TUESDAY morning was a treadmill for all of us. Insurance adjusters, more tradesmen with clipboards, customers coming and going, cars in and out, phones ringing … by 1:45 p.m. I was almost glad to leave Dougald in charge of the shop as Marjorie and I headed out for our appointment with Cardinal.
We went west along Carling in Sandy’s Miata, saying little along the way. It was cloudy, cool, and threatening rain. I concentrated on weaving through the traffic as Marjorie stared out the side window, a briefcase of our financial records balanced on her short-skirted knees.
We spent an hour with Cardinal’s uniformed assistant first. He examined two years of Britfit tax returns prepared by our accountant, plus Marjorie’s well-kept files on current revenues and expenditures. Marjorie did most of the talking.
Cardinal’s assistant, an easily blushing red-headed thirtysomething corporal named Fleming, seemed edgy at first. By the end of the hour, he looked happier. For all Marjorie’s eye-rolling insolence with me at the shop when I asked questions about our accounts, she was clearly up to speed, decisive and informative with this fellow. Maybe it was his red hair.
He left us alone in his cubicle, returning in a few minutes with Cardinal.
“Mr. Anderson, Ms. Howard. Mr. Anderson, I need to speak to you in my own office. Corporal Fleming will conduct a short interview here with Ms. Howard.”
I followed Cardinal to his own office, a real one with a door. There wasn’t much in it except for a desk covered with files, phone, computer on a rolling stand, and two hard chairs for visitors, one of which I took at his nod.
He looked at me for a few moments. I didn’t say anything.
“So what did you really do for the …” He looked down at a writing pad, but he wasn’t fooling me. “… Office of the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration?”
I lifted an eyebrow.
Cardinal grinned for the first time I’d seen.
“Odette Johnson was at our place last night. She plays bridge with my wife and two other women.”
I had to laugh out loud. Odette was JP’s parole officer, a former Public Safety departmental contact of mine and a friend to me still. At its government heart, Ottawa’s a small town.
“Well, lieutenant, Odette was one of my contacts when I was with the Minister’s Office. I was called ‘program liaison,’ seconded from the department before my directorate moved to the new Canada Border Services Agency. My background had been enforcement intelligence – gathering information about various things such as movements of suspected terrorists, global illegal immigration, false document trends, and so on. I was seconded to be a troubleshooter for the Minister’s Office. If there was a nasty case or issue brewing, I called in favours from departments like Odette’s, or the security services, sometimes agencies overseas. So, just a desk job really.”
Of course, the advantage of having such a loose job description, separate from the political staff but with powers as an immigration official, meant I could nip some potentially nasty things in the bud before the Minister was caught in a media firestorm. One January night, for example, I was standing behind a two-way mirror in a hidden office looking at people coming through Terminal Two Arrivals at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. On seeing the elderly, balding man moving through the Immigration control lineup, I’d given the high sign to the officer standing beside me.
That elderly man is still in Canada, five years later. But with help from counterparts in the security services, at least I’d matched him to his photo as a suspected war criminal, and his case was wending its way through the Canadian courts. He’d be dead of old age before he would exhaust all his appeals, be stripped of his Canadian citizenship, and finally cleared for deportation. But at least we’d nailed the swine, returning from a rare trip abroad. He would die broke and friendless after his lawyers and the media had finished with him. Justice of sorts, which is often what you have to settle for in government work.
“So you helped sweep things under the rug, that sort of thing?” Cardinal asked now.
I stiffened in my seat.
“Prevention, yes. Cover-up, no. I think you know the difference.”
“Okay. Well, Odette says you’re one of the good guys. It helps, too, that my corporal said your books are all in order. I wouldn’t have thought there’d be so much business in fixing old cars, but come to think of it, my nephew drives an MG.”
“Well, there you go. Tell him to bring it in for a tune-up.”
Cardinal swung in his chair, and then turned back.
