MacNeice smiled. “Let’s just say I have a genie. I don’t know for how long or for how many wishes, but I intend to use him while I can. Strictly speaking, however, this is a temporary redeployment of existing personnel, not a new hire.”
7.
THE FRONT OFFICE of Mancini Concrete was as Vertesi had imagined it would be: a wooden counter against which, over the years, countless heavyset men had stood and negotiated tonnage rates and delivery schedules, wearing away the plywood surface and its bullnose edge to raw pine. Behind the counter were four grey solid metal desks cluttered with paper, large binders, Rolodexes, ancient computers, coffee mugs, telephones, cellphones and desk calendars. On three of the desks sat model cement trucks with Mancini’s logo in red block letters on the driver’s door and on the white ready-mix drum. Covering everything—including, Vertesi thought, the men who staffed the desks—was a thin dusting of fine powder, likely unavoidable given the busy yard outside, with trucks coming and going from six in the morning till six at night. Along one wall of the office was a shelving unit with a work surface lost under dusty rolls of blueprints and flattened architectural drawings that looked as if they’d gone undisturbed for years. The scene put Vertesi in mind of images of Pompeii and its inhabitants after the volcano.
A fifth desk, set apart from the others and closest to the back wall, had on it a telephone, a laptop and mouse pad and a red model Ferrari as large as the cement trucks, its yellow stallion logo visible to Vertesi from fifteen feet away; he assumed it was the desk of Alberto’s only son, Pat. Though they were contemporaries, they weren’t friends. Michael Vertesi had gone to the local Catholic high school, while Pat Mancini had gone to St. Michael’s in Toronto for the hockey program and from there to Junior A. He was big and fast, and it was assumed by everyone that he’d have a long career in the NHL. Pat had been typecast as a heavy, but after several stellar seasons and one too many concussions, he—or the NHL—had called it quits. No one knew the exact details, but he had quietly come back to work in his family’s concrete business. Friends—Italian hockey fanatics—told Vertesi that Mancini had been miscast, that he was actually a finesse player who just happened to be big. On the ice he was targeted as a goon. For them that was an insult to the Italian community of Dundurn.
Catching the eye of one of the salesmen, Vertesi asked, “You leasing Ferraris now?” He nodded in the direction of the back desk.
“That? Nah, that’s Pat’s toy car. We stick to concrete here.”
Vertesi registered the man’s disdain and could easily imagine how he would resent the owner’s son—a young man who’d never worked in the business—suddenly taking over the best desk and installing a model of a $250,000 car on it. As he was thinking about the impact that would have on these men who spent their lives covered in dust, the door to the back office opened. Pat Mancini motioned for him to come through. Without acknowledging the detective, the concrete salesman at the counter lifted the movable section and with his foot swung the lower door open. “Thank you,” Michael said, to no response. He walked past another salesman sitting at his desk, who glanced up at him, a dusty black telephone cradled on his shoulder.
“How you doin’? Pat Mancini.” Mancini reached out and took Vertesi’s hand in his steely grip.
“I’m doing okay. We’ve met before. I’m Michael Vertesi.” Vertesi walked into the office as Alberto stood to greet him from behind his desk. He had a full head of white hair, a sculpted face with bright blue eyes and deep lines from his cheekbones to his jaw. He was wearing a grey suit, a white shirt and a narrow blue tie that made his eyes seem even brighter.
“Michael, how’s your dad?” They shook hands and exchanged brief pleasantries about Christmas visits past, then the older man offered Vertesi one of the two chairs in front of the desk. Pat sat in the other. Beige blinds covered the windows; a desk lamp and two standing lamps provided light quite different from the sunlight and fluorescent brightness of the front office. This could have been anywhere but a concrete yard. The walls were dressed in dark oak panelling with a variety of framed industry and civic awards hanging side by side. To the left was a leather sofa with two matching club chairs arranged around a coffee table on an Oriental carpet. On the table were two used espresso cups, a small plate of chocolate wafers and a vase with six red roses. Near the desk stood an elegant wooden trolley with several types of glasses and three rows of wine and spirits. There wasn’t a computer in the room.
