Free Straight No Chaser by Jack Batten Page A

Celtics cranked up, I’d get interested in team games.
    I dialled Annie’s number. Her answering machine told me she’d return my call. The answering machine told everybody she’d return their calls. Impersonal. Wasn’t I special? Annie must have been at the big bash that came after the Festival of Festivals’ opening movie. Had Daniel Day-Lewis hit town yet? I didn’t ask Annie’s answering machine.
    I took a book called Jazzletters: Singers and the Song to bed. It was written by a guy named Gene Lees, and I was up to the chapter on Johnny Mercer. When I fell asleep, the melody to “Skylark” was circling at the centre of my mind.

10
    D AVE GODDARD was an item in “For the Record” in Friday morning’s Globe . The first item was about a stockbroker and a half-million dollars; both were missing from a Bay Street investment firm. The second was about a man of no fixed address who got set on fire on the tennis courts behind the Moss Park Armoury. Dave was the third. “For the Record” runs every day in the back pages of the Globe ’s news section. It’s for readers on the run, six or seven one-paragraph stories, usually about crime, usually spiced up from routine police reports. The man of no fixed address probably didn’t think the fire was routine. He was alive and in St. Michael’s Hospital. So was Dave Goddard.
    The Globe paragraph said he’d been assaulted early Wednesday morning in a lane near Queen and Spadina. An injury to the head, the paragraph said, and no arrests had been made. Dave was described as “an internationally known jazz musician”. Someone on the copy desk at the Globe must have added the description. Or else the police guy who handed out the press announcement was more hip than the Toronto cops I usually cross-examined in court.
    I got to St. Mike’s before ten and didn’t have to go farther than the waiting room on the first floor to find Dave. He was sitting in the middle of a row of five chairs, and behind him there was a counter and a glassed-in area where women in civvies were talking on phones and tapping numbers into computers. Dave had an official-looking form attached to a clipboard in one hand. He had a ballpoint pen in the other hand, and a bandage on his head. It wasn’t easy to miss the bandage. It began just above Dave’s eyebrows and reached into his scalp. A couple of inches of Dave’s hair seemed to have been shaved to make way for the bandage. Dave was applying himself to the form on the clipboard.
    I sat in the chair beside him. Dave’s left eye panned over to me. The expression on his face was somewhere between blank and morose.
    â€œWhat’s happening, man?” Dave said to me.
    â€œThat ought to be my question, Dave. What happened to you?”
    â€œThe dude you were supposed to be tailing aced me.”
    I said, “He aced me too.”
    A woman leaned over the counter behind us and spoke to Dave. She had a Middle Eastern face and deep, dark eyes.
    â€œHow’s it coming there, Mr. Goddard?” she said.
    â€œRight with you, man,” Dave said without turning his head.
    The woman beamed her eyes on me and shrugged.
    I looked at the form in Dave’s lap. He was stuck at the entry for home address.
    â€œTry 48 Hiawatha Crescent,” I said.
    â€œI can dig it,” Dave said. “Ralph’s place.”
    The tip launched Dave on a roll of right answers. He filled in his own occupation and Ralph’s telephone number. His Ontario Hospital Insurance number stumped him.
    I said, “Tell the woman with the eyes you’ll phone it in.”
    Dave conferred with the woman, who asked him for a cash payment of five dollars and twenty-six cents. It covered a television set Dave rented. The woman said OHIP would pick up the cost of room, meals, bandage, and head shave. The woman’s eyes were large and moist and almost black. I could