the moment,” Griffin said.
The morning traffic on Bloor Street was jammed back from Bay, and the first parking space I found in the indoor car park on Yorkville was up on the sixth level. It wasn’t starting out to be my best day. Harry Hein’s face did nothing to lighten the load. The arrangement of lines, folds, and creased skin looked familiar and unhealthy. But his manner was more upbeat than it had been when I’d last seen him by dawn’s early light on Saturday.
“Exactly like I figured, Crang,” Harry said. “And then some.”
He was sitting behind the desk in his office, jacket off, red suspenders on display. I recognized the papers on the desk as the copies of invoices and other documents we’d taken from Ace Disposal’s accounting department. Harry paid no heed to the papers. It was the computer that had his attention. He was stroking it.
“I punched in the numbers last night,” Harry said. “Real incriminating stuff we got here, Crang.”
“Harry, leave the lawyer talk to me,” I said. “You stick to accountant’s language.”
“Well, in plain man’s terminology, Mr. Crang,” Harry said, putting a testy touch to each word, “somebody at Ace is a crook and very blatant about it.”
“Line it up for me.”
“It would be my pleasure,” Harry said. He was doing a Ralph Kramden to my Ed Norton.
“All righty,” Harry went on, “you remember we talked possibilities the first time you came to the office. I said it might be Ace was in cahoots with the weigh-masters at the dumps.”
“I remember.”
“Boy oh boy, was I correct.”
“About the cahoots.”
“The weigh-masters were, and still are, no doubt in my mind, weighing the Ace trucks in light and weighing them out heavy.”
“You’ve got the numbers to establish that?”
“I’ll show you,” Harry said. He swung his chair around to the keyboard on the computer.
“Don’t bother showing, Harry,” I said. “Telling will do the trick.”
Harry gave me a baleful look. Most of Harry’s looks were baleful.
He said, “You’re not making this much fun, Crang.”
Harry was right. He went along on the Ace break-in. That won him the right to show off with the computer and its secrets.
“Watch the screen,” Harry said. He was typing on the keyboard.
I knew what to expect. My eyes would hurt. I’d seen enough computers and word processors in action. Law firms use them, newspaper reporters, bank managers. Jug-milk stores would be next. White letters on shiny green backgrounds. They made my eyes sore.
“See this?” Harry said. “Isn’t it a honey? All in black and white.”
“Green and white,” I said.
Numbers in long columns blipped across the screen, and Harry performed his guided tour. By giving Ace’s trucks a lighter weight going into the dumps and a heavier weight coming out, the weigh-master at the Leslie Street dump saved Ace an average of twenty dollars per load on the fee Ace paid to Metro Toronto. Harry’s numbers said so. They said Ace trucks took about two hundred loads to the Leslie dump each day, sometimes more, sometimes less. Two hundred loads at a saving of twenty bucks per load meant that Ace was taking Metro for four thousand a day at the Leslie dump. Spread that across eleven more dump sites and the figure came to a daily forty-eight grand. Harry’s computer projected the fraud over a week, a month, a year. The numbers began to look like Wayne Gretzky’s salary.
“Not all profit for Ace, you understand,” Harry said. “They got their small expenses.”
“The bribes Sol Nash takes to the weigh-masters.”
“I don’t know from this Sol Nash,” Harry said. “But there must be bribes. How much, I haven’t got enough data to say. My educated guess, based on some entries the Ace books list under Miscellaneous, I’d say the payoffs are on the humble side. Doesn’t really matter. Must be nice to have something extra coming in in any amount if you’re a weigh-master.”
“Miscellaneous?”
“Much-used entry at Ace.”
“The truck drivers have to be in on the scam,” I said. “They can’t be wheeling on and off the scales without knowing the weigh-masters are doctoring the weights.”
“You’re not going to convict these guys in court if that’s what you want,” Harry said. “I know, I’m not the lawyer in the room. But there’s nothing in Ace’s books that connects them with what’s going on. No sign of payoffs, nothing like that.”
I said, “They get other rewards.”
“How so?”
I explained the deals that Ace drivers made on the side with small contractors.
“Yeah, that’s a form of payoff,” Harry said. “Other thing is, their salary structure is very high for your ordinary truck driver.”
“These guys aren’t ordinary, Harry.”
I stood up from my chair.
Harry said, “You think I’m finished?”
“That’s what I’m doing on my feet.”
“Oh, please, Mr. Crang, take your seat,” Harry said, back in his Ralph Kramden role. “The best is yet to come, yes it is.”
I sat down.
Harry typed on the computer’s keyboard. He muttered ho-hos and huh-huhs and filled the space around his side of the desk with an uncharacteristically radiant aura. Uncharacteristic for Harry.
“Have a look,” he said.
The left side of the screen was taken up with a list of company names. Some I recognized as outfits that did business of various sorts around the city. Laidlaw Construction, a specialist in shopping plazas. Mor-Jim, another big building firm. Consumers’ Brick, a large supplier of cement products. Other company names in the list didn’t ring any bells with me. On the right side of the screen, opposite the names, were a series of figures. They covered a wide range, mostly from the low hundreds to the high hundreds. Three or four numbers poked over one thousand. The screen wasn’t saying what the numbers measured. Currency? Tonnage? Number of goals scored in a lifetime? Harry wasn’t saying, either. He clicked at the keyboard and the lists of company names and numbers marched up the screen. My eyeballs were throbbing.
“Very impressive, Harry,” I said. “What are they?”
Harry was silent until the parade of names and figures reached an end. He shifted in his chair to face me.
“All the names you saw there, a hundred and forty-four of them, they’re Ace Disposal customers,”
