“Papa Anderson made the difference.”
“I’ll tell him so.”
Tony said, “You go round and see Papa much, him dyin’ and all that?”
“I intend to.”
“Me, I’m at his place, me and these other fighters, regular every Saturday.”
Chalk up two for Tony.
25
THE ROOM ON THE FIRST FLOOR of the CBC Radio building where I found Annie B. Cooke had a high ceiling, no windows, and a machine for editing tape. The machine was large and homely, and when I opened the door to the room, it was playing a passage from one of Annie’s tapes.
“Some people say if a movie works in the theatre, it’ll work on TV,” the voice on the tape, casual and masculine, was saying. “Sometimes yes. Testament does. Sometimes no. Nashville doesn’t. And anyway, you do get the idea of the Mona Lisa when the lady is printed on a bath towel, but what kind of idea is that?”
Annie mouthed “Hi” to me. She pointed at the tape and mouthed “Jay Scott.” Her face registered a high-satisfaction quotient.
“On the other hand,” Jay Scott’s voice continued, “who would order struggling parents with three kids to risk an expensive evening at the moving pictures when chances are about even that the picture in question will have been designed from inception to show up on what Judy Garland called ‘the hell where all little movies go when they’re bad.’ Television. Better by far to rent Trading Places for five bucks and save fifty. And that’s the real devastation accomplished by video.”
Annie pushed a button on the machine that stopped the tape, then punched another button that sent it whirring in reverse.
She said, “Isn’t the man a treat?”
“A wizard with words,” I said.
“Didn’t have to edit a damn thing in that section, which is more than I can say for my other heroes.”
Annie was sitting on the edge of one of the two folding metal chairs in the room. The other chair was dotted with tiny pieces of stray tape. I made a motion to wipe them into an overflowing waste basket.
“Yo, Crang, no housekeeping,” Annie said. She reached over and caught my hand before it touched the cuttings. “You almost threw out my verbs.”
“Every journalist should have a collection,” I said.
“Two of the New York people kept dropping them out of sentences,” Annie said. She tidied the scraps of tape into rows on the chair. “Whole paragraphs without an ‘is’ or a ‘was’ or a ‘will’. I had to go through the discards and find a bunch of pasts, presents, and futures of ‘to be’.”
“Those are the little darlings on the chair?”
“Tomorrow I’ll clip them into the stuff I’m using on air. My keepers.”
“Make the critics sound literate.”
“Crang, these guys are superliterate,” Annie said. Her voice bounced in her enthusiasm. “I want them to sound complete.”
“With verbs.”
“I’m fussy that way.”
Annie looked at her watch. She’d been editing for seven hours. I said she needed a protein boost. Annie packed her tapes, and we drove downtown to Joe Allen’s restaurant. Joe Allen is a smart cookie who came out of the U.S. Army and opened a New York restaurant that picked up on military dining. Basic chow in a stripped-down setting. The idea worked in Manhattan and Allen took it to Paris and Toronto. The restaurant in Toronto is long and narrow and has wooden floors, red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, paper napkins, and ketchup bottles on the tables. Its decor runs to framed posters and photos of showbiz subjects on the walls. Annie and I sat at a table halfway down the room under a movie still that showed a beautiful woman from the waist up. She was wearing nothing except wide red suspenders. The woman did more for them than Harry Hein.
The menu was chalked on blackboards that were nailed high on the walls. Annie asked the waiter for liver. “Pink but not raw,” she said. I ordered a hamburger, and while we waited, we drank from a litre of the house red and I told Annie about my day.
“The way it sounds to me,” Annie said when I was done, “it didn’t take much silver-tongue treatment to keep your client from making a beeline for police headquarters.”
“Wansborough made the right solid-citizen noises,” I said. “Objected when I asked him to keep events at Ace under his hat. But two other items took precedence.”
“Solving Alice Brackley’s murder and what else?”
“Alice is a distant third,” I said. “A threat to Wansborough’s investment in Ace comes first, and a threat to the good family name is second. Or the other way around.”
“All soul, your Mr. Wansborough.”
“I don’t have to fall in love with my clients to take on their problems.” “Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
Annie’s liver and my hamburger came with fried potatoes in jumbo size. They’d been hand-cut. The hamburger was thick and dripped juices. I felt like I was entering seventh heaven.
“What was it like,” Annie asked, “returning to the scene of your former glories?”
“Royal Ontario?” I said. “As nostalgia goes, it wasn’t a blast from the past.”
“Truly? All that money and privilege you once knew?”
“I always understood I had the perks on loan,” I said. “My ex-wife and her father didn’t let me forget who held the purse strings. Them.” Annie was eating the fries with her fingers.
She said, “I never asked before, why did Cynthia leave you?”
“Pamela,” I said. “She didn’t leave me.”
“Pamela. Cynthia. What’s the difference? Upper-crust names. So why did Pammie split?”
“You’re not getting the hang of this,” I said. “It’s Pamela to everyone except the girls she went to school with at Branksome Hall.”
“They call her Pammie?”
“They call her Pam,” I said. “She’s got a cousin named Buff and an aunt named Bun. Her mother’s Cle. Rhymes with key.”
“What’s the clue here?” Annie said. “One-syllable names?”
“Yeah, but they need the right ring.”
“Not a lot of Glads and Myrts in the Branksome gang.”
“Kate’s about as common as it gets.”
“So,” Annie said, “why’d Pam leave?”
“I called her Pamela.”
“That’s because you weren’t eligible for Branksome Hall.”
“The reason we separated,” I said, after I’d cleared my mouth of hamburger and bun and mustard, “was a mutual decision that Pamela should return to her own kind.”
“Migawd, Crang, you make it sound like a case study in Anthropology 101.”
“When Pamela was young, when I met her,” I said, “she had a rebellious streak.”
“Oh, sure,” Annie said. “Voted NDP once and married outside her class.”
“You’re the one who started this conversation,” I said. “You want to hear it out?”
“Sorry,” Annie said. “I promise to use my mouth henceforth for nothing