Chapter 1

When the court clerk and I had sorted out how to swear in a witness without using a Bible we were ready to proceed with the ritual swearing in. There are more and more of us who prefer not to use the Christian trappings in our lives but this was a new clerk and I was either the first atheist he had run into or he had not been properly briefed on administering oaths to non-Christians.

ADo you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"

AI do.@

AGive your full name, address and occupation@

AFrances Wingham Pilger, 260 Maplegrove Drive, Route 10, Vaughan, Ontario. My occupation is Accountant.@

The wheels of justice in this case had ground more slowly than anyone could ever imagine. This was the third time I had appeared as a witness in this case, both previous times the whole process had faltered when first the crown attorney became ill and had to be replaced and then the accused had fired his lawyer. Now everything had fallen into place and the presiding judge made it very clear to both sides that he would brook no further delays. The case was based on evidence I had supplied as an undercover Ontario Provincial Police officer three years ago when I posed as a shady bookkeeper for a restaurant owner who was laundering drug money for three brothers who were pushing drugs in Toronto= s north end. Two of the brothers were now in prison but the third was sitting in the gallery. Revenue Canada also had an observer at the trial and I had no doubt that Lou Cantoni would be facing tax evasion after the trial.

While I was no longer with the OPP, I was being paid for my time. I am not sure that the accused believed I was no longer a police officer as he kept prompting his lawyer to question my relationship with the police and whether my evidence could be used. The evidence was all there in black and white along with some tape recordings I had made and by four p.m. the jury was back with a guilty verdict. The judge reserved sentencing for a week but I was at last free of my obligations to the OPP. I paid little attention to the threats that Lou made as they led him away to his holding cell although I did pick up on the hand signal he made to the brother.

Back at the office I finished the notes on an audit that we had just completed. I glanced at the wall clock and realized that the office was quiet because everyone had left for home two hours ago. I locked up and headed for my car in the parking lot, carrying my heavy leather briefcase that was full of my homework for the evening. I was thinking of what I could cook for my dinner and did not see the two men standing by my car until I was about ten feet from them.

A Hey, bookkeeper - we want to have a chat with you,@ the smaller of the two said.

I recognized the third brother, dressed in his usual black leather jacket. His big friend was not a pleasant-looking fellow even in the dimly lit parking lot. He was well over six feet tall and would likely weigh close to three hundred pounds even without the long hair and beard. He had a baseball bat in his hand.

A Puzo - you don= t want to do this,@ I said.

A Gonna teach you something about bookkeeping. About how you ought to keep your mouth shut, about how you don= t cross us.@ He flicked open a knife that glinted in the light. At least they weren’t showing guns - just a baseball bat and a switch blade knife. I was armed only with my briefcase.

I gambled on the big fellow being slower than Puzo and went for Puzo without saying anything. The leather case had at least ten pounds of paper in it. I swung it as hard as I could, spinning around to add momentum as I released it into Puzo= s chest. It sent him staggering back against my car setting off the car alarm. He dropped the knife. I dropped down, doing a modified Snake Creeps Low from my Tai Chi routine, balanced on my hands and swept my legs, aiming at the big guy= s knees. My right foot caught his kneecap and he yelled in pain and staggered and finally fell, crashing like a big old pine tree. I was back on my feet and ready for Puzo. But he was bent over feeling the pavement for his knife. He came up slashing but missed on the first pass and I chopped hard at his neck. The solid contact knocked him down and his left arm, numbed by the blow, gave him no support. I launched a vicious kick that took him on the side of the head. He was out. The big guy was moaning about his knee. I picked up his baseball bat and carefully lining up the label, whacked his other kneecap. There was a satisfying crunch and scream. I dragged Puzo away from my car, found my briefcase and tossed it into the back seat. Puzo was making noises as if he were conscious so I dragged him over beside his big whining buddy. A If I ever see either of you two again, I= m going to get really mad. Do you understand?@

They both mumbled something but Puzo didn’t seem convinced. So I took the Louisville Slugger and applied the hardwood to his left knee. He understood now. I called 911 on my cell phone and told them there were two guys in the parking lot at Pilger and Associates who needed an ambulance. I told the dispatcher not to rush the call but did not give her my name.

