Straight No Chaser (23 page)

Except he'd have to take initial deliveries of the coke in bulk form before he and his guys divvied it up in gram units for retail. That'd be the only occasion when Big Bam and company got close to the coke, but it was a whole lot less risky than a few hundred weekly retail transactions.

And, speaking of bulk deliveries, who did Bam take them from? Probably from a bunch of different wholesalers. But I'd learned the name of one wholesaler.

Trevor Dalgleish.

Something stirred in my stomach. Hunger pangs. I put together more vodka and ice, and studied the inside of the refrigerator. Not promising. A tomato that was just barely on the edible side of mushy. A loaf of bran bread. And some other stuff that mostly had to do with breakfast. Should I send out for pizza? There was something about waiting for the pizza delivery man to ring the doorbell that generated tension in me. Dealing with the guy at the door always made me edgy too. How much to tip him? Another thing, cooked food wasn't meant to be transported in beat-up little trucks painted orange and pink. Cancel the pizza idea. I went back to the living room and lay in the dark some more.

Trevor peddled coke on a wholesale basis. Confirmed. Done and done. No doubt whatsoever. But as a killer? A killer of Raymond Fenk? I didn't make him for the role. Trevor was too lawyer-like, too Waspy. He lived in a house on Admiral Road and owned a tuxedo. Guys like that didn't go around strangling people. Of course, they didn't go around peddling coke either.

Big Bam made a better fit for killer. Any gent who could blow up a whole posse could bump off one Fenk. Or, if not Big Bam personally, then his faithful servants. I'd seen them at work with the baseball bats. A little matter of garrotting wouldn't raise a sweat for them. Or a qualm.

But there was a fly in the ointment with that line of reasoning. I had a direct link between Trevor and Fenk, but no direct link between Big Bam and Fenk. Or, put it another way, I had a link between Big Bam and Fenk, but the link was Trevor. He sold coke in large amounts to Bam, and one of the sources for Trevor's bulk stuff, at least recently, was Fenk, who smuggled in a quantity from California.

Which brought me around to Dave Goddard. My client. The guy whose predicament was the point of all this cogitating. It was Dave I was supposed to be getting off the hook, and how he got on the hook, to my way of deducing, was that Fenk must have used Dave's saxophone case to bring in part of the California coke shipment. Not all of it. Big Bam told me his current deal with Trevor was for twenty-four kilograms of coke. No way twenty-four K would have fitted in the lining of Dave's case. Three or four K, all right. Not twenty-four.

So how'd Fenk transport the rest? Something to do with the cans in the corner of Big Bam's office. Whatever the cans were, they eluded me. Maybe they didn't count anyway. What the heck, it was the coke hidden in Dave's saxophone case that tied together Fenk, Trevor, Big Bam, and the murder of the former by one or other of the latter. Concentrate on that point, Crang.

My stomach gurgled, not enough to yield to the pizza man but enough to go for a slightly soft tomato. I went into the kitchen and sliced up the tomato and built the slices into two sandwiches with the bran bread. Mayonnaise and black pepper for taste. I ate them in the living room, lights on, with a vodka and soda.

Big Bam and his gang for Fenk's killer. I liked the feel of it. Somehow they must have got through Trevor to Fenk as a cocaine source. Maybe they tried to strike a deal with Fenk. Cut out Trevor the middle man. Fenk balked. Or something else went wrong, and Fenk's life ended with a saxophone strap around his neck. Not bad as a piece of reasoning. It might explain why Trevor was steering clear of Big Bam. He knew Bam put the hit on Fenk and wanted to avoid the same fate.

Did that theory account for Trevor's other problem with Big Bam? The four kilograms of coke he still owed Bam? Not quite, but there must be a way of tying all the damned strands together. And still nail Bam for the killing. And put Dave Goddard in the clear.

Twenty-four hours.

That was how long I had to make sense out of things. Seemed a ridiculously short time. I had to get the cops on to Big Bam, on to Trevor too, and protect my own hide. Keep from taking the kind of licking Bam's swingers laid on the tall guy at the Pits.

