“But the Cameron, Dave?”
I was still wearing the astonished expression. The Cameron House was home to the chic young musical crowd. Electric pianos, synthesizers, fusion. To the Cameron bunch, fusion meant mixing jazz with rock, folk, salsa, other musical detritus. To me, it meant dilution of the only music that counted. Jazz. Scornful me.
“Give it a chance, man,” Dave said. “The kids over there, they dig what I’m laying down.”
“See you as an elder statesman maybe.”
“Whatever,” Dave said. “A young cat fixed me with a freebie room for the week.”
“On the House?”
“On the young cat.”
“The kids may be salt of the earth, Dave. Forgive me if I don’t get excited about their music.”
Harp Manley’s voice drifted over from a table near the bandstand. Harp had a high-pitched voice. It made an odd match with his portly body. He was sitting with a group of middle-aged fans who appeared delighted to be in Harp’s presence. Bet they were as narrow-minded about jazz as I was. Around the rest of the room, patrons were taking care of essential business, ordering the last drink, paying the bill, heading for the door. The man in the beige jacket was holding steady at the end of the bar.
Dave said to me, “Your chorus, man.”
He meant that I should take up position for my tailing operation. I was a whiz at interpreting Dave’s messages. Twenty-five bucks seemed enough to deal with two vodkas, the cover charge, and a tip for Speedy Gonzales. I dropped two tens and a five on the table, and squeezed my way through chairs and tables and people toward the door. While squeezing, I affected an air of nonchalance. It was designed to throw Beige Jacket off the scent. Never would he suspect the intrepid Crang had his number.
Outside Chase’s, the air was windless and dulcet and had the soft feel you sometimes get in early September. A Department of Public Works truck had passed a few minutes earlier and done a wash job on the pavement. Toronto the Scrubbed. The street was Queen, and I crossed it, over the streetcar tracks, and stood deep in the doorway of a second-hand paperback store.
Chase’s Club was on the north side of Queen two blocks and a bit west of University Avenue. The place was owned by a canny gent named Abner Chase who was fond enough of jazz that he’d kept his club in musical business for thirty years, even when jazz slumped as a consistent drawing card. Abner did a brisk lunch trade that offset the slow jazz nights. The major attraction at noon was the salad bar. It was fifty feet long and currently featured arugula.
I waited ten minutes. It was one-thirty. Three streetcars swayed by, one eastbound, two westbound. Clumps of people left the club. I recognized the jolly group that had been at Harp Manley’s feet. The neon sign over the door into the club blinked off. It spelled Chase’s minus the apostrophe. Without the neon, the street turned marginally darker.
Dave Goddard came out of the club five minutes later. He had the shiny saxophone case in his right hand. I tensed for action. Dave paused, pivoted to the right, and set off along Queen to the west at his gait of the long lopes. He got two dozen lopes down the street and the man in the beige jacket emerged from Chase’s. He too hove to the right and travelled west about twenty yards back of Dave. I waited a few seconds and enlisted in the migration. Westward ho.
Beige Jacket looked more formidable standing up and moving than sitting down and drinking. He was about my height, just under six feet, but had me beat in the tonnage department. I weighed one-seventy. Beige Jacket would clock in at fifty pounds over that. Most of the weight was concentrated in his upper body. He had a stiff, squared-off look, like Raymond Burr when he played Perry Mason.
Dave crossed Beverley Street and passed the Bakka science-fiction bookstore. Beige Jacket did likewise. On my side of the street, the south, it was restaurant row. Le Marais. Chicago’s. Le Bistingo. I’d dined in all. Some of their maîtres d’ knew me by name. Gave me a table in the window. All that heady stuff. I was a neighbour. When I got out of law school, I opened a practice in an office on Queen over a Czech ma-and-pa hardware store. That was before the street changed in the direction of gentrification. Now it was trendy restaurants and medium-couture shoppes. The Czech ma and pa were squeezed out by a boutique called Trapezoid that offered a line in leatherware to all sexes. Only two establishments remained from the Queen West of eighteen years earlier, a branch of the Legion and my office. A sturdy duo.
Dave’s stride was deceptive, much faster than it looked. It meant he, Beige Jacket, and I were covering the sidewalks at a lively clip, each of us holding at the distances we set at the beginning of the adventure. Beige Jacket was twenty yards behind Dave, and I was ten yards and the width of Queen to the rear of Beige Jacket. Apart from us, the street was sparsely populated. A bunch of kids were yakking it up outside the Bamboo Club on the north side. Dave passed them, passed Trapezoid and my office, and stopped for the red light at Queen and Spadina.
I dropped into the shadows of the entrance to Makos Furs at the southeast corner of the intersection and watched Dave and Beige Jacket cross Spadina Avenue. Spadina is as wide as the Gobi, and all the lurking in the Makos entrance opened the gap between me and Beige Jacket to fifty yards. The lights changed again, red to green, and I took up the trip across Spadina at something between a trot and a scuttle.
The Cameron House is a short block west of Spadina at the corner of Queen and a street called Cameron Avenue. Hence the hotel’s name. By the time I crossed Spadina, Dave and Beige Jacket had turned the corner at Cameron and disappeared from sight. I escalated my speed from trot and scuttle to sprint.
The Cameron is four storeys of brick that someone decided would look good in black paint. On its Cameron Avenue side, gaudy murals that reach as high as the second floor interrupt the black. The entrance door to the hotel is positioned mid-mural about halfway up the street. Dave was standing outside the door when my sprint brought him back into sight, and he seemed to be in distress.
Beige Jacket had caught up to Dave, and the two were performing a bizarre fandango. Beige Jacket was trying to yank the saxophone case from Dave’s grasp. Dave was resisting mightily.
I was still on the south side of Queen. A passing streetcar blocked my view of the tussle over the saxophone for five seconds.
The streetcar got by. Beige Jacket had the case in his hands and was running north on Cameron. Dave was in pursuit. Beige Jacket had impressive speed for a top-heavy guy. He was ten yards up on Dave.
I jogged to the centre of Queen. Beige Jacket rounded the north corner of the Cameron House. Dave followed. I waited for a Weston Foods transport trailer to rumble by in the north lane.
I ran up Cameron past the murals. No time to admire art. There seemed to be an alley running behind the Cameron House where Beige Jacket and Dave had turned in. I reached the north corner of the Cameron House. There was an alley, but there was no Beige Jacket, no Dave.
I checked out the terrain. The alley had three or four faint overhead lights that broke dim holes in the darkness. There was a pickup truck parked against the back wall of the Cameron. It had tires that a Brobdingnagian must have ordered. There were no other vehicles further down the alley. Nothing stirred. All I had to contend with was silence. For a semi-brave chap, that seemed sufficient.
I walked deeper into the alley until I was even with the pickup. Its huge tires lifted the back of the truck a couple of feet over my head. I counted my footsteps. Eight of them took me past the truck. The ground under my shoes made a light crunching noise. The alley was paved but covered in a coating of sand and grit.
I stopped.
There was nothing that caught my eye.
But something caught my ear.
It was more of the light crunching sound. And it didn’t come from under my shoes. It came from behind me.
I started to turn my head. It didn’t get far. A very hard object struck the back of it with a purposeful force.
The