Straight No Chaser (14 page)

“This isn't an invitation, Dave. More like an order. Sit down, I'm serious.”

I went into the kitchen and made a drink, a big Wyborowa and one small ice cube.

In the living room, Dave was still on his feet, beside the sofa, holding his saxophone.

“Whatever way you want, standing up, sitting down,” I said to Dave, and I told him the whole story. I thought I was particularly vivid in the passages that described the manner in which the saxophone strap with Dave's name on it cut into Fenk's neck.

“Down there at the police station, Dave, they got computers, all that state-of-the-art crap. The cops who called on you at the hospital, maybe they looked like they didn't give a damn, they still punched the facts into the computer. Man named Dave Goddard, David no doubt, reports he was assaulted and had his saxophone stolen.” I walked around the living room, to the window and back, talking, working on the drink. “This afternoon, tonight, tomorrow, whenever the chambermaid or somebody finds Raymond Fenk's body, pretty ugly by then I imagine, another cop is going to punch into the computer. This cop, homicide division, he'll punch in a long report, take him an hour, and at the end, he'll punch cause of death. A saxophone strap with a name on the clip. Dave Goddard. The computer'll go nuts. It's got the same name twice, it's got saxophone, it's practically solved the case.”

“Man, I'm fucked,” Dave said.

He sat on the sofa. I sat in a wing chair that was positioned kitty-corner to the sofa. Annie took charge of my furniture and its arrangement a year earlier. The wing chair was in a pattern of pale-green and brown stripes.

“You got a driver's licence, Dave?”

“Where you at, man? Driver's licence got nothing to do here. This's murder I'm in shit about.”

“You got one?”

“I been driving since I was, like, sixteen.”

“You can borrow my car. A place to stay, you got that? Quiet, out in the country, a place like that?”

“Ralph's cottage. But, man, I didn't kill anybody. I had the strap, I said already, forty years. You think I'd leave it around the dude's neck?”

“Where's Ralph's cottage?”

“Muskoka. Well, not exactly Muskoka. It isn't on the water or anything. Kind of back in the woods. I hate it, man.”

“Borrow my car, okay? Drive up there, to Ralph's Muskoka cottage, but don't tell Ralph. Can you get into it otherwise, without Ralph knowing?”

“There's a key, Ralph leaves it in this shed. But, man, you don't know, owls, crickets, it's noisy. All those birds, the kind of animals they are, they're out of tune.”

“Take my car. Never mind the musical judgments about the owls. Just drive up there. There's a phone?”

Dave nodded.

“Car's out back, the white Beetle,” I said. “Pick up your stuff at the Cameron and call me from Ralph's place so I know you got there. It'll take you, go up the 400, cut over at 11, how long, three hours?”

“Less. Except, man, what am I dodging up there for? I had nothing on with the dead guy I know of.”

“It's your strap killed him.”

“I don't dig this scene.”

“Dave, I'm advising you now partly like a lawyer and partly like a guy in a George Raft movie. Get out of town. I got an idea, two or three of them, and it'd be better in all ways if I have a free hand to follow up on them. You around, get arrested, I'd be using up time out at the jail, doing a bail application, talking to the homicide people, that kind of dance. For both our sakes, I know it's unorthodox, drive up to Ralph's tonight.”

“I don't get it, what's going down.”

“Neither do I, and I was the guy in the closet.”

I took Dave back downstairs and around to the alley where the Beetle was parked. First crack, he missed the timing between the clutch and the accelerator, and stalled the engine. Second crack, he steered smoothly out of the alley. I forgot to tell him to stick to the inside lane on the highway. Dave'd learn.

My second Wyborowa wasn't as large as the first. I sat in the kitchen with it and the phone book. Trevor Dalgleish had two entries, home and office. The office was on John Street. Cam Charles & Associates, of whom Trevor Dalgleish was one, worked out of a renovated house downtown near the Amsterdam Café. It had three storeys with a lot of glass and ferns and native Canadian art. Dalgleish's home was on Admiral Road, and the phone number began with 921. Admiral was a short, windy street in an enclave of large one-family houses between Avenue Road and St. George Street. For a young lawyer, a criminal lawyer, Trevor had a swell address.

