by Howard Engel
When I got downtown again, I looked up Brian O’Mara’s number in the phonebook. His wife, or the woman answering his phone, told me that he was at work and wouldn’t be home until just after four o’clock. She asked me who was speaking, but I pretended I didn’t hear her and continued to thank her before hanging up. I noted down the address on a scrap of paper torn from a bank-machine receipt and planned to call on him later in the day.
With a styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, I climbed the stairs to my office, shucked my jacket and then the lid from the coffee. My mind was drifting towards Friday night and Anna. I put a stop to that by getting out the phonebook. That kind of distraction I could do without. No wonder I kept nothing sharper than an electric razor in my bottom drawer.
The number I was looking for was for Environment Front. I dialled it. Every town has its media-conscious, pollution-sensitive activist who is always hard to get to. I talked to three people before I got to Alexander Pastor, who had written the newspaper articles about illegal dumping and bringing in toxic-tainted fuel oil from the United States. I remembered how these pieces kept turning up, keeping me away from my crossword puzzle.
“Yeah?” he said into my ear when I finally got to him.
“Is this Alexander Pastor?”
“You got him,” he said. “You also got Sandor Pásztory. Take your pick.” I didn’t quiz him about that. The fashion for Canadianizing foreign-sounding names is dying out. Even the business pages of the Beacon showing back-lit photographs of newly appointed directors to important companies was a harvest of non-Anglo-Saxon names. In the old days, whatever the origin of the executive, the name was suitably North American. Even actors were sticking to their own names nowadays, and the world hadn’t come to an end.
I explained to Pastor-Pásztory about my interest in the death of Jack Dowden at Kinross a year ago. I didn’t even have to remind him of the case; he was up on the details and agreed to meet me at Gosselin’s Turkey Roost up on the Scrampton Road in half an hour.
“Why that place?” I asked. “It’s right across from the Kinross yard. I’m not looking to walk into trouble,” I said with emphasis.
“There’s something I want to show you,” Pastor-Pásztory said and left it at that. It was a take-it-or-leave-it situation. I took it.
That left me travelling time and not much else to get there.
Gosselin’s Turkey Roost was one of the fast-food outlets on an industrial strip that took advantage of the workers at two quarries, a gravel pit and several trucking firms located along a concentrated three miles of chain-link fences, corrugated steel Quonset huts and aluminum-sided sheds. To me the eateries all looked alike. I was glad it was the pollution expert who chose our rendezvous.
The customers sitting at the counter of Gosselin’s Turkey Roost were mostly workers from the area: men working odd shifts, drivers of the rigs parked out front or in the lot to one side of the one-storey brick-and-cinderblock structure. Men in nylon bomber jackets with the names of their basketball teams on the front and back, or in heavy faded checkered shirts, contemplated the nuggets of turkey or their fresh French fries before putting them into their mouths. At one table, a Hydro crew nodded hard hats of yellow plastic over mugs of hot coffee. The corrugated broadside of a tractor-trailer obstructed my view across the road through big picture windows. Occasionally, as someone came in the door, the waitress or the short-order cook would look up. None of the customers showed much interest. On the wall near me, a sign, framed and covered in glass with a ketchup smear on it, read:
TEENAGERS & YOUNG FOLK EFFECTIVE immediately there will be a time-limit of 15 minutes imposed on all the above!—Management
As far as I could see, there were no teenagers or young folk counting off the allotted time. The notice was a complete success, unless the faded ketchup smear could be interpreted as a sign of youthful protest. The music, which held sway over the din of talk in the room, came from a coin-operated, plastic-wrapped, inwardly illuminated juke-box. It played old-fashioned country-andwestern songs by Johnny Cash, Ferlin Husky, Merle Haggard and Hank Snow. This wasn’t a camp re-creation of an era; it was the real thing still happening, without even a sideways glance at fashion. I was trying to imagine what the place might look like after dark, when the man who couldn’t have been anybody else but Alex Pastor-Pásztory came in. He had the look of a low-level bureaucrat crossed with a trailer-camp operator. There was some camp counsellor, graduate student and trail guide in there too. He didn’t have trouble picking me out of the line-up either. He shambled over towards me from the door, removing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows as he came. Under it was an old sweater, either moth-eaten in places or burned. He moved into the other side of the booth I’d taken and produced a pack of cigarettes at once. As he fished one out, I found matches and struck one. He leaned into the flame, nodding at my Player’s dozing in the ashtray.
“We’re a dying breed,” he said. “In more ways than one. But I can’t fight battles along a broad front. Can’t arm-wrestle the world out there and me at the same time. Oh, well, there’s next year. What’s your excuse?”
“Me? I never thought of quitting. I like my vice. It’s a poor thing, but mine own. I can’t stand the self-righteous propaganda of the anti-smoking lobby either. They’re right, I guess, but I wish they’d find a less self-satisfied way to make their points. I supposed I’ll have to give it up one of these days, like I gave up jellybeans and licorice allsorts.” Pásztory got up and waved to the waitress. When she didn’t see him, he called out. I admired his direct approach. It brought two cups of coffee within a minute.
