where feature writers hang their hats, the ones with “press” in the brims. Griffin, the copy girl said, was the sharp dresser. She giggled when she said it.
Griffin had his feet up on a desk just like an old-timey reporter, except there was a computer terminal beside the desk and he was young, in his late twenties. He had unwashed black hair, a droopy bandito moustache, and a large residue of acne scars on his face. He was wearing an emerald-green short-sleeved shirt, plaid Bermuda shorts, and sandals with a lot of strapping. I would have giggled too.
I introduced myself.
I said, “The garbage series seemed a little short on what you journalists call hard news.”
“The lawyers took the guts out of it,” Griffin said. He talked fast. “They’ve been nervous ever since the Mafia guy in Quebec won his libel case against a Montreal paper. But I’ll go back to it. Another year or so, it’ll make a hell of a story.”
“Some lawyers are like that,” I said.
“Aw shit, I had the stuff,” Griffin said, rushing his words. “I knew which guys belonged to which families, where their money came from originally, and where they went to scrub it up.”
“Grimaldi?” I said. “That one of your names? Charles Grimaldi?”
“I got all kinds of Grimaldis,” Griffin said.
He leaned over and opened a lower drawer of his desk without taking his sandals off the top. Nice feat of balance. He came up with two red file folders, put one on the desk and opened the other. It had a thick stack of pages of computer printouts held together perfectly squared with a large paper clip and six or seven stenographers’ notebooks. He chose one notebook and turned through the pages. He was very methodical. The handwriting in the notebook was as rounded and legible as a private-school girl’s.
“The Grimaldis,” Griffin said. “I’ll tell you all the dirt on the Grimaldis.”
I said, “It’s okay by me if you hold it down to Charles.”
“I got to go at this from the beginning.” He stopped turning the pages of the notebook in his lap, looked up, and started talking at full throttle.
“The old man, Pietro Grimaldi, that’s Charles’ father, he’s numero uno up in Guelph and has been since the end of the Second War. He came to Canada from Calabria and opened a grocery store. That’s what he still is today, a grocer in Guelph, Ontario. He’s also what you’d call the godfather up there. I’d call him godfather everywhere except in the newspaper or the lawyers’d go bananas. It sounds ridiculous anyway, godfather of Guelph. The whole area’s got maybe two hundred thousand people, but everything that’s organized crime around that part of the province, old Pietro’s in charge. The drugs, the girls, the counterfeiting, all that, and he’s never served a day in jail. He’s never been in a courtroom. Very sharp old guy.”
I kept waiting for Griffin to look at his notebook. He didn’t.
“The funny thing about these people, they don’t think of any of that stuff, drugs and prostitution and everything, as crime. It’s business.” Griffin’s pace had hit lickety-split. “But they know that all the rest of us think of it as criminal. That may be simple-minded to you and me, but it’s crucial if you want to understand the psychology of a guy like old Grimaldi.”
“I’m with you,” I said, just to give him a chance to take in some oxygen.
Griffin said, “Pietro was one of the first guys in the big crime scene to figure that all the money he’s making, he shouldn’t just turn it over into more drugs, more hookers, more whatever. He should put it into businesses that the rest of us citizens consider legitimate.”
“Which brings us to garbage,” I said.
“Not yet it doesn’t,” Griffin said.
“Right,” I said. “You have to go in order.”
“Pietro wasn’t going to run these straight businesses himself,” Griffin said. “He’s still a grocer. You should see him waiting on the customers. You’d take him for your kindly old Uncle Pete, and all the time, in the back room, he’s masterminding this whole network of bad guys. Anyway, he’s sticking at home, so he sends his three boys out into the world to look after the up-and-up operations.”
I said, “Garbage.”
“Wait,” Griffin said. The notebook was still open in his lap, uncon-sulted. “Pietro’s got three sons. The oldest, Pete Junior, he gets a string of laundries in Hamilton. Number two boy, John, he’s in car-washes through the southwest part of the province, London, Woodstock, down there. And Charles, the youngest, for him Pietro buys Ace Disposal, which is the largest garbage company in the city.”
“I read that somewhere,” I said. “You ever meet Charles?”
“Dark, good-looking guy in his early thirties,” Griffin said, not easing up on the speed. “He took me to lunch at Fenton’s when I was doing the story and talked a lot of bullshit about the challenge of garbage. He must’ve spent seventy bucks on the food and wine.”
“The old slyboots,” I said, “trying to purchase your favour that way.”
“Charles is the one in the family who’s different,” Griffin said. “He’s the only son with a record, two assault convictions when he was a kid. On the second, he was ten months in reformatory. That was thirteen years ago. Charles was nineteen. He hit a guy with the lever from a tire jack. Fractured his skull.”
Griffin closed the notebook on his lap.
I said, “You’re probably just as good without all the help from that thing.”
“Huh?”
I thanked Griffin for his time.
“Don’t forget,” he said, “I told you I’m still interested in the story.”
I said, “When I break this case wide open, you’ll get it first.”
He said, “Nobody talks like that any more.”
There was a Diamond Cab at the taxi stand in front of the building and I took it home.
3
MY HOUSE is in Goldwin Smith’s old neighbourhood. I moved in about eighty years after he moved on. Goldwin Smith was a wise old duck who wrote on political and social affairs around town in the late nineteenth century. He didn’t make much money out of his writing, but he married a rich woman. That was another thing Goldwin and I had in common. My rich woman was named Pamela. She was beautiful and talked through her nose. Her family had a lot more money than Matthew Wansborough and the money was a couple of hundred years older. Pamela married me when I was a law student in part because she thought I was quaint. My father thought Pamela was quaint. I come from a long line of working-class toilers and my father was a photo-engraver. Banged at pieces of metal for all his employed life. He died ten years ago, around the time Pamela stopped thinking I was quaint and we divorced. Goldwin Smith stayed married.
At the northwest corner of Beverley Street and Sullivan, there’s the Chinese Baptist Church, then a row of square red-brick houses. Mine’s up at the north end. It faces across Beverley
