Lawrence Sanders - Timothy's game

“What’s it to you?” Sally says sharply.

She shows him around the dump: sheds, unloading docks, compactors, maintenance garage, shower and locker room. She leaves him with old gimpy Ed Fogleman who got a leg caught in a mulcher but won’t quit. Jake Steiner keeps him on as a kind of plant caretaker, and is happy to have him.

Sally goes back to her office, draws her third cup of black coffee of the day from the big perk in Judy Bering’s cubbyhole, and gets back to her paperwork.

She is vice president and truck dispatcher at Steiner Waste Control. She directs, controls, hires, fires, praises, berates, curses, and occasionally comforts a crew of tough men, drivers and loaders, who make a living from their strength and their sweat. They work hard (Sally sees to that), and they live hard.

But Sally does more than schedule garbage trucks. She’s the office manager. She leans over the shoulder of the bookkeeper. She solicits and reviews bids on new equipment. She negotiates contracts with old and new customers. She deals with the union and approves all the city, state, and federal bumf required, including environmental reports.

Big job. Stress. Tension. Dealing with a lot of hardnoses. But she thrives on it. Because she’s a woman making her way in this coarse men’s world of the bribed and the bribers, the petty crooks, the thugs on the take, and the smiling lads with their knives hidden up their sleeves. Sally Steiner loves it because it’s alive, with a gross vitality that keeps her alert and steaming.

At about 12:30, she runs across Eleventh Avenue and has a pastrami and Swiss on a seeded roll, with iced tea, at the Stardust Diner. She and Mabel, the waitress, exchange ribald comments about the crazy Greek chef who recently flipped a hamburger so high that it stuck to the tin ceiling.

She returns to the Steiner dump. A loaded truck is coming in, driven by Terry Mulloy, a redheaded, red-faced harp. Sitting beside him is his loader, a black named Leroy Hamilton who’s big enough to play noseguard for the Rams. Both these guys are beer hounds, and on a hot day you want to stand well upwind from them.

“Hey, Sally baby,” Terry calls, waving. “How’ya doing?”

“Surviving,” she says, walking up to the truck. “How you two putzes doing?”

“Great,” Leroy says. “We’re getting a better class of crap today. You know that restaurant on Thirty-eighth? I picked out enough steak scraps to feed my Doberman for a week.”

“Bull shit!” Sally says. “You two morons are going to have a barbecue tonight.”

They laugh. “Hey, baby,” Terry says, “when are you and me going to make it? A night on the town. Maybe a show. A great dinner. All you can eat.”

“No, thanks,” Sally says. “I got no use for shorthorns.”

She flips a hand and starts away. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” Terry Mulloy yells after her.

She goes back to her office, smiling. That guy will never give up. But it’s okay; she can handle him. And she enjoys the rude challenge.

She works on the next week’s schedule, assigning drivers and loaders to the Steiner fleet of trucks. For a couple of years now she’s been trying to convince her father to computerize the whole operation. But Jake continues to resist. It’s not that they can’t afford it; he just doesn’t want to turn control over to machines; he’s got to see those scraps of paper with numbers scrawled on them.

Late in the afternoon he comes lumping into Sally’s office, collapses in the armchair alongside her desk.

“Jesus, Jake,” she says, “you smell like a distillery. You been hitting the sauce hard today.”

“A lot of people I had to see.” He takes off his hat. His balding head is covered with sweat. It’s been a warm April day; he looks wiped out.

“You want something?” she asks anxiously. “Coffee? A cold Coke?”

“Nah,” he says, “I’m okay. Just let me rest a minute.”

“You look like the wrath of God.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been on the go since this morning. What’s been going on around here?”

“Nothing much. The new guy showed up. His name’s Tony Ricci.”

“That figures,” Jake says. “He’s Mario Corsini’s cousin. Did I tell you that?”

“Yeah, pa, you told me.”

“What kind of a guy?”

“A good-looking boy. Fresh-but that’s okay.”

“Wait’ll he puts in a week lifting hundred-pound cans of dreck, he won’t be so fresh. You can handle him?”

“Oh, sure, pa. No problem. So tell me, how does the new territory look?”

“Not so bad,” Jake says. He takes out his handkerchief, wipes his face. He straightens up in the chair. “Pitzak had some good wheels. Three Loadmaster compactor trucks only a few years old. The rest of the stuff is shit, but still rolling. Their dispatcher is a lush; he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow; you’ll have to take over.”

“Okay, pa, I can do that. What about the customers?”

“Mostly industrial, thank God. Some restaurants, some diners, two apartment houses. But most of the stuff is clean. Like scrap wood, steel shavings, and so forth. There’s one paint factory and one chemical outfit that might give us some trouble. We’ll have to dump in Jersey. And three or four printers. But that’s only paper, so that’s no problem there. We can bale and sell.”

“What kind of printers?”

“One does magazines, a couple do catalogs and brochures, and one does printing for Wall Street outfits. Annual reports, documents, prospectuses, stuff like that.”

“Yeah?” Sally Steiner says. “That’s interesting.”

Late in May, Timothy Cone comes off a case that’s a real doozy. Cone’s an investigator for Haldering amp; Co., an outfit on John Street that provides “financial intelligence” for corporate and individual clients.

Early in May, a venture capital partnership hired Haldering to look into something called Ozam Biotechnology, Inc. Ozam had been advertising in the business media with big headlines: NEW ISSUE! Shares of Ozam available at ten bucks.

The legal and accounting departments of Haldering amp; Co. couldn’t find any record of Ozam anywhere. It apparently had no bank accounts, wasn’t chartered by the State of New York, nor was it registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So Timothy Cone went to work. He soon found there were two other eyes doing the same thing: a guy from the SEC and a woman from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

The three finally discover that Ozam just doesn’t exist. It is an out-and-out stock swindle dreamed up by a con man named Porfirio Le Blanc. How much loot he took in on those fraudulent ads they never do determine, but it must have been hefty because when Porfirio flies the coop, he flies first-class to Bolivia.

No one is interested in trying to extradite the rascal; just getting him out of the country is enough. So the Immigration and Naturalization Service is told to put Senor Le Blanc on the “watch list,” and Timothy Cone returns to his cubbyhole office to write out his report.

When he tosses it onto the desk of Samantha Whatley, who bosses the five Haldering amp; Co. investigators, he slumps in the doorway while she reads it.

“You’re a lousy speller,” she tells him. Then she shakes her head in disbelief. “Can you believe this? A guy takes out ads in newspapers, and people send him money. Fan -tastic.”

“It’s happened before,” Cone says, shrugging. “Years ago there was an ex-carny pitchman working the Midwest. He bought ads in small-town newspapers. All the ad said was: ‘Last chance to send in your dollar,’ with a P.O. Box number in Chicago. He was doing okay until the postal guys caught up with him.”