Dead and Buried

FOUR

“It’s been sooo long, Benny. It’s years since we did our little number on poor Ross,” Teddie said, sending a broad smile across the table. “You’re lucky to catch me in, you know. I’m only here for the wedding. Then I’m off to Arizona for the winter.”

“It’s only the beginning of October.”

“Well, between you and me, Benny, I hate to stay cooped up in this town. I don’t know how you handle it. Really I don’t. I mean you’re not so old, you’ve got a portable profession. I don’t see the attraction, frankly.”

Teddie Forbes had pressed my hand with something of the ancient warmth when she’d arrived in The Snug. She was looking at me so intently that I had to let my eyes wander away to the velvet and leather decor of the room. It was full of overtones of Ireland, from the piped-in music to the foolish leprechauns on the coasters under the drinks. She’d been her usual ten minutes late, just for old times, and I’d had plenty of time to take in the throng of trendy business people unwinding or wheeling and dealing over martinis and imported beer. Teddie was reminding me that a decade ago I had let the PI/client relationship get a little sloppy.

“My parents are still here, Teddie. I’m the apple that didn’t fall far from the tree.” She sent an intimate look at me over the rim of her martini glass and I lifted my rye and ginger ale to meet it.

Teddie Forbes had got prettier in the decade she’d been out of my sight. The puffy, dissipated face I’d been holding onto over the years had been replaced by sharply sculpted features with cheekbones and everything. The crowsfeet in the corners of her eyes made them look wiser than her years. I figured that she must be crowding forty by now. She was in the pink and had all the confidence that comes from knowing it. Her figure was still full, but now seemed as though she’d grown into it. She’d also learned a thing or two about clothes since I saw her last. She used to dress like a medicine-show wagon. Across from me, she sat in a tidy grey tweed that brought out the blue in her enormous eyes.

“… Now a week after I get to Flagstaff, I’ll start getting homesick for this looney-bin of home and friends and memories. I know it. I’m a sucker for nostalgia, Benny.” She took a deep sip and then gave me a smile that said we had come to the business part of our meeting. I was glad of that. She’d had me worried for a minute. “Well?” she asked.

“Teddie, something is going on at Kinross Disposals. My client thinks a family member may have been killed because he stumbled on what’s going on up there.”

“Wow!” Teddie said, putting down her drink without taking her blue headlamps off my face. “Do you think Ross is behind it?”

“Teddie, I know what you’re hoping. No, I don’t know anything except that I can’t see how I can get into the Kinross yard without being spotted. I’m not Dick Tracy and I’m not Sherlock Holmes. I can’t drive a big truck. I don’t even speak their lingo. It could take me a couple of weeks before I could arrange phoney ID, and that can run into money. If I go as myself, the phonebook unmasks me as a private investigator. Besides, in a place this size, I’m bound to run into somebody-somebody, hell! I’m sure to meet a dozen people who know me the first day on the job. That’s assuming they’ll hire me. I’ve never been in a spot like this.”

“Poor bunny, she said, enjoying my discomfort.

“There’s no way I can go undercover. No way into this puzzle. I’m going to have to do a crabdance around it until my client runs out of money. It’s going to be two steps back, three steps sideways for every half-step forward.”

“What are you going to do then? I can’t help you get through the gate at Kinross, Benny. I’m on the board of the holding company, but that doesn’t mean much, I can tell you.”

“I thought that you could help me to get Kinross and Phidias straight in my head. Ross has nothing to do with Kinross any more, right?”

“Right. That’s Norman Caine’s responsibility now. Ross has been kicked upstairs to run the parent organization. That’s Phidias.”

“Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s the human side I’m short on. I need the facts on what’s going on behind the scenes.”

“That’s a tall order. I haven’t seen those people in a long time.”

“I know that. I know that. But I’m just trying to get a handle on this thing. I’m looking for a place to begin, that’s all. I thought you could tell me something about Norman Caine and what’s been going on.”

“Caine’s new. He hasn’t been around more than a couple of years. I’ve seen him a few times with Sherry, of course. But that’s only natural, considering-”

“Sherry?”

“Ross’s daughter. I mean our daughter. Remember? She and Caine are engaged. They’re getting married-”

“Great, Teddie! This is terrific stuff. It’s just the sort of information I need!”

“You’re a great talker, Benny. You come on like a real womanizer.”

“Me?”

“Sure. I can always spot a womanizer.”

“How?”