Speaking of whom, why'd the Big Bam empire come down on the tall guy? Why him? “He altered the script,” Truong said when I asked. That rang a little bell. Script?
That
was the word the guy in the Armani jacket used. It's what he called the piece of paper with the address and the number of grams on it. Must be a piece of lingo in the Bam circle of sellers and buyers. So if the tall guy altered the script, what'd he do? He changed it. Rewrote something on it. Not the address. That made no sense. The
amount
!

Well, yeah, of course. Say he paid for five grams of coke, he might have changed the amount on the slip of paper, on the
script
, to read six. Something along those lines. Maybe it was a one and he made it a ten. Nah, that was too blatant. Whichever number was involved, he upped it. And got caught. And got the stuffing knocked out of him.

Nice analysis, Crang. Heck, guy, take a bow. Better, take another drink.

I didn't feel like another drink. After the day I'd put in, my body said it was tired, but my mind said it was still in overdrive.

I wasn't close to sleep. But I went into the bedroom, took off my clothes, and got under the covers with the Lees book. I'd been saving up for the chapter on Dick Haymes. The best ballad-singer of them all. A romantic. An innocent. My kind of guy.

26

I
THOUGHT
it was a Vietnamese hit man.

I marked the place in the Dick Haymes chapter and switched off the lamp on the bedside table.

Somebody had opened the door down below into the apartment. Now the somebody was on the stairs. Quarter of the way up, I calculated. I crept out of the bed on the side away from the door and tiptoed across the floor. Did the footsteps on the stairs sound stealthy? Not really. They were soft but deliberate. Maybe Vietnamese hit men considered small details like stealth unnecessary.

I opened the closet door. The hell with that. I'd exhausted my in-closet hiding time. But there was a tennis racquet in there. I picked it up by the grip and tiptoed back to the bedroom door. I raised the racquet in the air. It wasn't in the conventional overhead-smash stance. It was in a position to sock the invader. The footsteps paused in the dark outside the bedroom door. I started to bring the racquet down with maximum force.

“Crang?”

The voice was whispering and female.

I stopped the racquet about three inches from Annie's dark and lovely head.

“What
are
you doing?” she said.

I reached past her and switched on the bedroom light.

“I thought it was somebody else,” I said.

Annie's eyes were on the tennis racquet.

“You had a neat welcome for them, whoever it was,” she said.

I walked over and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Putting it mildly,” I said, “you surprised me.”

“What else have I got your key for? Surprises, right?”

“This one was a lulu.”

Annie sat on the bed beside me.

“Hey, is that what you wear at night when I'm not here?” she said.

I had on a Boston Celtics number 33 T-shirt. That's all I had on.

“Really sexy, your outfit,” Annie said. “I love Magic Johnson.”

“Larry Bird,” I said. “Magic's number 32 and he's the other guys, the Lakers.”

“Oh yeah, Los Angeles.”

“Glad you think it's sexy.”

Annie put her arm around my shoulder. I hadn't let go of the tennis racquet, and my hand was trembling. Annie didn't seem to notice.

“The reason I'm here,” she said, “apart from all this male flesh, I've got fantastic news.”

“Don't tell me, Ted Koppel's in town.”

Annie took her arm off my shoulder.

“Crang, you're spoiling it.”

“I'm a little jumpy is all it is. You want coffee or something, a drink?”

“If there's white wine open.”

My jeans were on the chair. Annie goosed me when I stood up to get them. I laughed. It was a trifle forced. I put on the jeans, and we went into the kitchen. I poured Annie a glass from the bottle of Soave and made myself yet another vodka on the rocks.

“The other five movies?” I said. “Is this what it's about? You talked to people who're connected to them, Trevor's five besides the Fenk movie?”

“The point I'll get to in a minute is I
didn't
talk to anybody from them,” Annie said. “But, anyway, on the scale of hot bulletins I bring from the front lines, the info about the five movies is in at least second place.”

“I think you want me to ask what's in first place.”

All sorts of whiffs were coming off Annie. Perfume. Cigarette smoke from whatever gathering she'd been at. Excitement. The perfume was Vivara by Pucci, impressed on my memory from past shopping expeditions.

“Fenk's movie?” Annie said. “
Hell's Barrio
? It was, get this, it was
stolen
.”

