Crang Plays the Ace Read online

  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

  MY 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.

  At the northwest corner of Beverley Street and Sullivan, there’s the Chinese Baptist Church, then a row of square red-brick houses. Mine’s up at the north end. It faces across Beverley to the park that used to be Goldwin Smith’s front lawn. His house was called the Grange and still is. It has a stone porch and stone pillars almost as tall as my house. The Art Gallery of Ontario uses the Grange for offices. I divided my house into two apartments, mine upstairs and one downstairs where a gay couple and their Irish setter have been in residence for six years. Alex is a civil servant, Ian sells real estate, and the dog slobbers on everyone he gets close to, friend or foe.

  I got the Wyborowa out of the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and poured some over three ice cubes in an old-fashioned glass. Whether Matthew Wansborough knew it or not, he had the mob for a partner. He wouldn’t want his pals who put on the funny red jackets and ride the horses with him on weekends to find out about that. On the other hand, he wanted the answer to the question he started out with: How come Ace Disposal was suddenly making money? Did Charles Grimaldi have a touch with garbage? Was the Grimaldi family using Ace as a front for other purposes? Lucrative purposes? Illegal purposes?

  I put a Bill Evans album on the stereo, You Must Believe in Spring, and went out to the kitchen. I spread a thin layer of Paul Newman spaghetti sauce on two large pieces of whole-wheat pita bread. Fine slices of mushroom, green pepper, cooking onion, zucchini, mozzarella cheese, and asparagus went on next. I organized them in jolly little patterns and covered them with flakes of parmesan. Boutique pizza, a woman friend of mine calls the recipe. It’s one of two in my repertoire. Chili is the other. Makes for a cramped diet and sends me out of the house for dinner most nights. I put the two pizzas in the oven at three hundred degrees. They needed twenty minutes. Bill Evans had reached the final bars of “We Will Meet Aga
in,” the last track on side one.

  I turned the record over, poured another vodka, and phoned my answering service. A Mrs. Turkin had returned my call. Mrs. Turkin was the mother of an eighteen-year-old kid I acted for. The kid’s girlfriend had got in the front seat of a taxi late one night and told the driver to let her off in the underground garage of a downtown apartment building. When the cab driver and the girl were concluding the transaction in the garage, which the driver may or may not have interpreted as a prelude to some quick and nasty sex, my kid jumped in the back seat of the cab. He made threatening noises at the driver while the girlfriend lifted the poor sap’s wallet. The cabbie said he got a good look at my kid as he and the girl were hot-footing it out of the garage, and a couple of weeks later he spotted my kid in front of Sam the Record Man’s on the Yonge Street Strip. The police reasoned that my kid’s girlfriend had set up the robbery, a variation on the old badger game. My kid said something to the cops when he was arrested. To wit: “The driver deserved it. He was just looking to get laid.” Clever. I jockeyed around with the crown attorney on the case for a month and we made a deal. She reduced the charge from robbery to assault with intent and I pleaded my kid guilty. Not bad considering my kid had a record, nothing violent before the waltz in the garage but a record. He’d been in jail for the month and was coming up for sentencing.

  I phoned Mrs. Turkin. At her end, the television was on in the background. More like the foreground.

  “We been worried sick about James, Mr. Crang,” she said. She had to talk up over Family Feud.

  I said, “He may go to jail, Mrs. Turkin.”

  “What we done for that boy, there wasn’t nothing more we could,” she said. Even talking up, her voice was whiny.

  “How long he goes to jail,” I said, “may depend on you and your husband.”

  “He got the marks in school,” she said. “We never made him quit or nothing.”

  I said, “The judge is going to sentence James on Monday morning, Mrs. Turkin. I’d like you or your husband to be in court.”

  “What?” The whine was gone.

  “Judges are usually impressed favourably, Mrs. Turkin, when the parents of a boy James’ age take the trouble to appear for sentencing.”

  She had put her hand over the receiver and was shouting at someone else. The shouting lasted ten seconds.

  “We can’t get off work, neither of us,” Mrs. Turkin said to me.

  I said, “It could make a difference of months in the sentence, Mrs. Turkin.”

  “Me and my husband got jobs to think of and that’s more than James can say.”

  She hung up.

  The pizzas were beginning to bubble in the oven and Bill Evans was halfway through “Sometime Ago.”

  I made another phone call and got Tom Catalano’s wife at home. She said Tom was still at the office. Her tone was in the small gap between patience and resignation. I dialled the night line at McIntosh, Brown & Crabtree, and someone said he’d dig Catalano out of the library.

  “This wouldn’t be a prodigal son call?” Catalano said when he knew it was me.

  Years earlier, I’d worked my eighteen months as an articling student at McIntosh, Brown. Catalano kept wanting me back.

  “I don’t get it, Crang, whatever it is that makes you stick it out in the criminal courts,” he said on the phone. “It’s grubby stuff and fundamentally boring. Come down here and I’ll guarantee you a Supreme Court civil trial first time out of the box.”

  “I’d flunk the dress code you got down there,” I said.

  “I’ll hand you the kind of cases they write up in the Dominion Law Reports,” Catalano said. “That ever happen with the clients you got smelling up your waiting room?”

  “Haven’t got a waiting room,” I said. “Anyway, one point in favour of my clients, so far none of them have been serious enough to consort with the guys who wear black suits and leave their associates in the trunks of cars out at the airport.”

  “Meaning?”