It took a couple of glasses of scotch to get the adrenaline under control when I got home. It had felt good to release some pent-up aggression that my accounting profession gathered but found no place to release. The daily rushes of police work had been difficult to replace after I quit the force three years ago. Bookkeeping is interesting, but hardly exciting. I was too restless that night to do my homework so I surfed around the TV channels until the eleven o= clock news. I finally fell into a deep sleep after telling Felix, my cat, all about two-bit thugs who thought bookkeepers were easy to intimidate. I had a bit of a hangover but tried to put on a cheery face as I went into work the next morning. It worked until Mary at reception told me Dad wanted me to go to Florida.

I used to like to visit sunny, warm Florida in the dead of winter when Karen was alive. A week or ten days, at least two or three times each winter, was just the break we needed to recharge our solar batteries that kept us from contracting the winter blahs. But now I was not looking forward to the trip south, even though we had suffered through one of the coldest Canadian winters in recent years. There were just too many memories of past vacations in the Sunshine State.

"Really, Dad, are you sure you can't send someone else? I'm still cleaning up the details on the Morgan file - I need at least another week on it. Why the Morgans ever hired a dyslexic bookkeeper, I'll never understand. Nothing balances in their accounts," I said in frustration. I had never seen so many transpositions of numbers in a set of books. Usually one can sort out transpositions by dividing by nine and thus correct the numbers, but in the Morgan file, there were so many errors I had to check virtually every entry.

My father, and my boss, was busy flipping through the pages of a client's file and only glanced up when I entered his roomy, plush office that was home to him for fifty or sixty hours a week. For as long as I could remember, my father, Philip Pilger, had spent more hours at this office than he had at our home in north Toronto. He was either working extra hours or away on business. Not that I had missed him as I was growing up, I just accepted his absence as normal. Many of my friends also had fathers were so busy earning a living that they had little time for family. I suppose it did not matter that much, for most of us had mothers and sports coaches who filled in the gaps in our lives left by absentee fathers. We grew up with other heroes, men on the silver screen who led exciting lives that had no comparison to the boring treadmills our real fathers walked. Perhaps some of us harboured unrealistic expectations of life that could never be met except in the movies or on the television screen, but I think I ended up being as normal as any boy who had a full-time dad.

"No, Frank, I want you personally to take care of Upper Canada. This is developing into a major account and I want the family touch on it. Upper Canada's connection with that pension fund can open many new doors for us. One day this firm will be yours and an account like Upper Canada could be the backbone of your business. Give the Morgan file to Henry, he can finish it."

"But Dad, I'll have to start right from scratch - I haven't even met the client - why don't you handle it yourself? You like Florida - a trip would be good for you." I tried the worried son approach. "Besides, you have been working much too hard lately. Take Mother and spend a couple of weeks resting in the sunshine."

"Frank, you know goddamn well that I don't want to spend two weeks with your mother - not in Florida, not anywhere. That woman drives me crazy!" he said much more aggressively than I thought necessary. That was the other side of my parental upbringing. My mother and father had grown apart over the years, and while they still shared the same roof, the bedrooms were separate. They were always civil to each other at home, and even pleasant when in company of strangers. An outsider would not believe that they were, for all intents and purposes, separated. But it was unusual for Father to show this much emotion about Mother. I wondered if their relationship had deteriorated recently.

"Come on, Dad, lighten up. If you two tried to get along, I'm sure you would both have a good time."

"No. Absolutely no! Besides, you're the one who needs a holiday. Get out and meet some new people. All you ever do is work. Hell, who knows, you might even meet a cute little beach bunny down there . . ."

I stopped listening. It was going to be one of those speeches about getting my life back together: find another woman; life is for the living; I had been in mourning too long; Karen was a wonderful wife, but there were other women who could give me the companionship and love that I needed; and on and on and on. Didn't they understand that I was simply not interested in bonding with another person - that I was content to live with the memories of Karen? Why did everyone near me find this so hard to comprehend?

"All right, all right, I'll go! Who's got the goddamn file?" I snapped.

Philip allowed a hint of a smile to cross his face. He had won again. "Mary has everything ready for you, Frank. We booked you on a flight this Friday."

