Crang Plays the Ace (6 page)

“The straight world you're talking about,” I said.

“There must be a better adjective.”

“The straight world gets a trifle bent,” I said. “Cops tell fibs. Crown attorneys push witnesses around. Judges reveal cruel streaks. Small points but true.”

“Is there a larger point?” Annie asked.

The Rioja was all gone. I made motions at the waiter.

I said to Annie, “Maybe not larger but pertinent to what we're talking about. These people, my beloved clients, aren't entirely rational. If they were, I'd probably find them dull. They pull these crazy stunts. Get themselves behind life's eight ball.”

“Everybody has a run of lousy luck now and then,” Annie said. “The difference is, your people go looking for the eight balls.”

“What makes them into bandits?” I said. “I'm fascinated to know if there's an answer.”

“Maybe you'll never find out.”

“The quest of a lifetime.”

The waiter poured more wine from the new bottle into our glasses. He poured with his right hand and held the left behind his back at the correct slope.

“Tom Catalano's still a nice guy,” I said.

“You'll do too,” Annie said.

I gave her an aw-shucks smile.

“Do I sound cranky about you sometimes?” Annie said.

She didn't wait for me to answer. I would have fibbed anyway.

“It's the rewards,” Annie said. “Or the status. I want the return for you that you ought to have earned. Okay, I'm talking from a perspective I might not be entitled to. I'll never make a big buck reviewing movies. Never expected to. But you, a lawyer, all those years at school, you . . . ah hell, Crang.”

“You aren't going to say I could be a somebody,” I said.

“Not that clichéd,” Annie said. “I was almost about to ask you to be more serious, but that's not right either.”

“Serious tends to be dull. Natural equation.”

“Tedious you're not.”

“This line of conversation has stalemated.”

“Leave it at this,” Annie said. “I hope your Mr. Wansborough is a harbinger of clients to come.”

I couldn't locate another mussel in my paella. Out of oysters, too. I went on a search for chicken.

“On the subject of careers,” I said, “how was Richard Gere's bare ass this afternoon?”

“Bare ass!” Annie said. There was an exclamation point in her voice. “We're talking full frontal nudity here. The man's basing stardom on his genitalia. What's worse, private parts aside, his acting's so bloody mannered, the Meryl Streep of his sex.”

Annie had a thought or two about performing mannerisms. All actors include them in their equipment, she said; the good ones make them disappear. Annie's thought or two expanded to a thesis. She said she admired Robert De Niro's technique. She said it was close to seamless. Annie was intense as she talked, and at the same time she was having fun with her subject. She said the older English actors had technique that vanished before one's very eyes. Annie thought it was amazing.

She talked, I played audience, enjoying it, and after the wine was gone, we had Spanish coffees, and Annie began to wind down.

“Gere had a line in the movie today you could handle,” she said to me.

“Set the scene.”

“It's one of those 1940s nightclubs you only see in movies,” Annie said. “Never existed otherwise. Women in slinky gowns, everybody smoking like mad, an orchestra with violins, waiters in tuxedos, and Gere's coming on to the gorgeous lady with the sultry look. Get the picture? The orchestra's playing a tango and Gere says—”

“—your place or mine?”

“Your reading lacks a certain
je ne sais quoi
but the wording's on the money.”

We finished our Spanish coffees. I paid the bill and tipped the waiter, who looked pleased as punch. And Annie and I resolved the Richard Gere dilemma. We went to her place, and some of the time we slept.

8

F
OR BREAKFAST
, Annie made us an omelette with bits of tomato mixed in and we sat at the table in the bow window of her apartment. I ate my half of the omelette and most of hers and drank two cups of coffee. I did the eating and drinking in silence except for the odd slurp. A book had Annie's undivided attention. It was about an Italian movie director named Alberti and it was written in Italian.

“Damn,” Annie said to her book, “I didn't know he wrote the script for that.”

She had an interview with Signor Alberti in the afternoon. He was passing through town on a promotion tour for his new movie.

Annie said, “The entertainment editor at the
Sun
says he'll pay me for a thousand words on Alberti if I deliver first thing tomorrow for Sunday's paper.”

