Straight No Chaser

by Jack Batten

  Long & McQuade’s is a music store on Bloor somewhere beyond Bathurst. The parking-lot attendant said I owed him three dollars. I paid and turned left out of the lot and drove west on Dundas.

  “The doctor said it’s cool to blow long’s I take it easy,” Dave said. “I told him, man, I usually do.”

  Dave almost smiled.

  I said, “The guy who did the number on your head is named Raymond Fenk.”

  Dave was silent.

  I said, “He’s in the Hollywood movie business.”

  Nothing from Dave’s side of the car.

  I said, “You were working a club in his neck of the woods two or three weeks ago.”

  Dave came to life.

  “Catch this, man,” he said. “The club you’re talking about’s in a shopping mall. Dude that owns it, he tells me, you get to the shoe store, right next to it’s the club. I’m thinking to myself, later for this, man. But I go inside, the place’s groovy.”

  Dundas narrows where it bisects old Chinatown. The cars had jammed up, and the drivers were looking desperate. It’d be worse farther west where the newer, expanded Chinatown is as dense as Hong Kong. Dundas was a lousy choice of route unless I was scouting for dim sum.

  “Whole gang of cats sat in with my band,” Dave said. He was heating up on the subject of the Alley Cat Bistro in Culver City, California. “These cats got the studio gigs, you dig. Play for the TV shows, the movies. But nights, for a change, get a taste of jazz, they came out to blow at the club.”

  I was three cars and a dump truck back of the red light at University Avenue.

  “Jack Sheldon did a couple sets with my band.”

  The light turned green, and the dump truck stalled. Nobody moved.

  “Snooky Young fell by twice.”

  I let Dave run through his catalogue of happy California memories. The traffic was on my mind. Some rich guy with marginal taste donated a sculpture for the boulevard that splits University on the south side of Dundas. It’s scrawny and metal, and at the top, maybe twenty-five feet high, there are parts like emaciated arms lifting straight up. People who question the sculpture’s merit have a nickname for it. Gumby Goes to Heaven.

  “Med Flory also,” Dave said.

  I turned right at University. Everybody was driving like Mario Andretti. I joined the race.

  “Somebody brought around, probably Jack Sheldon brought around an alto player by the name of Joe Romano. Real hot player.”

  I asked, “What about Raymond Fenk, Dave?”

  “Tell me his horn.”

  “Not a musician, Dave. Raymond Fenk was the guy I said handled the two-by-four.”

  “Don’t know of the dude from anywhere.”

  I pushed gently at Dave. I prodded and probed, and made the effort at thinking laterally. I discovered for my pains that, according to Dave, his stay in Los Angeles had been monastic. He frequented the Alley Cat and a Holiday Inn, and rode cabs in between. No concerts on the side, no movie contacts, no freelancing.

  “How about an all-day excursion to Disneyland?” I asked.

  “I knew a cat once worked there. Steady bread but the cat freaked. You believe it, man. ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ fifteen goes a day?”

  I found a space on a side street south of Bloor, and we walked back up to Long & McQuade’s. Dave went to the counter. I browsed. There were rows of plastic guitars in the contours and colours of rocket ships from old Flash Gordon comics. I stopped in front of an IVL 7000 Pitchrider Guitar MIDI Interface with Pickup and Footswitch. Dave bought some saxophone reeds. Lucky for Dave. The Pitchrider Interface cost two thousand dollars.

  Back in the car, Dave asked a question.

  “How’d you find out this name—Fenk, you said’s the dude?—is the name of the guy boffed me?”

  “Luck,” I said. “A little footwork, and help from a lady friend. Those three.”

  “I never saw the dude till I looked over my shoulder five days ago.”

  “Now he’s got your saxophone and case, and you want them back.”

  “My axe anyway, man.”

  “The case looks new and shiny,” I said. “Must be worth something.”

  “New isn’t shit. I liked my old one.”

  “It wore out?”

  “Some motherfucker swiped it.”

  “Too bad.”

