Quid Pro Quo Read online

  Stan Berrigan was wrong. This time, things did add up right.

  His story all made sense. Andy had calmed down as she got older, I guess, but not so much that I couldn't see her doing something demented like robbing a church.

  I could also see why she didn’t want me to find out about it. Throwing herself at a guy. Abandoning me. Stealing money from earthquake victims. Letting somebody else take the blame for it. Andy’d die of shame if I found out about even one of those things.

  No wonder she wasn’t very happy when Byron showed up at our door. She was afraid he was going to talk, but what could she do? She could hardly turn him away after what he’d done for us.

  Byron added up too. He did that hick routine, but I never really fell for it. I always knew he was smarter than that. Way smarter. Only a true genius could figure out how to be that obnoxious.

  I could even understand why he’d be like that. Byron had every right to hate us. Andy had an apartment and a law degree and, for a while there anyway, a career. What did Byron get out of being the good guy? A criminal record and half as many fingernails to clip as the rest of us.

  I’d be p.o.ed too.

  For a second there, I thought maybe that’s why he showed up. Just to make Andy uncomfortable. Just to make her squirm.

  But I knew there was more to it than that. Byron said he needed her for something. My guess, it was something to do with Consuela and the Masons’ Hall fire—but what? What did they have in common?

  I got back to the apartment by about ten in the morning and picked up the mail. Phone bill. Power bill. Water bill. Something about Andy’s student loan. The only good news was another package from War Amps.

  I almost laughed when I saw it. Andy and her stupid keys. Then it hit me why she’d been such a big supporter of War Amps all those years. It wasn’t just to get her keys back. It wasn’t just to help child amputees. It was to keep her honest. Every single day, that little tag on her key chain made Andy think of Byron and what he did. She might have treated him like dog dirt, but she knew she still owed him, big time. In fact, I figured she could spend the whole rest of her life going to anti-poverty protests and keeping crazy people out of jail and making sure no one ever got ripped off on their welfare check again and she’d probably still owe him.

  Believe me, if I went to jail and lost my hand as a FAVOR(!) to someone else, I’d be looking for a major payback.

  I went into the kitchen and tried to get organized again. I dumped all Andy’s work garbage back in the cardboard box except her daytimer, the messages and the photos. I put those on the table. I tore out the front page of the newspaper with the Masons’ Hall story on it and put it on the table too. I got out the spy-recorder tape and my notes from Stan. Then I tried to think how all this fit together.

  What it all added up to was this: I was dead meat.

  I couldn’t call the cops, and I couldn’t figure it out myself. I was broke. I was alone. My mother had run off without even leaving me anything to eat, unless of course you counted her powdered coffee whitener. So much for “There’s dinner in the freezer, sweetie!” What was she trying to do? Rub it in? “You’re starving and there’s no food! Ha ha! See ya!”

  Hey, I thought, what was she trying to do? So much had happened since I got that weird message that I’d never even thought of looking in the freezer. Maybe she knew she had to go, and she really did leave me some food. You could say a lot of stuff about Andy, but you’d have to admit, she always looked out for me.

  I yanked open the freezer door, and a puff of cold air rolled out. I was hoping for a frozen lasagna or even a couple of pizza pockets, but no such luck. The freezer was empty.

  Empty, except for a large legal folder.

  chapter

  twenty-five

  Title

  The right to ownership of property

  Andy also said she left me money for a treat in the Player’s Tobacco tin. When I realized dinner was going to be a pile of legal documents, I figured the best treat I could hope for would be an overdue electric bill, but I got the tin down anyway.

  Eighty-seven dollars in cold, hard cash. Andy must have cleaned out her bank account before she left. That—or I’d just found her stash.

  I didn’t take another look at the file until I’d gone to Toulany’s and bought myself three Swanson Hungry-Man Dinners, two liters of chocolate milk, a jumbo bag of Cheezies and some Oreos. The guy at the counter asked if I was having a party. No, I said, just lunch. A big guy like me, you know … While I was zapping the first dinner, I looked at the file. Mostly it was just notes that Andy had scrawled on loose-leaf.

