“How many times I got to tell you I never got caught? Not once in thirty years.”
“I recall you saying.”
“Only time I was ever busted on a break-and-enter, a Holiday Inn out on Eglinton Avenue right here in the city, I wasn’t the guy who went into the hotel room.”
“You were waiting in the car out in the parking lot while your partner handled the burglary duties inside. The trouble was, the husband of the couple in the room woke up, and bad things ensued. You told me about this calamity when we first met.”
“The cops took me downtown, me and my partner, a guy name of Abbey Marcoux, that bungled the entry.”
“Convicted at trial, confirmed on appeal. I read the appeal judgment.”
“Two years in the can up in Kingston.”
Maury’s face took on a morose look. He slowed his walking pace while I waited patiently for him to rally from his small sad reverie.
We had reached a park on Brunswick just above College. The park was small, green, and nicely looked after. I motioned Maury to a bench facing the park. It was twenty minutes to ten, and we were only five minutes away from Fletcher Marshall’s store. There was time to dally. We sat on a bench beside a sign reading “Margaret Fairley Park.”
“Ever heard of this Margaret Fairley broad?” Maury said, sounding brighter.
“She was a Coleridge specialist,” I said. “I read that in a book about the neighbourhood. And she edited a communist magazine.”
“That was what got the park named after her?”
I shook my head.
“Margaret lived in a house on this block where we’re sitting.” I said. “Everybody thought she was a generous neighbour.”
Maury’s expression told me he wasn’t convinced. Since I knew there would be no persuading him, both of us went amiably quiet for a few minutes.
Then Maury looked at his watch. “Time we got to the gig,” he said.
Chapter Four
Fletcher Marshall’s store was on the north side of College, across the street from the oldest functioning fire station in the city. The store took up the ground floor of a two-storey detached building. It had large windows on either side of the front door, both currently featuring handsome book displays. Canadiana was the centrepiece of one, and the other was given over to old books about nineteenth-century classical composers. On the right side of the building as we faced it, there was another door opening off the street. The sign in the door window announced that it led upstairs to the office of “Hamilton Carruthers RAIC, Architect, Environmental Design.”
“Don’t just stand there rubbernecking,” Fletcher said, waiting for Maury and me at the bookstore’s open door.
Fletcher was very tall, erect, and craggy-faced, in his early sixties but looking younger and fitter. In temperament, Fletcher was a flinty kind of guy, a direct speaker, always confident in his opinions. Today, a rarity in my experience of him, he gave off waves of agitation. Fletcher was jumpy.
I introduced him to Maury.
“Your talents are known to me, Mr. Samuels,” Fletcher said.
“They’re getting rusty.”
“I won’t be asking you to practise them, merely to assess somebody else’s exhibition of similar talents.”
“Show me what you got.”
Fletcher’s store had few of the smells a person expects in an antiquarian bookstore, especially one that has been in operation for more than twenty years. No hints of dust or mildew offended the nostrils. Fletcher had a scrupulous attitude toward his store and its contents. Thousands of books lined the shelves in the large main room, and each one gave the impression it had an attentive and loving owner.
Fletcher led Maury and me into a smaller room in the middle of the store. A couple of tables were pushed against one wall, each desk stacked with books. Among the stacks, there were two orderly piles of large-sized envelopes. Everything indicated that this room constituted the store’s shipping department. Against one wall stood the safe that was apparently at the centre of Fletcher’s grief. The safe, its door shut, showed no signs that anybody had messed with it.
“Digital lock,” Maury said, giving the safe his preliminary inspection.
“That’s a problem?” Fletcher said.
“Just an observation.”
“Very well,” Fletcher said. “Suppose I just tell you what I expect from you gentlemen this morning.”
Maury didn’t let Fletcher get any further. “You want me to take a run at the safe. See if I can open it. If I can, you’re hoping I can tell you what type of skill it took for the guy who cracked it last night. Maybe even take a guess at which particular guy, out of everybody I know in the burglary business in the city, was likely to have done the job. That about it?”
Fletcher looked offended that Maury had read him so accurately. He took a moment to organize his next step.
“Am I asking too much?” Fletcher said.
“Maybe not,” Maury said. He pulled on the white gloves from the briefcase Sal had prepared for him, then turned back to the safe.
Even though it was digital and therefore presumably modernized in every respect, the safe still had the cumbersome look of an old-time object. In height, it came up to Maury’s waist. It wasn’t particularly wide, but it ran deep in length and appeared to have plenty of storage room inside. The lock apparatus sat separately on top of the storage section and seemed to be attached to the lower part by a series of internal wires. On the lock apparatus’s face, there were rows of numbers on the right side, three numbers across and four down, and on the left side, there was a large dial.
“What’d the safe look like when you came in here at whatever time this morning?” Maury said to Fletcher. “Closed up like this?
“No,” Fletcher said. “The safe door was open, and the safe itself was empty. I’m the one who locked it up again.”
“You locked it up so that I could try opening it myself?”
“I imagined the whole procedure for the reason you just analyzed a minute ago. Maybe you can identify the type of person who broke in.”
Maury examined the safe’s face some more. “The dial works clockwise?” He asked Fletcher.
“Don’t all safes work clockwise?”
“Fletcher, “I said. “Maury’s the expert you hired. Just answer the questions. Never mind the editorials.”
“Clockwise, yes,” Fletcher said.
Maury put his right hand on the dial and paused. He looked like he was psyching himself for action.
“The way you’re touching the dial,” Fletcher said to Maury, “I get the idea you intend to turn it counterclockwise. I already told you it goes clockwise.”
Maury spoke without turning around. “Crang, tell your friend the next time he opens his mouth, I’m out the door.”
“You heard the man, Fletcher,” I said.
“I’m just a little apprehensive….” Fletcher said, his voice trailing off.
Maury bent over and picked up Sal’s black briefcase. For an instant I thought he was about to ditch the job. But all he did was reach into the briefcase and take out a medium-sized rubber mallet.
He turned back to the safe, holding the mallet in his left hand. With his right hand, Maury gave the dial a quick, hard, counterclockwise twist.