Straight No Chaser (4 page)

I walked into the living room and looked across Beverley Street into the park. The leaves on the trees were still green, and so was the grass. Verdant, I thought. A teenage girl in white painter pants and a white sleeveless blouse was perched on one of the picnic tables gently rocking a baby carriage. Two old geezers were sitting at another table playing cards. I watched the game for a few minutes. Gin rummy, it looked like.

My headache was beginning to recede. Should I interrupt the torpor of the day by chasing after Dave Goddard? What was my obligation to Dave? Was he a client? Or a friend in need? Had I botched the tailing operation? Should I make it up to Dave? Who was the guy in the beige jacket? Many more questions like those and the headache might stage a return.

I elected to postpone all decisions until after lunch and left the house on foot. My destination was the Belair Café. Annie B. Cooke was sure to be there. I'd give odds.

5

A
NNIE HAD A NOTEBOOK
laid flat on the table in front of her. Her dark head was bent low, and she was writing very quickly in the notebook.

A woman I recognized, Helga Stephenson, was taking care of the talking. Helga Stephenson had lips like Sophia Loren's, high cheekbones, a face of kinetic force. Plenty of guys must have cracked up on the shoals around Ms. Stephenson. Annie had introduced me to her a couple of times over the years. Helga Stephenson was the executive director of the Festival of Festivals.

Eleven-thirty in the morning, and the Belair was abustle. I got a table against the wall. It left a wide but mostly unobstructed space between me and Annie. I ordered a vodka and soda with a wedge of lime.

The third person in Annie's group was an overweight guy in a checked sweater and thick glasses. He looked familiar. He had a notebook too but wasn't writing. He was waiting, and not patiently. His legs jiggled under the table.

“I told you it was too early,” the kid at the table next to mine said to his friend. The kid was about seventeen, and he was twisting in his seat to look around the room.

“Last year, right over there, I saw Bertolucci drinking Perrier water,” the friend answered the kid. The friend was a girl the same age. “That table second from where the waiter's standing.”

“Could you tell who he was with? Bertolucci?” the kid asked. He had fuzz on his upper lip and scarlet acne streaked across his forehead.

“Press I suppose,” the girl answered. “Somebody boring like that.”

I squeezed the lime into my drink and prepared to sip. If the vodka gave me nausea, I might have to throw a tantrum.

“We still haven't decided about Sunday morning,” the girl at the next table said. She had skin without flaw. Life was unfair.

“Why do they make such dumb schedules?” the boy said. “The David Lynch on practically the same time as one of the Truffauts, that's maximum dumb.”

“Not as if the tickets are exactly cheap or anything,” the girl said.

“Your father paid for yours,” the boy said with the disdain only an adolescent can summon.

“It's still money, Don.”

I was a quarter of the way into the vodka and soda. Not a hint of upset tummy. All seemed copacetic with my gastric world. Annie was still writing in her notebook and still oblivious of my manly presence in the restaurant. Would she have sensed the aura of Dennis Quaid?

“We've already seen
Stolen Kisses
on TV about three times, Karen,” Don said to the girl with the perfect complexion. She had blonde hair and a little bow mouth to go with the skin.

“Plus it's on VCR,” Karen said.

“The only thing—”

Karen talked over Don. She said, her turn for disdain, “I know what you're going to say, Don. It's not the same on small screen.”

“The values, Karen,” Don said. “You have to admit.”

“I still think it's ridiculous to miss a new David Lynch,” Karen said. “There's probably going to be a hundred more Truffaut retrospectives besides this one. He is dead after all.”

Don and Karen were scrutinizing their Festival of Festivals schedule. The schedule folded accordion-style. Open, it covered most of Don and Karen's table. The Festival ran eleven days and screened maybe two hundred movies. Don and Karen may have been going for the all-time, all-world attendance record. On their schedule, there were tick marks beside four or five movies on each day. The theatres the Festival used were in midtown, an easy hike from the Belair, and Helga Stephenson's offices were around the corner on Yorkville Avenue. Proximity qualified the Belair as the Festival's unofficial watering hole. It was done in peach and grey and ficus plants and had a pianist in the bar who didn't gag at playing “Feelings” half a dozen times an evening. Bernardo Bertolucci once took Perrier at the Belair. I had Karen's word for it.

