Straight No Chaser

by Jack Batten

  I said, “Dave may be in some difficulties, Ralph.”

  Ralph sounded like he was sighing.

  “Not the drink again?” he said.

  “Nor the drugs.”

  I gave Ralph a précis of the previous night’s events.

  “Well, that just bothers the dickens out of me,” Ralph said when I finished.

  “The big guy doesn’t mean anything to you?” I asked. “The man Dave thinks was following him?”

  “Dave used to run with some real characters. But that was all in the past. My brother’s a reformed person, Crang.”

  “He drinks a lot of coffee all right.”

  “You don’t think we might be jumping the gun? Why, heck, Dave is just as liable to walk into the club tonight like nothing happened.”

  “Apart from the boff I took on the head.”

  “I guess I like to look on the positive side of life,” Ralph said.

  I told Ralph I’d check at Chase’s Club that night and let him know if Dave was absent. Ralph continued to look on the positive side of life. People who sound like pussycats and cocker spaniels tend to do that.

  Down on the street, the conga drummer and his hopped-up fan twirler took a break to count their earnings. I swivelled back to the desk. The wits among my clients say my office looks like it’s furnished in Early Salvation Army. I have a wooden desk as solid as the oak tree from which it came and badly chipped around the edges. There are four mismatched chairs, also wooden, also chipped, and there is a metal filing cabinet, which is green and chipped. I bought the desk, chairs, and filing cabinet at the Salvation Army depot on Richmond Street. I never reveal my secret to the wits among my clients. On the wall, I have a framed Henri Matisse poster. It’s called Jazz and has a background of the loveliest blue I may ever have seen.

  The phone rang, and I picked up the receiver.

  “Fenk,” the voice on the other end said. It was Annie’s voice.

  “What do I do with it?”

  “Write it down, fella,” Annie said. “It’s the name you asked me to scout up.”

  I wrote it down.

  “On paper,” I said, “it looks like a typographical error.”

  “Raymond Fenk.”

  I wrote down the given name.

  “He’s a producer,” Annie said. “From Hollywood. He’s got a movie in the Alternate Festival about Mexican illegals in Los Angeles.”

  “You sure you’re talking about the guy that floored me at the Park Plaza?” I said. “He doesn’t look like a movie producer.”

  “He isn’t,” Annie said.“Not in the David O. Selznick tradition. The movie about the Mexican illegals seems to be the first legitimate thing he’s got his name on. Hell’s Barrio it’s called. Imaginative, right? But get this, until now, Mr. Fenk’s movies have been strictly for the porn market.”

  “Cam Charles fed you the hot stuff?”

  “’Course not,” Annie said. “This is original research. I got Fenk’s name and the title of Fenk’s movie from Mr. Charles. Cameron, I should tell you, is very distressed with you. The rest I just finished digging out of my library. I’m home right now, doing your legwork, planning on a soaky bath, putting on the finery.”

  Annie was covering the opening movie of the Festival of Festivals that night. The new Norman Jewison led things off.

  “In your library,” I said, “you’ve got books on pornographic movies?”

  “Two reference works,” Annie said. “I counted eight listings for Raymond Fenk before I quit. Betty Blows Baltimore is one of his.”

  “Alliterative.”

  “Okay, sugar,” Annie said, “your turn.”

  “You’re wondering what nature of bad guy I’ve hired on to defend this time.”

  “Something like that,” Annie said. “In fact, exactly like that.”

  “Anybody’s the bad guy, it’s Raymond Fenk.”

  “He looks the part, I’ll go that far.”

  “And I’m not acting for him.”

  “I didn’t have the impression you were trying to collect a retainer from him this afternoon,” Annie said. “So who is your client?”

  “If I have a client, it’s a man named Dave Goddard,” I said. “Whatever he’s involved in—Dave’s a jazz musician—it may be troublesome. Other hand, it may be nothing.”

  “Oho, the familiar dichotomy,” Annie said. “Knowing you, I pick troublesome.”

  “Dave, the history he’s had, he doesn’t deserve any grief,” I said. “But he might’ve found it, and Raymond Fenk could be the one who made the grief. That’s as far as events’ve gone.”

