Dead & Buried (8 page)

Pásztory had a friendly, lopsided grin that sat on a face that must have been dour in repose. Brown eyes came magnified through his thick, steel-rimmed glasses. He was going bald in front and wore the remaining fringe rather long over his neck and ears. He gave me the same sort of appraisal as we talked.

“You wrote those pieces in the
Beacon
about the toxic-fuel scam last spring, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I used my uptown name on those: Alexander Pastor. Did you see that the
Globe
took them too? They were in a lot of papers.”

“Didn’t you win some kind of award with them?”

“That’s right, the Rushton Cup. I keep pennies in it.” He was still trying to place me and not getting anywhere. “This environmental stuff, this is not your usual beat, is it?”

“Right. I’m normally a family-law man. Reading about toxic waste steals my sleep. Your article made me feel the ozone layer being peeled away. Ugh! I have to limit my exposure if I want to survive. No offence. I’m just being honest. Like it’s not that I don’t agree with you. That’s not the point. I just have to control my intake, or it’s like living through an earthquake all the time.”

“That’s a good description. We have to make this planet last at least until we have the technology to move to another one when this one won’t support us any more.”

“Yeah, ‘Beam me back to Saturn, Scotty!’ Right?”

“And what if we don’t have the technology for that?”

“Then, we’re out of luck.” Pásztory added both cream and sugar to his coffee. Rather a lot of both.

“Sorry to sound off at you, Mr. Cooperman. I get carried away sometimes. What can I do for you? What do you want to know about?”

“I’m interested in Kinross and the kinds of games they’ve been playing.”

“What’s your first name again?”

“Benny.”

“Okay. Call me Sandy or Alex. I get both. I changed my name just when it was becoming popular to be a fine old Hunky name like Pásztory. A name like Pastor comes out of Saran Wrap.”

Pásztory’s fingers were stained with nicotine. He was a messy smoker. I could see where the holes in his sweater came from.

“I can tell you a lot about Kinross and about the parent company, Phidias Manufacturing. Hell, I can tell you something about almost every company working in the peninsula. Some are small independent operations; some have the mob playing a quiet role, like in Sangallo Restorations in Niagara-on-the-Lake. That’s Tony Pritchett’s little game. He launders some of his dirty money building
driving sheds and sand-blasting old brick houses along Queen Street. Have you heard of him?”

“In Grantham, it’s hard not to have heard about Anthony Horne Pritchett and his boys. But I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him.”

“He likes to keep a certain distance from his dirty companies, even the ones he only puts money into quietly. But saying this is one thing, the difficulty comes in proving the allegations. Even when I get in trouble with libel, I have to prove my way out or pay up. I’ve had to do that twice now. It’s like putting your head in a noose.”

“Do you let that stop you?”

“Hell, no! But I’m trying to tell you that you need more than Boy Scout instincts in this racket. Tony Pritchett doesn’t fool around. And even the companies with no links to organized crime can play tough. Does Kinross know that you are snooping around?”

“I talked to Dr. Gary Carswell who—”

“Yeah, I know him. You might as well have sent your picture to Norm Caine, Benny. You won’t get through the gate pretending to be a salesman or in some sort of disguise.”

“Hell, I thought I’d slip in dressed like Captain Hook in
Peter Pan.”

“Don’t joke about things like that. I’ve known guys who tried to do things that dim. One got his arm broken.”

“Are you telling me that there’s no way to prove what they are doing with their wastes?”

“I’ve been on their tail for three years at least. They have CBs—you know, radio-equipped trucks. If they spot you following them, they send an SOS and your goose is cooked. Without a relay team of cars, you’ll never be able to get close to them. And, believe me, Benny, they play rough.”

“What tricks are they up to?”

“You want the whole catalogue? They’ll run a rig, say, to Boston and back and open up a tap on the Massachusetts Turnpike. You can get rid of a lot of PCBs that way. Or, they’ll stick a hose in a storm sewer or a stream running into the Niagara River at night. There’s so much crap going into the Niagara from both sides of the border that you can’t make book on who’s doing it more, the Americans or us.”

“Are they dumping PCBs into the Niagara?”

“I don’t think so. Not Kinross. They go more for plating sludges, you know, cyanide baths either organic or inorganic.”

