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
THE 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.”
“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