Straight No Chaser Read online

  “Weirder and weirder,” she said.

  She opened the refrigerator door with her free hand, took out a quart bottle of mineral water, and swung her rump at the fridge door. It closed. Annie had a great rump. We went back to the table in the window.

  “Cocaine is Fenk’s background,” I said. “Two guilty pleas for possession. And Fenk was the guy who went to all the trouble of relieving Dave Goddard of the case. He knew the cocaine was in there.”

  “I never heard so much hypothetical in my life.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I’m crazy about it. It’s just hypothetical.”

  When Annie ate her sandwich, she held it with both hands. Women do that. You hardly ever see a man use two hands on a sandwich. I poured mineral water into the two empty wineglasses.

  “Thanks,” Annie said.

  “Think of what I just said as in the early formative stages. What I’m doing, I’m gathering the elements I’m sure of. I’m sure Fenk has a cocaine record. I’m sure illicit stuff, about the size of a few kilos of cocaine when you think of it, was hidden in the saxophone case’s lining. Why else was it ripped? And another thing I’m sure of, I’m sure Fenk knew the cocaine was in there, in the lining.”

  “Which Dave the musician didn’t?”

  “Goddard’s the name, and no, in this, from word go, he’s totally in the dark.”

  “He better be totally in Muskoka or you got trouble.”

  Annie finished her sandwich and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. She wiped so gently that the napkin showed hardly any creases. Another difference between the sexes. My paper napkin was a shredded ball.

  “Not to upset the applecart,” Annie said, “but why? Why would Fenk and the black confederate go to all the trouble? Hiding cocaine in the case and bashing Dave Goddard to get it back?”

  “I might come up short there. But, what about, it was a nifty way, foolproof practically, of transporting cocaine from California to Toronto?”

  “Could be,” Annie said.

  She looked at her watch again.

  “Better call a cab, sweetie,” she said.

  I stood, and Annie put her hand on my arm.

  She said, “There’s one thing makes me feel kind of warm about this whole awful schemozzle.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “You told me what was going on instead of clamming up.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “So what’s the excuse you didn’t come clean sooner?”

  20

  AQUARTER TO THREE, starring Harp Manley, was a heist movie. Rififi, The Italian Job, Bellman and True, that genre. Harp played a cop who went undercover into a gang that worked out a scheme to bust into the Philadelphia Museum of Art. No mean feat. The place looked like a cross between the Parthenon and the Acropolis. But it had an exhibition of jewels the gang planned to loot. The break-in was in the classic mould—shutting down the museum’s alarm system, duping the guards, climbing through a skylight, other intricate acts. Harp’s character was supposed to stick with the gang long enough to catch the gist of the caper and bring in the rest of the cops at the penultimate moment. But he got tempted. Maybe he’d go along with the gang and pocket his share of the loot. Harp and his wife had a teenage daughter with some fatal illness. He and the wife did much discussing of options. Duty to law and order versus money to ease the dying daughter’s last months.

  “Je-sus,” I whispered to Annie. “You hear that? Harp’s voice?”

  “Crang, do me a favour, I’m enjoying this.”

  “It didn’t hit me before.”

  “What’re you mumbling about?”

  “Another high-pitched voice, just like the one at the Silverdore, whoever killed Fenk.”

  “Next you’re going to say it was Tom Selleck in there.”

  Toward the end, the movie turned sappy. Harp’s character got the whole works. He wiped out the gang, snaffled some big money the gang had put together to finance the heist, and retired to New Mexico, where the air was going to work miracles for the daughter with the dread disease.

  “Would you call that pat?” Annie said. “The denouement and climax?”

  “Except Harp made me a believer.”

  “If he’s as good on his horn, whatever it is, as he is on screen, you should play me his records.”

  I didn’t tell Annie I’d sat her down for two or three Harp Manley albums over the years. Some jazz made an impression on Annie, some passed by her ears. She liked Bill Evans, she said, Paul Desmond, the Modern Jazz Quartet. She went for the romantics. Harp didn’t fit the category.

