Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. Jack Batten
aren’t entirely rational. If they were, I’d probably find them dull. They pull these crazy stunts. Get themselves behind life’s eight ball.”
“Everybody has a run of lousy luck now and then,” Annie said. “The difference is, your people go looking for the eight balls.”
“What makes them into bandits?” I said. “I’m fascinated to know if there’s an answer.”
“Maybe you’ll never find out.”
“The quest of a lifetime.”
The waiter poured more wine from the new bottle into our glasses. He poured with his right hand and held the left behind his back at the correct slope.
“Tom Catalano’s still a nice guy,” I said.
“You’ll do too,” Annie said.
I gave her an aw-shucks smile.
“Do I sound cranky about you sometimes?” Annie said.
She didn’t wait for me to answer. I would have fibbed anyway.
“It’s the rewards,” Annie said. “Or the status. I want the return for you that you ought to have earned. Okay, I’m talking from a perspective I might not be entitled to. I’ll never make a big buck reviewing movies. Never expected to. But you, a lawyer, all those years at school, you . . . ah hell, Crang.”
“You aren’t going to say I could be a somebody,” I said.
“Not that clichéd,” Annie said. “I was almost about to ask you to be more serious, but that’s not right either.”
“Serious tends to be dull. Natural equation.”
“Tedious you’re not.”
“This line of conversation has stalemated.”
“Leave it at this,” Annie said. “I hope your Mr. Wansborough is a harbinger of clients to come.”
I couldn’t locate another mussel in my paella. Out of oysters, too. I went on a search for chicken.
“On the subject of careers,” I said, “how was Richard Gere’s bare ass this afternoon?”
“Bare ass!” Annie said. There was an exclamation point in her voice. “We’re talking full frontal nudity here. The man’s basing stardom on his genitalia. What’s worse, private parts aside, his acting’s so bloody mannered, the Meryl Streep of his sex.”
Annie had a thought or two about performing mannerisms. All actors include them in their equipment, she said; the good ones make them disappear. Annie’s thought or two expanded to a thesis. She said she admired Robert De Niro’s technique. She said it was close to seamless. Annie was intense as she talked, and at the same time she was having fun with her subject. She said the older English actors had technique that vanished before one’s very eyes. Annie thought it was amazing.
She talked, I played audience, enjoying it, and after the wine was gone, we had Spanish coffees, and Annie began to wind down.
“Gere had a line in the movie today you could handle,” she said to me.
“Set the scene.”
“It’s one of those 1940s nightclubs you only see in movies,” Annie said. “Never existed otherwise. Women in slinky gowns, everybody smoking like mad, an orchestra with violins, waiters in tuxedos, and Gere’s coming on to the gorgeous lady with the sultry look. Get the picture? The orchestra’s playing a tango and Gere says—”
“—your place or mine?”
“Your reading lacks a certain je ne sais quoi but the wording’s on the money.”
We finished our Spanish coffees. I paid the bill and tipped the waiter, who looked pleased as punch. And Annie and I resolved the Richard Gere dilemma. We went to her place, and some of the time we slept.
8
FOR BREAKFAST, Annie made us an omelette with bits of tomato mixed in and we sat at the table in the bow window of her apartment. I ate my half of the omelette and most of hers and drank two cups of coffee. I did the eating and drinking in silence except for the odd slurp. A book had Annie’s undivided attention. It was about an Italian movie director named Alberti and it was written in Italian.
“Damn,” Annie said to her book, “I didn’t know he wrote the script for that.”
She had an interview with Signor Alberti in the afternoon. He was passing through town on a promotion tour for his new movie.
Annie said, “The entertainment editor at the Sun says he’ll pay me for a thousand words on Alberti if I deliver first thing tomorrow for Sunday’s paper.”
“They take freelance stuff?”
“Their regular movie guy’s out in California on a press junket and the editor said there was nobody else at the paper who knows as much about movies as I do.”
“How complimentary.”
“He did say European movies.”
I went home and changed into jeans and a cotton sports shirt, something comfy for more surveillance duty. I drove over to the Metro dump at the foot of Leslie Street and parked under the tree outside the entrance. Thursday, I’d started at Ace Disposal. Friday, I was beginning at the dump. Sometimes my talent for improvisation frightened me.
I watched trucks pass in and out of the dump, on and off the weigh scales, for an hour.
“Hey,” I said. Out loud. It was an exclamation of discovery.
I leaned across the front seat and fiddled among the odds and ends in the glove compartment. The street guide, a flask of brandy for swooning spells, a deck of playing cards with bicycle wheels on the back. Gloves, too, the kind with no fingers. They remain unworn. I’m saving them until I get my first Mercedes and can rightfully adopt the pretentious look in handwear. I got out a spiral-bound steno notebook and a ballpoint pen that wrote in black. I unstrapped my wristwatch and set it on my lap. I watched and I timed and I made notes.
Trucks arrived at the weigh scale on the average of about one every couple of minutes. Sometimes there was a lineup of three or four trucks. Sometimes five minutes went by without a truck in sight. They came out of the dump at the same rate. About half the trucks were from Ace Disposal, the rest from a variety of other companies. So far, so clear.
What prompted the “hey” was the amount of time it took the man inside the weigh-scale office to deal with the Ace trucks. It was the same man from the day before, the old pro in the short-sleeved white shirt. Maybe a different shirt. He consulted his weighing gadget, jotted numbers on his sheets of paper, handed out the carbon copies to the drivers as they left. Identical routine with each truck in and out. The fishy part was that the routine may have been identical with every truck, but according to my watch and calculations, it took him twenty to thirty seconds longer to deal with an Ace truck than with a truck from another disposal outfit. That was twenty or thirty seconds longer going in and the same coming out.
I started up the Volks and drove back on Leslie until I came to a phone booth. I looked up the number of the Star’s editorial department and let it ring seven times before somebody came on the line and told me Ray Griffin didn’t get in till noon. That was an hour away. I said I’d call later.
Back at the dump, a variation in routine greeted me. A Cadillac was parked in back of the weigh-scale building. It was very large and very pink, on the order of the gaudy sort that Mary Kay cosmetics salespersons cruise around in. Maybe old white-shirt in the weigh offIce had run out of lip gloss. A young man wearing a straw hat at a rakish angle sat behind the wheel of the pink Caddie. He’d left the motor running. A couple of minutes later, another man came out the back door of the weigh building. He had black hair, a deep tan, and a nose that was champion size, and he was wearing a light blue summer suit with dark blue stitching around the pockets. He was carrying a thin black briefcase.