Mancini sat with his arms on the desk, one hand resting gently over the other. “I heard you were shot last year, but I see you’ve recovered.”
“Yes, I have.”
“I remember,” Pat said. “A shotgun to the gut, right?” His lip tugged down on the left side; he nodded briefly and shifted in his chair.
“In the side, yes, but I’m fine.”
“A mangia-cake called Michael a wop!” Alberto said to his son.
“No shit?” Pat leaned forward, a wide grin on his face. Michael could see a thin white scar, a lazy S across the bottom of his chin.
“No shit.” Vertesi took out his notebook and pen to indicate this wasn’t a social call.
“Well, you give my regards to your pop, Michael, and your mother.”
“I will, sir. Thank you.”
“What did you want to discuss?”
“The Hamilton-Scourge Project for the eastern wharf, and the bid to supply concrete.”
“What do you want to know about it?”
“Well, sir—”
“Please, call me Alberto.” His smile was as gentle as the Pope’s and he opened his hands in the same manner—showering grace on the flowers of the church.
“Thank you, Alberto.” He couldn’t help but be touched and was certain his face showed it. Long ago, when their families would get together after Mass on Sundays, he had been taught to address his elders formally, and nothing had changed—until now. “We’ve found bodies at the bottom of the wharf, two of them recent, the others decades old.”
“So it’s true!”
“If you mean the urban myth, yes, it’s true.”
“What’s that got to do with us, Michael?” Alberto’s hands were relaxed, but the top one rose slightly with the question.
“Two of the bodies were dumped in concrete columns at roughly the same time as the bidding for this project was happening.”
“What’s your point?” Pat asked. He looked quickly at his father as if to measure how aggressive he should be, but there was no help there. Alberto could have been listening to the weather report from Saskatoon.
“Because our families know each other, Alberto, I thought I’d ask you if—”
“If I’d offed the guys and dumped them there.” No longer the Pope, Alberto spoke with icy sarcasm.
“No, sir, I want to know if there was anything you noticed during the bidding that might have led to these men being killed.”
“Son, this isn’t the twenties. We’re all businessmen. We compete. We win, lose, break even, score big or don’t score at all. It’s business, and at night we all go home for dinner.” Nothing about the father appeared defensive or insecure.
“Maybe I’m a bit slow, but are you accusing my dad of killing people?” Pat Mancini turned in his chair so he was more or less facing Vertesi. There was an unfocused energy about the man, as if he had difficulty sitting still, or difficulty living in his own skin.
Vertesi looked directly at the son and answered. “No, Pat, not at all.” Turning back to the father, he asked, “There are three suppliers, two in addition to Mancini. Do you know the principals of the other firms?”
“McNamara, yes. ‘The Irish’ we call them. The other is an American firm; they won a portion strictly for the … what do you call it?” He looked to his son, whose face was blank. “The optics. Politics. The Americans have a stake in this show, since the two ships were technically theirs, so they won a third. But they bought a Canadian business in Grimsby that was going under, so their piece is good fo
r both countries.”
“Is that substantial?”
“In this economy, supplying a third of a project this size is huge,” Pat said, looking at his father.
“Look, we couldn’t have handled the whole project and kept it on schedule,” Alberto said. “I don’t even think the Irish and Mancini together could have done it. Remember, the city’s got a deadline they’re trying to hit. We needed a third supplier.”
“Are you happy with the third they’ve chosen?”
The old man unfolded his arms and made the slow slicing movement with his hands that all Italian males revert to in conversation. “I don’t make the rules, Michael …”
“Do you know if McNamara felt the same way, or whether they might have been more concerned about an American supplier taking a third of the project?”
“Well, Americans aren’t doing the work; they’re just taking the profit.”
“What are the chances that ABC Canada’s parent company will shut down the Grimsby operation when this project is finished and take its principal assets back to head office in New York State?”
