Authors: Howard Engel
“Wonderful to see you, darling!” Biddy Forbes presented a well-powdered cheek to be kissed. Ross pecked her there and held her around the waist, still keeping a wary eye on his father. When he straightened up, he maintained his hold on his mother and Biddy locked her fingers around his.
“I thought we’d declared a truce until after the wedding, Dad? Have I missed a round of negotiations?”
“Would you like to sit down, Miss Biddy?” Fred said trying to remember to be polite. She shook her head and stood near Ross with her hand in his.
“Place is going to hell, I said, and I’ll say it to your face, Ross. It needs managing not coddling. We knew the difference in my day.”
“We’re not going to settle longstanding differences in the middle of Fred’s office, are we?” He smiled and took a step in his father’s direction with his hand stretched out. The Commander deliberately put his right hand in his jacket pocket, where it made him look both fey and petulant. Biddy’s head tilted and she regarded her son with moist eyes.
“I think I’m going back to the club, Ross,” she said. “There is still so much to do before the wedding.” She looked around the room, gave Fred a warm apologetic smile and went out into the reception area, where I could hear her talking to one of the secretaries as though nothing had happened in Fred McAuliffe’s office that was unfit for the ears of everyone on the payroll or for scores who had never heard of Phidias Manufacturing.
“Well, Dad,” Ross said at length. “Here wo go again. I hope we can agree not to get into another row with Mother around. It can’t be good for her heart.”
“I wasn’t saying anything behind your back I wouldn’t say—indeed, haven’t said—to your face.”
“We agree on that much at least.” It was as though the room had suddenly released a breath it had been holding for the last forty to fifty seconds. “When did you get back? I haven’t seen a light at the house.”
“Nearly a week now. We’ve been keeping to ourselves. Hiding out at the club. Once the family knows we’re back, and with this wedding thing, well, there’ll be no peace for either of us. I hope there are no changes in the plans you wired your mother?”
“Nothing important. Sherry still wants to go through with it. I’ve given up trying to get her to see reason.”
“You mean to see things your way! Well, Ross, the girl’s a match for you, eh? The women in this family always did have the balls. Take your mother. Bloody stoic. Bloody Spartan, if it comes to that. Your mother could lead a charge down St. Andrew Street.”
Ross looked about to go, not to retreat, but simply to leave the field on equal terms with the enemy, when he spotted me. “I remember you,” he said. “You’re Sugarman or Goodman or something.”
“Cooperman, Mr. Forbes.”
“Well, what the hell are you—? Wait a minute. That letter from Colling. I remember it now.”
“I have the letter right here, sir,” said McAuliffe, putting on his manners for the CEO. Was he the AV as well? I’d have to find out. McAuliffe passed the two-page document to Ross. It was intercepted without comment by the Commander who quickly glanced down each of the pages before handing them on to his son. He let loose
something like a stifled growl in the back of his throat. Ross studied the letter too and seemed to find something amusing in the contents, so that, when he looked at me, he was almost smiling.
I know what it’s like to have the tax people on my back. If it wasn’t my former wife, I’d be full of sympathy. You may tell her I said that.”
“Messenger boy,” said the Commander, fixing me with a cold eye. “Is that what he is? Come to spoil things for Teddie at a time like this?” I could tell he wanted me to wither up and blow away. Instead, I thought it was time to strut some of the things I’d learned from Jim Colling.
“Mrs. Forbes’s tax status is in dispute, Commander Forbes. We are just trying to clear it up as simply as possible.”
“What Mr. Cooperman is too polite to say, Father, is that Teddie has clout enough to demand a full-scale audit if we don’t cooperate.”
“And you cave in at the first blast of a gale? Ha!” The Commander made another of those croaking noises in the back of his throat and wandered out of the room shaking his head as though he had just come into the office and found it empty.
After a moment, Ross pulled his attention back to me and McAuliffe. It was plain that he had trouble sharing the floor with the old man. “Fred, you keep an eye on Mr. Cooperman here, will you?”
“I’ll be sure to do that, Mr. Forbes.”
