Straight No Chaser Page 6

  “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.”

  “Underground, Ralph. Dave’s got an underground reputation.”

  “I’m not up on the jazz lingo,” Ralph said. “All I know’s I booked this band of Dave’s into a bunch of clubs down the west coast. He was out there May to August.”

  “And at some point he hit Los Angeles?”

  “Last stop on the tour. But I don’t recall this what’s-his-name had anything to do with the place Dave played at.”

  “Raymond Fenk.”

  “Off the top of my head, I couldn’t tell you the name of the place either.”

  “Why not you get out the apple-pie records and we’ll both take a look.”

  “Will do,” Ralph said. He spun the Motolounger into the disembark position.“You sit there and enjoy the drink. I’ll get the paperwork out of the den.”

  I sipped from the rum and Coke. It seemed short on rum and long on Coke. I sipped again. A few more sips and I’d have a personality as sugary as Bill Cosby’s.

  Ralph kept his brother’s contracts, itineraries, and other documents in orderly six-by-twelve file folders. He had eight or nine of them stacked up. They were orange-coloured, and each was fat with forms held neatly together by paper clips.

  “Four people were in the band besides Dave,” Ralph said. He shuffled files as he spoke. “Dave rounded them up in Vancouver. I leave that end to him, the musicians. So, let’s see, the band played the first two, three weeks right around Vancouver and after that, kept moving right on south.”

  “They reached Los Angeles in August?”

  “Transportation’s your biggest expense.” Ralph stopped at one file, lifted out a sheaf of papers, and turned slowly through them. “Your other cost, it’s the lay-over time. Some of these jazz clubs only run weekends. So what was I gonna do with Dave and the four other fellas Monday to Thursday? Ship them all the way back to Vancouver?”

  Ralph raised his head from the papers and gave me the big grin.

  “Not on your life,” he said. “I just went on ahead and scouted through telephone books and whatnot for the areas out there, and I found universities, community colleges, the likes of them, places there was a lot of kids, and I sold them on a concert. Had to cut my price most times, but it paid the freight and some left over.”

  I said, “Abner Chase told me you were astute, Ralph.”

  “Did he now.”

  Ralph squared the sheaf of papers in his hand, returned them to their file, and resumed his shuffle through the other files. I leaned back in the sofa. This was going to take a while. I went at my drink very slowly. If I finished it, Ralph might offer me another.

  “Portland, Oregon. Eugene, that’s Oregon too,” Ralph said, more to himself than to me.“All righty, now we’re getting warmer. San Francisco. Dave did excellent there. Palo Alto is Stanford University.” Ralph unclipped sheets of paper that looked like contracts.

  “Here we go,” he said, his voice louder. “Actual fact, it wasn’t in Los Angeles Dave played.”

  Ralph separated out one contract.

  “Culver City,” he said. “I guess that’s a Los Angeles neighbourhood or something, little town close by maybe.”

  “Like Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga.”

  “It was the Alley Cat Bistro Dave worked at,” Ralph said. “How in the world could a man forget a name like that? Alley Cat Bi
stro in Culver City.”

  Ralph handed me the contract. It was four pages long. Most of it was in printed clauses, standard boilerplate stuff, but there were dates and money amounts typed in. I flipped to the last page. Whoever signed for the Alley Cat had an illegible hand, but the name was too long to be Raymond Fenk’s.

  Ralph said, “Dave thought the audiences were hep at this Alley Cat. Couldn’t have been a big place though, not according to what they paid.”

  “Did he play other jobs out there? A concert? Anything?”

  “Not in L.A.”

  “What about a movie soundtrack?”

  “A week at this Alley Cat and Dave flew straight home,” Ralph said. “He was a pretty excited guy.”

  “How could you tell?”

  Ralph performed the grin that lit up Don Mills.

  “Oh sure, Dave’s one for keeping the feelings to himself,” he said. “But anybody could see the week with Harp Manley had him real pleased.”

  “He knew about that before he came back from the western tour?”

  “Before he even went west,” Ralph said.“I had the contracts signed up first of May.”

  “Signed with whom? Manley’s people?”

