Chapter 12 - The Wolf in the C-Suite
The regional executive offices of Morris Supply Logistics occupied the second floor of a low-rise limestone building on the North Service Road in Burlington, overlooking the Queen Elizabeth Way.
It was an unpretentious structure, built back in 1988 when our distribution network was expanding past twenty facilities. Unlike the soaring glass needles on Bay Street where Arthur Vance conducted his legal wars, the Burlington office smelled of industrial carpet cleaner, stale roast coffee from the breakroom percolator, and the faint, sweet scent of carbon paper that still lingered in the filing archives.
At two o'clock that afternoon, the sleet had turned into a steady, driving blizzard that painted the north-facing windows with thick crusts of white ice.
Inside the corner office of the Western Ontario Division, the blinds were drawn halfway down.
Bradley Vance sat behind a massive desk of oiled Canadian cherry wood. At forty-nine, Bradley was twenty-two years younger than his cousin Arthur, and he had made sure every dollar of his three-hundred-thousand-dollar vice-presidential salary showed on his person. His charcoal suit was bespoke English flannel; his gold cufflinks were engraved with his initials; and his silver-streaked hair was cut with razor-sharp precision every other Thursday at a shop in Yorkville.
On the blotter in front of him sat three opened manila folders, a half-empty glass of San Pellegrino water, and an antique gold Montblanc pen.
When Arthur and I walked into the room without knocking, Bradley didn't look up immediately. He was signing his name to an equipment requisition with a flourish of dark blue ink.
“Jerry,” Bradley said smoothly, capping the pen and resting his forearms on the desk. “Arthur. I wasn't expecting you down from Toronto in this weather. The Skyway’s a parking lot. Did the St. Catharines dock expansion pass the municipal review?”
Arthur Vance did not sit down.
The seventy-one-year-old attorney stood just inside the heavy mahogany door, his overcoat unbuttoned, his silver-topped walking cane held firmly in his left hand. The dark circles under his pale blue eyes gave him the look of a medieval inquisitor who had spent the night reviewing the confessions of heretics.
“Close the door, Arthur,” I said quietly.
Arthur reached behind him and clicked the latch shut. The sound was heavy, deadened by the weather-stripping.
Bradley’s eyes flicked from me to his cousin, then back again. A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch occurred at the corner of his left eyelid. “What’s this about, Jerry? If this is about Caleb’s situation down at Hub Seven, I told you last week—I don't think it’s appropriate for the boy to be on the physical labor payroll. It creates liability with the union local, and if the regional directors—”
“The union local doesn't care about Caleb, Bradley,” I interrupted, pulling out one of the high-backed leather guest chairs and sitting down. I didn't take off my work coat. The damp wool smelled of melting snow and cold diesel exhaust. “The union local knows that any man who can swing a lumber hook without dropping a bundle is entitled to his hourly wage. We’re not here to talk about my son.”
Bradley leaned back, attempting an easy, indulgent smile that failed to reach his eyes. “Then what are we talking about?”
Arthur Vance stepped forward. He did not pull out a chair. He walked to the edge of the cherry desk, reached into the interior pocket of his charcoal overcoat, and laid a single, three-inch-thick bound dossier bound in blue legal cardstock onto the blotter.
On the cover, embossed in black ink, were four words: *Project Frontenac: Forensic Audit.*
The smile on Bradley’s face vanished as if it had been wiped away with a wet rag.
“You’ve been very busy over the past eighteen months, Bradley,” Arthur said. His voice was dangerously low, a dry, rustling whisper that carried the chill of an open grave. “While I was spending my seventy-first year drafting trust agreements for your mother’s estate, you were spending your afternoons meeting with a gentleman named Luc Desjardins at the bar of the Mount Royal Club in Montreal.”
Bradley didn't touch the binder. His fingers curled slightly into the leather pads of his executive chair. “Desjardins is an equipment broker. Daniels Haulage was looking to refinance forty tri-axle flatbeds. I provided a standard commercial reference. It’s well within my authority as Senior Vice President of Supply Chain.”
“A commercial reference,” I said, leaning forward, resting my elbows on my knees. “Is that what you call it when you hand over the internal freight tariff schedules for every Morris Supply depot between Windsor and Kingston?”
Bradley’s jaw tightened. “Jerry, that’s proprietary operational data, but it’s hardly—”
“Do not lie to this man, Bradley!” Arthur’s voice cracked across the room like a bullwhip, shattering the quiet hum of the heating vents. The old lawyer’s knuckles were white against the silver handle of his cane. “I sat across from Richard Daniels in the holding cells at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre four hours ago. Richard Daniels is facing seven counts of possession of property obtained by crime and federal conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He is fifty-eight years old, his blood pressure is two hundred over one-ten, and he knows that if he enters the protective custody unit at Collins Bay without an agreement with the Crown, the people from Laval will have him shivved in the laundry room before his first bail review!”
Arthur leaned across the desk until his face was six inches from his younger cousin’s.