“Okay. Let’s talk about this Jaguar again. I got a hold of this Bill Tate at Public Works, and he’s supposed to be here tomorrow. He’s pretty mad with all the paperwork he’s going to have to do. Complicated lease, government insurance, all this junk. We’re not finished with the wreck yet, but my guys say it was just a crude fuse in the gas tank filler neck. Your back compound isn’t alarmed?”
“No, there are motion detector lights, but even a squirrel will set those off. I guess the neighbours are used to seeing the lights go on and off and frankly, we’ve never had a problem before. Some kids jumped an older, lower fence once, but Dougald was still there and chased them away. Your firemen crushed my fencing, getting in …”
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
“I’m not complaining, believe me. What I mean is, it was a fairly new, high fence, with barbed wire at the top. Not easy to climb over. The building’s alarmed, and I’d set it myself Saturday just past noon when I left. They didn’t get in through the building. They must have cut the fence. Plenty of dark corners, and we have a bunch of cars back there to hide behind.”
“Where’s the fencing that our trucks knocked down?”
“The contractor who put up the new fence yesterday took it away.” I opened my briefcase, handed him the contractor’s card and he took down the details.
“Okay. Look, we’re still going to talk to your employees. What about this Jean-Paul Desrochers?”
“You’ve obviously talked to Odette about him already. She’s his PO, and yes he’s done jail time for theft. But he’s turned the corner. He works hard, he’s got a nice girlfriend, and he’s a good kid. He got screwed up, but he’s nearly finished his parole. There’s no way he would do something like this.”
“All right, but we still have to speak to him, you understand.”
“Sure, of course.”
“Well, do you have any ideas on this at all?”
“It’s got to go back to Morrison somehow.”
I’d already told Cardinal everything I knew about the gunmetal blue S-Type, Morrison’s suicide, our servicing of the car in January, the unknown Public Works official who had shown up with it out of the blue, everything I could think of.
“I talked to Quebec Sûreté. It’s case closed on the suicide as far as they’re concerned. The Morrison guy left a note and everything.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Okay. Well look, Mr. Anderson. If something else comes up on the car, I’ll be in touch. We’ll talk to all your people, we’ll drop by tomorrow and do it there if that’s okay, but in my own mind this seems like some kind of outside job and I’ll bring in the Ottawa PD when we’ve got a final report at our end.”
He stood up and extended his beefy right hand. I shook it, and went to find Marjorie.
She was chuckling as we headed back to the shop in a bucketing rainstorm, wipers flapping and the windshield defogger on full blast.
“I don’t know what’s so funny Marjorie …”
“He asked me out! The little red-haired fireman.”
“Hmm, well I guess that’s a good sign.”
“He looks kind of cute in that little uniform. Nice bum.”
“Okay, Marjorie. I’ll leave you to it. But what did he ask you besides your availability?”
“Oh, he just went through the motions really. Don’t worry, Conn, it was all proper. How long I’d worked at Britfit, my background, any trouble with the law, all that sort of thing. He was just ticking off boxes on a sheet for that part of it. But what about you?”
“Oh, I think it’ll be all right. Cardinal had done some homework. I think we’re all in the clear on this … it’s a mystery though. They’ll get the police more directly involved.”
We slowed down in the sheeting rain as traffic backed up for the left-turn lane northbound onto Bronson. By now it was nearly 4:30 p.m. and traffic was thick with solo drivers, most of them in SUVs and vans. When it rains, these people turn into real idiots, blabbing banalities on their cell phones instead of concentrating on what they were supposed to be doing.
Marjorie had returned her gaze to her passenger window and gone quiet.
“Look, Marj, let’s get some posters up in the neighbourhood. Isn’t there a photo of Jerry from the Christmas party? Make up a poster and photocopy it. There are lots of little kids around who might have seen him. We can post a reward, a hundred dollars, whatever.”
“I called the Ottawa Humane Society already; they said we’d just have to keep coming in to look at the strays people bring in.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
“But it’s so busy, I just can’t leave …”
“It’s okay. Take a taxi out of petty cash during the lulls, don’t worry about it.”
I was finally turning north on traffic-clogged Bronson now for the short block to another left turn onto Powell that would take us to Cambridge Street and the shop.
