Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. Jack Batten
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folders, put one on the desk and opened the other. It had a thick stack of pages of computer printouts held together perfectly squared with a large paper clip and six or seven stenographers’ notebooks. He chose one notebook and turned through the pages. He was very methodical. The handwriting in the notebook was as rounded and legible as a private-school girl’s.
“The Grimaldis,” Griffin said. “I’ll tell you all the dirt on the Grimaldis.”
I said, “It’s okay by me if you hold it down to Charles.”
“I got to go at this from the beginning.” He stopped turning the pages of the notebook in his lap, looked up, and started talking at full throttle.
“The old man, Pietro Grimaldi, that’s Charles’ father, he’s numero uno up in Guelph and has been since the end of the Second War. He came to Canada from Calabria and opened a grocery store. That’s what he still is today, a grocer in Guelph, Ontario. He’s also what you’d call the godfather up there. I’d call him godfather everywhere except in the newspaper or the lawyers’d go bananas. It sounds ridiculous anyway, godfather of Guelph. The whole area’s got maybe two hundred thousand people, but everything that’s organized crime around that part of the province, old Pietro’s in charge. The drugs, the girls, the counterfeiting, all that, and he’s never served a day in jail. He’s never been in a courtroom. Very sharp old guy.”
I kept waiting for Griffin to look at his notebook. He didn’t.
“The funny thing about these people, they don’t think of any of that stuff, drugs and prostitution and everything, as crime. It’s business.” Griffin’s pace had hit lickety-split. “But they know that all the rest of us think of it as criminal. That may be simple-minded to you and me, but it’s crucial if you want to understand the psychology of a guy like old Grimaldi.”
“I’m with you,” I said, just to give him a chance to take in some oxygen.
Griffin said, “Pietro was one of the first guys in the big crime scene to figure that all the money he’s making, he shouldn’t just turn it over into more drugs, more hookers, more whatever. He should put it into businesses that the rest of us citizens consider legitimate.”
“Which brings us to garbage,” I said.
“Not yet it doesn’t,” Griffin said.
“Right,” I said. “You have to go in order.”
“Pietro wasn’t going to run these straight businesses himself,” Griffin said. “He’s still a grocer. You should see him waiting on the customers. You’d take him for your kindly old Uncle Pete, and all the time, in the back room, he’s masterminding this whole network of bad guys. Anyway, he’s sticking at home, so he sends his three boys out into the world to look after the up-and-up operations.”
I said, “Garbage.”
“Wait,” Griffin said. The notebook was still open in his lap, uncon-sulted. “Pietro’s got three sons. The oldest, Pete Junior, he gets a string of laundries in Hamilton. Number two boy, John, he’s in car-washes through the southwest part of the province, London, Woodstock, down there. And Charles, the youngest, for him Pietro buys Ace Disposal, which is the largest garbage company in the city.”
“I read that somewhere,” I said. “You ever meet Charles?”
“Dark, good-looking guy in his early thirties,” Griffin said, not easing up on the speed. “He took me to lunch at Fenton’s when I was doing the story and talked a lot of bullshit about the challenge of garbage. He must’ve spent seventy bucks on the food and wine.”
“The old slyboots,” I said, “trying to purchase your favour that way.”
“Charles is the one in the family who’s different,” Griffin said. “He’s the only son with a record, two assault convictions when he was a kid. On the second, he was ten months in reformatory. That was thirteen years ago. Charles was nineteen. He hit a guy with the lever from a tire jack. Fractured his skull.”
Griffin closed the notebook on his lap.
I said, “You’re probably just as good without all the help from that thing.”
“Huh?”
I thanked Griffin for his time.
“Don’t forget,” he said, “I told you I’m still interested in the story.”
I said, “When I break this case wide open, you’ll get it first.”
He said, “Nobody talks like that any more.”
There was a Diamond Cab at the taxi stand in front of the building and I took it home.
3
MY HOUSE is in Goldwin Smith’s old neighbourhood. I moved in about eighty years after he moved on. Goldwin Smith was a wise old duck who wrote on political and social affairs around town in the late nineteenth century. He didn’t make much money out of his writing, but he married a rich woman. That was another thing Goldwin and I had in common. My rich woman was named Pamela. She was beautiful and talked through her nose. Her family had a lot more money than Matthew Wansborough and the money was a couple of hundred years older. Pamela married me when I was a law student in part because she thought I was quaint. My father thought Pamela was quaint. I come from a long line of working-class toilers and my father was a photo-engraver. Banged at pieces of metal for all his employed life. He died ten years ago, around the time Pamela stopped thinking I was quaint and we divorced. Goldwin Smith stayed married.
At the northwest corner of Beverley Street and Sullivan, there’s the Chinese Baptist Church, then a row of square red-brick houses. Mine’s up at the north end. It faces across Beverley to the park that used to be Goldwin Smith’s front lawn. His house was called the Grange and still is. It has a stone porch and stone pillars almost as tall as my house. The Art Gallery of Ontario uses the Grange for offices. I divided my house into two apartments, mine upstairs and one downstairs where a gay couple and their Irish setter have been in residence for six years. Alex is a civil servant, Ian sells real estate, and the dog slobbers on everyone he gets close to, friend or foe.
I got the Wyborowa out of the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and poured some over three ice cubes in an old-fashioned glass. Whether Matthew Wansborough knew it or not, he had the mob for a partner. He wouldn’t want his pals who put on the funny red jackets and ride the horses with him on weekends to find out about that. On the other hand, he wanted the answer to the question he started out with: How come Ace Disposal was suddenly making money? Did Charles Grimaldi have a touch with garbage? Was the Grimaldi family using Ace as a front for other purposes? Lucrative purposes? Illegal purposes?
I put a Bill Evans album on the stereo, You Must Believe in Spring, and went out to the kitchen. I spread a thin layer of Paul Newman spaghetti sauce on two large pieces of whole-wheat pita bread. Fine slices of mushroom, green pepper, cooking onion, zucchini, mozzarella cheese, and asparagus went on next. I organized them in jolly little patterns and covered them with flakes of parmesan. Boutique pizza, a woman friend of mine calls the recipe. It’s one of two in my repertoire. Chili is the other. Makes for a cramped diet and sends me out of the house for dinner most nights. I put the two pizzas in the oven at three hundred degrees. They needed twenty minutes. Bill Evans had reached the final bars of “We Will Meet Again,” the last track on side one.
I turned the record over, poured another vodka, and phoned my answering service. A Mrs. Turkin had returned my call. Mrs. Turkin was the mother of an eighteen-year-old kid I acted for. The kid’s girlfriend had got in the front seat of a taxi late one night and told the driver to let her off in the underground garage of a downtown apartment building. When the cab driver and the girl were concluding the transaction in the garage, which the driver may or may not have interpreted as a prelude to some quick and nasty sex, my kid jumped in the back seat of the cab. He made threatening noises at the driver while the girlfriend lifted the poor sap’s wallet. The cabbie said he got a good look at my kid as he and the girl were hot-footing it out of the garage, and a couple of