Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. Jack Batten

      “You think you can handle both? Safely, I mean?”

      “Package deal.”

      Annie reached across the table and shook my hand.

      26

      RAY GRIFFIN phoned before I left the apartment for Harry Hein’s office.

      “I bet Woodward and Bernstein don’t get up till noon,” I said. It was just past eight-thirty. I was drinking a first cup of coffee and reading the Globe. It had a two-paragraph item in the Metro section about Alice Brackley’s death. A murder-robbery, the story reported, and gave Alice’s age, address, and occupation. No-frills journalism.

      “Who’s this Alice Brackley?” Griffin said. “The story says she worked at Ace and she’s dead.”

      “See,” I said, “you really can believe everything you read.”

      “This is too much coincidence,” Griffin said. His voice had its speedy quality. “You come around asking about Ace and a few days later one of its executives gets murdered.”

      “Are you on the Alice Brackley story?”

      “Not officially,” Griffin said. “I don’t cover routine crime. We don’t say ‘on’ the story anyway.”

      “What do you say?”

      “Assigned to the story probably.”

      “Okay, are you assigned to the story?”

      “What’s the difference?” Griffin said. “If there’s something here, I’m going to speak to my editors and write it.”

      “Something’s here.”

      “Yeah?”

      “But I don’t know what the something is or the location of here.”

      “You must have facts of some kind, Crang,” Griffin said. As his voice got faster, its pitch moved higher. Hadn’t noticed that before.

      I said, “When I’ve stitched my facts together, you’ve earned whatever they come out to.”

      “If you don’t phone me,” Griffin said, “I’ll phone you. I’m serious.”

      “I can tell.”

      “At home, at your office, I swear.”

      The coffee was gone from my cup. I wouldn’t stay for another.

      “Is that what Alice Brackley’s murder is called down there at the fourth estate?” I asked. “Routine crime?”

      “At the moment,” Griffin said.

      The morning traffic on Bloor Street was jammed back from Bay, and the first parking space I found in the indoor car park on Yorkville was up on the sixth level. It wasn’t starting out to be my best day. Harry Hein’s face did nothing to lighten the load. The arrangement of lines, folds, and creased skin looked familiar and unhealthy. But his manner was more upbeat than it had been when I’d last seen him by dawn’s early light on Saturday.

      “Exactly like I figured, Crang,” Harry said. “And then some.”

      He was sitting behind the desk in his office, jacket off, red suspenders on display. I recognized the papers on the desk as the copies of invoices and other documents we’d taken from Ace Disposal’s accounting department. Harry paid no heed to the papers. It was the computer that had his attention. He was stroking it.

      “I punched in the numbers last night,” Harry said. “Real incriminating stuff we got here, Crang.”

      “Harry, leave the lawyer talk to me,” I said. “You stick to accountant’s language.”

      “Well, in plain man’s terminology, Mr. Crang,” Harry said, putting a testy touch to each word, “somebody at Ace is a crook and very blatant about it.”

      “Line it up for me.”

      “It would be my pleasure,” Harry said. He was doing a Ralph Kramden to my Ed Norton.

      “All righty,” Harry went on, “you remember we talked possibilities the first time you came to the office. I said it might be Ace was in cahoots with the weigh-masters at the dumps.”

      “I remember.”

      “Boy oh boy, was I correct.”

      “About the cahoots.”

      “The weigh-masters were, and still are, no doubt in my mind, weighing the Ace trucks in light and weighing them out heavy.”

      “You’ve got the numbers to establish that?”

      “I’ll show you,” Harry said. He swung his chair around to the keyboard on the computer.

      “Don’t bother showing, Harry,” I said. “Telling will do the trick.”

      Harry gave me a baleful look. Most of Harry’s looks were baleful.

      He said, “You’re not making this much fun, Crang.”

      Harry was right. He went along on the Ace break-in. That won him the right to show off with the computer and its secrets.

      “Watch the screen,” Harry said. He was typing on the keyboard.

      I knew what to expect. My eyes would hurt. I’d seen enough computers and word processors in action. Law firms use them, newspaper reporters, bank managers. Jug-milk stores would be next. White letters on shiny green backgrounds. They made my eyes sore.

      “See this?” Harry said. “Isn’t it a honey? All in black and white.”

      “Green and white,” I said.

      Numbers in long columns blipped across the screen, and Harry performed his guided tour. By giving Ace’s trucks a lighter weight going into the dumps and a heavier weight coming out, the weigh-master at the Leslie Street dump saved Ace an average of twenty dollars per load on the fee Ace paid to Metro Toronto. Harry’s numbers said so. They said Ace trucks took about two hundred loads to the Leslie dump each day, sometimes more, sometimes less. Two hundred loads at a saving of twenty bucks per load meant that Ace was taking Metro for four thousand a day at the Leslie dump. Spread that across eleven more dump sites and the figure came to a daily forty-eight grand. Harry’s computer projected the fraud over a week, a month, a year. The numbers began to look like Wayne Gretzky’s salary.

      “Not all profit for Ace, you understand,” Harry said. “They got their small expenses.”

      “The bribes Sol Nash takes to the weigh-masters.”

      “I don’t know from this Sol Nash,” Harry said. “But there must be bribes. How much, I haven’t got enough data to say. My educated guess, based on some entries the Ace books list under Miscellaneous, I’d say the payoffs are on the humble side. Doesn’t really matter. Must be nice to have something extra coming in in any amount if you’re a weigh-master.”

      “Miscellaneous?”

      “Much-used entry at Ace.”

      “The truck drivers have to be in on the scam,” I said. “They can’t be wheeling on and off the scales without knowing the weigh-masters are doctoring the weights.”

      “You’re not going to convict these guys in court if that’s what you want,” Harry said. “I know, I’m not the lawyer in the room. But there’s nothing in Ace’s books that connects them with what’s going on. No sign of payoffs, nothing like that.”

      I said, “They get other rewards.”

      “How so?”

      I explained the deals that Ace drivers made on the side with small contractors.

      “Yeah, that’s a form of payoff,” Harry said. “Other thing is, their salary structure is very high for