on the table in front of her, but she wasn’t reading it. She looked distracted, or maybe something worse. I put my arms around her from behind.
“Sweetheart,” she said to me, “I’ve been feeling so rattled I almost did something drastic a few minutes ago.”
“How drastic?”
“I was on the verge of making a martini.”
“Your martinis are undrinkable,” I said. “You never get the balance right.”
Annie turned in my arms and looked up at me. “See what I mean?” she said.
“It’s still almost a whole week before the book launch,” I said, “and already you’re a nervous wreck?”
Annie straightened up, pushed the Jane Gardam novel to one side, and folded her hands on the table.
“Crang,” she said, “just make the martinis. Please.”
Three steps up from the dining room was the open kitchen. I hustled up the steps and mixed two vodka martinis, made with Polish potato vodka from the good people at Luksusowa. One martini on the rocks with three little olives on a toothpick for Annie, the other straight-up with a twist of lemon for me. Both with a whiff of vermouth.
I carried the drinks to the dining room table. Annie and I clinked glasses in a small toast.
“Here’s to your book,” I said. “Reads like a smash hit to me.”
“Ha,” Annie said, “you’re the only one who’s read it except for the publishing people.” She took a sip of martini. “But thanks, fella.”
Annie’s book, her first, covered a small corner of the movie world. Movies were her business. She talked about them on CBC Radio, blogged reviews twice a week, wrote occasional magazine profiles of movie people, and now she had written a biography of Edward Everett Horton.
Edward Everett was never a movie name on everybody’s lips, but his acting won him semi-fame in the 1930s and ’40s when he worked as a character actor in musical comedies. He was a tall, funny flibbertigibbit of a guy who played second banana to Fred Astaire in a dozen films. Horton, now long deceased, grew up a New York kid and attended Columbia University. That was no doubt the reason why the university signed on to publish Annie’s book.
They were throwing a launch party for her at a theatre somewhere in Columbia’s complex of buildings. That was the following Tuesday. The plan was I’d fly down with Annie for a day and a half, then come back after the launch. Annie would stay longer to do publicity for the book. The prospect of the launch was what got her in a tizzy. She was relaxed and funny on radio, but when she was in front of a real live audience, like the one she’d have at Columbia, she got the heebie-jeebies.
“I heard a bit of good news today,” Annie said, sipping her martini.
“‘We pass this way but once,’” I said, quoting.
Annie looked at me, “Where’s that from?”
“Old New Yorker cartoon. Guy beaten down by life arrives home to his beaten-down wife. Guy says to wife, ‘Heard a bit of good news today. We pass this way but once.’”
“I’m going to be on the Charlie Rose show next week,” Annie said.
“Well, look at you,” I said. “Big-time Annie.”
“Charlie
