LockeStep (Locke 1)

one

I tracked Dee Sade, a.k.a. Billy Purvis, to the Victoria dining room of the Prince Albert Hotel. It's one of the best-known places in the city. That figured. Dee was the latest in a line of rockers that stretches all the way back to Liverpool. They were raised on fish-and-chips, and whenever one of them is in Toronto and leaves his suite to play with a steak, you can count on his doing it at the Prince Albert, where the reporters lie in wait to show the world that its idol has learned how to use a knife and fork.

Dee's fans had followed him to the hotel. A dozen policemen were holding the fort against a bunch of kids who should have been doing their homework instead of freezing their ears off in the February sleet. I was dressed for it, wearing a camel's hair overcoat on top of one of my two Savile Row suits. At the door I made a point of looking snooty, so the cops assumed I was a guest, and nobody tried to head me off as I walked into the dining room, leaving my topcoat with Maria, the Filipino hat-check girl.

The maître d' in the Victoria Room owes me one. I was eating dinner there once when a drunk punched a waiter in the eye and started explaining what the-trouble-with-you-bastards is. He was drowning out the spell I was trying to cast on a super-cool lady lawyer, so I put a come-along hold on him and whisked him out through the kitchen before the remaining female guests could reach for their lorgnettes to see who was doing all that swearing.

Now I called my marker. "I'm here to see Dee Sade," I told Maurice, and he shrugged so wide you'd have believed him that he hailed from Paris, instead of the Christian quarter of Beirut.

"He says no visitors, but for you, M'sieu Locke."

I winked and walked by, pulling the Dee Sade Enterprises check out of my top pocket. Sade was sitting with his body-guard, the one I'd been called in to replace three days ago when he overloaded his nose with Colombia's answer to the blahs and had to spend a little time wrapped in wet sheets.

The job had been relatively easy. I'd spent most of the time sitting on a hard chair outside the Star Suite, rereading. The Conquest of Gaul and turning down offers of chemical refreshment while Dee Sade and the Marquises broke up furniture and enjoyed female companionship inside.

He was no more depraved than any other sex god. He seemed heterosexual and preferred his girls nineteenish and blond. A few underage hopefuls had turned up, but I'd sent them home. I wasn't sure how fussy his drummer was about age. Sentiment on my part, the girls all looked hard enough to go the distance, but I've been in too many countries where children are for sale. It goes against my grain, if not the intended victim's. One of them had expressed her gratitude by calling me an interfering old asshole. I resent that. I'm only thirty-two.

Dee looked up from his Mousse Saumon de Maison. I noticed he was avoiding the capers. Maybe somebody should tell him they were chips. "This bounced," I told him and dropped his check in the middle of the plate.

The bodyguard jerked in his seat, but Dee shook his head and he subsided. "Sorry about that, mate," he said. "I'll get George to write you out another one."

"No, thanks, I've played enough handball for one contract. Why don't you reach into that bag you keep under your left armpit and peel me off three neat thousands."

The Liverpool sharpie shone through the mascara he was still wearing, a souvenir of his last gig, twenty-four hours ago. "'S the ma'er, wack, don't you trust me."

"Right in one." I smiled at him, like an uncle beaming at a backward boy. So far our voices had been low enough that the diners at the next table wouldn't have overheard. People would have thought I was asking for an autograph for my niece.

The bodyguard growled at me now like a well-trained Dobe. "Listen, Mac."

I beamed at him now. "Oh, hi, Freddy. They got the straw out of your nose, did they."

He flashed an angry look at Dee, who was still playing it cool. When you're used to being under hot lights with a thousand screaming girls throwing their underwear at you, I guess you develop your own built-in refrigeration system. He said nothing. It was time to up the ante. I slapped my hands together jovially. "So, in honor of the fact that your road manager has tried to stiff half the people who've worked for you this trip, why don't you pay up before you're wearing that mousse."

That was too much for trusty, loyal, helpful Freddy. He swore and lunged with his steak knife.