  Even to myself, I sounded defensive. I hadn’t told Annie about the Cameron alley assault. I didn’t want to get her worried. Or ticked off at my carelessness. No wonder I sounded defensive even to myself. Better to edge away from the subject.

  “Annie?” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “When Fenk sat me down at the press conference, how silly did I look?”

  Annie said, “Who was the American president who was always bumping his head and tripping whenever he got off Air Force One?”

  “That silly?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  Great line for an epitaph. Whom did the late Mr. Crang most remind you of, madame? Well, he had a touch of Gerald Ford.

  8

  HARP MANLEY was playing “Milestones” again. So were the three young black guys in the rhythm section. Dave Goddard wasn’t playing “Milestones” or anything else.

  I had a vodka on the rocks and a seat at the bar. Chase’s was as crowded as it had been the night before, except two of the principal characters weren’t centre stage. Raymond Fenk was probably at the Silverdore practising push and shove. It was Dave Goddard’s no-show that bothered me. Not half as much as it seemed to be bothering Harp Manley.

  He ended the first set early and abruptly, and ignored his adoring fans all the way to the bar. Manley pushed past a waiter into the bar’s service area and spoke to the bartender. The bartender picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label with a jigger on the end and held it over a tall glass until the jigger filled and emptied three times. The bartender didn’t add water. I got out of my seat and carried my vodka with me.

  “You mind we talk about Dave Goddard?” I said to Manley.

  He was wrapping a small white cocktail napkin around the bottom of the glass. He finished the job and had a long pull from the drink. I wasn’t sure he’d heard me.

  “Dave Goddard?” I said. Alistair Cooke couldn’t have enunciated more clearly.

  “Damn,” Manley said, “where’s that kiddie at?”

  His question was aimed at his drink.

  “Let’s discuss it,” I said.

  Manley swallowed more Scotch and used the swallowing time to give me a look of close inspection over his glass.

  “Kiddie plays real pretty,” he said. He spoke circumspectly.

  “It’s not Dave’s musicianship I had in mind,” I said.

  “Thought you was a critic.”

  “A lawyer.”

  “Dress like a critic.”

  I followed Manley to the table beside the door into the kitchen. On the way, he drank the Johnnie Walker down to the middle of the glass.

  “A lawyer, huh?” he said across the table. He had abandoned the circumspection. What I heard in his voice was the sound of a disgruntled boss.

  “Yeah, and if you’ll let me explain, I’ve got reason to think Dave Goddard may be in a piece of trouble.”

  “Trouble’s the only time a lawyer comes round,” Manley said. “Been my experience.”

  “Lot of people’s experience, but okay with you we stick to Dave?”

  “Trouble, huh?” Manley had a little ridge of tough hair under his lower lip. “That kiddie ain’t seen trouble he don’t get his sorry ass in here real fast. You understand what I’m saying, Mr. Lawyer. I need two horns, man my age. I can’t do all the damn solos. Ain’t got the lip like when I was young.”

>   “Good point,” I said. What should I call him? Harp seemed presumptuous, Mr. Manley too formal. Abner Chase had an exclusive on Harper.

  “Does Raymond Fenk mean anything to you?” I said. “That name?” Manley stared at me with an expression I read as incomprehension. His eyes were bloodshot, but apart from them and the patch of hair under the lip, Manley’s face had a round and contained look. Symmetrical. No wonder the camera loved it. He had on a single-breasted suit jacket with three buttons. All three buttons were buttoned up. He wore a crisp blue shirt and a black knit tie that was knotted precisely dead centre of the shirt’s wide collar. Short and rotund men don’t always achieve the neat look. Harp Manley did. It was combined with an uncomprehending look.

  I said to him, “Raymond Fenk was on stage same time as you at the Park Plaza this afternoon.”

  “You talking about the show for the TV people and the writers?” Manley said. “That was no Fenk. That was my man Cameron.”

  “He was in the group, Fenk was, with the rest of you behind Cam Charles.”

  “Nobody much back there except some fool slapping on another fool.”

  “I was the fool on the floor,” I said. “Fenk was the fool on his feet.”

