Authors: Howard Engel
“Why won’t he stall us?” I wondered whether he was listening.
“Because it’s in his interest to see that Teddie’s life stays as complicated as possible.” I believed him about the complicated part. “And as far as Section 319, et cetera, of the Criminal Code goes, you are not going to profit by any of this information financially. Not directly, anyway.” Colling was still selling. Teddie was backing him up to the hilt.
“I only regret I won’t be here to see the look on Ross’s face when he finds out!” Teddie said. Colling shot her a quick look and my eyes must have given me away too. She quickly added, “Years from now, I mean, Benny. Years from now. After it’s all over and done with.”
“Thanks a lot, you two,” I said, ripping open a plastic cream container I had no intention of using. “The best that can come of this is the lessons I’m going to get in how to stitch mail bags in Kingston pen. Haven’t either of you any idea that I can’t go around saying I’m an accountant when I’m not?”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Colling said, making a soothing gesture with both his chubby hands at once. “Supposing I set it all up from my office?” Jim suggested. “Without making any false claims, I can say things in an ambiguous way so that the treasurer of Phidias will expect you and then, once in, you can take it from there.”
“Oh great!” I said, trying to think things through. “What happens when Ross recognizes me? What happens
if he asks me a question I can’t answer ambiguously? He knows I’m an investigator.”
“Okay, you’re an investigator. That’s just as good.”
“He’ll see through it,” I said, shaking my head.
“He hates me too much,” Teddie said. “I’m his blind side, Benny. If he thinks I could get hurt, he’ll show you the books himself. Trust me, Benny. I know him.”
“My noses still itches where Ross Forbes flattened it.”
“Benny, I said trust me. I
know
Ross. I was married to him for Christ’s sake.”
“You’re all moving too fast for me. I have to think about the angles, Teddie. Remember, I don’t have an Arizona bolt-hole to run back to.”
“I thought you wanted to get inside Phidias, Benny. Were you just romancing me the other night or were you serious?” She was right. I had asked for help. It was just that I had an instinct to keep life simple. I was like the waitress. Simple is sometimes all I can take. As I watched the faces opposite me, I began to doubt my motives for getting inside the boardroom at Phidias. What was I expecting to find? An order to break the law and pollute the environment set out in black and white? Moved to snuff out one Jack Dowden for running off at the mouth. All those in favour? Carried.
Another two things bothered me. First, if Phidias knew what was going on at Kinross, then in the quiet offices of Phidias I’d be in as much trouble as I’d be walking into the Kinross yard asking questions. I could get myself killed and still not get any wiser.
The other thing was that I was in the dark about what Teddie and her lawyer were getting from all this. I didn’t like to hold the hammer Teddie was hitting Ross with. It was like standing between two cars bent on ramming one another. While you couldn’t tell how much damage they’d do to one another, it was pretty clear that I’d be a write-off.
And what about Colling? What was his interest? Is he just accommodating a lady or is there something in it for him? Teddie and Colling were watching me. I sat and sipped my cold coffee. Colling’s twin rows of tiny teeth were smiling expectantly. Teddie tilted her head sympathetically as I ruminated. I tried to go through all of the possibilities again in my head. I sweated the idea for another minute, then accepted on the principle that I hadn’t a clear alternative and what the hell.
ELEVEN
It was going to take a few days for Colling to work his magic on the treasurer at Phidias Manufacturing. In the meantime, I gave Kinross another chance to settle things before I had to run the risk of meeting Forbes again. I drove up to the Scrampton Road and took a table at the Turkey Roost where I could look across the road at the front gate. For half an hour I watched the way the guardhouse operated. There was a man inside who checked the documents of all trucks leaving the yard and who kept track on a clipboard of all the cars and trucks coming in. I wondered about the page for the day of Dowden’s death. I’d like to see that.
The only trucks I recognized were Euclids and Macks. I tried to concentrate on the rigs with closed containers and the ones hauling storage drums. Most of these were huge, lumbering things, with more wheels than the insides of a ten-dollar watch. I paid my bill for the coffee I’d consumed and the styrofoam cup I was taking back to my car with me. Once in the car, I decided to follow one of the trucks, just to see where it went. I didn’t see the driver’s face as he climbed into the cab.
