Crang Plays the Ace

by Jack Batten

  “That’s what I’m gettin’ at,” Tony said. “You’re lookin’ for me to say somethin’ bad about Mr. Nash. Stick his nuts in the wringer for you.”

  Tony might have been headed some place interesting. I kept my mouth shut.

  “Listen, what I’ll tell you, you ought to watch your ass as far as Mr. Nash goes,” Tony said. “Kind of guy he is, he carries this big fuckin’ cannon in his belt. Colt Mag or somethin’, I don’t know the name. Blow a guy’s brains all over the wall. He tells me stories sometimes we’re drivin’ around the dumps. It’s what Mr. Nash does, scare people, shit like that.”

  I asked, “Would he kill Alice Brackley?”

  “For what? They was both at the garbage company.”

  “Business associates have been known to fall out, especially when it’s monkey business.”

  Tony tried out an expression that passed for disgusted.

  “You back to that?” he said. “You’re a friend of Papa’s, all right, I’m sittin’ here talkin’ to you. It’s a favour. Thing about the dumps, I drive the car. Do what Mr. Nash tells me. Murder, that’s news to me. Fraud, also.”

  Tony waited for a moment, not paying attention to his soup, thinking hard.

  “You want somethin’,” he said, “you should ask about the bikers.”

  “The guys who drive Ace’s trucks?”

  “Them.”

  Tony’s thought processes were diverted by the arrival of his tamales. He soaked them in salsa sauce and ordered a piña colada to wash down the hot stuff. It came in a glass the size of the Seven Dwarfs’ bathtub.

  I said, “What about the drivers?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why did Ace hire a squadron of Hells Angels to man the trucks?”

  “Yeah, see, thing is the drivers do other stuff. Collections, for instance. Customer’s slow payin’ his bill, okay, one of the bikers gets sent around, asks for the money, customer shakes in his pants, and, shit, he’ll pay double to get that big sucker out of his office.”

  “Unpleasant all right,” I said, “but nothing illegal.”

  “Well, it’s muscle,” Tony said, disappointed. “Thought that was the kinda thing you were lookin’ for.”

  “You want to tell me about the hustling?” I said. “Deals the drivers make on the side?”

  “You caught on, right, the day you followed the fat guy around in that wiener car you got,” Tony said. “Jesus, that stuff ’s no sweat. Mr. Nash knows what’s happening, he laughs. He lets those guys do their deals.”

  I said, “The driver picks up a load and takes it to a gypsy dump.”

  “Yeah, a little load, from a house or somethin’. The contractor, guy building the house, he pays the driver.”

  “Cash.”

  “Eighty bucks is as high as it goes, a hundred maybe, and the driver has to pay the guy who owns the dump half.”

  “The transaction never shows up in Ace’s books.”

  “Mr. Nash says forty bucks, the drivers are entitled. Like tippin’ a waiter, Mr. Nash says.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “Forty-buck tip for a collection, something more impressive for a murder.”

  Tony gave me his stormy look, the one calculated to strike terror into the hearts of the comers in the Maritimes.

  He said, “You get out of my face about this murder shit, Mr. Lawyer, or you go drink with them cowboys at the bar.”

  “Think of this as practice, Tony,” I said. “Alice Brackley’s dead. The police are going to come around wondering why. Tell me what you know and when the cops ask the same questions, you’ll have the answers down pat.”

  “What’s the question?” Tony said. “You talk so much bull, I forget.”

  “A driver as Alice’s murderer,” I said, “does that fit?”

  “You’re asking, did a biker do it for sure, I don’t know,” Tony said. “But those guys, their morals is all up their ass, y’know what I mean.”

  I took Tony’s splendid metaphor to indicate that murder wasn’t unknown as one of the Ace drivers’ talents.

  “What about Charles Grimaldi?” I asked. “Your boss?”

  “Not my boss,” Tony said quickly. “I work for Mr. Nash personal. Mr. Grimaldi, he’s around, I walk away.”

  “You don’t like the gentleman?”

