Crang Plays the Ace by Jack Batten

shouldn’t have. Somebody who spoke off the record.”
    â€œOh sure, a source, you mean.”
    â€œI guess I do.”
    â€œI got plenty of stuff from a guy who used to drive for a disposal company.”
    â€œAce?”
    â€œAnother one. Ace’s drivers are heavies.”
    â€œI noticed.”
    â€œYou’re getting into this in a big way, it sounds like.”
    Griffin’s voice had turned confidential. He was a reporter who sniffed a scoop. Except he wouldn’t say scoop. Or sniffed.
    I said, “I’d like to talk to your driver. That possible?”
    â€œEasy,” Griffin said. “He works right here now. Drives a Star delivery truck. I can have him for you around four-thirty. He’s on the early shift and he’ll just be coming off.”
    We arranged to meet at a restaurant near the Star building called the Press Grill.
    â€œWe don’t call it that, us reporters,” Griffin said. “We call it La Salle de Crayons.”
    â€œYou sophisticated devils.” I hung up.

9
    T HE PRESS GRILL was windowless and as fragrant as the prisons of Turkey. It smelled of fried onions, stale beer, and cigarette smoke trapped since the days when Holy Joe Atkinson ran the Star . Holy Joe died in 1956. Somebody had tried to update the room’s decor in a style that ran to California manqué. The ferns drooped and were turning brown at their tips, the posters of 1970s rock groups had wrinkled in their frames, and the three waitresses were too matronly for the tight yellow dresses that passed as uniforms. The place wouldn’t see a revival of the Algonquin Round Table.
    Ray Griffin and a small, bouncy man with the sleeves of his blue work shirt rolled up tight over his biceps were sitting under a blow-up of Jim Morrison. They had a pitcher of beer in front of them.
    â€œCrang,” Griffin said, “like you to shake with Ernie Andrychuk.”
    Ernie had his first name spelled out in tidy script over the left breast of his blue shirt. He gave my hand a ferocious squeeze. Griffin had on a flaming-red tennis jersey with a green duck where René Lacoste puts his alligator.
    Ernie Andrychuk said, “Mr. Crang, I already told Ray here everything I know about Ace when he done them articles of his.”
    â€œYou want some of this beer, Crang?” Griffin asked.
    Before I could say vodka, Griffin was signalling one of the visions in yellow.
    â€œI appreciate your time, Ernie,” I said.
    â€œWell, I dunno,” Ernie said. He had a puckish face and eyes as blue as the sky over Eire. Andrychuk? Maybe the skies over the Ukraine.
    I said, “I’ve got some specifics you might be able to help me with, Ernie.”
    â€œLong’s somebody else’s paying for the beer,” Ernie said with an elfin grin. The Barry Fitzgerald of the Steppes.
    The waitress put a stein in front of me, the heavy kind that give lesser men than I a hernia.
    I said, “Is there a Metro dump on Bathurst Street, pretty far up, north of Highway 7?”
    â€œThere’s twelve dumps around the city,” Ernie said. “None of them’s on Bathurst north or south or any other part.”
    â€œWhy would an Ace driver pick up a load at a small building site and take it up there?”
    â€œThat’s easy,” Ernie said. He looked as satisfied as a kid who knows the answer to the first question on the ancient-history test. “Probably one of them gypsy dumps,” Ernie said. “The driver’s doing a run on his own. Takes a payoff from the builder and dumps the load for him and nobody’s the wiser at Ace.”
    â€œA little freelance finagle?”
    â€œThere ain’t much in it for anybody. ’Cept maybe the builder. He don’t have to go through Ace. He pays the driver maybe fifty bucks and the driver gives half to the guy who owns the land where he dumps the stuff.”
    â€œThe dump’s illegal?”
    â€œAll