“Fred, you still haven’t told me what Teddie’s doing with a man working in this office!” Again he fixed me with his eye. I felt like a notice pinned to a bulletin board. McAuliffe moved back behind his desk, sorting through a pile of papers under his pipe and tobacco tin.
“I’ll show you the letter, Commander. I think you’ll find that everything’s in order.”
“There hasn’t been anything like order around here, Fred, since I took my paws off the wheel. That’s a fact. You know it and I know it.” He looked at Biddy as he said this, seeing how the colour came to her cheeks and hoping that with McAuliffe in the room as well as a stranger she wouldn’t pick this moment to argue the point. Biddy held her tongue. The Commander took courage and went on. “Since the boy took charge, Fred, we’ve all been headed downhill on a runaway toboggan.”
“Murdo, the boy is about to give his daughter away in marriage!”
“I never said he couldn’t breed, Biddy! He couldn’t get me grandsons, though. Sherry’s a fine girl. I never said a word against her. And she’s marrying a fine man. Damn it, I don’t care what you say: Norman Caine will put new life into this business. You know as well as I do, both of you, Ross has never taken hold here, damn it!”
“Murdo! You’re talking about your own son!”
“Mother, don’t pretend you haven’t heard that line before. Hello, Fred. Good-afternoon, Dad.”
“Ross!” Ross Forbes was suddenly standing there and none of us had seen him come in. The Commander made a sort of bark at the back of his throat. Ross and his mother exchanged smiles. The old man looked at his son up and down without, apparently, finding anything to write home about. Ross hadn’t changed much. There was still the look of a spoiled child and the private school in every line of his face. He had that unbarbered look of an aristocrat.
“Wonderful to see you, darling!” Biddy Forbes presented a well-powdered cheek to be kissed. Ross pecked her there and held her around the waist, still keeping a wary eye on his father. When he straightened up, he maintained his hold on his mother and Biddy locked her fingers around his.
“I thought we’d declared a truce until after the wedding, Dad? Have I missed a round of negotiations?”
“Would you like to sit down, Miss Biddy?” Fred said trying to remember to be polite. She shook her head and stood near Ross with her hand in his.
“Place is going to hell, I said, and I’ll say it to your face, Ross. It needs managing not coddling. We knew the difference in my day.”
“We’re not going to settle longstanding differences in the middle of Fred’s office, are we?” He smiled and took a step in his father’s direction with his hand stretched out. The Commander deliberately put his right hand in his jacket pocket, where it made him look both fey and petulant. Biddy’s head tilted and she regarded her son with moist eyes.
“I think I’m going back to the club, Ross,” she said. “There is still so much to do before the wedding.” She looked around the room, gave Fred a warm apologetic smile and went out into the reception area, where I could hear her talking to one of the secretaries as though nothing had happened in Fred McAuliffe’s office that was unfit for the ears of everyone on the payroll or for scores who had never heard of Phidias Manufacturing.
“Well, Dad,” Ross said at length. “Here wo go again. I hope we can agree not to get into another row with Mother around. It can’t be good for her heart.”
“I wasn’t saying anything behind your back I wouldn’t say-indeed, haven’t said-to your face.”
“We agree on that much at least.” It was as though the room had suddenly released a breath it had been holding for the last forty to fifty seconds. “When did you get back? I haven’t seen a light at the house.”
“Nearly a week now. We’ve been keeping to ourselves. Hiding out at the club. Once the family knows we’re back, and with this wedding thing, well, there’ll be no peace for either of us. I hope there are no changes in the plans you wired your mother?”
“Nothing important. Sherry still wants to go through with it. I’ve given up trying to get her to see reason.”
“You mean to see things your way! Well, Ross, the girl’s a match for you, eh? The women in this family always did have the balls. Take your mother. Bloody stoic. Bloody Spartan, if it comes to that. Your mother could lead a charge down St. Andrew Street.”