  “From the club beside the shoe store.”

  I hadn’t started the car engine. We were parked under a well-established city maple, and on the sidewalk beside us two girls about nine years old had a piece of chalk and were marking out squares for hopscotch.

  “And where’d you get the new case?” I asked Dave.

  “Same place.”

  “The original case was stolen the week you were playing at the Alley Cat?”

  “I bought that case the day I bought my horn,” Dave said. “Like forty years back, man.”

  “Concentrate on the present, Dave.”

  “One night the case’s gone. You get used to a case, man. I must’ve carried it on a hundred thousand jobs. I felt like crying.”

  “What do you mean you got the new case at the Alley Cat?”

  “You want to hear the truth, man?” Dave faced toward me. “I did cry. Back at the hotel, I bawled my eyes out for a couple of minutes. It was nice later when the dude gave me the new case. But . . .”

  Dave turned back to the scene in front of the car. One of the little girls was bouncing through the hopscotch squares. She was using an acorn as a marker.

  “Which dude are we at now?” I asked. “Who was it gave you the replacement case?”

  “Never met with him, man,” Dave said. “The guy that owns the Alley Cat comes up to me and says, guess what, a dude said he heard you got your case lifted and he left this new number for you. Fans like to lay things on musicians. A drink. A joint. Come to their place for dinner. I figure it was that way with the dude with the new case.”

  “Did the Alley Cat owner say what he looked like? The case’s donor?”

  “Just a fan. I never asked.”

  I could recognize a clue when it jumped up and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Dave,” I said, “Raymond Fenk didn’t want your saxophone. He wanted the case.”

  “Jesus, man, he could’ve asked.”

  “There must be something about the case.”

  “He didn’t have to put me in the hospital,” Dave said. “I would’ve given it to him before he came down with the two-by-four.”

  I pulled away from the curb and the hopscotch game, and drove on streets that would take us to the Cameron House. Dave was saying something about reeds. He was fussy about them. They had to be extra hard. Flip Bochner would provide the substitute saxophone, but Dave said he had to choose the reeds. That explained the trip to Long & McQuade’s.

  “At the hospital, Dave,” I said, “what’d you tell the police?”

  “What happened is what I told them,” he said. “A dude was following me and finally caught up.”

  “You mention my name?”

  “No. I told them I wanted my axe back.”

  “They seem interested?”

  “One cop asked questions, and the other wrote stuff down, and both of them split. No, I don’t think they were interested, man.”

  “I wonder what it is with the case?” I said. “Someone steals the old case and replaces it in Los Angeles, and someone else in Toronto from Los Angeles, Raymond Fenk, steals the new case.”

  “Forget the case, man,” Dave said. “It’s the axe.”

  “I think I know how to retrieve both.”

  “How?”

  “Same way you lost them,” I said. “Steal them again.”

  11

  ON THE TELEPHONE, James Turkin’s polite sister told me James had a room on Howland Avenue and was given to passing his late afternoons at a café called Dooney’s. Howland and Dooney’s were in the Annex. I thanked the sister and drove to the café. It was five o’clock.

  Outside Doon
ey’s, large block letters advertised cappuccino and gelati. Not a shamrock or shillelagh in sight. Inside, the room was long and narrow and bright. One wall was all window, and the tables were filled with talkers who looked serious about it. James Turkin was sitting alone at a table for two near the back. He had a coffee cup in front of him and an open magazine, and he was watching me walk the length of the room toward him.

  “I don’t need a lawyer,” he said when I got close.

  “The reason I came calling, James, I’m not selling my services. I’m retaining yours.”

  I sat in the other chair.

  James said, “I don’t do houses.”

  “We’re still in business,” I said.

  “Or apartments.”

  “What’s this?” I asked. “You experience a change of calling?”

  “Factories I do, office buildings. As far as houses go, I got . . . scruples.”

  As a sideline, James worked at upgrading his vocabulary. The rest of the time, he was the best burglar I knew. One day the break-and-enter squad would come down on him, and I’d defend James in court. He had pale features and light-brown hair that he wore in a 1950s pompadour. He was nineteen. His nerves were as steady as the Dalai Lama’s.

