Straight No Chaser (7 page)

I said to him, “Raymond Fenk was on stage same time as you at the Park Plaza this afternoon.”

“You talking about the show for the TV people and the writers?” Manley said. “That was no Fenk. That was my man Cameron.”

“He was in the group, Fenk was, with the rest of you behind Cam Charles.”

“Nobody much back there except some fool slapping on another fool.”

“I was the fool on the floor,” I said. “Fenk was the fool on his feet.”

Manley left his chair and walked to the bar. When he came back, his glass was full and darker than amber. He had a fresh cocktail napkin wrapped around the bottom. My glass could stand a recharge, but I didn't want to risk losing the audience with Manley.

“You're a lawyer for damn sure,” he said to me. “First you say, hey, Harp, what about this kiddie plays in the band? Now you say, Harp, what about this other kiddie here? That's a lawyer's way of getting what you really got on your mind for Harp.”

Was this an invitation to call him Harp?

“You're going to have to take my word on this, Harp,” I said. “Some of it's conjecture. But I think the man I asked you about, Raymond Fenk, he's the heavy. He banged Dave over the head or something as bad, and that's why Dave isn't up there on the stand tonight.”

“Conjecture, huh?” Manley said. “The kiddie send you down here with this conjecture?”

“My point, Harp, I'm trying to tell you I don't know where Dave is. Hurt some place. Worse maybe.”

“Laying up with some woman more likely.”

As skeptics went, Manley was making H. L. Mencken sound like a true believer.

He said, “The kiddies always got the stories when they don't make the job on time.”

“Harp,” I said, “the thing may be a story about Dave, but I'm an eyewitness, partly anyway. It happened.”

“This the first time I remember a kiddie hired a lawyer to save his ass.”

It seemed the moment for a switch in tactics.

I said, “May I ask how come you were the surprise package at Cam Charles's press conference?”

“You a movie man, Mr. Lawyer?” Manley asked.

“You should've won the Oscar, Harp.”

“Saw me, huh?” Manley said.“Gonna see me again. What's it today? Thursday? All right, Mr. Lawyer, Sunday night, there's gonna be them long black stretch limousines, spotlights looking up in the sky, me in my tuxedo, all that fine shit. You hear what I'm saying? A world premiere.”

He gave premiere the French pronunciation. Harp Manley hadn't come back from his years on the continent an unlettered man.

“Cam Charles?” I said. “He's got first dibs on your new movie?”

“You see that skinny little grey-haired kiddie beside me?” Manley asked.

“Where? At the press conference? Can't say I did.”

“My man Cam and that kiddie did the deal,” Manley said. “The skinny little kiddie owns the movie. Listen to this, Mr. Lawyer, he paid me cash money in my pocket. None of that, hey, Harp, we gonna be rich some day. He say, Harp, you take the cash money right now.”

“Back up a couple of steps, Harp. You're talking about the producer of your new movie, and he's given Cam Charles rights to a first screening at the Alternate Festival. I'm with you?”

Manley nodded and drank some Scotch.

“The skinny kiddie wrote the movie,” he said. “Then he got the cash money from the bank and he told me on the phone, Harp, you make this movie, you gonna be big as Clint Eastwood. Damn, I think that kiddie's right.”

“Has he got a name? This paragon of a writer-producer?”

“Bobby.”

I waited. Manley added no more names.

“Well, I asked, didn't I,” I said.

“Huh?”

Manley swallowed more Johnnie Walker. I was stuck with an empty glass and a man whose narrative style fluctuated between convoluted and terse.

“Is Bobby a Hollywood guy?” I asked. Once again into the fray.

Manley shook his head.

“New York,” he said. “Bobby don't mess with them big California studios. He got his own cash money.”

“From the bank. So you said.”

Manley's drink had reached the level of the white paper napkin. How much of the stuff could he absorb before it fluffed his trumpet work?

I said, “I take it Bobby isn't likely to have connections in the business with Raymond Fenk?”

Manley frowned and gave me the same inspecting look he'd greeted me with earlier. The look must have been a specialty of his. Or else he saved it for people who roused the suspicious side of his nature. Me, for instance.

I said, “My thought is, Fenk's in movies, but he seems to be strictly Hollywood, and Bobby isn't.”

