by Jack Batten
Annie, on stage in her black suit, made a demure curtsy. Her editor hugged her. The young president held up her arm the way a referee raises the arm of a triumphant boxer.
“Brava!”
Chapter Twenty
Annie and I were sitting with Jerome at a table against the wall in a basement club in SoHo called Right Now. It was just past eleven. We’d had dinner at an Italian restaurant a couple of blocks away, near the Holland Tunnel. Then we walked to the club for our rendezvous with Flame. Jerome told Annie and me that Right Now was the current trendy spot for the hip hop crowd.
“How many books did I sell tonight?” Annie asked, not for the first time.
“Three hundred and twenty-four,” Jerome and I said in unison.
“Just making sure you guys were on your toes,” Annie said.
She was beginning to come down from the stratosphere she’d been flying in after the triumph at the Miller Theater. She was tired, but still raced up on adrenalin and high spirits.
A waitress with a blonde bob and a black miniskirt took our orders. Annie, scaling back, asked for soda water. Jerome and I ordered Budweisers.
“Isn’t that cousinQu in the crowd over there?” Annie said, waving her hand in the general direction of an area where five or six tables were pushed together to accommodate about twenty-five people. “The guy with no shirt and the pants riding way below his hips?”
“You know about cousinQu?” Jerome said to Annie. Jerome still hadn’t got over the thrill of meeting Annie.
“Annie studies at Loblaw’s,” I said.
“What’s that, man, a website?”
“His table, cousinQu’s,” Annie said, “it looks like they’re unhappy with the people at the table on the other side of the room. See what I mean, a lot of rude gestures going back and forth?”
“That’s Big Mose over there,” Jerome said, talking about another table as crowded as cousinQu’s. “Bad blood between those two boys over dAruba.”
“Do I need to know all this?” I asked.
“I read about what’s happening,” Annie said to me. “CousinQu and Big Mose are two major rappers, both in love with dAruba. So, right now, in front of us, we have the two rivals in the same room, their entourages gathered round. It’s like a rap summit at the club where all the rap greats congregate. Who’s going to win dAruba, the queen of hip hop? Crang, sweetie, we’re present at a moment in pop cultural history.”
“Just answer one question,” I said. “What are they drinking? You’ll notice it’s dozens of the same bottles at both tables, those opaque ones, kind of metallic looking, got an emblem on them, an ace of spades, it looks like.”
“That there’s Armand de Brignac Brut Gold champagne,” Jerome said. “Ace of Spades is what the rappers call it. Runs a thousand bucks a bottle in a club like this.”
“Ever since Jay-Z put Ace of Spades in his song ‘Show Me What You Got,’ it’s been the drink,” Annie said. “People quit Cristal and started drinking the new stuff.”
“Isn’t this getting silly?” I said.
“History, Crang,” Annie said. “Didn’t I just say that?”
“Where does Flame fit in this?” I asked Jerome. “Has he got a stand on dAruba? What’s he think about Ace of Spades?”
“He doesn’t drink much of anything, man,” Jerome said. “But that Ace of Spades, he’s got bottles of the stuff in his mother’s nice cool basement. Rap people are always giving one another gifts of Ace of Spades. Flame been saving his.”
“I’m getting the impression of a cautious person. That about right?
“Ask Flame himself whatever you want to know, man,” Jerome said, turning toward the rear of the club. “There he is over by the door. He always comes slipping in the back way.”
Flame was shorter than I expected, about five-nine. His head seemed a little too big for his body, but the head size gave an effect of strength and command. His skin colour was what was once called café au lait. Maybe that was still the accepted description. Flame was a handsome guy, and as advertised, he had the Cary Grant cleft in the chin. His body was of the lean and athletic type, and he wore much more conventional clothes than the two other big shots of rap in the room. Flame had on a loose olive shirt, buttoned up all the way to the neck, medium brown, pleated trousers, and dark brown, all-weather loafers.