Philip Pilger was used to getting his way. He has imposed his will on people as long as I can remember. If he could not prevail by forceful argument, then his size was enough to change most people's point of view. He had this knack of knowing when he had to dominate someone physically and when he could sweet-talk them around a problem. He was not one for compromise, always believing that his was the best solution to any problem. Even now, as he approaches sixty-two, my old man is a strong figure. He is almost as tall and weighs nearly as much as I, yet he is nimble of foot and strong of arm. He goes to the Country Club every day for a thirty-minute workout, watches what he eats and is a moderate drinker. My Dad never smoked and is quite intolerant of those who do. His staying power on the tennis courts attested to the good lungs that he says are the result of not smoking. I cannot remember the man ever being sick enough to miss a day of work. He seems to have bypassed that time of life when the male body starts to fall apart, aches become common, inflexible joints appear and that extra weight goes on around the middle. He has all of his hair, although it is turning grey around the edges now, giving him an even more distinguished appearance. Philip always dresses very well, buying only the best suits, shirts and shoes. His clothing never overshadows that of anyone he meets, but one look by a discerning eye and you see quality. Dad never had a mid-life crisis, when men often go chasing after younger women to prove their virility, although I often wondered why, since he and mother certainly had no sex life together. The one failure in his life has been his marriage, and even that has the public face of success.

I tried to slam his door on the way out of his office but it has one of those pressure regulators on it that won't let a person express his frustration in a loud way. Mary had the regulator installed so Philip couldn't do the same thing in front of customers.

Mary Jeppson always has everything ready. She is the most organized person I have ever known. Without Mary, Dad's office would be a shambles, but then, I often wondered if he didn't intentionally leave things around for Mary to organize. Mary has been with the firm for at least thirty years and knows more about accounting than some of the junior staff members. She has a degree from the University of Toronto but prefers to present herself as just a normal, everyday, effective secretary, not our super-efficient office manager, not a person with a Master's degree in English Literature. Mary has been my special friend since my childhood, a person I could always talk to, a ready listener for a teenager who could not talk to his Dad because Dad was always too busy. Mary must be close to sixty, although she looks much younger. She too, has a membership at the Country Club, paid by the firm, and does the workout routine. I have never seen her play sports, but she has a couple of trophies for tennis and curling on the filing cabinet in her office, so I supposed that she has some athletic skills.

My Mother, Clara, well, Mother lives in her own world, a world of social fantasy. My Mother is one of those tall, large-boned women who carry their stature so well as they age. Although Mother's hair is now grey, it is always perfectly coiffed and tinted only slightly with a rinse that makes it sparkle. I get my blue eyes from Mother, and I suppose the combination of genes from both parents explains my size. Mother of course dresses well, wearing only the finest labels that must have put a dent in her budget. Mother was from a moneyed family and she had a few investments that gave her a degree of independence from Philip. Her life has always been bridge and tea parties, fund-raising instead of raising her only child, shopping for clothes and endless hours on the telephone trading all the gossip of who and what in the society circle of her female friends who live in the right neighbourhoods in Toronto. My mother had this image of herself and her role as wife of a successful businessman that left little room for me. She always saw that I was properly fed, clothed and healthy, but she never had that motherly touch that I now know most mothers have. She could apply a Band-Aid to a small cut but would never kiss a scratch better. Little things like that. So when I reached my teens and had a problem understanding the female psyche, it was Mary I turned to. Mary, who had never married, and as far as I knew never had a beau; Mary, my Father's employee; Mary, my surrogate mother.

"Good morning, Mary," I said as I entered her small private office, "How's your love life?" Mary and I always greeted each other this way. Whoever spoke first got to ask that question. And the reply was always the same.

"Mine's just fine, Frank. How about yours?"

"Well, I'm not complaining. Dad says I'm supposed to take on that new file and go to Florida on Friday. Why is the Upper Canada Mall interested in property in Florida?"

"Actually, Frank, it's not Upper Canada, but the mall manager, a Mr. Martin Cosso, who is the client of record. He is acting unofficially for Upper Canada, as he described the situation to me. I checked with the Chairman for Upper Canada, and he has confirmed to me that they are looking for property, but their Board has yet to ratify the venture. For reasons that will become obvious, Upper Canada does not want their name used until a deal is struck. This is just preliminary work - I think you may find yourself going to Florida several more times. I have everything in the file for you and I have arranged for you to meet Mr. Cosso tomorrow for lunch so you can get the finer details from him."

"Tomorrow?"