“They take freelance stuff?”

“Their regular movie guy's out in California on a press junket and the editor said there was nobody else at the paper who knows as much about movies as I do.”

“How complimentary.”

“He did say European movies.”

I went home and changed into jeans and a cotton sports shirt, something comfy for more surveillance duty. I drove over to the Metro dump at the foot of Leslie Street and parked under the tree outside the entrance. Thursday, I'd started at Ace Disposal. Friday, I was beginning at the dump. Sometimes my talent for improvisation frightened me.

I watched trucks pass in and out of the dump, on and off the weigh scales, for an hour.

“Hey,” I said. Out loud. It was an exclamation of discovery.

I leaned across the front seat and fiddled among the odds and ends in the glove compartment. The street guide, a flask of brandy for swooning spells, a deck of playing cards with bicycle wheels on the back. Gloves, too, the kind with no fingers. They remain unworn. I'm saving them until I get my first Mercedes and can rightfully adopt the pretentious look in handwear. I got out a spiral-bound steno notebook and a ballpoint pen that wrote in black. I unstrapped my wristwatch and set it on my lap. I watched and I timed and I made notes.

Trucks arrived at the weigh scale on the average of about one every couple of minutes. Sometimes there was a lineup of three or four trucks. Sometimes five minutes went by without a truck in sight. They came out of the dump at the same rate. About half the trucks were from Ace Disposal, the rest from a variety of other companies. So far, so clear.

What prompted the “hey” was the amount of time it took the man inside the weigh-scale office to deal with the Ace trucks. It was the same man from the day before, the old pro in the short-sleeved white shirt. Maybe a different shirt. He consulted his weighing gadget, jotted numbers on his sheets of paper, handed out the carbon copies to the drivers as they left. Identical routine with each truck in and out. The fishy part was that the routine may have been identical with every truck, but according to my watch and calculations, it took him twenty to thirty seconds longer to deal with an Ace truck than with a truck from another disposal outfit. That was twenty or thirty seconds longer going in and the same coming out.

I started up the Volks and drove back on Leslie until I came to a phone booth. I looked up the number of the
Star
's editorial department and let it ring seven times before somebody came on the line and told me Ray Griffin didn't get in till noon. That was an hour away. I said I'd call later.

Back at the dump, a variation in routine greeted me. A Cadillac was parked in back of the weigh-scale building. It was very large and very pink, on the order of the gaudy sort that Mary Kay cosmetics salespersons cruise around in. Maybe old white-shirt in the weigh offIce had run out of lip gloss. A young man wearing a straw hat at a rakish angle sat behind the wheel of the pink Caddie. He'd left the motor running. A couple of minutes later, another man came out the back door of the weigh building. He had black hair, a deep tan, and a nose that was champion size, and he was wearing a light blue summer suit with dark blue stitching around the pockets. He was carrying a thin black briefcase. He got into the front passenger seat of the Cadillac, and before he'd closed the door, the driver was reversing out of the yard and gunning up Leslie. In a cloud of dust.

I stuck it out for another hour. I timed and noted and got the same answers. Ace trucks took about twenty-five, thirty seconds longer to service. Whatever it meant, it was, as they say in the accounting business, a confirmed trend. I drove back to the phone booth, and when I got Ray Griffin on the line, I had a question for him.

“You got somebody tame in the disposal business?”

“Are you on to something?”

“I asked first.”

There was a pause on the other end.

“What'd you mean tame?” Griffin asked.

“Somebody inside the industry who didn't mind feeding you material he probably shouldn't have. Somebody who spoke off the record.”

“Oh sure, a source, you mean.”

“I guess I do.”

“I got plenty of stuff from a guy who used to drive for a disposal company.”

“Ace?”

“Another one. Ace's drivers are heavies.”

“I noticed.”

“You're getting into this in a big way, it sounds like.”

Griffin's voice had turned confidential. He was a reporter who sniffed a scoop. Except he wouldn't say scoop. Or sniffed.

I said, “I'd like to talk to your driver. That possible?”

