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 were laying something on me back there, man?” Dave said to me.
“I was.”
I intended to offer Dave a couple of reasons for excluding me from his scheme. Dignity, for one reason. It wouldn’t be dignified for a lawyer like me, not precisely a pillar of the bar but still a criminal counsel with eighteen years’ worth of plucky service in the courtrooms of Toronto, to do a Philip Marlowe. That’s what I intended to say. But I couldn’t get the words out, not with Dave Goddard the jazz musician asking me for this favour. The hell with dignity.
“Okay, Dave,” I said, “what’s the gent on your case look like when he’s on your case?”
“Man, I’m sitting here rapping with you and he’s making the scene.”
“He’s in the club now?”
“Would I shuck you?”
“Suppose not.”
I started to turn my head for a survey of the room.
“Don’t avert your eyes, man,” Dave said.
Avert? Was that a piece of hip phraseology I’d missed out on? I left my eyes on Dave.
“The dude’s sitting at the bar,” Dave said. “I’ll give you the word when to peek. Far end of the bar.”
Dave’s off-centre eye alignment must have yielded an edge in the vision department. He didn’t have to avert his eyes to sneak a peek.
“Go, man,” Dave said.
I turned my head. The bar ran along the back of Chase’s. Photographs of musicians who’d worked the room over the years hung on the wall behind the bar. The club was three-quarters full, a very good house for a Wednesday night. I glanced to the end of the bar long enough to register the man sitting on the last stool. He had on a beige jacket and was drinking a glass of beer. He was looking straight ahead toward the bandstand. Not for long. His head twitched in the direction of Dave and me. I turned back to Dave. The beige jacket I was sure of. The guy may also have had thinning hair and a small moustache.
“Man in the beige jacket,” I said to Dave.
“Bald dude,” Dave said.
Ah.
“Got a moustache,” Dave said.
Double ah. The powers of observation remained intact.
“The jacket,” I said, “with it, he’ll stand out in a crowd.”
Dave’s expression didn’t change, but his voice edged up a notch in volume. “This mean you’re in, man?” he said.
“I’ll follow your buddy, Dave. But before we decide the next move from there, we regroup for further strategy.”
“Mellow.”
“Right, Dave.”
Dave Goddard was a man locked into the late 1940s. His language. His clothes. His music. He blew the tenor saxophone the way Stan Getz and Zoot Sims blew theirs in Woody Herman’s orchestra when it was called the Four Brothers Band. That was 1948. Getz and Sims let their styles evolve over the years. Dave held firm with his. His sound was light and feathery, and he shaped his solos in graceful little arcs. Dave hadn’t seemed to notice the passing of the last four decades. But his playing kept him employed. Maybe it was his Canadian origins. That was quaint for a jazz musician.
When I was a kid, I heard Dave play at concerts and clubs around town. Dave was a Toronto guy. His playing used to send little thrills through me. It still did. When Montreal was the hot Canadian jazz city, Dave lived there. All the clubs booked him. Same with Vancouver. Sometimes things broke exactly right for Dave and he toured Europe and Japan, played clubs in California and Manhattan. Usually he went as a sideman in somebody else’s group, somebody with a big name. Dave could always fit in.
He wasn’t an anachronism, more like a man who’d found the perfect year and decided to cling to it. Dave’s year happened to be 1948. I’d have to ask him where he found the Mr. B shirts in 1989.
“Hold tight till one bell, man,” Dave said.
He wanted me to wait until one o’clock.
It was time for the last set of the night. Dave stood up and walked toward Chase’s tiny bandstand. When Dave walked, he took long, deliberate strides. His body moved in sections.
The waiter in the stained red jacket chugged back to the table. He was carrying a glass Silex coffee pot.
“Too late for Mr. Dave?” he asked.
“Beats me.”
2