We pulled up to the forecourt and I shut off the Miata’s engine. We both stared straight ahead at the now easing rain, pausing before preparing to make the dash from the small car’s cockpit to the front door of the shop.
Suddenly, I felt Marjorie’s hand on mine. I looked at her.
“I want to find him, too, love. Don’t worry, he’ll turn up. C’mon, make a run for it.”
Inside, all seemed under control. JP was first in view, packing up his case of cleaning supplies beside the gleaming black E-Type brought in earlier by the Jaguar club’s president. Seeing us, he bowed and extended his right arm in a matador’s flourish toward his work of valeting art.
Marjorie obliged with “ooohhs” and “aaahhhs” and then headed to her office to dump her case of financial records and turn to her computer.
“Lovely job, JP.”
“Merci, monsieur … How was your afternoon?”
Reg and Dougald had gathered around, too. The Sprite was gone, clutch replaced and returned to its owner thanks to Reg. Dougald had fitted the new convertible top to the fire-debrisdamaged TR6, since the owner had convinced his insurance adjuster this morning that he wanted us to perform the task.
Our own adjuster would make good the owner’s costs for this, plus the paint damage touch-ups at another shop we recommended for this type of work. Insurance companies can be notoriously unhelpful. My own insurance agent, Bill Kelly, was a personal friend from college days. He had been in touch with Cardinal more than once and obviously accepted the fire department’s preliminary opinion that the arson was not an inside job. I didn’t anticipate too much delay in the insurance company’s settling up.
The blaze-coloured Spitfire owned by that club’s president was on the second hoist, brakes serviced and waiting for a lubrication by Reg. A light-blue MGB had arrived during the afternoon, paintwork still beaded with the afternoon’s rain. Another minor tune-up and oil change for tomorrow.
Dougald had been in charge of the phone while fitting the TR6’s new convertible top. The insurance adjuster had called back to give names of the contractors we could hire to repair the shop’s roof, drywall the inside back wall, and then re-paint. The roofers would show up first thing tomorrow morning as the forecast was for clear weather. The inside workers would start Thursday. The adjuster also cleared the new fencing cost, and we were to send him the bill we’d already paid.
“Oh, and a Miss Sandy called. Said you had to be back for dinner tonight with Isabelle.”
“Okay, thanks, Dougald. Look, it’s been a long day. Let’s all go home. Tomorrow it’s more of the same.”
Marjorie had quickly created a “lost cat” poster on her computer, scanning in a photo of Jerry. She’d taken me at my word about a reward, bumping the ante to $200. She and JP would staple a few of the posters on telephone poles in the neighbourhood tonight before heading home.
I hurriedly locked up the shop and turned the Miata south to home. The rain had stopped. I turned on the radio, which murmured news of the day to me as I put the little red car through its paces yet again. I mentally counted the cash in my wallet and pulled over to fill the tank at the gas station at Hog’s Back and Prince of Wales drive. As the fuel gurgled into the tank, I remembered I had to phone in a credit card payment for the parking tickets so the fines wouldn’t arrive at Sandy’s mailing address as the owner of the car.
I’ve always been a “devil’s in the details” type of person, and like to think that, while I wasn’t so hidebound by planning every silly thing, it didn’t hurt to try. There was enough to be surprised about as it was. Expect the unexpected, as they say.
After filling up the Miata’s tank, I continued south along Prince of Wales, familiar as an old shoe after over two years of commuting on it to the shop and back. I love driving, hands and feet moving automatically to keep a good machine on the go efficiently, sometimes fast and overtaking, sometimes just in pace with the traffic. It helped me think.
What I was thinking now was that things seemed to be working out. Whatever was going on over Rodney’s Jag, we looked to be in the clear concerning the arson. The damage to the shop was minimal and hadn’t interfered with our busiest time of the season. Except for the missing Jerry, we had no casualties. Furthermore, Cardinal seemed satisfied that there was some outside force at work that had nothing to do with my business per se.
And I was looking forward to a relaxing dinner with Isabelle … and Sandy.