Straight No Chaser

by Jack Batten

  “Lousy for office morale.”

  “And I’m not inclined to hire some sloppy private investigator.”

  “So it’s sloppy me.”

  It was more fun to think about the Town oil than about Cam’s proposition. I had another idea about the painting. It was a glimpse close up of a giant fissure in a rock. Bet it had Rocky Mountains somewhere in the title. Cam wasn’t talking proposition. He was talking arm-twisting. My arm.

  I said, “I need material to get me going, Cam.”

  “It’s yours.”

  “Clients’ names. Trevor can’t be playing footsy with everyone who comes through the door. Make a list of the people you think are too much into Trevor. Or vice versa.”

  Cam reached into his inside jacket pocket and brought out a pen and a small pad. The pad had a dark leather cover, and the pen was slim and gold. What had Annie said? Cam goes first cabin.

  “Something else,” I said. “I want the names of the movies Trevor lined up for your film festival.”

  Cam stopped jotting.

  “No, Crang,” he said, dragging it out, exasperated. “The festival’s unrelated. No bearing whatsoever.”

  “Think of yourself, I know this is hard, Cam, as the client here. I’m the guy you do what I ask.”

  Cam got his gold pen busy again.

  “Raymond Fenk,” I said. “The deceased.”

  Cam tightened up around the mouth, but he didn’t speak. Cam had discipline.

  “Get onto your pal at homicide, the old Stuffer,” I said. “Tell him to phone the Los Angeles police, telex, fax machine, whichever’s fastest. Find out if Fenk has a record. Had a record.”

  Cam was a swift notetaker.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  Cam put away his implements.

  “Expect a package of information by three this afternoon,” he said, and walked away from me and the Harold Town retrospective without a nod for either of us.

  I’d run out of guesses about the green canvas. Fissure in the Rocky Mountains was what I was going with. I went over to the small card on the wall beside the picture. “1965,” it said. “Oil on Canvas. The Great Divide.” Well, what the hell, fissure and Great Divide were close. I took twenty minutes to look at the rest of the show, and on the way out, I bought a catalogue for ten bucks. I’d swallow the ten.

  18

  THERE WAS A BOWL of five-day-old homemade chili in the refrigerator. The home it was made in was mine. I peeled back the Saran Wrap that covered the bowl, and sniffed. My nostrils didn’t shrivel, and no blue mould lurked at the bowl’s edges. I scooped the chili into a pan, and put the pan on the stove at a low heat.

  On television in the living room, CBS was showing U.S. Open Tennis. Ivan Lendl was playing. When wasn’t Ivan Lendl playing? I had a vodka and soda and the Harold Town catalogue. The Great Divide was reproduced in its whites and greens near the front of the catalogue, and on the opposite page there was an explanation of the picture. It said Town took his first plane flight in 1965. He was in his forties, and the experience of looking at the world from the new perspective of straight down blew him away. He went home and painted The Great Divide. It was his interpretation of a telescoped view out of the window as the plane came over the runway at the end of a night flight. Nice guess, Crang, fissure in the rock. Not even close.

  I turned the catalogue’s pages, and on television the tennis match went on. By and large, tennis makes genteel noises. The light thonk of the ball coming off the racquet, the polite handclapping between points, the referee’s moderate tones. The occasional roar of planes heading into LaGuardia Airport near the U.S. Open stadium was a pain in the eardrum, and the now-and-then hollers from yahoos in the stands. But mostly the background tennis sounds seemed about right for a browse through the Town catalogue. After a while, I ate the chili.

  At ten past three, the doorbell rang. The young man on the front step looked like he’d just been let out of Sunday school. He was wearing a light single-breasted black suit, white button-down shirt, and a tie that was so discreet I couldn’t tell whether it was black or deep purple. He said he was present on an errand for Mr. Charles, and handed me a large brown envelope.

  “You haven’t been inconvenienced, sir?” The kid had taken lessons in earnest from Cam. “I was supposed to have this to you at three.”

  “Just listening to tennis. No inconvenience.”

  “Of course, Mr. Crang. Thank you, sir.”

