Live Bait (11 page)

With Straight out of town, I would go and find Tony and see what sparks flew when I told him some cock and bull story about Straight. In the meantime, I would give Louise and the kids the best protection they could have.

"I'd like to leave Sam behind tonight. He's fed up with driving all over Toronto in that crummy car. I'll give him a night off." I was fiddling in my pocket for car keys, not meeting her eyes.

"Is something the matter?" She wasn't scared, her question was for my safety, not hers, she couldn't guess at a world where women and children were in danger because of the things their menfolk did for a living. That happened only on television, not in North Toronto among the wisteria and divorces.

"Not really, but there are some real creeps mixed up in this thing and I'd feel happier if Sam were sleeping on the rug down here than if he were off with me somewhere."

She snorted a quick little laugh. "You don't expect someone to come here?"

"No, but Sam's staying here would make me happier as I toddle on my weary way. What do you say?"

She laughed, "As Dad always used to say, anything for a quiet life."

I leaned over and gave her a quick kiss on the forehead, then I walked Sam out into the garden to get him comfortable for the night and brought him back in. I showed him through all the rooms, one after the other. "Guard!" I told him, and raised my left index finger to let him know I was serious. It was my own signal for the ultimate defense against prowlers; it kept him silent, charged with knocking an intruder down and standing over his throat until I called him off. He settled down on the hall rug with a thump and I patted his head and went back to Louise.

After that there was nothing to stop me going out. I asked her to come out to the stoop and wave to me as I left, and I carried an empty suitcase with me to the car. Anybody who was thinking about my lifestyle would have known that Sam would have been with me if I were leaving, but it was dark by now and I figured it might fool a casual observer. Maybe they would think I had taken the hint and gone home. And maybe they wouldn't, but at least Sam was on duty for me.

I had left too late to catch Tony at his circuit so I drove right to the racetrack, bought a ticket and went looking for him.

The usual crowd was there. Most of them are the mugs—working stiffs who work at lousy jobs because they think of nothing but the track and the modest little wins they make that pay for steaks and bottles of cheap rye once in a while. One time you found nothing but Cabbagetown natives there, guys born and bred in Toronto's only real slum. Tonight it was different. I guess the world has changed in the last ten years. Many of the horseplayers were black, West Indians by the sound of their singsong voices, and from the strong whiff of marijuana that hung over the area. And there was a good smattering of Chinese, gambling the Caucasian way for a change instead of sticking with their endless games of fantan in Chinatown.

The real regulars were still there, the guys who work at nothing but racing. You see the prosperous ones in the clubhouse, sipping Scotch on the rocks and eating lobster while the girls come to their tables to take the hundred-dollar bets. But most of them are down at the two-dollar windows, scraping change to get a bet together. They wear shiny suits and threadbare shirts and usually a raincoat, summer and winter, and they hustle for cash like pelicans diving for fish off the Florida Keys. Nothing's too murky to draw them if the money is there.

I recognized one of them when I walked through. He's a thin guy in his fifties, five-nine around one thirty. He's deep enough inside himself to disguise his endless poverty and bad luck by improvising a little dance with every few steps he takes. Some copper called him Bojangles once and the name stuck although he's white, or would be if he took a bath. He'd finked for me a few times when I was a detective in Toronto and he recognized me at once as the source of a possible fin, maybe a sawbuck if the world was looking after him. He bobbed over to me and stood, ducking his shoulders, smiling his toothless smile. "Hey, Mr. Bennett, waddya say?"

"Hi, Bo. What's new?"

He sketched a few steps. "Aw, hell, shoulda had the six horse in the third race. He paid thirty-seven-eighty."

He was set to give me a summary of all the horses he had bet in the last three years if I hadn't cut him off. "Listen, feel like doing me a favor? I wanna see Tony. You know, Tony with the loans, he's generally here by now."

He glanced around in surprise, "Hey, yeah, gen'ally." Then he turned back and peered at me, shielding his eyes with his hand, as if I were hot. "You mean you're flat, Mr. Bennett?" He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Hell, I wouldn't go to Tony for a bet on the only horse in the race. He's ugly, y'know? That guy as works for him broke my buddy's thumb one time."