Flame walked to Big Mose’s table. Big Mose rose to greet him, and the two guys hugged one another and chatted for a couple of minutes. That done, Flame strolled across the room to cousinQu’s table and went through the same routine. CousinQu’s pants slid down another inch into very dangerous territory.
At our table, Flame shook hands all round, beginning with Annie. Up close, he seemed even more of a star-quality kind of guy. He sat in the empty chair next to mine.
“An old recording of yours I’m curious about,” I said to Flame once we’d settled in together.
“I’ll help if I can,” he said.
“A song that seems out of sync with the rest of your work.”
Flame smiled. “‘Lush Life,’ I’m betting.”
“How old were you when you discovered the song? And why?”
“Age was the point,” he said. “I was seventeen at Harbord Collegiate. I got to be buddies with a guy who was big on jazz. He played me somebody’s record of ‘Lush Life,’ and he said the guy whose song it was, he wrote both the melody and the lyrics when he was eighteen. I thought, Whoa, eighteen? So I taught myself the song and made a video of it just to see if some of that might rub off on me.”
“You wanted a little Billy Strayhorn in your music?”
“Strayhorn, right, I forgot his name.”
“I don’t hear much of him in your own songs of today.”
“It was the idea of him that influenced me,” Flame said. “A guy only eighteen could write like that? Maybe I could too. Not write exactly his kind of music, but write music I was serious about. You follow me?”
I wanted to push Flame further on the subject of Billy Strayhorn, but an escalation in the racket coming from the other tables drew our table’s attention.
“What’s going down with those two?” Jerome said to Flame, nodding in the general direction of cousinQu, then of Big Mose. “They gonna get nasty?”
Flame looked at his watch. “I give it another half hour.”
“Then what?” Annie asked.
“They’ll probably start throwing bottles at one another.”
“Full or empty?” I said.
Flame shrugged. “I’d say whatever each person happens to pick up.”
“Are you serious?” I said. “At a thousand bucks a pop, they’re going to toss champagne around?”
“People, at a certain level, they stop thinking about the cash side of things,” Flame said. “There’s just so much available money, you get what I’m saying, it isn’t even a factor.”
“But wait a second,” I said. “Only one guy at each table actually earns the big dough. All the other people, apart from Big Mose and cousinQu, are just guys in the entourage. They do chores, right? Drive the cars and pour the champagne? But essentially they’re hangers-on?”
“It’s all part of the mystique,” Flame said. “Money, bodyguards, entourages, expensive cars. Their fans expect it of guys like Big Mose and cousinQu.”
“But not of you?”
Flame laughed. “If I showed up with a dozen guys opening car doors for me, fetching me some Ace of Spades, my fans would consider it a betrayal.”
“That was your strategy from the beginning?”
“Not mine, Mr. Crang,” Flame said, bending a little closer to me. “It’s all Mr. Carnale. He’s the one who shaped my image.” Flame hesitated for a moment. “That sounds pompous, right? But it’s true, the part about Mr. Carnale.”
The waitress with the blonde bob reappeared. Flame asked for a cup
of coffee. Nobody else wanted anything more. Annie and Jerome were laying plans for Jerome to drive Annie around the city to her book promotion interviews over the next few days. Otherwise, the publishing people at Columbia were leaving the transportation arrangements to Annie and whatever cabs she could flag down.
“It was Roger’s plan that you’d be the rapper on the tight budget?” I said to Flame. “Give the appearance of not being a spendthrift?”
“That’s no appearance, Mr. Crang,” Flame said. “That’s the reality. Mr. Carnale, he’s kept me on an allowance from day one.”
“No penthouse in Manhattan, cottage in Muskoka, those kinds of addresses?”
“I’ve spent big just once, comparatively speaking,” Flame said, “I bought my mother a house near Dundas and Bathurst back home. It’s close to our old apartment in the projects where I grew up, close to Mum’s friends from when she started in nursing. But it’s a nice old house.”
“Where’s your own principal domicile?”
