Capriccio (8 page)

“Bald!” The howl caused heads to turn three tables away.

“I didn’t say bald. Balding—there’s a difference. You still have quite a bit of hair. You probably won’t be bald for four or five years.”

“Jeez, you really know how to wreck a guy’s appetite,” he complained and ate on with no noticeable decrease in either speed or pleasure.

Everything was just as we’d left it when we got back to the apartment including Victor’s Corvette parked in the garage. I didn’t see Betty’s door open when we went into the apartment, and after about two minutes Sean said he was going down to talk to her. “I’d better put my hat on,” he said, patting his hairline and glaring at me.

“And leave it on,” I urged.

I kept my door ajar and heard him charm his way in like a snake oil salesman. He thickened up his accent a few degrees.

“Howdy, Ma’am,” he said. “The name’s Bradley, Sean Bradley. A friend of Victor Mazzini—the gentleman that lives next door. I can’t seem to get a line on him. The rascal’s run to ground and forgot to pay me a little old debt. It’s only a couple of hundred, but I’m visiting in your fine city and find myself a bit short.”

The next thing I heard was her door open and Sean’s boots shuffle in. I waited ten minutes (twelve and a half, actually), and when he came back, his lower face was bruised.

“Now there is one lonesome lady!” he exclaimed and pulled out his handkerchief to wipe his brow. As the handkerchief was red with white polka dots, I couldn’t see the lipstick on it, but I knew it would be there.

I swallowed down my revulsion and said, “Did you find out anything?”

“Oh yeah. Victor’s hawking some jewelry for her. She gave him a diamond ring and a bracelet, and she hasn’t seen hide or hair of him since. Just three days ago, she handed them over. What do you make of it?”

“Harry Walton,” I said, and explained. “He’s a friend of Victor’s who handles second hand jewelry. I’m sure my uncle wasn’t planning to steal them.”

“Why don’t you give Harry a call and be sure?”

“I will.”

I called Harry, and heard with a rush of relief that Victor had taken the ring and bracelet to him. He didn’t have a buyer yet, but a woman was interested in the ring. Harry asked about Victor’s disappearance; I said we hadn’t found out much yet and hung up.

“It’s funny Victor was selling Betty’s jewelry. I thought he wasn’t seeing her these days,” I said.

“He goes over to her place when you’re out. You’re too young to scandalize with the affair. What I was wondering is whether she has a key. She said he goes there. I didn’t like to ask her right out.”

“I thought from your dislocated jaw you might be intimate enough to enquire.”

“Not yet, but I’m working on it,” he smiled softly. “Betty thinks bald men are sexy.”

“Betty thinks all men are sexy. Betty is probably a nymphomaniac.”

He smiled blissfully. “And I was afraid a Canadian holiday might be dull. Just goes to show you.”

CHAPTER 6

“Do you think you could handle a drink, with those sore lips?” I asked.

Sean oozed a leery smile at me. “A cold beer would hit the spot,” he agreed. “They could do with some cooling down.”

It did hit the spot, and I was glad I had a little alcohol in me when the phone rang. I only jumped one foot, instead of going through the ceiling.

“This is Mr. Bartlett from the Bank of Montreal speaking,” the disembodied voice announced—a flat, banker’s voice. “I’ve been reading of Mr. Mazzini’s disappearance in the papers. Have you had any word from him?”

Already a nervous upheaval was building under my ribs. Banks weren’t chummy enough to be making a purely social call. I explained who I was, and told him no, we hadn’t had any word.

“I’m a little worried about his loan,” he said, in a voice that was more than just a little worried.

“Loan?” The nervous upheaval escalated to a quake. “The loan he arranged last week. It’s insured against his death, of course, but in the case of a disappearance, I—well quite frankly, Miss Newton, I don’t know what to do. I’m the Loan Manager. I personally approved the loan and now to have him disappear . . .” His tone implied it was pretty shabby behavior on Victor’s part.

I gulped and said, “I’m sure he’ll turn up soon. How much is the loan for?”

“I can’t divulge that information over the phone.”

Bankers understand money as surely as Betty Friske understands sex, so I tried a little guile on him. “I see. I thought perhaps you wanted me to meet the payments in his absence.”

There was interest in his reply, but doubt was paramount. How did he know by my voice I was penniless? “It was a rather large loan.”

