died two or three years ago,” Annie said. “Of AIDS.”
“Guy was careless,” Bart said.
“AIDS?” I repeated.
“So,” Bart said, addressing himself to Annie, “you want a feature on me, that the plan?”
“Just a sec, Bart,” I butted in. “AIDS. Reminds me of a nice man died the other day of the same thing. Ian Argyll? You ever run across him? Could’ve been at the Purple Zinnia? Bar downstairs?”
The large guy’s chair hit the floor hard on the front legs. The skinny kid’s head swivelled around to me. His face had a stricken expression. Annie didn’t look too happy, either. If I judged the room’s mood correctly, I had rushed too precipitately into the main issue.
“What’s happening here?” The easy sound had left Bart’s tenor.
“You knew Ian Argyll?” I said.
“Where you coming from, Jack?” Bart was definitely upset. “You and the broad?”
I hesitated, searching for an answer to calm the room’s mood. The hesitation was an error in tactics. Bart motioned the big guy out of his chair. Standing up, the guy was tall as well as wide, about six foot four. He gripped my arms close to the shoulders in his two hands and slammed me against the door. My shoes were a foot off the ground.
The big guy’s voice was a rumble. “Go ahead, answer the man.”
Something like a gasp came out of my mouth. The posture the big guy had me in, pinned to the door a foot above the floor, made my shirt ride up my neck. It was cutting off my air intake.
“You want me to tell Axe there to hammer you?” Bart was barking at me from across the room. “How come you’re asking I know the Argyll guy?”
“Hey, your turn, talk.” The big guy, Axe, sprayed me with spittle. “Don’t matter to me, asshole, I have to hammer you.”
I got out another gasp.
Axe shook me. Over his shoulder, I glimpsed Annie in motion. She flitted out of my line of vision. Almost immediately, she was back in sight. Her hand was outstretched, and she held something in it.
“I hammer a guy,” Axe spit at me, “guy stays ham —”
He didn’t finish his threat. Annie’s hand came around in front of Axe’s face. She jammed whatever she’d been holding into the guy’s open mouth. He let go of my arms. I clunked to the floor. Axe was gagging, and his hands clawed at the object in his mouth.
“Honey,” Annie shouted, “open the door.”
I did what I was told and at the same time reached for Annie’s hand. We turned right. It was only a couple of yards to the fire exit at the end of the corridor. We covered the distance, hand in hand, banged on the metal crossbar and hit the outside air at good speed.
We were in an unpaved alley. It was the width of two cars and gritty underfoot. We lit out to the right, south toward Charles Street, weaving past a pair of parked cars.
I risked a glance to the rear.
“Nobody in hot pursuit.” The words came out between puffs.
“Heck with that,” Annie puffed back.
“Not even cold pursuit.”
“Just run.”
We ran across Charles, down the centre of a city parking lot, left at Isabella.
I checked behind us again.
“Nobody,” I huffed.
“Not Axe?”
“’Specially not him.”
“Okay.”
We stopped and did some deep bending from the waist and other cooling-down stuff.
“Bart got a trifle testy when I brought up Ian’s name,” I said after a minute or two.
“Might have been the subtle way you slid into the topic.”
“You think I was too direct?”
“Never mind, fella.” Annie patted me on the back. “You showed there’s a connection between Bart and Ian, and Bart’d prefer to keep it under wraps.”
“About all he’s keeping under wraps.”
We climbed into the Volks.
“A drink?” Annie said. “At my place? Calm the nerves?”
“I agree to the three of those.”
I pointed the car toward Cabbagetown.
“Loved the way you neutralized Axe,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“What’d you stick in his mouth? The thing that got him choking?”
“I thought that was a clever bit of improvisation.”
“Me, too, but what was the thing?”
“Give you a hint.”
“Yeah?”
“It had silver stripes.”
Chapter Nine
The client who came to my office for the two o’clock Tuesday appointment was nervous. That’s rare in my practice. In my practice, the clients are criminals, I’m a criminal lawyer, everybody knows his or her role, and nobody gets nervous.
“Try to relax, Mr. Shumacher,” I said. “Don’t talk so fast, and it’ll go smooth for both of us.”
“Please,” the man said, “call me Cleve.”
“Let it flow, Cleve.”
Cleve Shumacher was a fastidious-looking guy. His black hair was beautifully trimmed and blow-dried. He had on a spiffy light brown suit, a dark brown shirt, and a deep green tie cinched with a gold tiepin. He had a rubbery face, thick nose, and fleshy lips. I would have placed him in his mid-forties. He’d phoned for an appointment that morning. Urgent, he’d said.
“Can we get some chronology going, Cleve?” I said. “You’re charged with what?”
“Fraud. The police say it’s fraud.”
“You came to the right place.” In twenty-two years of practice, I’d developed a modest specialty in fraud cases. “How much money?”
“Two hundred and forty thousand dollars supposedly, but Mrs. Mortimer, the client, approved everything I did with the money, that is, Mrs. Helen Mortimer.”
“What business was she in?”
