“Let’s plan on vamping somewhere between pinned and steady for a decade or two.”
“You’re not otherwise entangled tonight, is that the reason for this early-morning chat? You’re not labouring on behalf of people who probably should stay in jail anyway?”
“It’s Thursday,” I said, “date night all over the world.”
“Seems to me you once described Saturday as date night all over the world.”
“Next I may say Friday,” I said. “It’s a shifting kaleidoscope out there.”
“Okay, I’ve got a screening of the new Richard Gere at four,” Annie said. She spoke in her down-to-brass-tacks tone. “You can come by at seven. This is for dinner, I take it. I wonder how many times Gere’s going to drop his pants in this one. Seven o’clock and I’ll brace you with one of those vodka martinis before we go out. Or whatever it is you do with one of those vodka martinis.”
“Drink it.”
I went into the bathroom for a shave and a shower. My bathroom is decorated with a framed poster Annie gave me for my last birthday. It’s from a 1940s movie called The Mask of Dimitrios. It shows Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Zachary Scott trying for a snarl in their expressions. My kind of guys.
I fell for Annie B. Cooke’s voice before I met the rest of her. It kept turning up on the radio in the morning. One day the program Annie does the movie reviews for had me on in a four-minute guest spot. I was in the news with a weird defence I’d worked out for a teenage hooker who’d retained me. The defence got her off. Other criminal lawyers picked up on it and the CBC morning show wanted me to explain the defence on the air. I agreed. The program’s host was hyped-up and energetic and got in more jokes than I did until the four minutes were over and someone was tapping me on the shoulder. It was Annie. She was next up on the show and wanted the microphone I was sitting in front of. I hung around and asked Annie out to dinner. She accepted. That was a year and a half ago.
We get along pretty well together. Annie isn’t keen on my clients, but that isn’t a problem. More a point of vigorous debate. Everything else is jake. I like her line of patter, she likes mine. We’re attracted to one another in the physical department. We may even be in love. But we aren’t saying. We don’t discuss marriage or moving in together. Gun-shy. Or maybe that’s partner-shy. I’ve had a marriage that didn’t pan out. She had a live-in guy for a couple of years and I gather it ended messily. For Annie and me, it’s comfortable the way it is, keeping our own places, stepping out on plenty of dates, maintaining mutual faithfulness. We’re still getting to know one another. I trust it’ll be a lengthy process.
5
IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A CAR that anyone who has a regular job would drive. It’d make a grand third car in a rich stockbroker’s family, something for the kids to wheel over to the country club. It’s a Volkswagen convertible, small, white, and sporty.
I drove it out from behind the house. I went over to Spadina and headed south. I wanted to get out to the west suburbs and I had a choice, Lakeshore Road or the Gardiner Expressway. No sense putting the Volks up against the speed merchants on the Gardiner. I turned off Spadina on to the Lakeshore.
I’d always wanted a convertible. Indeed, lusted for one. The Volks wasn’t what I’d had in mind but it came as a gift. I was defending a client who’d served time for robbing banks. He was on trial for another holdup. My client was black. At the preliminary hearing, the bank teller who’d emptied his till when someone pointed a gun at him described the robber as a look-alike for Sammy Davis Jr. My guy was tall and light-skinned. He looked more like Lena Horne than Sammy Davis Jr.
At the trial, I read the teller’s testimony to the jury. I showed them a dozen photographs of Sammy Davis, including the one of old Sam embracing Richard Nixon at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. I asked the jury if that man resembled my client. They took fifteen minutes to acquit.
My guy paid his fee. He said he was so grateful he had a present for me. A convertible. I was thinking something flashy and American. My guy was thinking miniature and German.
The traffic was light on the Lakeshore and I dawdled along. On my left, the sun glinted off the water. Lake Ontario was almost motionless in the still of the morning. I passed the Argonaut Rowing Club. Three strapping lads in blue singlets and shorts were easing their shells into the water. Farther along, a dozen ladies were taking a tennis clinic on the courts at the Boulevard Club. The soft thunk of racquets meeting balls drifted on the air. Another few hundred yards down the road, kids splashed in the Sunnyside pool. Ah, the wide, wide world of sports.
Up ahead, the Palace Pier signalled the end of the public stretch of lakefront. The Palace Pier is a tall, bleak condominium on a small piece of land that juts into the lake, and it isn’t the real Palace Pier. The genuine article was a dance hall of the same name that stood for years on the site. I heard Duke Ellington’s band there near the end. They were getting long in the tooth, Hodges, Carney, Lawrence Brown, and the rest, but when they played, they still made your stomach lift.
I followed the ramp off the Lakeshore on to the Queen Elizabeth Way. The lake disappeared behind rows of squat factories and warehouses. I stuck on the Queen E to Kipling Avenue and turned north. According to the street guide I keep in the glove compartment, Ace Disposal’s address put it on one of the back streets west of Kipling and south of Dundas. It was an area that catered to man and his car. I drove past a Speedy Muffler outlet, a coin car wash, a Rad Man, and half a dozen body shops.
I turned left off Dundas, and in a couple of blocks, on the other side of an unpainted garage where you could have your transmission overhauled, the premises of Ace Disposal announced themselves in a large square sign that hung about twelve feet in the air on a steel pole. The sign had red lettering on a yellow background. Beyond the pole was a chain-link fence. It enclosed four or five acres of asphalted property. The fence stood as tall as the pole with the sign and had a thick trimming of barbed wire at the top. I didn’t bother checking for a welcome mat.
I pulled beyond Ace’s land, made a U-turn, and parked on the other side of the street in front of a bar and restaurant that advertised exotic dancers from noon to midnight. Just the ticket to pass the hours while your car is getting a lube job up the street.
There were two gates in Ace’s fence. Both were closed. One gate was for people and the other for trucks. The people gate led on to a cement path that crossed a patch of brown grass to a long rectangular one-storey building. The building was glum and red-brick and had air-conditioning units sticking out of every second window. No doubt typists, bookkeepers, and various office workers laboured on the other side of the air conditioners. If I wanted to chat up Charles Grimaldi or Wansborough’s cousin, Alice Brackley the headstrong, that was where I figured to find them. But I didn’t want to chat up Charles or Alice. Not yet. I didn’t have the right questions. I was on a reconnoitring mission. Reconnoitring was a word that made me feel efficient.
In the middle of the property, a bigger grey-brick building had a small office area at one end. The rest of it opened up in large bays for servicing trucks. There were eight bays, and four of them were in business. Six or seven men in mechanics’ overalls swarmed around the trucks. The asphalted surface that surrounded the buildings had painted-in spaces for at least two hundred trucks, but only ten spaces were occupied. The rest of the trucks must have been out on the job. Whatever precisely that was. Maybe reconnoitring would enlighten me.
The trucks in the parking spaces were uniform in appearance, big and blunt, a dusty red colour, and looked like they’d been put together from a giant set of kids’ Lego blocks. The largest piece of Lego sat on the back. It was a bin, a good ten feet deep and probably that much across. If I read correctly the series of bars and chains that led from it to the cab of the truck, the bin could be hoisted on and off the truck when you pushed and pulled the right buttons and levers in the cab. As toys go, it was probably a lot of fun.
I