Читать книгу Riviera Blues - Jack Batten - Страница 11

On Friday morning, I called Trumball Fraser. He said sure, he was free for lunch. Did I know Coaster’s? Little place over by the St. Lawrence Market? Trum said he was a regular there. I didn’t know Coaster’s, but I knew Trum. When he said he was a regular, it meant Coaster’s must be an out-of-the-way spot where Trum could have long lunches and longer drinks without other Cayuga & Granark employees crowding his noon hour. I said I’d meet him at twelve-thirty.

Trum Fraser was a lawyer about my age. Professionally, he had two strikes against him, his father and his older brother. They were both civil litigation lawyers whose names looked incomplete unless the adjective “distinguished” was inserted up front. Distinguished counsel Justin and Roger Fraser. They argued before the Supreme Court of Canada about every other week and had their cases written up in the Dominion Law Reports. Trum got the short end of the stick in the family when it came to the law. He had most of the brains but not much of the ambition. He took the path of least resistance: a job as an in-house lawyer at Cayuga & Granark. He read contracts, wrote memos on changes in laws that affected trust companies, nothing terrifically demanding in the legal line. If litigation loomed, a lawsuit against C&G, Trum briefed counsel outside the trust company, someone like his distinguished father or his distinguished older brother. They ran with the case in court while Trum stayed snug in his office at C&G and had lengthy lunches at Coaster’s.

The weather had turned close to balmy. I left the Volks at home. Nice day for a walk. Tulips were starting to bloom red and yellow in the boulevards that divide University Avenue. Secretaries and guys in shirt sleeves ate lunches out of paper bags on the benches around the plaza behind the Toronto-Dominion Centre. And in the little park next to the Flatiron Building, people reclined in the grass with their faces up to the sun, getting a head start on their summer tans. If I were Gene Kelly, I’d have broken out the taps for a chorus of “It Might as Well Be Spring.”

Coaster’s was down a short sloping street that ran alongside the market. Delivery trucks jammed up the traffic, dropping off crates of lettuce and sides of beef to the vendors in the market building. The restaurant was on the opposite side of the street and up two flights of stairs. I climbed the two flights. The room was agreeably ramshackle and felt like it’d be easy on the noontime nerves. The only flaw was the place’s sound system and the owner’s lousy taste in tapes. Willie Nelson was whining about another cheatin’ woman.

Trum Fraser had a table for two beside one of the windows. The table and chairs were like the rest of the restaurant, somewhere between unpretentious and rickety.

“Know what I like about this joint?” Trum said.

“Everything except the music.”

Trum listened as if he were taking in Willie’s droning for the first time.

“Not that shit,” he said. “What I like, the bartender here understands the connection between the words bathtub and martini.”

“Makes them ample, does he?”

“The guy must be American,” Trum said. “Ever notice how unsatisfied you feel after a Canadian martini?”

Trum’s face was that of a man on a lifelong search for the satisfying martini. Flushed cheeks, veins beginning to break, nose headed in the direction of W.C. Fields’. He was about thirty pounds too heavy, stuffed into his brown suit, the collar of his white shirt digging a crease in his neck. But as lushes went, Trum was a thinking man’s lush. I’d never seen him drunk. Never seen him when his brain wasn’t taking care of business.

“You could’ve had it made, Crang,” Trum said to me. He must have arrived five or ten minutes earlier. The level of the martini in his hand was two-thirds of the way down the bathtub.

“If you’re talking about life in general, I’m not doing too badly,” I said. “If it’s the law, I never counted on getting it made. Just getting a light grip on it is sufficient.”

“I mean business, the trust company, good old C&G,” Trum said. “After you got off the phone this morning, I was thinking, when you were married to Pamela, Jesus, if you’d played your cards right, you’d be up there on the thirty-second floor today, right down the hall from Whetherhill.”

“You know how much fun that’d be, Trum?”

“Fun, hell. Think of the power.”

“About as much fun as you in partnership with the other two Frasers.”

“Oh, low blow. I’d be honoured to serve alongside my papa and sibling.”

“Bull.”

“Fortunately they never asked me.”

A waitress showed up at our table.

“Connie, my little petunia,” Trum said to her, holding out his empty martini glass, “I trust you’re keeping count.”

“When I come back,” Connie said, “it’ll be with the third.”

“What time’d you get here, Trum?” I asked.

“Noon,” Connie answered for him. “Stroke of. As usual.”

I asked for a glass of white wine. The menu was printed in small type on the place mats. Trum said he’d have the Friday special. I went for a dish billed as half an appetizer plate.

“Speaking of your shop,” I said to Trum, “how’s business?”

