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 alley rose up to smack my face. Or my face fell down to hit the alley. Either way, there was nothing behind my eyeballs except a black abyss.
3
THE WORST PART was I had on the Cy Mann navy blue.
Most days I go casual to the office. Jeans, work shirt, Rockport Walkers on my feet. Days I’m in court, I wear the Cy Mann. This had been one of those days, and with me spread out in the alley behind the Cameron House, the suit was bound to be losing its flare.
“Shit,” I said, not to myself. Out loud.
I opened my eyes. My line of vision was aimed at a garage on the south side of the alley. There was a sentence spray-painted on the garage door. “The moon is full of roses and bum cheese.” How enigmatic. How ridiculous. What did it mean? I pondered the question with a clear head. That surprised me. I’d been KO’d, and my head was clear. No buzzing, no ache, no dizzy spell.
I stood up and felt a tad light-headed. Nothing more life-threatening. The damage was to the suit. I brushed at the grey dust that covered my jacket and pants. The dust was stubborn, and all that my brushing accomplished was to blend the grey of the dust more intrinsically with the blue of the fabric.
My watch said it was exactly two o’clock. I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a minute, not long enough to destroy many brain cells but long enough for the alley to empty of friend and foe. There was nothing back there except me and the graffiti.
I walked past the pickup truck with the oversized tires, out of the alley, and back down the street to the door into the Cameron. A sticker on the door said “Pull”. I pulled. The hall inside was narrow, and a mad muralist had wreaked his artistic will on its walls. Green fish with bulging eyes swam in a sea of vibrant pink. At the end of the hall, another corridor, equally narrow, branched left and right. I chose left and stepped into the Cameron’s bar. It was almost empty.
The room’s only occupant was a woman sitting at one of the small round tables that lined both walls. She was drinking from a can of Diet Coke and reading the personals section of Now.
It’s the weekly that caters to what passes for the Toronto counterculture these days. The woman was in her late twenties and had pale skin, frizzed brown hair, and a figure that in polite circles is generally called full. She was wearing a peasant blouse that scooped low across her breasts. Now’s personals must have been juicy. The woman didn’t look up from them until I spoke.
I said, “Wonder if you could help me?”
The woman let her eyes run up my suit to my face. It took five seconds.
“I would,” she said, “except I don’t do dry cleaning.”
She had a light voice.
“A man stays here named Dave Goddard,” I said. “You happen to know did he come through here the last ten minutes?”
“Guy talks like a Jack Kerouac novel?” the woman asked. She kept her finger on a Now ad.
I said, “That’d be Dave.”
“Got funny eyes?”
“Those too.”
“Collars
