I’m doing on my feet.”
“Oh, please, Mr. Crang, take your seat,” Harry said, back in his Ralph Kramden role. “The best is yet to come, yes it is.”
I sat down.
Harry typed on the computer’s keyboard. He muttered ho-hos and huh-huhs and filled the space around his side of the desk with an uncharacteristically radiant aura. Uncharacteristic for Harry.
“Have a look,” he said.
The left side of the screen was taken up with a list of company names. Some I recognized as outfits that did business of various sorts around the city. Laidlaw Construction, a specialist in shopping plazas. Mor-Jim, another big building firm. Consumers’ Brick, a large supplier of cement products. Other company names in the list didn’t ring any bells with me. On the right side of the screen, opposite the names, were a series of figures. They covered a wide range, mostly from the low hundreds to the high hundreds. Three or four numbers poked over one thousand. The screen wasn’t saying what the numbers measured. Currency? Tonnage? Number of goals scored in a lifetime? Harry wasn’t saying, either. He clicked at the keyboard and the lists of company names and numbers marched up the screen. My eyeballs were throbbing.
“Very impressive, Harry,” I said. “What are they?”
Harry was silent until the parade of names and figures reached an end. He shifted in his chair to face me.
“All the names you saw there, a hundred and forty-four of them, they’re Ace Disposal customers,” Harry said. “The numbers beside the names are the charges at the dumps for the stuff Ace hauled away for each customer during one day in June this year.”
“Those numbers are dollars?”
“Right.”
“Why didn’t it just say so on the screen?”
“Don’t get picky, Crang.”
“Okay, those figures showed how much Ace billed the customers,” I said, feeling like a fast learner.
“I didn’t say that,” Harry said.
I held my hands up.
“I surrender,” I said.
“Those numbers you saw came from invoices in Ace’s files,” Harry said. He was talking very slowly. Maybe he’d concluded the learner he had on his hands was less than fast. “I took a sample day for June, pulled out the invoices the drivers brought back from the dumps, and tabulated them the way you saw on the screen.”
“Those figures,” I said, “are the result of the doctoring by the weigh-masters.”
“They are,” Harry said. “But that isn’t what’s relevant here.”
I told myself to have patience.
Harry was back at the computer keyboard tapping out another sprightly tune.
“Yes, indeedy,” he said and leaned back from the keyboard. “Look again, Crang.”
Down the left side of the screen, once again, a list of company names ran in a continuous vertical column. Laidlaw Construction was in place, Mor-Jim, Consumers’ Brick, all the rest.
“Same list as before,” I said.
“Same one hundred and forty-four customers,” Harry said.
Opposite the names, as before, were numbers.
“Is the computer on the fritz?” I asked Harry.
“It’s working perfectly, my friend,” Harry said. “What you see is what I found.”
The numbers were all the same. For each company name, the screen showed the figure 837. I presumed it was dollars.
“The numeral,” Harry said, “is what Ace actually billed all those customers for the test day in June I told you I picked out.”
Harry kept the names and numbers shifting up the screen. The names changed. The number stuck at 837. Dollars.
I said, “It didn’t matter how much Ace dumped for each customer. All of them were billed the same amount.”
“That’s it,” Harry said. “Beautiful piece of trickery. If you worked out an average billing for the day, which I did, average for all the customers, it comes to just over 450 bucks. Ace billed 837. That’s a very tidy profit when you’re talking a hundred and forty-four customers.”
“Where did the figure come from?” I asked. “The 837?”
“That’s what makes the scheme so plausible,” Harry said. “One of the invoices from the dump, the invoice for a customer called Weyman Iron, showed 837 dollars. It was genuine. The real goods. What somebody at Ace did was make copies of that invoice, the 837, and send them to all the customers along with the normal charge for each pickup. That’s seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five plus the amount on the invoice.”
“The invoice doesn’t show Weyman’s name on it?” I said.
“Course not,” Harry said. “It’s all garbage. The only thing that counts to the customer is he’s got an invoice from a Metro dump that shows Ace hauled 837 dollars’ worth of junk to the dump. He assumes the junk is his. Why not? These are customers with big businesses. Lot of refuse gets taken away. It comes to 837 dollars? Okay, pay the man.”
The list of names on the screen reached its end.
“Ace does it every day,” Harry said. “Picks an invoice in the high range, copies it, and sends it to all of that day’s customers.”
“Gorgeous,” I said. “All of them get the same thing, same amount and same invoice number. Except who’s to know?”
“I’ll print all this stuff out for you,” Harry said. “You can take it with you. The invoices and other papers on the desk, them too. Take everything.”
Harry pressed some keys on the board and switched on a button at the back. The printer that was hooked into the computer went clack-ety-clack and an endless stream of perforated paper began to fold out of a slot in the front of the printer.
I talked over the racket.
“Harry,” I said, “Ace is cheating at both ends.”
“You win a cigar, Crang,” Harry said. “That scheme they got on with the weigh-masters, they’re chiselling the Metro government out of a million minimum every month. With the customers, I’d say they’re taking down another million and a half.”
“The first, the deception at the dumps,” I said, “that’s a kind of negative fraud. Ace is saving itself big money. The other, with the customers, it’s pure profit.”
“Simple when you know what’s happening,” Harry said. “Took some brains to set up in the first place.”
I sat up in my chair, put my elbows on the chair’s arms, and tapped my fingers in front of me. My Alistair Cooke pose.
“There’s got to be a flaw,” I said.
“What flaw?” Harry said. “At the dumps they probably worked into it gradually, took a little off Ace’s weights at a time. Spread it over a few months and nobody up in Metro’s head office would notice what the weigh-masters were up to.”
“If any questions got asked,” I said, “the weigh-masters could blame the drop on a fall-off in building sites in the city. Something like that. Or maybe say it was a seasonal decline.”
The printer clacked to a stop. Harry tore the sheets of paper along the perforations and assembled them in neat order.
“On the other side,” I said, “the only way the customers might catch on is if they compared charges and discovered everybody was paying the same.”
Harry said, “Not a topic that comes up at cocktail parties, Crang.”
“Yeah,”