“Be specific.”

“Jamie Haddon.”

“There you go, old buddy, another case of nepotism. But he’s smarter than you, Crang, young Jamie is. He has tied himself to old Whetherhill’s coattails, and he’s not about to let go.”

“I think you got your metaphors mixed up there, Trum.”

“Jamie also knows which side his bread is buttered on.”

Connie made the round trip with my white wine and Trum’s third martini.

“Leaving aside family advantages,” I asked Trum, “how is Jamie on his own merits, in your humble opinion?”

“Well, one talent of his, he’s hot stuff in the boardroom. Very organized with the reports when his turn comes around. Doesn’t say a whole lot, but he drops the odd harmless witticism. Knows how to butter up the guy in the chair without brown-nosing. He’s a political guy, Jamie.”

“Young man going places is what you’re telling me?”

“Listen, I’ll lay it out for you from the top. C&G isn’t a bad place to work, not for Jamie, not for me, not for anybody. You think of it, we’re talking about the last of the old-school trust companies in this country that hasn’t been gobbled up by a bank or some marauding American. The company is solid as a rock, and it’s Whetherhill, him and his family, who built it. Swotty’s idea of a lavish salary doesn’t happen to coincide with mine, but there are other benefits. Stock options, smart people to work with, and God knows the place is going to be there forever. That’s all Whetherhill’s accomplishment, and you’re asking about Jamie Haddon, well, Swotty treats the kid like he’s seen the future and Jamie Haddon’s in it.”

Connie plunked down two plates. The Friday special was chili. My half appetizer plate held a full complement of fish, crustaceans, and molluscs. Shrimp, lobster, herring, two oysters.

“Computers,” I said to Trum, moving along my list of topics. “I assume C&G is chock-a-block with them.”

“I love those suckers.”

“You personally? You use a computer?”

“I got a little honey right beside my desk. Every day I ask myself, how did I ever work, how did I live, before whoever invented computers invented them.”

“You should understand this is coming as a cruel disappointment to me, Trum. I had you down for a fellow Luddite.”

Trum pointed his fork at me.

“I got something I want to give to my secretary … follow me on this, Crang, it’s a good example of what my computer does for me … and the secretary isn’t at her desk. Do I chase after her, wait around, look for another girl? Hell, no, I bang the message, the memo, whatever, into my computer and press a button and, zip, it’s in her computer. Or, get this, I’m setting up a short meeting with a couple of other people, say some guys two floors down from me. Am I gonna take the elevator, and it ends up these guys are out of the office, in a conference, something like that? You kidding me? I do the whole arrangement on the computer. Never leave my desk. Those examples, I save myself, easy, thirty minutes out of every day at the office.”

Trum was serious.

“That’s great,” I said. “What do you do with the extra half-hour?”

“Get out to the golf course a half-hour earlier.”

Trum was still serious.

“What about Jamie?”

“Never played golf with him. He looks more of a squash type to me.”

“Come on, Trum, you know what I mean. Jamie and computers.”

“Now you mention it, he’s pretty sharp. He talks all the time about ways we can use computers I never thought of. The truth is I don’t frankly understand it when Jamie gets on one of his kicks. ‘Your programming’s out of date, Trum.’ Shit, gimme a break, I’m only sending memos to my secretary. But, you know, to each his own. Jamie knows computers. I know law.”

“Don’t undersell yourself, Trum. You’re sitting next to one of them all day, you must have a notion about the machines, how computers work.”

“A thing I learned, lemme tell you, Crang, they’re resilient little suckers. There was a hell of a flap two, three weeks back. I’m punching away at my computer, putting in this big deal report to the head guy over in the securities department. My screen all of a sudden goes berserk. Jumping around like a bitch, like a movie out of focus, except sometimes the screen would be absolutely blank for long stretches. This wasn’t just my computer. Same thing all over the entire trust company.”

“What’d happened?”

“Some kind of massive short circuit, I don’t know. But never mind that. It isn’t the point of the story.”

“I’m still listening.”

“All right, you know the old brick warehouse, looks deserted, right at Spadina and Wellington, far side?”

“No, but if you say so.”

“That building, it isn’t empty at all. In there, they got a computer backup system for the C&G computer. It takes over in case the computer at the main office blows. Which it did. Okay, within minutes, the backup over at Spadina and Wellington kicks in.”

“Trum, I’m astounded, really am. Totally awestruck.”

“You don’t give a rat’s ass, Crang, I can tell. But to me, it was amazing. One minute, I was running around the hall. The computer’s out, I was saying, my report’s lost, the sky is falling. And next thing, a couple of minutes later, I was back in my office, and everything was normal. Not a syllable got lost. My report to the head securities guy was right there, right in the middle of the sentence I was typing. Fucking-A amazing.”

