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Authors: Eric Wight

BOOK: The Last Hand
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“What? When?”
“Before she left. I asked her when you were going to retire.”
“What did she say?”
“She said you had to quit soon. How do you feel about it?”
Salter looked for the honest answer that would reinforce this new bond between them without alarming Seth or depressing himself. “I'm nervous,” he said. “I don't have any plans. I don't know what happens next.”
Seth grinned. “Read ‘Ulysses',” he said.
Salter's year and a half at university provided the reference. “I did look at it once. I didn't get far. I couldn't see why they banned it.”
“That comes at the end. I didn't mean the novel, the poem. Tenny-son.”
“What's that about?”
“Ulysses at sixty, picking up his oar for the last time, maybe, but still heading out to sea.”
“Good poem? Readable?”
“Terrific.”
There was a time, in the sixties, when Harry Barberian's steak house was one of the few Toronto restaurants that out-of towners, especially show business people on the road, recommended to each other. In those days Toronto had a French restaurant, La Chaumiere, a spaghetti house, George's, and a fish restaurant, The Mermaid, several steak houses and, of course–the backbone of Canadian dining since the last spike was driven into the Trans-Canada Railroad bed–the dining rooms of the major hotels, the railroad hotels. And the Park Plaza. Most of the other eating places in those days competed in offering the cheapest breakfast in town.
Now there are sixteen Yellow Pages of restaurants offering a range of cuisines from couscous to curried goat, a choice as varied as that on the West Side of New York below 120th street. Most of the dining rooms of the sixties are gone now, but Harry Barberian's has kept its place of honor among the local steak-eaters, and visiting actors still recommend it to each other.
 
 
An earnest discussion of how long the restaurant had been there, and how much a twelve-ounce rib steak had cost the first time they had been there, and when that first time was in each case, took Salter and Marinelli through the awkward time, until the predinner scotch took hold and they could come to the point, whatever that was.
Marinelli coughed, adjusted himself in his chair, sipped his drink, moved his knife and fork slightly, and said, “Thanks for coming along, Charlie. Gives me a chance to show my appreciation for all the help you've been over the last few years. And still to come, I hope. How old are you now?”
“Sixty.”
“Uh-huh. I figured about that. You know Harry Wycke? Used to be in Homicide years ago, then moved to Community Affairs? Retired last year. You know him?”
“I use his cabin for fishing.”
“Yeah? Well, I bumped into him the other day. He lives near me. He thought you'd reached mandatory retirement already.”
“This year.”
“But you
could
retire now, couldn't you?”
“Any time in the last eight years.”
“Why don't you just take the money and run?”
“You think I should? If I was a senator I would stay around for another fifteen years.”
“Yeah, and you'd get a living allowance for the days you weren't in Florida, too. But most normal people look forward to putting their feet up by now. They plan for it.”
“I've got a pension, my wife has her own money, and my kids are independent, more or less.”
“Sounds good. How's your dad?”
“He died last year.”
Marinelli looked for a new start.
“You hear some people talk about nothing else,” he said finally. “Can't wait to retire.”
“Some of the jobs people have to do I'm not surprised. But I'm already doing everything I want to do. I don't have any hobbies except squash, and the old buggers I play with will last my time. I need something to do, you know? What I'd like is to start all over again, retire to a little town, be the one-man police force. They used to have them in this province. My first act would be to lock up the gun, be the first police force in Canada that goes back to the truncheon. That has to start somewhere. If any armed bandits come to town I'd send for the Mounties.”
Marinelli smiled to acknowledge that he recognized Salter was talking playfully, though maybe from a serious impulse. “There haven't been any one-man police forces in Ontario for a long time, Charlie. You could open an agency.”
“Sit in a car all day taking pictures of guys faking injuries for insurance companies? Let's change the subject. What are you up to these days?”
“Me and June joined the local tennis club. They've got a bubble so you can play all winter. I've put on two pounds a year for the last ten years. I'll be up to two hundred and fifty by the time I'm your age. I figure a couple of tennis matches a week and no desserts and I should be able to hold my own. Otherwise, I …”
“I mean, what are you working on?”
“At work, you mean?”
“Yeah. Are you busy?”
“We're always
busy,
Charlie, you know that. There's always a backlog of stuff we can get on with.”
“Mackenzie doesn't tell me everything. Open files?”
“Sure. I make the new guys read them. Once in a while they come up with something we ought to look at again. Nothing very dramatic.”
“How often has it happened that one of these old cases got solved? In your time.”
“Just once, actually. But I live in hope.”
And then Salter couldn't resist it. He had provided Marinelli with plenty of openings, but now he tried the direct route. “How about that lawyer who was stabbed. Got any farther with that one yet?”
“We still figure it was a hooker.”
“But you haven't found her.”
“We will. Someone will whisper her whereabouts to us. One of her buddies when she's trying to beat a rap of her own. You know how it is, you keep the pressure on and someone comes forward eventually.”
“I was thinking about her, after I heard you tell Mackenzie about her. I was wondering, did you consider the possibility that she may not be around anymore?”
“Skipped town, you mean? We've put out a bulletin across the country. Someone will turn her in.”
“Maybe she doesn't exist.” There. It was out.
Marinelli laughed. “At least three people saw her. She'll surface eventually. Oh, yeah, she exists, all right. We'll find her.”
“There might be another way of seeing it,” Salter offered, but Marinelli cut him off.
“If there is, we'll get there. Now I'd better head off. No, no. This is mine. I asked you. Let's do it again, on you. Before you quit for good.”
Salter thought, I'm being put in my place. All I did was make a chatty remark, could have been helpful, because they are looking in the wrong place for the wrong person. But he came ready to keep me off their grass. So fuck him.
 
