Crang Plays the Ace (2 page)

Wansborough's voice had a snap to it. For all his prissiness, he didn't strike me as anybody's pushover. When he rode to hounds, I'd put my money on him as first rider to the fox every time. He had a squared-off face and jutting eyebrows and he was as tall as I, five eleven or so, and heavier, over two hundred pounds. I'm built along the lines of yon Cassius. Lean and hungry.

“What about the aberration, Mr. Wansborough?” I said. “Why Ace Disposal? And what is an Ace Disposal?”

“The investment was to show support for my cousin,” Wansborough said. “I advanced $300,000 four years ago last February. My cousin wished to buy into a company as a working partner and chose Ace Disposal for the purpose. The investment made the family a minority shareholder and obtained my cousin a vice-presidency. Ace's business, as far as that is concerned, is in transporting waste from construction sites to municipal dumps. Its assets consist of a great many large trucks and a maintenance area here in the city. In the first two years after my investment, the company showed negligible profits, as I rather expected would be the case. Beginning in the second quarter last year, however, it has yielded what I consider a disproportionately high profit. That puzzles me.”

“Let's go back to your cousin,” I said. “What's he have to say about the new bonanza?”

“She, Mr. Crang,” Wansborough said. “My cousin is Alice Brackley. On my mother's side. She attributes the change to improved management. My cousin, I tell you this in confidence, has been the difficult member of the family. Intelligent enough for a woman but terribly stubborn. I believe she went into Ace Disposal to show she was as competent in business as any of the men in our family. Especially into such a business as Ace Disposal.”

I said, “Headstrong.”

Wansborough liked that. He said, “One doesn't hear such an adjective these days.”

“One doesn't.”

Wansborough said, “The change for the better in the company coincided with a new group purchasing a majority interest. A man named Grimaldi has been president for the past twenty months.”

“Fine old Monacan name.”

“That would be another branch of the family,” Wansborough said. The snap was back in his voice.

“Mr. Grimaldi has an expansive charm,” he said. “I concede that. And his operational manner is aggressive. He keeps the trucks on the road six days a week, that sort of thing. Charles is Mr. Grimaldi's first name, and certainly my cousin praises his person and his methods. But he is in my view evasive when I inquire into the company's recent success. So is Alice. I have never read the company books.”

I swivelled around to face Wansborough and put on my summing-up look.

“What we have here,” I said, “is an outfit doing better business than you think it should and an executive officer who isn't to your taste.”

Wansborough's head made a brusque nod.

I said, “ And you're retaining me to ease your mind about both.”

Another nod. I was a whiz at synthesizing information. I said, “At the worst, you want to know if there's hanky-panky.”

Wansborough said, “Mr. Catalano said you have had previous experience in the sort of inquiry we're discussing.”

“Tom's talking fraud,” I said. “One of McIntosh, Brown's corporate clients, big printing firm, it developed a leak in its treasury. The company was coming up a few hundred thousand short and nobody could find the hole. Catalano hired me to poke around on the quiet. Turned out the two women at the top of the accounting department, longtime employees, much beloved by all, were running a sweet racket. They invented employees on paper. Gave them names, social security numbers, bank accounts. Put them on the tax roll, handed out T-4s, filed their income tax returns in the spring. And every week they issued pay cheques to the employees' bank accounts. Except the employees were paper people and the two old darlings ended up with the cash.”

Wansborough's lips did their pursing number.

I said, “In accounting parlance, that's called a dead-horse fraud.”

Wansborough's face looked tight.

“Don't take it as a precedent,” I said. “Your problem doesn't sound in the same league.”

I couldn't tell whether I'd reassured Wansborough. He left the office and I watched him from my window. He was walking east on Queen behind a girl with a haircut I'd last seen on William Bendix in
Wake Island
.

2

S
TREETS WHERE BIG FINANCIERS
take care of their financing are narrow. Wall Street, Threadneedle Street, Bay Street.

