Crang Mysteries 6-Book Bundle. Jack Batten
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If the briefcase surfaces, I’ll give you preference over a chisel.”
“No extra charge. The two hundred’ll cover it.”
“Competitive, but a sportsman.”
We were in Dooney’s. I’d drunk two bottles of Perrier. The adventure at the Silverdore left me thirsty. It also left me enervated. I ordered a double espresso. James had coffee—milk, no sugar. He sipped it as if he’d just returned from a trip to Grandma’s. The kid was immutable. I made a mental note to lend him the word.
“Two possibilities,” I said. “Either Fenk didn’t bring the briefcase back to the room or else the guy who killed Fenk took it when he left.”
“You think one guy?”
“That’s the other puzzle. One killer or two, I didn’t pin down how many people were in the sitting room.”
“Okay, one of the voices, I couldn’t tell what he was saying, or anybody else, what they were saying, but he had a deeper voice.”
“A deep voice would be Fenk.”
“What I think too. When I lifted the key from him at the restaurant, he was talking some, giving me shit. His voice was like the father’s on TV. The Munsters, that father.”
“Young fella like you, James, you remember Fred Gwynne?”
“Reruns.”
“Keep going, James. Let’s hear you on the other voice. Or voices.”
“Higher or lighter,” James said. “Not like a girl’s, but higher or lighter. And the way the words ran together, that was different.”
“Trevor Dalgleish.”
“Who’s he?”
“His name was on a piece of paper on Fenk’s desk in the sitting room. Trevor’s got a light voice, tenor maybe, and his accent leans to mid-Atlantic.”
“Middle of the Atlantic? No country out there I heard of.”
“People who grow up in Rosedale, tony neighbourhoods like that, some of them speak in a mid-Atlantic accent. They want you to think, these people, Canadian, American, whatever, they’re plugged into upper-class England. Kind of an affectation. You storing this away, James? That’s roughly what a mid-Atlantic accent comes down to.”
I checked for the waiter. Dooney’s was doing a brisk Saturday-afternoon trade in the usual serious talkers, and I was getting desperate for my double espresso.
James said, “Doesn’t mean this Dalgleish had to be the guy out there with Fenk.”
“True, but just for theory’s sake, let’s use what’s handy.”
James’s face had lost its customary sulk. The kid was getting a kick out of his phonetician’s role.
“Mid-Atlantic, I don’t know,” he said. “But what it was like, me listening to whoever was with Fenk, it was like I’m on the subway, and people’re talking beside me. Talking English, okay? But I feel like I’m right out of it.”
“Very perceptive, James. Opens up another possibility.”
“Yeah?”
“Tell you why. There were two other names on the paper I told you about on Fenk’s desk, two besides Trevor Dalgleish’s, and they belonged to guys from the Far East.”
“Israel, in around there?”
“That’s Near East. Far East is China, Thailand, Vietnam, teeming millions.”
“Those people, yeah, high voices.”
“Compared to Fenk’s,” I said. “Except I’m beginning to think Paul Robeson had a high voice compared to Fenk’s.”
My double espresso arrived. Lukewarm, but I didn’t care. I needed an adrenalin boost, and I swallowed a quarter of the cup at one go. James stirred a spoon in his coffee. He looked like he’d run out of linguistic analogies.
I said, “Want me to sum up?”
“It’s just . . . speculation.”
“Hell, let’s think wild, James. Reach for it. Plunge into the realms of might be.” Was I getting hyper? Must have been the double espresso. Or a reaction to the afternoon’s crime spree. “What we might have in the sitting room,” I said, “is either one Trevor Dalgleish or two Vietnamese.”
“And that was who wrapped the thing around the dead guy’s neck.”
“It’s surmising, but what the heck.”
“And,” James said. The kid had gone into a dogged mode. “And it would also be who might’ve walked out with the dead guy’s briefcase that had in it that stuff that used to be inside the lining of your guy’s saxophone case.”
“Well, as long as were surmising, we might as well take it all the way.”
James developed the expression of a man having second thoughts. He said, “There’s one place, you follow me, we don’t take it.”
“I know,” I said, “to the cops.”
“No way.”
“Too fanciful for the police, James, all our theorizing about voice tones and speech patterns.”
“That’s not the reason I’m thinking about.”
I lifted my cup of lukewarm espresso and drank another quarter of it. That took ten long seconds. James didn’t look like he was enjoying the ten seconds.
“Besides,” I said, “if we approached the police, we might have to answer for several crimes of our own.”
“Now you’re talking,” James said. He exhaled a long breath. First time I’d seen the kid show a small flash of nerves.
“One thing,” James said, “the guy’s gonna be happy to get his instrument back.”
“Well, let’s see, you picked a pocket, we did a burglary, Fenk got strangled, I sat in a dark closet for a century or two, but, yeah, Dave Goddard should be one happy tenor-saxophone player.”
“Personally, what happened today, I liked it.”
I finished the espresso, reminded James I was available for the defence if his career in crime foundered, and drove home.
The first chore was to store the saxophone and its case in the hall closet. I’d return them to Dave later in the evening, after I’d caught a nap. Exhausting work, the break-and-enter game. Dave could get by with the Flip Bochner saxophone for one more night of music. Was there a need for me to brief Dave on Fenk’s murder? Maybe the fact, but not the cause. If the cops couldn’t trace the saxophone strap to Dave—how could they?—why should I burden him with the news? By recovering Dave’s sax, I’d made up for the botched tail job. Or almost. What about Fenk’s murder? Did I have a duty there? The questions were getting tougher by the second.
I lay on the bed with my clothes on and read again at the Gene Lees book, Jazzletters. Something to take the mind off crime and my part in it.
Lees had a theory in a chapter called “Pavilions in the Rain” about the demise of the great bands. Claude Thornhill. Jimmy Lunceford. Boyd Raeburn. Lees thought the bands were hurried to their decline when the American transportation system shifted and changed. Cars came along in bigger numbers, pushed by money men who had interests in road construction and rubber firms. Lees said the money people lobbied successfully for the dismantling of the trolley systems and the electric railroads that carried people, among other destinations, to the pavilions and dance halls in the countryside where the big bands played on weekends. Goodbye trolleys, goodbye pavilions, goodbye bands. Sounded convincing, but I was always a sucker for a guy who could pitch a well-reasoned theory.
I fell asleep, clothes on, Lees