 
The phone rang in both offices, and Salter picked up the call. “Deputy Chief Mackenzie's Office. Staff Inspector Salter speaking.”
It was the agreed-upon formula to take care of Salter's calls directly and to create a buffer for Mackenzie. The deputy's vanity did not require that someone should answer his phone; he just liked Salter to do it because it gave him time to think if, say, the prime minister was on the line.
The constable at the reception desk in the rotunda said, “I have a Mr. Gregson here, would like to have a word with the deputy chief.”
“Tell him to write a letter, ask for an appointment. Tell him the deputy's in a meeting,” he added.
A pause. “He says it's urgent. He says that he's Mr. Calvin Gregson. He says he was just passing by and thought he would drop in to talk about a pressing matter. Shall I send him on his way, sir?”
“Hang on.” The name Calvin Gregson rang a bell. Salter pressed the hold button and walked to the door of the inner office. “Calvin Gregson, sir. Want to see him?”
“Who's he? Oh, shit, him. What's he want that's important enough to walk up here for? Better find out. Tell him I'm in a meeting. Be free in ten minutes.”
Salter relayed the message, adding, “I'll come down and get him.” Mackenzie stood up and went over to the tiny mirror on the back of his closet door. He smoothed his hair, bared his teeth and knocked the dandruff off his shoulders. “Right,” he said.
 