“You just lost me.”

“Organic are things like carbon-related products. You know about the carbon rings?” I shook my head. Pásztory shrugged. He wasn’t responsible for the quality of the detective asking questions. He didn’t have time to worry about that too. He kept on going. “It doesn’t matter. The inorganic stuff is solutions with heavy metals in them. Things like lead and zinc. They sometimes will sell oil with PCBs in it to township rubes for laying the dust on back roads. It lays the dust all right! Ha!” His cheeks got
quite red when he laughed; the capillaries on his high cheekbones stood out on his tough, tanned face. “But to be fair,” he added, nearly choking on his sip of coffee, “even that’s harder to get away with now. The province has just plugged this loophole on paper. You can’t legally lay the dust as in days of yore.”

“How do you know Kinross is doing these things?”

“I know and I don’t know. I know because I’ve had a few spies out looking, but I don’t know well enough to take Kinross or any of the others to court. I mean, short of having a photograph of a truck putting a hose into a sewer at midnight, you’re talking about tough proof to collect. Okay, say you’ve got them red-handed, staring into the camera flash with their beady pink eyes. They up and say, ‘We were pumping water from the river
into
the truck to mix with the waste.’ Or they say, ‘We were only dumping water from clean tanks.’ What are you going to say to guys like that? They got you coming and going.”

“At the time Dowden died, he was reading up on the subject. He must have been getting scared.” Pásztory nodded and worked his mouth from side to side, as though there was a bit of tobacco stuck between his teeth.

“The post-mortem didn’t show any organic disease that could be related to driving hot stuff,” Pásztory said.

“Oh, so you’ve seen that too. I
know
you’ve seen the coroner’s report. Have there been any other deaths at Kinross since Dowden?” At the mention of the coroner’s report, Pásztory sat up straighter in his seat. I think he appreciated the homework I’d been doing.

“I haven’t heard of anything at Kinross. But accidents like what happened to Jack Dowden are rare. They look out for their drivers because there’s so much riding on their goodwill. They get good wages for keeping their mouth shut, and there’s always a medical man around in time of crisis.”

“Like Dr. Gary Carswell?”

“That’s the one. Yeah, like him. On one side of the fence he deals with all medical needs. On the other he tells the world what the firm is doing to clean up the environment. He can make me cry when he talks about the evils of pollution in the Great Lakes. Have you ever heard him? He does the Chamber of Commerce and Rotary a couple of times a year,” Pásztory said, lighting another cigarette.

“We know that Dowden was worried about the toxic substances he was carrying a year ago. He wasn’t an activist long, before he died.”

“I know what you’re thinking, but you won’t ever be able to prove a word of that. You weren’t there and there are respectable witnesses who were, including your Dr. Carswell.”

“I’m meeting Dowden’s friend Brian O’Mara this afternoon,” I said. “Maybe he has done some thinking since the accident. Maybe he’d be willing to talk.”

“Accident,” he sneered. “I guess we’ll have to go on calling it that. I love the expression.”

“Maybe there
have
been other Dowdens and we haven’t recognized the signs,” I said, thinking out loud. “They didn’t all have to walk in front of their trucks.”

“I’ll keep on reading up old coroner’s reports, but I don’t think they’ll give us anything we can use. Remember,” he added, “I’ve been in this business longer than you have. I know more about the dirty tricks they play.”

“So your bunch isn’t ready to take Kinross to court on a dumping of toxic chemicals charge, I take it?”

“We are closer to getting the goods on another company. Kinross isn’t the only heavy around, Benny. But as I said, building up a case takes months of careful work. We were just about to act when we walked into a brick wall. That was about two weeks ago. You want to hear about it?”

“Sure. I’ve got time.”

“Okay. There’s an outfit name Millgate-Falkner down by Papertown South. The head man’s Lloyd Barlow. M-F’s a smaller outfit than Kinross, but they go through a fair amount of stuff. I had a number of the pollution people that hang around Environment Front keep an eye on M-F over a three-week period. We were on the brink of taking them into court when, somehow, they knew we were waiting for them. There’d been a tip-off and we were dead.”

“You still had the evidence?”

