I’m advising you now partly like a lawyer and partly like a guy in a George Raft movie. Get out of town. I got an idea, two or three of them, and it’d be better in all ways if I have a free hand to follow up on them. You around, get arrested, I’d be using up time out at the jail, doing a bail application, talking to the homicide people, that kind of dance. For both our sakes, I know it’s unorthodox, drive up to Ralph’s tonight.”
“I don’t get it, what’s going down.”
“Neither do I, and I was the guy in the closet.”
I took Dave back downstairs and around to the alley where the Beetle was parked. First crack, he missed the timing between the clutch and the accelerator, and stalled the engine. Second crack, he steered smoothly out of the alley. I forgot to tell him to stick to the inside lane on the highway. Dave’d learn.
My second Wyborowa wasn’t as large as the first. I sat in the kitchen with it and the phone book. Trevor Dalgleish had two entries, home and office. The office was on John Street. Cam Charles & Associates, of whom Trevor Dalgleish was one, worked out of a renovated house downtown near the Amsterdam Café. It had three storeys with a lot of glass and ferns and native Canadian art. Dalgleish’s home was on Admiral Road, and the phone number began with 921. Admiral was a short, windy street in an enclave of large one-family houses between Avenue Road and St. George Street. For a young lawyer, a criminal lawyer, Trevor had a swell address.
It was almost two o’clock. I could telephone Dalgleish and ask him about Raymond Fenk or I could wait till first light. First light seemed more civilized. Calling Dalgleish was my number one idea. I told Dave I had two or three ideas. I exaggerated. The case was hurling me into a moral abyss. Prevaricating, postponing, exaggerating. I went in search of the Gene Lees book and the chapter on Edith Piaf.
17
CAM CHARLES’S phone call came at orange-juicing time. Fourteen minutes past nine.
I said, “You rad lawyers get a fast jump on Sunday office hours.”
“I’m at home, Crang.”
“Me too. That keeps us even so far.”
“Obviously I know where you are.” Cam caught himself. “Why am I always getting into foolish exchanges with you?”
“Must be chemistry.”
“I’d like us to meet this morning.”
“See, I told you it was chemistry.”
“If you can grasp this, Crang, I want the meeting to be confidential.”
“What you mean, you don’t want me around your office.”
“Correct.”
“Or home. I might lower the tone.”
“There’s a potential problem, and I hate to say this, you may be the man I need to find out how close to real it is.”
I asked, “This wouldn’t, any chance, have something to do with the late Raymond Fenk?”
Cam hesitated.
He said finally, “It may have to do with a lot of unpleasant things, but not that one.”
“I have to say, Cam, I admire your way with the auxiliary verbs.”
“What?”
“All those mays.”
“Crang, can we just for God’s sake make an appointment.”
“Some place off the beaten track.”
“For reasons I haven’t got time to go into right now, I don’t want anyone from my office seeing us together, anyone from the criminal bar for that matter, and people from my firm happen to be in the house at this moment.”
Cam lived in a big house in Forest Hill. Trevor Dalgleish lived in a house on Admiral Road that had to be just as big. Where did I go wrong?
“I got the perfect spot,” I said.
“Where?”
“The AGO.”
Silence from Cam’s end.
“You know,” I said, “paintings on the wall, Henry Moores on the floor.”
“I know the art gallery, Crang. I’m thinking about it for a meeting place. Weighing it.”
“All the criminal lawyers I ever heard of ’ll be in bed or out visiting clients at West End Detention.”
“You’re probably right.”
“One thing, there might be a lawyer’s wife on cash at the gift shop.”
“I’m not acquainted with lawyers whose wives do that sort of volunteer work.”
“Understand what you mean, Cam. Bourgeois.”
“I’ll meet you at ten.”
“Sorry. Place doesn’t open till eleven.”
“All right. Eleven then.”
Cam hung up, and I got another orange out of the refrigerator. Had Cam slammed down his receiver? Slamming the phone is a wasted gesture. All the guy on the other end hears, the slammee, is a click. Interesting metaphysical question. Slam at one end, click at the other. If Bishop Berkeley had lived in the age of the telephone, he would have dissected it. I pressed a fourth orange and had myself a full glass.
I hadn’t phoned Trevor Dalgleish. I hadn’t done anything constructive. I hadn’t thought up any more angles to pursue in the quest of Fenk’s killer. I hadn’t slept much. Dave Goddard woke me at four-thirty with his call from Ralph’s Muskoka cottage. I asked Dave a question I’d overlooked earlier. Where was he on Saturday afternoon when Fenk was expiring in the Silverdore sitting room? In bed at the Cameron, Dave said, all afternoon, all alone. Terrific alibi, I said, and tossed and turned until the sun came up.
Cam Charles’s phone call and the orange juice gave me a kick-start on the day. I sliced two raisin buns into halves and put them in the oven to toast. The day was overcast, and in the living room, no sunbeams warmed the sofa. I made more orange juice and buttered the raisin buns. “A potential problem,” Cam said on the phone. Little did he know. Or did he? My mouth was full of raisin bun. I stopped in mid-chew, and in my head I heard the tumblers click into place.
“Something,” I’d asked Cam, “to do with the late Raymond Fenk?”
Uh-oh.
I got the Wyborowa out of the freezer and poured two fingers into the orange juice. How did I know Fenk was dead? How did I know? Is that why Cam hesitated before he said his problem didn’t concern Fenk’s murder? The vodka in the orange juice wasn’t making me feel much better about my gaffe. What was the drink called? Orange blossom? No, screwdriver. One right answer for the morning.
At ten, I flashed the radio around the dial to on-the-hour newscasts. None mentioned a murdered person in a midtown hotel. I walked down to Queen Street and bought a Sunday Star. Raymond Fenk didn’t make the front page or any of the pages after it. He was dead, and nobody seemed to know except Cam Charles, me, and, undoubtedly, the police. It must have been the cops who told Cam. That’d be natural, given Fenk’s presence in town for Cam’s film festival. The cops hadn’t phoned my place. No one had informed me of Fenk’s death, not cops, radio, or press. This is a fine mess you’ve got us into, Stanley. I cleaned the breakfast dishes and sauntered up Beverley Street to the AGO.
Cam was facing the entrance to the gallery, and his reflection came back at him in the bright glass of the doors. He had on a brown and grey tweed jacket and chocolate-brown slacks, with a crimson foulard at his throat. Sunday-slumming attire for your prominent criminal barrister. He didn’t see me walking up the stone steps behind him.
“You want to look at the show while we talk, Cam?” I said to