I shook my head patiently and took out my wallet. I still had my vacation pay from Murphy's Harbour. It looked like Eldorado to him. "No, I just got paid. I wanna see him about something personal." I tugged on the corner of a ten, pulling it as gently as a good stripper working on her first glove. Bojangles cleared his throat, his voice cracked like a teenager's.

"I could ask around for you, if you wan'ed."

I gave the bill a decisive tug and handed it to him. "Do that, eh, I'll be over by the rail."

He grinned and vanished the bill into his dirty pocket. "Fer sure, fer sure, Mr. Bennett. Be right back."

He didn't come back until after the next race, shaking his head angrily. "Sonofabitch broke," he started, but I waved him down. "It's about Tony…"

"Oh, yeah." He cleared his throat again. "Well, I met a guy, see…" He paused, waiting for me to bring out my wallet again but I looked at him calmly and his nerve gave out and he rushed ahead with his message. "Yeah, well, I was talkin' to a guy, said Tony's stayin' home tonight. Said if a feller wanted to see him, he'd have to go over his place." He stood looking at me, licking his dry lips. I took pity on him and pulled out another ten. Before he could grab it I said, "There's a horse called Baby Lou running in the next race. Put me a deuce down and spend the change."

His emotions were split right down the middle. Gratitude for the extra cash was almost outweighed by the certainty that my horse would end down the track. How could anyone as rich as I was be so dumb, he wondered. But he bobbed a nervous thanks again and took off. I watched him go, then reached in my pocket and pulled out the note I had made when Fullwell mentioned Tony's address. Good. It was in the West End, I could cut across the Gardner Expressway instead of ploughing through the traffic lights and stop signs to head north or east.

I went back out to my car and drove away, down the Woodbine extension that swings around the bay, south of the race track, and then climbed on to the Expressway. It was pleasant, driving past the lights of the downtown area, chest-high to the big office buildings. I cut off at Jameson and headed north through the Italian area. It was a warm enough night that a few people were out on their porches, drinking homemade wine and spraying their neat front gardens with casual hoses. It made me feel a little homesick for somewhere I've never been, a place where there was company and conversation about things I'd never had a chance to talk to anybody about. And I wondered about Yin Su. What would she be doing now? Laundry for the next day, perhaps, maybe just listening to music. Whatever it was, she was most likely not brooding on me, I decided, and I shouldn't waste any time day-dreaming about her.

Tony's apartment block stuck up out of a row of good two storey houses in a way that let you know the builder had a lot of clout with the local zoning authorities. I wondered if Tony, or his family members, owned the place.

Calabria Enterprises had a penthouse. I pressed the bell and immediately it buzzed in response, without anybody's asking who was there. That surprised me. Guys like Tony don't casually admit strangers. Even if he were lying around in a dressing gown, waiting for a call girl to arrive, he would have checked. When you employ men to break limbs for you, you have to be careful.

I rode up seventeen floors, listening to Muzak and wondering what kind of person defaces the walls of elevators. From the height of the scratches on this one it was somebody short. That let Tony off the hook.

His apartment was located at the far end of the hall and I stood for a moment to check that there was nobody around. An apartment corridor is a bad place to be ambushed.

Nobody jumped out of a doorway at me and I came to P6 and tapped. I could hear rock music playing; it sounded like a party, but somebody heard me at once and the door swung open inwards, almost slickly enough to be automatic. But I don't believe in magic. To me the open door meant an ambush and I reacted without even thinking.

I took a quick step into the room and turned to slam my full weight against the door, flinging it back another foot as I faced away from it, preparing to take on whoever was setting me up. The door didn't hit the wall. As I expected it squeezed back, against the body of the man who was hiding behind it.

I tried to hold it against the wall, but the man was too small to be trapped. He forced himself out of the space and came at me like a cyclone, crouched in the kung fu stance, whirling and kicking as I backed away, reaching for anything I could throw. I hit him with the Princess telephone but the cable checked it, preventing it from hurting him. Then I scrabbled a lamp and dish of fruit at him, but he was winning, backing me away from the door. I reeled back against a coffee table, scooped the ashtray off it and sent it at his head but he ducked under it and came on. Desperately I grabbed the table and held it between us. It was only a delaying tactic. My arms would tire before he did. So I did what all the manuals advise rape victims to do. I began to shout. "Police, here! You back off. Police! Police!" It wasn't very dignified, but neither is lying in a hospital bed with your arms and legs tied to the ceiling, and that was the only outcome I could see to this situation.