“What's going on, Mr. Lawyer?” Manley said. He still had on the frown and the look of close scrutiny.

“Let's try to establish a small bond of trust, Harp,” I said. “We're both interested in what's happened to Dave Goddard, you for business reasons, me for personal reasons.”

“Personal, huh? You supposed to be the kiddie's lawyer.”

“That too,” I said. “The reason I'm asking the questions about Raymond Fenk, I'm sure he's got something to do with Dave's disappearance. Why and how, I don't know yet. You say you and your movie and good old Bobby have no tie-in to Fenk. That's a start. Negative, but a start.”

“This Fenk whapped the kiddie upside the head?”

“That's the assumption I'm going on.”

Manley's eyes switched away from my face.

“I suppose I got to let that young kiddie I got on the piano stretch out some,” he said.

“Take up the solo slack until Dave comes back?”

“Ain't worth shit.”

“Who isn't?” I said. “You're not talking about Dave?”

“The young kiddie on the piano. Plays too many notes.”

Manley finished the rest of his drink.

“All right if I ask something private, Harp?” I said. “How much Scotch can you hold when you're on the job?”

Manley looked at his empty glass.

“I don't hardly juice,” he said. “Only time is if the kiddies get to acting bad on me.”

“I'll alert Abner Chase,” I said. “Get him to lay in an extra stock of Black Label for the rest of the week.”

9

C
OMMUTERS
call it the DVP. They say it with affection. It's the Don Valley Parkway. It's three lanes wide both ways, five lanes at the collector points, and it carries traffic from the centre of the city to the northern suburbs and beyond. A tractor-trailer passed me, and my car shimmied. A Tinker Toy could pass me and my car would shimmy. I drive a white Volkswagen Beetle convertible. I was on the inside lane of the Parkway and heading north. A grateful bank robber gave me the Beetle. A bonus, he said, for getting him an acquittal. The gift may reveal something about my clientele. If Cam Charles had a client overflowing in gratitude, the Reverend Moon maybe, he'd probably reward Cam with a Lamborghini.

On either side of the Parkway, tall dark trees stood on hills against the sky. The trees were all that was left of the old valley from the centuries before it was paved for the four lanes each way. Somewhere down below me to the left was the Don River. It had turned as grey and greasy as Mr. Kipling's Limpopo. I took the off ramp for Don Mills Road North and drove past a junior high school named after Marc Garneau. I had the top up on the Beetle, but the windows were open, and the air, away from the Parkway, felt damp and fresh. Marc Garneau was Canada's astronaut. Mission Control in Houston fired him into space and brought him back. Good for Marc. Were other schools named after living Canadians of renown? Deanna Durbin Collegiate Institute? Didn't seem likely.

On the north side of Eglinton Avenue, past the IBM complex, I took a right and got myself into the fringes of residential suburbia. The streets were laid out in loops and crescents that probably adhered to a master design. The design eluded me. I slowed and circled and watched for street signs. People who live in downtown Toronto look askance at people who live in the suburbs. The suburban dwellers drive into the city, take up parking space, talk noisy in restaurants, and go home to their crooked little streets on a highway they call by a pet name. Maybe it was just an image problem.

Ralph Goddard lived at 48 Hiawatha Crescent, and I was at the intersection of Tomahawk and Wigwam. Where was John Wayne when you needed him? I found Hiawatha and Number 48 on my own. Ralph's house was white stucco and two storeys. There was a Pontiac station wagon in the driveway, and the porch light was on. I parked in front of the house and walked up the sidewalk. It was made of rust-coloured bricks that had been fitted together in an intricate pattern. There was a birdbath on the lawn, and a sign by the door, raised black metal lettering on a light-brown plaque, announced “The Goddards”. I didn't spot any pink flamingos.

Ralph Goddard answered the door after I pushed the bell a second time. He didn't look much like Dave.

“You must be the famous Mr. Crang,” he said.

Ralph had a grin that would crack most men's cheeks.

“Any friend of Dave's,” he said.

He gripped my elbow in his left fist and shook my hand with his right in a display of great conviviality. Ralph was taller, fatter, and greyer than his brother. He had on a short-sleeved white shirt, green gabardine slacks, and Hush Puppies. His eye alignment appeared to be in order.

