Just at the moment, Coal Blackstone was
grateful for her martinis, though a second glance at the death threat letter
sent earlier that day to Mayor Cass Tamburlaine’s office surprised her enough
to put her off Chef Leroy Didier’s soufflé—which the waiter had just set before
her. She looked at Joy Pommery in
some alarm.
“And you say he’s been getting these for
some time?”
“For
three or four days now, yes,” Joy replied.
“And are they all as unsettling as this
one?”
“They’ve been getting steadily…more
elaborate. And each one is
different. They must have taken
hours and hours to make.”
Coal looked again at the note. Where she might have expected
obscenity, blood, gore and intimations of mayhem, spelled out in letters
roughly cut from magazines and glued onto the page, what she was looking at
instead was a dazzlingly conceived and queasily competent watercolor painting
of a fallen angel—drawn and painted in an exalted high renaissance style, as if
it had been limned by Raphael himself.
But while the painting offered a creepy virtuosity, the message was
about par for death threats: “Hey fat Mayor Tamberlane…”
Coal looked up. “I see he spells Cass’s name incorrectly.”
Joy nodded.
And then she read the rest of it. “You are an Incompetent Side of Beef
and you will soon Hanging on a Hook, Making your own Gravy!”
“Very nice,” she said, handing the sheet
of paper back to Joy.
“Charming. Have you
contacted the police?”
“No.
And Cass doesn’t want to.
Not yet anyhow. It would
all get out for sure and within hours, this fucking Old Master painting—she
waved the pretty Fallen Angel at Coal—would be gracing the front page of the Toronto
Sun.”
“I hate to say so,” said Coal, taking a
sip from her third martini, “but I suspect there are lots of people who’d be
rooting for Raphael here.”
“I know,” Joy sighed. “But what do you think Cass should do?”
“Nothing for the moment,” said Coal.
“But do you think this Raphael, as you
call him, is dangerous?”
“Oh absolutely.”
“So what’s the next step?”
“Well, I think I’ll pay a call on His
Worship.”
“You’ll find he’s really pretty spooked
about these notes,” said Joy.
“So am I,” replied Coal.
“So am I,” replied Coal.