“Try to remember that we’re doing Teddie a favour, Mr. Cooperman. If you have any problems that Fred here can’t help you with, which I find hard to imagine, since he’s been here longer than anybody except Father, you bring it to me. Is that understood?” I nodded but refused to pull my forelock. I was still trying to be my own man. “See you at the wedding, Fred.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t miss Miss Sherry’s wedding, Mr. Forbes,” said McAuliffe. “Oh, no. We were at all the family weddings, you remember. Oh, May and I’ll be there with bells on—wedding bells!” Forbes smiled at the older man’s little joke and sucked in his largish belly so that it vanished under the shelter of his barrel chest, giving the illusion of fitness and health. Of the whole Forbes clan and throwing in McAuliffe and me for nothing, the Commander looked about as trim and healthy as the rest of us put together. For a man on the brink of eighty, he was putting us all to shame in the health department. I still wasn’t ready to live under his whimsical, iron tyranny. There might be some hope for the son, but I doubted it. With the slightest of glances in my direction, Ross Forbes left me in McAuliffe’s custody.
SIXTEEN
The first piece of interesting information I learned in the head office of Phidias wasn’t about Kinross Disposals at all. It was about Sangallo Restorations. Recent events had partially obscured my primary mission to the extent that, when I found a description of Sangallo, I ate it up greedily. As I expected, it was a small firm with an office and small yard on the outskirts of Niagara-on-the-Lake. It had been a subsidiary of Phidias Manufacturing since 1988 and, like Kinross, appeared to operate with a measure of autonomy from the mother house. What raised my eyelids to fully open was the discovery that the chief executive officer was Harold Grier. Grier was a family name I’d run into before in this investigation. With a little discreet questioning of Fred McAuliffe, I learned that Harold was the brother-in-law of both Ross Forbes and Paul Renner of the city’s sanitation department. Harold was the brother of the women they married. I tried not to show my delight at this piece of news. But I could almost hear myself whispering under my breath, “Rub-adub dub / Three men in a tub / The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.” And I was forgetting that Grier must
be the front man for Tony Pritchett and his boys. The tub was more crowded than I thought.
From his desk across the room from me, McAuliffe sat surrounded by a cloud of his own pipesmoke. He had had a blower unit installed above his head, something he called his “ceiling-hung blower unit,” which had no doubt been put in to obey the smoking by-laws, but from what I could see, McAuliffe rarely bothered to turn the thing on. Wherever I went with him in the office, on any of the floors and once down into the basement to the dead-files room, Fred ignored all
NO SMOKING
signs posted by the elevators and stairs. He was too old to change his spots, he told me. He spent a good part of his day scraping, cleaning, reaming, filling and, on occasion, smoking one of his fifty briars. They were all a big part of him. Like the burned holes in his desk blotter and the ashes—I’ve seen them even in his eyebrows—everywhere, McAuliffe was a leftover from an earlier day. I hadn’t come into the office with any high regard for Phidias or any of its tentacles, but the fact that it gave office space to this tweedy, Dickensian character, who always had time to digress and give me the history or background on any matter that came up, made me respect it and give it the benefit of the doubt.
I had never been a whiz with figures, but Fred McAuliffe could breathe life into a ledger. He seemed to remember every entry. Sometimes he would explain the reason for a group of figures as though he were lecturing to a large class of students; another time he would close
the door and whisper reasons to me that I was too thick to follow. I got the general idea that Phidias had an insatiable appetite for small companies that had expanded as far as they could on the available capital. When it came to blocks of shares and values before and after splits, I was over my head, and only McAuliffe’s gentle patience helped me keep one toe on the bottom and my nose clearing the waves.
What made working this close to Fred agreeable was that he enjoyed distraction from work as much as I did. I learned more about all four of the Welland Canals than has ever been printed in books. He was a walking encyclopedia. For instance, he told me his name, McAuliffe, came from the same word as Hamlet and that they both were fancy forms of Olaf.
I asked Fred if he knew anything about the excavations at Fort Mississauga in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He didn’t suddenly change. In fact, he smiled.
“Ah, yes!” he said. “That’s one of the Sangallo jobs. Yes, I’m glad to be associated with that. You know the supervisor is Dr. John Roppa of the RAM in Toronto, same fellow who discovered the remains of those American soldiers from the War of 1812 at Queenston three years ago.”
“What’s he finding at the fort?”
“Well, he’s keeping it very hush-hush at this stage. But I know this much: they are putting the earthworks back where they were originally, as well as making general repairs and restorations to the main structure.”
