Straight No Chaser (2 page)

“Man, I'm sitting here rapping with you and he's making the scene.”

“He's in the club now?”

“Would I shuck you?”

“Suppose not.”

I started to turn my head for a survey of the room.

“Don't avert your eyes, man,” Dave said.

Avert? Was that a piece of hip phraseology I'd missed out on? I left my eyes on Dave.

“The dude's sitting at the bar,” Dave said. “I'll give you the word when to peek. Far end of the bar.”

Dave's off-centre eye alignment must have yielded an edge in the vision department. He didn't have to avert his eyes to sneak a peek.

“Go, man,” Dave said.

I turned my head. The bar ran along the back of Chase's. Photographs of musicians who'd worked the room over the years hung on the wall behind the bar. The club was three-quarters full, a very good house for a Wednesday night. I glanced to the end of the bar long enough to register the man sitting on the last stool. He had on a beige jacket and was drinking a glass of beer. He was looking straight ahead toward the bandstand. Not for long. His head twitched in the direction of Dave and me. I turned back to Dave. The beige jacket I was sure of. The guy may also have had thinning hair and a small moustache.

“Man in the beige jacket,” I said to Dave.

“Bald dude,” Dave said.

Ah.

“Got a moustache,” Dave said.

Double ah. The powers of observation remained intact.

“The jacket,” I said, “with it, he'll stand out in a crowd.”

Dave's expression didn't change, but his voice edged up a notch in volume. “This mean you're in, man?” he said.

“I'll follow your buddy, Dave. But before we decide the next move from there, we regroup for further strategy.”

“Mellow.”

“Right, Dave.”

Dave Goddard was a man locked into the late 1940s. His language. His clothes. His music. He blew the tenor saxophone the way Stan Getz and Zoot Sims blew theirs in Woody Herman's orchestra when it was called the Four Brothers Band. That was 1948. Getz and Sims let their styles evolve over the years. Dave held firm with his. His sound was light and feathery, and he shaped his solos in graceful little arcs. Dave hadn't seemed to notice the passing of the last four decades. But his playing kept him employed. Maybe it was his Canadian origins. That was quaint for a jazz musician.

When I was a kid, I heard Dave play at concerts and clubs around town. Dave was a Toronto guy. His playing used to send little thrills through me. It still did. When Montreal was the hot Canadian jazz city, Dave lived there. All the clubs booked him. Same with Vancouver. Sometimes things broke exactly right for Dave and he toured Europe and Japan, played clubs in California and Manhattan. Usually he went as a sideman in somebody else's group, somebody with a big name. Dave could always fit in.

He wasn't an anachronism, more like a man who'd found the perfect year and decided to cling to it. Dave's year happened to be 1948. I'd have to ask him where he found the Mr. B shirts in 1989.

“Hold tight till one bell, man,” Dave said.

He wanted me to wait until one o'clock.

It was time for the last set of the night. Dave stood up and walked toward Chase's tiny bandstand. When Dave walked, he took long, deliberate strides. His body moved in sections.

The waiter in the stained red jacket chugged back to the table. He was carrying a glass Silex coffee pot.

“Too late for Mr. Dave?” he asked.

“Beats me.”

2

T
HE QUINTET
played “Milestones” first, then a ballad, “I Remember Clifford”.

Dave Goddard wasn't the leader on the job. Harp Manley was. Harp was a short rotund man in his mid-sixties. He had skin the colour of a football, and he was experiencing a renaissance. He played trumpet in the manner of the man remembered in the ballad, Clifford Brown. Harp blew fast and fat. That took technique. Most bebop trumpet players, which was what Harp was, had small tones and spattered notes like pellets from a BB gun. There were exceptions. Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, Harp Manley. Clifford and Fats died young. Harp was still with us and recently prospering.

He'd sunk from view for most of the 1960s and 1970s. He lived in Amsterdam and worked the clubs and festivals in Europe, the odd date back home in New York. Bebop always had a small audience. It changed for Harp when Martin Scorsese cast him in a movie. Harp played a retired Harlem pimp. He turned out to be as controlled an actor as he was a jazz musician, and he won an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. He didn't get the Oscar, but the attention put his musical career in the hot category. Harp probably didn't think of it that way. He was blowing the way he'd always blown. The difference was more people were paying to listen.

