The Art Gallery of Ontario uses the Grange for offices. I divided my house into two apartments, mine upstairs and one downstairs where a gay couple and their Irish setter have been in residence for six years. Alex is a civil servant, Ian sells real estate, and the dog slobbers on everyone he gets close to, friend or foe.
I got the Wyborowa out of the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and poured some over three ice cubes in an old-fashioned glass. Whether Matthew Wansborough knew it or not, he had the mob for a partner. He wouldn’t want his pals who put on the funny red jackets and ride the horses with him on weekends to find out about that. On the other hand, he wanted the answer to the question he started out with: How come Ace Disposal was suddenly making money? Did Charles Grimaldi have a touch with garbage? Was the Grimaldi family using Ace as a front for other purposes? Lucrative purposes? Illegal purposes?
I put a Bill Evans album on the stereo, You Must Believe in Spring, and went out to the kitchen. I spread a thin layer of Paul Newman spaghetti sauce on two large pieces of whole-wheat pita bread. Fine slices of mushroom, green pepper, cooking onion, zucchini, mozzarella cheese, and asparagus went on next. I organized them in jolly little patterns and covered them with flakes of parmesan. Boutique pizza, a woman friend of mine calls the recipe. It’s one of two in my repertoire. Chili is the other. Makes for a cramped diet and sends me out of the house for dinner most nights. I put the two pizzas in the oven at three hundred degrees. They needed twenty minutes. Bill Evans had reached the final bars of “We Will Meet Again,” the last track on side one.
I turned the record over, poured another vodka, and phoned my answering service. A Mrs. Turkin had returned my call. Mrs. Turkin was the mother of an eighteen-year-old kid I acted for. The kid’s girlfriend had got in the front seat of a taxi late one night and told the driver to let her off in the underground garage of a downtown apartment building. When the cab driver and the girl were concluding the transaction in the garage, which the driver may or may not have interpreted as a prelude to some quick and nasty sex, my kid jumped in the back seat of the cab. He made threatening noises at the driver while the girlfriend lifted the poor sap’s wallet. The cabbie said he got a good look at my kid as he and the girl were hot-footing it out of the garage, and a couple of weeks later he spotted my kid in front of Sam the Record Man’s on the Yonge Street Strip. The police reasoned that my kid’s girlfriend had set up the robbery, a variation on the old badger game. My kid said something to the cops when he was arrested. To wit: “The driver deserved it. He was just looking to get laid.” Clever. I jockeyed around with the crown attorney on the case for a month and we made a deal. She reduced the charge from robbery to assault with intent and I pleaded my kid guilty. Not bad considering my kid had a record, nothing violent before the waltz in the garage but a record. He’d been in jail for the month and was coming up for sentencing.
I phoned Mrs. Turkin. At her end, the television was on in the background. More like the foreground.
“We been worried sick about James, Mr. Crang,” she said. She had to talk up over Family Feud.
I said, “He may go to jail, Mrs. Turkin.”
“What we done for that boy, there wasn’t nothing more we could,” she said. Even talking up, her voice was whiny.
“How long he goes to jail,” I said, “may depend on you and your husband.”
“He got the marks in school,” she said. “We never made him quit or nothing.”
I said, “The judge is going to sentence James on Monday morning, Mrs. Turkin. I’d like you or your husband to be in court.”
“What?” The whine was gone.
“Judges are usually impressed favourably, Mrs. Turkin, when the parents of a boy James’ age take the trouble to appear for sentencing.”
She had put her hand over the receiver and was shouting at someone else. The shouting lasted ten seconds.
“We can’t get off work, neither of us,” Mrs. Turkin said to me.
I said, “It could make a difference of months in the sentence, Mrs. Turkin.”
“Me and my husband got jobs to think of and that’s more than James can say.”
She hung up.
The pizzas were beginning to bubble in the oven and Bill Evans was halfway through “Sometime Ago.”
I made another phone call and got Tom Catalano’s wife at home. She said Tom was still at the office. Her tone was in the small gap between patience and resignation. I dialled the night line at McIntosh, Brown & Crabtree, and someone said he’d dig Catalano out of the library.
“This wouldn’t be a prodigal son call?” Catalano said when he knew it was me.
Years earlier, I’d worked my eighteen months as an articling student at McIntosh, Brown. Catalano kept wanting me back.
“I don’t get it, Crang, whatever it is that makes you stick it out in the criminal courts,” he said on the phone. “It’s grubby stuff and fundamentally boring. Come down here and I’ll guarantee you a Supreme Court civil trial first time out of the box.”
“I’d flunk the dress code you got down there,” I said.
“I’ll hand you the kind of cases they write up in the Dominion Law Reports,” Catalano said. “That ever happen with the clients you got smelling up your waiting room?”
“Haven’t got a waiting room,” I said. “Anyway, one point in favour of my clients, so far none of them have been serious enough to consort with the guys who wear black suits and leave their associates in the trunks of cars out at the airport.”
“Meaning?”
I told Catalano about Matthew Wansborough and Ace Disposal and the Grimaldis, father and sons. He was silent for about three beats and asked if I had told Wansborough my news. I said no and asked him if Wansborough was likely to get himself involved in something shifty and keep it from his lawyers. Catalano said, was the Pope Jewish? He said a newspaper reporter’s unprinted allegations weren’t much to go on. I said Ray Griffin impressed me as sound on his research. Catalano said he’d hold off on reporting to Wansborough, and in the meantime, I should find out what I could about the Grimaldis and Ace and do it about as soon as yesterday.
“Listen,” Catalano said when we were through with Wansborough’s troubles, “one of our juniors came to work this morning in corduroy pants and a tweed jacket. We let him walk around that way all day.”
I said, “Tell me when he shows up in a windbreaker from his bowling league.”
I called my answering service again and told them I wouldn’t be in the office next day. I phoned my secretary and told her the same thing. Part-time secretary. In a practice like mine, paperwork is minimal, mostly a matter of reports to the Legal Aid Society on cases they send me, a few letters, subpoenas. Mrs. Reid is a proper lady in her early sixties who will forever be Mrs. Reid to me and I will be Mr. Crang to her. She comes in two or three days a week to type things and file other things. On days when she doesn’t come in and I’m not around, the office is unmanned. And unwomanned.
I ate the pizzas at the table in the kitchen, and afterwards I poured another vodka and watched television. Barbara Frum on The Journal was carrying on a four-way interview with an economist in Halifax, the Minister of Finance in the Toronto studio, a union man in Hamilton, and a former provincial premier in Regina. The subject was