  The lights came up in the theatre, and a small group moved to a microphone that was in position down front. Cam Charles led the way. Harp came right behind him. Both had on tuxedos. Cam’s shoes were patent leather.

  “Wasn’t that a triumph, ladies and gentlemen?” Cam shouted into the microphone. His right arm was slung over Harp’s shoulders, and his left was raised in the air in a power salute. The crowd in the theatre applauded lustily, and there was a sprinkling of bravos.

  Cam made a speech, and Harp said a few words, and a grey-haired gent droned on about the pride he and his company took in sponsoring the opening night of the Alternate Festival. I didn’t pay much attention. Neither did Annie. We only had eyes for the theatre. The Eglinton is on the shrinking list of Toronto’s grand old movie palaces. Not that old either, maybe sixty years. It came from the age of Art Deco. Opulence and vulgarity, curves and geometry, all that stuff in nutty balance. I felt at home in the place when I was a kid at Saturday matinees, and I felt at home at the Harp Manley premiere. There was a high ceiling, rows of long, thin lamps up there, and an alabaster nude on either side of the screen. It was fussy and elaborate and kind of effeminate, but it beat hell out of the cramped boxes the movie chains were passing off as theatres these days.

  “You know what?” Annie said. “I’d come here even for a rotten movie.”

  Down front at the mike, Cam invited everyone to stay for a reception in the Eglinton’s lobby. “An opportunity to mingle with the stars,” he put it. Not everyone took Cam up on the invitation. That was a blessing; the lobby was as lovely as the rest of the building but not exactly ballroom-sized. Cam’s chic PR ladies were once again on deck, moving through the crowd with words of welcome and trays of red and white wine. I took two glasses of white, handed one to Annie, and we rubbernecked. Harp had a fawning crowd around him. So did the guy who played the chief heavy in the movie, the mastermind behind the bank robbery. Was it Charles Durning or Brian Dennehy?

  “It’s neither actor you think it is,” Annie said, following my stare.

  “You into mind-reading now?”

  “Everybody mixes them up. The actor over there is Ned Beatty.”

  “Maybe there’s really only one of them. He uses three names and works a lot.”

  Annie waved at a tall, slim, short-haired guy who waved back.

  “Jay Scott?” I said. Jay Scott was the Globe’s movie critic.

  “Another smart move from Cam Charles,” Annie said.

  “Yeah?”

  “He didn’t give the reviewers an advance screening of Quarter to Three, which means Jay and everybody else, if they want to see it, and they definitely do since it’s for certain going to be a hot movie later this fall, they had to come to this gala opening.”

  “Gives the event more prestige.”

  “And the festival more press coverage.”

  Annie and I simultaneously spotted somebody. They were different somebodies. I didn’t notice Annie’s target, but mine was Trevor Dalgleish. He was moving away from the bar that had been set up where popcorn was normally peddled, and he had one glass of red wine in his hand.

  “Sweetie,” Annie said, “you excuse me for a minute?”

  “That was going to be my line.”

  I weaved through the mob in Trevor’s direction. So far no one had intercepted him. He wore a tux and a confident smile. I caught up to him befo
re he could join a group of three other people in formal gear.

  “Congratulations, Trev,” I said. “Festival’s off to a boffo start.”

  “Hello, Crang.” Trevor didn’t sound overwhelmed by my company. “The little lady got you in tow again?”

  His accent wasn’t as mid-Atlantic as I’d thought, but the flavour was there, the inflections built in from his Old Toronto upbringing and the St. Andrew’s education. And the voice was on the right pitch, in the tenor range.

  I said, “Too bad not everybody could be here.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Trevor swept his free hand in a general gesture meant to encompass the lobby. “Look around. An A-list gathering if I’m any judge.”

  “I had Raymond Fenk in mind, Trev.”

  Trevor dropped a heavy hand on my shoulder and steered me toward the side of the lobby opposite the bar. It was an accomplished bit of ballet, the way Trevor executed it. I ended up with my back to the wall, and Trevor had his to the crowd. I felt hemmed in and vaguely threatened.

