Free Dead & Buried by Howard Engel Page B

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 Americandraft-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-laugh 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.”
    “So they stay clear of controversy.”
    “Completely. Their PR is great, their image is