“We’re in the concrete business, not the speculation business. Apart from the quarry, there wasn’t enough to keep them going before ABC came in. It’s anybody’s guess.” He checked his watch, then pulled down his sleeve.
“Was another contender for the purchase of the Grimsby operation edged out by ABC?”
“He asks good questions, Patrizio, you see that?” Alberto smiled at his son before turning back to Vertesi. “Si, si, now you have an interesting path to follow. But you must do your homework.” Alberto stood up. “I’m sorry, I have to go to a meeting outside the office. If you have any more questions, call me.” He walked over to the vase of roses, chose one, snapped its stem and inserted the bloom in his jacket buttonhole, dropping the broken stem into the bin under his desk. He looked every inch the distinguished president of a concrete firm.
“One last question: is there a legitimate fourth competitor for this project within fifty miles of the site?”
Coming around the desk, Alberto took Vertesi’s hand in both of his. “Not precisely, no.” With a hand on Vertesi’s shoulder, he led him to his office door. “Pat will see you out. Ciao, Michael, and take care of yourself.”
Pat stood up to usher Vertesi to the front door. “You park outside?”
“Yes, just to the left.”
“You’ll need a car wash after this; it’s a bitch on a good paint job. You driving standard issue?”
“All the way.”
“What is it now? A beefed-up Chevy, or have they sucked you into driving a hybrid for the optics of it?”
“Not yet—a Chevy it is. Thank you, Pat. Good to see you back in town.”
“Yeah, not much choice. Did I know you?”
“Not really, just when we’d go to your place around Christmas time. When we were kids.”
“Sure as shit aren’t kids anymore. Mike, a word to the wise: we take care of our own, no complaints that way. Ciao for now.” Pat shook his hand, harder this time, and held the door open for a second after he left. Vertesi could feel the younger Mancini’s eyes still on him as he waited in his car for two cement trucks to turn into the driveway of the yard.
8.
MACNEICE PARKED THE Chevy next to an old Land Rover, one of the ones built before the company decided to become groovy. On the hood the pale blue paint was worn down to the primer, and the interior was a mess. The back seat was littered with papers, a tennis racquet, a pair of white scuffed court shoes, a hand shovel, some whisks and brushes, several binders with the university logo on the cover, and on the floor, at least a dozen paper coffee cups. On the front passenger seat were six or seven CDs without covers; he couldn’t make out what they were. To finish it off, a jiggly plastic Hawaiian girl with a lei and a grass skirt was mounted on the dash under the rear-view mirror. MacNeice smiled. No Good Housekeeping Seal for this puppy, he thought. He put on his jacket and walked over to the tent. A new team of security guards was stationed outside, looking considerably keener than the last, which wasn’t saying much. MacNeice pulled out his badge and the guard on the door nodded and opened up for him, adding perfunctorily, “She’s expecting you.”
Once inside, he let his eyes adjust to the brightness. What was left of the two round columns had been taken away to the lab for examination; the bodies next to the Packard were gone, and there were obvious signs that August had opened the square columns. Next to the third rail cart, a woman in worn, baggy jeans and a T-shirt stood looking at him. She was slim, with a mop of grey-brown hair that looked as if she spent as much time at the hairdresser as she did at the car wash.
“Detective Superintendent MacNeice. This is your show, I understand.” She had dancing eyes, a smoker’s voice—low, gravelly and strong—and an unmistakable British accent. What is it, he thought, with female Brits and dead bodies?
“What do you make of it so far?” she said, and then added, “Sheilagh Thomas, by the way. Pleased to meet you finally. Mary thinks you’re the brightest bulb on the homicide tree.”
MacNeice shrugged off the compliment. “I was going to ask you that very question, Doctor. What do you make of them?”
“P.F., they’ve been at the bottom roughly seventy to eighty years, died at the same time more or less, and what you see on the rail trolleys is only what came away from the concrete—”
“P.F.?”