“Come on up to the family room,” Ralph said.

He led the way up a short flight of stairs carpeted in pink and into a room straight ahead. The pink carpet continued around to the left, presumably to the bedrooms.

“Get you a drink?” Ralph asked. “Something nice and cool?”

“Vodka'd taste good.”

“One vodka coming up,” Ralph said. He'd inherited the hearty genes in the Goddard family. “Anything with it? Tang?”

“Ice, just ice, Ralph.”

He went back down the stairs. The family room had flocked wallpaper in a mustard shade. The shelves along one wall held a collection of china birds, and, on a low end-table, two marble bookends enclosed a short row of Louis L'Amour novels in hardcover. There was a set of a sofa and two armchairs covered in shiny material in browns and yellows that picked up the mustard on the walls. Another chair was aimed at the TV set. The chair had many movable parts, a headrest, a footrest, arms that raised up and down. You could buy chairs like that on your Visa card by dialling a toll-free number in Akron, Ohio. I'd seen the ads. Ralph's chair was in brown corduroy. He'd left the television on with the sound down low. It was tuned to the Blue Jays ball game.

Ralph came back to the room empty-handed.

“What's your second choice, Crang?” he said. “Doreen went to the booze store today and bought the place out, it looks like.”

“Except no vodka.”

“You got it.”

“Why don't I have whatever you're drinking.”

“That'll be two dark rum and Coke.”

By the time I left the family room, I'd be on the road to gout. Why was it called the family room? If the kids were out in the world and Ralph and Doreen lived alone, wouldn't every room in the house qualify as family room? I'd ponder the question next time I strolled Philosopher's Walk.

The ice in the large glasses tinkled against the sides. Ralph carried a glass in each hand. He handed one to me and leaned over to turn off the television set.

“Top of the sixth,” he said. “Jays in front by three. You a baseball fan, Crang?”

“You bet,” I said. It was the second lie I'd told to a member of the Goddard family in twenty-four hours. Baseball makes me nod off, but there was no sense alienating Ralph at a time when I had more worrying matters for him.

“Dave didn't appear at Chase's tonight,” I said.

“I thought that'd be it soon's I saw you standing at the door down there,” Ralph said. He sat in the chair with the gadgets and touched something that swung it in my direction. I remembered the chair's brand. Motolounger. I was sitting on the sofa.

I said to Ralph, “I've got a name since I talked to you this afternoon. Raymond Fenk. He's the party seems to be responsible for all the rough stuff.”

“The whole shebang buffaloes me,” Ralph said. “Dave's been toeing the mark ever since I got him to let me look after things.”

“Fenk's in the movie business. Might he have any business connection with Dave? Does the name mean something? Fenk?”

“I thought you told me Dave saw this bozo and didn't recognize him.”

“The face registered nothing,” I said. “Maybe the name does.”

“Fenk?” Ralph rubbed his jaw and took his time over the name. “I got to tell you, Crang, there's a lot of people on a lot of contracts. But I don't recollect Fenk. I could look through the files. I keep Dave's records in apple-pie order. Nobody from Revenue Canada or any place else'd find a number out of place.”

“Remind me to call you around income tax time, Ralph,” I said. “Fenk is Hollywood. That's my information, and I know it's reliable. Let's suppose they had an encounter out there, Dave and Fenk. What do your records say about Dave in the neighbourhood of Hollywood?”

“How's that get Dave back on the job at Abner Chase's?” Ralph said. “He's lost a night's pay already, and I just know Harp Manley's bummed off, excuse my French. What we ought to be doing, my opinion, is beat the bushes for Dave right now. You sure he's not drunk or something? Had a relapse?”

“Fenk's the link. Let's go with that for the moment. If we can come up with a reason for Fenk's interest in Dave, maybe we stand a chance of locating Dave.”

Ralph hadn't touched his dark rum and Coke. Neither had I. I was nervous about the taste. What was Ralph's excuse?

Ralph said, “Well, you're right about California. Dave was out there a couple of weeks ago on a tour. Dave Goddard and His Canadian All-Stars. I thought that one up. Dave's got a big underdog reputation, you know. Fans from way back still come out to hear him.”