“THEY were pretty smart, the girls who saw you.” Tony told me. “One of them dialed 911 on her own cell, the other saw your car keys on the sidewalk, thought to unlock it and check for your name on the registration. She found your cell phone, hit the redial number, and I answered.”
He sat back in the chair beside my bed, cracking his knuckles.
“Apparently you were mumbling quite loudly, telling them to “get the paper, tell Tony the number, gray Chev …”
It was Thursday morning, around 9 a.m. Tony had bullied his way onto the fourth floor ward waving his RCMP identification. Hospitals don’t normally allow visitors this early unless the patients being visited are in real trouble in the ICU. I had a slight concussion and had been admitted for observation overnight, but no bleeding in my brain had been detected. My scalp was tight, though, and reaching behind my head I could feel some crusty matted blood on my hair that the emergency staff had missed cleaning off.
The funny thing was I could remember distinctly the “ting” noise that the bat made as it bashed my skull from behind. “Ah, an aluminum baseball bat,” I remembered thinking as I dropped like a stone onto the sidewalk. It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to brace myself for the impact of falling on my right side.
My elbow was still swollen, and my shoulder felt as sore as my stitched-up head. X-rays showed nothing broken, which was a relief. I was going to need some fresh clothes from my flat, though, as scalp wounds bleed profusely. I must have looked like a blood-soaked horror film zombie by the time the ambulance arrived.
“So, things worked out. The OPP pulled Short over on the 401 after midnight; he was nearly past Kingston. He shoved one officer and tried to get away on foot, but they had him cuffed real fast.”
I owed my life to two young women who shared a flat farther east along Powell. They had just gotten off a northbound Bronson bus after a night out and were walking home when they saw what was happening and started yelling. Short was poised over me on the sidewalk near the parked Mini Cooper, ready to hit me over the head again and finish the job. Instead, he ran off, jumped into a large car parked on the same side farther along the street, and accelerated away.
It was too dark to see the licence plate on the car, but as Tony had pointed out, they’d been able to hear me referring to a slip of paper, found it in my jacket pocket, and read the plate number to Tony.
It was likely a fluke that Short noticed my Mini Cooper parked one block up from Bryson’s home after he dropped her there. Figuring I must be somewhere in the neighbourhood, all he had to do was wait near the Cooper for me to show up, saving him a trip to Isabelle’s.
An orderly walked in, placed a plastic tray with metal covered dishes on the bed next to my legs, and left.
I pulled the tray closer and lifted the cold dish cover. Glueylooking scrambled eggs and soggy toast. There was a little container of orange juice and a plastic-topped coffee mug on the tray as well.
The orderly had no sooner left than a teenaged Asian girl in a white coat with a stethoscope around her neck walked in.
She flipped through my chart at the end of the bed impatiently.
“You never really lost consciousness – is that right, Mr. Anderson?”
“Right, not really.”
She moved over much closer and shone a light into my eyes.
“Okay, I will sign you out this afternoon.”
She left, maybe to get her own, hotter breakfast in the cafeteria. Or, more likely, to check seventy other patients over the next half-hour.
Tony sat looking at me, shaking his head.
“You just had to confront Bryson yourself, didn’t you?”
“Well, she started it. I was going to tell you about the daughter connection, but you had to ring off. Is that why you didn’t bring me any grapes?”
Martello smirked.
“And no flowers either.”
The CIC Minister resigned his cabinet post, and speculation was he wouldn’t run again for his seat in Parliament in the next election, whenever that was going to be. Jill Bryson left the public service and basically disappeared from view. Over the course of the summer there was the odd mention in the press about her daughter, Jennifer, free on a significant amount of bail, but likely facing serious jail time.
The CIC department announced at the end of May that the card-processing centre would be relocated out of Sydney to a new place to be determined. The new centre would have stateof-the-art computer technology and safeguards to prevent any similar illicit production of cards and would be “more secure than the Canadian Mint,” in the words of a public affairs official for the department.
This ended up being an unfortunate comparison when the Mint itself was found to have “misplaced” some fifteen million in gold bullion that June.
Closer to home, after the spring rush, work on cars at the shop settled down as was usual during the summer months. Dougald and Reg were kept sporadically busy as customers still brought their cars in for tune-ups and oil changes, but we had the time to switch over to some longer-term projects such as complete engine rebuilds. My Riley’s chassis was delivered to the shop in June, and Reg was rebuilding the motor while the wooden frame and body panels were being repaired separately at another shop in Kemptville.