After Wansborough left, I rode a Queen streetcar over to Bay, got on a trolley bus headed south, and sat in the traffic. Bay is two lanes wide each way and lined with buildings where stockbrokers and money men make deals. Delivery trucks park in no-stopping zones. Cabs pick up fares. It takes ten minutes to travel a block. I watched a spruce old party in a white seersucker suit and a panama hat totter down the front steps of the National Club. Bet he'd had a swell day—a couple of gimlets at lunch, a few games of hearts with his cronies, some reminiscing over the good old days in killer financing, and now it was home, James, for a nap. The bus broke free of the scrimmage at Front Street and made time under the tunnel by Union Station and through the scramble of east-west expressways near the Lakeshore. I got out at Queen's Quay and walked a block east to the Toronto Star building.

It doesn't look like a newspaper building. It looks like insurance salesmen or government clerks lurk within. But whatever architect did the cookie-cutter job on the design, he couldn't mess with the smell. It was there when I pushed through the revolving door, the smell of newsprint. It's a smell of promise, maybe only the promise of news but that's good enough. I like it when newsprint rubs off on my hands. I remember when the old
Toronto Telegram
was printed in pink editions. The type still rubbed off black. Do young people get the same kicks these days? Do videos have a homey smell? Do ghetto blasters rub off on their hands?

I took the elevator to the fifth, the editorial floor, and walked around a couple of corners to the library. I asked a clerk who'd done favours for me in the past for the news clippings on Ace Disposal Services. She punched into the wall of big mechanical drawers where all
Star
stories are filed in brown envelopes in tidy alphabetical order. Nope, she said, nothing under Ace Disposal. I asked her to try disposal services. Drew another blank. Waste? Zip. Garbage? Bingo city.

It wasn't much. I sat at a table in the library and read a two-part series from six months earlier about organized crime and the garbage business. The lead paragraph in part one announced mighty revelations to follow, but what the series delivered was a few thousand words of generalities. It leaned on those two familiar dancing partners, unnamed sources and police spokesmen. Unnamed sources disclosed that crime syndicates, looking to launder their profits from drugs, loan-sharking, strippers, and the like, were dropping money into the private garbage industry. Police spokesmen hinted at signs of gang infiltration of said industry. No specifics, no numbers. Ace Disposal made the series twice, both times as “the largest company in the garbage field in Toronto.” Period.

The byline on the stories read Ray Griffin, and I went looking for him in the city room. A copy girl steered me to the section of the floor where feature writers hang their hats, the ones with “press” in the brims. Griffin, the copy girl said, was the sharp dresser. She giggled when she said it.

Griffin had his feet up on a desk just like an old-timey reporter, except there was a computer terminal beside the desk and he was young, in his late twenties. He had unwashed black hair, a droopy bandito moustache, and a large residue of acne scars on his face. He was wearing an emerald-green short-sleeved shirt, plaid Bermuda shorts, and sandals with a lot of strapping. I would have giggled too.

I introduced myself.

I said, “The garbage series seemed a little short on what you journalists call hard news.”

“The lawyers took the guts out of it,” Griffin said. He talked fast. “They've been nervous ever since the Mafia guy in Quebec won his libel case against a Montreal paper. But I'll go back to it. Another year or so, it'll make a hell of a story.”

“Some lawyers are like that,” I said.

“Aw shit, I had the stuff,” Griffin said, rushing his words. “I knew which guys belonged to which families, where their money came from originally, and where they went to scrub it up.”

“Grimaldi?” I said. “That one of your names? Charles Grimaldi?”

“I got all kinds of Grimaldis,” Griffin said.

He leaned over and opened a lower drawer of his desk without taking his sandals off the top. Nice feat of balance. He came up with two red file folders, put one on the desk and opened the other. It had a thick stack of pages of computer printouts held together perfectly squared with a large paper clip and six or seven stenographers' notebooks. He chose one notebook and turned through the pages. He was very methodical. The handwriting in the notebook was as rounded and legible as a private-school girl's.

“The Grimaldis,” Griffin said. “I'll tell you all the dirt on the Grimaldis.”

I said, “It's okay by me if you hold it down to Charles.”

