Straight No Chaser Page 10

  “Why aren’t you whispering?” I whispered.

  “Guy won’t hear us.”

  “Unconscious?”

  I was still whispering.

  “Probably was two, three minutes ago,” James said. “No way he is now.”

  “Quit it with the laconic stuff, James.” I’d given up on the whispering. “What’s the mystery?”

  I walked past James into the sitting room, and once again came face to face with Raymond Fenk. My face developed a quiver around the mouth. His stared up at the ceiling from the floor.

  “Dead,” James said.

  Fenk had a cord wrapped into his neck so tightly that most of it disappeared into the flesh. His face was a high red, and his eyes were open and bulging. If he hadn’t been garrotted, he’d suffered something as close to that technical description of strangulation as I cared to witness from up close. On the other hand, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and I’d lost the quiver around the mouth.

  “You feel for a pulse or anything medical like that?” I asked James.

  “The guy’s out of here. You kidding?”

  James was right. Fenk’s vital signs had fled while I was hunkered down in the closet.

  “Now what?” James said. “For us, I mean.”

  “We skedaddle.”

  I went back into the bedroom and reclaimed Dave Goddard’s saxophone from the closet floor.

  “Hey, all right,” James said when he saw what was in my hands.

  I fitted the saxophone into the case and snapped it shut just the way I’d seen Dave do it at Chase’s three nights earlier.

  James had the door open a crack.

  “Don’t get your speed up,” he said. “People out there that got their names on their lapels, buttons, ribbons, stuff like that on.”

  At the desk, I looked for the Hell’s Barrio press release. It was gone, and with it went the three names and the phone number that someone, undoubtedly the late Fenk, had written in the margin. The page from the scratch pad where I’d scribbled Trevor Dalgleish’s name and the first three digits of the phone number remained in place. I tore it off the pad and crumpled it in my jeans pocket.

  “People got something against their rooms or what?” James said from the door. “They’re having a party in the hall.”

  Fenk’s face was the colour of a Santa Claus suit. His mouth was slack, and his eyes popped in a way that made the irises seem smaller and the white parts larger. He didn’t look as bad-tempered in death as in life. He looked scared. The cord must have hurt like hell.

  “Oh my God.”

  “What’s the matter?” James asked, holding position at the door.

  “Nothing that’s part of your job,” I answered James.

  I opened the saxophone case. No strap. I looked back at Fenk. The strap was buried in his neck, the strap that held Dave Goddard’s saxophone when he played it.

  “People in the hall,” James said, “they’re . . . dispensing.”

  “Dispersing.”

  “Going to their rooms.”

  One saxophone strap looked like another. The police medical people would say Fenk died of strangulation brought on by the tightening of a saxophone strap around his neck. But there was nothing to connect the strap to Dave Goddard. How did that stand up as reasoning? Probably had a flaw or two. But removing the strap from the folds of Fenk’s flesh was a task for a man far less squeamish than I.

  “Cleared up out there,” James said.

  I lifted the saxophone case in my right hand, and James and I fled the scene of our break-and-enter and Fenk’s murder.

  15

  JAMES POINTED OUT out that Fenk’s briefcase with all the locks on it had been nowhere in evidence in the hotel sitting room.

  “I’d’ve liked to time myself on it,” James said. “Three, four locks it had. Probably one had a key, others different combinations. Take me, I’d add up the work, six minutes to spring.”

  “You got the real competitive spirit, James. If the briefcase surfaces, I’ll give you preference over a chisel.”

  “No extra charge. The two hundred’ll cover it.”

  “Competitive, but a sportsman.”

  We were in Dooney’s. I’d drunk two bottles of Perrier. The adventure at the Silverdore left me thirsty. It also left me enervated. I ordered a double espresso. James had coffee—milk, no sugar. He sipped it as if he’d just returned from a trip to Grandma’s. The kid was immutable. I made a mental note to lend him the word.

  “Two possibilities,” I said. “Either Fenk didn’t bring the briefcase back to the room or else the guy who killed Fenk took it when he left.”

  “You think one guy?”

  “That’s the other puzzle. One killer or two, I didn’t pin down how many people were in the sitting room.”

  “Okay, one of the voices, I couldn’t tell what he was saying, or anybody else, what they were saying, but he had a deeper voice.”

  “A deep voice would be Fenk.”

  “What I think too. When I lifted the key from him at the restaurant, he was talking some, giving me shit. His voice was like the father’s on TV. The Munsters, that father.”

  “Young fella like you, James, you remember Fred Gwynne?”

  “Reruns.”

  “Keep going, James. Let’s hear you on the other voice. Or voices.”