  “With everybody,” Ralph said. “Abner Chase booked Manley into his club, and his agency in New York, Manley’s agency, told Abner they needed another horn for Toronto. Abner asked if Dave was okay. Well, that needed backing and forthing because Manley had to give his personal stamp, which he did soon’s he heard it was Dave. So, Bob’s your uncle, the contract came from New York and Abner signed and I signed, and Dave felt real good about everything.”

  “Until Raymond Fenk arrived on the scene.”

  I gave the Alley Cat contract back to Ralph. He aligned the orange files so that their corners were exact and placed them on the floor beside the Motolounger.

  Ralph said, “Where’s all this get us?”

  “Not far past square one.”

  “Don’t think I don’t appreciate your worry, Crang,” Ralph said. “But I’m just thinking Dave’ll walk in tomorrow, you know, sheepish, apologizing to all concerned. I’ll read him the riot act, count on it, and we’ll get back to business as usual.”

  No rum and Coke had passed Ralph’s lips. Maybe Doreen was the drinker in the household. I finished my glass and told Ralph I’d keep in touch. He stood under the porch light until I drove out of sight around one of Hiawatha’s curves.

  I chose a route home by way of Eglinton and North Toronto’s back streets. If someone I knew spotted me on the DVP, word might get out I was a closet suburbanite. It was ten-thirty, and I hadn’t eaten since Cam Charles’s spread. Falafel felt about right. I stopped at the Kensington Kitchen on Harbord and ordered a plate to go. Falafel, hummus, tabbouleh, and pita. The pita was whole-wheat.

  I ate the food and drank two glasses of Soave in front of the CITY-TV news. The sports guy’s sweater had more colours than a test pattern. He said the Blue Jays lost in the ninth and the Maple Leafs had a couple of promising defencemen. I switched off the set. When the Boston Celtics cranked up, I’d get interested in team games.

  I dialled Annie’s number. Her answering machine told me she’d return my call. The answering machine told everybody she’d return their calls. Impersonal. Wasn’t I special? Annie must have been at the big bash that came after the Festival of Festivals’ opening movie. Had Daniel Day-Lewis hit town yet? I didn’t ask Annie’s answering machine.

  I took a book called Jazzletters: Singers and the Song to bed. It was written by a guy named Gene Lees, and I was up to the chapter on Johnny Mercer. When I fell asleep, the melody to “Skylark” was circling at the centre of my mind.

  10

  DAVE GODDARD was an item in “For the Record” in Friday morning’s Globe. The first item was about a stockbroker and a half-million dollars; both were missing from a Bay Street investment firm. The second was about a man of no fixed address who got set on fire on the tennis courts behind the Moss Park Armoury. Dave was the third. “For the Record” runs every day in the back pages of the Globe’s news section. It’s for readers on the run, six or seven one-paragraph stories, usually about crime, usually spiced up from routine police reports. The man of no fixed address probably didn’t think the fire was routine. He was alive and in St. Michael’s Hospital. So was Dave Goddard.

  The Globe paragraph said he’d been assaulted early Wednesday morning in a lane near Queen and Spadina. An injury to the head, the paragraph said, and no arrests had been made. Dave was described as “an internationally known jazz musician”. Someone on the copy desk at the Globe must have added the description. Or else the police guy who handed out the press announcement was more hip than the Toronto cops I usually cross-examined in court.

  I got to St. Mike’s before ten and didn’t have to go farther than the waiting room on the first floor to find Dave. He was sitting in the middle of a row of five chairs, and behind him there was a counter and a glassed-in area where women in civvies were talking on phones and tapping numbers into computers. Dave had an official-looking form attached to a clipboard in one hand. He had a ballpoint pen in the other hand, and a bandage on his head. It wasn’t easy to miss the bandage. It began just above Dave’s eyebrows and reached into his scalp. A couple of inches of Dave’s hair seemed to have been shaved to make way for the bandage. Dave was applying himself to the form on the clipboard.

  I sat in the chair beside him. Dave’s left eye panned over to me. The expression on his face was somewhere between blank and morose.

  “What’s happening, man?” Dave said to me.

