Crang Plays the Ace (4 page)

I'd always wanted a convertible. Indeed, lusted for one. The Volks wasn't what I'd had in mind but it came as a gift. I was defending a client who'd served time for robbing banks. He was on trial for another holdup. My client was black. At the preliminary hearing, the bank teller who'd emptied his till when someone pointed a gun at him described the robber as a look-alike for Sammy Davis Jr. My guy was tall and light-skinned. He looked more like Lena Horne than Sammy Davis Jr.

At the trial, I read the teller's testimony to the jury. I showed them a dozen photographs of Sammy Davis, including the one of old Sam embracing Richard Nixon at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. I asked the jury if that man resembled my client. They took fifteen minutes to acquit.

My guy paid his fee. He said he was so grateful he had a present for me. A convertible. I was thinking something flashy and American. My guy was thinking miniature and German.

The traffic was light on the Lakeshore and I dawdled along. On my left, the sun glinted off the water. Lake Ontario was almost motionless in the still of the morning. I passed the Argonaut Rowing Club. Three strapping lads in blue singlets and shorts were easing their shells into the water. Farther along, a dozen ladies were taking a tennis clinic on the courts at the Boulevard Club. The soft thunk of racquets meeting balls drifted on the air. Another few hundred yards down the road, kids splashed in the Sunnyside pool. Ah, the wide, wide world of sports.

Up ahead, the Palace Pier signalled the end of the public stretch of lakefront. The Palace Pier is a tall, bleak condominium on a small piece of land that juts into the lake, and it isn't the real Palace Pier. The genuine article was a dance hall of the same name that stood for years on the site. I heard Duke Ellington's band there near the end. They were getting long in the tooth, Hodges, Carney, Lawrence Brown, and the rest, but when they played, they still made your stomach lift.

I followed the ramp off the Lakeshore on to the Queen Elizabeth Way. The lake disappeared behind rows of squat factories and warehouses. I stuck on the Queen E to Kipling Avenue and turned north. According to the street guide I keep in the glove compartment, Ace Disposal's address put it on one of the back streets west of Kipling and south of Dundas. It was an area that catered to man and his car. I drove past a Speedy Muffler outlet, a coin car wash, a Rad Man, and half a dozen body shops.

I turned left off Dundas, and in a couple of blocks, on the other side of an unpainted garage where you could have your transmission overhauled, the premises of Ace Disposal announced themselves in a large square sign that hung about twelve feet in the air on a steel pole. The sign had red lettering on a yellow background. Beyond the pole was a chain-link fence. It enclosed four or five acres of asphalted property. The fence stood as tall as the pole with the sign and had a thick trimming of barbed wire at the top. I didn't bother checking for a welcome mat.

I pulled beyond Ace's land, made a U-turn, and parked on the other side of the street in front of a bar and restaurant that advertised exotic dancers from noon to midnight. Just the ticket to pass the hours while your car is getting a lube job up the street.

There were two gates in Ace's fence. Both were closed. One gate was for people and the other for trucks. The people gate led on to a cement path that crossed a patch of brown grass to a long rectangular one-storey building. The building was glum and red-brick and had air-conditioning units sticking out of every second window. No doubt typists, bookkeepers, and various office workers laboured on the other side of the air conditioners. If I wanted to chat up Charles Grimaldi or Wansborough's cousin, Alice Brackley the headstrong, that was where I figured to find them. But I didn't want to chat up Charles or Alice. Not yet. I didn't have the right questions. I was on a reconnoitring mission. Reconnoitring was a word that made me feel efficient.

In the middle of the property, a bigger grey-brick building had a small office area at one end. The rest of it opened up in large bays for servicing trucks. There were eight bays, and four of them were in business. Six or seven men in mechanics' overalls swarmed around the trucks. The asphalted surface that surrounded the buildings had painted-in spaces for at least two hundred trucks, but only ten spaces were occupied. The rest of the trucks must have been out on the job. Whatever precisely that was. Maybe reconnoitring would enlighten me.

