Straight No Chaser Page 11

  “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

  CAM 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?”

  “Stuffy Kernohan’s first call was to me. As soon as he saw Fenk was connected with my film festival, after the body was found, by whom I don’t know, Stuffy rang me at home, and we agreed he’d low-play the announcement to the press. I don’t need that kind of publicity on the day the festival opens. Later in the week perhaps, but not right on top of the opening. Stuffy understood. He owed me one.”

  Stuffy Kernohan? Should I know him? The Silverdore’s manager? A police guy? With a name like Stuffy Kernohan, he could be the Chicago Black Hawks goalie.

  “If you’re finished with your questions, Crang,” Cam said, “let’s get to business. I’m on a tight schedule.”

  “Who’s Stuffy Kernohan?”

  “Oh, Crang.” Cam was good at scorn. “Stuffy’s been on the homicide squad since before we came out of law school.”

  “I don’t do murder cases, Cam, remember?”

  Criminal lawyers get slotted. I had a mini-specialty in fraud charges. The rest of my files were a hodgepodge of hold-ups, break-and-enters, other crimes against property. Alleged murderers seemed to go elsewhere. Just as well if it meant sucking around guys like Stuffy Kernohan who sucked around guys like Cam Charles.

  “Everything I tell you from now on is in strictest confidence,” Cam said. He was into his earnest routine. “This concerns an associate of mine. Trevor Dalgleish.”

  “Funny, his name’s been crossing my mind lately.”

  “I talk, Crang, you listen.”

  You had to hand it to Cam—I did—he knew how to run a briefing. Crisp sentences, no wasted motion, and he was right into Trevor Dalgleish’s bio. Thirty-one years old. Member of a FOOF. Fine old Ontario family. Undergraduate degree in economics. Scored high in the LSATs. Came out of the University of Toronto Law School clutching a prize in criminal law. Articled with Eddie Greenspan. Switched to Cam’s firm when he got his call. Worked fifteen hours a day. Smooth in court, something I’d seen for myself a few times. Trevor, Cam said, was a rising star, and versatile. He sat in on the discussions when the Alternate Festival was hatched. And took over responsibility for a block of films—booking, contacts, drawing the documents, getting names on dotted lines. Leading up to the festival, Cam said, Trevor was working twenty hours a day.

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked. “Paragon like that, some other law firm’s liable to steal him away.”

  “All his life,” Cam said, now sounding concerned, wise, avuncular, and a pain in the neck, “as long as I’ve known him, which is very nearly all his life, Trevor’s been a man who takes short cuts.”

  Cam had an illustration. It seemed that as a young buck at St. Andrew’s College, the very prep school that Cam had attended earlier, Trevor ran a lucrative scam that involved bribing a printer’s apprentice to slip him exam papers in advance. Trevor peddled the papers to his fellow preppies. A suspicious teacher nailed a group of students who got uncharacteristic As on the exams. The fuss was short-term but scandalous.

  “Look at the bright side, Cam,” I said. “Trevor probably learned a lesson. Cheaters never prosper.”

  “That’s just it. Trevor wasn’t caught.”

  “The mastermind, and he got away with it?”

  “And may still be getting away with something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that’s what I’m retaining you to find out.”

  “Closer to blackmailing me to find out.”

  “Don’t take it personally, Crang.”

  On the wall opposite the bench where we were sitting, there was a Town oil, about seven feet high by five wide. Green was the major colour, hundreds of tight little green balls with tiny black centres. A long, jagged white line cut through the entire middle of the painting, top to bottom. What was the picture supposed to be? Maybe a close-up of a monster zipper?

  “Give me some help, Cam, teensy little hints,” I said. “Why’s Trevor got you nervous?”

  “Number one, my read on Trevor is he spends more money on himself than his billings at the firm warrant.”

  “Is it that big? Trevor’s house on Admiral Road?”

  “It’s also the scene of very lavish dinner parties.”

  “Never been invited.”

  “Doubt you ever will,” Cam said. “Besides the house, Trevor has his place in the country up in King.”

  “Let me guess—he rides horses out there.”

  “What else does everybody in King do? Trevor’s very expert at it. Jumps his horse at the Royal Winter Fair, that kind of thing. All of which costs a great deal of money for a man just past thirty.”

  “Sure, Cam,” I said. “But a minute ago you told me Trevor comes from good stock. Ever think it�
��s family money that finances his conspicuous consumption?”

  “An excellent family name, I said that, grandfather associated with E. P. Taylor, all the rest. Trevor’s got the name, but the family money evaporated with Trevor’s father.”

  “Isn’t that just the way, always a wastrel in there to blow the ancestral fortune.”

  “Number two, Trevor’s too intimate with clients.”

  “Ho boy, that could be risky around your place, Cam, guys with the dreadlocks, smoke the ganja.”

  Cam went through the motions of looking disgusted, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was more interested in surging ahead with the briefing.

  “You and I know it happens, Crang, criminal lawyers overly involved in the lives of the people they’re defending.”

  “Rubbing shoulders with the bandits, yeah. Start out drinking in the same bars, end up sharing a cell.”

  “Precisely.”

  “One problem, Cam, the way you described young Trevor, workaholic, nice way about him in front of a judge, I’ve seen that, he doesn’t give off the feel of lawyers I know’ve gone down the tubes.”

  “I hope I’m wrong. Probably am. But I want to find out if Trevor has troubles.”

  “If, you mean, if you have troubles.”

  “With Trevor.”

  I gave the Harold Town more study, the greens and the white line zigging down the centre. If you turned the picture on its side, it’d look like an ECG printout. Guess again, Crang. If Town wanted it on its side, he’d have painted it on its side.

  “Why me, Cam?” I asked.

  “You’ve acquired a bit of a reputation, you must be aware, for this kind of thing.”

  “What? Nosing around?”

  “If you want to put it that way. The qualities I criticized you for a minute ago, don’t be offended, they have their uses in situations like this. Irreverent, push in where don’t necessarily belong.”

  “Really glad I came to our little meet, Cam. Swell boost for the ego.”

  “I can’t ask about Trevor myself, obviously, or delegate one of the other people in the firm to make inquiries into our own associate.”