And then, almost contemptuously, he ended it, sending a smashing kick at the table, tearing it sideways in my hands as he half stepped forward and hit me like a lightning strike over the right temple.

As I somersaulted away from him into darkness, one detail filled my mind. He was small and dark and deadly, and he was dressed in a suit that was too wide in the lapels, too long in the skirt to be fashionable, unless you happened to be Chinese, which he was.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 13

 

 

I
thought at first I was in the belly of a chopper, my body jouncing awkwardly against some spar that was digging into my chest. But as I opened my eyes I found I was looking at the soft, fawn broadloom rug of Tony's apartment. The jouncing was coming from the shiny toe of a big shoe that was sticking out of the leg of a polyester suit, the kind that comes with two pairs of pants for ninety-nine-ninety.

Painfully, I rolled on to one elbow, my head threatening to snap right off my neck, and peered six feet away to the happy moon face of Elmer Svensen. "Nice try, asshole," he said and dug me again with his shoe.

Normally I would have caught his foot at the ankle and thrown him on his back but my body was playing old man games on me.

"Did you get him?" I heard my wheezy voice ask and the big face split into a grin.

"Let's establish the rules of this game," he said. "I ask the questions, you do the answers. Okay?" I had heard him use similar routines a dozen times on investigations we had shared. It was his method of letting the suspect know there was no chance of getting away with anything. He was caught, dead to rights.

"Did you get the guy who hit me? He was Chinese, dark suit, maybe five-three, around 120."

Svensen laughed the bigger than life laugh of the schoolyard bully. With his big meaty face hanging open he turned around and called to his partner, "Hey, guess what, hotshot got all messed up by some Chink pygmy."

There was no answer and Svensen dropped the laugh and prodded me again with the same shoe. I reached up and tapped him on the shinbone with the point of my middle finger. "Don't do that," I cautioned him. He drew his leg away with a yelp of surprise and I got up, first to my knees and then to my feet.

"Did you see the Chinese guy?" I asked again, politely. There is nothing like being hit on the head to heighten your sense of the importance of politeness.

Svensen snarled now, all pretense at humor and amusement gone. "I didn't see any Chinaman because there wasn't any Chinaman."

I sat down on the arm of Tony's chesterfield. "I was here," I explained mildly. "Take my word for it there was one tough little Bruce Lee of a Chinese kid, and he was good."

"Okay," Svensen said, suddenly hearty again. "Let's go along with this fairy story of yours. Only I want all of it. First of all why were you in this apartment? Second, everything that happened while you were here."

I gave him the outline, leaving out all reference to Straight. I had come back to talk to Tony because the people at Bonded had asked me to follow up on the investigation, not in an official capacity, just to see if I could find anything out in a casual way. When I got to the apartment, I suspected something tricky and had been right, painfully right.

Svensen listened, not saying anything, just glancing at me and then around, to his partner, who seemed to be waiting outside the door, as if afraid to come in and embarrass me with his presence.

When I finished, Svensen said. "Won't stand up, none of it."

"Why would that matter, I haven't done anything wrong, I come to visit a guy, somebody jumps me and hits me in the head. Except for one hell of a headache I'm in no trouble."

Svensen turned to look me full in the face now, his grin starting to show, like the edge of a woman's slip. He backed off one pace and beckoned to me with his index finger. I got up and followed, holding my head in both hands. It felt as if it might drop off if I let go.

He led me down the short hallway beyond the living room. It had three doors in it. One went into the bathroom, the second was closed, the third was open and led to a bedroom with an enormous round water bed in the middle of it, covered with a silk embroidered counterpane. On the counterpane lay what used to be Tony Caporetto. He had blood oozing from the corner of his mouth and his eyes were open, rolled back in his head, just the whites showing.