“When you tell them that you come from Grantham, Ontario, they lean across at you and say, ‘So you come from Grantham! That’s very interesting!’”

“And am I like that?”

“Aw, Benny, I know you too well.” Teddie gave me one of those warm smiles that had Special Delivery written on it. She knows how to make a man feel totally alone with her and the sole focus of her interest. She probably didn’t even know she was doing it, but I intended to relax and enjoy it all the same.

“Norman Caine is marrying Sherry. Is that like Kinross marrying Phidias, or France marrying Portugal?”

“It’s a bit like that, but Caine isn’t quite up there with the Forbeses yet. He’s trying hard, but he hasn’t quite made it.”

“He has a free hand with Kinross, does he?”

“As far as I know, he has. But, Benny, they are both family companies. The Forbeses change the rules to suit themselves. I can’t swear that Ross hasn’t kept out of Kinross’s affairs, honest.”

“What’s happened to Ross since you left him? I he still with that travel agent?”

Teddie smiled and tilted her head at my ignorance. After scolding me for not holding my ear to the ground, she answered the question. “Ross left Marie Gladwell flat when he met Caroline Grier, back in 1982, I think. He and Marie had been keeping house without benefit of clergy for seven years. While he was still legally married to me, he kept up appearances, but that was it.”

“It’s beginning to come back to me. The last time I saw you, you told me I wouldn’t have to testify after all.”

“Ross sweetened the settlement when he found out what we had on him.” She was trying to get the waiter’s eye and wasn’t doing any better than I was. Her martini had disappeared with impressive speed, and she was gnawing on the olive stone, prettily. She went on speaking, although her eyes were no longer on mine. “I got out of town for a year after that. Even now, I stay as far away from Ross as I can. Ross is the perfect bully, you know, aggressive when the light’s on, but in the dark he goes to pieces. I should have seen him for a weakling from the beginning. He’s not a patch on the Commander.”

“The Commander? Ah, yes. His father. Has he been collected to his ancestors or does he still give Ross a hard time?”

“He’s still alive, but I don’t think he goes into the business any more. He must be pushing eighty! But, I’ll bet he still gives Ross a mark to shoot at. Murdo Forbes! Gosh, he was formidable in his day. I remember him firing six executives on Christmas Eve without batting an eye. All friends of his, people he played golf with.”

“Never had the pleasure,” I said. “Who runs things now? Ross?”

“He’s still CEO, but Norm Caine is breathing down his neck from one side, and the old man can’t stay retired one hundred percent. The Commander’s chairman of the board, naturally; Caine has the ambition, and Ross has the stock.”

“I can almost feel sorry for him. He’s the kid who can’t escape the shade of his old man, and at the same time he’s getting beaten by a poor newcomer. I’m glad I’m not Ross Forbes.”

“That makes two of us. He always was a man whose grasp exceeds his reach. But he could be sweet when he was away from the Commander and not trying to wheedle something.”

“Wheedling, yeah. That’s what stays with me about him. He never came straight out of his corner at you. He was always ducking to the right or left, always sneaking around and backing away.”

“Bicycle Ross I used to call him. It wasn’t his fault when you come right down to it. The Commander was always paying people off to let him get out of one scrape after another. He got expelled from one private school because the Commander tried to bribe the headmaster. The Commander thought he could buy anything.”

“There wasn’t much he couldn’t buy.”

“But those were the things he wanted most. Ross adored him but could never please him. You wouldn’t believe the things Ross did to make the old man respect him, love him. It always ended with Ross and a bottle of Chivas in a corner somewhere where I couldn’t reach him.” The waiter’s eye had been caught by one of Teddie’s finely arched eyebrows. A few moments later he brought her a second martini. He left me and my nearly full rye and ginger ale to wait out this round. Teddie went on:

“I think Marie was good for him. She was able to put some sense into him. She was a smart woman, except where her own interests were at stake. What did she get out of it? A few presents, a few trips and a ‘Dear Marie’ letter when it was all over. No! I take that back. Ross wouldn’t put it in writing.”

“Is she still around? Marie?”

“Could be. I haven’t seen her in a donkey’s age. But then we were never close, Benny. Christ, I was the wronged wife!”

“One thing you can help me straighten out, Teddie, is the relationship between Phidias and Kinross. Phidias owns Kinross, is that it?”

“Let me see if I can remember all this. I have a seat on the board at Phidias, but I never sit, if you know what I mean. Kinross has been around for a long time, years and years. I think it got started at the time of the first or second Welland Canal. The original Kinross was a contractor for a stretch of the ‘Deep Cut.’”

