LITMIR.BIZ

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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 on his shirt the same size as lapels on a jacket?”

      “Right again.”

      “Which he hasn’t got anyway, the 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

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