  “That ought to be my question, Dave. What happened to you?”

  “The dude you were supposed to be tailing aced me.”

  I said, “He aced me too.”

  A woman leaned over the counter behind us and spoke to Dave. She had a Middle Eastern face and deep, dark eyes.

  “How’s it coming there, Mr. Goddard?” she said.

  “Right with you, man,” Dave said without turning his head.

  The woman beamed her eyes on me and shrugged.

  I looked at the form in Dave’s lap. He was stuck at the entry for home address.

  “Try 48 Hiawatha Crescent,” I said.

  “I can dig it,” Dave said. “Ralph’s place.”

  The tip launched Dave on a roll of right answers. He filled in his own occupation and Ralph’s telephone number. His Ontario Hospital Insurance number stumped him.

  I said, “Tell the woman with the eyes you’ll phone it in.”

  Dave conferred with the woman, who asked him for a cash payment of five dollars and twenty-six cents. It covered a television set Dave rented. The woman said OHIP would pick up the cost of room, meals, bandage, and head shave. The woman’s eyes were large and moist and almost black. I could drown in eyes like hers.

  The Volks was parked in a lot on Dundas Street. Dave’s clothes looked rumpled but not as ingrained with dust and grit as my Cy Mann navy blue. Dave and I walked up Bond Street. His hands were conspicuously empty of the gleaming new saxophone case. I asked Dave what had gone on between him and his assailant outside the entrance to the Cameron.

  Dave said, “Enough of this shit.”

  “Dave,” I said, “I think it’ll help if we discuss your contact with the guy.”

  “That’s what the dude said.”

  “‘Enough of this shit?’”

  “That’s it, man.”

  “Next thing he made off with your saxophone?”

  “Maybe what the dude said was more like, ‘I got no time for this shit.’”

  “Which shit would that be, Dave?”

  “All I know, man,” Dave said, “the dude wasn’t in a mood for hanging out.”

  “He wanted your saxophone?”

  “Grabbed my axe and took off up the street.”

  “No more conversation?”

  “I went around the corner at the Cameron,” Dave said, “and here’s the dude with this big mother of a two-by-four ra
ised up in the air.”

  “What next?”

  “Twelve stitches and a concussion.”

  Dave and I crossed Shuter and walked past the St. Michael’s Choir School.

  “We got a gap in time and movement between the alley and the hospital,” I said. “What I’d like, Dave, you fill it.”

  “Cat was loading a bunch of crates in his truck back of the Cameron,” Dave said. “He dumped a crate on me. Surprised hell out of the cat. It’s middle of the night, and me and the two-by-four’s laid out in his truck.”

  “This truck, it have wheels like on a tractor?”

  “I wasn’t doing a size survey, man.”

  We cut off Bond Street and across the parking lot. I needed my daily hit of facts. Lawyers live off facts. Raymond Fenk bashed Dave with the two-by-four. He slung Dave in the back of the truck with the monster tires, and when I showed up, he wielded the two-by-four on me. I could figure out that much. Facts have a consecutive beauty. The consecutive part was my difficulty with Dave. He was a lateral thinker. I was a vertical thinker. Clash of two modes. The owner of the truck found Dave and drove him to the hospital. Or called the cops, who did the hospital run. If I wanted the ration of facts that covered events of the previous thirty-six hours, I’d have to wait Dave out. Brother Ralph was more my kind of thinker, painstaking but vertical.

  “I wish you’d phoned me from the hospital, Dave,” I said. “Me or Abner Chase or Ralph.”

  “I phoned Flip.”

  “Good thinking, Dave,” I said. “Who’s Flip?”

  “He’s pushing buttons to get me the loan of an axe till mine comes back,” Dave said. “Flip Bochner.”

  We reached the Volks. Dave groaned a little when he stooped to sit in the passenger seat.

  “You in shape to play?” I asked.

  It was still and quiet inside the car. The bandage on Dave’s head looked more ominous than it had in the hospital waiting room.

  “Man,” Dave said. He was facing straight ahead. “How about you drive me to Long & McQuade’s? Be okay?”