Читать книгу Crang Mysteries 6-Book Bundle - Jack Batten - Страница 44

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 was my difficulty with Dave. He was a lateral thinker. I was a vertical thinker. Clash of two modes. The owner of the truck found Dave and drove him to the hospital. Or called the cops, who did the hospital run. If I wanted the ration of facts that covered events of the previous thirty-six hours, I’d have to wait Dave out. Brother Ralph was more my kind of thinker, painstaking but vertical.

“I wish you’d phoned me from the hospital, Dave,” I said. “Me or Abner Chase or Ralph.”

“I phoned Flip.”

“Good thinking, Dave,” I said. “Who’s Flip?”

“He’s pushing buttons to get me the loan of an axe till mine comes back,” Dave said. “Flip Bochner.”

We reached the Volks. Dave groaned a little when he stooped to sit in the passenger seat.

“You in shape to play?” I asked.

It was still and quiet inside the car. The bandage on Dave’s head looked more ominous than it had in the hospital waiting room.

“Man,” Dave said. He was facing straight ahead. “How about you drive me to Long & McQuade’s? Be okay?”

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.”