High Chicago jg-1

by Howard Shrier

  I lay there in a T-shirt and shorts. The king bed was more than big enough but I knew I wasn't going to sleep for a while, so I appreciated that the ceiling was in good overall repair: no flaking paint, no cracks, no spiderwebs. A chandelier free of dust. The chambermaid had done a good job. Got into the corners. Got the place fresh. Hadn't slipped in with a knife so far. This hotel was all right with me. I wasn't so all right with me.

  Maybe that would pass once I had done the last thing I needed to do to close Marilyn Cantor's case.

  CHAPTER 52

  I walked along the side of Rob Cantor's house in the light of a pale moon that barely showed the chink in the brick where Perry had tried to take my head off with a shovel. Like I'd ever let myself get beaten by a guy named Perry. Bad enough a Simon and a Francis had almost killed me. But not a Perry. Or an Arthur or a Skippy or a Todd.

  It had been an unusual day, to say the least. I went straight home from the airport, made myself eggs and sat in front of CNN, watching the news surrounding Simon Birk's stunning demise. There was footage of a covered body beside the unfinished Millennium Skyline tower, surrounded by grim-looking men. There were interviews with police and safety officials, with the network's business analysts, the Tribune's architecture critic, Donald Trump and Birk's other competitors. "You couldn't really call us colleagues," Trump said. "Simon saw everyone as competition."

  There was even a sidebar story on Tom Barnett, the Chicago detective who never gave up on the home invasion, who always believed Joyce Mulhearn Birk deserved to be heard, even if she herself could not speak, and who finally had been forced to shoot down his former partner. The circumstances were under investigation by the Chicago Police Review Authority, but he was being spoken of in reverent tones.

  Once the news of Birk's death got out, my phone started ringing. My mother called, relieved to hear I was back; I was relieved she couldn't see me, banged up as I was.

  My brother called. I let his call go to the machine.

  Hollinger called. I let her call go too. What could I say to her that wasn't offputting or outright incriminating?

  At eleven, Jenn called to say she and Ryan were on the 401 approaching the Don Valley. Ryan had done all the driving, she said, pumped up on coffee and adrenaline. I told her they should come by for breakfast, see Tom Barnett on the news.

  Rob Cantor called while I was waiting for them. "Jesus Christ," he exploded. "What the hell happened there? Did you see him? Did you talk to him? Did he tell you anything about-"

  "Rob," I said. "I'm going to have to tell you this in person." Not over the phone, you idiot.

  "Oh, Jesus. Of course. Look, I'm going into an emergency meeting of our board in about three minutes. It's going to be nuts, I can tell you, because not one of us has a clue what this means. Can you come by the house later?"

  "How later?"

  "The latest we'll go is seven because the chair and at least two other members have to catch the last flight to New York. Make it eight to be safe." Ryan dropped Jenn off at eleven-thirty. I offered him more coffee but he waved it off. "Time for me to transform back into a mild-mannered restaurateur. Drive down to the market, hope I'm not too late to get good enough veal for osso buco. And then grab a few hours sleep." He hugged me and told me to come by Giulio's later if I was hungry. Then he turned to Jenn, held out his arms. She clasped his right hand and pumped it awkwardly. Just as his frown started to tighten, she sparked into laughter, grabbed him and held him close.

  "He behave himself in the car?" I asked Jenn.

  "You kidding? He's not such a tough guy after all. We spent most of the drive back talking about cooking. And cooking shows."

  He said, "Don't start."

  "Dante Ryan watches cooking shows?"

  Ryan said to me, "The look I'm about to give you…"

  "Not only does he watch cooking shows," Jenn said, "he even watches the horseshit reality shows where the chefs throw tantrums on cue."

  "Once, I told you," Ryan said. "I watched it once. Most of the time it's-"

  "Biba," Jenn beamed. "He watches Biba. She cooks like his Italian nana."

  "That's real cooking, is all I'm saying."

  She patted his cheek. "Thanks for the ride, tough guy." I told Jenn what we needed to do before I went to the Cantor house. She agreed. We made the necessary phone call. The other party agreed-eventually-to provide what we asked for. Being entirely uninjured, Jenn agreed to fetch the item we had just procured.

  Everyone so agreeable.

  I took a hot bath while Jenn was gone. I could almost make fists. I tried to relax, breathe my way into a better state, but I couldn't even keep my eyes closed. Too hyper, trying to think of everything I knew, of anything I might have missed.

  When Jenn got back, we turned off the news-CNN had nothing new to add to its reports on Birk, now packaged under the banner "A Tycoon Falls"-and played the tape she had retrieved. Played it and played it. Rewinding, fast-forwarding, pausing. Advancing frame-by-frame. Watching people's heads, shoulders, backs, parcels. Their feet coming and going. The passage of hours. Moments in time. — I could hear Nina's workout track going, booming bass and pounding drums getting into my chest like a defibrillator as I knocked on the French doors. And kept knocking, a good ten times over thirty seconds until the sound went down by half and she came to the door.

