I’m fucked,” Dave said.
He sat on the sofa. I sat in a wing chair that was positioned kitty-corner to the sofa. Annie took charge of my furniture and its arrangement a year earlier. The wing chair was in a pattern of pale-green and brown stripes.
“You got a driver’s licence, Dave?”
“Where you at, man? Driver’s licence got nothing to do here. This’s murder I’m in shit about.”
“You got one?”
“I been driving since I was, like, sixteen.”
“You can borrow my car. A place to stay, you got that? Quiet, out in the country, a place like that?”
“Ralph’s cottage. But, man, I didn’t kill anybody. I had the strap, I said already, forty years. You think I’d leave it around the dude’s neck?”
“Where’s Ralph’s cottage?”
“Muskoka. Well, not exactly Muskoka. It isn’t on the water or anything. Kind of back in the woods. I hate it, man.”
“Borrow my car, okay? Drive up there, to Ralph’s Muskoka cottage, but don’t tell Ralph. Can you get into it otherwise, without Ralph knowing?”
“There’s a key, Ralph leaves it in this shed. But, man, you don’t know, owls, crickets, it’s noisy. All those birds, the kind of animals they are, they’re out of tune.”
“Take my car. Never mind the musical judgments about the owls. Just drive up there. There’s a phone?”
Dave nodded.
“Car’s out back, the white Beetle,” I said. “Pick up your stuff at the Cameron and call me from Ralph’s place so I know you got there. It’ll take you, go up the 400, cut over at 11, how long, three hours?”
“Less. Except, man, what am I dodging up there for? I had nothing on with the dead guy I know of.”
“It’s your strap killed him.”
“I don’t dig this scene.”
“Dave, I’m advising you now partly like a lawyer and partly like a guy in a George Raft movie. Get out of town. I got an idea, two or three of them, and it’d be better in all ways if I have a free hand to follow up on them. You around, get arrested, I’d be using up time out at the jail, doing a bail application, talking to the homicide people, that kind of dance. For both our sakes, I know it’s unorthodox, drive up to Ralph’s tonight.”
“I don’t get it, what’s going down.”
“Neither do I, and I was the guy in the closet.”
I took Dave back downstairs and around to the alley where the Beetle was parked. First crack, he missed the timing between the clutch and the accelerator, and stalled the engine. Second crack, he steered smoothly out of the alley. I forgot to tell him to stick to the inside lane on the highway. Dave’d learn.
My second Wyborowa wasn’t as large as the first. I sat in the kitchen with it and the phone book. Trevor Dalgleish had two entries, home and office. The office was on John Street. Cam Charles & Associates, of whom Trevor Dalgleish was one, worked out of a renovated house downtown near the Amsterdam Café. It had three storeys with a lot of glass and ferns and native Canadian art. Dalgleish’s home was on Admiral Road, and the phone number began with 921. Admiral was a short, windy street in an enclave of large one-family houses between Avenue Road and St. George Street. For a young lawyer, a criminal lawyer, Trevor had a swell address.
It was almost two o’clock. I could telephone Dalgleish and ask him about Raymond Fenk or I could wait till first light. First light seemed more civilized. Calling Dalgleish was my number one idea. I told Dave I had two or three ideas. I exaggerated. The case was hurling me into a moral abyss. Prevaricating, postponing, exaggerating. I went in search of the Gene Lees book and the chapter on Edith Piaf.
17
CAM CHARLES’S phone call came at orange-juicing time. Fourteen minutes past nine.
I said, “You rad lawyers get a fast jump on Sunday office hours.”
“I’m at home, Crang.”
“Me too. That keeps us even so far.”
“Obviously I know where you are.” Cam caught himself. “Why am I always getting into foolish exchanges with you?”
“Must be chemistry.”
“I’d like us to meet this morning.”
“See, I told you it was chemistry.”
“If you can grasp this, Crang, I want the meeting to be confidential.”
“What you mean, you don’t want me around your office.”
“Correct.”
“Or home. I might lower the tone.”
“There’s a potential problem, and I hate to say this, you may be the man I need to find out how close to real it is.”
I asked, “This wouldn’t, any chance, have something to do with the late Raymond Fenk?”
Cam hesitated.
He said finally, “It may have to do with a lot of unpleasant things, but not that one.”
“I have to say, Cam, I admire your way with the auxiliary verbs.”
“What?”
“All those mays.”
“Crang, can we just for God’s sake make an appointment.”
“Some place off the beaten track.”
“For reasons I haven’t got time to go into right now, I don’t want anyone from my office seeing us together, anyone from the criminal bar for that matter, and people from my firm happen to be in the house at this moment.”
Cam lived in a big house in Forest Hill. Trevor Dalgleish lived in a house on Admiral Road that had to be just as big. Where did I go wrong?
“I got the perfect spot,” I said.
“Where?”
“The AGO.”
Silence from Cam’s end.
“You know,” I said, “paintings on the wall, Henry Moores on the floor.”
“I know the art gallery, Crang. I’m thinking about it for a meeting place. Weighing it.”
“All the criminal lawyers I ever heard of ’ll be in bed or out visiting clients at West End Detention.”
“You’re probably right.”
“One thing,