“The what?”

“The Deep Cut was the hardest part of the canal to dig. They had to cut through a hump of land to avoid building a lock up to a new level and then another down to where they started. It was a major engineering-”

“Teddie, let’s cut out the ancient history and get down to the present day. Who owns and runs it today? Kinross, I mean.”

“It was owned by the Kinross family down to the 1950s. It was bought up by Phidias in the seventies. From excavating and haulage, they were specializing in trucking waste from industrial and municipal sites. For the last ten years, they’ve specialized further: poisonous waste is their main business.”

“What about Phidias?”

“Well, first of all, it isn’t as old as Kinross.”

“Thank God for small mercies!”

“But, it’s a lot bigger, Benny. It’s a holding company with control of a lot of smaller firms like Kinross. Don’t let the manufacturing name fool you. Phidias hasn’t manufactured anything but profits for many years. It was started by a man named MacCallum, Sandy MacCallum, a one-eyed veteran of the First World War. He tried to start an airline with one plane. When it crashed, he turned his machine shop first to making bicycles, and then to buckets and other hardware items. MacCallum was a bright fellow, from all I heard at the time I was married to his grandson. He saw, so I was told, that with electricity available anywhere, it was no longer necessary to make a factory in a style designed for water-power. Most of the heavy industry in town used to be located along the canal. Sandy saw that he could locate a factory anywhere that was served by electricity.

“By the time Murdo married Sandy’s daughter, Biddy, MacCallum was one of the biggest manufacturers of sharp-edged tools in this part of the world. And when the Second World War came along, they went into war production with government contracts for bayonets, helmets and mess kits.”

“So Murdo Forbes was Sandy MacCallum’s son-inlaw?”

“He came with nothing but the bare buttocks sticking out of a worn-out pair of dungarees. He started as a clock-punching labourer and then gravitated into the office. They say he took night-school courses at the Collegiate. Old Sandy took a shine to Murdo before Biddy did. Thought he might fill the gap left by the son who’d died of diphtheria.”

“The Commander became the Commander in World War Two? Is that right?”

“Murdo got a commission in the Navy. I think Sandy may have had to pull a few strings. We didn’t have rules about political influence and the buying and selling of it in those days. The party in power got paid off and Murdo set sail into the North Atlantic. And another illustrious page of Canadian history was written. This second martini it getting to me.” Teddie put down the empty glass and began looking for the waiter again. While she was waiting, I went on with questions that led with the precision of a blast from a cheap shotgun all around the area of interest. Teddie smiled over my shoulder when contact with the waiter had been made. Then she examined her empty glass, turning it around in her hand between the red-tipped fingers.

“How did he do in the Navy?”

“Oh, he came out of it alive, and a hero. He was torpedoed once and spent a week with a dozen men on a life raft. It was in all the papers at the time. He came home a big celebrity. That’s why he’s always been the Commander. Every other officer has gone back to mister, but the Commander is still the Commander.”

“What happened after the war?”

“Diversification. Phidias set up another company to take over the retooling of the old plant for peacetime work, leaving Phidias to dabble in real-estate speculation, building subdivisions, bridge-building, highway construction and I don’t know what all. Each business was set up so that it was controlled by Phidias but had its own structure and a great deal of autonomy. From there Phidias got into distilling, trucking-that’s when it picked up Kinross-and building apartments and office towers.”

“They’ve got a lot to answer for. Especially if they did their building locally.”

“Today, they’re all over. You can’t blame the look of James Street on Phidias completely. You have to share the blame around. It’s the modern style, Benny.”

“Yeah, pull down something worth saving, and put up something you’ve already seen enough of.” Teddie was well into her third martini by now. I was still working away at the edges of drink number one. “Teddie, somebody at Kinross-I say it’s somebody, maybe it’s everybody; I don’t know-may be up to dirty tricks. It could be overweight trucking on Sundays, it could be the illegal dumping of toxic wastes. It could be smuggling or dope or-I don’t know exactly what, but I’m sure that it’s being kept quiet. A year ago, according to what I’ve learned, a trucker was killed. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn’t. I’m keeping an open mind. It could be that this guy knew too much. Maybe he threatened to blow the whistle on the whole shebang, whatever it was.” Teddie was watching me closely while I tried to put one word in front of the next. I lost my place. It was Teddie’s interest that did it. She was leaning towards me across the table, her eyes on mine and reacting to all the turns in my story. It was just her interest, but I got it confused with her abundantly female presence. You’d think, with Anna in my life, things like Teddie’s perfumed nearness would melt into the background so that I could get on with business, but no, I had to try looking not into those blue eyes of hers but at the bridge of her nose. That was safe, and I tried to get the story back on the rails. Teddie could see me struggling. She helped me to get started again.

