Blood Count, page 14
I stopped and got out of the Volks. My movements were gingerly. I walked in little circles and shook loose the coffee that hadn’t settled into my flannels to stay. I experimented with my sport jacket, arranging it to cover the big stain. It didn’t work.
The hell with it. I let the jacket hang straight and went into the Waterfront Tennis Club.
“Hi there, can I help you? I’m Monica.”
The voice, unbelievably vivid for the hour, came from a young woman seated behind a waist-high counter. She had a handsome face and a smile like Marilyn Monroe’s.
“Hi, ah, Monica.”
The young woman’s view was confined to my upper half, but the brilliance of her greeting increased my self-consciousness over the unseemly dark spot.
“Would you like a tour of the courts?” Monica asked me. “There’re seven of them. Look over the facilities?”
“Well, yeah, I play tennis,” I said, “but not much recently. My old club folded.”
“The Downtown, right? Okay, you’d love it here. Tons of old Downtown members came to us.”
“Great. But at the moment, this morning, I’m waiting to see Mr. Rowbottom.”
“David? He’s in the Early Bird Clinic. You can wait for him in the dining room,” Monica said, standing up and pointing down a short hall. “And help yourself to —” she spotted the stain “— fresh coffee.”
Monica turned up her smile to full blast.
“And the men’s room’s over there,” she said. “It has lots of towels.”
I slunk into the washroom and applied towels to my flannels. When the wet spot appeared to have returned to a colour approximating the rest of the pants, I walked into the dining room, shoulders back, as confident as a Miss Canada candidate stepping out on centre stage.
People in sweaty tennis clothes sat drinking orange juice and chewing on Danishes. I gathered myself a tray of juice, muffin, and coffee and carried it down some stairs to the dining room’s lower level next to the windows. They looked across the harbour to the crescent-shaped grouping of the Toronto Islands. There was a handful of sailboats on the water, and a tubby old ferry plowed its way to Ward’s Island. I relaxed.
David Rowbottom caught me an hour and a half later in a daydream by the window.
“I’m told you’re waiting to see me,” he said.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, thanks.”
“I’m pressed for time. What is it?”
“We have mutual concerns,” I said. “They need discussing.”
Rowbottom looked me over. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“We talked on the phone,” I said. “You did the talking. I listened. Monday morning around ten fifteen.”
Rowbottom sat down across from me. He was a lanky guy in his mid-forties and had high, hunched-forward shoulders. He had the kind of build no amount of expensive dressing can disguise. His tailor had tried. The suit Rowbottom had on looked like about two thousand dollars’ worth of double-breasted tweed. His face was long, and all the bones in it were prominent — cheekbones, forehead, jaw. The skin over the bones was pulled tight and had a pale shine. The eyes were his best feature, electric Paul Newman blues, and he seemed to know how to use them, raising or lowering the voltage so that all a person noticed about him were the eyes.
“You’re the man who broke into my apartment?” Rowbottom asked, incredulous. He was putting a total glare on me. “I could walk over to the phone on Monica’s desk and get the police here in two minutes.”
“Yeah, but do that, and all of us’ll be in a colloquy about embarrassing subjects like murder.”
“Look, what’s your name?”
“Crang.”
“Well, Mr. Crang, I’m not about to let you get the better of me a second time.”
“Who’s Hubert, apart from a part-time waiter and full-time motorcycle cowboy?”
“No, no, no.” Rowbottom made a motion with his right hand like he was rubbing a brush back and forth across a blackboard. “I ask the questions.”
“The doorman phoned you? Mikey? Told you two guys had gone up to your apartment?”
“The message went from the receptionist to my secretary to my executive assistant to me. I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about.”
“You thought it was Hubert? Him and, I guess, another guy?”
“Naturally Hubert has the run of — Stop right there. I told you I was asking the questions.”
“Good thing for me you called the apartment first. Before you rang the cops, I mean.”
Rowbottom revved up the eye voltage. “Who, just who are you that you think you can pull off a stunt like this?”
“Who am I? Friend of Ian Argyll. Friend of Alex Corcoran. Both dead. Both connected to you.”
A little wind went out of Rowbottom’s sails. “You’re very sure of yourself for a common burglar,” he said.
“Uncommon actually. Only do it in crisis situations. Anyway, not to waste the time of a busy public servant like yourself, there’s a photograph of Ian Argyll in that little hidey-hole of yours, and you phoned Alex Corcoran on the Friday night of Ian’s funeral. So can we take your connections to them as established, no horsing around?”
“You stole one of my photographs.”
“Of the aforesaid Hubert ‘The Waxer’ Wax, yeah. I’ll see you get it back. But let’s stick to Ian and Alex.”
Rowbottom seemed to be regrouping. His eyes were back on beam. “I knew Ian Argyll socially. Did you expect me to deny it? As for Alex Corcoran, I make many phone calls every day and night. If I rang Alex on a certain evening, it was undoubtedly concerning cabinet business.”
“He was in education, you’re in culture and communications.”