  They were a mess. I couldn’t decipher them on an empty stomach. I put them aside.

  The rest seemed to be real estate stuff. It looked like Andy had done a title search on the Masons’ Hall. I had to help her with one when she was in law school. Any time a building is sold, you have to make sure the seller has “clear title” to the property. In other words, you have to make sure he actually owns what he says he owns. That’s why you hire a lawyer to do a title search. They go to this government office—I think it’s the Registry of Deeds, something like that anyway—and sort of do a history of the property. They look at all the documents showing every time the place was sold or divided in two or whatever. They go way, way back. The one we did in law school showed title right back to 17something, to this soldier who got a land grant from the king. (The only problem was the king couldn’t prove how he got it from the Indians, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone in those days.)

  The Masons’ Hall title search didn’t go back that far. The Uniacke family owned the land for, like, a hundred years, then the Masons bought it in 1886, built the hall in 1888 and sold it in 1998 to the Heritage Preservation Association of Nova Scotia. That was all straightforward enough. The only thing unusual in the title was that an estoppel had been put on the property in 1889.

  Estoppel.

  I tried it again.

  Es.

  Top.

  Pel.

  Oh, geez, I remembered that from law school. What I mean is, I remembered the word estoppel. I didn’t have the first clue what it actually meant. I was pretty tired by then, but still. You’d think that, given this was a life-or-death type thing for Andy, I could’ve come up with something.

  But no. I just sat there, scratching my head and looking like a baboon doing double-digit division.

  What was the matter with me? I actually slapped myself in the side of the head and said, “Smarten up, jerkface.”

  I needed to find out what estoppel meant.

  Like, right away.

  I rifled through Andy’s room, hoping I could find her old law dictionary, but no luck. She’s so disorganized I don’t know why I even bothered. Gives you some idea how desperate I was, I guess.

  I chewed on my hangnail for a while and thought.

  I could call Atula and ask her what estoppel meant.

  That’d work.

  No, it wouldn’t. She’d just say, “Why don’t you ask your mother, Cyril? And by the way, where is your mother?”

  Good point.

  I could go to the law library.

  Wrong. I needed an identification card to get in there.

  Wrong right back to you! I had an identification card! Andy’s ID.

  I even knew where it was. I could see it from where I was standing. Andy used it to prop open her window.

  I yanked it out and the window slammed shut. I couldn’t believe my luck. The ID card was bent and dirty, but it was still good for a couple of months.

  There was only one problem.

  It was a picture ID. Having Andy’s card wouldn’t do me any good because I didn’t have Andy’s face.

  chapter

  twenty-six

  Misrepresentation

  Conduct, or a statement, that gives

  a false impression

  If I’d had more time, I could’ve come up with a better solu-tion. I know I could have. I
mean, even while I was pulling on Andy’s skirt, other schemes were running through my head. I could call Jeannie Richardson from her law school class. I could track down that Craig guy who had the hots for her. Geez, any lawyer could have told me what estoppel meant.

  But I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t waste the time trying to find them. I couldn’t risk anyone getting suspicious. I just had to forget about that. I went back to rooting around in Andy’s drawer until I found some pantyhose that sort of matched. I considered stuffing a bra with socks and putting that on too, but there are limits to how far a guy will go to save his mother.

  I pulled on the boots with the biggest heels and hoped they made me look tall enough, put about fifteen rings on my fingers and started wrapping my head in bandages. Completely in bandages. I’m talking Return of the Mummy. You know, nothing showing but my eyes. If anyone asked, I’d just say I’d had a terrible accident.

  No. No.

  I’d say, “I had massive plastic surgery.”

  That cracked me up. Andy would kill me for saying that.

  I slapped myself for laughing at a time like this, threw on her coat and left.

  Then came back.

  Andy’s got brown eyes. I’ve got blue.