"I checked your scheduler and you were free so I reserved a table at Spencer's for twelve thirty. Is that okay?" I had forgotten to check my computer when I came in or I would have seen the addition to my schedule. We had just installed the electronic mail system so I was not yet trained by the computer to check my mailbox first thing each day. The Lotus Scheduler is another of those computer programs that takes over your life once you sign on. Everyone in the office could look at my schedule and plan meetings for me. Mary prints my schedule for me and puts on my desk each morning in case I forget to read my messages.

"Uh, sure." Mary and Dad had obviously worked this out long before they told me I was getting the file. Even though I am a full partner in the firm, Dad seldom tells me what was going on until the last minute. It is a trait of his that has irked the other partners at times, but a highly successful accounting business with handsome dividends keeps the grumbling about management techniques to a minimum. The electronic mail and scheduler were supposed to keep staff more informed but it would take some time before we all were comfortable with the system. "Dad said you had me booked to Florida. Where am I staying and how long am I supposed to be there?"

"Philip suggested you stay in Tampa the first week. You can meet with several of the larger real estate brokers there and then move over to Clearwater for a week or two. I have a list of possible contacts in the file for you so don't forget to update your laptop before you leave. Mr. Cosso has expressed an interest in the area around Clearwater," Mary replied.

"Am I staying at he Holiday Inn in Tampa?" I asked. I liked the location of the Holiday Inn in downtown Tampa. I like Tampa's downtown area. It's a city that seems to have grown with some forethought, a city that has room in its core for people. There are only a few tall buildings and each has its own unique architecture. Someone even built a round building; a structure that I imagine is terribly impractical when it comes to installing the traditional square offices. Perhaps everyone has a wedge-shaped office. One of these days I am going to take a look inside that building. The only rectangular building is the Barnett Bank tower, and I suppose if there has to be one traditional building, it should be a bank. Since every major building has either a fountain or some outdoor art, whether it is the silver metal wave or the over-sized aluminium flowers, the downtown core has some class. It also has a number of really good restaurants that Karen and I used to visit every year.

"Not this time," Mary said, "Philip wants you to use the Helnan. He has worked out some sort of a deal with the Helnan for the Transat flight crews and he wants you to check out the place and see that the Transat people are being properly cared for. Transat is one of our bigger accounts . . ." Besides the accounting business, my father was the majority owner in a travel agency and a shareholder in Transat Airlines, so whenever he could combine the two ventures he did. There was no one who would tell him he had a conflict of interest, not even the tax man. The last young auditor from Revenue Canada got so lost in the inter-company transactions that he finally just took Dad's word as a fellow accountant and went away hoping never to get the file again. Junior auditors are fun for Philip.

"I know, Mary, and we always put the customer first," I said, echoing my father's favourite saying. "But the Riverside Helnan is as old as Methuselah. Karen and I stayed there ten years ago, and it was an old hotel then," I complained.

"Well, I didn't book anything in Clearwater for you so you can get a nicer place there."

"Gee, I wonder if I'll be able to find anything - it's still the busy season down there."

"I'm sure you'll be able to find something comfortable, Mr. Detective," she jibed me.

The 'Mr. Detective' was what Dad and Mary used to call me when I was with the force, working as a forensic accountant. After graduating from Western with an MBA, I worked in Dad's business for two years while I earned my CGA accounting designation. The good marks I maintained after Western attracted my next employer - the Ontario Provincial Police. I had never thought about police work as a career, but one of the students in my final year of the CGA course, a Mountie named Buddy Olsen, talked to me a few times over a beer or two after a class. The work of the forensic accountants sounded quite interesting, and his description of a few of the cases he had worked on made the job did sound much more exciting than just auditing the books of some relatively honest company. I asked him later if he had put the OPP onto me, but he denied it. As I found out later, Buddy never lied; he just had a habit of omitting some of the truth.

I was twenty-four when I joined the force and my career lasted twelve years. I suppose that I could have stayed on with the police, then retired from the force when I reached sixty and had a long, enjoyable, productive life fighting crime using computers and my accounting skills. But when I was hauled up on the carpet for sticking my inquisitive nose into the accident investigation of Karen's death, I decided that it was time to move on to something else. Little did I know that I was about to be drawn back into that investigation three years later.

I met Karen when I was at the Police College in Aylmer, a small farming town in south-western Ontario. Karen worked as assistant manager at the local art gallery in Aylmer. I met her on one of my weekend excursions, and when she heard I was a cop, she tried to brush me off as a suitor. The boys at the police training college have a little reputation as philanders and that no doubt had preceded me. But I was a good-looking, husky young man, who was interested in art and I finally broke through her defences.