  The kid didn’t kiss my hand. No one’s faultless.

  I opened the brown envelope at the kitchen table. There were two single sheets and a bunch of other papers clipped together. The top sheet dealt with Raymond Fenk. Ha, he had a record. Not much, but a record. Two convictions in California for possession of an illegal drug. On both, he’d been charged with trafficking but pleaded guilty to reduced counts of simple possession. Must have had a defence lawyer who was a winner at plea bargaining. Fenk paid a fine on the first charge and did ninety days on the second. The drug in question was described on the sheet of paper in formal laboratory language. But, scraping away the Latin and the chemistry, we were talking cocaine.

  The second sheet was headed “Trevor Dalgleish Clients”. These had to be the people Cam thought Trevor might be romancing. Ten names altogether. The first six were separated by double spaces and had complete addresses and phone numbers after them. None of the names rang bells. The other four names were grouped and had one address for the lot and no phone number. Nho Truong. Dan Nguyen. Nghiep Tran. My Do Thai. I was in business. The names were Vietnamese. Were any of them matches for the two names I saw on Saturday afternoon? Written above Trevor’s name on the press release for Hell’s Barrio? In Fenk’s hotel room? My memory was okay, but not photographic.

  The address for the four men put me on more solid ground. It was an Oxford Street number. Oxford ran off Spadina Avenue south of College. It was in the Kensington Market area. Portuguese fish stores. West Indians peddling live chickens and rabbits and ducks. Fruit and vegetable stalls on the streets. Annie and I did monthly excursions to the market for provisions. I don’t think we’d run into Nho Truong and the guys. Hadn’t bought a live duck either.

  The papers clipped together were publicity blurbs, cast listings, and other informative bumpf on six movies. Hell’s Barrio came first. Raymond Fenk’s name was front and centre as producer. I didn’t recognize the names of the rest of the Hell’s Barrio people: the actors, director, cinematographer, the best boy. On the other five movies, my recognition quotient was a total zip. The people who made the movies had names that meant nothing to me. Neither did the movies’ titles. All I knew was, the same guy was in charge of lining up the six for the Alternate Festival. Trevor Dalgleish.

  Was there a common thread in the six? Hell’s Barrio, I already gathered, was about Hispanics having it tough in L.A. The second movie was about AIDS. I couldn’t tell from the literature whether it was feature or documentary. Next was a film “as relevant as today’s headlines and just as explosive”, the publicity said, about black street gangs in a city that wasn’t identified. Hispanics, AIDS, and gangs? So far, not much of a common thread. People who weren’t getting a kick out of life? Maybe film analysis wasn’t my long suit.

  My vodka and soda was empty. This seemed to be a job—figuring out what the six movies shared—for the in-house film critic. If I asked Annie to take a shot at it, I’d have to go all the way. Tell her everything that had gone on: the tail job for Dave Goddard, Fenk’s murder, the rest. Well, I was due to let her in on the events to date. Overdue. Then she could look over the six movies for points in common. She could also tell me what the hell a best boy was.

  19

  ANNIE DIDN’T THINK I’d used my most mature judgment.

  “This is a case,” she said, “damn near terminal, of you losing your marbles.”

  “It seemed a good idea at the time, the part about swiping the saxophone back. It still does if it weren’t for the dead person.”

  “You
have to call the police. Come on, this is murder.”

  It’d taken me a half-hour to tell the story of the stolen saxophone, my expedition with James, Fenk on the sitting-room floor. Start to finish, it was good for no more than ten minutes, but Annie interrupted with many variations on “say that again” and “you did what?” The food and wine got in the way too. Annie made us a platter of tuna-salad sandwiches with olives and tomato slices and gherkins, and she opened a bottle of white Dao. It was an early supper or a light dinner, whatever meal came at six-thirty before we went off to the premiere of Harp Manley’s movie. I ate my half of the platter and more. Annie’s appetite was on hold.

  “So?” she said. “You want my opinion? There’s the phone over on the table.”

  “One point emerges, I think. I’m in kind of deep.”