  “Nuthin’ to do with it, like or not like,” Tony said. “Mr. Nash’s a hard guy, that’s what he’s supposed to be, the way he earns his living. Mr. Grimaldi’s a hard guy, he does it ’cause he likes it. There’s fighters, certain kind of fighter, hits guys that are already fallin’ through the ropes. Weirdos. Mr. Grimaldi’s that kinda person. I told Mr. Nash once. I said Mr. Grimaldi’s weird, and Mr. Nash told me never mind. That’s it, I never mind.”

  Tony had fibbed when he said he knew nothing about Ace Disposal’s wheeling and dealing at the Metro dumps. I’d bet my house on it. I’d make the same wager he was straight with me on the other items. He didn’t kill Alice Brackley and he had no first-hand information on who handled the deed. But in his own assessment, he wouldn’t rule out Sol Nash, worship the man as he did, or one of the drivers, maybe on a contract job. And there was more. Tony’s pigeonholing of Charles Grimaldi’s character seemed to make him, in Tony’s mind, another possibility as a murderer.

  “You done?” Tony said to me. “You wanta watch me eat key lime pie?”

  “Enjoy, Tony,” I said. “Thanks for the time.”

  “I never said nothing against Mr. Nash.”

  “You didn’t throw a right cross at me either.”

  “Papa Anderson made the difference.”

  “I’ll tell him so.”

  Tony said, “You go round and see Papa much, him dyin’ and all that?”

  “I intend to.”

  “Me, I’m at his place, me and these other fighters, regular every Saturday.”

  Chalk up two for Tony.

  25

  THE ROOM ON THE FIRST FLOOR of the CBC Radio building where I found Annie B. Cooke had a high ceiling, no windows, and a machine for editing tape. The machine was large and homely, and when I opened the door to the room, it was playing a passage from one of Annie’s tapes.

  “Some people say if a movie works in the theatre, it’ll work on TV,” the voice on the tape, casual and masculine, was saying. “Sometimes yes. Testament does. Sometimes no. Nashville doesn’t. And anyway, you do get the idea of the Mona Lisa when the lady is printed on a bath towel, but what kind of idea is that?”

  Annie mouthed “Hi” to me. She pointed at the tape and mouthed “Jay Scott.” Her face registered a high-satisfaction quotient.

  “On the other hand,” Jay Scott’s voice continued, “who would order struggling parents with three kids to risk an expensive evening at the moving pictures when chances are about even that the picture in question will have been designed from inception to show up on what Judy Garland called ‘the hell where all little movies go when they’re bad.’ Television. Better by far to rent Trading Places for five bucks and save fifty. And that’s the real devastation accomplished by video.”

  Annie pushed a button on the machine that stopped the tape, then punched another button that sent it whirring in reverse.

  She said, “Isn’t the man a treat?”

  “A wizard with words,” I said.

  “Didn’t have to edit a damn thing in that section, which is more than I can say for my other heroes.”

  Annie was sitting on the edge of one of the two folding metal chairs in the room. The other chair was dotted with tiny pieces of stray tape. I made a motion to wipe them into an overflowing waste basket.

  “Yo, Crang, no housekeeping,” Annie said. She reached over and caught my hand before it touched the cuttings. “You almost threw out my verbs.”

  “Every journalist should have a collection,” I said.

  “Two of the New York people kept dropping them out of sentences,” Annie said. She tidied the scraps of tape into rows on the chair. “Whole paragraphs without an ‘is’ or a ‘wa
s’ or a ‘will’. I had to go through the discards and find a bunch of pasts, presents, and futures of ‘to be’.”

  “Those are the little darlings on the chair?”

  “Tomorrow I’ll clip them into the stuff I’m using on air. My keepers.”

  “Make the critics sound literate.”

  “Crang, these guys are superliterate,” Annie said. Her voice bounced in her enthusiasm. “I want them to sound complete.”

  “With verbs.”

  “I’m fussy that way.”

