Crang Plays the Ace (7 page)
“And from there, Donnelly billed the customers, that right?”
“Sure, the customer pays a flat rate, fifty bucks a pickup or whatever, plus more for the weight of the load which is what your waybill tells ya.”
Ernie drained off the rest of the beer from his stein. The pitcher was empty and we paused while Griffin rounded up the waitress for a refill.
“Think about this one, Ernie,” I said. “Why would it take the weigh-master over at the Leslie dump a half-minute longer to process an Ace truck than a truck from another company?”
Ernie's face lost its merriness. It scrunched into a puzzled expression. His busy little mind must have been telling him he was going to flunk ancient history after all.
“Don't sweat it, Ernie,” I said. “Try another one. You know anybody in the business who rides around in a pink Caddie? Dark guy with a big nose?”
“Solly the Snozz.”
Ernie came close to shouting the answer. Saved by the last question. Passed the test. Good grades to take home to Mum and Dad.
“That what you call him?” I asked.
“Well, me, I don't, not to his face anyways. He's Sol Nash. Works at Ace, I dunno as what, but I used to see him all over the place. He's got a driver who's a boxer, a pro I mean, when he's not suspended for hittin' the referee or something.”
“Why would Nash drop in on the weigh-master at Leslie Street?”
“He goes regular to all the dumps. Who knows why? I never heard of office guys from other companies doin' that. But everything's different about Ace.”
“Such as?”
“Bigger, that's for sure. They got two hundred trucks at least. I bet more, even. And the drivers they hire for them trucks, nobody messes with those guys unless you wanta get your arm broke or something. They're bikers, those guys, Hells Angels or whatever you call them.”
Ernie poured more beer from the pitcher into his stein.
“How am I doin', Mr. Crang?” he asked.
“Peachy, Ernie,” I said. “You earned a B-plus.”
“Sorry about Ace's trucks takin' longer on the scales. Can't figure that one.”
“You think it's important, Crang?” Griffin asked.
“Everything's important,” I said, “if you don't know the answers.”
“You're keeping me posted, promise?”
“I'd do anything for another visit to you scribes in your natural habitat.”
Griffin turned in his seat and looked around the room. It was filling up with men and women who gave off waves of energy and panic. Reporters fuelling up for a deadline or coming down from meeting a deadline. Either way, they wanted their drinks in a hurry, and the three waitresses bustled back and forth between the tables and the bar. The decor still struck me as ersatz San Francisco. Griffin caught my reaction.
“One of the dames in Features, hell of a writer, she has another name for in here,” he said. “She calls it Château Despair.”
I put a ten and a five on the table to cover the pitchers of beer and promised Griffin he'd get the late-breaking news on Ace and Grimaldi. He winced.
Outside the restaurant, the sun had left its invisible message on the pavement. The heat off the asphalt in the parking lot seeped through the soles of my Rockports and gave my feet a soft, oozy feel. The sun was sliding behind the Harbour Castle Hilton across the street.
I drove up University Avenue, turned left before I reached the block where all the hospitals start, and switched through the side streets until I reached my place. The air in the living room was hot and stale. I didn't have air conditioning in the house. Air conditioning makes my body think it's gone to its final resting place in a Holiday Inn. I opened the windows in the kitchen and the living room, and in a few minutes a gentle cross-wind ruffled the staleness. I poured a Wyborowa on some ice cubes and sat in the chair that looks over the park across the street. A couple of guys with their shirts off were playing chess at one of the tables.
Little things. I propped my feet on the windowsill and took a swallow of vodka. Everything I had so far was little. Ace hired bikers to drive its trucks. The man on the Leslie Street scale needed a half-minute of extra attention to weigh in the Ace trucks and another half-minute on the way out. One of Ace's big shots made regular calls on weigh offices around the city. Three things and none of them significant in itself, but maybe there was a pattern. One of the shirtless chess players across the street stood up from his seat and paced back and forth behind his side of the board. Big move coming up. Another little thing was the bearded driver's run up Bathurst Street. But that didn't fit the pattern, if one existed. The pacing player in the park resumed his seat and moved one of his pieces. His opponent stared at the board. Everything except the freelance fiddle at the Bathurst dump spoke, albeit faintly, of something possibly shifty on Ace's part. The man across the street stopped staring. He swiped his right hand at the board and knocked the pieces to the grass. Sore loser. I'd concentrate on my three small items that were consistent with Ace's potential wrongdoing and see whether they led somewhere. The winning chess player was picking the pieces out of the grass. His friend remained in a funk. I went back to the kitchen for more ice and vodka and took my drink into the bathroom for a shower.