JP was kept hopping detailing customers’ cars for concours d’élégance competitions all summer long. One hot July day, Jim Bartlett and his son pulled up unannounced on our forecourt in Bartlett’s black E-Type. The son haltingly apologized to JP for implicating him in the theft of his father’s wallet. He’d eventually been charged with public mischief and let off with a suspended sentence.
JP shook hands with the lad, noting that perhaps the boy’s father should write me a cheque to cover my legal expenses in getting JP cleared. Bartlett senior, gulping a little, did this on the spot, placing it on Marjorie’s outstretched palm. JP then walked around the car, tut-tutting about the amateurish job the two had been doing in cleaning and polishing the E-Type themselves, pointing out excess wax stuck in the trim and some dirty spokes on the wire wheels.
“You’ll lose lots of competition points there,” JP said.
Bartlett booked the car in for a full, better detailing job later in the week, and the Barletts left, the father tossing the E-Type’s keys to his son. Dougald, Reg, JP and I watched as the son clashed the car into first gear, Bartlett senior grimacing at us from the passenger seat, but at least not yelling, which seemed like a good sign.
Of course, JP could afford to be magnanimous. As it turned out, and the various relationships were convoluted, clear title for the Lagonda found in Quebec reverted to his girlfriend Michelle, great grandchild of Tante Madeline and longdeceased cinematic heartthrob Lawrence Cross.
The Lagonda, an LG45 Rapide tourer, while not a factory team racer, was still rare enough to net Michelle, at the June RM auction in Toronto, the equivalent of $365,400 in Canadian funds from a Swiss who placed his winning bid over the telephone. She was adamant that our shop take ten per cent for services rendered. She and JP were having a post and beam house built in the Gatineau hills near Chelsea with the rest of the proceeds.
Tony Martello joined us at the pub occasionally on Friday evenings after work. Marjorie’s beau, Fred Fleming, the corporal on Fire Investigator Cardinal’s team, also became a fixture. Tony kept us up to speed on details as more and more unregulated immigration consultants across the country were charged by the RCMP with a variety of offences relating to sale of the PR cards plus possession of and dealing in crack cocaine supplied by Short, Morrison, and Archambault.
Most of the thousand or so customers who had come forward to confess paying for and receiving the cards, effectively jumping the immigrant processing queue, were being allowed to retain their status provided they had no criminal records and were otherwise eligible to stay. Giving evidence against the consultants went in their favour. Those who had paid their $5,000 as the operation was winding down and never received cards were simply out the money. There wasn’t anything, realistically, with which they could be charged and successfully convicted.
The funeral of DC John Phillips was held at the Beechwood Cemetery chapel after the Victoria Day weekend in May. The weather had turned cool and wet after a gloriously warm and sunny beginning to spring. Phillips’ colleagues in the Ottawa Police Department and his former ones in the RCMP attended in full force, as did hundreds of other policemen and women from across the country.
Tony Martello was there, of course, as was Detective-Sergeant Sally Quinn, Phillips’ partner at Ottawa PD. Phillips’ widow was at the graveside supported by their two daughters. A piper played a lament after the fired salute. I wandered over to Lizzie’s grave in another section of the cemetery and visited there awhile.
Marjorie went to the Humane Society and acquired a new cat for the shop. Jerry had already been getting on in years, and his injuries the night of the arson and subsequent surgeries had slowed him down even more. He was content to sleep away most of the day and night on Isabelle’s lap.
Isabelle complained about his lassitude and how his body always got in the way of her crossword puzzles and the books and periodicals she was trying to read in her recliner. But she could be heard cooing to him when she thought no one was listening.
The new shop cat, named Larry by Michelle in honour of Lawrence Cross and his Lagonda, was a real handful. A sixmonth old neutered male tortoiseshell, he had an insatiable thirst for water to be dribbled into his mouth from the cold tap of the full-sized industrial sink in the shop’s washroom.
We took turns in this somewhat tiresome tap-running ritual all day long. But he caught mice aplenty and made us laugh with his running and bouncing, arched-back attack cat posturing, and general playfulness.
My scalp wound healed quickly and the six-inch scar was soon covered by at least some hair that grew back.
“Didn’t really knock any more sense into you, Guv’nor,” Reg said.
“Thanks, Reg. Oh and by the way, you’re fired.”
“Wot, again?”
And so it went.