“How large?”

“As I said, I can’t divulge that over the phone.”

Sean, listening at my shoulder, covered the receiver with his hand and said, “We can go down in person.” I relayed this to Mr. Bartlett, and a meeting was arranged for as soon as we could get there. His eagerness gave rise to shattering worries about the size of Victor’s loan.

Since my uncle used the closest bank, it was hardly more than an elevator ride away.

“He won’t tell me anything if you’re along,” I pointed out to Sean. “He wouldn’t even tell me, and I’m Victor’s niece.”

“I’m your fiancé,” he decided. “Maybe you better let me do the talking.”

Help was one thing, and appreciated, but taking over was less welcome. This was a family matter, and he sounded like he didn’t think I could handle it. “No, maybe I better not!” He took my decision quietly, so I let him tag along.

Mr. Bartlett looked more prepossessing than his voice had led me to imagine. He was tall, a slender man with graying hair and tinted glasses. He wore a dark suit, even in summer, and had a private office of sorts, the privacy diluted by a glass wall from the waist up.

I introduced Sean as my fiancé, and rushed on to do the talking myself. I figured an appeal to Bartlett’s greed was my best lever, and outlined that my uncle would be greatly embarrassed to have his financial reputation stained by not meeting his loan payments, so if he’d just tell me how much the payment would be, and when it was due, I’d sell some securities (this I managed without a blush) and make the payment for him. Was it due now?

“Oh no! Not till the middle of July. He only arranged the loan a week ago. It’s these distressing stories in the newspapers that have caused the alarm. As I said, it was rather a large loan,” he added, brows raised. A man probably in charge of millions, and he was as scared as a jackrabbit.

“Over a million?” Sean asked nonchalantly. He had turned on the Texas accent for the occasion. “I don’t know as I see my way clear to handling anything over a million, darlin’,” he added in an apologetic aside to me.

“Dear me, no! Not a million!” Mr. Bartlett exclaimed, and laughed aloud with relief. “More in the amount of a hundred thousand.
Over
one hundred thousand,” he added importantly.

Sean smiled and tossed up his hands. “No problem. It might help us locate Mr. Mazzini if you’d let us have a look at his account. I reckon he deposited the money in his account here. If he drew a check on it, it’ll give us an idea what he did with the money and hopefully a lead on where we can find him.”

“But he didn’t take a check. He asked for cash,” Mr. Bartlett said, and I believe he regretted the disclosure as soon as he’d made it.

“Cash! Isn’t that very unusual?” I asked.

“Highly irregular, but Mr. Mazzini has always been a rather—unusual customer. Not to say he doesn’t repay when he overdraws, but the artistic temperament . . .” He hunched his narrow shoulders forgivingly. “I thought it had to do with opening a Swiss account, or something of that sort,” he added, looking to the Texas tycoon for agreement.

Sean nodded obligingly, as if he had a few million stashed in Switzerland himself. “How much over a hundred thousand?” he asked. To reproduce his accent would be impossible. It was Texan and broadly drawn.

“He asked for two hundred thousand. I couldn’t see my way clear to letting him have that much. Of course he has good collateral. He borrowed between one and two hundred thousand—halfway between,” he said, giving us the total in this oblique way, and with some anxiety that he was straying from the path of banking rectitude.

I blanched. “Now don’t you worry your pretty little head about a thing, darlin’,” Sean told me.

We all three sat looking at each other for a minute, then Sean gave a jerk of the head, and I began the ritual of leaving, thanking Mr. Bartlett, and assuring him the loan was in no jeopardy. As Mr. Bartlett wasn’t aware of the insignificant nature of my bank balance and the spurious nature of Sean’s accent and fortune, he looked relieved.

"A real pleasure to meet you, sir,” Sean said and clamped Bartlett’s hand.

He took my arm, and we hustled out to the street. “At least we know what’s being looked for now,” I said.

“He got the loan a week ago. Do you think he was still carrying around the cash?”

Upon consideration, it sounded unlikely. Why borrow such a huge sum, only to pay the interest on it? Obviously he had some immediate need for the money. As the European tour wasn’t till the autumn, it seemed logical he’d borrow in the autumn, if he meant to stash the money in a Swiss account. But surely people didn’t borrow money to put in a Swiss account. They were for people with money to spare, money to hide from the taxman.