  “Take the sun ten years to reach you, that deep.”

  I expected Annie to be upset. She wasn’t. She was mad, which was better than upset. Mad is closer to rational analysis. I needed a little of that, as long as it didn’t include a call to the cops.

  “The police,” Annie said, “solve murders. They get paid for it. You, what you get paid for, the way you explained it to me one or two hundred times, you come along later, after the murder. You say to the judge, oh, no, it wasn’t my client who did the murder. Or it wasn’t murder. Or some such.”

  “Yeah, well, events seem to have got out of the normal sequence.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Another factor, kind of crucial, the cops’ idea of solving Fenk’s murder, they’ll charge Dave Goddard.”

  “And you.”

  “It went through my mind.”

  “And that JD sidekick of yours.”

  “James Turkin is delinquent, no question there, but juvenile, no. If you ever meet him, Annie, you wouldn’t think of the word.”

  “If I ever meet him, I’ll kick his ass.”

  Annie’s temper had just about run the course. We were sitting at the butcher-block table in the window of her apartment. The chairs were bentwood knockoffs, and Annie had been perching on the edge of hers. She poured wine into both glasses and eased back in her chair.

  “I’m scared for you,” she said.

  “Feeling nervous myself.”

  “I don’t suppose that means you’re going to do anything sensible.”

  “There’re beginning to be facts, you think about it, that dovetail.”

  “For instance? The voices you and your pet criminal heard in the hotel sitting room? I don’t care about accents or timbre, that could’ve been practically anybody.”

  “Theoretically, yeah. But we know Fenk had some kind of contact with Trevor and two Vietnamese guys. There names were on his desk, and whoever offed him took the paper with the names when he or they left.”

  “‘Offed’ gives me the creeps.”

  “I used it to show you I was macho and unafraid.”

  “Didn’t work.”

  “Whoever murdered Fenk left the room with the paper with the names on it.”

  “Better. And the person or persons probably left with the briefcase too.”

  “Now you’re getting into it,” I said. “And another conjunction of facts: Trevor must be acquainted with Fenk from booking his movie into Cam Charles’s festival, and Trevor for sure knows some Vietnamese guys who are his clients.”

  “Hm.”

  “Does that, the hm, mean I should go on?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I produce for your perusal the contents of one brown envelope.”

  It was the envelope that Cam’s delivery kid dropped off at my place. I’d left the two separate sheets at home, the one with Fenk’s record and the other with the four Vietnamese names. The movie info was still in the envelope.

  “These,” I said to Annie, “are the six movies Trevor’s got the responsibility for. Signing up the people, contracts, nitty-gritty details. What I wonder, Fenk’s one movie and five others I never heard of, do they link together somehow?”

  Annie pushed the platter to my side of the table and organized the movie material in six piles. The platter had three-quarters of a tuna sandwich on it. I ate the three-quarters.

  “I only recognize the titles,” Annie said, lifting the papers, reading, putting them down. “And that’s just from seeing them earlier in the program Cam’s ladies handed out at the Park Plaza.”

  Annie got up from the table and went to the corner of the living room she calls her office. It has a white wicker desk and chair, a bookcase full of movie tomes, a typewriter, and the cursed answering machine, and on the wall there’s a poster from The Man with Two Brains. I gave Annie the poster. The Man with Two Brains is my favourite Steve Martin movie. Annie came back with a program that had a glossy cover in silver and blue.

  “Give me five minutes,” she said. She looked at the title of one of the movies and began flipping through the program. It was the program for the Alternate Film Festival. “Another thing I was wondering,” I said. “All the movies, you see in the credits ‘best boy’, usually right next to ‘grip’ and ‘gaffer’. You got any idea what a best boy does?”

  “Five minutes,” Annie said, “of silence.”

  I occupied myself with the Dao and the view out the window of Annie’s corner of Cabbagetown. The sky was still overcast. Might rain. A leaf fell from a tree in front of the house across the street. I wasn’t a whiz at marking time.

  “Well, I don’t know.” Annie gave the program an impatient shove. “If these’ve got something the same about them, it beats me. Different themes, different producers, sounds like different techniques.”

