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FOR BREAKFAST, Annie made us an omelette with bits of tomato mixed in and we sat at the table in the bow window of her apartment. I ate my half of the omelette and most of hers and drank two cups of coffee. I did the eating and drinking in silence except for the odd slurp. A book had Annie’s undivided attention. It was about an Italian movie director named Alberti and it was written in Italian.

“Damn,” Annie said to her book, “I didn’t know he wrote the script for that.”

She had an interview with Signor Alberti in the afternoon. He was passing through town on a promotion tour for his new movie.

Annie said, “The entertainment editor at the Sun says he’ll pay me for a thousand words on Alberti if I deliver first thing tomorrow for Sunday’s paper.”

“They take freelance stuff?”

“Their regular movie guy’s out in California on a press junket and the editor said there was nobody else at the paper who knows as much about movies as I do.”

“How complimentary.”

“He did say European movies.”

I went home and changed into jeans and a cotton sports shirt, something comfy for more surveillance duty. I drove over to the Metro dump at the foot of Leslie Street and parked under the tree outside the entrance. Thursday, I’d started at Ace Disposal. Friday, I was beginning at the dump. Sometimes my talent for improvisation frightened me.

I watched trucks pass in and out of the dump, on and off the weigh scales, for an hour.

“Hey,” I said. Out loud. It was an exclamation of discovery.

I leaned across the front seat and fiddled among the odds and ends in the glove compartment. The street guide, a flask of brandy for swooning spells, a deck of playing cards with bicycle wheels on the back. Gloves, too, the kind with no fingers. They remain unworn. I’m saving them until I get my first Mercedes and can rightfully adopt the pretentious look in handwear. I got out a spiral-bound steno notebook and a ballpoint pen that wrote in black. I unstrapped my wristwatch and set it on my lap. I watched and I timed and I made notes.

Trucks arrived at the weigh scale on the average of about one every couple of minutes. Sometimes there was a lineup of three or four trucks. Sometimes five minutes went by without a truck in sight. They came out of the dump at the same rate. About half the trucks were from Ace Disposal, the rest from a variety of other companies. So far, so clear.

What prompted the “hey” was the amount of time it took the man inside the weigh-scale office to deal with the Ace trucks. It was the same man from the day before, the old pro in the short-sleeved white shirt. Maybe a different shirt. He consulted his weighing gadget, jotted numbers on his sheets of paper, handed out the carbon copies to the drivers as they left. Identical routine with each truck in and out. The fishy part was that the routine may have been identical with every truck, but according to my watch and calculations, it took him twenty to thirty seconds longer to deal with an Ace truck than with a truck from another disposal outfit. That was twenty or thirty seconds longer going in and the same coming out.

I started up the Volks and drove back on Leslie until I came to a phone booth. I looked up the number of the Star’s editorial department and let it ring seven times before somebody came on the line and told me Ray Griffin didn’t get in till noon. That was an hour away. I said I’d call later.

Back at the dump, a variation in routine greeted me. A Cadillac was parked in back of the weigh-scale building. It was very large and very pink, on the order of the gaudy sort that Mary Kay cosmetics salespersons cruise around in. Maybe old white-shirt in the weigh offIce had run out of lip gloss. A young man wearing a straw hat at a rakish angle sat behind the wheel of the pink Caddie. He’d left the motor running. A couple of minutes later, another man came out the back door of the weigh building. He had black hair, a deep tan, and a nose that was champion size, and he was wearing a light blue summer suit with dark blue stitching around the pockets. He was carrying a thin black briefcase. He got into the front passenger seat of the Cadillac, and before he’d closed the door, the driver was reversing out of the yard and gunning up Leslie. In a cloud of dust.

I stuck it out for another hour. I timed and noted and got the same answers. Ace trucks took about twenty-five, thirty seconds longer to service. Whatever it meant, it was, as they say in the accounting business, a confirmed trend. I drove back to the phone booth, and when I got Ray Griffin on the line, I had a question for him.

“You got somebody tame in the disposal business?”

“Are you on to something?”

“I asked first.”

There was a pause on the other end.

“What’d you mean tame?” Griffin asked.

“Somebody inside the industry who didn’t mind feeding you material he probably shouldn’t have. Somebody who spoke off the record.”

“Oh sure, a source, you mean.”

“I guess I do.”

“I got plenty of stuff from a guy who used to drive for a disposal company.”

“Ace?”

“Another one. Ace’s drivers are heavies.”

“I noticed.”

“You’re getting into this in a big way, it sounds like.”

Griffin’s voice had turned confidential. He was a reporter who sniffed a scoop. Except he wouldn’t say scoop. Or sniffed.

I said, “I’d like to talk to your driver. That possible?”

“Easy,” Griffin said. “He works right here now. Drives a Star delivery truck. I can have him for you around four-thirty. He’s on the early shift and he’ll just be coming off.”

We arranged to meet at a restaurant near the Star building called the Press Grill.

“We don’t call it that, us reporters,” Griffin said. “We call it La Salle de Crayons.”

“You sophisticated devils.” I hung up.