I did a lot of body-building exercises back in my teen years, labouring under the delusion that young women would be attracted to my fine physique. I have kept myself in good training condition and even now, after all these years, and although I tip the scales at 220 pounds, my six foot-two, big-boned frame carries the weight well. I no longer do the body building but I belong to the local Tai Chi club and the daily exercises keep my muscles as fit as if I worked out in a gym.

I had visited the little art gallery as a courtesy to my mother who was doing her arty thing at that time. She was always on the lookout for promising, new young artists who often got their beginnings in small galleries. Mother was in her Mennonite period and Aylmer was in Mennonite country. Karen did have a few works by a young painter named Snyder that I thought Mother would like to see, so I arranged to drive Mother to Aylmer one weekend. Karen and Mother struck it off right from the start and this improved my status with Karen. In six months time we were engaged; a year later we were married. Through Mother's connections, Karen got a position with one of the better galleries in Toronto and she was soon doing very well, financially. Karen had taken a postgraduate course in modern art and spent one year in France doing research on her doctoral dissertation, a critique on artist authentication. I had not realized how important this field of endeavour was, but when I heard the figures that were involved in the sale of some of the old masters, I was suitably impressed. One did not want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Vermeer only to find that it had been painted by some apprentice who could copy the master's style, but would never become famous in his own right. Karen continued to write papers after we were married and had several published through the U of T. I was able to help her a little with her research projects since I had some connections at the OPP Forensic Laboratory and had a friend who would run some spectrograph tests for Karen. He would do it after regular working hours, of course.

Tuesday at noon I met Martin Cosso. It may have been my years with the police that triggers a prejudice when I meet some people for the first time, or perhaps when you have worked with the criminal element for so many years, you can recognize one of them, but in either case, I did not like Mr. Martin Cosso. Cosso was a few years my junior, of short, but solid build. He had a nose that was slightly too large and eyes that seemed just a little too close together. His was a rat-like face. His body movements were quick, almost hyper-active, giving off signs of nervousness. In the old days I would have said he gave off bad vibes, but now, in jargon of the New Age spiritualism, and even though I personally could not see any aura around Martin Cosso, he would be placed towards the red end of the spectrum. Maybe a warning amber.

"Frank, Frank, so glad to meet you! Your Dad says you're just the man for my project," he said as he grasped my hand too firmly, shaking it as if he were trying to test my strength. I like a firm handshake but I have deliberately eased up on the pressure I apply. I was meeting many Orientals in this business, and to them a display of personal strength is not the proper way to open negotiations unless you are in the brawn, not brains, end of the business. Much better to show one's mettle when it got down to the short strokes. And frequently, I was being introduced to women who were slowly working their way into the upper ranks of commerce. An overly-firm handshake was definitely not going to impress a woman with a small, fine-boned hand, although I have met some women whose hardened hands attest to a level of physical fitness that belies their overall appearance. But when some people meet a big man, they try to impress themselves with their own strength. Martin Cosso was one of these turkeys, and I was sure that I could have crushed his hand. This was not the time to do it, so I only partially met Cosso's grip.

"It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Cosso. Yes, I think we can help you with your real estate search."

"Martin. Please, all my friends call me Martin. You know, at first it seemed funny to me to be going to my accountants for real estate, but when Philip explained how you handle all of a client's work nowadays, it does make sense. Why hire accountants, lawyers, real estate brokers and investment consultants when one firm can do it all!"

"Yes, we like to think we can give a full line of service to our clients. This way there is better control of the accounts, less chance of confidential items going astray," I prompted. Somehow I thought that this guy would like to think that everything was confidential.

"Glad to hear that, Frank," he leaned towards me, dropping his voice, "This deal has to be kept quiet for a few weeks. The Board of Upper Canada hasn't passed the motion yet to go ahead with this, but I am certain it's going to pass. If the word gets out that they are looking to buy land in Florida for a mall, the competition will force the price up."

"You mean the American companies would be worried about a Canadian company going into Florida?" I asked. It seemed highly unlikely to me. I was used to American companies coming into Canada and swallowing up our smaller enterprises - the thought that the people south of the border were afraid of us was one to be savoured.

