Straight No Chaser Read Online Free Page A

I got three oranges out of the refrigerator and pressed them in an electric squeezer. The squeezer was neither small nor black nor Sony. Large, white, and German. I patronize all the old Axis powers. There was a pair of Gucci loafers on the floor of my closet. I drank the juice with two vitamin C tablets. It didn’t do much for my headache, but it made me feel the model of healthy virtue.
    I started up the Mr. Coffee and went downstairs to fetch the Globe and Mail . The entertainment section had a long article on the prospects for the Festival of Festivals. It was starting that night, the third- or fourth-hottest film festival in the world measured in commerce, number of movie luminaries on site, and other such criteria. There was Cannes and New York and then probably the Festival of Festivals. Or maybe Berlin snuck into third place.
    There was a small mirror, antique with a carved wooden frame, hanging on the wall inside the kitchen door. I unhooked it and took it to the bathroom. By standing with my back to the mirror on the cabinet, tilting my head, and holding the antique mirror at about two o’clock, I could conduct an examination of the crown of my head.
    Didn’t seem to be anything back there except hair. No cut, no blood, nothing of a foreign nature. A check with my fingers didn’t reveal a bump. The dastardly attack from behind had left me with not much more than a headache and an extra two hours of sleep. I spent another minute on the crown. It looked fit to present in public.
    I got busy. Shower. Shave. Two cups of coffee. A perusal of the Globe ’s sports pages. National Hockey League teams were in training camp. I looked out the kitchen window. The sun was shining, and a slim woman in shorts and a halter was picking flowers from her garden two houses up from mine. Why didn’t the NHL wait till the ponds froze over before they started training camp? I reloaded the Mr. Coffee and put on clean jeans, a long-sleeved shirt with a lot of vertical stripes in different shades of blue, and the Rockport Walkers. Not many ponds left around Toronto to freeze over.
    Peter Gzowski was delivering a little essay on the radio. It was about the Labour Day weekend he’d spent up north with the woman in his life. That was his expression, “the woman in my life”. As descriptions of female persons one isn’t necessarily married to but to whom one is committed, it beat “the girlfriend” or “my old lady”. Most of the time on Gzowski’s program, three hours of it, he interviews people. Occasionally he serves up essays he writes in the spirit of a latter-day E. B. White. Except E. B. White probably wouldn’t have said a phrase like “the woman in my life” out loud. Neither would I, come to think of it. The woman in my life was Annie B. Cooke.
    I turned off the radio and looked up the number for the Cameron House in the telephone book. The man who answered my call was polite and of minimal assistance.
    No, he hadn’t seen Dave Goddard that morning, and, no, there wasn’t a phone in Dave’s room. Correction. Jim Kirk’s room. I asked if he’d mind hiking up to the fourth floor and tapping on Jim or Dave’s door, and he said, no, he wouldn’t mind. Five minutes later he was back on the phone and said, no, nobody was at home in the Jim Kirk room. I thanked him for the nos, and poured my third cup of coffee.
    The day stretched empty in front of me, and I liked the sensation. Nothing like a dash of sloth to comfort a man. The day before, I ended a preliminary hearing that went two weeks in Provincial Court. My client was charged with fraud in big numbers, and the Provincial Court judge had to decide if he should commit my guy for trial in a higher court. The way the crown attorney spelled out the case, my guy bought an apartment building for one million bucks. That’s how much the building apparently commanded on the market, one million,