  Would anyone notice? I was getting paranoid, I guess, but I didn’t want to blow my cover over a stupid little thing like that. I pulled the tips of my ears out from under the bandages, hung some sunglasses on them and left again.

  Mr. Bradley, the commissionaire, was checking IDs at the law library. Good thing I wore the sunglasses. He’d have known right off the bat that Andy’s eyes weren’t blue. He was about eighty, but still looking for action. Always talking up the babes. Can you believe these old guys? I guess they figure if you’re decrepit enough you can get away with anything.

  Still, I’ve got to give him credit. He practically started to cry when he realized, or when he thought he realized, it was Andy under all those bandages. “Oh, my land! What … HAPPENED… to you, girlie?”

  “Nothing,” I scribbled on his logbook. “Just a little plastic surgery.”

  “Plas-tic SURGERY! What’d you go do a thing like that for?” He looked at me like I’d just sawed my own legs off. “You had such a gorgeous kisser already!” I waved my hand like “aw shucks” and wrote that I’d be all better next week and more beautiful than ever. Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge.

  He shook his head and said, “You come back then and let old Gus decide about that. ” I nodded. He let me in.

  I went straight to the law dictionaries. Nobody even took a second look at me. They were all too polite.

  ESTOPPEL: Originally known as preclusion; a bar; an impairment whereby a party is precluded in any subsequent proceedings from alleging or proving that certain facts are otherwise than they were originally … BLAH, BLAH, BLAH … That wasn’t the meaning I was looking for. Lawyers use “estoppel” like the rest of us use “thingamajig.” It can mean all sorts of things. I scanned through the dictionary again.

  ESTOPPEL BY DEED: An estoppel tha arises where a statement of fact is made in a deed and verified by seal. The rule simply states that … No.

  ESTOPPEL BY RECORD. No.

  PROMISSORY ESTOPPEL. No clue what that meant.

  ESTOPPEL IN PAIS. Hmm.

  ESTOPPEL IN PAIS: Also known as ESTOPPEL BY CONDUCT. The usual meaning of the word estoppel: When one person by his or her conduct leads another to believe that certain facts are true and these are acted upon, then in subsequent proceedings this person cannot deny the truth of such facts.

  That was it. Something was coming back to me. There was this case I remembered drilling Andy over and over on for some exam. It went something like this. A person built a house. Part of it was on the neighbor’s property. The neighbor knew the house was on his land but didn’t do anything about it until after the house was built. Then he took the guy to court to have the house moved. The judge didn’t go for it. He said, “You knew he was building the house on your land. You should have said something before he finished it because it costs way too much to expect him to move it now.”

  See, it’s all about equity. (That’s one of those I’m-smarter-than-you legal words. It just means “fairness.”) It wouldn’t be fair to make the poor sucker tear his house down. But it wouldn’t be fair to just give the neighbor’s land to him either.

  That’s why the judge applied the “principle of equity” to the case. He, like, fiddled with the law until it was fair.

  The judge put an “estoppel” on the property. That meant that the builder didn’t have to move the house, but if anything ever happened to it—say it burnt down, for instance—the neighbor would get his land back to use any way he wanted.

  I slammed the dictionary shut and tried to say, “Bingo!”

  Somebody had benefited from burning the Masons’ Hall down. Somebody who wanted the land back. But who?

  And how was Byron connected?

  I chewed on that question all the way home on the bus. I could almost hear the Jeopardy theme music playing.

  Da-di da da. Da-di-dahhh. Da-di da da. Da-di… Just before the buzzer sounded, I answered. “Ahhh…who are ‘homeless people,’ Alex?”

  This is how I figured it. Homeless people like Byron and that friend of his who died used to sneak into the empty Masons’ Hall and hang out. Maybe Byron saw something there he wasn’t supposed to.

  Or maybe someone talked Byron into burning the place down for them. Told him it was for the good of humanity.

  Or maybe Byron was taking the rap for someone else having burned it down, though you’d think he would have learned to quit taking the rap by now.

