Читать книгу Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - Jack Batten - Страница 21

ACE’S ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT occupied a double office that looked out the back windows of the building. Harry liked that. No one passing in the street could see him at his clandestine labours. The department consisted of several desks, a medium-sized computer, and a wall of filing cabinets. Harry opened his briefcase and took out three sharpened pencils, a pad of foolscap, and a pocket calculator that ran on batteries. He laid out his tools of the trade on one of the desks and walked over to the filing cabinets.

“You want us to give you a hand?” I asked. James and I were standing at the door into the accounting area. I didn’t feel useful.

“No,” Harry said. He pulled open one of the drawers in the wall. A row of brown file folders filled the length of the drawer. Each folder had an indicator tag sticking out of the top at the left side. Harry flipped through the folders, stopped, and looked back to James and me.

“No, for chrissake, Crang,” he said. “Bad enough in here without you guys hanging over my shoulder.”

James and I stepped into the hall.

“You’re on guard duty,” I said to James. “I’ll snoop.”

I posted James at a window that gave him a view of the street.

“Anything fishy,” I said, “let out a shout.”

“What’s fishy?”

“You’ll recognize it.”

I walked down the hall past the accounting department. At the end of the building, two roomy offices faced one another across the hall. The office on the street side was Alice Brackley’s. It had a blonde wood desk and armchairs with chintz covering. On the desk there was a photograph in a silver frame of Alice and a man with grey hair who looked old enough to be her father. He probably was her father. Same thin lips.

The office on the other side of the hall didn’t display any personal photographs, but the ambience announced Charles Grimaldi. Its furnishings were heavy and masculine. Oak desk, leather sofa and chairs, a LeRoy Neiman drawing on the wall of a halfback crashing through the line. In one corner, a rectangular silver machine that stood waist high gleamed at me. I went over and patted it. It was a photocopier.

At the desk in the accounting area, Harry was intent over an opened file folder. A sheet of foolscap at his right showed a list of one-word notations with numbers opposite the notations. The fingers of Harry’s left hand danced on the keys of the pocket calculator, his right hand held a pencil and jotted on the foolscap. Harry’s handwriting made up in speed what it lacked in legibility.

“Harry,” I said, “a copy machine in the boss’s office. That in the usual line of executive furnishing?”

“You want me to get through this stuff,” Harry said, “don’t interrupt.”

“How you making out?”

“This is going to be strictly a sampling,” Harry said. “Anything definitive, I’d need four, five days.”

“All I’m asking is hints,” I said. “Trends.”

“One thing I can say already, General Motors doesn’t keep books the way these people do it.”

I turned back to the door.

“The answer to your question is negative,” Harry said from his desk. “It makes no sense for the boss to put a photocopy machine in his personal office.”

Two short flights of stairs led from the first-floor hall down to the building’s basement. At the bottom of the first flight, I looked through the window in a door opening on to Ace’s back property. Two hundred trucks waited in their spaces. In the silence and shadows, they took on anthropomorphic features—ominous, skulking creatures at temporary rest. Another minute and I could have worked myself up for the Robert Redford role in Out of Africa. Herd of beasts out there, Karen, dangerous when roused.

A time clock jutted from the wall of the landing just inside the door. Rows of cards in slots covered the rest of the wall space. The cards were light brown and each had a name and an employee number printed at the top. There were twenty-six cards in the line of slots along the bottom row and I pulled every one of them. Made for exciting reading, times punched in to work, times punched out after work. Some employees came on at eight a.m. or a few minutes thereafter and left at six p.m. or a little earlier. Some worked noon till eight or nine at night. And some had a shift that brought them to Ace at six in the morning. Those early birds better not catch the burglars.

Down the second short flight of stairs, the basement was given over to a locker room. Beat-up grey metal half-lockers ran lengthwise along two sides, and in the middle of the room there were two groupings of wooden tables and chairs. One table had a deck of cards on it, and a Playboy calendar hung on the back of a closet door. Miss July bore more than a passing resemblance to the nurse on duty at the Majestic. The locker room seemed the preserve of Ace’s drivers. They must come in from the yard through the back door, change clothes, play cards, shoot the breeze between trips on the monsters outside. There was a shower stall off one end of the room, and an electric kettle, some mismatched mugs, and a jar of instant coffee sat on a rickety table in a corner. I made three cups and carried them upstairs. Harry took his black, James wanted double sugar.