Across the room, Helga Stephenson talked, Annie wrote, and fatso jiggled. Don and Karen stewed over the Sunday-morning blank space. I willed them to take the old François Truffaut instead of the new Dave Lynch. When I saw
Blue Velvet
, I came down with a severe case of the heebie-jeebies. To celebrate my recovery from the Wyborowa trauma of the night before, I asked the waiter for another vodka and soda.

Don cranked his head around the room and turned back to Karen in high excitement.

“Roger Ebert,” he said. His voice cracked.

“Oh wild,” Karen said. Her voice didn't crack. “With those two women in the corner.”

Don and Karen had it right. Roger Ebert was the jiggler with Annie and Helga Stephenson. Could Gene Siskel be far behind?

Annie folded her notebook, stood up, and smiled at Helga and Roger. Annie had a sneaky smile. She turned it on, and you felt select. She turned it off, and you noticed an ache in your heart that didn't use to be there. Annie was petite, as they would say in
Vogue
. No bigger than a minute, as my old mother would have said. Her hair was black like midnight is black, and she wore it cut in a tight cap around her head. She had on a pale-blue denim dress that buttoned down the front and stopped within hailing distance of her knees. Her leather shoes, flats, were the same pale-blue, and the only jewellery that adorned her person was a small gold pocket watch on a gold chain around her neck. Annie saw me, and I got the smile. I knew all about the ache in the heart. So far, two years of Annie and me, the ache hadn't come close to permanent.

“Aren't you just full of surprises,” Annie said. She leaned over my table and kissed me lightly on the lips.“You're supposed to be in court. Your Arizona man.”

“The judge gave us a holiday,” I said. “You were in swift company over there.”

“Roger? He and Gene Siskel come up for the Chicago papers every year.”

Silence emanated from the next table. Don was tilting in Annie's direction. Karen, more subtle in the arts of eavesdropping, sat upright and stared straight ahead.

I said to Annie, “It's Oklahoma, by the way, the scheme my guy's charged with.”

“Sweetie pie, is the state relevant?”

“It could be Delaware, in your view, and my guy'd still be guilty?”

“I couldn't have phrased it more cogently.”

Annie didn't disapprove of all my clients. Ninety-nine per cent of them.

“Your pal Roger seemed antsy,” I said. Don and Karen would be grateful for the change in topic back to movie personnel.

“He thought he'd scare me off with his big rep,” Annie said. “It was my appointment with Helga, and dammit, I needed every second.”

“Fill your notebook?”

“Crang, this year, seriously, it's freelance heaven.” Annie's deepbrown eyes shone. “I've got
Metro Morning
same as usual, but it's stepped up to five minutes every single day of the Festival. Television,
The Journal
's having me on for a wrap-up panel a week from Friday. And last night I get a call from San Francisco, the
Chronicle
. Their regular guy's all of a sudden sick, and would I file two big pieces? You impressed?”

“Pauline Kael, step aside.”

Annie reviewed movies. She had one steady gig. It was radio, twice-a-week commentaries on the local CBC wake-up program. For the rest, she scrambled. Articles in
Premiere Magazine
, sometimes a radio documentary, guest spots on TV. It made for a precarious career.

“Helga's setting me up for the major leagues,” Annie said. “Get this, a half-hour interview Tuesday night with Daniel Day-Lewis.”

Don made motions like he might fall out of his chair.

I said, “The English guy, that Daniel Day-Lewis? Handsome, young, talented, probably articulate?”

“The material I can get,” Annie said, “all the radio producers, newspaper editors, they'll be kissing me on both cheeks.”

“Daniel Day-Lewis, the guy the two women in the movie you took me to year before last went crazy over?”

“
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
.”

“The same reaction to Daniel Day-Lewis among women, I imagine, applies off the screen.”

Karen's head made a nod that I assumed to be of enthusiastic affirmation.

Annie said, “If this is jealousy, Crang, put a sock in it. I need you for something else.”

“My charm?”