  They all made sense, sort of.

  I got off the bus, picked up my skirt and booted it the rest of the way home. People looked at me strangely. This one guy grabbed my arm and said, “Should you be running in your condition? Can I help you?” I shook his hand off and kept running. I had to. I’d just remembered I left my turkey dinner in the microwave.

  chapter

  twenty-seven

  Suspect

  A person wanted by the law

  in relation to a crime

  T he turkey was looking pretty sad by the time I got there, but I didn’t care. It was 2:30. I was starving. I ripped off just enough bandages to get a fork in and started hoovering my way through my cold and crunchy Hungry Man dinner.

  I gorged a while. It was great. It was like being a little kid again. The only thoughts going through my head were “Mmmmm. Yummy. Yummmy. Ya… Ya. Mmmmm. More, more, more, more, more, more, more!”

  That didn’t last. Once my hunger got under control, my brain kicked in again. I started to think about all the stuff I was getting hit with. It was a lot to digest—the stuff, I mean, not the dinner. (Frankly, they never put in enough mashed potatoes for me.) I was just mulling it all over and sort of absentmindedly fiddling with stuff on the table when I flipped over that picture of Andy at the Immigration Resource Center. There was something written on the back that I hadn’t noticed before:

  Left to right: Atula Varma – Varma and Associates Law Firm; Robert Chisling – Honorary Chairman, Immigration Resource Center, and President, Waterfront Construction Corp.; Andi McIntyre – Varma and Associates.

  Hmph, I thought, they spelled Andy’s name wrong. I bet she was wild about that. I was just picking the peas out of the gravy (I was hungry, but not hungry enough to eat peas) when something else hit me about the caption. I picked up the photograph again. “Waterfront.” Kind of a coincidence, I thought, Andy spending so much time at the waterfront and this guy being president of Waterfront Construction.

  Then I thought, Robert Chisling.

  Bob Chisling.

  B.C.

  BC – Wtrfrnt

  I dropped my fork and grabbed Andy’s daytimer. I flipped through it. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? I checked the times Andy met with B.C. Three forty-five in the afternoon, four in the afternoon, ten to five … If she’d been meeting with Byron, I would
have known about it. I would’ve been home—and he wouldn’t have been.

  B.C. couldn’t have been Byron.

  That was a relief, but it was sort of a drag too. Andy meeting with Byron down at the waterfront was the only real “fact” I had up till then. Everything else was just me making up theories, based on other theories, based on other theories, based on other theories … It kind of made me feel like giving up again, but I didn’t. I just kicked the table, flicked a few peas at the window and got on with it. I said to myself, “Okay. What if B.C. is Bob Chisling? Where does that get me?”

  I turned to the day Andy went missing. She was supposed to meet B.C. at three o’clock that day. Maybe she did, or maybe he was the important colleague Atula said Andy had left hanging. Bob Chisling, President. It fits.

  Then I thought, Construction. Just where was this Chisling guy constructing stuff? Anywhere near the Masons’ Hall by any chance?

  Time for an Internet search. I gulped down some chocolate milk and got ready to go to the library. The regular library. I didn’t want Mr. Bradley thinking I couldn’t live without him. Which reminded me… I tore off Andy’s clothes and threw my own back on. Boy, was I glad to get out of that pantyhose. It kept bagging at the crotch.

  My apartment key was somewhere under the junk on the kitchen table. I was in no mood to start looking for it. I just tore open the War Amps envelope and left with Andy’s keys.

  chapter

  twenty-eight

  Zoning by-laws

  Rules made for the regulation,

  administration or management of a certain district

  Bob Chisling wasn’t shy, that’s for sure. I punched his name into Google and got about three hundred references. He was on every charity organization that would have him. He particularly loved diseases. Cancer, MS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome … after a while I got so I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him raising money for the Acne Break-out Prevention Society or the Chronic Jock Itch All-Star Scratch-a-thon.