I trailed him, slow and steady, staying just far enough behind him so that he wasn’t tempted to use his CB and send for help. He took the Queen Elizabeth Way towards Niagara Falls. Ah, I thought, pay dirt on the first try. But he turned off and stopped at the little park with the floral clock in it just outside Niagara Falls. The clock was shut down, of course, waiting for spring like the eager student horticulturists who maintained it from April to Labour Day. I saw the driver retrieve a few large metal planters made in the shape of numerals, a three and a six, which he put into the back of his trailer before getting back on the road again. After less than three minutes, he’d pulled into a truck-stop called The Fifth Wheel, the restaurant O’Mara had mentioned. I could see that the lot at the side was full of loaded rigs from all over. I suppressed an urge to drop in. I didn’t know which of the faces inside I was following. I made a U-turn and returned to the Scrampton Road again, thinking about the floral clock and the things I’d seen behind the Quonset hut.
After a toasted chopped-egg sandwich a the Turkey Roost, I tried again. This time it was a tanker, which headed straight for the City Yard on Louth Street. Here I was stopped at the gate, not by a guard, but by a failure of the imagination. I couldn’t think what I would say to anyone challenging my right to be there. I used to be better at this, but now television has turned all parking-lot attendants and yard men into Perry Masons. There was a time when I could work for a year and never have to flash ID. Even phoney ID. Now you have to wave paper or
plastic in front of everybody, even when all you want to do is use the toilet.
The tanker had disappeared around one of the two beehive-shaped storage sheds. From the street, as I turned off into the approach to the yard, they resembled two enormous breasts reminiscent of the busty pinups of the 1940s. The nearest intersection was notorious for the number of accidents that occurred within eyeshot of these mammoth mammaries. I wonder whether there is any connection. From my standing position at the gatehouse, I could see that the sheds had non-erotic functions as well as the fender-bending ones. I could see grey piles of road salt ready to attack the bottom of my car in the coming winter. The salt kept ice off the roads, but it exacted a random tax on the cars that used them: a muffler here, a tailpipe there and other bits of rusted underpinnings, mute testimony to the efficiency of the roads services of the Department of Works and Sanitation.
A big fellow in a nylon anorak of faded green had caught sight of me admiring his sheds. He stood looking at the car for a few seconds while a thought began forming under his yellow hard hat. When he was fully aware of its nature, he waved me off the property. Maybe he was reading my mind; I couldn’t think of what I was doing there either. I turned the car around and came to a stop long enough to let a big, flat-bottomed, wide-bed truck with a medium-sized load under tarps out to Louth Street. It was a huge thing and I had to back up further to give it elbow room to pass me. I always have a lot of respect
for anything that size. It would collect it, whether I was willing to give it or not.
My foot nearly froze on the brake when I saw that the man in the cab of the truck was Brian O’Mara. It took a second to react. Just like the guard, who was now closing the gate. I let the rig get ahead of me and I completed my turn and pulled out after him. I was fairly sure that he wouldn’t beat me up even if he did catch sight of me in his rear-view mirror. But with all of his side mirrors he would have to be half asleep not to catch the shape of the Olds coming after him.
He moved north-east along Pelham Road and turned off into Glendale Avenue, where it crossed the Eleven Mile Creek, and followed it parallel to the base of the escarpment through the vanishing farms and fields that are now subdivisions and shopping plazas until it crossed the Queen Elizabeth Way. This was major traffic, and for a moment I thought that I would lose my prey either to Toronto or Buffalo. But he didn’t join the highway, he crossed over to the other side and picked the old road to St. David’s and Niagara-on-the-Lake.
O’Mara’s apparent destination pricked up my ears. I took my eyes off the colouring trees, and the blowing eddies of fallen leaves and the bright red of the sumachs and thought about Jack Dowden’s shoebox of credit-card flimsies. Niagara-on-the-Lake was popular with Jack too. I was doing something right for a change.
I kept a pick-up truck with bushels of squash and turnips between me and O’Mara. The pick-up’s suspension
was dragging and raised a few sparks when the asphalt got rough. O’Mara had the road ahead of him clear; he didn’t seem to be out to set a new speed record. Maybe he was looking at the changing leaves too.