At three-fifteen, Harry spoke.

“Make yourself useful, Crang,” he said.

On his desk, Harry had organized papers and documents into three orderly piles. The tallest pile was of file folders from the wall cabinets, the smallest was his own stack of notations on the sheets of foolscap. The medium-sized pile seemed to be made up of waybills and invoices. Harry pointed to the third collection.

“Them, I want copies of,” he said to me. “Use that machine you found in the boss’s office, whatever his name is.”

“Grimaldi.”

“And keep the papers in the same order I gave them to you,” Harry said. “That way, I know exactly what file to put them back in, and nobody’s going to know we’ve been looking at this stuff.”

“What are these papers I’m copying?” I asked.

“Could be your smoking gun.”

The nervous Harry of earlier in the night had been replaced by the confident accountant.

I made three more cups of coffee at four o’clock. Thirty minutes later, Harry sent me back to the photocopier with a second bundle of documents. At five o’clock a thin line of yellow dawn showed across the eastern sky. Time to urge on the troops. When I suggested to Harry that we close down operations, he said he’d reached the limits of immediate information. He began returning the file folders to the cabinets and packing the copied documents in his briefcase. At five-thirty, James walked down the hall.

“Cops out there,” he said.

“Son of a bitch,” Harry said. He dropped a folder from his hand and the papers inside spilled across the floor. While he hastily gathered them, I went back down the hall with James and peeked through the window. A yellow cruiser was parked across the street in front of the Majestic. Two policemen sat in front talking to one another.

“Same cops that came by when I was doing the alarm,” James said in his best matter-of-fact voice.

“You recognize them?” I asked.

“Not the cops,” James said. “The numbers. I saw the numbers last time and this car’s got the same.”

The numerals 3148 were printed in blunt black on the side door of the cruiser. The driver got out of the car and raised his arms in a leisurely stretch. The other cop came around from his side of the car. He was smoking a cigarette. The driver reached through the cruiser’s window and brought out a brown paper bag. He opened it and offered a sandwich to his partner the smoker. The smoker shook his head and the driver bit into one of the sandwiches. He was a methodical chewer.

Harry joined James and me at the watch. He carried his briefcase in both hands. It was much fatter than when we’d arrived.

“Why in hell don’t those cops get on with their business?” Harry said.

“They’ve settled in for a fuel break,” I said. “Is it breakfast if that guy’s eating a sandwich?”

James said, “I’m gonna need ten minutes to take my wire off the alarm box and hook up the system the way it was before.”

I looked at my watch. Almost five-forty. The sun was above the line of buildings to the east.

“By six o’clock,” I said, “we’ll see traffic out there.”

“What’re you talking about?” Harry said.

“The guys who drive Ace’s trucks,” I said. “Six is starting time for some of them.”

“Jesus, we’re cooked,” Harry said. The nervous Harry had resumed ascendancy over the confident accountant. “A goddamned employee’s going to come through the gate before those cops move off.”

“Something might hurry them on their rounds,” I said. “Maybe a disapproving taxpayer.”

I went downstairs and opened four of the half-lockers until I found what I was looking for. Inside the fourth locker there was a dirty maroon windbreaker with “Ace” written in yellow across the back. The lettering was the same as on the sign in front of the building. I put on the windbreaker and a John Deere cap that was hanging on the hook underneath it. The windbreaker made a tight fit. A wooden box with a handle lay across the top of two adjoining lockers. It held a collection of wrenches and hammers and soiled rags. I used one of the rags to give my hands and face a wipe of grease. The tool box was heavy, but I hoisted it in my right hand with a jaunty swing and walked upstairs.

“Master of a thousand disguises,” I said. James said nothing. Harry’s eyes rolled back in his head.