I moved outside the thrust and chopped him across the nose. He crashed backward, tipping his chair and splaying his feet up in the air until he rocked sideways and lay still. Somebody screamed. I turned to the door and nodded to Mahomet, alias Maurice, beckoning with one finger. He flew to my side.

"This gentleman seems to have fainted," I said, "Perhaps you could take him outside to get some air."

He stayed in character. "M'sieu! We cannot 'ave violence."

I picked up Freddy's napkin from the table and dropped it on his face to cover the blood. Then I reached into my top pocket and came up with my emergency fifty. I tucked it into Maurice's hand. "Cause him to disappear," I said.

He did. "Oh, mon pauvre," he cooed. "Come this way," and he propped Freddy up on his wobbly legs, out through the kitchen, away from the high-priced diners.

I turned back to Dee Sade. "It's about my three grand."

He laughed. Not a disarming, hands-raised chuckle, like a rock star fending off compliments. This was a street brawler's guffaw at a coup. "'Ard-nosed sod, aren't you," he said. But he was reaching past his gold crucifix and Scorpio sign, in under his left armpit.

He pulled out his money bag and extracted two thousands and a handful of hundreds. I counted them. There were twelve.

"What's this, a bonus?"

"Naaaoh, that's for makin' me laugh," he said. "I 'aven't 'ad a chuckle like that since me mam caught 'er tits in the mangle."

A class act.

I folded the cash and stuffed it into my pocket. Maurice came back. "The gentleman is 'urt," he said.

Dee cut me off before I could apologize. "Tell 'im to go see George, get 'is money, an' go 'ome. 'E's bleedin' useless."

I unfolded one of the hundreds. "And make sure he gets this." Maurice looked at it greedily. "Make good and sure," I said, and his shoulder sagged. "Of course, m'sieu."

He picked up the chair and went back to the kitchen, holding the hundred ahead of him, like a Freddy-finder that was switched on. Dee frowned at me. "Are you the one was an officer in the SAS."

I nodded. "Lieutenant Locke, at your service."

He wasn't smiling. Under his mascara and the ravaged leanness his eyes were intelligent, I noticed. When he spoke again he had shed the working-class Liverpool accent. He sounded like any north-country British actor. "I had a cousin in the Paras. The IRA killed him and seventeen others in an ambush."

I nodded. "Yes, we got the man who set that bomb. The news was never in the papers. He was run over by a truck, a terrible accident."

Dee pointed to the chair that Maurice had straightened. "Have you had dinner yet?"

"Not yet."

He waved his hand, a gesture that would have plucked a million female heartstrings if he'd done it onstage, and when he spoke, his accent was back full-blown. "For Crissakes, wack, siddown an' eat. An' if we can get that bleedin' camel jockey back, I'll start agen on one o' them pink things."

I ended up earning my extra two bills by taking him to the airport in a limousine. We got there at nine, and I remembered my other appointment. As soon as Dee was safely through security, off my hands, and teamed up with his sidemen, I rang my downstairs neighbor, Janet Frobisher.

She answered, her voice diluted by Handel's Water Music, pouring down the receiver at me. "Hello."

"Hi, Janet, it's your friendly neighborhood pest, John Locke."

"Hello, John. You can't make bail, right?"

"Wrong. But if you look outside your back door pretty soon, you're going to see a moose with a big Irish face muttering to himself about my letting him down. I wondered if you could tell him I'll be there in forty minutes, I'm out at the airport."

She laughed. Her laugh is one of the nicer things about her. There are several. "Is he a friendly moose?"

"A pussycat. His name is Martin Cahill and he's a Mountie. But don't expect the red tunic, he usually wears a greenish tweed suit. Could you give him my message, please?"

"I'll do better than that. I'll pour him a drink on your behalf," she said. "If he's an Irish moose, I'm sure that will cool him right out."

"Do that for me, and I promise never to propose."

She laughed again. "You're on," she said and hung up.