Crang Mysteries 6-Book Bundle. Jack Batten
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laboratory language. But, scraping away the Latin and the chemistry, we were talking cocaine.
The second sheet was headed “Trevor Dalgleish Clients”. These had to be the people Cam thought Trevor might be romancing. Ten names altogether. The first six were separated by double spaces and had complete addresses and phone numbers after them. None of the names rang bells. The other four names were grouped and had one address for the lot and no phone number. Nho Truong. Dan Nguyen. Nghiep Tran. My Do Thai. I was in business. The names were Vietnamese. Were any of them matches for the two names I saw on Saturday afternoon? Written above Trevor’s name on the press release for Hell’s Barrio? In Fenk’s hotel room? My memory was okay, but not photographic.
The address for the four men put me on more solid ground. It was an Oxford Street number. Oxford ran off Spadina Avenue south of College. It was in the Kensington Market area. Portuguese fish stores. West Indians peddling live chickens and rabbits and ducks. Fruit and vegetable stalls on the streets. Annie and I did monthly excursions to the market for provisions. I don’t think we’d run into Nho Truong and the guys. Hadn’t bought a live duck either.
The papers clipped together were publicity blurbs, cast listings, and other informative bumpf on six movies. Hell’s Barrio came first. Raymond Fenk’s name was front and centre as producer. I didn’t recognize the names of the rest of the Hell’s Barrio people: the actors, director, cinematographer, the best boy. On the other five movies, my recognition quotient was a total zip. The people who made the movies had names that meant nothing to me. Neither did the movies’ titles. All I knew was, the same guy was in charge of lining up the six for the Alternate Festival. Trevor Dalgleish.
Was there a common thread in the six? Hell’s Barrio, I already gathered, was about Hispanics having it tough in L.A. The second movie was about AIDS. I couldn’t tell from the literature whether it was feature or documentary. Next was a film “as relevant as today’s headlines and just as explosive”, the publicity said, about black street gangs in a city that wasn’t identified. Hispanics, AIDS, and gangs? So far, not much of a common thread. People who weren’t getting a kick out of life? Maybe film analysis wasn’t my long suit.
My vodka and soda was empty. This seemed to be a job—figuring out what the six movies shared—for the in-house film critic. If I asked Annie to take a shot at it, I’d have to go all the way. Tell her everything that had gone on: the tail job for Dave Goddard, Fenk’s murder, the rest. Well, I was due to let her in on the events to date. Overdue. Then she could look over the six movies for points in common. She could also tell me what the hell a best boy was.
19
ANNIE DIDN’T THINK I’d used my most mature judgment.
“This is a case,” she said, “damn near terminal, of you losing your marbles.”
“It seemed a good idea at the time, the part about swiping the saxophone back. It still does if it weren’t for the dead person.”
“You have to call the police. Come on, this is murder.”
It’d taken me a half-hour to tell the story of the stolen saxophone, my expedition with James, Fenk on the sitting-room floor. Start to finish, it was good for no more than ten minutes, but Annie interrupted with many variations on “say that again” and “you did what?” The food and wine got in the way too. Annie made us a platter of tuna-salad sandwiches with olives and tomato slices and gherkins, and she opened a bottle of white Dao. It was an early supper or a light dinner, whatever meal came at six-thirty before we went off to the premiere of Harp Manley’s movie. I ate my half of the platter and more. Annie’s appetite was on hold.
“So?” she said. “You want my opinion? There’s the phone over on the table.”
“One point emerges, I think. I’m in kind of deep.”
“Take the sun ten years to reach you, that deep.”
I expected Annie to be upset. She wasn’t. She was mad, which was better than upset. Mad is closer to rational analysis. I needed a little of that, as long as it didn’t include a call to the cops.
“The police,” Annie said, “solve murders. They get paid for it. You, what you get paid for, the way you explained it to me one or two hundred times, you come along later, after the murder. You say to the judge, oh, no, it wasn’t my client who did the murder. Or it wasn’t murder. Or some such.”
“Yeah, well, events seem to have got out of the normal sequence.”
“No kidding.”
“Another factor, kind of crucial, the cops’ idea of solving Fenk’s murder, they’ll charge Dave Goddard.”
“And you.”
“It went through my mind.”
“And that JD sidekick of yours.”
“James Turkin is delinquent, no question there, but juvenile, no. If you ever meet him, Annie, you wouldn’t think of the word.”
“If I ever meet him, I’ll kick his ass.”
Annie’s temper had just about run the course. We were sitting at the butcher-block table in the window of her apartment. The chairs were bentwood knockoffs, and Annie had been perching on the edge of hers. She poured wine into both glasses and eased back in her chair.
“I’m scared for you,” she said.
“Feeling nervous myself.”
“I don’t suppose that means you’re going to do anything sensible.”
“There’re beginning to be facts, you think about it, that dovetail.”
“For instance? The voices you and your pet criminal heard in the hotel sitting room? I don’t care about accents or timbre, that could’ve been practically anybody.”
“Theoretically, yeah. But we know Fenk had some kind of contact with Trevor and two Vietnamese guys. There names were on his desk, and whoever offed him took the paper with the names when he or they left.”
“‘Offed’ gives me the creeps.”
“I used it to show you I was macho and unafraid.”
“Didn’t work.”
“Whoever murdered Fenk left the room with the paper with the names on it.”
“Better. And the person or persons probably left with the briefcase too.”
“Now you’re getting into it,” I said. “And another conjunction of facts: Trevor must be acquainted with Fenk from booking his movie into Cam Charles’s festival, and Trevor for sure knows some Vietnamese guys who are his clients.”
“Hm.”
“Does that, the hm, mean I should go on?”
“Hmmm.”
“I produce for your perusal the contents of one brown envelope.”
It was the envelope that Cam’s delivery kid dropped off at my place. I’d left the two separate sheets at home, the one with Fenk’s record and the other with the four Vietnamese names. The movie info was still in the envelope.
“These,” I said to Annie, “are the six movies Trevor’s got the responsibility for. Signing up the people, contracts, nitty-gritty details. What I wonder, Fenk’s one movie and five others I never heard of, do they link together somehow?”
Annie pushed the platter to my side of the table and organized the movie material in six piles. The platter had three-quarters of a tuna sandwich on it. I ate the three-quarters.
“I only recognize the titles,” Annie said, lifting the papers, reading, putting them down. “And that’s just from seeing them earlier in the program Cam’s ladies handed out at the Park Plaza.”
Annie got up from the table and went to the