The trucks in the parking spaces were uniform in appearance, big and blunt, a dusty red colour, and looked like they'd been put together from a giant set of kids' Lego blocks. The largest piece of Lego sat on the back. It was a bin, a good ten feet deep and probably that much across. If I read correctly the series of bars and chains that led from it to the cab of the truck, the bin could be hoisted on and off the truck when you pushed and pulled the right buttons and levers in the cab. As toys go, it was probably a lot of fun.

I sat in the Volks for fifteen minutes. A man came out of the office end of the grey-brick building and walked toward one of the parked trucks. From the distance, all I could make out of the man were jeans riding low on a bulging stomach, a black T-shirt, and a face covered in a thick, dark beard. He swung into the cab of the truck with a nonchalance that said he'd done it more than once before. He started the engine and steered the truck slowly toward the larger of the two gates. A man in a security guard's outfit stepped from a small hut near the gate, pulled it open, and waved the truck through. The driver turned left and the truck rumbled up the street toward Dundas. It had me for company.

I followed the truck on a route that took us back to the centre of the city. We came off the Lakeshore at York Street and headed north toward Queen.

The Ace truck slowed down a block and a half short of Queen, just south of Osgoode Hall, the elegant nineteenth-century building that houses Ontario's Supreme Court. It turned into the opening in a construction site that was surrounded by smart orange hoardings. There were glass and chrome skyscrapers on either side of the construction site. If I knew my downtown Toronto developers, there'd soon be a third of the same. Three identical skyscrapers in a row. The guy who'd designed Osgoode Hall wouldn't have understood.

The orange hoardings had a dozen glassed-in viewing spots for interested citizens to catch the action. I parked in a tow-away zone and took up position at one of the viewing spots. The excavation dropped fifty or sixty feet. At the bottom, workmen were laying foundations for the new building. My truck had braked its way down a steep incline to the base of the excavation. My truck. Already I was feeling proprietorial.

My truck wheeled in a semicircle and stopped. The driver opened his door and leaned over the side of the truck, half in and half out of the cab. As he leaned, he operated a couple of levers with his right hand. In response, the empty bin on the back of the truck lifted up and out and down. Gradually it settled on the bumpy ground of the excavation.

I patted myself on the head. Metaphorically speaking. The truck operated in just the way I'd thought back at Ace's yard.

The driver closed himself back in the cab and jockeyed the truck several yards north in the excavation. He backed up to another bin that was sitting on the ground. The second bin overflowed with irregularly shaped chunks of cement, broken two-by-fours, and other construction debris.

The driver worked with the levers in the cab. An arrangement of forklifts reached out from the back of the truck and hoisted the full bin into the spot that had been vacated by the empty bin. Rube Goldberg couldn't have diagrammed it better.

The driver gave a ho-hum wave to a group of workers in yellow hard hats and steered up the incline out of the site. I crossed the street and started the Volks. The truck driver picked his way through the streets east and south away from downtown. I remained in surreptitious pursuit.

Following a large truck through slow traffic in clear daylight. Did that qualify as surreptitious pursuit? Close enough for a beginner.

The driver got the truck on to Leslie Street and aimed south at the lake. He drove as far as he could go. That brought him to a sign that read “Metropolitan Toronto Dump Site. No Admittance.”

The driver ignored the instruction.

I didn't.

I pulled off to the right and parked on the shoulder of the road. I watched the truck through the side window of the Volks.

The truck passed through an opening in the wire fence around the dump. It stopped fifty feet inside at a building that was about the size of a booth on a parking lot. On either side of the small building were large metal platforms.

I gave the metal platforms a solid five seconds of scrutiny. Right, got it, the metal platforms were weigh scales. Time for another metaphorical pat on the head.

The truck drove on to the weigh scale at the west side of the small building. At an open window with a counter on it, a man in a short-sleeved, open-neck white shirt consulted a little gadget in front of him. He jotted something on a sheet of paper that looked like it had three or four carbons attached to it. The little gadget figured to be the weigh-scale indicator. The man in the white shirt had weighed my truck. He gave a nod of his head at the driver. The truck pulled away and disappeared out of my sight into the mass of mounds and hillocks that made up the dump.