It was almost two o'clock. I could telephone Dalgleish and ask him about Raymond Fenk or I could wait till first light. First light seemed more civilized. Calling Dalgleish was my number one idea. I told Dave I had two or three ideas. I exaggerated. The case was hurling me into a moral abyss. Prevaricating, postponing, exaggerating. I went in search of the Gene Lees book and the chapter on Edith Piaf.

17

C
AM CHARLES'S
phone call came at orange-juicing time. Fourteen minutes past nine.

I said, “You rad lawyers get a fast jump on Sunday office hours.”

“I'm at home, Crang.”

“Me too. That keeps us even so far.”

“Obviously I know where you are.” Cam caught himself. “Why am I always getting into foolish exchanges with you?”

“Must be chemistry.”

“I'd like us to meet this morning.”

“See, I told you it was chemistry.”

“If you can grasp this, Crang, I want the meeting to be confidential.”

“What you mean, you don't want me around your office.”

“Correct.”

“Or home. I might lower the tone.”

“There's a potential problem, and I hate to say this, you may be the man I need to find out how close to real it is.”

I asked, “This wouldn't, any chance, have something to do with the late Raymond Fenk?”

Cam hesitated.

He said finally, “It may have to do with a lot of unpleasant things, but not that one.”

“I have to say, Cam, I admire your way with the auxiliary verbs.”

“What?”

“All those mays.”

“Crang, can we just for God's sake make an appointment.”

“Some place off the beaten track.”

“For reasons I haven't got time to go into right now, I don't want anyone from my office seeing us together, anyone from the criminal bar for that matter, and people from my firm happen to be in the house at this moment.”

Cam lived in a big house in Forest Hill. Trevor Dalgleish lived in a house on Admiral Road that had to be just as big. Where did I go wrong?

“I got the perfect spot,” I said.

“Where?”

“The AGO.”

Silence from Cam's end.

“You know,” I said, “paintings on the wall, Henry Moores on the floor.”

“I
know
the art gallery, Crang. I'm thinking about it for a meeting place. Weighing it.”

“All the criminal lawyers I ever heard of 'll be in bed or out visiting clients at West End Detention.”

“You're probably right.”

“One thing, there might be a lawyer's wife on cash at the gift shop.”

“I'm not acquainted with lawyers whose wives do that sort of volunteer work.”

“Understand what you mean, Cam. Bourgeois.”

“I'll meet you at ten.”

“Sorry. Place doesn't open till eleven.”

“All
right
. Eleven then.”

Cam hung up, and I got another orange out of the refrigerator. Had Cam slammed down his receiver? Slamming the phone is a wasted gesture. All the guy on the other end hears, the slammee, is a click. Interesting metaphysical question. Slam at one end, click at the other. If Bishop Berkeley had lived in the age of the telephone, he would have dissected it. I pressed a fourth orange and had myself a full glass.

I hadn't phoned Trevor Dalgleish. I hadn't done anything constructive. I hadn't thought up any more angles to pursue in the quest of Fenk's killer. I hadn't slept much. Dave Goddard woke me at four-thirty with his call from Ralph's Muskoka cottage. I asked Dave a question I'd overlooked earlier. Where was he on Saturday afternoon when Fenk was expiring in the Silverdore sitting room? In bed at the Cameron, Dave said, all afternoon, all alone. Terrific alibi, I said, and tossed and turned until the sun came up.

Cam Charles's phone call and the orange juice gave me a kick-start on the day. I sliced two raisin buns into halves and put them in the oven to toast. The day was overcast, and in the living room, no sunbeams warmed the sofa. I made more orange juice and buttered the raisin buns. “A potential problem,” Cam said on the phone. Little did he know. Or did he? My mouth was full of raisin bun. I stopped in mid-chew, and in my head I heard the tumblers click into place.

“Something,” I'd asked Cam, “to do with the late Raymond Fenk?”

Uh-oh.

I got the Wyborowa out of the freezer and poured two fingers into the orange juice. How did I
know
Fenk was dead? How did
I
know? Is that why Cam hesitated before he said his problem didn't concern Fenk's murder? The vodka in the orange juice wasn't making me feel much better about my gaffe. What was the drink called? Orange blossom? No, screwdriver. One right answer for the morning.

