Lawyer, or you go drink with them cowboys at the bar.”
“Think of this as practice, Tony,” I said. “Alice Brackley’s dead. The police are going to come around wondering why. Tell me what you know and when the cops ask the same questions, you’ll have the answers down pat.”
“What’s the question?” Tony said. “You talk so much bull, I forget.”
“A driver as Alice’s murderer,” I said, “does that fit?”
“You’re asking, did a biker do it for sure, I don’t know,” Tony said. “But those guys, their morals is all up their ass, y’know what I mean.”
I took Tony’s splendid metaphor to indicate that murder wasn’t unknown as one of the Ace drivers’ talents.
“What about Charles Grimaldi?” I asked. “Your boss?”
“Not my boss,” Tony said quickly. “I work for Mr. Nash personal. Mr. Grimaldi, he’s around, I walk away.”
“You don’t like the gentleman?”
“Nuthin’ to do with it, like or not like,” Tony said. “Mr. Nash’s a hard guy, that’s what he’s supposed to be, the way he earns his living. Mr. Grimaldi’s a hard guy, he does it ’cause he likes it. There’s fighters, certain kind of fighter, hits guys that are already fallin’ through the ropes. Weirdos. Mr. Grimaldi’s that kinda person. I told Mr. Nash once. I said Mr. Grimaldi’s weird, and Mr. Nash told me never mind. That’s it, I never mind.”
Tony had fibbed when he said he knew nothing about Ace Disposal’s wheeling and dealing at the Metro dumps. I’d bet my house on it. I’d make the same wager he was straight with me on the other items. He didn’t kill Alice Brackley and he had no first-hand information on who handled the deed. But in his own assessment, he wouldn’t rule out Sol Nash, worship the man as he did, or one of the drivers, maybe on a contract job. And there was more. Tony’s pigeonholing of Charles Grimaldi’s character seemed to make him, in Tony’s mind, another possibility as a murderer.
“You done?” Tony said to me. “You wanta watch me eat key lime pie?”
“Enjoy, Tony,” I said. “Thanks for the time.”
“I never said nothing against Mr. Nash.”
“You didn’t throw a right cross at me either.”
“Papa Anderson made the difference.”
“I’ll tell him so.”
Tony said, “You go round and see Papa much, him dyin’ and all that?”
“I intend to.”
“Me, I’m at his place, me and these other fighters, regular every Saturday.”
Chalk up two for Tony.
25
THE ROOM ON THE FIRST FLOOR of the CBC Radio building where I found Annie B. Cooke had a high ceiling, no windows, and a machine for editing tape. The machine was large and homely, and when I opened the door to the room, it was playing a passage from one of Annie’s tapes.
“Some people say if a movie works in the theatre, it’ll work on TV,” the voice on the tape, casual and masculine, was saying. “Sometimes yes. Testament does. Sometimes no. Nashville doesn’t. And anyway, you do get the idea of the Mona Lisa when the lady is printed on a bath towel, but what kind of idea is that?”
Annie mouthed “Hi” to me. She pointed at the tape and mouthed “Jay Scott.” Her face registered a high-satisfaction quotient.
“On the other hand,” Jay Scott’s voice continued, “who would order struggling parents with three kids to risk an expensive evening at the moving pictures when chances are about even that the picture in question will have been designed from inception to show up on what Judy Garland called ‘the hell where all little movies go when they’re bad.’ Television. Better by far to rent Trading Places for five bucks and save fifty. And that’s the real devastation accomplished by video.”
Annie pushed a button on the machine that stopped the tape, then punched another button that sent it whirring in reverse.
She said, “Isn’t the man a treat?”
“A wizard with words,” I said.
“Didn’t have to edit a damn thing in that section, which is more than I can say for my other heroes.”
Annie was sitting on the edge of one of the two folding metal chairs in the room. The other chair was dotted with tiny pieces of stray tape. I made a motion to wipe them into an overflowing waste basket.
“Yo, Crang, no housekeeping,” Annie said. She reached over and caught my hand before it touched the cuttings. “You almost threw out my verbs.”
“Every journalist should have a collection,” I said.
“Two of the New York people kept dropping them out of sentences,” Annie said. She tidied the scraps of tape into rows on the chair. “Whole paragraphs without an ‘is’ or a ‘was’ or a ‘will’. I had to go through the discards and find a bunch of pasts, presents, and futures of ‘to be’.”
“Those are the little darlings on the chair?”
“Tomorrow I’ll clip them into the stuff I’m using on air. My keepers.”
“Make the critics sound literate.”
“Crang, these guys are superliterate,” Annie said. Her voice bounced in her enthusiasm. “I want them to sound complete.”
“With verbs.”
“I’m fussy that way.”
Annie looked at her watch. She’d been editing for seven hours. I said she needed a protein boost. Annie packed her tapes, and we drove downtown to Joe Allen’s restaurant. Joe Allen is a smart cookie who came out of the U.S. Army and opened a New York restaurant that picked up on military dining. Basic chow in a stripped-down setting. The idea worked in Manhattan and Allen took it to Paris and Toronto. The restaurant in Toronto is long and narrow and has wooden floors, red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, paper napkins, and ketchup bottles on the tables. Its decor runs to framed posters and photos of showbiz subjects on the walls. Annie and I sat at a table halfway down the room under a movie still that showed a beautiful woman from the waist up. She was wearing nothing except wide red suspenders. The woman did more for them than Harry Hein.
The menu was chalked on blackboards that were nailed high on the walls. Annie asked the waiter for liver. “Pink but not raw,” she said. I ordered a hamburger, and while we waited, we drank from a litre of the house red and I told Annie about my day.
“The way it sounds to me,” Annie said when I was done, “it didn’t take much silver-tongue treatment to keep your client from making a beeline for police headquarters.”
“Wansborough made the right solid-citizen noises,” I said. “Objected when I asked him to keep events at Ace under his hat. But two other items took precedence.”