"No question about it. You may not realize it, but Canadian companies control a lot of the mall properties in the US. And it's not just the big ones like Cadillac-Fairview or the Reichmans. Yes, Frank, this must be done quickly and quietly."

"Well, I can definitely guarantee that it will be done quietly but I'm not sure just how quickly we can move. Do you have any particular area of Florida in mind for this mall?"

"Yes. The area just north of St. Petersburg up as far as Tarpon Springs is what I am looking at. Are you familiar with that area?"

"Yes, in fact up until a few years ago, my wife and I owned a timeshare condo at Hamelin's Landing. We played golf throughout that part of the country."

"Good. You'll know then that there are a lot of strip malls and smaller traditional malls in the area. My plan is to put in a super shopping mall - a mall that will pull people from the whole of the panhandle and even from Tampa. That whole west side of Florida does not have an attraction that can compete with Orlando or Miami," Cosso said.

"But surely you can't be thinking of competing with Disney or even Busch Gardens. Those places draw people like flies to syrup," I said. They also drew a few flies to other things, as I remembered the area around the gorilla cages at Busch Gardens.

"Have you ever been to the West Edmonton Mall?" I nodded that I had. "There have been a couple of other large theme malls tried, some have had a measure of success, and a couple have failed. I have studied the ones that failed, and in every case there were ordinary malls nearby that expanded or upgraded their services just enough to keep some loyal customers. When the West Edmonton Mall was built it was out in the boonies - no competition nearby. What I want you to do is to check out the land around these other malls," he said, taking a list from his briefcase, "I have all the major malls listed here for you. If none of these malls can expand without a great deal of cost, then we have a safer location."

Cosso talked through the lunch of club sandwiches and imported beer, telling me about how he had managed the malls where he had worked, what techniques he had used to minimize costs while still attracting more and more customers. He apparently had some purchasing connections in the Far East where he could pick up manufactured goods at very low prices and he helped his mall tenants by using this purchasing power. This seemed almost too altruistic for a mall manager, but then maybe that was what made his malls successful. The man did seem to have some good ideas but he would not tell me just what was going to be so unique about this mall that he planned to build right in the midst of some of the most concentrated shopping facilities in Florida. But I did see from the area of land that he had written in his notes that this was going to be a large project.

We were just finishing coffee when Cosso sprung the last part of his project on me. "Frank, I would also like you to do some personal work for me while you are down there. This is not to be billed to the Upper Canada account, but to my personal account. I have some friends who are interested in residential properties in Florida. If we can pick up some land adjacent to the mall property, I would be interested in presenting this to them. I figure it would be a good deal for both them and Upper Canada, since they would have a choice location for some residential buildings and the Mall would have a built-in customer base."

"Okay," I said, A I guess there is no real conflict there.@ Was this the red flag going up? Who were his > Friends= ? A I'll keep the costs separated as much as I can. It may take me a little longer than the two weeks I had planned to spend down there. Do you have a firm time line of when you need the report?"

"I'd like the report by next month at this time. That's a couple of weeks before the Board meeting. If you find something that looks promising and think we should put a deposit on the land, just call me and we'll see what we can do to raise the money before the Board meeting."

It was snowing again and the thoughts of Florida seemed somewhat more appealing to me as I drove back to our office. I asked Mary if she would pull both the Upper Canada and Martin Cosso's files. I spent the afternoon looking for some clue that would reinforce my gut feeling about the man, but found little. The Mall account was perfectly normal. The owners, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement fund, or OMERS as it was referred to in the file, had a large portfolio, the Upper Canada Mall being just another one of their successful investments. Cosso's own paperwork could have been handled by a novice - there was really no reason for him to pay us to do his books and tax return. He was drawing a good salary, nearing the $70,000 mark, plus annual bonuses from the Upper Canada group of about $25,000. Not bad, I thought. But it was not the kind of money that would be partnered to people wanting to develop a residential complex in Florida. The old cop in me smelled a rat.

That evening I looked at the travel folder Mary had given me. I was booked on an early morning - 6:15 a.m. - flight that would put me into Clearwater three hours later. Dad wanted a full day of work from me. The Helnan had booked a comfortable, air-conditioned room on the sixth floor overlooking the scenic Hillsborough River, right in downtown Tampa, the most progressive city in Florida. Dollar Car Rentals had a car reserved for me at the airport. I made a mental note to have Mary upgrade the car because I knew the one that came with the discounted package would be some little puddle- jumper that would be too small for me. The folder included flyers from all the local attractions, offering half-price admissions or free rides. A dozen free oranges with every purchase over ten dollars and free driving range privileges at Bardmoor. Mary knew I liked oranges and golf. There was a folder advertising Tarpon Springs and I put that one aside since Tarpon Springs had come up in the conversation at lunch. The last folder in the package advertised the Dali Museum. Damn.