  I told Catalano about Matthew Wansborough and Ace Disposal and the Grimaldis, father and sons. He was silent for about three beats and asked if I had told Wansborough my news. I said no and asked him if Wansborough was likely to get himself involved in something shifty and keep it from his lawyers. Catalano said, was the Pope Jewish? He said a newspaper reporter’s unprinted allegations weren’t much to go on. I said Ray Griffin impressed me as sound on his research. Catalano said he’d hold off on reporting to Wansborough, and in the meantime, I should find out what I could about the Grimaldis and Ace and do it about as soon as yesterday.

  “Listen,” Catalano said when we were through with Wansborough’s troubles, “one of our juniors came to work this morning in corduroy pants and a tweed jacket. We let him walk around that way all day.”

  I said, “Tell me when he shows up in a windbreaker from his bowling league.”

  I called my answering service again and told them I wouldn’t be in the office next day. I phoned my secretary and told her the same thing. Part-time secretary. In a practice like mine, paperwork is minimal, mostly a matter of reports to the Legal Aid Society on cases they send me, a few letters, subpoenas. Mrs. Reid is a proper lady in her early sixties who will forever be Mrs. Reid to me and I will be Mr. Crang to her. She comes in two or three days a week to type things and file other things. On days when she doesn’t come in and I’m not around, the office is unmanned. And unwomanned.

  I ate the pizzas at the table in the kitchen, and afterwards I poured another vodka and watched television. Barbara Frum on The Journal was carrying on a four-way interview with an economist in Halifax, the Minister of Finance in the Toronto studio, a union man in Hamilton, and a former provincial premier in Regina. The subject was interest rates. After a while, the camera-switching made me forget whether I was being enlightened.

  I flicked off the set and turned out the lights. Across the street, three gentlemen who looked in need of fresh barbering were sitting at one of the tables under a light in the park passing around a bottle in a brown paper bag. Maybe they weren’t winos. Maybe they were free and questing spirits come to commune with the shade of Goldwin Smith. I went to the bedroom at the back of the apartment and slept straight through for eight hours.

  4

  IWAS DRINKING my second cup of coffee, and when it got to be eight-twenty, I turned on the radio in the kitchen. The radio was set at the CBC station. The morning show was in its third hour and time had come for Annie B. Cooke to do her movie reviews. I never miss Annie B. Cooke.

  The show’s host introduced her, and after he and she had engaged in fifteen seconds of what passed for witty badinage at eight-twenty in the morning, Annie B. Cooke waded into a movie about Tarzan. I gathered it was a movie that its makers intended to be taken seriously. Ms. Cooke wasn’t having any of that.

  “The movie reveals how Tarzan was raised in semi-dark Africa by a bunch of guys dressed in costumes left over from Planet of the Apes,” she said in a voice that was a match for Debra Winger’s, “how Tarzan grew up and shopped at a jungle emporium for a loincloth by Giorgio Armani, and how he was taken to London, where he freaked out when he discovered his former jungle colleagues locked in cages at the zoo. The movie is pompous and makes you yearn for the good old days of Johnny Weissmuller.”

  The host chuckled, and Annie B. Cooke praised a French movie with Lino Ventura, trashed a directing job by Paul Mazursky, and recommended a comedy that Carl Reiner had written the script for. The host thanked her and it was over to the weatherman to size up the prospects for more July heat wave.

  I turned down the radio and poured a third coffee. When five minutes had gone by on the clock on the stove, I picked up the phone and dialled a number I knew by heart.

  “You have a nimble way with a phrase,” I said when Annie answered at the other end.

  “Aren’t you the loyal listener,” she said. She sounded out of breath. It takes her five minutes to walk rapidly out of the CBC Cabbagetown studio where the
morning show comes from, half a block north and two blocks east to her flat on the third floor of a renovated house. Renovated is the only way houses come in Cabbagetown these days. Annie always walks rapidly after her morning reviews, something about the adrenalin pump of working live radio.

  “Listening to you,” I said, “it beats going to the dud movies.”

  “Hang in there, Crang,” Annie said. “Next month, the Roxy’s running an Anita Ekberg retrospective.”

  “Just my speed.”

  “We’ll go to the seven-o’clock screenings. My treat.”

  “Does this mean we’re steadies?”

  “Pinned. It’s a progression: dating, pinned, steady, engaged, married, cheating, an entry on the court calendar.”

  “Let’s plan on vamping somewhere between pinned and steady for a decade or two.”

  “You’re not otherwise entangled tonight, is that the reason for this early-morning chat? You’re not labouring on behalf of people who probably should stay in jail anyway?”

  “It’s Thursday,” I said, “date night all over the world.”

  “Seems to me you once described Saturday as date night all over the world.”

  “Next I may say Friday,” I said. “It’s a shifting kaleidoscope out there.”

  “Okay, I’ve got a screening of the new Richard Gere at four,” Annie said. She spoke in her down-to-brass-tacks tone. “You can come by at seven. This is for dinner, I take it. I wonder how many times Gere’s going to drop his pants in this one. Seven o’clock and I’ll brace you with one of those vodka martinis before we go out. Or whatever it is you do with one of those vodka martinis.”

  “Drink it.”

  I went into the bathroom for a shave and a shower. My bathroom is decorated with a framed poster Annie gave me for my last birthday. It’s from a 1940s movie called The Mask of Dimitrios. It shows Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Zachary Scott trying for a snarl in their expressions. My kind of guys.