  “Also,” James said, “I took a course in another . . . endeavour.”

  “A course sounds like you found something on the straight and narrow.”

  “Picks,” James said.

  “Come again.”

  “Pickpocketing,” James said. Nothing moved except his lips. “A one-week course.”

  “I can see it now,” I said. “George Brown College offers night classes in Pocket Picking, followed by Extortion 101.”

  “This was two old Colombian guys came up from New York, and all it cost was four hundred including equipment.”

  “What equipment?”

  “Mannequins,” James said. “They had bells tied on them. The idea is you tried to lift the wallet off the mannequin, inside pocket, hip pocket, different places, and if the bell rang, you failed. One guy quit the first day. It was like all he had to do was breathe next to the mannequin and bells started like in a church. Anyway, soon as you got it so you could pick ten pockets and no bells happened, the Colombian guys took you down Eaton Centre. Work on humans.”

  “You think you got your four hundred dollars’ worth?”

  “I was the only student in the class the Colombians let do the newspaper routine for real.”

  “Am I going to want to hear this?” I asked.

  “You’re on the subway.” James sounded as close to eager as he gets. “You hold the Sun in one hand, and the other, you reach into the guy beside you’s pocket. Has to be quick. I got a teacher’s wallet.”

  “Bad luck,” I said. “The teacher must’ve been slim pickings.”

  “I mailed it back to the guy.”

  The waiter came by, and I ordered an espresso.

  “You heard of this writer?” James was leafing through his magazine. It was Harper’s. “Lewis Lapham?”

  “He writes some very funny pieces. Acerbic.”

  “What I mean, is he any good?”

  “Yeah, he’s good. Got a nice style, and he keeps you turning the pages to find out what he’s saying. I’d call that good.”

  “I thought so. I underlined twenty, I don’t know, thirty words in this one story.”

  “Here’s one for you, James. William Safire in the New York Times, especially Sunday. You’ll go crazy underlining.”

  James didn’t write down Safire’s name. He’d remember. James was a kind of idiot savant in training. His fields were words and locks and now apparently other people’s pockets. I’d acted for him on a charge of assault with intent when he was young and foolish and unfocussed. The judge put him on probation for two years. The probation had another ten months to run, and it hadn’t dissuaded James from his new life of non-violent crime. He thought he was indestructible. Maybe he was, but I kept his file in my active drawer.

  “What’s the word mean?” James asked. “About Lewis Lapham?”

  “A touch of the bitter. That’s how you define acerbic. Astringent, okay? There you got another adjective. Put the two on the same list, acerbic and astringent. Use them when you want to say something has a taste of sour. Harsh.”

  My espresso arrived.

  “End of today’s lesson in etymology, James,” I said. “I want to talk to you about a job in the category of piece of cake.”

  “I already said I don’t go into houses any more or apartments, places where people live.”

  “How about where they reside temporarily?”

  “Like what, an office where the guy sometimes sleeps over? That happened to me in this factory out in Etobicoke. I go in, three in the morning, and a man, must’ve been an executive, was sound asleep in the dark. Office as big as this restaurant, leather couch he was laying on, girl with him asleep also. No clothes on either one of the guy or the girl. I was . . . mortified.”

  “Mortified is nice, James,” I said. “Let me test your philosophy of residences vis-à-vis commercial properties. What does a hotel come under?”

  “I’ve never done a hotel.”

  “People come and go. Hotels, at least not this one, aren’t permanent dwellings.”

  “You shouldn’t be asking me this stuff. You’re a lawyer.”

  “You’re right, James, the Law Society wouldn’t approve. But, take my word, this is a worthy cause.”

  James hesitated. He was rummaging for a word.

  He said, “That’s your . . . justification.”

  He’d settled for second-best. I wouldn’t tell him about rationalization.

  “Work it out, James,” I said. “The bad guy took something from the good guy, and we’re going to take it back from the bad guy.”

