I turned the lights off and walked home. Office cleanup could wait. Was this another little thing to add to my list of Ace transgressions? If so, it was a whole lot closer to home. My home. To take my mind off the little things, I got in bed with a new collection of Whitney Balliett’s essays on jazz from the New Yorker. It didn’t work. I went to sleep and dreamed that Charlie Parker broke into my bedroom. He raised his alto saxophone to his mouth, and when he blew, he sounded like a graduate of the Guy Lombardo reed section.
10
I HAD A COURT at the Downtown Tennis Club for ten o’clock Saturday morning. My opponent was an intense, dark-haired stockbroker in his mid-thirties. He and I schedule a few sets every week, and they’re always close. He says tennis is what keeps him sane during the angst of the market’s bulls and bears. I lifted weights for a year and jogged four times a week for another year, but gave up both. I couldn’t stand the solitude. When I take my exercise, I want to bang against my fellow man. I beat the stockbroker 6-3 in the first set and was running away from him 4-0 in the second when our court time ran out.
“You were pumped up today,” he said in the locker room.
“Must have been something motivating me,” I said.
I called Annie B. Cooke from the phone in the tennis club’s lobby.
“How’s the definitive profile of Signor Alberti?” I asked.
“At a thousand words, nothing’s definitive.” Annie’s voice sounded weary.
“Seminal?”
“How about superficial?”
“You that discouraged?”
“It’s my old problem. I over-researched. Alberti gave me all the time in the world and I asked him approximately one hundred and forty-six questions for which he had approximately one hundred and forty-six articulate answers.”
“That’s more exact than approximate.”
“The thing is, I can’t make up my mind what to leave out.”
“When’s your deadline?”
“Twelve-thirty.”
“I’ll buy you lunch at one.”
“Deal.”
I went shopping. Two bottles of Côtes-du-Rhône at the rare-wines store on Queen’s Quay, then up to Daniel et Daniel on Carlton Street around the corner from Annie’s apartment. It’s a classy patisserie-cum-French-style-deli, and I bought a bunch of salads—zucchini, pasta, shrimp, and hearts of artichoke. I got a couple of poached chicken breasts and two fat chocolate eclairs. I hit Annie’s front door at five minutes past one. She answered my knock in a light blue dress, white sandals, and a wide-brimmed white hat like the one Anita O’Day wore in Jazz on a Summer’s Day.
“Picnic time,” I said.
“Take a seat,” she said and walked to the back of her apartment where the bedroom is.
I leafed through a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma looking at the photographs. I lingered over one of Isabelle Adjani. She had on high heels.
“Ah,” Annie said from over my shoulder, “the defence counsel searches for a weakness in the case.”
“What do you suppose Isabelle was planning to wear with these shoes?” I said.
Annie had changed to wheat-coloured trousers and a navy blue tank top. She’d ditched the wide-brimmed hat and was carrying a wicker picnic basket.
“Knives, forks, paper plates, salt, pepper, napkins, plastic glasses, and a corkscrew,” she said. “I gather you’ve got what goes with the equipment.”
“Daniel et Daniel’s best spread.”
“Then I was right to pack the linen napkins.”
We angled through Cabbagetown’s back streets and came out at the Bayview expressway. The day was without wind or clouds, the sky was a bright blue, and it felt good not to be one of the hundreds of thousands of Torontonians who hit the highways on summer weekends for what radio traffic reporters call cottage country. We drove north on Bayview and east on Eglinton Avenue to Serena Gundy Park across the road from the Inn on the Park. The parking lot was crowded. I carried the bottles of wine and Annie looked after the picnic basket. She said it took a woman’s fine sense of balance to keep the contents firm and steady. We walked south from the parking lot alongside a river that I remembered swimming in on Boy Scout camp-outs. I said so to Annie.
“I don’t know which is more unbelievable,” she said. “Swimming in that brown water or you joining the Boy Scouts.”
“Everything was green and fresh back then,” I said.
“The water or you?”
The path passed through a small woods and emerged on to a huge expanse of gently rolling hills. Families gathered around the picnic tables that dotted the landscape, and in between, little kids kicked around soccer balls and their parents tossed Frisbees. We turned to the left and soon put the athletic action behind us. There was another small wooded section on the edge of the park down the steep hill from the Ontario Science Centre. Not many picnickers bothered to hike that far. Annie and I arranged our goodies under a maple tree and I opened the first bottle of wine. While we gave it a proper savouring, I told Annie the story of my latest poking into Ace’s operations and of the break-in at my office.
I said, “I think the two are linked or my name isn’t Sam Spade.”
“It isn’t,” Annie said, “and what did the police say when you reported the break-in?”
Before I could answer, she said, “Oh, forgetful me, you’re the independent fellow who goes it alone when crime strikes.”
“I think it might be someone telling me to back off,” I said. “I haven’t exactly made myself invisible to Ace. The truck driver I popped could have taken my licence number or the guy on the Leslie weigh scale might have done the same and passed it on.”
“If the break-in was intended to discourage you,” Annie said, “then the breakers-in have made the miscalculation of their lives.”
Two squirrels scrambled through the branches of the maple tree over our picnic. Their blue-black fur was mangy, but they bounced around like the Flying Wallendsas.
“I have a client,” I said to Annie. “I owe it to him not to bring the cops in until I know where he figures in the picture. That makes a difference.” “Give me a break.”
“It doesn’t make a difference?”
“I’m objecting strictly as a matter of form, okay?” Annie reached out her empty plastic glass and I made like the sommelier. She went on, “I know, O light of my life, you’re determined to stick your face into whatever nastiness this Ace Disposal thing may represent until someone takes a poke at it. Correction, second poke. We can’t leave out your scuffle with the bearded gentleman. Duty to the client and all those other noble sentiments, I appreciate their truth in the legal profession. But honestly, Crang, maybe you’re using them as a cover. You just like playing the gallant snoop, which is okay except I think you’ve got Sir Galahad and Inspector Clouseau so mixed up you might do yourself real harm.”
An emotion of the awkward sort covered the picnic. The sound of traffic on Eglinton drifted in from the far distance and the chatter of the two squirrels filled the middle distance.
I said, “I liked the part where you said, ‘O light of my life.’”
“Who, me?” Annie said in a mock-innocent voice. She drew her left hand across her breast and cocked her head like a silent-movie heroine.
I leaned toward her. She met me halfway. We closed our eyes and kissed.