  “You tried, kid. It was just a thought.”

  “California, but so what?”

  “So what, what? Where’s California come in?”

  “That’s where the six movies were made, but so were probably six hundred other movies this year.”

  If there’d been wine left in my glass, I would have poured it down my throat in one large, dramatic flourish. The glass was empty, and so was the bottle. I settled for giving Annie my best meaningful look. The gesture was wasted. Annie spoke first.

  “I see what you’re going to say, yeah,” she said. “Fenk’s a Los Angeles person.”

  “So doesn’t it mean something that Trevor’s booked only movies from California? Trevor who’s been maybe up to fishy business with Fenk of the same state? Must be a tie-in.”

  “California.”

  “Why didn’t you let me say it first, about the connection between the six movies and Trevor and Fenk?”

  “Come on, you were going through all that nonsense about checking the wine and staring into my eyes like you were Sherlock Holmes. What was I supposed to do, sit here and look stupid?”

  “Dr. Watson would have.”

  Annie smiled. It was her first from the time I arrived and began the story that revealed all. Or almost all. I didn’t get graphic in describing the look of Fenk on the sitting-room floor.

  Annie said, “I wouldn’t be mistaken, would I, if I guessed you want me to ask around, see who knows the dirt on the other five movies besides Hell’s Barrio?”

  “There must be people at the festival up from California for those. Producers, directors, writers, stars, best boys.”

  “Actors in the movies in the Alternate Festival, except for Harp Manley, I think they’re too lowly to be called stars.”

  “If they’re here is all that counts. Maybe they’re hooked into Fenk or Trevor or both, some of the California types, and maybe there’s a pattern of links somewhere.”

  Annie said, “Well, I’ve got the right cover for a person asking pertinent questions. Impertinent questions too.”

  “Everybody’ll say, oh golly, it’s just that adorable Annie B. Cooke doing interviews. Her occupation.”

  “Part of my occupation.”

  “Chatting up the stars, present stars, future stars, mega stars. Daniel Day-Lewis.”

  “Again? You’re bringing up the man agai
n?” Annie said. She made a little gesture of semi-annoyance with her arms. Then, switching manner, she said, coquettish, “Well, just because he’s one of the world’s divine males . . .”

  Why had I mentioned Daniel Day-Lewis? I didn’t know his name was on my tongue till I let it roll off. What was this? Incipient green-eyed monster syndrome? Who was the dolt in the Preston Sturges movie? The one where the symphony conductor imagines his wife’s having an affair with another guy? Unfaithfully Yours. Linda Darnell was the wife. Funny movie. Ah, Rex Harrison was the conductor. I was playing Rex Harrison. Not as suave, but as doltish.

  Annie was looking at her watch upside down.

  “We got half an hour,” she said. “You know what? I’m starved.”

  She carried the platter back to the kitchen, and I followed.

  “I’ll find out what I can about the five movies.” Annie had her back to me and was mixing canned tuna, Hellman’s mayonnaise, and chopped green onion in a small bowl. “You do what it is you’ve made up your mind to do. But I still don’t get it.”

  “Did I leave something out?”

  “The part about the dead man and Trevor Dalgleish and the six movies, I’m in it up to there. I understand why you’re poking around them. To see what they’re up to, if anything. But who’s your client? I know who he is. He’s Dave somebody or other the jazz player. But who is he in the story?”

  “An innocent bystander.”

  “I don’t believe this, I honestly don’t,” Annie said. She kept on making her sandwich.

  “Here’s as far as I’ve got,” I said. “Things start with Fenk’s confederate at the jazz club Dave worked in Culver City.”

  “Confederate, I like that.”

  “He stole Dave’s old saxophone case at the Alley Cat, and next night this guy, a large black guy I gather from the Alley Cat boss, made Dave an anonymous gift of a new case. One difference, the new case had contraband hidden in the lining.”

  “First, confederate. Now contraband.”

  “In the lining, I’ll give odds, it was cocaine.”

  Annie turned around. In her hand she had a plate with one sandwich on it.