“Easy,” Griffin said. “He works right here now. Drives a
Star
delivery truck. I can have him for you around four-thirty. He's on the early shift and he'll just be coming off.”

We arranged to meet at a restaurant near the Star building called the Press Grill.

“We don't call it that, us reporters,” Griffin said. “We call it La Salle de Crayons.”

“You sophisticated devils.” I hung up.

9

T
HE PRESS GRILL
was windowless and as fragrant as the prisons of Turkey. It smelled of fried onions, stale beer, and cigarette smoke trapped since the days when Holy Joe Atkinson ran the
Star
. Holy Joe died in 1956. Somebody had tried to update the room's decor in a style that ran to California manqué. The ferns drooped and were turning brown at their tips, the posters of 1970s rock groups had wrinkled in their frames, and the three waitresses were too matronly for the tight yellow dresses that passed as uniforms. The place wouldn't see a revival of the Algonquin Round Table.

Ray Griffin and a small, bouncy man with the sleeves of his blue work shirt rolled up tight over his biceps were sitting under a blow-up of Jim Morrison. They had a pitcher of beer in front of them.

“Crang,” Griffin said, “like you to shake with Ernie Andrychuk.”

Ernie had his first name spelled out in tidy script over the left breast of his blue shirt. He gave my hand a ferocious squeeze. Griffin had on a flaming-red tennis jersey with a green duck where René Lacoste puts his alligator.

Ernie Andrychuk said, “Mr. Crang, I already told Ray here everything I know about Ace when he done them articles of his.”

“You want some of this beer, Crang?” Griffin asked.

Before I could say vodka, Griffin was signalling one of the visions in yellow.

“I appreciate your time, Ernie,” I said.

“Well, I dunno,” Ernie said. He had a puckish face and eyes as blue as the sky over Eire. Andrychuk? Maybe the skies over the Ukraine.

I said, “I've got some specifics you might be able to help me with, Ernie.”

“Long's somebody else's paying for the beer,” Ernie said with an elfin grin. The Barry Fitzgerald of the Steppes.

The waitress put a stein in front of me, the heavy kind that give lesser men than I a hernia.

I said, “Is there a Metro dump on Bathurst Street, pretty far up, north of Highway 7?”

“There's twelve dumps around the city,” Ernie said. “None of them's on Bathurst north or south or any other part.”

“Why would an Ace driver pick up a load at a small building site and take it up there?”

“That's easy,” Ernie said. He looked as satisfied as a kid who knows the answer to the first question on the ancient-history test. “Probably one of them gypsy dumps,” Ernie said. “The driver's doing a run on his own. Takes a payoff from the builder and dumps the load for him and nobody's the wiser at Ace.”

“A little freelance finagle?”

“There ain't much in it for anybody. 'Cept maybe the builder. He don't have to go through Ace. He pays the driver maybe fifty bucks and the driver gives half to the guy who owns the land where he dumps the stuff.”

“The dump's illegal?”

“All kinds of people do it that got the land out in the sticks and nothing on it.”

I sipped my beer. It tasted soapy. To me, all beer tastes soapy. I drink it only on occasions of crisis or diplomacy. In the Press Grill, I drank it out of tact. Blend in with my companions. Be one of the guys.

“You're on to something, Crang?” Griffin said.

“Not what I want to be on to,” I said. “But it's yours for the taking.”

I wasn't looking for scams that lost money for Ace. I wanted the kind that might be turning Ace a profit.

“Let's take the usual drill a driver goes through,” I said to Ernie Andrychuk. “He weighs a load in at the dump, drops the load, and weighs out empty. The weigh-master or whatever you call the guy in the building at the scales gives him a sheet of paper and he goes on his way.”

“That sheet of paper, it's called your waybill.”

“Got it.”

“Weigh-master keeps the original and a copy and the driver gets the other copy.”

I asked, “What does the driver do with the waybills he's accumulated at the end of the day?”

“Place where I worked, Donnelly Disposal, it was kind of small compared to Ace, nine or ten trucks is all, we handed them in to the dispatcher back at the yard.”