Straight No Chaser Read Online Free PDF Page B

last year’s news.”
    â€œYeah? What’s the latest poop?”
    Annie held her wine glass by the stem and took a tiny sip.
    She said, “Charles’s fronting a counter-festival. I don’t know who’s actually booking the films. Guess we’ll find out more at the press conference. Anyway, Charles’s name is on top of the information releases, and his office is listed as the festival’s headquarters. He resigned from the Festival of Festivals board in the spring and started this new deal. The Alternate Film Festival it’s called.”
    â€œCam, it sounds like, is going head to head with Helga Stephenson.”
    â€œAlmost,” Annie said. “The Alternate starts Sunday night and runs to Saturday. That makes a fairly consistent overlap with the Festival of Festivals.”
    â€œEnterprise like that, it doesn’t strike me as one of the great and wise commercial decisions.”
    â€œHelga isn’t particularly bothered,” Annie said. “Actually, Charles is going at it pretty intelligently. Keeping everything small-scale but quite interesting. He’s using one theatre only, the Eglinton, which is the nicest in the city if you ask me, and he’s got a festival theme of sorts.”
    â€œWhat sort?”
    â€œMildly radical, I guess you could say,” Annie said. “Movies from Third World countries, movies black people made in Chicago on small budgets. Minorities stuff. Chicanos in New Mexico, like that.”
    I said, “Right up Cam’s alley.”
    â€œWell, tell me. What I need’s background. How come a criminal lawyer’s doing a movie festival?”
    Don and Karen didn’t care to know the answer to Annie’s question. They checked out of our conversation and returned to the dilemma of their Sunday-morning movie. Annie took another miniature taste from her spritzer. She’d made a half-dozen passes at the drink, and the level of wine, soda and melting ice hadn’t dropped a quarter-inch. She was thirty-five years old and hadn’t learned to drink like a man.
    I said, “Cam’s speciality is minorities. In his law practice I’m talking about. People he acts for, they’re, oh, Jamaican guys charged in stick-ups. Hong Kong kids doing extortion over in Chinatown. What else? Sikh bombers. Those are Cam’s clients. He defended the Moonies last year.”
    â€œMoonies?” Annie said. “They don’t go with the rest.”
    â€œJust because a group is rich and diabolical doesn’t mean it can’t be a minority.”
    â€œThe Reverend Sun Myung Moon aside,” Annie said, “your friend Cam sounds okay. Altruistic I might describe him.”
    â€œSome of my colleagues at the criminal bar say Cam’s the only lawyer in town can afford his clientele.”
    â€œWell, well, aren’t we snide at the criminal bar.”
    â€œCam isn’t, by the way,” I said, “my friend.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œHe thinks I’m frivolous.”
    â€œNow I’m really panting to meet Cameron Charles.”
    I said, “The point about Cam affording the Jamaicans and the Sikhs and the Hong Kong kids, it’s usually Legal Aid pays their bills. Pays little, I probably told you before, and pays late. And Cam—here’s the real point—he’s conspicuously wealthy.”
    â€œNot from the law, I take it.”
    â€œFrom Dad and Granddad. Those signs on construction sites all over the city are theirs. CharlesCorp. They build condos.”
    Annie jotted a couple of lines on the notebook’s blank pages. The ice was melting more rapidly in her glass, and the level of liquid was approaching the overflow mark.
    I said, “This is probably totally unfair to Cam, but I think of him and I think of the magazine piece Tom Wolfe wrote a lot of years ago, the article about Leonard Bernstein and all the New York people with the money that took up the