Crang Plays the Ace (15 page)

Later in the afternoon, I walked over to the Sheraton Centre on Queen Street and rented a black Dodge Dart from the Avis outlet in the hotel. Compared with my Volks, it felt as broad as William the Refrigerator Perry. I parked it in back of the house and whiled away the evening. Heating tomato sauce from a jar and eating it on fettuccine from a package took care of a half-hour. I watched
Miami Vice
and the local news, and just about the time a sensible lawyer would hit the hay, I went down the stairs and drove away in the Dodge Dart.

James was standing in front of the same variety store on Gerrard. I leaned across and opened the passenger door, and he climbed in to the back seat. He had his cloth liquor bag and a kitchen stool. The stool had chip marks in its white paint but looked sturdy and about two feet high.

“A stool?” I said.

“You'll see,” James said. He didn't talk while we drove over to pick up Harry Hein outside his office on Bay Street.

Harry was nervous. He got in the front seat, carrying a small briefcase, and acknowledged James when I introduced the two. One sweating man and one teenager. My team.

“Crang,” Harry said, “you know how many years I can get in prison for this?”

“Look at it another way, Harry,” I said. “With me defending you, you'll have a lawyer who's truly involved in the case.”

I drove down University Avenue and out the Gardiner.

“This is crazy anyway,” Harry said. “The amount of time I'm going to put in on these people's books, I can't do any kind of systematic analysis.”

“You got till Ace's morning shift comes on, Harry.”

“They work Saturdays?”

“Not till after the sun comes up.”

I passed the old Seaway Hotel and crossed from the Gardiner onto the Queen E.

“Car smells new,” James said from the back seat. He wasn't nervous. “ You trade the Volks for this thing?”

“Rented it,” I said. “The Volks was growing familiar to our friends in the west end.”

The traffic was light, some tractor-trailers and a few late-nighters driving back to the suburbs from a hot time downtown.

“Besides,” I said, “all rented cars smell new. Comes from a spray patented by Mr. Avis.”

The lights were out in the Majestic and the parking lot was empty of cars. I parked the Dart at the rear of the lot under a tree with overhanging branches that were thick with leaves. It would be tough for anyone passing by to spot a black car.

“Now what?” Harry said.

“Across the street,” I said, “that's our destination.”

A white handkerchief was fluffed out of the breast pocket of Harry's jacket. He had on a business suit and shirt and tie. He looked over at the Ace building and used the handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his forehead.

“Place looks like the
Queen Mary
,” he said, “all those damned lights.”

“Okay, James,” I said into the back seat, “do your stuff.”

I got out of my door and pulled back the seat to let James exit with his bag and stool. He was wearing his black outfit from the night before and he trotted with deliberate speed across the parking lot and over the street to the people gate in the chain-link fence around the Ace property. The bag was in his right hand, the stool in his left. He dropped both on the ground in front of the gate and took a short, thin wire out of the bag. He leaned over and applied it to the padlock on the gate. In half a minute he straightened up and yanked at the padlock. It opened. James pulled the gate toward him and stepped through it with his bag and stool. He put them on the path inside the grounds and pushed the gate back into position. He left the padlock dangling loose and open.

“The kid's fast,” I said to Harry.

“You think that's going to make me relax?” Harry said.

“And he's slick,” I said. “You should appreciate slick.”

Across the street, James scooted up the cement path to the door into the Ace building. He took a pair of pliers out of his bag and another piece of wire. This wire was of the thick industrial variety and about three feet long. James positioned his stool on the ground under the alarm box over the door. He stood on the stool.

“Planning ahead,” I said. “You like that, Harry?”

“Just let him get the hell on with it,” Harry said.

James balanced himself on the stool, reached up, and used his pliers to clip off the wire leading into the alarm box from the left side. With a roll of black electrical tape that he took out of his back pants pocket, he bound one end of the piece of industrial wire into the loose strand on the top of the door. He ran the wire over the alarm box and performed the same operation on the right side of the box. Clipped the wire leading out of the box and taped in the industrial wire. If James had things correctly doped out, the alarm box was now neutralized and out of commission.

