Straight No Chaser

by Jack Batten

  Dave said to me, “Your chorus, man.”

  He meant that I should take up position for my tailing operation. I was a whiz at interpreting Dave’s messages. Twenty-five bucks seemed enough to deal with two vodkas, the cover charge, and a tip for Speedy Gonzales. I dropped two tens and a five on the table, and squeezed my way through chairs and tables and people toward the door. While squeezing, I affected an air of nonchalance. It was designed to throw Beige Jacket off the scent. Never would he suspect the intrepid Crang had his number.

  Outside Chase’s, the air was windless and dulcet and had the soft feel you sometimes get in early September. A Department of Public Works truck had passed a few minutes earlier and done a wash job on the pavement. Toronto the Scrubbed. The street was Queen, and I crossed it, over the streetcar tracks, and stood deep in the doorway of a second-hand paperback store.

  Chase’s Club was on the north side of Queen two blocks and a bit west of University Avenue. The place was owned by a canny gent named Abner Chase who was fond enough of jazz that he’d kept his club in musical business for thirty years, even when jazz slumped as a consistent drawing card. Abner did a brisk lunch trade that offset the slow jazz nights. The major attraction at noon was the salad bar. It was fifty feet long and currently featured arugula.

  I waited ten minutes. It was one-thirty. Three streetcars swayed by, one eastbound, two westbound. Clumps of people left the club. I recognized the jolly group that had been at Harp Manley’s feet. The neon sign over the door into the club blinked off. It spelled Chase’s minus the apostrophe. Without the neon, the street turned marginally darker.

  Dave Goddard came out of the club five minutes later. He had the shiny saxophone case in his right hand. I tensed for action. Dave paused, pivoted to the right, and set off along Queen to the west at his gait of the long lopes. He got two dozen lopes down the street and the man in the beige jacket emerged from Chase’s. He too hove to the right and travelled west about twenty yards back of Dave. I waited a few seconds and enlisted in the migration. Westward ho.

  Beige Jacket looked more formidable standing up and moving than sitting down and drinking. He was about my height, just under six feet, but had me beat in the tonnage department. I weighed one-seventy. Beige Jacket would clock in at fifty pounds over that. Most of the weight was concentrated in his upper body. He had a stiff, squared-off look, like Raymond Burr when he played Perry Mason.

  Dave crossed Beverley Street and passed the Bakka science-fiction bookstore. Beige Jacket did likewise. On my side of the street, the south, it was restaurant row. Le Marais. Chicago’s. Le Bistingo. I’d dined in all. Some of their maîtres d’ knew me by name. Gave me a table in the window. All that heady stuff. I was a neighbour. When I got out of law school, I opened a practice in an office on Queen over a Czech ma-and-pa hardware store. That was before the street changed in the direction of gentrification. Now it was trendy restaurants and medium-couture shoppes. The Czech ma and pa were squeezed out by a boutique called Trapezoid that offered a line in leatherware to all sexes. Only two establishments remained from the Queen West of eighteen years earlier, a branch of the Legion and my office. A sturdy duo.

  Dave’s stride was deceptive, much faster than it looked. It meant he, Beige Jacket, and I were covering the sidewalks at a lively clip, each of us holding at the distances we set at the beginning of the adventure. Beige Jacket was twenty yards behind Dave, and I was ten yards and the width of Queen to the rear of Beige Jacket. Apart from us, the street was sparsely populated. A bunch of kids were yakking it up outside the Bamboo Club on the north side. Dave passed them, passed Trapezoid and my office, and stopped for the red light at Queen and Spadina.

  I dropped into the shadows of the entrance to Makos Furs at the southeast corner of the intersection and watched Dave and Beige Jacket cross Spadina Avenue. Spadina is as wide as the Gobi, and all the lurking in the Makos entrance opened the gap between me and Beige Jacket to fifty yards. The lights changed again, red to green, and I took up the trip across Spadina at something between a trot and a scuttle.

  The Cameron House is a short block west of Spadina at the corner of Queen and a street called Cameron Avenue. Hence the hotel’s name. By the time I crossed Spadina, Dave and Beige Jacket had turned the corner at Cameron and disappeared from sight. I escalated my speed from trot and scuttle to sprint.