Connie reappeared.

“You going for four, Trum?” she asked.

Trum wiped chili from the side of his mouth.

“Not till I’ve called my friend here’s bluff,” he answered.

Connie went away. I waited for Trum to call my bluff. What bluff? I was guarding a secret about Pamela and Jamie, but I wasn’t trying to blow anything past Trum.

“I guessed soon as you started in with the Jamie Haddon questions.” Trum looked satisfied with himself. “You’re acting for a client, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not, and the name of the client, the reason you’re having lunch with me, is Archie Cartwright.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Okay, confidentiality, I understand. You’re not gonna level with me.”

Trum’s eyes, I hadn’t realized before, were surprisingly clear and sharp, a minimum of red for a man as dedicated to martinis as he was.

“But if you expect me to go further,” Trum said, “I want it between us, officially, you heard nothing from me.”

“About what?”

“The affair, for chrissake.”

“The affair?”

I knew what affair Trum meant. But how did he know about it? And wasn’t Pamela going to blow her stack when I told her Trum knew?

“Yeah,” Trum said. “The affair.”

“Pamela and Jamie?”

“See? I knew you were acting for Archie.”

“Trum, not that it matters, but I don’t take matrimonial cases.”

“Sure, you’re criminal. But I’m thinking to myself, maybe Archie found out Pamela’s screwing around, and he wanted someone to do a little preliminary digging before the divorce lawyers come in and the fees hit six figures, and he arrives at you because for reasons of your own, Pamela giving you the brush years ago, you might be willing to throw yourself into the job.”

“I’m wounded, Trum, hurt to the quick. You’d think that of me?”

“Must be my lawyer’s training,” Trum said. “Anyhow, I’m with Pamela if the time comes for choosing up who you have to be with.”

“Archie Cartwright — listen to my every word, Trum — Archie Cartwright has never communicated with me by letter, by telephone, by an intermediary, by telex or fax, or by semaphore.”

Trum eased his stomach away from the edge of the table. He looked at me from over his swelling nose.

“Pamela and me,” Trum said, “we go back. I remember, years before you ever came along, I was at UCC, she was at Branksome. We went to the formals, the battalion balls, her father’s house, my father’s house. Same gang of us did all that teenage crap together. That’s why I still got a lot of time for Pamela.”

“Very touching, Trum,” I said. “Now, how did you find out about the affair?”

“Jamie told me.”

“Holy shit.”

“That’s what I thought too. An affair, you only tell your best buddy about, and I’m not Jamie’s. He’s just a guy I work with on projects at the office. But a while ago, he says, let’s have lunch. First time that happened, believe me. Anyhow, I’m into my second silver bullet, he starts in about him and Pamela. Wouldn’t shut up.”

“How much did he tell you?”

“That it’s been going on a year, that Pamela set him up in an apartment, and that, in so many words, she’s a great lay.”

“Charming.”

“I would’ve punched him, except I wanted to hear more.”

Connie took away our empty plates and brought coffee.

“You holding at three?” she asked Trum.

“I’m saving number four for my confreres at the bar,” Trum answered, nodding toward the centre of the room.

“Just another couple of questions,” I said. “Anybody else privy to all this?”

“Two, maybe three other people at C&G. They found out the same way as me, same general time too. From Jamie, last month. The guy that runs the investment department, he knows, and Jamie’s immediate boss, him as well.”

“What about Swotty? Any chance of these guys passing it to him?”

“Are you nuts?” Trum jerked his hand and spilled coffee on his placemat. “Can you see one of us dropping in at Whetherhill’s office. ‘Oh, by the way, Chief, your married daughter’s banging a guy from the trust department. And, hey, you’ll never guess, Chief, the guy’s a relative of yours.’”

“Yeah,” I said. “Dumb question.”

Trum lifted his cup and mopped the spilled coffee with a paper napkin.

“Sure sign,” he said. “When I start dumping coffee all over the place, I need another drink.”

“This has been a large help, Trum,” I said. “I’ll let you know how it develops.”

“You won’t need to. If anything hits the fan, it’ll be all over the office.” Trum put his hands on the table and levered himself out of his chair. The table rocked on its legs. “I did all the talking,” he said. “So you get to do the paying. Fair? Not at the bar though. I’ll pick up for what I drink there.”

“Number four?”

“All this shit we been talking about, I might feel a fifth coming on.”

When Trum reached the bar, the guys sitting there opened up a space for him. A martini was waiting on the Formica top.