“You’re all right?” Annie asked. “Nothing violent done to you?”
“Piece of cake.”
There was something familiar about the cops and the cruiser out front. The cruiser number was 3148. Oh-oh. The two cops were the smoker and the apple-eater from the encounter early Saturday morning. Annie was saying on the phone that she was ahead of schedule and she’d be done with editing the tapes by dinnertime. I interrupted her.
“Maybe nine o’clock for the champagne,” I said. “I see an extra hour of explaining coming my way. Can you wait?”
Annie said she’d consider waiting forever. I said it wouldn’t take that long. Not quite. I hung up the phone and went to let the cops in.
1
DAVE GODDARD was asking me to tail a guy he said was tailing him.
I said, “At law school, Dave, when I went, I don’t recall they taught a course in close and surreptitious pursuit.”
“The reason I flashed on you for the gig, man, you’re a criminal lawyer.”
“You got that part right, Dave.”
“So dig this, you’re a criminal lawyer, and the thing going down, this dude on my case, it’s a crime.”
“Watching and besetting maybe.”
“That’s no jive, man.”
“Dave, when I said watching and besetting, that’s what we lawyers call legal wit.”
Dave wasn’t in the mood for legal wit. He had a cup of coffee in front of him. I was drinking vodka on the rocks. It was a few minutes after midnight, and we were sitting at the table in Chase’s Club reserved for musicians. The table was next to the door into the kitchen.
“Here’s the deal, man.” Dave leaned six inches over the table. “The dude follows me to my pad. You follow the dude. I fall into bed.”
Dave stopped talking. He was still leaning.
I said, “That seems to leave me and your alleged tail all by ourselves on the street.”
“Wait for it, man,” Dave said. “What this dude’s gonna do, me down for the night, you dig, he’s gonna head back to his own pad. You with me, man?”
I said, “And I keep him company at a discreet distance. Which gets us the gentleman’s address and eventually his name.”
Dave signified his pleasure.
“Solid,” he said.
“I’m a quick study, Dave.”
I let a beat of silence go by. Dave swallowed from his cup of coffee. Black with enough sugar to give an ordinary man diabetes.
“What if I have a doubt or two?” I said.
Dave put down his coffee cup.
He said, “Crang, the dude’s not how you said. Alleged? Last two days, he’s right there. I look, dude’s back there. Yesterday afternoon, I’m in my room at the hotel, TV’s on, I’m laid out on the bed watching my soaps, somebody starts working on the lock from out in the hall. ‘Hey’, I holler. Whoever’s out there splits. It had to be the same dude.”
“Sounds persuasive, Dave.”
I lied. Dave wasn’t persuading me to take part in his dingbat enterprise. But just because it was Dave, I was willing to sit at the table in Chase’s while he tried more persuading.
Dave was a tall, reedy guy in his late fifties, about fifteen years older than me. His face was oval-shaped, the kind you usually see on a woman. It looked fine on Dave. He had a head of hair that was still dark, still full. One of his eyes was a fraction off-centre. I think it was the right. When he talked to me, the left was the eye that seemed to be staring into mine. Dave had on a lightweight brown sports jacket and a pale-brown shirt. The jacket had no lapels, and the shirt had a roll collar like the kind Billy Eckstine used to wear. Maybe Mr. B still wears them. A thin leather strap was looped around Dave’s neck and hung almost to his waist. A metal clip was fixed to the end of the strap. It held Dave’s tenor saxophone when he played. Dave was a jazz musician. In my value system, that gave Dave a status close to heroic. Should a grown man have a hero? Soft spot maybe. I had a soft spot for Dave, and it made me more patient than I’d otherwise be with the talk about trailing a stranger who was trailing Dave.
I said, “Let me suggest something else, Dave, an alternate plan.”
Dave focussed his left eye on me.
I said,“Why not step up to the gent and ask how come the fascination with you?”
Dave raised both hands and made shooing motions.
“Definitely no eyes for that, man,” he said.
“Understand, Dave, I’m doing what a lawyer’s supposed to do.”
“Man?”
“Ask questions.”
“I’m hip.”
“So what’s wrong with the frontal approach?” I asked. “The guy may be about as threatening as a shy fan.”
“Not this dude.” Dave went into his leaning routine. “See, the amount of years I been on the scene, I can suss when a cat’s not cool. This dude isn’t. Maybe I crossed him somewhere a long time back. You remember what I was like ten, fifteen years ago, juicing, sticking needles in my arm, all that shit. I did far-out numbers I didn’t know I was doing. Maybe this dude, he’s somebody I ripped off. Who knows? Cat could be pissed at me from way back.”
“Getting even?” I said. “That’s what you think the guy doing the following is all about?”
Dave shrugged.
A waiter in a black bow tie and a red jacket with stains down the front put a tray of drinks on the table at my elbow. I moved my elbow. It was a protective measure. I was wearing my Cy Mann navy blue. Twelve hundred dollars of suit, the most extravagant garment in my wardrobe. The waiter mused over the tray and selected a glass from the collection. He placed it in front of me. I hoped it was vodka and ice. The waiter performed his duties in slow motion. Probably didn’t want to get more stains on the jacket. I tasted the drink. The vodka was the bar variety, sweet and lacking in punch. The ice was the genuine article.
“How I read it,” I said to Dave, “you may have things wrong way round.”
“You don’t want another vodka?” the waiter said to me.
“Not you,” I said to the waiter. “Fine with the drink.”
“First was a vodka. You ask for another, I figure you mean same as before.”
“I was talking to the other gentleman.”
“Something wrong with the coffee, Mr. Dave?” the waiter asked Dave.
Dave said, “Kinda chilled out now you mention it, man.”
The conversation was getting away from me. Not that I had much grip on it from the time I arrived at Chase’s to keep the appointment with Dave Goddard.
“You want me to top it up?” the waiter asked Dave.
“You don’t mind, man?”
“A pleasure.”
The waiter needed twenty seconds of slow-mo lifting to reclaim the tray of drinks and amble in search of fresh coffee.
“You