  “Is this a new hotel or old?”

  “Thirty, forty years it’s been up, from the architecture and everything else.”

  “You know what’s a tough building? The library in North York, couple years old, and it’s got the latest. I went in Tuesday night for practice. Guy told me about the electronic things in the ceiling, high tech, they track you everywhere you move.”

  “What’d you bring out? Dictionary?”

  “Only practice. You don’t believe me, I already had seven hundred dollars from the naked guy’s wallet in Etobicoke.”

  “Electronic surveillance I don’t think is a problem at the Silverdore.”

  “A hotel would look good on my résumé.”

  “I like it, résumé. Your profession’s gotten into white-collar procedures?”

  “Not written down. Just, some guy asks what places I’ve done, I can say hotel.”

  “This is rush, James, if you’re telling me yes. I don’t mean next week or two days from now. It has to be right away.”

  “Tonight I got something on.”

  “Make it tomorrow in the daylight. The guy, Fenk’s his name, we aren’t going in there and tiptoe around his room while he’s in bed. Some time before noon tomorrow ought to be right. That suit you? Fenk’ll be out and moving by then. Away from the room.”

  “You the lookout or you mean you’re going in with me all the way?”

  “Never send a man on a mission you wouldn’t go on yourself, James, or something along those lines.”

  “What’s coming out?”

  “One portable object dearly beloved by its true and long-time owner.”

  “How much is my end?”

  “Payment of two hundred dollars on completion of the operation.”

  James’s face remained as immobile as usual. But I gathered the price met his standards, unless it was the idea of an addition to his résumé that attracted him. He agreed to meet me on Charles Street near the Silverdore at eleven on Saturday morning.

  I said, “You’re not likely to get detoured, are you, by whatever’s on tonight, to the slammer maybe?”

  “It’s a beginners’ class for dips. I’m the teacher.”

/>   I got the bill from the waiter for my espresso and James’s coffee, and paid at the cashier’s desk.

  “You want to practise on me?” I said to James on the street. “I’ll tell you if any bells go off. The wallet’s in my rear pocket.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  I touched my pocket and felt nothing except a small wave of panic in my stomach.

  “Here you go,” James said.

  He was holding my wallet out to me.

  “When you were going out the door,” James said, “I lifted it then.”

  “That was scary, James. Not even a tinkle.”

  12

  IF IT WAS SIX-FIFTEEN in my apartment, it was three-fifteen at the Alley Cat Bistro. I got its number from California directory assistance and spoke to a man with an Hispanic accent who said the boss wouldn’t be in for an hour. He called me señor.

  The focal point of my living room, I tell myself when I’m thinking decor, is a sofa covered in greyish-brown fabric that has enough of a satiny sheen to make a luxury statement. Jackie O. would willingly sit on my sofa. It faces the front window and is set about ten feet into the room. In the mornings, the early sun hits the sofa. Sometimes, if duty doesn’t summon me to office or court, I carry my breakfast coffee into the sofa and sun, and think of the Côte d’Azur. The fantasy doesn’t work in the evenings. I poured a Wyborowa on the rocks and sat on the sofa in the semi-gloom.

  What the hell was so precious about Dave Goddard’s saxophone case? Not the old one. It was out of the picture. The new case. Raymond Fenk couldn’t have been after the tenor saxophone. He didn’t strike me as a guy who wanted to rehearse the John Coltrane songbook. He struck me as someone shifty who knew the saxophone case had value. Someone shifty and violent. Impatient too. And maybe kind of stupid. Couldn’t he have displayed a more subtle touch in relieving Dave of the case? An act of grab and assault, Fenk’s act, was a trifle obvious. Arrogant even. That was a possibility. Combine arrogance and impatience and you might have Raymond Fenk.

  I went into the kitchen and phoned Annie’s answering machine to remind it of my dinner date with Annie. The machine was indifferent. I freshened my drink, two ice cubes and the same number of ounces of vodka, and got comfy on the sofa.