Harp made another movie. It was set for a world premiere in Toronto during the week he was at Chase's Club. I read about the movie in a profile of Harp in that morning's
Globe and Mail
. Mark Miller wrote the profile, best jazz critic in the city. He didn't have a lot of competition. Harp played a Philadelphia cop in the movie. According to Mark Miller, advance word had it that Harp established himself as more than a one-role wonder.

In the meantime, he was touring with a small band that had three young black guys from New York in the rhythm section. In Toronto, Harp added an extra horn to the group's front line. The extra horn was Dave Goddard on tenor saxophone.

The quintet finished the set with a Thelonious Monk tune, “Well You Needn't”. Dave's solo was a marvel of gentle curves.

“Lovely stuff, Dave,” I said when he came back to the table next to the door into the kitchen.

“You ready, man?”

I guessed Dave was too distracted to absorb the compliment.

“More or less,” I said.

Dave had his tenor saxophone in his right hand, its case in his left. He sat down across the table from me. The saxophone was a Selmer and looked like it had been with Dave for all his years in the jazz life. Its brass colour was dull and scuffed, and elastic bands were wrapped around four or five of the valves. The case was a different proposition. It was spiffy and gleaming black, fresh from the store. Dave fitted the saxophone into the case. He took the strap from around his neck, draped it over the saxophone, and snapped shut the case.

“This shadow job,” I said, “where's the first stop?”

I felt like an idiot talking about shadow jobs. More G. Gordon Liddy than Philip Marlowe.

Dave said, “Place where I'm staying? That part's a touch, man. Six, seven blocks down the street. We can stroll it. Me, the dude, and you.”

“In that order.”

“To the Cameron.”

“The Cameron House's where you have a room?”

I went into my astonished expression. It involved a drooping of the lower lip.

“I hadda let my old place go, the apartment,” Dave said. “Been on the road is why.”

“But the Cameron, Dave?”

I was still wearing the astonished expression. The Cameron House was home to the chic young musical crowd. Electric pianos, synthesizers, fusion. To the Cameron bunch, fusion meant mixing jazz with rock, folk, salsa, other musical detritus. To me, it meant dilution of the only music that counted. Jazz. Scornful me.

“Give it a chance, man,” Dave said. “The kids over there, they dig what I'm laying down.”

“See you as an elder statesman maybe.”

“Whatever,” Dave said. “A young cat fixed me with a freebie room for the week.”

“On the House?”

“On the young cat.”

“The kids may be salt of the earth, Dave. Forgive me if I don't get excited about their music.”

Harp Manley's voice drifted over from a table near the bandstand. Harp had a high-pitched voice. It made an odd match with his portly body. He was sitting with a group of middle-aged fans who appeared delighted to be in Harp's presence. Bet they were as narrow-minded about jazz as I was. Around the rest of the room, patrons were taking care of essential business, ordering the last drink, paying the bill, heading for the door. The man in the beige jacket was holding steady at the end of the bar.

Dave said to me, “Your chorus, man.”

He meant that I should take up position for my tailing operation. I was a whiz at interpreting Dave's messages. Twenty-five bucks seemed enough to deal with two vodkas, the cover charge, and a tip for Speedy Gonzales. I dropped two tens and a five on the table, and squeezed my way through chairs and tables and people toward the door. While squeezing, I affected an air of nonchalance. It was designed to throw Beige Jacket off the scent. Never would he suspect the intrepid Crang had his number.

Outside Chase's, the air was windless and dulcet and had the soft feel you sometimes get in early September. A Department of Public Works truck had passed a few minutes earlier and done a wash job on the pavement. Toronto the Scrubbed. The street was Queen, and I crossed it, over the streetcar tracks, and stood deep in the doorway of a second-hand paperback store.

Chase's Club was on the north side of Queen two blocks and a bit west of University Avenue. The place was owned by a canny gent named Abner Chase who was fond enough of jazz that he'd kept his club in musical business for thirty years, even when jazz slumped as a consistent drawing card. Abner did a brisk lunch trade that offset the slow jazz nights. The major attraction at noon was the salad bar. It was fifty feet long and currently featured arugula.