  “Higher or lighter,” James said. “Not like a girl’s, but higher or lighter. And the way the words ran together, that was different.”

  “Trevor Dalgleish.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “His name was on a piece of paper on Fenk’s desk in the sitting room. Trevor’s got a light voice, tenor maybe, and his accent leans to mid-Atlantic.”

  “Middle of the Atlantic? No country out there I heard of.”

  “People who grow up in Rosedale, tony neighbourhoods like that, some of them speak in a mid-Atlantic accent. They want you to think, these people, Canadian, American, whatever, they’re plugged into upper-class England. Kind of an affectation. You storing this away, James? That’s roughly what a mid-Atlantic accent comes down to.”

  I checked for the waiter. Dooney’s was doing a brisk Saturday-afternoon trade in the usual serious talkers, and I was getting desperate for my double espresso.

  James said, “Doesn’t mean this Dalgleish had to be the guy out there with Fenk.”

  “True, but just for theory’s sake, let’s use what’s handy.”

  James’s face had lost its customary sulk. The kid was getting a kick out of his phonetician’s role.

  “Mid-Atlantic, I don’t know,” he said. “But what it was like, me listening to whoever was with Fenk, it was like I’m on the subway, and people’re talking beside me. Talking English, okay? But I feel like I’m right out of it.”

  “Very perceptive, James. Opens up another possibility.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell you why. There were two other names on the paper I told you about on Fenk’s desk, two besides Trevor Dalgleish’s, and they belonged to guys from the Far East.”

  “Israel, in around there?”

  “That’s Near East. Far East is China, Thailand, Vietnam, teeming millions.”

  “Those people, yeah, high voices.”

  “Compared to Fenk’s,” I said. “Except I’m beginning to think Paul Robeson had a high voice compared to Fenk’s.”

  My double espresso arrived. Lukewarm, but I didn’t care. I needed an adrenalin boost, and I swallowed a quarter of the cup at one go. James stirred a spoon in his coffee. He looked like he’d run out of linguistic analogies.

  I said, “Want me to sum up?”

  “It’s just . . . speculation.”

  “Hell, let’s think wild, James. Reach for it. Plunge into the realms of might be.” Was I getting hyper? Must have been the double espresso. Or a reaction to the afternoon’s crime spree. “What we might have in the sitting room,” I said, “is either one Trevor Dalgleish or two Vietnamese.”

  “And that was who wrap
ped the thing around the dead guy’s neck.”

  “It’s surmising, but what the heck.”

  “And,” James said. The kid had gone into a dogged mode. “And it would also be who might’ve walked out with the dead guy’s briefcase that had in it that stuff that used to be inside the lining of your guy’s saxophone case.”

  “Well, as long as were surmising, we might as well take it all the way.”

  James developed the expression of a man having second thoughts. He said, “There’s one place, you follow me, we don’t take it.”

  “I know,” I said, “to the cops.”

  “No way.”

  “Too fanciful for the police, James, all our theorizing about voice tones and speech patterns.”

  “That’s not the reason I’m thinking about.”

  I lifted my cup of lukewarm espresso and drank another quarter of it. That took ten long seconds. James didn’t look like he was enjoying the ten seconds.

  “Besides,” I said, “if we approached the police, we might have to answer for several crimes of our own.”

  “Now you’re talking,” James said. He exhaled a long breath. First time I’d seen the kid show a small flash of nerves.

  “One thing,” James said, “the guy’s gonna be happy to get his instrument back.”

  “Well, let’s see, you picked a pocket, we did a burglary, Fenk got strangled, I sat in a dark closet for a century or two, but, yeah, Dave Goddard should be one happy tenor-saxophone player.”

  “Personally, what happened today, I liked it.”

  I finished the espresso, reminded James I was available for the defence if his career in crime foundered, and drove home.

  The first chore was to store the saxophone and its case in the hall closet. I’d return them to Dave later in the evening, after I’d caught a nap. Exhausting work, the break-and-enter game. Dave could get by with the Flip Bochner saxophone for one more night of music. Was there a need for me to brief Dave on Fenk’s murder? Maybe the fact, but not the cause. If the cops couldn’t trace the saxophone strap to Dave—how could they?—why should I burden him with the news? By recovering Dave’s sax, I’d made up for the botched tail job. Or almost. What about Fenk’s murder? Did I have a duty there? The questions were getting tougher by the second.

  I lay on the bed with my clothes on and read again at the Gene Lees book, Jazzletters. Something to take the mind off crime and my part in it.