Ten minutes under the spray didn't do much for my ratiocinative powers but it worked up a swell appetite. I put on a clean collarless white shirt and the same jeans and Rockports I'd been wearing and strolled down Beverley Street to Queen. It was almost nine o'clock and Queen was humming. Every second female wore a Madonna get-up. The guys were harder to fit to type, everything from virile Bruce Spring-steens in basic black T-shirts to candidates for the Hitler Youth in clumpy boots and leather gear. Commerce was brisk at the outdoor cafés and the boutiques that dealt in clothes my mother and father used to wear. A kid in a long white apron cooked and sold chapatis from a hibachi on a wagon parked at the curb. Two girls in their early twenties were projecting slides on the brick wall of a building beyond a parking lot. The night hadn't grown dark enough to give the pictures complete definition, but an ornately printed sign beside the projector invited one and all to purchase the paintings shown in the slides, all originals and nothing over two hundred dollars. The painting style was Dali-esque. So was the salesmanship.
I waved at the woman behind the cash register in Trapezoid, the clothing store under my office, and glanced at the windows above. Lights out, all safe and snug. The woman waved back. She was a dead ringer for Diahann Carroll and about the same age. If Annie B. Cooke didn't have a lock on my affections, I might have invited the Trapezoid woman around to look at my collection of old
Jazz Reviews
.
I kept walking until I reached the Rivoli a few doors past my office. The Riv, as we smart insiders call it, serves the best food on the block. It's a long, narrow room with taupe walls, a high hammered-tin ceiling painted burgundy, black tables and chairs, and fixtures done in a nutty variation on art deco. A booth was empty near the back and I squeezed in. Sitting room at the Riv is as tight as an economy seat on Air Canada, but the menu makes up for all sins. Even the sin of the music. The space cadet who selects the tapes for the Riv's sound system takes glee in playing musical mind games, Frank Sinatra's “Strangers in the Night” followed by John Cage ruminations. Set them up, knock them down. Or maybe I was the only customer who noticed. Maybe the undiscovered artists and out-of-gig rock musicians who frequented the place always dined to the sound of squeak and squawk. My waitress had Theda Bara eye makeup and three studs in her left ear. I ordered Thai red beef curry and a half-litre of the house white. The waitress gave me a winning smile and thanked me. She tacked on a “sir” at the end. If the Queen Street crowd in their far-out clothes and accessories were supposed to be the rebels of the generation, they'd struck out. They were too sunny and polite to think about overthrowing the establishment.
The curry was light and mild and made pleasing sensations on my tongue. Artie Shaw played “Frenesi” on the sound system. I tapped my toe but lost the beat when the tape segued to something punk rock. Or was it new wave? Was there a difference? Had I just defined middle age? I drank an espresso and sauntered back the way I'd come on Queen. Trapezoid had closed down for the night, but the building wasn't dark. The lights were on in my office.
The door that opens on to the stairs leading up to the office is on the front left of the building. I turned the knob. It opened. That wasn't right either. I couldn't hear any sounds from above, no footsteps, nothing furtive. I took it slow on the way up, putting my feet down on the outer corners of the stairs. Less chance of squeaking the boards. I picked up that piece of wisdom from Nancy Drew. I poked my head around the corner at the top of the stairs. The door to my office was open, but all was still and quiet. The hell with it. I stepped down the hall in forthright fashion and turned into the office. It was empty. So were my bookshelves, green metal filing cabinet, and desk drawers. Someone had dumped their contents in heaps on the floor.
I made a wide berth around the heaps and sat in the chair behind my desk. I contemplated the mess, and the longer I contemplated it, the more random it appeared. Whatever the aftermath of a burglary looked like, my office wasn't it. Files and books had been thrown on the floor for the sake of the throwing. The files couldn't have been examined paper by paper. The contents of most files remained intact inside the folders. I seemed to be looking at a piece of run-of-the-mill vandalism.