I looked at my watch.

“Four minutes and fifteen seconds,” I said.

Harry grunted.

“Was that approbation?” I said.

“Oh, shit,” Harry said. He was ducking his head and pointing toward the street.

The headlights of a car cut through the darkness from somewhere down the road beyond the Majestic.

“Red alert,” I said.

I tapped the horn once and lightly. It was enough to catch James' ear. He looked out to the street. My view of the car with the headlights was blocked by the Majestic. James scooped up his stool and bag and scuttled toward the corner of the building away from the approaching car.

“Must be about a block up the road,” I said to Harry, “and not coming fast.”

Harry said, “It doesn't matter how far up the car is if whoever's driving it saw the kid doing all that suspicious stuff.”

“It's not suspicious,” I said. “It's criminal.”

The headlights grew brighter and the car came into sight around the outline of the Majestic.

“Damn, damn,” Harry whispered. He crouched in his seat below the level of the window.

The car on the street was a yellow cruiser. Two cops sat in front. The cruiser was moving at not much more than twenty miles an hour, and as it pulled even with the Ace building, James disappeared around the back corner out of the cops' range of vision. Their range of vision seemed limited anyway. The driver was talking and the cop in the passenger seat nodded his head and laughed. Both were looking straight ahead. Swell watchdogs. The talk and laughter carried from the cruiser's window across the parking lot. It made a companionable sound in the late night. The cruiser moved out of my sight down the street.

“Start breathing again, Harry,” I said.

I got out of the Dart.

“When I signal,” I said to Harry, “give the horn a soft honk.”

“Crang, for chrissake, my hands are shaking,” Harry said. He held up both hands. They were shaking.

“Use your foot,” I said.

I walked across the lot to the edge of the road. The cruiser's rear lights were drifting away, growing fainter as I watched. When the lights were the size of a couple of glowing cigarettes, I raised my hand to Harry. The car horn gave a harsh blare that echoed off the wall of the Majestic. James stuck his head around the rear corner of the Ace building. I held up my arm to him in a stop motion and looked back down the road. Two or three minutes went by and there was no sign of a returning cruiser. I waved at James. He came out from behind the building with his bag and stool. I walked back to the Dart.

“I'm not cut out for this, Crang,” Harry said. His hands were making knots with the white handkerchief.

“You're doing fine, Harry,” I said. “Little heavy on the horn, but that's not your specialty.”

“Hardly touched the damned thing,” Harry said, “and it went off like that.”

James was hunched over the door into the Ace building. His body cut off the view from the Dart of what he was up to. After three or four minutes he straightened up. He had a small implement in his right hand, another toy from the cloth bag. James turned in our direction and flapped the hand without the small implement.

“We're on,” I said to Harry.

“Wait a minute,” Harry said. “He hasn't got the damned door open.”

“He wants his audience.”

Harry and I crossed the parking lot and went through the gate into Ace and up the paved walk.

“I'm done,” James said. If he was feeling triumphant, his face wasn't ready to give it away.

“Turn the knob, James,” I said.

“Hold it,” Harry said. He looked at James. “You positive the alarm up there isn't going to ring?”

“I bypassed it,” James said.

“Yeah,” Harry said, “well, how do you know there isn't a backup alarm?”

“No more wires,” James said. Along with aplomb and brevity, James had patience. My own wasn't unlimited.

“Harry,” I said, “when we get inside, James isn't going to second-guess your accounting techniques.”

I nodded at James. He reached out, turned the knob on the door, and pushed. Harry made a loud swallowing noise and held his briefcase to his chest. The door swung open and bumped against the inside wall. The bump was the only sound in the night. No clanging alarm broke the silence.

“Textbook job, James,” I said.

James grinned. The grin was part smirk and part snigger. James' face wasn't built for grinning. Or maybe he was out of practice.

19

A
CE'S ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT
occupied a double office that looked out the back windows of the building. Harry liked that. No one passing in the street could see him at his clandestine labours. The department consisted of several desks, a medium-sized computer, and a wall of filing cabinets. Harry opened his briefcase and took out three sharpened pencils, a pad of foolscap, and a pocket calculator that ran on batteries. He laid out his tools of the trade on one of the desks and walked over to the filing cabinets.