Ross looked about to go, not to retreat, but simply to leave the field on equal terms with the enemy, when he spotted me. “I remember you,” he said. “You’re Sugarman or Goodman or something.”
“Cooperman, Mr. Forbes.”
“Well, what the hell are you-? Wait a minute. That letter from Colling. I remember it now.”
“I have the letter right here, sir,” said McAuliffe, putting on his manners for the CEO. Was he the AV as well? I’d have to find out. McAuliffe passed the two-page document to Ross. It was intercepted without comment by the Commander who quickly glanced down each of the pages before handing them on to his son. He let loose something like a stifled growl in the back of his throat. Ross studied the letter too and seemed to find something amusing in the contents, so that, when he looked at me, he was almost smiling.
I know what it’s like to have the tax people on my back. If it wasn’t my former wife, I’d be full of sympathy. You may tell her I said that.”
“Messenger boy,” said the Commander, fixing me with a cold eye. “Is that what he is? Come to spoil things for Teddie at a time like this?” I could tell he wanted me to wither up and blow away. Instead, I thought it was time to strut some of the things I’d learned from Jim Colling.
“Mrs. Forbes’s tax status is in dispute, Commander Forbes. We are just trying to clear it up as simply as possible.”
“What Mr. Cooperman is too polite to say, Father, is that Teddie has clout enough to demand a full-scale audit if we don’t cooperate.”
“And you cave in at the first blast of a gale? Ha!” The Commander made another of those croaking noises in the back of his throat and wandered out of the room shaking his head as though he had just come into the office and found it empty.
After a moment, Ross pulled his attention back to me and McAuliffe. It was plain that he had trouble sharing the floor with the old man. “Fred, you keep an eye on Mr. Cooperman here, will you?”
“I’ll be sure to do that, Mr. Forbes.”
“Try to remember that we’re doing Teddie a favour, Mr. Cooperman. If you have any problems that Fred here can’t help you with, which I find hard to imagine, since he’s been here longer than anybody except Father, you bring it to me. Is that understood?” I nodded but refused to pull my forelock. I was still trying to be my own man. “See you at the wedding, Fred.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t miss Miss Sherry’s wedding, Mr. Forbes,” said McAuliffe. “Oh, no. We were at all the family weddings, you remember. Oh, May and I’ll be there with bells on-wedding bells!” Forbes smiled at the older man’s little joke and sucked in his largish belly so that it vanished under the shelter of his barrel chest, giving the illusion of fitness and health. Of the whole Forbes clan and throwing in McAuliffe and me for nothing, the Commander looked about as trim and healthy as the rest of us put together. For a man on the brink of eighty, he was putting us all to shame in the health department. I still wasn’t ready to live under his whimsical, iron tyranny. There might be some hope for the son, but I doubted it. With the slightest of glances in my direction, Ross Forbes left me in McAuliffe’s custody.
SIXTEEN
The first piece of interesting information I learned in the head office of Phidias wasn’t about Kinross Disposals at all. It was about Sangallo Restorations. Recent events had partially obscured my primary mission to the extent that, when I found a description of Sangallo, I ate it up greedily. As I expected, it was a small firm with an office and small yard on the outskirts of Niagara-on-the-Lake. It had been a subsidiary of Phidias Manufacturing since 1988 and, like Kinross, appeared to operate with a measure of autonomy from the mother house. What raised my eyelids to fully open was the discovery that the chief executive officer was Harold Grier. Grier was a family name I’d run into before in this investigation. With a little discreet questioning of Fred McAuliffe, I learned that Harold was the brother-in-law of both Ross Forbes and Paul Renner of the city’s sanitation department. Harold was the brother of the women they married. I tried not to show my delight at this piece of news. But I could almost hear myself whispering under my breath, “Rub-adub dub / Three men in a tub / The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.” And I was forgetting that Grier must be the front man for Tony Pritchett and his boys. The tub was more crowded than I thought.