I blamed Salvador Dali for my wife's death. I felt a momentary flash of anger at Mary. She knew that we had visited the Dali Museum many times and she knew damn well how I felt about Dali! Mary was getting as bad as my father for meddling in my private life. They had what was beginning to look like a conspiracy going - either make me forget Karen or . . . no, Mary would not do that to me. In fact, she was one of the few people who believed me when I maintained that Karen had been murdered, not the victim of a hit and run accident. So perhaps this was Mary's way of pushing me to take one last look at Karen's death. And the Dali Museum was the logical place to start.

Karen's thesis was that you could identify an artist's work by more than the usual brush strokes, the recurrence of colours, or themes and locations, and even carbon dating. Her theory was established on the simple fact that we humans are all different. We are particularly different when it comes to seeing things. If we could see the artist's work through his eyes, would it be different? If we could exactly catalogue the colours, using, say the OPP colour spectrometer in the Forensic lab, we could then 'see' the paintings as the artist saw them. If an artist liked a particular shade of blue, and that colour was the one he used to express himself, then that was the colour he would use most often. Everyone looking at his pictures would see them the same way, but not perhaps in the exact shade of blue that the artist saw when he painted the picture. Of course, the mixing of pigments is not an exact science, but that was one thing that made the great artists different from the ordinary - they could mix their colours to an exactness that they could see was just to their liking. Anyone painting a copy or forgery would see that blue from his own eyes, not from the eyes of the artist.

So an art authenticator could tell the fake from the original, not only by applying the usual tests, but also if he or she knew what exact colour to look for and was able to compare that to a specification sheet printed from the spectrometer. Of course, not many art dealers could afford to have a colour spectrometer or even know how to use one. Nor could Karen. Once she had a sample of the artist' work tested and catalogued, she would know how the artist viewed the world. She could duplicate that world view by fitting herself with specially coloured lens and an ultra violet light. It took her several months and many, many trips to her optician, but Karen finally had two pairs of > glasses= that worked for her test subject, Salvador Dali. One pair for looking at his Spanish works, another pair for the New York period, for although Dali did not change his view of the world, the light conditions were different in these two settings. Karen calibrated her eyes against the standard set by the spectrometer using a large sample of photographs of works owned by the Morse family, and so she determined the way Dali saw his own works. I used to kid her that Dali had much more wrong with him than his vision, but by the time she solved the dead artist's visual quirks, I began to admire his work. These > glasses= were really prisms fitted to a regular set of eye glass frames. The glass was ground to spread the green/blue light, under the ultra violet lamp, on a painting so Karen could visually match the pigment on a painting to a printout from the OPP spectrometer.

A. Reynolds Morse, a personal friend of Salvador Dali, had one of the more complete private collections of Dali art and it was through Morse that Karen had the opportunity to test her thesis. Morse had just recently moved his collection from Cleveland to St. Petersburg where Morse and his wife could enjoy the Florida climate and their beloved Dali art in their final years. Morse donated his collection to the Dali Museum, partly to avoid millions of dollars of estate taxes, partly to ensure that the works would be on display for the public long after the Morse family had passed on. The Gallery was ever trying to add to their collection of originals and it had been Karen who had warned them off a clever fake using her glasses.

It was true that the painting in question was from a period when Dali may have painted a picture that he did not record or remember, for it was reputedly painted in 1928 when Salvador first fell in love with Gala Eluard. The painting was offered to the Dali Museum for a mere $450,000, a price that suggested its authenticity, but when Karen scotched the deal, the painting disappeared from the art's marketplace. Rumour had it that it was purchased by a dealer who had tried to resell it many times but now no gallery would touch it. Someone had spent a lot of money to buy that picture and was very displeased with a young Canadian art critic for turning the painting into a worthless piece of early abstract art, painted albeit, in the Dali style.