“Sure, and they knew exactly what evidence we had against them. They had three lawyers working around the clock on our people. They nailed one for being an American
draft-dodger who never applied for landed-immigrant status, another for having a marijuana conviction ten years in his past and a few more intimate tricks like that. We had a mole inside M-F. He suddenly moved to Prince Rupert, B.C. Do you want me to go on?”

“I get the picture. The security of your organization has been breached.”

“Look, Benny. I don’t believe in security. It can’t be breached because I don’t trust anybody. No, this went up in smoke after it left us and went to our lawyer.”

“And your lawyer had to disclose to the Crown, is that it?” Pásztory lit another cigarette from the butt of its predecessor.

“All I know for sure is that we walked into court with no surprises. I can still hear the horse-laugh we got as every one of our witnesses failed to appear.”

“Sounds like a nightmare.”

“I’m just telling you this to warn you so you won’t have a nightmare of your own.” Pásztory had been lowering his voice steadily as we talked, as though the listening walls were moving closer. Half the time I could hardly hear him from across the table. It was his way of making sure I knew that this was inside information. I had to piece together the sense of what he said from the general flow. “These guys,” he went on, “are playing with big bucks. With little or no yelling from the public, they’re making huge profits and not taking responsibility for getting rid of the garbage reasonably.”

“Are you saying that nobody cares?”

“The only issue the average Joe Citizen gets excited about is when somebody plans to dump waste near him. Then he yells his head off. The papers pick up the echo and the idea dies. Now Kinross and M-F, they don’t make the average Joe Citizen mad because they don’t build dump sites. They dump at midnight or while Joe Citizen is watching the news on TV after the hockey game.”

“So they stay clear of controversy.”

“Completely. Their PR is great, their image is dust-free and untarnished. It makes me sick.”

“So, what are you going to do about it?” I asked.

Pásztory grinned as though my question was a good one. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said, lowering his voice a notch or two, “when I leave you, I’m going off to meet the AV. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.” The AV, I wondered. What was an AV when it was at home? I’d have to look that up. I’m not up to date on all of the fancy initials they used in modern business. I didn’t have the training. Then I remembered something.

“You told me that there was something in the Kinross yard you wanted me to see,” I reminded him.

“I didn’t say it was in the Kinross yard, but you’re right. That’s where it is all right.”

“We can’t just walk in there.”

“When you leave here, take a peek through the fence beside the first of the Quonset huts. It’s so unusual, you’ll spot it in a—” He stopped talking suddenly. He held his coffee cup where it was, near his lips, but had stopped sipping between sentences. “I gotta go,” he said, looking
over his shoulder. He replaced the cup in the saucer, spilling and slopping some of the coffee on the table. “You were right about this place after all,” he said. He threw a two-dollar bill on the table’s vinyl top and got up to go. “Talk to yuh,” he said and walked straight to the door and through it.

I turned around in my seat to see what had touched Pásztory off like that. The only thing odd I could see was a group of three men wearing yellow hard hats standing around a table and choosing who was going to sit across from whom. I was about to pass from them for another source of bother. Then I looked at the hard hats again. Two of them were strangers to me, but the one who finally sat looking in my direction was far from a stranger. Under the plastic helmet I recognized the features of Dr. Gary Carswell.

EIGHT

I’d be a bad witness on whether Dr. Carswell recognized either Alex Pásztory or me. At least he didn’t knock the dishes off the table and get suddenly to his feet with the whites of his eyes enlarged like Don Webster in the Grantham’s Players’ Guild production of
Macbeth.
When Don, as Macbeth, saw Banquo’s ghost, he let everybody in on it. At least Carswell was keeping it to himself if he spotted us. The yellow hard hats remained on the heads of the doctor and his friends. Coffee came for them and occasionally I heard a loud laugh from their booth. While I tried to think what to do next, I paid my check, adding another dollar to the two Alex Pásztory had left behind. The waitress swept the money away without a word; I’d had my fifteen minutes and it was time to move on.

After leaving the restaurant, I walked in front of the truck that had been blocking the view across the road. At least here I couldn’t be observed by Carswell. Once again I was face to face with the Kinross yard. It hadn’t changed much. The same chain-link fence surrounded the enclosure. Three strands of barbed wire formed the icing on the cake. An illegal entry would have to be premeditated. Something with a ladder, I thought, and a mattress.