I gave the Alley Cat contract back to Ralph. He aligned the orange files so that their corners were exact and placed them on the floor beside the Motolounger.
Ralph said, “Where’s all this get us?”
“Not far past square one.”
“Don’t think I don’t appreciate your worry, Crang,” Ralph said. “But I’m just thinking Dave’ll walk in tomorrow, you know, sheepish, apologizing to all concerned. I’ll read him the riot act, count on it, and we’ll get back to business as usual.”
No rum and Coke had passed Ralph’s lips. Maybe Doreen was the drinker in the household. I finished my glass and told Ralph I’d keep in touch. He stood under the porch light until I drove out of sight around one of Hiawatha’s curves.
I chose a route home by way of Eglinton and North Toronto’s back streets. If someone I knew spotted me on the DVP, word might get out I was a closet suburbanite. It was ten-thirty, and I hadn’t eaten since Cam Charles’s spread. Falafel felt about right. I stopped at the Kensington Kitchen on Harbord and ordered a plate to go. Falafel, hummus, tabbouleh, and pita. The pita was whole-wheat.
I ate the food and drank two glasses of Soave in front of the CITY-TV news. The sports guy’s sweater had more colours than a test pattern. He said the Blue Jays lost in the ninth and the Maple Leafs had a couple of promising defencemen. I switched off the set. When the Boston Celtics cranked up, I’d get interested in team games.
I dialled Annie’s number. Her answering machine told me she’d return my call. The answering machine told everybody she’d return their calls. Impersonal. Wasn’t I special? Annie must have been at the big bash that came after the Festival of Festivals’ opening movie. Had Daniel Day-Lewis hit town yet? I didn’t ask Annie’s answering machine.
I took a book called Jazzletters: Singers and the Song to bed. It was written by a guy named Gene Lees, and I was up to the chapter on Johnny Mercer. When I fell asleep, the melody to “Skylark” was circling at the centre of my mind.
10
DAVE GODDARD was an item in “For the Record” in Friday morning’s Globe. The first item was about a stockbroker and a half-million dollars; both were missing from a Bay Street investment firm. The second was about a man of no fixed address who got set on fire on the tennis courts behind the Moss Park Armoury. Dave was the third. “For the Record” runs every day in the back pages of the Globe’s news section. It’s for readers on the run, six or seven one-paragraph stories, usually about crime, usually spiced up from routine police reports. The man of no fixed address probably didn’t think the fire was routine. He was alive and in St. Michael’s Hospital. So was Dave Goddard.
The Globe paragraph said he’d been assaulted early Wednesday morning in a lane near Queen and Spadina. An injury to the head, the paragraph said, and no arrests had been made. Dave was described as “an internationally known jazz musician”. Someone on the copy desk at the Globe must have added the description. Or else the police guy who handed out the press announcement was more hip than the Toronto cops I usually cross-examined in court.
I got to St. Mike’s before ten and didn’t have to go farther than the waiting room on the first floor to find Dave. He was sitting in the middle of a row of five chairs, and behind him there was a counter and a glassed-in area where women in civvies were talking on phones and tapping numbers into computers. Dave had an official-looking form attached to a clipboard in one hand. He had a ballpoint pen in the other hand, and a bandage on his head. It wasn’t easy to miss the bandage. It began just above Dave’s eyebrows and reached into his scalp. A couple of inches of Dave’s hair seemed to have been shaved to make way for the bandage. Dave was applying himself to the form on the clipboard.
I sat in the chair beside him. Dave’s left eye panned over to me. The expression on his face was somewhere between blank and morose.
“What’s happening, man?” Dave said to me.
“That ought to be my question, Dave. What happened to you?”
“The dude you were supposed to be tailing aced me.”
I said, “He aced me too.”
A woman leaned over the counter behind us and spoke to Dave. She had a Middle Eastern face and deep, dark eyes.
“How’s it coming there, Mr. Goddard?” she said.
“Right with you, man,” Dave said without turning his head.
The woman beamed her eyes on me and shrugged.
I looked at the form in Dave’s lap. He was stuck at the entry for home address.
“Try 48 Hiawatha Crescent,” I said.
“I can dig it,” Dave said. “Ralph’s place.”
The tip launched Dave on a roll of right answers. He filled in his own occupation and Ralph’s telephone number. His Ontario Hospital Insurance number stumped him.
I said, “Tell the woman with the eyes you’ll phone it in.”
Dave conferred with the woman, who asked him for a cash payment of five dollars and twenty-six cents. It covered a television set Dave rented. The woman said OHIP would pick up the cost of room, meals, bandage, and head shave. The woman’s eyes were large and moist and almost black. I could drown in eyes like hers.
The Volks was parked in a lot on Dundas Street. Dave’s clothes looked rumpled but not as ingrained with dust and grit as my Cy Mann navy blue. Dave and I walked up Bond Street. His hands were conspicuously empty of the gleaming new saxophone case. I asked Dave what had gone on between him and his assailant outside the entrance to the Cameron.
Dave said, “Enough of this shit.”
“Dave,” I said, “I think it’ll help if we discuss your contact with the guy.”
“That’s what the dude said.”
“‘Enough of this shit?’”
“That’s it, man.”
“Next thing he made off with your saxophone?”
“Maybe what the dude said was more like, ‘I got no time for this shit.’”
“Which shit would that be, Dave?”
“All I know, man,” Dave said, “the dude wasn’t in a mood for hanging out.”
“He wanted your saxophone?”
“Grabbed my axe and took off up the street.”
“No more conversation?”
“I went around the corner at the Cameron,” Dave said, “and here’s the dude with this big mother of a two-by-four raised up in the air.”
“What next?”
“Twelve stitches and a concussion.”
Dave and I crossed Shuter and walked past the St. Michael’s Choir School.
“We got a gap in time and movement between the alley and the hospital,” I said. “What I’d like, Dave, you fill it.”
“Cat was loading a bunch of crates in his truck back of the Cameron,” Dave said. “He dumped a crate on me. Surprised hell out of the cat. It’s middle of the night, and me and the two-by-four’s laid out in his truck.”
“This truck, it have wheels like on a tractor?”
“I wasn’t doing a size survey, man.”
We cut off Bond Street and across the parking lot. I needed my daily hit of facts. Lawyers live off facts. Raymond Fenk bashed Dave with the two-by-four. He slung Dave in the back of the truck with the monster tires, and when I showed up, he wielded the two-by-four on me. I could figure out that much. Facts have a consecutive beauty. The consecutive part