I opened the front door and started down the path, trying like hell to look like I belonged to the tool box. The cop with the cigarette nudged the cop with the lunch. He was working on an apple. Both followed my forthright progress along the path. At the gate, I lifted out the padlock, stepped through, and locked the padlock in place. I tested it with an authoritative yank.

“Hey, you guys got the soft life,” I said to the two cops when I was partway across the street.

The cop eating the apple stopped chewing.

“What’re you doing around here this hour, Jack?” he said.

I said, “Working, which is more than I can say for you and your buddy.”

I let the tool box drop to the pavement. The cop with the cigarette flinched at the bang and the jangle of the hammers and wrenches.

“Working?” he said. “At what?”

“Couple of trucks needed servicing before they go on the road this morning,” I said. “Took all fucking night.”

The cop threw the cigarette on the road and butted it out with his boot.

“How’d you get here?” he asked. “Car or what?”

“Parked over there,” I said. I pointed at the Dart under the trees in the Majestic lot. “I came on around midnight and the only key they gave me is for the lock in the little gate. That satisfy you hotshots? I had to leave my car outside.”

Both cops thought over my answer.

“Ask more questions, why not?” I said. I put my hands on my hips and worked my mouth into a lopsided grin. “Make you feel real big-time, hey guys?”

The cop with the lunch put his half-eaten apple in the brown paper bag.

“That lip’s gonna get you run in one day, Jack,” he said.

“What for?” I said. “Doing my job like an honest citizen?”

The cop who’d been smoking took a turn.

“Don’t lean too hard,” he said to me.

“So radio in,” I said. I was grinning like a fool. Let the law know it had a crazy on its hands. “Tell the dispatcher you got an innocent bystander needs his ticket punched.”

The cop who’d been eating tossed his paper bag through the cruiser’s window. He motioned to his partner with his hands, palms up, thumbs pointed out. The gesture had its own eloquence. It said the morning was early, the shift was almost over, and a loudmouth was hassling two tired cops. Time to toss in the towel.

“Your lucky day, fella,” the first cop said to me. He opened the door on the driver’s side. The other cop walked around to his side.

“Look at me,” I said. “Trembling in my boots, Officer.”

The driver started his engine and squealed his tires as he pulled down the road.

“Hey,” I shouted after the car, “have a nice day.”

James and Harry came out of Ace’s front door on the run. Harry ran like Danny DeVito. They reached the gate.

“You’re absolutely nuts, Crang,” Harry said.

“Only in emergency situations,” I said.

James applied his thin wire to the padlock and sprang it open for the second time in six hours. I went through the gate with the tool box. Harry headed in the opposite direction with his briefcase, bound for the safety of the Dart. I returned the tool box, jacket, and cap to the basement locker room and cleaned my face and hands, and when I got back upstairs, James was standing on his stool and working on the alarm box. He untaped the wire he’d used to bypass the box and fit in new wires running into the box and leading out of it on the other side. It was eight minutes to six. A car drove up the street. James didn’t hesitate at his task. The car kept moving past the Ace property.

“Anybody studies real close, they’re gonna see what I did here,” James said. He was taping the wires into place. The tape made a matching pair of lumps in the otherwise even line of the wiring.

“Not your concern, James,” I said.

Three more cars passed in the street.

“Also,” James said, “I left a couple of marks where I picked the lock on the door.”

Two fine scratches showed where James’ pick had missed the keyhole.

“Never mind the perfectionism,” I said. “The job’s done.”

“Almost,” James said.

He stood down from the stool. Cars were moving on the street in a regular rhythm of traffic. Four minutes to six. If I were Jimmy the Greek, I’d shorten the odds on an Ace employee showing up. James pulled the front door shut. No bells rang.

“Okay,” James said. “The alarm’s operational.”

“Operational?” I said. “Any chance of putting me up for membership in your word-of-the-day club, James?”

James slung the cloth bag over his shoulder and picked up the stool. We were almost to the gate when a blue Cutlass stopped at the truck gate into the Ace property. The Cutlass’s driver put on his handbrake and got out of the car. He was rotund and middle-aged and had a cigar in his mouth. He wore a security guard’s uniform and carried a ring of keys in his hand.

