Keeper of the Flame. Jack Batten
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a day into the trial.”
“Yeah, my client was the nice girl from Sobey’s meat department,” I said. “It started out murder one. I got it reduced to manslaughter a couple months before trial. Then the Crown threw up their hands. One of my better results this year.”
“All the more reason for being generous to yourself on the fees,” Gloria said.
The coffee machine burbled to its conclusion. I got up and poured coffee into my two best mugs, both deep Matisse blue in colour and purchased at the Levin Ceramics Museum. Gloria and I took our coffee the same way — black, no sugar.
“Hmm,” Gloria said, sipping and savouring. “It’s surprisingly fabulous, Crang.”
“More specific, if you don’t mind?”
“Hardy, an oaky taste, and a touch mysterious. That good enough for you?”
“Label says it’s organic and fair trade.”
“Okay, okay! It makes me feel on the side of the angels as well as caffeinated,” Gloria said impatiently. “Now can we get to the fee for the Sobey’s meat girl?”
I sipped some more of the Hoodoo Jo, confirmed it was damn good, and said to Gloria, “Forget about the fee thing for a minute while I tell you about the juicy new file we got.”
“Okay,” she said. “Juicy always thrills me.”
I told Gloria all about Flame and the Reverend Alton Douglas’s machinations. She jotted notes in her iPad, and held back whatever comments she had until I finished.
“You kind of skated over what this person Flame wrote in his songs that was so almighty horrible,” Gloria said as soon as I stopped talking.
“Homophobically ugly, racially horrific, and so on, accept my word for it,” I said. “The point is, Flame’s people think the song lyrics are bad enough to take the Reverend Douglas’s intentions very seriously.”
I got the pages with the lyrics out of my jacket pocket, neatly folded, and handed them to Gloria.
“Read them if you want,” I said. “But if I were you, I’d give the whole thing a pass.”
Gloria took the pages, not wasting so much as a glance at the words on them. “Why don’t I just open a file,” she said. “Put these pages in the file for future reference.”
“Which may not be necessary,” I said.
“So,” Gloria said after she’d filed the pages, “the alleged bad guy is a church minister?”
“Seems that way.”
“So what you’ll want from me is everything I can find out about Reverend Alton Douglas,” Gloria said as she typed. “Background, financial situation, all that. And the building 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