Howard Engel: Dead and Buried

“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.”