Riviera Blues. Jack Batten

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      She must have put a hand over the receiver. At my end, I got muffled half-words. One of the half-words was “hole.” I had an inkling the other half was “ass.”

      Pamela came back on the line, unmuffled.

      “Archie’s getting antsy,” she said.

      “Did I half-hear you describe me as an asshole?”

      “You half-heard me describe the credit manager at Creed’s as an asshole who’s bothering the wrong Mrs. Cartwright at an hour when sensible credit managers should be in the bosom of their families.”

      “I got more on Jamie,” I said. “We should meet again. Not for tea.”

      “Whatever you’ve been doing in the last few hours, Crang, you’d better not have blown my problem into major proportions. This isn’t a criminal case, you know.”

      “Those are just about the same words Swotty used at lunch.”

      “Well, Daddy is usually right.”

      “A meeting?”

      Pamela didn’t hesitate. “Saturday at five-thirty,” she said. “The Courtyard.”

      She hung up.

      I spent another five minutes on the phone talking to a young criminal lawyer I know, one of the new computer-friendly breed. He said he’d be free to look at the optical disk and its contents Sunday morning. I thanked him, and thought about hiding the disk until Sunday.

      If the disk was important enough to conceal in Jamie’s apartment, it merited the same treatment in mine. I moseyed around the living room and out to the kitchen checking for a hiding place that qualified as cunning. In the end, after fifteen minutes of moseying, I settled on the white globe around the overhead light in my bedroom. I stood on a chair from the kitchen, unscrewed the globe, took out the light bulb, dropped in the disk, and re-screwed the globe. Maybe not out-and-out cunning, but fairly crafty.

      I phoned Annie and got her answering machine. Annie was busy with movies. She had to see six or seven before we left for France and put reviews of them on tape for Metro Morning to use in her absence. I made a sandwich out of three-grain bread and some turkey slices that were just beginning to harden at the edges. A rerun of L.A. Law was on TV. I watched it, ate the sandwich, and helped it along with a Wyborowa and soda. When L.A. Law ended, I tried to decide whether I identified more with Jimmy Smits or Corbin Bernsen. Tough call. I was still working on the decision when I fell asleep.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      On Friday morning, I called Trumball Fraser. He said sure, he was free for lunch. Did I know Coaster’s? Little place over by the St. Lawrence Market? Trum said he was a regular there. I didn’t know Coaster’s, but I knew Trum. When he said he was a regular, it meant Coaster’s must be an out-of-the-way spot where Trum could have long lunches and longer drinks without other Cayuga & Granark employees crowding his noon hour. I said I’d meet him at twelve-thirty.

      Trum Fraser was a lawyer about my age. Professionally, he had two strikes against him, his father and his older brother. They were both civil litigation lawyers whose names looked incomplete unless the adjective “distinguished” was inserted up front. Distinguished counsel Justin and Roger Fraser. They argued before the Supreme Court of Canada about every other week and had their cases written up in the Dominion Law Reports. Trum got the short end of the stick in the family when it came to the law. He had most of the brains but not much of the ambition. He took the path of least resistance: a job as an in-house lawyer at Cayuga & Granark. He read contracts, wrote memos on changes in laws that affected trust companies, nothing terrifically demanding in the legal line. If litigation loomed, a lawsuit against C&G, Trum briefed counsel outside the trust company, someone like his distinguished father or his distinguished older brother. They ran with the case in court while Trum stayed snug in his office at C&G and had lengthy lunches at Coaster’s.

      The weather had turned close to balmy. I left the Volks at home. Nice day for a walk. Tulips were starting to bloom red and yellow in the boulevards that divide University Avenue. Secretaries and guys in shirt sleeves ate lunches out of paper bags on the benches around the plaza behind the Toronto-Dominion Centre. And in the little park next to the Flatiron Building, people reclined in the grass with their faces up to the sun, getting a head start on their summer tans. If I were Gene Kelly, I’d have broken out the taps for a chorus of “It Might as Well Be Spring.”

      Coaster’s was down a short sloping street that ran alongside the market. Delivery trucks jammed up the traffic, dropping off crates of lettuce and sides of beef to the vendors in the market building. The restaurant was on the opposite side of the street and up two flights of stairs. I climbed the two flights. The room was agreeably ramshackle and felt like it’d be easy on the noontime nerves. The only flaw was the place’s sound system and the owner’s lousy taste in tapes. Willie Nelson was whining about another cheatin’ woman.

      Trum Fraser had a table for two beside one of the windows. The table and chairs were like the rest of the restaurant, somewhere between unpretentious and rickety.

      “Know what I like about this joint?” Trum said.

      “Everything except the music.”

      Trum listened as if he were taking in Willie’s droning for the first time.

      “Not that shit,” he said. “What I like, the bartender here understands the connection between the words bathtub and martini.”

      “Makes them ample, does he?”

      “The guy must be American,” Trum said. “Ever notice how unsatisfied you feel after a Canadian martini?”

      Trum’s face was that of a man on a lifelong search for the satisfying martini. Flushed cheeks, veins beginning to break, nose headed in the direction of W.C. Fields’. He was about thirty pounds too heavy, stuffed into his brown suit, the collar of his white shirt digging a crease in his neck. But as lushes went, Trum was a thinking man’s lush. I’d never seen him drunk. Never seen him when his brain wasn’t taking care of business.

      “You could’ve had it made, Crang,” Trum said to me. He must have arrived five or ten minutes earlier. The level of the martini in his hand was two-thirds of the way down the bathtub.

      “If you’re talking about life in general, I’m not doing too badly,” I said. “If it’s the law, I never counted on getting it made. Just getting a light grip on it is sufficient.”

      “I mean business, the trust company, good old C&G,” Trum said. “After you got off the phone this morning, I was thinking, when you were married to Pamela, Jesus, if you’d played your cards right, you’d be up there on the thirty-second floor today, right down the hall from Whetherhill.”

      “You know how much fun that’d be, Trum?”

      “Fun, hell. Think of the power.”

      “About as much fun as you in partnership with the other two Frasers.”

      “Oh, low blow. I’d be honoured to serve alongside my papa and sibling.”

      “Bull.”

      “Fortunately they never asked me.”

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