Rowbottom’s smile was condescending. “I can see you fail to understand the workings of government, Crang. There is a great deal of cross consultation, if you must know, among ministers and senior members of the civil service, as Alex Corcoran was.”
“Okay,” I said, “instead of fencing with one another, I’ll lay out what I think is a possibility.”
“I’m not sure I’m interested in your possibilities, Crang. Correction, I know I’m not interested.”
“Well, get interested,” I said. “Here it is. Some gay guy with AIDS passed on the disease to Ian Argyll. He died, and Alex Corcoran set out to find and kill the gay guy with the AIDS. The guy found Alex first and killed him. Until you get off your high horse, Mr. Rowbottom, and prove otherwise, I rank you as a good wager for the role of Alex’s killer.”
Rowbottom’s face passed swiftly through emotions from disbelief to stupefaction to plain old wrath.
“If you repeat in public what you just said to me,” he said through clenched teeth, “my lawyers will slap you with a slander action before your eyes can blink twice.”
“I take it you’re denying my thesis?”
“You have been warned, Crang.”
“Somebody else told me the same thing just this Sunday.”
“They were right.”
Rowbottom stood up.
“I haven’t finished,” I said.
“I have.”
“What about your late-night caller?” I asked. “Bart the Bulge?”
“Bartley Santucci? What about him?”
“Is that his last name?”
“What about Mr. Santucci?”
“He makes movies,” I said. “The department you run dishes out money to moviemakers. My question, assuming Santucci is a receiver of grants, would it warm the electorate’s heart to know his movies are porno?”
“Crang,” Rowbottom said, his voice restrained and even and simmering with underground storms, “my ministry’s grants to filmmakers, poets, sculptors, composers, performance artists, oboe players, and goddamn weavers and potters are a matter of public record.”
“Yeah, well, what do you say —”
Rowbottom brought his bony face, with its juts of jaw and forehead and high cheeks, to within a couple of inches of my own face.
“Crang,” he said, “fuck off.”
Rowbottom turned to the restaurant’s inner stairs and trotted up them, two at a time again.
“Hey,” I called after him, “we haven’t discussed Paulie Ross or Birks Robinson.…”
Some of the tennis players looked up from their juice and coffee and glared at me, the noisy intruder in their midst. David Rowbottom continued out the front door.
Chapter Twenty
Two hours later, two hours after I left the Waterfront Tennis Club clutching a membership application that Monica with the smile had pressed on me, I asked John Rose about Birks Robinson.
“Birks Robinson,” John repeated. “Help me a little more.”
“A short story of his was in an anthology published in the past couple of years.”
“That really narrows it down,” John said. “To a select five hundred or so.”
“It must be a clue that he’s a guy. Isn’t there a rule about Canadian short story writers? They have to be women.”
“True. And he’s a Canadian for sure?”
“As far as I know. And black. And gay.”
“Gay? You should have said that at the beginning.”
John got up from his desk and ambled down an aisle toward the back of the store. John’s store, called Bakka, is on Queen a block and a half east of my office. Bakka deals in books, and it’s been on the street longer than I have, longer than any of the current establishments except maybe the Legion Hall. The store’s specialty is science fiction, but it buys and sells second-hand books in every category. Its smell is necessarily of mildew, old basements, and other people’s libraries.
“Right about …” John was in the CanLit section, and his hand was running along the spines of books on a lower shelf. “Here.”
He pulled a book out of the line, a large-sized paperback. I read the book’s title over John’s shoulder. The Third Sex: New Canadian Stories.
John flipped to the table of contents. “Birks Robinson, his very self,” he said, pointing to the name. The story Birks had written was called “And You Thought James Baldwin Had It Tough.”
John held the book so that the spine showed the publisher’s name.
“MacPherson Press,” he said. “They’re one of the good little houses, strictly quality stuff.”
“Is that Mr., Mrs., or Ms. MacPherson?”
“It’s avenue, as in MacPherson Avenue,” John said. “I forget the name of the people who run it, but a clever criminal lawyer like you shouldn’t have trouble figuring out the address.”
“Okay,” I said, “I owe you one, John.”
“You owe me six bucks,” John said. “The book is for sale.”
“Oh, yeah.”
I took the book to the office and read “And You Thought James Baldwin Had It Tough.” If I was any judge, Birks knew how to write. The story was funny and ironic and without a lot of wasted motion.
I looked up MacPherson Press in the phone book and got a woman on the line who said she was the editor-in-chief. I told her I was a literary agent.
“In the market for fresh blood,” I said to her. “It’s the only thing that keeps an agency vibrant. Foreign sales is what I have in mind.”
The woman hesitated on the other end. Maybe I hadn’t struck the right note.
“You’re actually looking for writers?” she said. “All the agents I know are beating them away with a big stick. Too many amateur writers out there and too few agents.”
“Well, I’m new in the game, trying to establish an identity, you know.”
“You must be new. I’ve never come across your name before,” the woman said. “Oh, well, who is it you’re interested in?”
“A young fellow from one of your collections. Birks Robinson.”