“I got a room in my mother’s house. The rest of the time down here in New York, I live in a hotel a few blocks from here. Nice funky place, like the Chelsea used to be, so I’m told.”
“That sounds modest,” I said. “What’s happening to the millions I assume you bank with concerts and videos and the rest?”
“Mr. Carnale keeps me invested,” Flame said. “I get quarterly statements, shows where my money is. Steady growth, the arrow pointing up in every statement.”
“The Carnale long-term idea is when guys like cousinQu over there and Big Mose eventually lose their fans or go out of style,” I said, “they’ll discover their money’s all disappeared on entourages and Ace of Spades. You, on the other hand, will have investments, not to mention a movie career. That’s your profit curve?”
“Jerome told me he filled you in on me and the movie,” Flame said.
Even though the club’s din put us all in the market for hearing aids, he dropped to sotto voce when he mentioned his movie. Straining to listen to him, I made out what he was saying mostly in fragments.
“And Annie too,” I said, close to shouting.
“I appreciate the discretion from both of you,” Flame said. “And whatever it is you’re doing about this Reverend who’s running the blackmail thing, I’m grateful for that too.”
“You have any idea how the Reverend got his hands on the song lyrics?”
Flame shook his head. “Those sheets of paper were always in either my mother’s apartment or her house depending on the year. Mum’s a saver. Everything that concerns me, school report cards, newspaper reviews, all of that, she hangs on to the paper stuff. Put it all on shelves at the house the last few years. I suppose anybody who came through our place could have messed around in my things. Taken what they wanted.”
“Wouldn’t that be a time-consuming chore for anyone, going on a hunt through years of material to find the song lyrics we’re talking about?”
“Not necessarily,” Flame said. “My mother’s an organizer as well as a saver. She’s got all the papers arranged chronologically, year by year, different files for each year. All a person would have to know is what year he’s looking for. Start from there, and it’s a quick process.”
“Any suspects come to mind?” I said. “A person with a motive for thieving?”
“I hate to name a name,” Flame said. “It would probably have to be somebody I regarded as a friend.”
“Not a nice dilemma.”
“Could be a musician I worked with or anybody else who came over to rehearse with me. Lots of people visited at my place for different reasons. Music or business or a media interview or just socializing.”
Jerome interrupted Flame.
“Heads up, everybody,” he said.
“What’s going down, man?” Flame asked.
“The major thing that happened,” Jerome said, “Big Mose sent the blonde waitress to cousinQu’s table with a bottle of Ace of Spades and a note. See that over there — cousinQu’s still reading the damn note.”
“Might be a clothing tip,” I said. “Big Mose is warning cousinQu to pull up his pants.”
“Likely it’s something about dAruba,” Flame said. “Mose is telling cousinQu that dAruba may be the love of cousinQu’s life, but she’d rather have sex with Mose.”
“That’d get the man going,” Jerome said.
“I beg to differ,” I said. “Shouldn’t it get us going? Vamoose out of here before the bottles start flying?”
Everybody at our table was looking over at cousinQu. He held the paper close to his eyes, and he was staring at it, his face more or less a blank.
“Man looks like he’s gonna blow his top any minute now,” Jerome said.
“The concentration he’s needing to absorb the damn note,” I said, “it might be the Gettysburg address written on there.”
“Okay, people,” Flame said. “The back door.”
Flame went around the table and held Annie’s chair while she stood up. He offered her his arm, and the two of them led Jerome and me on a path through the tables, Jerome bringing up the rear.
We had just passed one end of Big Mose’s table on a beeline for the back door when a bottle crashed into the wall at the other end of the table.
I stopped to take a look. The bottle that hit the wall must have been the one Big Mose sent with the note.
“My god, Jerome,” I said, “that bottle was full!”
Jerome pushed me in the back. “Keep moving, man,” he said. “Next bottle’s liable to hit you in the head.”
“Think of the wasted bubbly,” I said.
Jerome gave me another shove. This time, I went where I was shoved.