By whom? Not kids. There was nothing in the way of valuable loot to draw them into my office in the first place unless they coveted the framed Henri Matisse poster on the wall. They didn't. It was still on the wall. Besides, whoever had done the trashing job had been professional about gaining access. There were no broken windows or busted doors. Somebody had jimmied the lock on the door downstairs. It wouldn't be difficult, probably a matter of inserting a credit card at the proper angle, but it spoke of a practised hand.
I turned the lights off and walked home. Office cleanup could wait. Was this another little thing to add to my list of Ace transgressions? If so, it was a whole lot closer to home. My home. To take my mind off the little things, I got in bed with a new collection of Whitney Balliett's essays on jazz from the
New Yorker
. It didn't work. I went to sleep and dreamed that Charlie Parker broke into my bedroom. He raised his alto saxophone to his mouth, and when he blew, he sounded like a graduate of the Guy Lombardo reed section.
I
HAD A COURT
at the Downtown Tennis Club for ten o'clock Saturday morning. My opponent was an intense, dark-haired stockbroker in his mid-thirties. He and I schedule a few sets every week, and they're always close. He says tennis is what keeps him sane during the angst of the market's bulls and bears. I lifted weights for a year and jogged four times a week for another year, but gave up both. I couldn't stand the solitude. When I take my exercise, I want to bang against my fellow man. I beat the stockbroker 6-3 in the first set and was running away from him 4-0 in the second when our court time ran out.
“You were pumped up today,” he said in the locker room.
“Must have been something motivating me,” I said.
I called Annie B. Cooke from the phone in the tennis club's lobby.
“How's the definitive profile of Signor Alberti?” I asked.
“At a thousand words, nothing's definitive.” Annie's voice sounded weary.
“Seminal?”
“How about superficial?”
“You that discouraged?”
“It's my old problem. I over-researched. Alberti gave me all the time in the world and I asked him approximately one hundred and forty-six questions for which he had approximately one hundred and forty-six articulate answers.”
“That's more exact than approximate.”
“The thing is, I can't make up my mind what to leave out.”
“When's your deadline?”
“Twelve-thirty.”
“I'll buy you lunch at one.”
“Deal.”
I went shopping. Two bottles of Côtes-du-Rhône at the rare-wines store on Queen's Quay, then up to Daniel et Daniel on Carlton Street around the corner from Annie's apartment. It's a classy patisserie-cum-French-style-deli, and I bought a bunch of saladsâzucchini, pasta, shrimp, and hearts of artichoke. I got a couple of poached chicken breasts and two fat chocolate eclairs. I hit Annie's front door at five minutes past one. She answered my knock in a light blue dress, white sandals, and a wide-brimmed white hat like the one Anita O'Day wore in
Jazz on a Summer's Day
.
“Picnic time,” I said.
“Take a seat,” she said and walked to the back of her apartment where the bedroom is.
I leafed through a copy of
Cahiers du Cinéma
looking at the photographs. I lingered over one of Isabelle Adjani. She had on high heels.
“Ah,” Annie said from over my shoulder, “the defence counsel searches for a weakness in the case.”
“What do you suppose Isabelle was planning to wear with these shoes?” I said.
Annie had changed to wheat-coloured trousers and a navy blue tank top. She'd ditched the wide-brimmed hat and was carrying a wicker picnic basket.
“Knives, forks, paper plates, salt, pepper, napkins, plastic glasses, and a corkscrew,” she said. “I gather you've got what goes with the equipment.”
“Daniel et Daniel's best spread.”
“Then I was right to pack the linen napkins.”
We angled through Cabbagetown's back streets and came out at the Bayview expressway. The day was without wind or clouds, the sky was a bright blue, and it felt good not to be one of the hundreds of thousands of Torontonians who hit the highways on summer weekends for what radio traffic reporters call cottage country. We drove north on Bayview and east on Eglinton Avenue to Serena Gundy Park across the road from the Inn on the Park. The parking lot was crowded. I carried the bottles of wine and Annie looked after the picnic basket. She said it took a woman's fine sense of balance to keep the contents firm and steady. We walked south from the parking lot alongside a river that I remembered swimming in on Boy Scout camp-outs. I said so to Annie.