  Manley left his chair and walked to the bar. When he came back, his glass was full and darker than amber. He had a fresh cocktail napkin wrapped around the bottom. My glass could stand a recharge, but I didn’t want to risk losing the audience with Manley.

  “You’re a lawyer for damn sure,” he said to me. “First you say, hey, Harp, what about this kiddie plays in the band? Now you say, Harp, what about this other kiddie here? That’s a lawyer’s way of getting what you really got on your mind for Harp.”

  Was this an invitation to call him Harp?

  “You’re going to have to take my word on this, Harp,” I said. “Some of it’s conjecture. But I think the man I asked you about, Raymond Fenk, he’s the heavy. He banged Dave over the head or something as bad, and that’s why Dave isn’t up there on the stand tonight.”

  “Conjecture, huh?” Manley said. “The kiddie send you down here with this conjecture?”

  “My point, Harp, I’m trying to tell you I don’t know where Dave is. Hurt some place. Worse maybe.”

  “Laying up with some woman more likely.”

  As skeptics went, Manley was making H. L. Mencken sound like a true believer.

  He said, “The kiddies always got the stories when they don’t make the job on time.”

  “Harp,” I said, “the thing may be a story about Dave, but I’m an eyewitness, partly anyway. It happened.”

  “This the first time I remember a kiddie hired a lawyer to save his ass.”

  It seemed the moment for a switch in tactics.

  I said, “May I ask how come you were the surprise package at Cam Charles’s press conference?”

  “You a movie man, Mr. Lawyer?” Manley asked.

  “You should’ve won the Oscar, Harp.”

  “Saw me, huh?” Manley said.“Gonna see me again. What’s it today? Thursday? All right, Mr. Lawyer, Sunday night, there’s gonna be them long black stretch limousines, spotlights looking up in the sky, me in my tuxedo, all that fine shit. You hear what I’m saying? A world premiere.”

  He gave premiere the French pronunciation. Harp Manley hadn’t come back from his years on the continent an unlettered man.

  “Cam Charles?” I said. “He’s got first dibs on your new movie?”

  “You see that skinny little grey-haired kiddie beside me?” Manley asked.

  “Where? At the press conference? Can’t say I did.”

  “My man Cam and that kiddie did the deal,” Manley said. “The skinny little kiddie owns the movie. Listen to this, Mr. Lawyer, he paid me cash money in my pocket. None of that, hey, Harp, we gonna be rich some day. He say, Harp, you take the cash money right now.”

  “Back up a couple of steps, Harp. You’re talking about the producer of your new movie, and he’s given Cam Charles rights to a first screening at the Alternate Festival. I’m with you?”

  Manley nodded and drank some Scotch.

  “The skinny kiddie wrote the movie,” he said. “Then he got the cash money from the bank and he told me on the phone, Harp, you make this movie, you gonna be big as Clint Eastwood. Damn, I think that kiddie’s right.”

  “Has he got a name? This paragon of a writer-producer?”

  “Bobby.”

  I waited. Manley added no more names.

  “Well, I asked, didn’t I,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  Manley swallowed more Johnnie Walker. I was stuck with an empty glass and a man whose narrative style fluctuated between convoluted and terse.

  “Is Bobby a Hollywood guy?” I asked. Once again into the fray.

  Manley shook his head.

  “New York,” he said. “Bobby don’t mess with them big California studios. He got his own cash money.”

  “From the bank. So you said.”

  Manley’s drink had reached the level of the white paper napkin. How much of the stuff could he absorb before it fluffed his trumpet work?

  I said, “I take it Bobby isn’t likely to have connections in the business with Raymond Fenk?”

  Manley frowned and gave me the same inspecting look he’d greeted me with earlier. The look must have been a specialty of his. Or else he saved it for people who roused the suspicious side of his nature. Me, for instance.

  I said, “My thought is, Fenk’s in movies, but he seems to be strictly Hollywood, and Bobby isn’t.”

  “What’s going on, Mr. Lawyer?” Manley said. He still had on the frown and the look of close scrutiny.

  “Let’s try to establish a small bond of trust, Harp,” I said. “We’re both interested in what’s happened to Dave Goddard, you for business reasons, me for personal reasons.”