  Annie looked at her watch. She’d been editing for seven hours. I said she needed a protein boost. Annie packed her tapes, and we drove downtown to Joe Allen’s restaurant. Joe Allen is a smart cookie who came out of the U.S. Army and opened a New York restaurant that picked up on military dining. Basic chow in a stripped-down setting. The idea worked in Manhattan and Allen took it to Paris and Toronto. The restaurant in Toronto is long and narrow and has wooden floors, red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, paper napkins, and ketchup bottles on the tables. Its decor runs to framed posters and photos of showbiz subjects on the walls. Annie and I sat at a table halfway down the room under a movie still that showed a beautiful woman from the waist up. She was wearing nothing except wide red suspenders. The woman did more for them than Harry Hein.

  The menu was chalked on blackboards that were nailed high on the walls. Annie asked the waiter for liver. “Pink but not raw,” she said. I ordered a hamburger, and while we waited, we drank from a litre of the house red and I told Annie about my day.

  “The way it sounds to me,” Annie said when I was done, “it didn’t take much silver-tongue treatment to keep your client from making a beeline for police headquarters.”

  “Wansborough made the right solid-citizen noises,” I said. “Objected when I asked him to keep events at Ace under his hat. But two other items took precedence.”

  “Solving Alice Brackley’s murder and what else?”

  “Alice is a distant third,” I said. “A threat to Wansborough’s investment in Ace comes first, and a threat to the good family name is second. Or the other way around.”

  “All soul, your Mr. Wansborough.”

  “I don’t have to fall in love with my clients to take on their problems.” “Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

  Annie’s liver and my hamburger came with fried potatoes in jumbo size. They’d been hand-cut. The hamburger was thick and dripped juices. I felt like I was entering seventh heaven.

  “What was it like,” Annie asked, “returning to the scene of your former glories?”

  “Royal Ontario?” I said. “As nostalgia goes, it wasn’t a blast from the past.”

  “Truly? All that money and privilege you once knew?”

  “I always understood I had the perks on loan,” I said. “My ex-wife and her father didn’t let me forget who held the purse strings. Them.” Annie was eating the fries with her fingers.

  She said, “I never asked before, why did Cynthia leave you?”

  “Pamela,” I said. “She didn’t leave me.”

  “Pamela. Cynthia. What’s the difference? Upper-crust names. So why did Pammie split?”

  “You’re not getting the hang of this,” I said. “It’s Pamela to everyone except the girls she went to school with at Branksome Hall.”

  “They call her Pammie?”

  “They call her Pam,” I said. “She’s got a cousin named Buff and an aunt named Bun. Her mother’s Cle. Rhymes with key.”

  “What’s the clue here?” Annie said. “One-syllable names?”

  “Yeah, but they need the right ring.”

  “Not a lot of Glads and Myrts in the Branksome gang.”

  “Kate’s about as common as it gets.”

  “So,” Annie said, “why’d Pam leave?”

  “I called her Pamela.”

  “That’s because you weren’t eligible for Branksome Hall.”

  “The reason we separated,” I said, after I’d cleared my mouth of hamburger and bun and mustard, “was a mutual decision that Pamela should return to her own kind.”

  “Migawd, Crang, you make it sound like a case study in Anthropology 101.”

  “When Pamela was young, when I met her,” I said, “she had a rebellious streak.”

  “Oh, sure,” Annie said. “Voted NDP once and married outside her class.”

  “You’re the one who started this conversation,” I said. “You want to hear it out?”

  “Sorry,” Annie said. “I promise to use my mouth henceforth for nothing except chewing liver and sipping wine. Both are divine, by the way.”

  I said, “Everybody else in Pamela’s group was hooking up with guys who were going into their daddies’ firms. Lot of bond dealers in there, a few lawyers.”

  “Not your kind of law, right?” Annie said, breaking her promise.

  “Corporate takeovers, leaseback deals, condo mortgages. Law that talks on paper.”

  “Then what happened?” Annie said. “Pamela trotted you out to the family as a symbol of her tiny rebellion?”

  “Not that crass,” I said. “In the gesture department, I was a large cut above brassiere-burning. Pamela cared for me. Genuinely.”

  “Well,” Annie said, “shows her innate good taste.”

  “Put it like this,” I said. “It added a dash of piquancy to the love affair that I was the only man she brought home who didn’t have his own boat over at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club.”

  “You had boxing gloves.”

  “Things went along, three, four years of marriage, and I seemed less exotic to Pamela.”

