Straight No Chaser Read online

  Jack Batten, after a brief and unhappy career as a lawyer, has been a very happy Toronto freelance writer for many years. He has written thirty-five books, including four crime novels featuring Crang, the unorthodox criminal lawyer who has a bad habit of stumbling on murders that need his personal attention. Batten reviewed jazz for the Globe and Mail for several years, reviewed movies on CBC Radio for twenty-five-years, and now reviews crime novels for the Toronto Star. Not surprisingly, jazz, movies, and crime turn up frequently in Crang’s life.

  STRAIGHT NO CHASER

  A Crang Mystery

  STRAIGHT NO CHASER

  Jack Batten

  THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS

  TORONTO

  Copyright © 2011 by Jack Batten

  Macmillan edition published September 1989

  Seal edition published October 1990

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Batten, Jack, 1932–

  Straight no chaser : a Crang mystery / by Jack Batten.

  First published: Toronto : Macmillan of Canada, 1989.

  ISBN 978-0-88762-747-7

  I. Title.

  PS8553.A833S8 2011 C813'.54 C2010-908132-3

  Cover design: Sputnik Design

  Cover image: Steve Buchanan/Getty Images

  Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,

  a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,

  390 Steelcase Road East,

  Markham, Ontario L3R 1G2 Canada

  www.thomasallen.ca

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of

  The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1

  Text printed on 100% PCW recycled stock

  Printed and bound in Canada

  For

  Howard Engel

  and

  Eric Wright

  STRAIGHT NO CHASER

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  1

  DAVE GODDARD was asking me to tail a guy he said was tailing him.

  I said, “At law school, Dave, when I went, I don’t recall they taught a course in close and surreptitious pursuit.”

  “The reason I flashed on you for the gig, man, you’re a criminal lawyer.”

  “You got that part right, Dave.”

  “So dig this, you’re a criminal lawyer, and the thing going down, this dude on my case, it’s a crime.”

  “Watching and besetting maybe.”

  “That’s no jive, man.”

  “Dave, when I said watching and besetting, that’s what we lawyers call legal wit.”

  Dave wasn’t in the mood for legal wit. He had a cup of coffee in front of him. I was drinking vodka on the rocks. It was a few minutes after midnight, and we were sitting at the table in Chase’s Club reserved for musicians. The table was next to the door into the kitchen.

  “Here’s the deal, man.” Dave leaned six inches over the table. “The dude follows me to my pad. You follow the dude. I fall into bed.”

  Dave stopped talking. He was still leaning.

  I said, “That seems to leave me and your alleged tail all by ourselves on the street.”

  “Wait for it, man,” Dave said. “What this dude’s gonna do, me down for the night, you dig, he’s gonna head back to his own pad. You with me, man?”

  I said, “And I keep him company at a discreet distance. Which gets us the gentleman’s address and eventually his name.”

  Dave signified his pleasure.

  “Solid,” he said.

  “I’m a quick study, Dave.”

  I let a beat of silence go by. Dave swallowed from his cup of coffee. Black with enough sugar to give an ordinary man diabetes.

  “What if I have a doubt or two?” I said.

  Dave put down his coffee cup.

  He said, “Crang, the dude’s not how you said. Alleged? Last two days, he’s right there. I look, dude’s back there. Yesterday afternoon, I’m in my room at the hotel, TV’s on, I’m laid out on the bed watching my soaps, somebody starts working on the lock from out in the hall. ‘Hey’, I holler. Whoever’s out there splits. It had to be the same dude.”

  “Sounds persuasive, Dave.”

  I lied. Dave wasn’t persuading me to take part in his dingbat enterprise. But just because it was Dave, I was willing to sit at the table in Chase’s while he tried more persuading.

  Dave was a tall, reedy guy in his late fifties, about fifteen years older than me. His face was oval-shaped, the kind you usually see on a woman. It looked fine on Dave. He had a head of hair that was still dark, still full. One of his eyes was a fraction off-centre. I think it was the right. When he talked to me, the left was the eye that seemed to be staring into mine. Dave had on a lightweight brown sports jacket and a pale-brown shirt. The jacket had no lapels, and the shirt had a roll collar like the kind Billy Eckstine used to wear. Maybe Mr. B still wears them. A thin leather strap was looped around Dave’s neck and hung almost to his waist. A metal clip was fixed to the end of the strap. It held Dave’s tenor saxophone when he played. Dave was a jazz musician. In my value system, that gave Dave a status close to heroic. Should a grown man have a hero? Soft spot maybe. I had a soft spot for Dave, and it made me more patient than I’d otherwise be with the talk about trailing a stranger who was trailing Dave.

  I said, “Let me suggest something else, Dave, an alternate plan.”

  Dave focussed his left eye on me.

  I said,“Why not step up to the gent and ask how come the fascination with you?”

  Dave raised both hands and made shooing motions.

  “Definitely no eyes for that, man,” he said.

  “Understand, Dave, I’m doing what a lawyer’s supposed to do.”

  “Man?”

  “Ask questions.”

  “I’m hip.”

  “So what’s wrong with the frontal approach?” I asked. “The guy may be about as threatening as a shy fan.”

  “Not this dude.” Dave went into his leaning routine. “See, the amount of years I been on the scene, I can suss when a cat’s not cool. This dude isn’t. Maybe I crossed him somewhere a long time back. You remember what I was like ten, fifteen years ago, juicing, sticking needles in my arm, all that shit. I did far-out numbers I didn’t know I was doing. Maybe this dude, he’s
somebody I ripped off. Who knows? Cat could be pissed at me from way back.”

  “Getting even?” I said. “That’s what you think the guy doing the following is all about?”

  Dave shrugged.

  A waiter in a black bow tie and a red jacket with stains down the front put a tray of drinks on the table at my elbow. I moved my elbow. It was a protective measure. I was wearing my Cy Mann navy blue. Twelve hundred dollars of suit, the most extravagant garment in my wardrobe. The waiter mused over the tray and selected a glass from the collection. He placed it in front of me. I hoped it was vodka and ice. The waiter performed his duties in slow motion. Probably didn’t want to get more stains on the jacket. I tasted the drink. The vodka was the bar variety, sweet and lacking in punch. The ice was the genuine article.

  “How I read it,” I said to Dave, “you may have things wrong way round.”

  “You don’t want another vodka?” the waiter said to me.

  “Not you,” I said to the waiter. “Fine with the drink.”

  “First was a vodka. You ask for another, I figure you mean same as before.”

  “I was talking to the other gentleman.”

  “Something wrong with the coffee, Mr. Dave?” the waiter asked Dave.

  Dave said, “Kinda chilled out now you mention it, man.”

  The conversation was getting away from me. Not that I had much grip on it from the time I arrived at Chase’s to keep the appointment with Dave Goddard.

  “You want me to top it up?” the waiter asked Dave.

  “You don’t mind, man?”

  “A pleasure.”

  The waiter needed twenty seconds of slow-mo lifting to reclaim the tray of drinks and amble in search of fresh coffee.

  “You were laying something on me back there, man?” Dave said to me.

  “I was.”

  I intended to offer Dave a couple of reasons for excluding me from his scheme. Dignity, for one reason. It wouldn’t be dignified for a lawyer like me, not precisely a pillar of the bar but still a criminal counsel with eighteen years’ worth of plucky service in the courtrooms of Toronto, to do a Philip Marlowe. That’s what I intended to say. But I couldn’t get the words out, not with Dave Goddard the jazz musician asking me for this favour. The hell with dignity.

  “Okay, Dave,” I said, “what’s the gent on your case look like when he’s on your case?”

  “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

  THE 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.

  “L
ovely 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.