“Ho boy, wasn't Fenk the light-fingered guy. Swiped everything that wasn't nailed down, Dave's saxophone case, a whole Hollywood movie. Who'd he steal it from?”

Annie was shaking her head.

“You're not following. Or I'm not saying it right. Fenk didn't take the movie from someone and say it was his. That's not the kind of theft I'm talking about. Somebody stole it from the
festival
. It was scheduled to run tonight. But there was a substitute instead, this really sincere thing from Sri Lanka. So afterwards I go asking about
Hell's Barrio
, and I'm persistent and charming as the dickens and the rest of it, and I find out the entire movie, the
physical
movie, has gone missing. Somebody walked off with the actual cans of film.”

Annie was in one of the kitchen chairs, the heels of both shoes hooked on a rung under her. I was leaning against the counter. When Annie got to the end of her spiel, I bounced my bum gently on the edge of the counter. Otherwise, I gave no indication I was a man putting a big two and two together.

“They sort of chunky metal things, these film cans?” I said. “In a hexagon shape around the outer edges?”

“Yeah, silver-coloured usually,” Annie said. “So it must be significant, you agree? The cans that had
Hell's Barrio
in them are gone. Disappeared. Vanished in a puff of smoke.”

“They got big handles on them, these cans, for lifting?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I think I know where the cans are.”

“Aw, come off it, Crang. What're you? The man who's always one step ahead?”

“The cans I saw, I couldn't tell they had the film in them for
Hell's
Barrio
. But the tipoff is they weren't in a place where film cans should be. There were seven or eight of them, my guess, and the one on top of the pile had a yellow sticker and a line of black type. A title probably. I should've done something about a closer look.”

Annie had her hand on her chin, and she was wearing her concentrating look, the eyes a little wider, a small frown line between them.

“Seven or eight cans is too many for one movie,” she said. “Except maybe
Gone with the Wind
, which
Hell's Barrio
isn't in length or probably in anything else. It'd take up only three cans of film, maximum. The rest you saw must be other movies.”

“Cans of film,” I said. “Got that. Keep going, honeybun. You're doing great.”

Annie took her first sip of wine, enough to wet her lips.

“Okay,” she said. “Late-breaking piece of news number two. The other five movies Trevor Dalgleish booked? There's nobody up from California for any of them. No actors, no producers, no persons whatsoever. But I asked a very nice young woman from the festival, one of those long-stemmed beauties you admired at the press lunch, and she told me, no problem—they all say no problem a lot, the tall girls— any inquiries on those films go to one man, same rep up from California for all five, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah. Guess who she said?”

“Raymond Fenk.”

“Dammit, Crang, you get a kick out of ruining my revelations?”

“Fenk
was
here for
Hell's Barrio
and the other five California movies?”

“The long-stemmed one didn't seem to know he was dead.”

“And you didn't enlighten her?”

“'Course not. But now we're cooking, you think so? Trevor Dalgleish is responsible for six movies at the festival, and the deceased, Raymond Fenk, is the California contact on the whole six.”

“Great sleuthing,” I said. “Where'd you get your touch? Read the complete Nancy Drew when you were a kid?”

“I'm not finished yet.”

“Maybe I better re-fortify myself.”

I got more ice cubes from the freezer. The Wyborowa was on the table. I put a small splash over the ice.

“All of this is happening up at the Eglinton,” Annie said. “Those receptions in the lobby after the last film of the night are apparently a regular feature. Cam Charles's there playing the host. A few press people, the ones who aren't down at the Festival of Festivals. Patrons, guests, a couple of people from the Sri Lanka movie. Very sweet they were, but I couldn't get two useful sentences out of them for my San Francisco articles. So I'm poking around, getting the scoop on the stolen movie cans and everything, and I can't help noticing that Trevor Dalgleish has a new companion. New to me anyway.”

“This is terrific, kiddo, the scene-setting,” I said.

“But you're wondering where's the action?”

I didn't answer.

“All right,” Annie said. “The guy hanging in at Trevor's side, he has four out-front, can't-miss features. Some of this I got from personal observation, the obvious parts. The others I just walked up to Trevor and the guy and put myself in their conversation.”