The four of us headed out the club’s back entrance, but that didn’t take us into the outdoors. We were in a long, dimly lit subterranean passageway. Flame, our leader, knew where our destination lay. We followed him through the gloom to a flight of stairs. Up we went, then a quick left turn through another door. That put us in a back alley half a block removed from Right Now. The air felt fresh and invigorating after the club’s muggy atmosphere.
“Thanks, guys,” Annie said to Flame and Jerome, “never a dull moment in your company.”
Jerome left the alley to find a cab for Annie and me.
“I expect we’ll be getting together some time soon,” Annie said to Flame.
“Count on it,” Flame said. He kissed Annie on both cheeks.
Jerome came back with a yellow checkerboard cab.
“I’ll pick you up at ten in the morning,” Jerome said to Annie. “Your apartment.”
“Ten o’clock?” I said. “Jeez, I’ll be landing in Toronto about then.”
Annie slipped her arm in mine. “In that case, you’ll need a little shut-eye, sweetie.”
She and I got in the cab for the long ride uptown.
Chapter Twenty-One
My plane was an hour late getting in to Billy Bishop. I took a cab to my office, and told the driver to wait while I picked up a couple of items. One was the affidavit I wanted Reverend Douglas to sign, and the other was the copy of the lyrics I freed up from the Reverend’s desk drawer. I was thinking about using the copy to pressure the Reverend into telling me how he, of all unikely people, got his hands on the damn things in the first place.
I felt tired, hungry, and irritable, but I had enough wit to direct the cab driver on a route that led us through streets behind Heaven’s Philosophers. Steer clear of St. Clair, I thought. Cut down on the chances of getting spotted by Squeaky Fallis’s crowd. Play sneaky the way the Reverend asked me to.
The cab driver let me out half a block up the street back of the church parking lot. I walked the rest of the way, carrying a crisp, sealed, brown envelope with the affidavit inside. The swiped copy of the song lyrics were tucked in my jacket pocket.
The church
parking lot was empty of cars. Maybe Squeaky and his guys were late to their weekly social gathering. I walked along the alley in back of the church, and using one of the keys the Reverend had given me, I opened the door into the passage with the hidden ladder. So far, everything was proceeding smoothly. Too bad I looked on myself at that moment as a world-class ass. Skulking in a narrow passage and climbing a ladder two storeys high seemed an embarrassment. Maybe I should charge my client extra to cover the humiliation factor.
I started climbing. After a few steps, it began to feel a little more like fun. I stepped up the rungs in steady form and with no apparent danger to my cardiac system, arriving soon enough at a tiny platform next to the door into the church’s auditorium.
I got out the Reverend’s second key, and fiddled it into the door’s keyhole. The key turned easily, and I gave the door a shove. As it opened, I got tangled in the curtain that covered the door from the inside. I’d forgotten about the curtain. It was heavy, and I thrashed around with the thing for a few seconds. When I pushed past it, I faced two men who were looking at me with expressions that went beyond hostile.
Both men held guns in their hands. The guns were zeroing in on my chest.
One guy was wearing a grey windbreaker, and the other was in a Toronto policeman’s uniform.
The two were shouting at me to hold my hands over my head. I hated the shouting. Cops always shouted. They shouted on TV crime shows, and they shouted in real life. I raised my arms.
The cop in the windbreaker was someone I recognized. His name was Wally Crawford, and he’d been in the Homicide Squad for almost as long as I’d been a criminal lawyer. He and I had faced one another in court a dozen times over the years, me asking him questions on cross-examination, him dancing around the answers.
“Who’s dead, Wally?” I asked, my hands still in the air.
“How do you know somebody’s dead?” the uniformed cop shouted. “Answer me! How do you know? Did you do it?”
“Cool it, Gordie,” Wally said to the uniformed cop. Wally put his own gun back in its shoulder holster under his grey windbreaker. Still speaking to the uniformed cop, Wally nodded toward me. “This guy’s name is Crang,” he said, “and he knows I’m in Homicide.”