I waited.

More trucks arrived at the dump. Some were dusty red and had Ace's name on the side. Some came from other disposal companies. The trucks stopped on the weigh scale at the west side of the building.

Other trucks, some Ace and some not, came out of the dump. They stopped on the weigh scale on the east side of the building.

The man in the white shirt took care of both sides. He consulted the weigh-scale indicator on the west side and a similar indicator on the east side. For each truck, he wrote down something on a different sheet of paper with carbons, giving the bottom copy to the driver. He moved purposefully back and forth between the two windows in his little kingdom. He didn't appear rushed. None of the drivers honked a horn at him. A professional at work.

My truck came out of the dump in twenty minutes. It had a jolly bounce that told me its bin had been emptied of the construction debris. The truck pulled on to the east scale. The guy inside the booth jotted his notations, tore off the bottom copy, and handed it to the Ace driver.

Presumably—no, certainly—the sheet was the same paper that the man in the white shirt had used for his notations when my truck arrived at the dump and weighed in on the west side.

Old white-shirt gave a nod of the head to the driver. The truck moved off the scale.

I turned my head from the side window and looked straight ahead. The Volks was parked under a tree, and the front window was in shadows. My face reflected back at me in the semi-darkness. The expression on it was studied. When I look studied, I also look like I should be wearing a tall hat in a conical shape. I let the studiedness slide off my face.

My truck had weighed in with a full load.

It weighed out empty.

The man in the small building had recorded the two weights.

Subtract the second weight from the first and you had the weight of the load.

That figure was the basis on which Ace paid Metropolitan Toronto for the privilege of dumping waste on Metro land.

Ace passed on the charge to its customers. Customers like the guys who were putting up the skyscraper on York Street. Ace charged the customers the amount of the charge it paid Metro plus something for its own services in hauling the stuff to the dump.

All very legitimate and businesslike.

I checked my reflection in the window. Nobody in there wearing a conical hat on his head.

Hot dog, I'd mastered the basics of the disposal business.

6

I
FOLLOWED THE TRUCK
around for the rest of the day. Maybe more surveillance would firm up my analysis of the Ace operation. Maybe I'd discover something dodgy about the disposal business. Maybe I'd pick up a light tan with the top down on the Volks. Maybe the George Hamilton look would come back in style.

The truck made two more runs. Each took us to a different construction site and back to the dump. Empty the bin, take the paper from the man in the booth, move on.

After the third trip, it was two o'clock. The driver parked his truck a few blocks up Leslie from the dump in front of a place called Jerry's Tavern. The driver went in. Jerry must have been a cheery soul. His tavern was painted canary yellow and had more than its complement of neon. It was also ancient enough to offer two entrances. The custom dated back to genteel days when Ontario law required ladies to arrive in drinking establishments through a door exclusive to their sex.

I went into a variety store across the street from Jerry's. A small Korean lady was selling a fistful of lottery tickets to a large black man. When they finished, I bought a quart carton of two-per-cent milk and a package of butter tarts. A sugar hit to carry me through an afternoon of surveillance. I sat in the Volks, sipped the milk, and tried to pin down the flavour of the butter tarts. Band-Aids. The tarts tasted like Band-Aids.

An hour after the driver entered Jerry's, he exited. He stood on the sidewalk and belched. I noted two fresh pieces of information. His T-shirt wasn't all black. It had Duran Duran printed on the front in faded white lettering. At his right hip, hooked on a belt loop, he wore a ring of many keys. It looked heavy. If I carried a load like that on my belt loop, my pants would fall around my ankles.

The driver climbed into his cab and drove north on Leslie. I did likewise.

Duran Duran. Was that the name of the guy or of the band? You didn't run into such conundrums in my kind of music. Stan Getz was the guy. The Stan Getz Quartet was the name of the band.

The truck drove straight across the city to a residential street in the Annex district near Bathurst and Bloor. A triplex was going up on a lot between two Victorian houses. The driver dumped the empty bin from the truck on the front lawn and scooped up another binful of construction trash. All as before.