Pásztory had a friendly, lopsided grin that sat on a face that must have been dour in repose. Brown eyes came magnified through his thick, steel-rimmed glasses. He was going bald in front and wore the remaining fringe rather long over his neck and ears. He gave me the same sort of appraisal as we talked.
“You wrote those pieces in the Beacon about the toxic-fuel scam last spring, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I used my uptown name on those: Alexander Pastor. Did you see that the Globe took them too? They were in a lot of papers.”
“Didn’t you win some kind of award with them?”
“That’s right, the Rushton Cup. I keep pennies in it.” He was still trying to place me and not getting anywhere. “This environmental stuff, this is not your usual beat, is it?”
“Right. I’m normally a family-law man. Reading about toxic waste steals my sleep. Your article made me feel the ozone layer being peeled away. Ugh! I have to limit my exposure if I want to survive. No offence. I’m just being honest. Like it’s not that I don’t agree with you. That’s not the point. I just have to control my intake, or it’s like living through an earthquake all the time.”
“That’s a good description. We have to make this planet last at least until we have the technology to move to another one when this one won’t support us any more.”
“Yeah, ‘Beam me back to Saturn, Scotty!’ Right?”
“And what if we don’t have the technology for that?”
“Then, we’re out of luck.” Pásztory added both cream and sugar to his coffee. Rather a lot of both.
“Sorry to sound off at you, Mr. Cooperman. I get carried away sometimes. What can I do for you? What do you want to know about?”
“I’m interested in Kinross and the kinds of games they’ve been playing.”
“What’s your first name again?”
“Benny.”
“Okay. Call me Sandy or Alex. I get both. I changed my name just when it was becoming popular to be a fine old Hunky name like Pásztory. A name like Pastor comes out of Saran Wrap.”
Pásztory’s fingers were stained with nicotine. He was a messy smoker. I could see where the holes in his sweater came from.
“I can tell you a lot about Kinross and about the parent company, Phidias Manufacturing. Hell, I can tell you something about almost every company working in the peninsula. Some are small independent
operations; some have the mob playing a quiet role, like in Sangallo Restorations in Niagara-on-the-Lake. That’s Tony Pritchett’s little game. He launders some of his dirty money building driving sheds and sand-blasting old brick houses along Queen Street. Have you heard of him?”
“In Grantham, it’s hard not to have heard about Anthony Horne Pritchett and his boys. But I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him.”
“He likes to keep a certain distance from his dirty companies, even the ones he only puts money into quietly. But saying this is one thing, the difficulty comes in proving the allegations. Even when I get in trouble with libel, I have to prove my way out or pay up. I’ve had to do that twice now. It’s like putting your head in a noose.”
“Do you let that stop you?”
“Hell, no! But I’m trying to tell you that you need more than Boy Scout instincts in this racket. Tony Pritchett doesn’t fool around. And even the companies with no links to organized crime can play tough. Does Kinross know that you are snooping around?”
“I talked to Dr. Gary Carswell who—”
“Yeah, I know him. You might as well have sent your picture to Norm Caine, Benny. You won’t get through the gate pretending to be a salesman or in some sort of disguise.”
“Hell, I thought I’d slip in dressed like Captain Hook in Peter Pan.”
“Don’t joke about things like that. I’ve known guys who tried to do things that dim. One got his arm broken.”
“Are you telling me that there’s no way to prove what they are doing with their wastes?”
“I’ve been on their tail for three years at least. They have CBs—you know, radio-equipped trucks. If they spot you following them, they send an SOS and your goose is cooked. Without a relay team of cars, you’ll never be able to get close to them. And, believe me, Benny, they play rough.”
“What tricks are they up to?”
“You want the whole catalogue? They’ll run a rig, say, to Boston and back and open up a tap on the Massachusetts Turnpike. You can get rid of a lot of PCBs that way. Or, they’ll stick a hose in a storm sewer or a stream running into the Niagara River at night. There’s so much crap going into the Niagara from both sides of the border that you can’t make book on who’s doing it more, the Americans or us.”
“Are they dumping PCBs into the Niagara?”
“I don’t think so. Not Kinross. They go more for plating sludges, you know, cyanide baths either organic or inorganic.”
“You just lost me.”
“Organic are things like carbon-related products. You know about the carbon rings?” I shook my head. Pásztory shrugged. He wasn’t responsible for the quality of the detective asking questions. He didn’t have time to worry about that too. He kept on going. “It doesn’t matter. The inorganic stuff is solutions with heavy metals in them. Things like lead and zinc. They sometimes will sell oil with PCBs in it to township rubes for laying the dust on back roads. It lays the dust all right! Ha!” His cheeks got quite red when he laughed; the capillaries on his high cheekbones stood out on his tough, tanned face. “But to be fair,” he added, nearly choking on his sip of coffee, “even that’s harder to get away with now. The province has just plugged this loophole on paper. You can’t legally lay the dust as in days of yore.”