This all happened during the period of the great Dali art scandal that was sweeping the world. The scandal was not so much focussed on original paintings as on reproductions - both lithographs and photo-mechanical prints that were flooding the marketplace. The US Postal Office was pressing fraud charges against a number of galleries for misrepresenting prints as being signed by Dali, when in fact they were not. Dali was not one to keep records of his works or the signed blank paper used for reproductions, so it was difficult to decide what was real and what was not. In the case of original works, however, Karen was considered an expert on Dali.

It was with a heavy sigh that I now stood on the old Bentwood chair and reached up into Karen's closet for the boxes that contained her files on Dali. Once again I would have to read through everything and see what it was that I had missed. I had been through these boxes several times in the months after Karen's death, but I may have been too upset then to see something that would now, after three years, give me one more, and what I now swore would be the final chance, to solve her murder.

Three hours later I realized I was thirsty, and although it was now nearing midnight, I was wide awake. I had completed my review of Karen's research that led up to the spectrometer study of Dali's work. I reached into the refrigerator for a Pepsi but came away with a can of beer. Karen's notes must have been dry reading because by the time I finished there were three crumpled beer cans in the waste basket in my study. The one thing that I had not followed up on was the prescriptions for the Dali Glasses, as we had called them.

I turned on the perimeter lights in the living room and the spot lights for the Dali prints we had hung there. We had a collection of eighteen Dali prints, all framed, that we rotated in our little private gallery. I had changed the works a few times since Karen's death, but not as often as Karen did. The paintings now on the wall were the trio of works that we called the Millet series. Dali had been so fascinated with Millet's Angelus that he had painted at least three different versions of the famous painting that depicted a peasant and his wife bowing over the basket of food at the end of the day, presumably in a prayer of thanksgiving. Dali, of course, claimed to see something beneath the surface of the painting, something not visible to others. As with the William Tell series, Dali had his own interpretation of the legends. He felt that Millet's Angelus depicted not thanksgiving, but grief and remorse. Years after painting his Millet series, he persuaded the curators at the Louvre to x-ray the Angelus. Beneath the picnic basket, the x-ray revealed the image of a child's coffin, thus proving that Millet had indeed changed his original composition to improve the painting's marketability. So suddenly the Dali works, painted twenty years earlier as a sombre tribute to Millet, became all the more meaningful. I made a note to exchange the pictures when I came back from Florida. I would hang our William Tell group in honour of my last and most recent loss of willpower with my father.

I went back to the study and found the file from Barney's Optical. Karen had tried ten pairs of glasses before they got the prescription correct it seemed. All ten sets of lenses were marked and in their own envelopes. Once more, I looked at the invoices from Barney's. Fifteen invoices. Ten sets of lenses. I opened another can of Blue Light beer and began comparing the invoices. I soon spotted what must have been Karen's normal prescription marked on the bottom of the oldest invoices. In the notation field there were some numbers that I thought must have been the formula for grinding. I went back to her notebook on the spectrometer findings. And there it was, the solution that she had found for the Dali glasses. Somehow she had come up with a formula that compared Dali's computed green/blue comprehension or as her notes abbreviated, DSS and DSN for Dali Skew Spain and Dali Skew New York. I checked the last set of figures to invoice number ten. They were the same.

Invoice eleven was different. The prescription at the bottom was also different. In fact it was a strong correction, not anything near the numbers for Karen's own eyes. Invoice fourteen was again for an entirely different prescription. Invoice fifteen was a credit note for the previous invoice. Someone had penned a note on it saying it was billed to Karen in error. But the glass was the same code - the DSS type. I went back to the notes. There was nothing that caught my eye, so I sat back and tried to recall the sequence of events leading up to Karen's announcement of the fake painting.

Felix, our cat, had been prowling around the house, obviously upset at my interruption of his night time routine. Felix is a black and white cat that Karen rescued from the Humane Society on a tip from my mother. That was during Mother's Humane Society period when she served on their Board of Directors. Mother had to get right down to the roots of the operation of the Society and had spotted Felix at a shelter in Rosedale. Felix adopted us and became my good friend and companion these past three years. He missed Karen, as much as I did, but finally agreed to let me become master of the household so long as I did not cross any of the many boundaries that were his domain. I am allowed to feed and brush Himself, clean out the litter box, and once a year, under protest, take him for his shots at the vet's. In return, Felix will allow me to pet him, share his morning Globe and Mail paper and play tag with him just before bedtime.

copyright 2006  W. W. Walton