  “Personal, huh? You supposed to be the kiddie’s lawyer.”

  “That too,” I said. “The reason I’m asking the questions about Raymond Fenk, I’m sure he’s got something to do with Dave’s disappearance. Why and how, I don’t know yet. You say you and your movie and good old Bobby have no tie-in to Fenk. That’s a start. Negative, but a start.”

  “This Fenk whapped the kiddie upside the head?”

  “That’s the assumption I’m going on.”

  Manley’s eyes switched away from my face.

  “I suppose I got to let that young kiddie I got on the piano stretch out some,” he said.

  “Take up the solo slack until Dave comes back?”

  “Ain’t worth shit.”

  “Who isn’t?” I said. “You’re not talking about Dave?”

  “The young kiddie on the piano. Plays too many notes.”

  Manley finished the rest of his drink.

  “All right if I ask something private, Harp?” I said. “How much Scotch can you hold when you’re on the job?”

  Manley looked at his empty glass.

  “I don’t hardly juice,” he said. “Only time is if the kiddies get to acting bad on me.”

  “I’ll alert Abner Chase,” I said. “Get him to lay in an extra stock of Black Label for the rest of the week.”

  9

  COMMUTERS call it the DVP. They say it with affection. It’s the Don Valley Parkway. It’s three lanes wide both ways, five lanes at the collector points, and it carries traffic from the centre of the city to the northern suburbs and beyond. A tractor-trailer passed me, and my car shimmied. A Tinker Toy could pass me and my car would shimmy. I drive a white Volkswagen Beetle convertible. I was on the inside lane of the Parkway and heading north. A grateful bank robber gave me the Beetle. A bonus, he said, for getting him an acquittal. The gift may reveal something about my clientele. If Cam Charles had a client overflowing in gratitude, the Reverend Moon maybe, he’d probably reward Cam with a Lamborghini.

  On either side of the Parkway, tall dark trees stood on hills against the sky. The trees were all that was left of the old valley from the centuries
before it was paved for the four lanes each way. Somewhere down below me to the left was the Don River. It had turned as grey and greasy as Mr. Kipling’s Limpopo. I took the off ramp for Don Mills Road North and drove past a junior high school named after Marc Garneau. I had the top up on the Beetle, but the windows were open, and the air, away from the Parkway, felt damp and fresh. Marc Garneau was Canada’s astronaut. Mission Control in Houston fired him into space and brought him back. Good for Marc. Were other schools named after living Canadians of renown? Deanna Durbin Collegiate Institute? Didn’t seem likely.

  On the north side of Eglinton Avenue, past the IBM complex, I took a right and got myself into the fringes of residential suburbia. The streets were laid out in loops and crescents that probably adhered to a master design. The design eluded me. I slowed and circled and watched for street signs. People who live in downtown Toronto look askance at people who live in the suburbs. The suburban dwellers drive into the city, take up parking space, talk noisy in restaurants, and go home to their crooked little streets on a highway they call by a pet name. Maybe it was just an image problem.

  Ralph Goddard lived at 48 Hiawatha Crescent, and I was at the intersection of Tomahawk and Wigwam. Where was John Wayne when you needed him? I found Hiawatha and Number 48 on my own. Ralph’s house was white stucco and two storeys. There was a Pontiac station wagon in the driveway, and the porch light was on. I parked in front of the house and walked up the sidewalk. It was made of rust-coloured bricks that had been fitted together in an intricate pattern. There was a birdbath on the lawn, and a sign by the door, raised black metal lettering on a light-brown plaque, announced “The Goddards”. I didn’t spot any pink flamingos.

  Ralph Goddard answered the door after I pushed the bell a second time. He didn’t look much like Dave.

  “You must be the famous Mr. Crang,” he said.

  Ralph had a grin that would crack most men’s cheeks.

  “Any friend of Dave’s,” he said.

  He gripped my elbow in his left fist and shook my hand with his right in a display of great conviviality. Ralph was taller, fatter, and greyer than his brother. He had on a short-sleeved white shirt, green gabardine slacks, and Hush Puppies. His eye alignment appeared to be in order.