“How do you know Kinross is doing these things?”
“I know and I don’t know. I know because I’ve had a few spies out looking, but I don’t know well enough to take Kinross or any of the others to court. I mean, short of having a photograph of a truck putting a hose into a sewer at midnight, you’re talking about tough proof to collect. Okay, say you’ve got them red-handed, staring into the camera flash with their beady pink eyes. They up and say, ‘We were pumping water from the river into the truck to mix with the waste.’ Or they say, ‘We were only dumping water from clean tanks.’ What are you going to say to guys like that? They got you coming and going.”
“At the time Dowden died, he was reading up on the subject. He must have been getting scared.” Pásztory nodded and worked his mouth from side to side, as though there was a bit of tobacco stuck between his teeth.
“The post-mortem didn’t show any organic disease that could be related to driving hot stuff,” Pásztory said.
“Oh, so you’ve seen that too. I know you’ve seen the coroner’s report. Have there been any other deaths at Kinross since Dowden?” At the mention of the coroner’s report, Pásztory sat up straighter in his seat. I think he appreciated the homework I’d been doing.
“I haven’t heard of anything at Kinross. But accidents like what happened to Jack Dowden are rare. They look out for their drivers because there’s so much riding on their goodwill. They get good wages for keeping their mouth shut, and there’s always a medical man around in time of crisis.”
“Like Dr. Gary Carswell?”
“That’s the one. Yeah, like him. On one side of the fence he deals with all medical needs. On the other he tells the world what the firm is doing to clean up the environment. He can make me cry when he talks about the evils of pollution in the Great Lakes. Have you ever heard him? He does the Chamber of Commerce and Rotary a couple of times a year,” Pásztory said, lighting another cigarette.
“We know that Dowden was worried about the toxic substances he was carrying a year ago. He wasn’t an activist long, before he died.”
“I know what you’re thinking, but you won’t ever be able to prove a word of that. You weren’t there and there are respectable witnesses who were, including your Dr. Carswell.”
“I’m meeting Dowden’s friend Brian O’Mara this afternoon,” I said. “Maybe he has done some thinking since the accident. Maybe he’d be willing to talk.”
“Accident,” he sneered. “I guess we’ll have to go on calling it that. I love the expression.”
“Maybe there have been other Dowdens and we haven’t recognized the signs,” I said, thinking out loud. “They didn’t all have to walk in front of their trucks.”
“I’ll keep on reading up old coroner’s reports, but I don’t think they’ll give us anything we can use. Remember,” he added, “I’ve been in this business longer than you have. I know more about the dirty tricks they play.”
“So your bunch isn’t ready to take Kinross to court on a dumping of toxic chemicals charge, I take it?”
“We are closer to getting the goods on another company. Kinross isn’t the only heavy around, Benny. But as I said, building up a case takes months of careful work. We were just about to act when we walked into a brick wall. That was about two weeks ago. You want to hear about it?”
“Sure. I’ve got time.”
“Okay. There’s an outfit name Millgate-Falkner down by Papertown South. The head man’s Lloyd Barlow. M-F’s a smaller outfit than Kinross, but they go through a fair amount of stuff. I had a number of the pollution people that hang around Environment Front keep an eye on M-F over a three-week period. We were on the brink of taking them into court when, somehow, they knew we were waiting for them. There’d been a tip-off and we were dead.”
“You still had the evidence?”
“Sure, and they knew exactly what evidence we had against them. They had three lawyers working around the clock on our people. They nailed one for being an American draft-dodger who never applied for landed-immigrant status, another for having a marijuana conviction ten years in his past and a few more intimate tricks like that. We had a mole inside M-F. He suddenly moved to Prince Rupert, B.C. Do you want me to go on?”
“I get the picture. The security of your organization has been breached.”
“Look, Benny. I don’t believe in security. It can’t be breached because I don’t trust anybody. No, this went up in smoke after it left us and went to our lawyer.”
“And your lawyer had to disclose to the Crown, is that it?” Pásztory lit another cigarette from the butt of its predecessor.
“All I know for sure is that we walked into court with no surprises. I can still hear the horse-l
augh we got as every one of our witnesses failed to appear.”
“Sounds like a nightmare.”
“I’m just telling you this to warn you so you won’t have a nightmare of your own.” Pásztory had been lowering his voice steadily as we talked, as though the listening walls were moving closer. Half the time I could hardly hear him from across the table. It was his way of making sure I knew that this was inside information. I had to piece together the sense of what he said from the general flow. “These guys,” he went on, “are playing with big bucks. With little or no yelling from the public, they’re making huge profits and not taking responsibility for getting rid of the garbage reasonably.”
“Are you saying that nobody cares?”
“The only issue the average Joe Citizen gets excited about is when somebody plans to dump waste near him. Then he yells his head off. The papers pick up the echo and the idea dies. Now Kinross and M-F, they don’t make the average Joe Citizen mad because they don’t build dump sites. They dump at midnight or while Joe Citizen is watching the news on TV after the hockey game.”