“You think Ross is at the bottom of whatever it is?”

“I don’t know. Either he knows all about it and ordered what happened, or he has been compromised by the people working under him. This Caine fellow, most likely. You know anything about him? Anything at all?”

“Well, I told you about the wedding. That’s the big news. It’s a week Saturday. That’s why I’m in town.”

“And the Commander’s all for it, I’ll bet. The wedding, I mean.”

“Sure. And Biddy’s giving silent support in the rear. Biddy’s the tall, silent type. Clark Gable in skirts. She keeps out of the spotlight, but nobody makes a move she doesn’t know about.”

An old school friend came into The Snug and grinned at me over Teddie’s shoulder. It was a nasty, conspiratorial grin that made me want to get up and set him straight, but before I could, he’d been claimed by three men our age at the bar, who made more noise than absolutely necessary. Teddie had been thinking meanwhile and finally let me know what it was. “All his life, Ross has known that control of Phidias-and that means control of a big industrial empire, Benny-was coming to him. When the Commander stepped down, Ross stepped in with the support of the board. But after the provincial inquiry was set up, he’s been in a lot of trouble about environmental matters. The board isn’t happy. Ross hasn’t handled things the way the Commander would have.”

“Caine, coming up fast on the outside, is looking better and better,” I suggested.

“Sure, and after next Saturday, well, then it’s the clash of dynasties, isn’t it?”

“But, when all bets are on the table, the old man will have to back his own son, won’t he?”

“We aren’t talking about the same Murdo Forbes, Benny. Sherry’s his granddaughter, after all. He got where he is by marrying the boss’s daughter. I’d say he’ll back his granddaughter’s husband against her father. Don’t you wish this were on television so you could watch it happen?”

I shifted myself in my seat. I felt like I wasn’t asking the best questions again. It was an occupational bugbear and I was usually able to ignore it. “Teddie,” I asked, trying to rescue the last minutes of our conversation, “is there any legal way that you can think of for me to walk through the front doors of Phidias’s head office on James Street and not get kicked out on my ear?” Teddie smiled at what I imagined was a picture of me picking myself out of the gutter. She folded the corner of the scalloped placemat under her glass. I was about to tell her not to worry about it, when she came back at me with a vague but optimistic suggestion:

“I can’t think of anything right now, Benny, but let me sleep on it. I get all my really good ideas in the morning.” She set down her glass with a note of finality. She played with the stem. I wondered whether it would be her last drink of the day. Maybe these three martinis were just for old times’ sake. Her appearance didn’t hint at any problems with alcohol. I was glad of that. I’d always liked Teddie. Even at the worst of our dealings with Ross, I’d always felt that she was holding me back, holding her lawyer back, too, for that matter. She was always softening the blow.

“Well, Teddie, I appreciate your giving me all this.” I put some money where the waiter could see it near the nearly empty saucer of salted peanuts. She watched me return my wallet to my pocket. Was she holding on to me? I could feel it as surely as if she had me by the sleeve. She fiddled in her purse, looking for a photograph of her Flagstaff home to show me. She found several of a pale ranch-style place with a mountain view. Behind the last of these I found a creased photo of a man in riding boots. I smiled as I turned it around: my old sparring partner. She took it from me and examined it as though for the first time.

“I still have a tender spot for him, when I’m in the mood.” She laughed suddenly. “I know what you’re thinking! I’m a mass of contradictions, right? Don’t tell me. Two analysts have got there before you. I’m not looking forward to seeing him again, but I can’t throw his picture away. I don’t trust the guy, I don’t even like him, but I wouldn’t want to see him dead. He’s a son of a bitch, but he can charm the pants off me if I’m not careful. Benny, you try to be careful.”

“Teddie, I’m planning to stay as far away from him as the job allows. And I don’t imagine for a minute that I’ll ever see the charming side of his character. I’m ready for the worst.”

I gave Teddie the two numbers where she could reach me and we left The Snug. I was only half-prepared for the good-night kiss she planted on me. By the time I recovered, she was getting into her white Corvette. She was gone when I reached my battered Olds.