At ten, I flashed the radio around the dial to on-the-hour newscasts. None mentioned a murdered person in a midtown hotel. I walked down to Queen Street and bought a
Sunday Star
. Raymond Fenk didn't make the front page or any of the pages after it. He was dead, and nobody seemed to know except Cam Charles, me, and, undoubtedly, the police. It must have been the cops who told Cam. That'd be natural, given Fenk's presence in town for Cam's film festival. The cops hadn't phoned my place. No one had informed me of Fenk's death, not cops, radio, or press. This is a fine mess you've got us into, Stanley. I cleaned the breakfast dishes and sauntered up Beverley Street to the AGO.

Cam was facing the entrance to the gallery, and his reflection came back at him in the bright glass of the doors. He had on a brown and grey tweed jacket and chocolate-brown slacks, with a crimson foulard at his throat. Sunday-slumming attire for your prominent criminal barrister. He didn't see me walking up the stone steps behind him.

“You want to look at the show while we talk, Cam?” I said to the back of the tweed jacket. “It's Harold Town, kind of stuff that'll bump us out of the mundane.”

Cam turned from his image in the glass.

“There you are, Crang,” he said. “At last.”

Imperious bastard. It was two minutes past eleven.

“If you don't mind,” he said, “I'd prefer to do this sitting down.”

“They got benches in there,” I said. “In front of the paintings.”

There was a small congregation of people at the ticket counter. I bought admissions for two. That was seven bucks I'd have to charge to my client. Who was my client? Dave Goddard? I'd swallow the seven.

The Harold Town retrospective was on the second floor in the Sam and Ayala Zacks Wing. Sam and Ayala were a wealthy couple who had more taste than the guy who put Gumby Goes to Heaven on University Avenue. Cam said nothing on the way up the stairs. In the first room, where the Towns were hung, there was so much colour on the walls they gave me the sensation they were in motion. I stopped at the door. Straight ahead, dead centre, was a collage that looked like an abstract slice of ancient Babylon. There was another painting, mostly reds, of a toy horse, and one of a strange enormous seal—the kind that kings and potentates used to slap on their written pronouncements— against a midnight curtain. Cam made a beeline for a bench that had a black leather covering and no back. I sat beside him.

“What's shaking, Cam?”

“Two points, and that's one more than I had before I phoned you this morning. The first, really the second but never mind, is this— you're in a bind, Crang, you know that?”

“Well, I'm pretty good at identifying binds, Cam. This current one, I've got no doubt, you're wondering how come I knew Raymond Fenk was recently departed, not as in on his way back to Los Angeles but as in dead.”

Cam looked wonderfully pleased with himself. I didn't take it as a comment on my present predicament. Cam always looked wonderfully pleased with himself. Maybe it was his barbering. Up close, on the black leather bench, studying Cam's head, I had never seen a man shaved, trimmed, shampooed, and cologned to such perfection. Beside him, I felt shabby. That was worse than feeling in a bind.

Cam said, “You know what's your trouble, Crang? Always has been? Don't answer. You don't want to know, but I'm going to tell you. You're impetuous, irreverent, and too much of a smartass.”

Cam kept on looking pleased with himself.

I said, “We got to the part yet about what my trouble is?”

“My call two hours ago, the purpose was to ask you, to
retain
you actually, if you'd carry out a little job, something in the, shall we say, quasi-legal line. I still want you to do the little job, but now I'm not asking you. I'm telling you.”

“Because of the, shall we also say, previously mentioned bind?”

“I don't care how you know about Fenk's murder. I'm not even going to inquire about your embarrassing display with the man at the Park Plaza press conference. I don't think any of that is relevant to my problem. But the fact is you know about Fenk and his murder and you shouldn't, and I'm going to use that information for my own purposes.”

“For pressuring me into taking on the little quasi-legal job.”

“Correct.”

“Maybe I would've said yes anyway.”

“Maybe you would have.”

“Just so we clear the decks, Cam, satisfy my own curiosity, how'd you find out about Fenk's murder?”