SUCKER PUNCH
SUCKER PUNCH
MARC STRANGE
A Castle Street Mystery
Copyright © Marc Strange, 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or oth erwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Michael Carroll
Proofreader: Jennifer Gallant
Designer: Erin Mallory
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Strange, Marc
Sucker punch: a Joe Grundy mystery / Marc Strange.
ISBN 978-1-55002-702-0
I. Title.
PS8637.T725S82 2007 C813’.6 C2007-900089-4
1 2 3 4 5 11 10 09 08 07
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J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
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For Karen
chapter one
Most afternoons I have a nap between three and six so I’m fresh for the evening shift, and then I have some toast and coffee at the Lobby Café next door to the magazine shop. The café closes at six, but Hattie lets me in through the kitchen and gives me an order of toast and a short pot of coffee, better coffee than you can get from room service.
“You want to look at the paper, Joe?”
“Is the crossword done?”
“Not by me,” she says.
Hattie brings me a copy of the Emblem with my cup.
“How’d you like to be him?” she asks.
The front page has a banner headline that says IT’S ALL HIS! and a photograph of a young, bearded guy surrounded by reporters on the courthouse steps.
“What’s all his?” I ask.
“Some old geezer left him a boatload of money. They’ve been fighting the will for two years, but he won. It’s all his.”
“So it says.” I open the paper for the crossword, but someone’s been there before me and made a mess of the job. I turn to the comics and read the ones I like. Hattie brings me toast with extra butter, no jam, and heats up my coffee.
“Half a billion,” she says. “What would you do with all that money?”
There’s a large man in a wide green jacket peering in from the lobby. He’s rapping the window and jiggling the handle of the sliding glass door. The sign in front of his face reads CLOSED, but he chooses to ignore it. Hattie looks sternly over her shoulder, points to the large clock behind her, which reads 6:09, makes a brisk two-palm gesture that in baseball might signal “safe” but otherwise means over, done, finished. The Lobby Café is closed, and Hattie doesn’t care to debate the issue.
“Buy some new shoes,” I tell her. “Maybe a suit.”
The man in the green jacket raps again, but Hattie ignores him. She’s run the Lobby Café since before I got here. She’s hard to rattle.
“Now there’s a guy who needs a new suit,” she says. “The jolly green giant. His jacket’s about to split at the seams.”
A green foothill lumbers across the red carpet towards the front desk. “I miss Calvin and Hobbes,” I say.
“I miss Terry and the Pirates,” Hattie says.
It’s six-thirty when I take my first walkabout. The pre-evening lull admits echoes from above where seminars are disengaging on the mezzanine level. Most of the lobby traffic is moving from the entrance to the elevators, guests in a hurry to change for dinner or straggling in from excursions, looking forward to a hot bath and a room-service tray. The hotel’s shuttle bus is off-loading luggage, and a group tour is checking in, late arrivals from the airport, still complaining about the flight.
I spot Gritch sitting near his favourite palm tree, pretending to read the Globe and Mail. The world sees me coming a block away, but Gritch can disappear behind a Boston fern. He is sixty-one years old, short, egg-shaped. He sees all and is rarely noticed. My eyes and ears. When I took the security job about seven years ago, Leo Alexander told me to hire Wallace Gritchfield. “The Lord Douglas isn’t an office building,” Leo said. “It’s a castle. Secret rooms, hidden staircases, wouldn’t be surprised if there was a dungeon somewhere.”
If there is a dungeon, Gritch knows about it, how to get there, and how to break out.
“You’re off,” I say.
“You might want me to stick around.”
He’s never in a hurry to go home. He keeps trying to move in with me, and his wife can’t see that it would make much difference in their lives, but I insist he visit her once in a while if only to pick out a suit that doesn’t smell of bad cigars.
“S’up?” I ask.
“Talk to Margo,” Gritch says. “She’s got a VIP checking in soon and she thinks maybe there’ll be a crowd.”
“She still here?”
“Yeah, she’ll be down in a minute. I think she went up to check the Governor’s Suite, make sure housekeeping has the towels folded.”
“I’ll be back in fifteen,” I say.
I leave him sitting in the lobby with his newspaper and continue my tour. The Palm Court is filling up. Rolf Kalman has his reservation book open and has already begun pocketing the discreetly folded bills that ensure the good tables and attentive service to which the guests are already entitled. The Only, the hotel’s justly famous seafood house, is dealing oysters, chowder, and planked salmon; the Street Level Sports Bar is filling up. The Street’s bouncer, Dougray Crain, a former linebacker with the B.C. Lions, gives me a thumbs-up. My job doesn’t involve security for the hotel’s bars, but I like to get a feel for how an evening is building.
There’s a big wedding reception in the Gabriola Ballroom, and in the hotel’s most exclusive function room, Floor Eleven, a retiring city father is being roasted at five hundred dollars a plate.