  Lees had a theory in a chapter called “Pavilions in the Rain” about the demise of the great bands. Claude Thornhill. Jimmy Lunceford. Boyd Raeburn. Lees thought the bands were hurried to their decline when the American transportation system shifted and changed. Cars came along in bigger numbers, pushed by money men who had interests in road construction and rubber firms. Lees said the money people lobbied successfully for the dismantling of the trolley systems and the electric railroads that carried people, among other destinations, to the pavilions and dance halls in the countryside where the big bands played on weekends. Goodbye trolleys, goodbye pavilions, goodbye bands. Sounded convincing, but I was always a sucker for a guy who could pitch a well-reasoned theory.

  I fell asleep, clothes on, Lees book on my chest, and woke up three hours later. If I had a dream, I didn’t remember it.

  16

  DAVE GODDARD cut a bizarre figure on Abner Chase’s bandstand. The white bandage on his forehead glowed eerily in the overhead spot, and the way he handled the borrowed saxophone, he looked how I feel when I drive a Hertz car. He looked awkward.

  But none of it, not the bandage or the strange horn, got in the way of Dave’s playing. Harp Manley gave Dave a featured solo on “What Is There To Say”, and he made gorgeous music. His sound was more tart than usual, lemony, and his improvisation, subdued and reaching into French impressionist territory, packed little mysteries in the melody line. It was a few minutes of unrepeatable beauty, and the audience in the club, even the Saturday-night people on their night to howl, knew it. Patrons kept the silence, waiters stayed at their stations, nobody hit the cash register. And at the end, after the last phrase of Dave’s music, there were five seconds of hush before the cheers came.

  The quintet played a semi-fast “Rhythm-a-ning” to wind up the set. It was the final set of the night and of the week, and I slid away from the bar and pushed through the crowd to head off Dave. I wanted to tell him about the magic of his solo, but I knew Dave wasn’t a guy for a complimentary word. I’d settle for letting him know I had a surprise at home he’d like.

  Dave was at the musician’s table, standing, holding the Flip Bochner saxophone and listening, impatiently I judged, to a trio of fans who were heaping on him the kind of praise I had in mind.

  “Happening, man?” Dave said to me, mostly a mumble, talking against the eager fans.

  “You want to come by my place, Dave? It’ll be worth the detour, I promise.”

  “I don’t know, man. My head’s beating like a bitch.”

  “Ten minutes, Dave.”

  He left the club with me, not precisely kicking and screaming but not as if he were on the way to a banquet in his honour either. Dave was tired and down, and conversation on the walk up Beverley was desultory.

  “You get to Raymond—what’s his name, Fenk?” Dave asked.

  “Me, among others, I got to him.”

  “What about my axe, man?”

  “Hold your horses, Dave.”

  I led the way up the stairs to my apartment. It was quiet downstairs. Ian and Alex’s custom was to go a little crazy on Friday nights and settle in with a couple of rented movies and early to bed Saturdays. I switched on the lamp in the living room and got Dave’s saxophone case from the closet.

  Dave reached out, not quite believing, for the case. The fatigue dropped away from his face. He put the case on the sofa and lifted out the saxophone. He cradled it. His baby’d come home.

  “Can you dig it, man? It’s been like the last couple nights, only half me was on the job.”

  Dave raised the mouthpiece to his lips and blew a dozen quick, light notes.

  “Man, you saved my life.”

  “Well, there’s a little story that goes with the recovery, Dave.”

  Dave turned back to the case on the sofa and ran his hand around its interior.

  “I don’t want to come on I’m not grateful, man,” he said, “but something’s missing.”

  “That, the rip in the lining, is probably part of the story.”

  “Rip doesn’t matter, man. My strap’s nowhere’s here.”

  “Dave, let me get to the story.”

  “Man, remember I told you the axe and the old case, the one before this one, I bought them the same time, sort of a package deal? The strap came too.”

  “Of the three, saxophone, case, strap,” I said, impatience in my voice, “the strap’s the easiest to replace. Must be. One strap’s like another.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Dave, the sooner I tell you my story, the sooner—” I stopped. “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “I lost the old case already, so okay, I cooled out about that. But the strap, well, man, if it’s possible, you know where it’s at? The cat at the store I bought everything from, like forty years ago, he really cared, that cat. He cut my name into the strap, the metal part, in the clip. It’s still there like he did it yesterday.”

  I straightened the magazines on the table in front of me. Vanity Fair was on the top of the pile. It had Tom Hanks on the cover.

  “Dave, you want to sit down.”

  “Not really, man. The whack on the head, I feel wonky on account of it still. I’m gonna split.”

  “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 D
ave, 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.”