“I got to go at this from the beginning.” He stopped turning the pages of the notebook in his lap, looked up, and started talking at full throttle.

“The old man, Pietro Grimaldi, that's Charles' father, he's numero uno up in Guelph and has been since the end of the Second War. He came to Canada from Calabria and opened a grocery store. That's what he still is today, a grocer in Guelph, Ontario. He's also what you'd call the godfather up there. I'd call him godfather everywhere except in the newspaper or the lawyers'd go bananas. It sounds ridiculous anyway, godfather of Guelph. The whole area's got maybe two hundred thousand people, but everything that's organized crime around that part of the province, old Pietro's in charge. The drugs, the girls, the counterfeiting, all that, and he's never served a day in jail. He's never been in a courtroom. Very sharp old guy.”

I kept waiting for Griffin to look at his notebook. He didn't.

“The funny thing about these people, they don't think of any of that stuff, drugs and prostitution and everything, as crime. It's business.” Griffin's pace had hit lickety-split. “But they know that all the rest of us think of it as criminal. That may be simple-minded to you and me, but it's crucial if you want to understand the psychology of a guy like old Grimaldi.”

“I'm with you,” I said, just to give him a chance to take in some oxygen.

Griffin said, “Pietro was one of the first guys in the big crime scene to figure that all the money he's making, he shouldn't just turn it over into more drugs, more hookers, more whatever. He should put it into businesses that the rest of us citizens consider legitimate.”

“Which brings us to garbage,” I said.

“Not yet it doesn't,” Griffin said.

“Right,” I said. “You have to go in order.”

“Pietro wasn't going to run these straight businesses himself,” Griffin said. “He's still a grocer. You should see him waiting on the customers. You'd take him for your kindly old Uncle Pete, and all the time, in the back room, he's masterminding this whole network of bad guys. Anyway, he's sticking at home, so he sends his three boys out into the world to look after the up-and-up operations.”

I said, “Garbage.”

“Wait,” Griffin said. The notebook was still open in his lap, uncon-sulted. “Pietro's got three sons. The oldest, Pete Junior, he gets a string of laundries in Hamilton. Number two boy, John, he's in car-washes through the southwest part of the province, London, Woodstock, down there. And Charles, the youngest, for him Pietro buys Ace Disposal, which is the largest garbage company in the city.”

“I read that somewhere,” I said. “You ever meet Charles?”

“Dark, good-looking guy in his early thirties,” Griffin said, not easing up on the speed. “He took me to lunch at Fenton's when I was doing the story and talked a lot of bullshit about the challenge of garbage. He must've spent seventy bucks on the food and wine.”

“The old slyboots,” I said, “trying to purchase your favour that way.”

“Charles is the one in the family who's different,” Griffin said. “He's the only son with a record, two assault convictions when he was a kid. On the second, he was ten months in reformatory. That was thirteen years ago. Charles was nineteen. He hit a guy with the lever from a tire jack. Fractured his skull.”

Griffin closed the notebook on his lap.

I said, “You're probably just as good without all the help from that thing.”

“Huh?”

I thanked Griffin for his time.

“Don't forget,” he said, “I told you I'm still interested in the story.”

I said, “When I break this case wide open, you'll get it first.”

He said, “Nobody talks like that any more.”

There was a Diamond Cab at the taxi stand in front of the building and I took it home.

3

M
Y HOUSE
is in Goldwin Smith's old neighbourhood. I moved in about eighty years after he moved on. Goldwin Smith was a wise old duck who wrote on political and social affairs around town in the late nineteenth century. He didn't make much money out of his writing, but he married a rich woman. That was another thing Goldwin and I had in common. My rich woman was named Pamela. She was beautiful and talked through her nose. Her family had a lot more money than Matthew Wansborough and the money was a couple of hundred years older. Pamela married me when I was a law student in part because she thought I was quaint. My father thought Pamela was quaint. I come from a long line of working-class toilers and my father was a photo-engraver. Banged at pieces of metal for all his employed life. He died ten years ago, around the time Pamela stopped thinking I was quaint and we divorced. Goldwin Smith stayed married.