lapels.”
“I think we’ve got the identity problem licked.”
“Right now,” the woman said, triumphantly I thought, “he’s at work down the street, the guy you’re looking for.”
I had a feeling I wasn’t going to locate Dave in the very immediate future. I had another feeling. Exasperation. Two in the morning was a dumb hour for a lawyer who’d been bopped on the bean to be gadding about the bohemian byways of the city.
“Well, no,” I said to the woman. “When last seen, a few minutes ago, Dave Goddard was outside this very hotel.”
“Who last saw him?”
“I.”
“That gives you the edge on me.”
The bar was no bigger than my living room and not as cunningly furnished. Everything looked like it’d come from a basic-black sale, the small round tables, the leather banquettes. The air was an advertisement for black-lung disease.
I gave the woman one more shot.
I said, “Correct me if I’ve got it wrong. Dave Goddard, the man I’m trying to locate, he’s staying here, far as you know?”
“Jim Kirk lent the guy his room while he’s doing places up north with his band. Timmins. Sudbury. Jim’s got two-nighters each place.”
“Jim Kirk?”
“Keyboard man.”
She would say keyboard man. What happened to pianist?
I said, “Which would Jim’s room be?”
“Top floor, very front,” the woman said. “I’m on the second at the back.”
“You live here too?”
“I’m a singer.” The young woman took her finger from its place on the Nowad. “I do kind of an Ella Fitzgerald act. Scat on ‘Lady Be Good’, cover the Duke Ellington songbook, material like that, you know? I got a special arrangement on ‘A-tisket, A-tasket’.”
This was musical progress. On the other hand, Linda Ronstadt recorded albums that destroyed the works of Porter,Arlen, and Rodgers and Hart. I elected not to pursue the subject of Ella Fitzgerald.
“When it’s slow with the act,” the young woman said, “I waitress.”
I couldn’t help myself.
I said, “Oh my, the terrible things happening to verbs.”
“Say what?”
“Access. Impact. It’s computers. Inducing illiteracy.”
“What’s the story, guy?”
“To waitress isn’t a verb.”
“For a person looks like he’s been rolling in the sandbox,” the young woman said, “you’re talking awful picky.”
I was in danger of losing her to Now.
“Sorry,” I said, and meant it. “It’s been an awkward evening.”
The young woman’s finger was back on the ads. Her eyes were sure to follow.
I said, “Be a problem about me tapping on Dave’s door?”
“Fine by me,” the young woman said. Her head had dropped down. “One thing, that’s the wrong possessive.”
“How so?” I asked the top of her frizz.
“It’s Jim’s door.”
The stairway was narrow all the way to the top, four flights up. Sounds of television sets and record players came faintly from behind the doors. Inside, the rooms may have been heavenly little oases. Out in the hall, it felt like the Gulag Archipelago.
Jim Kirk’s door had an advertisement for Yamaha Pianos pasted in the centre with Kirk’s own name neatly printed in block letters along the top of the ad.
I knocked softly on the door.
Nothing stirred inside.
I knocked more vigorously.
A door opened behind me, and I looked back. A man was leaning out of a room halfway between me and the stairs. He was Oriental and didn’t have a shirt on.
“Nobody’s home down there,” the man said.
“What about the temporary tenant? Dave Goddard?”
“Still working up the street.”
That made it unanimous.
I went down the stairs. The Ella Fitzgerald act was still analyzing Now’s personals. With her brand of respect for the printed word, she might be able to decipher the graffiti on the garage door out back. I left the Cameron and walked home.
It wasn’t far, east on Queen to Beverley Street, left turn, and north for three and a quarter blocks. I own a duplex that looks across Beverley to the orderly park behind the Art Gallery of Ontario. Two gay chaps named Ian and Alex and their Irish setter rent the apartment downstairs. I live upstairs. The setter’s name is Genet.
In the kitchen, I took the bottle of Wyborowa out of the freezer and poured an inch and a half into an old-fashioned glass without ice. When I raised the glass to my mouth, I felt nauseated. That wasn’t the reaction Polish vodka customarily induced in me. The bang on the head must have been kicking in on a delayed reaction. I poured the Wyborowa back in the bottle without losing a drop and switched to milk.
I drank two glasses and took my nausea to bed.
4
IT WAS LATER than it was supposed to be.
I switched on the small black Sony radio on the table beside the bed and heard Peter Gzowski’s voice. Peter Gzowski’s program comes on the CBC at 9:05. My usual waking hour is seven-thirty. I looked at the small black Sony clock behind the radio. It said nine-fifty. Something else was different. I had a headache.
I put on my maroon cotton dressing gown, a birthday present from Annie B. Cooke, and carried the radio into the bathroom. Gzowski was interviewing a Hungarian movie director who was in town for the Festival of Festivals. Whatever pain reliever nine out of ten doctors would take to a desert island wasn’t in my bathroom cabinet. I filled the sink with cold water and held my face in it. Gzowski thanked the Hungarian movie director and took a break for the ten o’clock news. Who would trust a doctor who’d pack a pain reliever on a trip to a desert island?
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