“Oh, Birks.” The woman’s voice brightened. “He’s a gem. If I could just pull that novel out of him.… I hope you’re not planning to steal him away from me and take him to one of the big houses.”
“A novel.” I raised my brightness to the woman’s level. “That really excites me. And no fear, as I said, I’m only looking to develop foreign markets. Wouldn’t dream of interfering with your relationship with Robinson. You wouldn’t happen to have an address where I might reach the young man?”
“Stay there a minute.”
The woman was gone from the line for less than a minute. She came back on with a number on Euclid Avenue.
“If you’re sincerely keen on helping new writers,” she said, “I’ve got three women I’m high as a kite on.…”
I needed ten more minutes to shake MacPherson Press’s editor-in-chief. When she got off the line, I went down the long lists of Robinsons in the phone book and came up with a Robinson, C. at the Euclid address.
I dialed the number.
“Who is it?” A man with a raspy voice answered.
“Yes, hello, is Birks at home by any chance?”
“No.”
The raspy-voiced guy hung up.
Euclid Avenue was probably forty minutes by foot from my office. I locked the door, walked west along Queen and angled north until I was above College Street. Euclid was heavy on Portuguese who put chain-link fences around the front yards and painted the bricks of the houses in noisy shades of scarlet and aqua.
At the number I was looking for, there was no fence, and the brick was in its original state. The house had a wooden veranda, and a man was sitting on a sofa that took up half the veranda’s width. He was an older black man with long legs and a skinny body that collapsed into the sofa’s contours. He had a high forehead and greying hair, and he was listening to music from a tape deck. I recognized the tune. It was a Bud Powell recording of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.”
I walked up the front walk to the veranda stairs and waited for the song to finish.
“Not many piano players left like that,” I said.
The man looked at me. He had deep vertical lines in his face and yellowy eyes.
“Not any piano players left like Mr. Bud Powell,” he said. I recognized the raspy voice from the phone.
“Well, I mean, there were all kinds of wonderful bebop pianists,” I said. “Dodo Marmarosa, Al Haig, Duke Jordan. But Bud Powell was the original.”
The man didn’t respond immediately. He seemed to have a habit of leaving time gaps between the end of my statements and the beginning of his.
“You’re too young, young man, to’ve heard all the piano men you just named so confidently,” he said after a bit.
“On records,” I said. “I never heard Bud Powell live. In person, I mean. But live, I’ve heard other people, other instrumentalists who came out of bebop. Frank Morgan, James Moody, Dizzy of course.”
“Mr. Dizzy Gillespie, ah, now. You heard him, you say?”
“Several times.”
“I played with Mr. Dizzy Gillespie.”
“You did?”
“The month of December 1951 at the Casino Theatre down the street from the old City Hall. Mr. Dizzy Gillespie had Mr. John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Mr. Milt Jackson at the vibraphone, and sundry others. He came to town with no piano player. A friend of an acquaintance mentioned my name as worthy to Mr. Dizzy Gillespie, and as a consequence, I performed one week, four shows a day at the Casino Theatre.”
I looked at the man’s hands. They had fingers long enough to drop on a tenth chord.
The man said, “Mr. Dizzy Gillespie was in the custom of calling many tunes at very fast tempos. Chord changes of great complexity, too.”
“Hard on the piano player,” I said.
“I was twenty years of age,” the man said. “I learned more lessons in jazz music in one week with Mr. Dizzy Gillespie than in all the other weeks of my life.”
“You were working with one of the gods.”
“When I tell you about all the weeks of my life, I refer to before and since.”
“So,” I said, “you named your son after Dizzy.”
The pause was longer.
“Mr. John Birks Gillespie,” the man said. He nodded. It was the first time in our talk he’d moved a part of his body except his mouth. “I called my boy Birks, you have it correct.”
“Does Birks appreciate the honour, if that’s the right way to put it?”
“Birks is more a words man than a music man.”
“I read a story of his,” I said. “Birks is talented.”
“I believe that to be the case.”
I stepped up from the bottom of the veranda stairs and leaned against the railing.
“If, as you say, you have read a little story Birks wrote,” Mr. Robinson said, “you are aware he is homosexual.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“That’s all the boy writes about. He tells me he will move out of it and discover other subjects for his stories.”
“Artistic growth I think that’s called.”
“Are you homosexual?” Mr. Robinson asked me.
“No. I’m a criminal lawyer. My name’s Crang.”
“Well, now, a criminal lawyer who listens to Bud Powell records and is standing on my porch in the middle of the morning,” Mr. Robinson said. “I wonder why.”
“Birks left his job rather abruptly.”
“You are not intending to tell me that his employer sent a criminal lawyer around to call on his daddy?”
I shook my head. “I’m here in my own interests. And Birks’s.”
“Birks is keeping his own counsel at present.”
“But you’re in touch with him?”
“I’m his daddy.”
“Could I ask you to do this?” I said. “Tell Birks I’m the man he spoke to at the Purple Zinnia a week ago last Saturday, the man wanting information about Ian Argyll. Birks helped me that night. Maybe I can repay the favour.”