“Oh, simply post facto—and I should also tell you I think their age at time of death was roughly twenty-eight for Harry here”—she patted a thigh bone—“and perhaps thirty-two for Arthur. Though once we get the matter cleaned off the concrete and we scope these bones, I’ll be more exact. If you can imagine taking off a leg cast and everything but the bones comes away with the plaster—well, that’s roughly what happened to these chaps.”
“Any indication of a prior wound or assault?”
“You mean other than Harry’s massively crushed skull and Arthur’s split head? No, but I should have thought that was sufficient to do the job in any case.”
“What do you need from me?” he asked.
“Well, for starters, what’s your objective here? The people who put these men in concrete are surely themselves long underground, or somewhere else in the bay. We may be able to discover something interesting that would help in an investigation, but investigate what, or whom?”
“I have the distinct impression you’re about to make a proposition, Sheilagh—mind if I call you Sheilagh?”
“You are a bright one. I usually insist on ‘gorgeous,’ but Sheilagh will do. A proposition—exactly so. The university would like to take ownership”—she waved a hand at the skeletal remains as if she were presenting a plate of smoked salmon—“to relieve you of Harry and Arthur for the study and enlightenment of the next generation—actually only the second generation—of medical anthropologists. Of course, you—and by ‘you’ I mean the police and City of Dundurn—will be the first to know what we find, and we will spare no effort in uncovering all that there is to, um, uncover.”
“I can’t speak for the City—”
“I beg to differ. I’ve already spoken to the mayor’s office, and the word is ‘Whatever MacNeice wants to do with them will be in the City’s interest.’ So you see, I’m here to ply you with reason, and later with wine, if necessary, to appeal to you to let me have them.”
“Well, then, on behalf of the good people of Dundurn, I bequeath Harry and Arthur to the university.”
“Splendid. I’ll toddle off to the Rover for the paperwork.” She bowed slightly, which seemed as odd as it was charming, and then walked cheerfully towards the entrance.
If Richardson’s humour was dry, Thomas’s was considerably wetter. She was wearing tan hiking boots scuffed and stained from years of digging holes and spilling God-knows-what on the leather. He wanted to believe it was from creating an English country garden in Dundurn, but he doubted it.
When she returned, she said,
“It’s a bit of a tip inside; took me a while to find it.”
“I did notice a lot of coffee cups.”
“Ha! You imagine that I’m trucked up on caffeine, Detective. I drink only tea, water, wine and single-malt Irish whiskey. And I refuse, I stubbornly refuse, to drink tea from a paper cup.”
Seeing the confusion on his face, she explained. “The cups are for samples. Human samples.” She shoved Harry’s leg bones back from the edge of the cart, saying, “No, no, don’t get up,” and put down her binder. Flipping the pages, she came to a photocopied form with the university’s logo on top. She wrote the details of what she was taking ownership of on the appropriate lines and checked the caveats concerning distribution of any discoveries found during study. She signed the bottom above her name, which was printed on the form, and dated the signature before handing the pen to MacNeice.
“Do I need to read it?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“No. Was this written by the university’s legal department?”
“By me.” She smiled.
He bent over, mindful of the leg bones just beyond the page, and signed.
She looked down at his signature. “Thank you, Iain.”
“Don’t call me Iain.”
“Right. Mac it is. I’ll be in touch once I have something on these two and the two from the trunk. We’ll do that work outside this contract, so they’re still the City’s property. But we’d be happy to discuss ownership of them as well.” She flipped the binder closed. “Until then, bonne chance and Godspeed.” She bowed again and then offered her hand. For such a strong, almost masculine woman, her hand was soft and her handshake worthy of royalty—gentle and firm, with a brief pause before a quick release.
“One last thing. Why did you call them Harry and Arthur?”
“It’s more human than ‘John Doe One’ and ‘John Doe Two,’ or any number. Being an optimist, I can imagine them as aliases that will eventually get put aside for their real names. Of course, if we can’t discover them, they’ll each have a number in perpetuity.”
The Ambitious City Page 5