  “Ray Fenk’s death, a tragedy really, isn’t common knowledge, Crang.” Trevor’s voice went grave, and his face developed a light flush. “How’s it happen you know? Cam indicated to me the news wasn’t going beyond our office and the homicide people, not until the police develop a lead they have.”

  “What’s the lead?”

  “Pardon me, Crang, that isn’t the question.”

  “The way I know about Fenk’s murder, Trev, a client of mine may be implicated.”

  “How odd,” Trevor said. He looked to me like a guy who was both curious and uneasy. “May I ask who your client is?”

  “If I can ask what the lead is.”

  “That’s confidential.”

  “You mean it’s staying in the family of three: Cam, your good self, and Stuffy Kernohan.”

  “D’you know Kernohan?”

  “Heck, Trev, when it comes to the homicide squad, Stuffy’s a Hall-of-Famer.”

  Around the right side of Trevor, I could see Annie in profile. She had on a short jacket and short skirt. Both were black and tightly tailored. Her blouse was white, and it came with a neckline that showed a little breast bone. She was talking with great animation to a guy I didn’t recognize.

  “My client you’re wondering about,” I said to Trevor, “he’s a musician. Plays the tenor saxophone. That’s of the reed family. Has a curved bell, valves for the fingers to play, a long, thin cord. The cord’s a leather thing that drapes around the neck.”

  It wasn’t subtle, banging away at Trevor that way. It may not have been awfully bright. But time wasn’t an ingredient I was in ample supply of. If Trevor had first-hand information about Fenk’s murder, if he had a hand in the killing, maybe I could wedge something out of him with a few blunt remarks. When it came to blunt, I was a master.

  “This is all very fascinating, Crang,” Trevor said, his face deepening from blush to medium pink, his hands flexing to fists. “But I seem to recall you had your own encounter with Ray Fenk.”

  “The dust-up at the Park Plaza,” I said. “That seems to be on the list of everybody’s favourite memories.”

  “It was Ray’s first trip to Toronto. He knew no one here, just myself and one or two others at the festival. It does seem strange, new in town like that, just arrived, he’d apparently been irritated so soon by you.”

  “Little trick of the personality I have, Trev.”

  The guy on the receiving end of Annie’s animation was slim and medium height. His hair was dark and clipped close to the head, and he had an angular face. Not a terrific smiler, from where I was standing, but you could say attractive.

  “You’ll already know this, Trev,” I said, “but your Mr. Fenk wouldn’t win any good-citizenship awards. Porno movies, they were his specialty, and he had a couple of cocaine convictions back home.”

  Trevor shifted his feet, got a knowing smile on his pink face, and made little circling motions with the hand that held the wineglass. The way I interpreted the gestures, Trevor was about to say something patronizing.

  “Both of us,” he said, “—don’t let me sound gauche, Crang—are men of the world.”

  “I know what comes next.”

  “You do?”

  “And cocaine is a fact of life.”

  “In contemporary society,” Trevor said.

  “I shouldn’t have left that out.”

  Trevor shifted again. His first shift had blocked my view of Annie and her companion. Now they were back in sight. Annie’s animation continued.

  “Well, my God, Crang,” Trevor said, “some of the best people I know—I hate it when I hear myself speaking in thundering clichés— they serve cocaine in their homes like an appetizer. What’s the harm, within certain sensible bounds? Ray Fenk’s troubles, as far as cocaine went, were no more than unfortunate. Really, I’ve had clients, you must have too, who’ve done worse and suffered less.”

  “The Vietnamese guys, for example, speaking of clients?”

  Trevor looked like a guy who might be having trouble with anger— the colour of his face, the nervous clenching of his hands.

  “What is this conversation, Crang?” he said. “You’re all over the map.”

  “Just comparing notes, Trev.”

  Annie’s companion turned full-face. I gave him a once-over. Hot damn, the guy was Daniel Day-Lewis.

  Trevor glanced over his shoulder in the direction I was doing the once-over.

  “I’m keeping you from someone,” he said to me.

  “Not yet,” I said. “What’re they like, clientwise, the Vietnamese?”

  “Very obliging. Why? You’ve had bad experiences yourself?”