“Later,” Annie said. “Right now, it's information.”

“Charm comes free. Information, I turn the meter on.”

“Suppose I ask my questions, and you answer charmingly.”

“You want to order an expensive lunch while we talk?”

“Just a spritzer,” Annie said. “Well eat at the press conference.”

“What press conference?”

“The one I need the information for.”

A waiter sauntered by to bring Coke refills for Don and Karen. I asked for Annie's spritzer. Was Don unaware of the red horrors the sugar was wreaking on his forehead?

Annie flipped through her notebook to a blank page.

She said to me, “A man in your racket, criminal lawyer by the name of F. Cameron Charles.”

“Sure,” I said. “Classmate of mine at law school, and today the Clarence Darrow of his time and place.”

“He's that good?”

“According to Cam he is.”

“I see,” Annie said. “We're dealing with an ego.”

“Like the CN Tower.”

Annie's spritzer arrived.

“Maybe I'm ahead of you on this, kiddo,” I said.“Cam's on the Festival of Festivals board. That's the reason for the questions?”

“Him on the board is last year's news.”

“Yeah? What's the latest poop?”

Annie held her wine glass by the stem and took a tiny sip.

She said, “Charles's fronting a counter-festival. I don't know who's actually booking the films. Guess we'll find out more at the press conference. Anyway, Charles's name is on top of the information releases, and his office is listed as the festival's headquarters. He resigned from the Festival of Festivals board in the spring and started this new deal. The Alternate Film Festival it's called.”

“Cam, it sounds like, is going head to head with Helga Stephenson.”

“Almost,” Annie said. “The Alternate starts Sunday night and runs to Saturday. That makes a fairly consistent overlap with the Festival of Festivals.”

“Enterprise like that, it doesn't strike me as one of the great and wise commercial decisions.”

“Helga isn't particularly bothered,” Annie said. “Actually, Charles is going at it pretty intelligently. Keeping everything small-scale but quite interesting. He's using one theatre only, the Eglinton, which is the nicest in the city if you ask me, and he's got a festival theme of sorts.”

“What sort?”

“Mildly radical, I guess you could say,” Annie said. “Movies from Third World countries, movies black people made in Chicago on small budgets. Minorities stuff. Chicanos in New Mexico, like that.”

I said, “Right up Cam's alley.”

“Well, tell me. What I need's background. How come a criminal lawyer's doing a movie festival?”

Don and Karen didn't care to know the answer to Annie's question. They checked out of our conversation and returned to the dilemma of their Sunday-morning movie. Annie took another miniature taste from her spritzer. She'd made a half-dozen passes at the drink, and the level of wine, soda and melting ice hadn't dropped a quarter-inch. She was thirty-five years old and hadn't learned to drink like a man.

I said, “Cam's speciality is minorities. In his law practice I'm talking about. People he acts for, they're, oh, Jamaican guys charged in stick-ups. Hong Kong kids doing extortion over in Chinatown. What else? Sikh bombers. Those are Cam's clients. He defended the Moonies last year.”

“Moonies?” Annie said. “They don't go with the rest.”

“Just because a group is rich and diabolical doesn't mean it can't be a minority.”

“The Reverend Sun Myung Moon aside,” Annie said, “your friend Cam sounds okay. Altruistic I might describe him.”

“Some of my colleagues at the criminal bar say Cam's the only lawyer in town can afford his clientele.”

“Well, well, aren't we snide at the criminal bar.”

“Cam isn't, by the way,” I said, “my friend.”

“No?”

“He thinks I'm frivolous.”

“Now I'm really panting to meet Cameron Charles.”

I said, “The point about Cam affording the Jamaicans and the Sikhs and the Hong Kong kids, it's usually Legal Aid pays their bills. Pays little, I probably told you before, and pays late. And Cam—here's the real point—he's conspicuously wealthy.”

“Not from the law, I take it.”

“From Dad and Granddad. Those signs on construction sites all over the city are theirs. CharlesCorp. They build condos.”

Annie jotted a couple of lines on the notebook's blank pages. The ice was melting more rapidly in her glass, and the level of liquid was approaching the overflow mark.