“You want us to give you a hand?” I asked. James and I were standing at the door into the accounting area. I didn't feel useful.

“No,” Harry said. He pulled open one of the drawers in the wall. A row of brown file folders filled the length of the drawer. Each folder had an indicator tag sticking out of the top at the left side. Harry flipped through the folders, stopped, and looked back to James and me.

“No, for chrissake, Crang,” he said. “Bad enough in here without you guys hanging over my shoulder.”

James and I stepped into the hall.

“You're on guard duty,” I said to James. “I'll snoop.”

I posted James at a window that gave him a view of the street.

“Anything fishy,” I said, “let out a shout.”

“What's fishy?”

“You'll recognize it.”

I walked down the hall past the accounting department. At the end of the building, two roomy offices faced one another across the hall. The office on the street side was Alice Brackley's. It had a blonde wood desk and armchairs with chintz covering. On the desk there was a photograph in a silver frame of Alice and a man with grey hair who looked old enough to be her father. He probably was her father. Same thin lips.

The office on the other side of the hall didn't display any personal photographs, but the ambience announced Charles Grimaldi. Its furnishings were heavy and masculine. Oak desk, leather sofa and chairs, a LeRoy Neiman drawing on the wall of a halfback crashing through the line. In one corner, a rectangular silver machine that stood waist high gleamed at me. I went over and patted it. It was a photocopier.

At the desk in the accounting area, Harry was intent over an opened file folder. A sheet of foolscap at his right showed a list of one-word notations with numbers opposite the notations. The fingers of Harry's left hand danced on the keys of the pocket calculator, his right hand held a pencil and jotted on the foolscap. Harry's handwriting made up in speed what it lacked in legibility.

“Harry,” I said, “a copy machine in the boss's office. That in the usual line of executive furnishing?”

“You want me to get through this stuff,” Harry said, “don't interrupt.”

“How you making out?”

“This is going to be strictly a sampling,” Harry said. “Anything definitive, I'd need four, five days.”

“All I'm asking is hints,” I said. “Trends.”

“One thing I can say already, General Motors doesn't keep books the way these people do it.”

I turned back to the door.

“The answer to your question is negative,” Harry said from his desk. “It makes no sense for the boss to put a photocopy machine in his personal office.”

Two short flights of stairs led from the first-floor hall down to the building's basement. At the bottom of the first flight, I looked through the window in a door opening on to Ace's back property. Two hundred trucks waited in their spaces. In the silence and shadows, they took on anthropomorphic features—ominous, skulking creatures at temporary rest. Another minute and I could have worked myself up for the Robert Redford role in
Out of Africa
. Herd of beasts out there, Karen, dangerous when roused.

A time clock jutted from the wall of the landing just inside the door. Rows of cards in slots covered the rest of the wall space. The cards were light brown and each had a name and an employee number printed at the top. There were twenty-six cards in the line of slots along the bottom row and I pulled every one of them. Made for exciting reading, times punched in to work, times punched out after work. Some employees came on at eight a.m. or a few minutes thereafter and left at six p.m. or a little earlier. Some worked noon till eight or nine at night. And some had a shift that brought them to Ace at six in the morning. Those early birds better not catch the burglars.

Down the second short flight of stairs, the basement was given over to a locker room. Beat-up grey metal half-lockers ran lengthwise along two sides, and in the middle of the room there were two groupings of wooden tables and chairs. One table had a deck of cards on it, and a
Playboy
calendar hung on the back of a closet door. Miss July bore more than a passing resemblance to the nurse on duty at the Majestic. The locker room seemed the preserve of Ace's drivers. They must come in from the yard through the back door, change clothes, play cards, shoot the breeze between trips on the monsters outside. There was a shower stall off one end of the room, and an electric kettle, some mismatched mugs, and a jar of instant coffee sat on a rickety table in a corner. I made three cups and carried them upstairs. Harry took his black, James wanted double sugar.