  “She must have met your clients.”

  “She ran out of rebellion,” I said. “Her gang went to Lyford Cay for February, flats in Belgravia, walking trips up Kilimanjaro. I didn’t fit in with the gang. Pamela stayed home with me out of loyalty, but she felt on the sidelines.”

  Annie put down her knife and fork and whistled the first bars of “April in Paris.”

  “Eventually she went,” I said. “As the unattached spouse.”

  Annie touched my arm.

  “Never mind, Crang,” she said. “I’m prying too much.”

  “She had an affair with a Swedish guy she met at a hotel on Sardinia.”

  “Really? How’d you feel?” Annie asked. She was getting right back into it.

  “Lousy,” I said. “For about a day and a half. What made it less painful is I’d already been through the hard part. I knew the thing between Pamela and me had gone to its grave long before she admitted it to anyone. To me, anyway.”

  “Prescient you.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “One time I remember, watershed event, Pamela flew to Acapulco with a woman named Sass, her first excursion without me. Sass told her what to pack. New bikini, Sonia Rykiel sundresses, a bottle of Joy. Get my drift? Sass was the bad kid in the gang, and when Pamela came back, she was changed in ways that told me our marriage wouldn’t last into the sunset years.”

  “What ways?” Annie said. “She cancelled her subscription to Ms.? What? Took Amnesty International off her list of charities?”

  “Let’s just say,” I said, “I knew Pamela was on her way home to the family and all that that entails.”

  Annie picked up her paper napkin from her lap and wiped very slowly around her mouth. She was fighting the urge to ask me more specifics about the change in Pamela after Acapulco. She won the fight.

  “Where’s Pamela got to?” she asked. It was a neutral question. “Since you and she broke up, I mean.”

  “She married a guy named Archie. His daddy’s firm, Archie’s now, makes cellophane wrappers.”

  “The kind you put peanuts in? I don’t believe it,” Annie said. “For crackers? That kind of cellophane?”

  “I didn’t say the old family businesses had to do something distinguished.”

  “Lot of money in cellophane, I suppose,” Annie said.

  “It puts Archie close to Pamela’s league,” I said. “They’ve got a
house in Ardwold Gate and a daughter at Branksome.”

  “What’s her name? The daughter?”

  “Cordelia.”

  “They slipped up there,” Annie said. “The kid’s buddies’ll have to call her Cord.”

  I was using the fries to sop up the nice red stuff that had oozed out of the hamburger on to my plate.

  “What about you?” Annie asked. “I know why old Pamela went into the marriage. How was it from your side?”

  “Easy,” I said. “She was beautiful, hell of a dresser, knew how to get off a great line, and I was crazy about her.”

  “Well, I asked, didn’t I.”

  “There was something else,” I said. “I was young and foolish.”

  Annie leaned on her elbows. Her face was about a foot from mine, and it had a sly grin.

  “Now,” she said, “you’re up for somebody mature.”

  “Close call between you and Cybill Shepherd. You win.”

  Annie had something with whipped cream for dessert. I ordered another hamburger, never mind the fries.

  “Your client might have made an apt second-time-around guy for Pamela,” Annie said.

  “Wansborough?” I said. “You just insulted Pamela.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Annie said. “Except for this cellophane blind spot, she shapes up okay.”

  Annie fiddled at the whipped-cream concoction.

  “Fact is,” she said, hesitancy in her voice, “about Mr. Wansborough and his gang and your involvement with them, I seem to be experiencing, as of today, this severe bout of ambivalence.”

  I said, “One guy you haven’t met, you don’t like the sound of. Wansborough. The other guy you have met, you don’t like the looks of. Grimaldi. What’s ambivalent?”

  “You left out I think it’s unnecessarily dangerous for you to get mixed up in any kind of violent nonsense.”

  “I rest my case against ambivalence.”

  Annie’s upper lip had a line of whipped cream running from one corner of her mouth to the other.

  She said, “Alice Brackley’s been really on my mind. I met her only those two times, not enough to get tight with her, but I told you this morning, she was the kind of woman I wouldn’t have minded seeing a lot more. Now she’s dead.”