  “Haven’t represented any Vietnamese so far.”

  “Then what the hell are you on about? If it’s any of your concern, which I very much doubt, I’m just on retainer for my Vietnamese. Nothing’s come up yet.”

  “What might come up? What field they in?”

  “Businessmen. They’re in business.”

  “High risk, I betcha.”

  “You just went past the bounds, Crang.” Trevor pushed back his sleeve and read his watch. “I have other duties here tonight.”

  I said, “Look forward to more of it, the conversation.”

  “Perhaps when you’re less opaque.”

  Trevor moved away. Across the lobby, Daniel Day-Lewis was nowhere in view. Annie was talking to a woman who looked like she’d borrowed her clothes from Diane Keaton’s wardrobe. I moseyed through the crowd, had another glass of wine, and chatted with people I knew from other movie bashes. After an hour of it, Annie and I flagged a cab on the street in front of the theatre.

  In the back seat, Annie laced her hand through mine.

  She said, “Don’t even mention his name.”

  “Daniel Day-Lewis.”

  “How’d you get such a hang-up about the man?”

  “Well, you did give the impression back there, you must know, you were sort of bowled over by the guy, hanging on his every word, and one of the world’s most divine men you said earlier.”

  “Crang, honey, listening to Daniel Day-Lewis, that’s called work.”

  The cab was headed down Avenue Road, and when we got to Upper Canada College, the driver cut over to Oriole Parkway and kept going south.

  “Some of what he told me,” Annie said, “I can sneak into Metro Morning, and the rest I’ll use for the Chronicle pieces.”

  “So you cancelled the Tuesday interview? Got all you need from Mr. Daniel Day-Lewis?”

  “Are you joking? Tonight was luck. Tuesday’s serious.”

  Annie leaned over and kissed my cheek.

  “Crang, whatever’s in your mind, Day-Lewis is not my type, it turns out. A nice man, sexy on the screen, but in real life, nothing emanated for me. Happy now?”

  “Not your type?”

  “No tingles.”

  “Well, listen, good-looker, who is your type?”

  Annie put her head back and w
as quiet for three or four seconds.

  “My type?” she said. “Ted Koppel.”

  21

  ANNIE WAS SITTING at my kitchen table. She had a ballpoint pen with red ink, and she was writing in a nimble hand on pages in a ringed notebook. It was just coming up to 7 a.m.

  “Know what I’m getting you this Christmas?” she said. “A typewriter.”

  “Really romantic.” I was standing in the doorway in my maroon dressing gown. “What should I get you? A snow shovel?”

  “If you had a typewriter,” Annie said, “nights when I sleep over, I could type the notes for the radio program. This way, longhand, I get in front of the mike and can hardly read my own writing.”

  Annie was due on air for her Metro Morning movie review at around ten to eight. She was dressed and had a cup of coffee beside the ringed notebook. There was more in the Mr. Coffee machine. I poured a cup.

  “Which one you going to talk about?” I asked. “The Harp Manley?”

  Annie made a grunting noise that I took to be affirmative.

  “Want some background stuff?” I asked. “About Manley as a jazz musician?”

  Another grunt that I interpreted as negative.

  I sat at the table and let my coffee cool. Three or four minutes went by, and when Annie’s writing seemed to be slowing down, I spoke again.

  “Study the guy closely,” I said, “and Ted Koppel bears a striking resemblance to Howdy Doody.”

  “Eye of the beholder,” Annie said without raising her head from the notebook.

  “With an overlay of Alfred E. Newman.”

  “The man exudes intelligence.” Annie looked up. “I can’t help myself, Crang. Ted speaks from the TV screen and I get all unglued.”

  “Must be the hour.”

  “He does come on late, which is a shame.”

  “Not Koppel’s hour. This hour, right now, seven in the morning. It’s too early for rational talk about sex appeal.”

  “For talk maybe.” Annie let go a slinky smile. “But I’ve known you to show fantastically sexy moves at ridiculously early hours.”

  I looked at the wall clock. Ten past seven.

  “Not now, idiot,” Annie said. “A girl needs a little foreplay.”