  The Cameron is four storeys of brick that someone decided would look good in black paint. On its Cameron Avenue side, gaudy murals that reach as high as the second floor interrupt the black. The entrance door to the hotel is positioned mid-mural about halfway up the street. Dave was standing outside the door when my sprint brought him back into sight, and he seemed to be in distress.

  Beige Jacket had caught up to Dave, and the two were performing a bizarre fandango. Beige Jacket was trying to yank the saxophone case from Dave’s grasp. Dave was resisting mightily.

  I was still on the south side of Queen. A passing streetcar blocked my view of the tussle over the saxophone for five seconds.

  The streetcar got by. Beige Jacket had the case in his hands and was running north on Cameron. Dave was in pursuit. Beige Jacket had impressive speed for a top-heavy guy. He was ten yards up on Dave.

  I jogged to the centre of Queen. Beige Jacket rounded the north corner of the Cameron House. Dave followed. I waited for a Weston Foods transport trailer to rumble by in the north lane.

  I ran up Cameron past the murals. No time to admire art. There seemed to be an alley running behind the Cameron House where Beige Jacket and Dave had turned in. I reached the north corner of the Cameron House. There was an alley, but there was no Beige Jacket, no Dave.

  I checked out the terrain. The alley had three or four faint overhead lights that broke dim holes in the darkness. There was a pickup truck parked against the back wall of the Cameron. It had tires that a Brobdingnagian must have ordered. There were no other vehicles further down the alley. Nothing stirred. All I had to contend with was silence. For a semi-brave chap, that seemed sufficient.

  I walked deeper into the alley until I was even with the pickup. Its huge tires lifted the back of the truck a couple of feet over my head. I counted my footsteps. Eight of them took me past the truck. The ground under my shoes made a light crunching noise. The alley was paved but covered in a coating of sand and grit.

  I stopped.

  There was nothing that caught my eye.

  But something caught my ear.

  It was more of the light crunching sound. And it didn’t come from under my shoes. It came from behind me.

  I started to turn my head. It didn’t get far. A very hard object struck the back of it with a purposeful force.

  The alley rose up to smack my face. Or my face fell down to hit the alley. Either way, there was nothing behind my eyeballs except a black abyss.

  3

  THE WORST PART was I had on the Cy Mann navy blue.

  Most days I go casual to the office. Jeans, work shirt, Rockport Walkers on my feet. Days I’m in court, I wear the Cy Mann. This had been one of those days, and with me spread out in the alley behind the Cameron House, the suit was bound to be losing its flare.

  “Shit,” I said, not to myself. Out loud.

  I opened my eyes. My line of vision was aimed at a garage on the south side of the alley. There was a sentence spray-painted on the garage door. “The moon is full of roses and bum cheese.” How enigmatic. How ridiculous. What did it mean? I pondered the question with a clear head. That surprised me. I’d been KO’d, and my head was clear. No buzzing, no ache, no dizzy spell.

  I stood up and felt a tad light-headed. Nothing more life-threatening. The damage was to the suit. I brushed at the grey dust that covered my jacket and pants. The dust was stubborn, and all that my brushing accomplished was to blend the grey of the dust more intrinsically with the blue of the fabric.

  My watch said it was exactly two o’clock. I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a minute, not long enough to destroy many brain
cells but long enough for the alley to empty of friend and foe. There was nothing back there except me and the graffiti.

  I walked past the pickup truck with the oversized tires, out of the alley, and back down the street to the door into the Cameron. A sticker on the door said “Pull”. I pulled. The hall inside was narrow, and a mad muralist had wreaked his artistic will on its walls. Green fish with bulging eyes swam in a sea of vibrant pink. At the end of the hall, another corridor, equally narrow, branched left and right. I chose left and stepped into the Cameron’s bar. It was almost empty.

  The room’s only occupant was a woman sitting at one of the small round tables that lined both walls. She was drinking from a can of Diet Coke and reading the personals section of Now.

  It’s the weekly that caters to what passes for the Toronto counterculture these days. The woman was in her late twenties and had pale skin, frizzed brown hair, and a figure that in polite circles is generally called full. She was wearing a peasant blouse that scooped low across her breasts. Now’s personals must have been juicy. The woman didn’t look up from them until I spoke.