“The last time I saw it, it looked like it had a skin disease.”
“Ha! That’s pargeting,” said Mr. McAuliffe.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Parging, pargeting, covering the brick with plaster to keep the weather out. What the English call roughcast. The golf club’s lease on the property ends in 1991. After that, it will probably go to the Parks Board, like Fort George. The golf club’s moved a couple of tees and the old green beside the tower so that the historic landmarks people didn’t stage a protest. There’ve been more letters about that damned fort in the paper than there have been about the local water supply, which, to hear them, comes directly from the Love Canal over the river.”
From the records I was looking at, it appeared that the Commander had retained active control of Phidias until recently. It was only when advanced age and crotchetiness had got the better of him that he had reluctantly stepped aside in favour of his son. But Murdo Forbes was still an important shareholder. Without owning an overall majority, he could at least match with his own shares anything that Ross could put up. Teddie’s interest in the firm amounted to a tidy ten percent. I couldn’t see why she had hung on to her shares since the divorce, but Fred explained that she would need the consent of the other board members to sell, and that permission had not been expressed in the minutes.
“Oh, I’ve seen it more than once,” Fred said, “where an unwilling shareholder is kept involuntarily. It keeps
the board from having to buy her out and it keeps newcomers away. On Mr. Forbes’s side, too, I think there may be something personal.”
“Like spite?”
“That’s your word for it, Mr. Cooperman, not mine. Teddie’s family is an old one in this town, you know, and Teddie herself has been a credit to her name.”
From Fred I learned that Ross had never really taken charge of Phidias, not in the way the old man had. “The boy doesn’t have the grit of the Commander. He’s never had to worry about where his next meal is coming from, eh?” he said with a grin, while sending a shower of sparks up towards the ceiling-hung blower unit. “The Commander wasn’t born to a bed of roses. He made his own way, same as I did.”
“Did Ross Forbes ever have a chance around here?”
“Chance? Why, what are you talking about? There’s an opportunity born every day. And most days Mr. Ross comes in at ten in the morning. The Commander was always deep at work when I came in at seven in the old days. Seven, eh! And he’d be still hard at it when I went home for my supper at seven at night. Oh, the Commander loved making this place tick. And he kept all the subsidiaries ticking too. Why, I remember once he bought a failing dairy. He did everything but milk the cows until it turned a profit a year and a half later. Mr. Ross isn’t a detail man like his father. He goes for flow charts and graphs and printouts I can hardly read. The Commander can call any worker by his first name and tell you his
wife’s name too and how many youngsters they have. Oh, the Commander’s a remarkable man.”
“It’s a remarkable family,” I agreed. “And I guess they will all be on their best behaviour for the wedding?”
“That’s where class shows, Mr. Cooperman. There may be problems. I’m not saying there aren’t. But in public it will be smooth as silk. Oh, the Forbeses are the salt of the earth.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I lied. I was trying to cut down on sodium like the Forbeses. They were bad for my diet.
“The interesting thing, Mr. Cooperman, is that this wedding is a case of history repeating itself.”
I thought I’d heard that story before, but I thought I might learn something new. “How’s that?” I asked.
“Sandy MacCallum didn’t have a son to carry on his business, so he married his daughter to a capable young lad with lots of get-up-and-go. He could see that the Commander, even in those days, had as much stick-to-itiveness as he had himself. That’s why he became more of a son than a son-in-law. Now the Commander is looking at Mr. Ross’s girl, Sherry, as a second Miss Biddy. You see? He thinks the world of Miss Sherry’s young man, Mr. Caine. Mr. Caine will be grand for the business, Mr. Cooperman. I think he’s the Commander all over again.”
“I hope you’re right.” Fred had repeated the story as I’d first heart it; so it must be common knowledge. In my business a little confirmation is a big help in taking the next step.
“Oh, I am,” Fred was saying. “I know I am. You see, it’s not just breeding, it’s the military training. Mr. Caine was in Central America with the Americans for a year as a volunteer. Before that, he was in the Canadian Forces. You can’t beat military training, Mr. Cooperman. It cuts out fuzzy thinking. They all had it, you know: the Commander, of course; Miss Biddy in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps; even Mr. Ross held a commission at one time and he had all those military academies one after the other.”