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