  I said, “Wonder if you could help me?”

  The woman let her eyes run up my suit to my face. It took five seconds.

  “I would,” she said, “except I don’t do dry cleaning.”

  She had a light voice.

  “A man stays here named Dave Goddard,” I said. “You happen to know did he come through here the last ten minutes?”

  “Guy talks like a Jack Kerouac novel?” the woman asked. She kept her finger on a Now ad.

  I said, “That’d be Dave.”

  “Got funny eyes?”

  “Those too.”

  “Collars on his shirt the same size as lapels on a jacket?”

  “Right again.”

  “Which he hasn’t got anyway, the lapels.”

  “I think we’ve got the identity problem licked.”

  “Right now,” the woman said, triumphantly I thought, “he’s at work down the street, the guy you’re looking for.”

  I had a feeling I wasn’t going to locate Dave in the very immediate future. I had another feeling. Exasperation. Two in the morning was a dumb hour for a lawyer who’d been bopped on the bean to be gadding about the bohemian byways of the city.

  “Well, no,” I said to the woman. “When last seen, a few minutes ago, Dave Goddard was outside this very hotel.”

  “Who last saw him?”

  “I.”

  “That gives you the edge on me.”

  The bar was no bigger than my living room and not as cunningly furnished. Everything looked like it’d come from a basic-black sale, the small round tables, the leather banquettes. The air was an advertisement for black-lung disease.

  I gave the woman one more shot.

  I said, “Correct me if I’ve got it wrong. Dave Goddard, the man I’m trying to locate, he’s staying here, far as you know?”

  “Jim Kirk lent the guy his room while he’s doing places up north with his band. Timmins. Sudbury. Jim’s got two-nighters each place.”

  “Jim Kirk?”

  “Keyboard man.”

  She would say keyboard man. What happened to pianist?

  I said, “Which would Jim’s room be?”

  “Top floor, very front,” the woman said. “I’m on the second at the back.”

  “You live here too?”

  “I’m a singer.” The young woman took her finger from its place on the Nowad. “I do kind of an Ella Fitzgerald act. Scat on ‘Lady Be Good’, cover the Duke Ellington songbook, material like that, you know? I got a special arrangement on ‘A-tisket, A-tasket’.”

  This was musical progress. On the other hand, Linda Ronstadt recorded albums that destroyed the works of Porter,Arlen, and Rodgers and Hart. I elected not to pursue the subject of Ella Fitzgerald.

  “When it’s slow with the act,” the young woman said, “I waitress.”

  I couldn’t help myself.

  I said, “Oh my, the terrible things happening to verbs.”

  “Say what?”

  “Access. Impact. It’s computers. Inducing illiteracy.”

  “What’s the story, guy?”

  “To waitress isn’t a verb.”

  “For a person looks like he’s been rolling in the sandbox,” the young woman said, “you’re talking awful picky.”

  I was in danger of losing her to Now.

  “Sorry,” I said, and meant it. “It’s been an awkward evening.”

  The young woman’s finger was back on the ads. Her eyes were sure to follow.

  I said, “Be a problem about me tapping on Dave’s door?”

  “Fine by me,” the young woman said. Her head had dropped down. “One thing, that’s the wrong possessive.”

  “How so?” I asked the top of her frizz.

  “It’s Jim’s door.”

  The stairway was narrow all the way to the top, four flights up. Sounds of television sets and record players came faintly from behind the doors. Inside, the rooms may have been heavenly little oases. Out in the hall, it felt like the Gulag Archipelago.

  Jim Kirk’s door had an advertisement for Yamaha Pianos pasted in the centre with Kirk’s own name neatly printed in block letters along the top of the ad.

  I knocked softly on the door.

  Nothing stirred inside.

  I knocked more vigorously.

  A door opened behind me, and I looked back. A man was leaning out of a room halfway between me and the stairs. He was Oriental and didn’t have a shirt on.

  “Nobody’s home down there,” the man said.

  “What about the temporary tenant? Dave Goddard?”

  “Still working up the street.”

  That made it unanimous.