“Richard Daniels gave up the encrypted server addresses forty-five minutes after his lawyer realized Jerry wasn't going to bail his company out,” Arthur whispered. “He gave up the offshore accounts in Grand Cayman. He gave up the wire transfer routing numbers for the consulting fees paid to a shell corporation registered in Saint John, New Brunswick, under the name *B.V. Logistics Holdings*.”
Bradley went dead white.
The color did not drain from his face slowly; it vanished in a single, catastrophic wave, leaving his skin looking like wet plaster. His gaze dropped to the blue legal dossier sitting on his blotter.
“Arthur,” Bradley croaked, his voice cracking into an ugly, dry falsetto. “Arthur, listen to me. You don't understand the pressure we were under. The board was talking about consolidating the Western division into Toronto. They were going to phase out the Burlington regional office. If Frontenac acquired Daniels Haulage and took over the private carrier contracts, Morris Supply would have had to outsource eighty percent of its long-haul freight to our dedicated lines. We would have controlled the entire Golden Horseshoe corridor. We would have been untouchable!”
“*We*?” I asked.
I stood up. I walked behind his desk, stepping over the thick executive rug until I was standing between Bradley Vance and the ice-crusted window that looked out over the highway.
“You didn't do this for the company, Bradley,” I said, looking down at the silver monogram on his tailored cuffs. “You did it because Richard Daniels promised you seven percent of the gross freight volume once StoneBridge was forced to sell off the transportation division to cover the mezzanine default. You were going to bleed my company dry from the inside, let Frontenac’s loan sharks break the freight margins, and then step in as the white knight to buy the wreckage for twenty cents on the dollar.”
“Jerry, please,” Bradley gasped. He turned his chair toward me, his hands rising in a frantic, fluttering motion of supplication. “I’ve given twenty-four years to this firm. Twenty-four years! When you were expanding into London and Sarnia, who was living out of Holiday Inns for eight months running the distribution conversions? I built this supply chain!”
“You built nothing,” I said. “You managed assets that Kathy and I paid for with forty years of sixty-hour work weeks. You sat in air-conditioned offices and shuffled paper while men like Mike Dykstra broke their backs on the docks to make sure the orders were filled on time.”
Arthur stepped to the door, opened it three inches, and nodded toward the corridor.
Two men stepped into the office.
One was an inspector from the Ontario Provincial Police Anti-Rackets Branch, wearing a dark navy suit and carrying a leather warrant briefcase. The other was Frank Kowalski, his overcoat still damp from the snow on Barton Street, holding a cardboard archive box under his arm.
“Bradley Vance,” the OPP inspector said, pulling a folded document from his breast pocket. “I have an execution warrant issued by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice for the search and seizure of all electronic devices, financial records, and personal correspondence located within this suite. Furthermore, there is an active warrant for your arrest under Section 380 of the Criminal Code of Canada for fraud exceeding five thousand dollars.”
Bradley looked at the officer as if the man were speaking a foreign tongue. He looked back at Arthur, his own blood, searching for a single shred of familial mercy in the old lawyer’s flint-grey eyes.
“Arthur,” Bradley whimpered. “Think of the family. What will I tell Mother?”
Arthur Vance adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles with a cold, steady finger.
“You should have thought of your mother, Bradley, before you partnered with the Caruana-Pesce syndicate to steal from the man who paid for your law school tuition,” Arthur said softly. “You will tell her that you are precisely what your father always feared you would become: a clever boy who thought wisdom was just another word for not getting caught.”
Frank Kowalski set the cardboard box on the cherry desk with a dull, hollow thump.
“Cell phone on the blotter, Mr. Vance,” Frank said, his voice entirely devoid of emotion. “Laptops, keys, and your executive security fob. You have five minutes to collect your winter coat before the inspector takes you down the service elevator.”
Bradley Vance didn't reach for his coat.
He sat motionless while the OPP officer clicked the steel handcuffs around his manicured wrists, the bright chrome flashing against the charcoal flannel of his bespoke sleeves. When they led him out the heavy mahogany door, his polished Italian leather loafers dragged slightly against the industrial carpet, leaving two thin, dark lines in the grey nap.
I stood by the window for a long time, watching the patrol cruiser back out of the executive parking lot into the swirling white fury of the blizzard.
Arthur walked over and stood beside me, his shoulder nearly touching mine. The old man looked frail in the grey afternoon light, the weight of his cousin’s treason pressing down upon his seventy-year-old frame like a heavy timber.
“I’m sorry, Jerry,” Arthur whispered. “Thirty years I’ve known him. I held that boy at his baptism.”
I reached out and rested my hand on Arthur’s shoulder.
“A tree doesn't choose which branches rot, Arthur,” I said. “The only thing you can do is take the saw to the wood before the rot reaches the trunk.”
“What about Richard?” Arthur asked. “The Montreal syndicate knows he’s talking. Luke Mercer reported that two unmarked sedans with Quebec plates were spotted idling outside the Daniels terminal in Brampton an hour ago.”
May you like
“Let them idle,” I said, turning away from the window and picking up my keys. “Richard Daniels made his bed with the wolves. Now he gets to find out how they behave when the meat runs out.”
***