Niagara-on-the-Lake has become a sand-blasted antique early-nineteenth-century town since the days when I first knew it. Then it was just a sleepy backwater with a jam factory. Now it was a tourist mecca because of the success of the Shaw Festival, an annual theatrical tribute to the bard of Ayot St. Lawrence. Apart from the theatre, of course, there was the fudge. Places like Niagara revolve around fudge in the summer. Every other store sells it, tourists munch it as they stare through store windows at paper flowers, local history books and expensive soap smelling of sandalwood. People seem to be able to concentrate on fudge, which you could see being made through other store windows, long after interest in antiques, theatre and shopping has worn off. In August the stately brick homes of Niagara, the old Presbyterian church with its Greek columns, the sand-blasted façades along Queen Street dissolve into a mad rush of tourists with a need for a sweet fudge fix.
O’Mara stopped at the lights on the way into town, then headed straight up Mississauga Street to Queen. From here, over the fairways of the golf course, I could see the point where the Niagara River empties into Lake Ontario. Across the water, on the American side, three flags flew from Fort Niagara. Three hundred years ago, Fort Niagara was the only man-made structure around
here except for teepees and wigwams. On the Canadian side, the smaller of the two Canadian forts looked like an up-ended flower-pot or a child’s one-scoop sand-castle in the middle of the golf course.
The truck turned east at Queen; then, after a block, it turned off the main drag into Simcoe and headed towards the river. I followed at a safe distance, catching a glimpse of the clocktower in the middle of Queen Street further down by the old town hall. With the golf course on our left, we both continued down Simcoe to the corner where it met Front Street. The houses along the other side of the street were big and old, going back well into the last century.
O’Mara took a left at the corner, where a temporary construction road headed off across the open terrain of the golf course in the direction of the fort. I turned the Olds in the opposite direction along Front and parked in the lot reserved for guests at the Oban Inn. I watched his rig bounce over the uneven ballast of the work road, seeing it grow smaller as it approached the Canadian Fort. I dismissed the idea of following it; out on the fairway, I’d be as conspicuous as a dead fly on a white sheet. That would have got O’Mara in trouble as well as yours truly. And I needed O’Mara. There were a lot of things he’d forgotten to tell me the other night.
I got out of the car and raised the hood, just to give me something to do in case there were eyes behind the window curtains of the Oban Inn. Across the warm motor, Fort Mississauga looked like it was painted by an amateur
against a blue backdrop of lake and sky. It looked squatter from here than it did from Queen Street. There were no crenellated walls, no bastions, ravelins or parapets as far as I could see, just a row of loopholes around the waist of a brick tower. For musket fire, I guess. The curved surface of the otherwise unadorned wall suffered from a skin disease; the plaster was peeling off to expose red brick underneath. For years the fort’s thick hide had withstood the seasonal barrage of countless duffers from the second tee. I don’t remember hearing whether it ever exchanged shots with Fort Niagara across the mouth of the river.
The truck disappeared behind a temporary enclosure that had been thrown up around the fort. It didn’t look solid enough to protect it from tourists’ golf balls, but it was a gesture in the right direction. A wind had come up, blowing eddies of dry leaves around in front of the Olds. There were whitecaps on the slate blue tops of the waves in Lake Ontario. It was hard to tell from where I was whether I was looking at the river or the lake. I wasn’t expecting to see a dotted line separating the geographical features, but from ground level it was confusing.
There was no movement at the fort as far as I could see. O’Mara’s truck had been swallowed up into what must be a depression in the ground close to the walls. I got the feeling that there was activity going on behind the fence, but I couldn’t prove it until another truck emerged from the gateway. It had its headlights on and it headed over the bumpy construction road in my direction. By the
time it reached the corner of Simcoe and Front to turn towards the highway, I was apparently lost in thought as I contemplated my distributor under the hood. The truck had a yellow panel on its door. It read: Sangallo Restorations, Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was a Euclid truck and the hopper in back was full of Ontario real estate. I was closing up the hood of the Olds when I remembered seeing the yellow Sangallo sign on a truck parked outside The Fifth Wheel less than half an hour ago. I knew I was going to see a lot of similar signs now that I was aware of Sangallo’s existence. That’s the way life works. Alex Pásztory had mentioned Sangallo. Something to do with Tony Pritchett and his mob.