“Hell of a great day for it,” I shouted over to him. My voice resonated with the hearty sycophancy of Ed McMahon buttering up Johnny Carson.

The rotund man stared at us.

“You bet,” he said. He had the look of an instinctively friendly old boy, but the presence of James and me was giving him trouble. We didn’t belong to his daily routine. The signs of a small inner struggle showed on his face. Quizzical. That was his expression.

“Everything’s shipshape inside,” I said. James and I kept walking.

“Oh, hell, this shop turns over like a clock,” the rotund man said. He took the cigar out of his mouth and gave us close scrutiny. He had piggy eyes.

James and I reached the pedestrian gate.

“What d’you think?” I called to the rotund man. “Lock this thing up or leave it for the others?”

“Office staff don’t come in Saturdays,” he said. “You guys office people?”

“Consulting job,” I said. “One shot and we’re gone.”

“Yeah,” the rotund man said. He was jingling the ring of keys in his hand. “Wondered why I didn’t recognize you and the kid.”

“In and out,” I said. “That’s the way it is in our game.”

“Well, hell, you might’s well lock the gate,” the rotund man said. “I’m only supposed to look after this here one for the vehicles.”

He pronounced it vee-hick-els.

I snapped the lock and waved to the rotund man.

“See you next year around the same time,” I said. My smile was as radiant as Wayne Newton’s. And as false.

“Where’d you say you two guys were from?” the rotund man asked. “Like, what company?”

The smile must have been too close to Wayne Newton’s.

“Didn’t say,” I said.

“Maybe I better take a look at who sent you people,” the rotund man said. He put the cigar back in his mouth, the keys in his pants pocket, and took a first step toward us. “I mean, what’s the kid doing with that there stool anyway?”

A horn honked behind us. The rotund man turned. A pickup truck had pulled behind the Cutlass, and back of the pickup a bright yellow Honda Civic was stopping. The pickup’s driver leaned out of the window. He was wearing a maroon and yellow Ace cap and a pair of wraparound sunglasses.

“You gonna jaw all morning, Wally?” he shouted. “Or you opening the fucking gate?”

Rotund Wally looked at the driver and back to us.

“Stay right there,” he said to James and me. “Just my duty, you understand, but I gotta check who you are.”

“No problem, Wally,” I said. The grin made my cheeks throb.

The driver in the pickup sounded another blast of his horn.

“Hold your water,” Wally said. He got the key ring from his pocket and unlocked the padlock on the truck gate.

“Soon as he moves his car,” I said to James, “we walk over to the Dart.”

Wally swung open the gate, secured it in place, and climbed back in the Cutlass.

“Now,” I said.

James and I stepped between the rear of the pickup truck and the front of the yellow Honda. I gave a friendly flick of my hand to the man behind the Honda’s wheel. He smiled back. Two more cars had joined the line waiting to get in the gate. James and I crossed the road and reached the Majestic parking lot. Rotund Wally had driven his Cutlass far enough into the Ace grounds to allow the following cars room to pull in and pass him. When he stepped from his driver’s seat, dust stirred by the wheels of the cars whirled around him. By the time James and I got to the Dart, Rotund Wally hadn’t spotted us.

“This is cutting it too fine, Crang,” Harry Hein said from the back seat. The briefcase sat on his lap and he’d worked his white handkerchief into a damp ball.

I turned the Dart out of the parking lot to the right. Rotund Wally, his hands swatting at the cloud of dust that enveloped him, was looking left. We drove downtown into the rising sun. My eyes ached, and the rest of my body felt the way it should, like it’d been up all night. No one spoke in the car until I turned off the Gardiner at Spadina.

“Now we’re all square, Crang?” Harry said.

“It’s a saw-off in the favour department, Harry,” I said.

Harry thought he’d need until Monday morning to sort out the data he’d lifted from Ace’s accounting department. I let him out of the car in front of his office, then drove James to Regent Park, where I handed the kid six twenties. He raised his eyebrows.

“Bonus for efficiency,” I said.

James walked away from the Dart without speaking. I went home and stood in the kitchen and drank a quart of milk from the carton.