“On the off chance that Victor’s bank book might give us a clue to this, shall we go back up to his studio?” I suggested.

“My thoughts exactly.”

Inside the main doorway, I suddenly glanced at the locked mail boxes. The mailman didn’t arrive till after I left for work, so I usually got my letters from the mahogany table by the front door, but Victor had given me a key, and I used it to pick up the mail before going upstairs. There was a letter from Mom to me, some bills and a letter in a Royal York Hotel envelope for my uncle. It had a paper inside, with something hard wrapped in it. The most intriguing thing about it, however, was that the handwriting on the envelope was Victor’s. There was no mistaking his bold, flashy scrawl. The postmark was Toronto, and the date of mailing was yesterday. It temporarily put the bank statement out of my mind.

“There’s something funny here,” I muttered. Before the elevator reached the seventeenth floor, we had torn the envelope open. Wrapped inside a piece of Royal York stationery was a plain metal key with the number 87 on it.

“It’s from some kind of a locker,” Sean said.

“The Royal York connects underground to Union Station. There are baggage lockers there,” I told him. My heart quickened. “I arrived there by train from Montreal and used them. This looks like the right kind of key.”

We went through the formality of checking out the apartment for signs of trespassing or Victor’s return—both negative— before we went tearing down to Union Station. “The subway would be faster,” Sean mentioned. “It goes right to the station.”

It always surprised me how quickly other people got their bearings in a strange city. We went to the bus stop to grab a bus to the subway. “How long have you been visiting here?” I asked him.

“A week now,” he said, which surprised me. In some unreasonable way I pictured him arriving just before we met at the Casa Loma.

As we jostled along on the bus to the subway I said, “I guess you ye seen all the sights by now then, huh?”

“I’ve been looking around,” he said vaguely. “I went up to the top of that tower, the CN Tower they call it. I saw the Parliament Buildings at Queen’s Park, been out to Ontario Place and down to the Harbour Front. Oh, and the Eaton Centre, of course. We’ve got a mall a lot like it in North Platte, only a bit smaller.”

Our time together had been nearly totally occupied with looking for Victor, but during the lulls, I’d been forming some plan of showing Sean the town after we found my uncle to reward him for his help. I felt gypped. I should have realized the Casa Loma wouldn’t be the first item on a visitor’s agenda.

“There’s a lot more to see,” I said.

“I’d like to catch a Blue Jays game.”

Next to fishing, baseball is the dullest thing I could think of.

Sean had already learned his way around the subway. He even had a pocketful of metal tokens. He negotiated the maze at the terminal without any difficulty at all, down escalators and up stairs, till we reached the bank of luggage lockers.

We both paid lip service to the idea that the hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been spent or invested, but I, for one, also had a firm idea it was resting in cubicle 87 and could hardly speak for the walloping of my heart.

Our key opened locker 87, and there sitting in the square cubicle was Victor’s well-battered black violin case. Nothing else, just the case. Sean lifted it out with a wary look over his shoulder, looking for God only knows what, except that it seemed a climactic enough moment for some crook to jump out at us.

“His violin,” I said, bewildered.

“We’d better open this in some private place,” Sean suggested. His eyes were sparkling like fire crackers.

“Why, it’s only his violin, isn’t it?” He looked doubtful. “I’ll take it to the ladies’ washroom,” I decided, and reached for it.

He didn’t let go. “That’s a little too private. I want you to be where I can keep an eye on you. For your safety, I mean,” he added hastily. He caught the swift rise of suspicion in my eyes. Why should he want to “keep an eye on me”? “There’s something in it all right, but it doesn’t feel like a violin.” He gave it a little shake, by the handle. I could hear a louder rattle than the violin made.

“Does it feel like a hundred and fifty thousand bucks?”

He gave a triumphant smile. “Sure does—wrapped in two bundles.”

My impatience soared. I wanted to rip it open right then and there. “Couldn’t we go up to your room?”

“My room?” he asked, frowning.

“Aren’t you putting up at the Royal York?”

“Where’d you get that idea?”

“I don’t know. You just seemed the Royal York type.”

“What type is that?”

Safe, solid, middleclass was what I thought, but I said, “North Platte type.”