I waited ten minutes. It was one-thirty. Three streetcars swayed by, one eastbound, two westbound. Clumps of people left the club. I recognized the jolly group that had been at Harp Manley's feet. The neon sign over the door into the club blinked off. It spelled Chase's minus the apostrophe. Without the neon, the street turned marginally darker.

Dave Goddard came out of the club five minutes later. He had the shiny saxophone case in his right hand. I tensed for action. Dave paused, pivoted to the right, and set off along Queen to the west at his gait of the long lopes. He got two dozen lopes down the street and the man in the beige jacket emerged from Chase's. He too hove to the right and travelled west about twenty yards back of Dave. I waited a few seconds and enlisted in the migration. Westward ho.

Beige Jacket looked more formidable standing up and moving than sitting down and drinking. He was about my height, just under six feet, but had me beat in the tonnage department. I weighed one-seventy. Beige Jacket would clock in at fifty pounds over that. Most of the weight was concentrated in his upper body. He had a stiff, squared-off look, like Raymond Burr when he played Perry Mason.

Dave crossed Beverley Street and passed the Bakka science-fiction bookstore. Beige Jacket did likewise. On my side of the street, the south, it was restaurant row. Le Marais. Chicago's. Le Bistingo. I'd dined in all. Some of their maîtres d' knew me by name. Gave me a table in the window. All that heady stuff. I was a neighbour. When I got out of law school, I opened a practice in an office on Queen over a Czech ma-and-pa hardware store. That was before the street changed in the direction of gentrification. Now it was trendy restaurants and medium-couture shoppes. The Czech ma and pa were squeezed out by a boutique called Trapezoid that offered a line in leatherware to all sexes. Only two establishments remained from the Queen West of eighteen years earlier, a branch of the Legion and my office. A sturdy duo.

Dave's stride was deceptive, much faster than it looked. It meant he, Beige Jacket, and I were covering the sidewalks at a lively clip, each of us holding at the distances we set at the beginning of the adventure. Beige Jacket was twenty yards behind Dave, and I was ten yards and the width of Queen to the rear of Beige Jacket. Apart from us, the street was sparsely populated. A bunch of kids were yakking it up outside the Bamboo Club on the north side. Dave passed them, passed Trapezoid and my office, and stopped for the red light at Queen and Spadina.

I dropped into the shadows of the entrance to Makos Furs at the southeast corner of the intersection and watched Dave and Beige Jacket cross Spadina Avenue. Spadina is as wide as the Gobi, and all the lurking in the Makos entrance opened the gap between me and Beige Jacket to fifty yards. The lights changed again, red to green, and I took up the trip across Spadina at something between a trot and a scuttle.

The Cameron House is a short block west of Spadina at the corner of Queen and a street called Cameron Avenue. Hence the hotel's name. By the time I crossed Spadina, Dave and Beige Jacket had turned the corner at Cameron and disappeared from sight. I escalated my speed from trot and scuttle to sprint.

The Cameron is four storeys of brick that someone decided would look good in black paint. On its Cameron Avenue side, gaudy murals that reach as high as the second floor interrupt the black. The entrance door to the hotel is positioned mid-mural about halfway up the street. Dave was standing outside the door when my sprint brought him back into sight, and he seemed to be in distress.

Beige Jacket had caught up to Dave, and the two were performing a bizarre fandango. Beige Jacket was trying to yank the saxophone case from Dave's grasp. Dave was resisting mightily.

I was still on the south side of Queen. A passing streetcar blocked my view of the tussle over the saxophone for five seconds.

The streetcar got by. Beige Jacket had the case in his hands and was running north on Cameron. Dave was in pursuit. Beige Jacket had impressive speed for a top-heavy guy. He was ten yards up on Dave.

I jogged to the centre of Queen. Beige Jacket rounded the north corner of the Cameron House. Dave followed. I waited for a Weston Foods transport trailer to rumble by in the north lane.

I ran up Cameron past the murals. No time to admire art. There seemed to be an alley running behind the Cameron House where Beige Jacket and Dave had turned in. I reached the north corner of the Cameron House. There was an alley, but there was no Beige Jacket, no Dave.