  I went down the stairs. The Ella Fitzgerald act was still analyzing Now’s personals. With her brand of respect for the printed word, she might be able to decipher the graffiti on the garage door out back. I left the Cameron and walked home.

  It wasn’t far, east on Queen to Beverley Street, left turn, and north for three and a quarter blocks. I own a duplex that looks across Beverley to the orderly park behind the Art Gallery of Ontario. Two gay chaps named Ian and Alex and their Irish setter rent the apartment downstairs. I live upstairs. The setter’s name is Genet.

  In the kitchen, I took the bottle of Wyborowa out of the freezer and poured an inch and a half into an old-fashioned glass without ice. When I raised the glass to my mouth, I felt nauseated. That wasn’t the reaction Polish vodka customarily induced in me. The bang on the head must have been kicking in on a delayed reaction. I poured the Wyborowa back in the bottle without losing a drop and switched to milk.

  I drank two glasses and took my nausea to bed.

  4

  IT WAS LATER than it was supposed to be.

  I switched on the small black Sony radio on the table beside the bed and heard Peter Gzowski’s voice. Peter Gzowski’s program comes on the CBC at 9:05. My usual waking hour is seven-thirty. I looked at the small black Sony clock behind the radio. It said nine-fifty. Something else was different. I had a headache.

  I put on my maroon cotton dressing gown, a birthday present from Annie B. Cooke, and carried the radio into the bathroom. Gzowski was interviewing a Hungarian movie director who was in town for the Festival of Festivals. Whatever pain reliever nine out of ten doctors would take to a desert island wasn’t in my bathroom cabinet. I filled the sink with cold water and held my face in it. Gzowski thanked the Hungarian movie director and took a break for the ten o’clock news. Who would trust a doctor who’d pack a pain reliever on a trip to a desert island?

  In the kitchen, I got three oranges out of the refrigerator and pressed them in an electric squeezer. The squeezer was neither small nor black nor Sony. Large, white, and German. I patronize all the old Axis powers. There was a pair of Gucci loafers on the floor of my closet. I drank the juice with two vitamin C tablets. It didn’t do much for my headache, but it made me feel the model of h
ealthy virtue.

  I started up the Mr. Coffee and went downstairs to fetch the Globe and Mail. The entertainment section had a long article on the prospects for the Festival of Festivals. It was starting that night, the third- or fourth-hottest film festival in the world measured in commerce, number of movie luminaries on site, and other such criteria. There was Cannes and New York and then probably the Festival of Festivals. Or maybe Berlin snuck into third place.

  There was a small mirror, antique with a carved wooden frame, hanging on the wall inside the kitchen door. I unhooked it and took it to the bathroom. By standing with my back to the mirror on the cabinet, tilting my head, and holding the antique mirror at about two o’clock, I could conduct an examination of the crown of my head.

  Didn’t seem to be anything back there except hair. No cut, no blood, nothing of a foreign nature. A check with my fingers didn’t reveal a bump. The dastardly attack from behind had left me with not much more than a headache and an extra two hours of sleep. I spent another minute on the crown. It looked fit to present in public.

  I got busy. Shower. Shave. Two cups of coffee. A perusal of the Globe’s sports pages. National Hockey League teams were in training camp. I looked out the kitchen window. The sun was shining, and a slim woman in shorts and a halter was picking flowers from her garden two houses up from mine. Why didn’t the NHL wait till the ponds froze over before they started training camp? I reloaded the Mr. Coffee and put on clean jeans, a long-sleeved shirt with a lot of vertical stripes in different shades of blue, and the Rockport Walkers. Not many ponds left around Toronto to freeze over.

  Peter Gzowski was delivering a little essay on the radio. It was about the Labour Day weekend he’d spent up north with the woman in his life. That was his expression, “the woman in my life”. As descriptions of female persons one isn’t necessarily married to but to whom one is committed, it beat “the girlfriend” or “my old lady”. Most of the time on Gzowski’s program, three hours of it, he interviews people. Occasionally he serves up essays he writes in the spirit of a latter-day E. B. White. Except E. B. White probably wouldn’t have said a phrase like “the woman in my life” out loud. Neither would I, come to think of it. The woman in my life was Annie B. Cooke.