 
“I'm here on the kind of mission that a leading criminal lawyer should never attempt, Hal. I want to find out what is happening in the Lucas case. You know, the lawyer found stabbed in his apartment? And if you tell me nothing is happening, I'm here to ask why not? And to tell you about a little problem that's just cropped up.”
Calvin Gregson, at fifty, one of Toronto's and therefore the country's leading criminal lawyers, threw a two-thousand-dollar raincoat at a chair and sat down in another, loosening his tie.
“What's that, then?” Mackenzie straightened his own tie and made sure his cuffs were even as he placed his hands on the desk and looked down at himself. He was pleased with his suit; he had bought it at the Bay, where he bought everything he wore. It always paid to buy quality, though you could go too far. He thought Gregson looked like a tailor's dummy. An Italian tailor.
“Lucas's sister, Flora, the member of the Provincial Parliament herself, is expecting a visit from a reporter on the
Daily Dominion
–you know, the new media crusader for truth on the block? And not
any
reporter, by the way, but the one the
Dominion
bought a couple of weeks ago from a Vancouver paper. The
Dominion
offered him a piss-pot full of money I hear. I wonder if the day isn't coming when everybody will be traded like sports stars? You know, if
The World
gives a reporter an iron-clad, two-year contract with an option, then develops him until he's worth as much as Fulford, say, could they put him on the block with a big price attached? Interesting. He'd need a lawyer to represent him, wouldn't he?”
Mackenzie, hearing through Gregson's patter the sound of someone trying to ingratiate himself, relaxed slightly. “What's the guy's name?”
“Gavin Chapel.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, yes, indeed, Hal, and so does everybody in Vancouver.
Chapel isn't a reporter; he's a ‘Special-to-the
-Dominion,
' award-winning shit-disturber, the one who will write the stories when you guys fuck up.”
So this was it. Mackenzie tried not to look as bothered as he felt. He clasped his hands together, leaned forward, and searched for something casual to say. Although he had not had time to assess Gregson's news, it was obviously full of portent. The fact that Gregson was sitting in Mackenzie's office at all, never mind the “drop-by visit” bullshit, was significant in itself. Gregson's time was too valuable to squander.
Mackenzie knew him, of course. Gregson had many times defended people accused of major crimes, often successfully, and always spectacularly, so that criminals with serious money tended to seek him out. Occasionally–when he was deeply irritated at some particularly casual misuse of the law by the police in their eagerness to get a conviction-he worked for nothing. Usually these were cases in which Gregson's presence was enough to tip the balance in the defendant's favor when an awed jury or judge was called on to choose between the police version or the defendant's version of the story in, for example, a case of police brutality.
Gregson made no secret of the fact that he practiced law for money first, then fame. He had both already, and was now rich enough to tithe himself (as he called it)–not by giving to Grace-Church-on-the-Hill, though he did that generously enough–but by donating a portion of his time to people who couldn't afford him.
“You retained by the family?”
“Not for a fee, no.”
“I've already had one conversation with this other lawyer, guy named Holt. Now you. What's up?”
“I'm helping out Flora, his sister. She's the only family he had.”
“The MPP.”
“The attorney general after the next election. I want to keep her on my side.” Gregson grinned and winked, though whether to indicate his cunning, or to give the lie to what he was saying, Mackenzie couldn't tell.
“She throwing her weight about? Should I be worried?”
An actor faced with Mackenzie's last line would have a lot of
room for interpretation. Mackenzie's own delivery was sufficiently poker-faced that he might have been consulting Gregson, wary of Flora Lucas's clout;
or
speaking sarcastically, indicating that no female politician, especially a
provincial
politician, was going to bother him,
or
asking Gregson if Flora Lucas had raised questions he should take seriously. A really good actor would try for all three possibilities.
“Insofar as Flora Lucas is a member of the Provincial Parliament, an M dot P dot P dot, she is not about to let you feel her full legislative weight, no …” Gregson, necessarily something of an actor himself, was much given to the dramatic pause, but the first flourishes of any speech were only the preliminary capework performed while he gathered his thoughts.
“ … but insofar as Flora is a woman, the sole survivor of an old Ontario family, distinguished in her lineage and proud of the family name, she is determined to do everything in her power to bring the killer to justice, and to preserve her brother's good name.”
Mackenzie had an elementary knowledge of city and provincial politics; elementary, but adequate to the job of keeping his nose clean. He knew who Flora Lucas was; he also knew she was a Liberal, whereas Gregson, he was pretty sure, at one time had been a bagman for the Progressive Conservatives. So what was going on? “So she hired you?” he asked.

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