Blood Count. Jack Batten

in fraud cases. “How much money?”

      “Two hundred and forty thousand dollars supposedly, but Mrs. Mortimer, the client, approved everything I did with the money, that is, Mrs. Helen Mortimer.”

      “What business was she in?”

      “Is. She is still my client as far as I’m concerned. The market. I’m a stockbroker.”

      “I’ve acted for many of your brethren over the years, Cleve.”

      “I’m sure you have, Mr. Crang, but as it happens I’m quite innocent of fraud or anything remotely like it.”

      “Okay, Cleve, from the top, slowly and not necessarily with feeling.”

      At first, as Shumacher talked, I looked at him. I got sick of that in a hurry. He was fidgety as well as fastidious, and his tics and mannerisms were distracting. I shifted to a view out the window — north side of Queen Street from the second floor, east of Spadina Avenue. I’d rented the office since the years before my strip of Queen became home to restaurants where a hundred bucks might get you a reasonable dinner for two and clothing stores where another hundred might get you a knockoff Yves Saint Laurent shirt.

      “I’m very, very creative on behalf of my widow clients, Mr. Crang,” Cleve Shumacher was saying. “That’s because they allow me room to evolve and use space. My businessmen clients, God, they badger me to buy them something on the Vancouver exchange they heard about the night before from someone they sat next to on the plane from Montreal. Dollars to doughnuts, it’s a dog and I have to tap dance for half an hour to keep them from absolutely destroying their portfolios.… Are you listening, Mr. Crang?”

      “The creativity of the market, so on, so forth.”

      “It’s just that we weren’t making eye contact.”

      “Nothing personal, Cleve.” I looked at Shumacher. His eyelids were twitching. It’d be easier to make eye contact with a June bug. “From your preamble,” I said, “I take it Helen Mortimer is the widow Mortimer.”

      “I was coming to that.”

      “Sooner is better than later.”

      Shumacher took a deep breath and resumed. “It’s her son, a despicable person named Arthur Mortimer, trust me on this, despicable, he’s the one who says it’s fraud.”