  She made no pretense of being glad to see me through the glass pane but she did let me in. She wore a dark purple workout suit over a black sports bra. "The shit-kicking detective," she said. "I thought you were in Chicago."

  "I'm back."

  "I can see why. Is all hell breaking loose there or what? Rob is so freaked out about this. I mean, even I've been watching the news. Is it all true? Some lunatic pushed Simon Birk off his own building?"

  "Yes."

  Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest, the forearm muscles well defined. "Why?"

  "Presumably because he was a lunatic."

  "I mean, why now? Why Rob? He finally has it all in his grasp, he's got a partner who knows absolutely everyone, every door is open, he's stepping out in the spotlight, and boom, someone throws Simon Birk off a roof and that's it? Because the way Rob's talking, the whole deal is falling apart."

  "He's home?"

  "No, he called from the car a few minutes ago to say he was stuck on Bayview where they're digging up Moore. He'll be fifteen, twenty minutes."

  "Is there somewhere I can wait?"

  She looked me up and down. "Wipe your feet," she said. "Come on back to the gym."

  I wiped as directed and followed her through the den, past the entertainment unit that took up all of one wall, its centrepiece a mounted plasma TV at least sixty inches wide, with speakers placed around the room to provide full sound. Hundreds of CDs, hundreds of DVDs. If Rob had set them up, they'd be alphabetical; if Nina, by the workout they provided. I noted with relief that among the many video and stereo components was a working VCR.

  In the fitness room, Nina took a white towel off a pile of them and wiped a puddle of her sweat off the base of a stair-climber, then rubbed away dark wet stains on the grips. She tossed the towel into a laundry bin, then took another from the pile to rub her arms and legs, used a third to mop her face and neck. She squatted in front of a mini-fridge next to a stack of free weights that went in pairs from five to twenty-five pounds. She took a bottle of spring water. Offered me one. I decided to match her drink for drink.

  She took a long drink of her water, half the bottle in three or four fierce gulps, wiped her mouth and said, "So do you know what really happened there? More than was on the news?"

  "I know a lot of what happened."

  "Can you tell me without Rob here? Or is it, like, privileged or something?"

  "First of all, he's not my client. Marilyn is. And even if he were, you're his wife. So I think we're on safe ground."

  I wanted Nina talking about it. Wanted to see what she would ask me.

  She sat on a gym mat and stretched
out her legs, not able to do full splits but coming close, dampness visible in all the expected places. She leaned out over each leg, exhaling slowly. "What are you going to tell Rob about Maya?" she said on an outward breath. Perspiration visible at her dyed hairline, above her lips, between her breasts. "Did they kill her?"

  I said, "Birk was desperate to finish his building in Chicago. He was late, he had hit every possible obstacle, he was jammed up, and this man Francis Curry, the one who killed him, he had made a career out of removing obstacles from Simon Birk's path. He would do anything to keep Birk going because it kept him going too."

  "So he killed Maya?"

  "He would have, if Birk had told him to. If he'd thought of it himself. He killed at least three others I know of, two of them right here. He admitted it. He also stood by while Birk beat his wife into a coma. Helped him commit massive fraud. He admitted all that. So did Birk."

  "That's awful."

  "He came close to getting away with it."

  She turned away from me, stretched herself out over the far leg. "How?"

  "Tape. He had tape of Birk beating his wife, taken off a security camera. I learned a fair bit about these systems while I was down there. And the thing that stands out, Nina, out of everything I saw, is how much power you have over someone once you catch them doing something bad on tape."

  I figured it was as good a time as any to take the tape I had brought out of my jacket pocket and lay it on the counter above the mini-fridge, with the label facing the wall.

  Nina didn't ask what it was.

  "Like I told you," I said, "Birk and Curry did some terrible things. Admitted them… well, not exactly freely but out loud, on tape and in front of a lawyer. But neither of them owned up to Maya. No reason not to-in for a penny, in for a pound-but neither one did."

  "So she did kill herself. Is that what you came to tell Rob?"

  "No. I wouldn't tell him that. No one still believes that."

  "Well, I do. Everyone did, till you came around."

  "Someone threw her off the balcony, Nina. Someone hoisted her over and gave her a good start off her balcony. Maybe they stunned her first. Choked her out. I thought maybe Rob had, because he had the most to lose if Harbourview went bad."

  "That's crazy," she said. "He would never."

  "But somebody did. Someone else who wanted that building to keep going up and up. And I came back from Chicago convinced no one there had anything to do with it. I thought about her brother Andrew," I said. "He's definitely strong enough to have done it and he's devoted to his dad and that building. It was a big part of his future."

  "He never says very much," Nina said. "At least not to me. Although I'm pretty sure he'd fuck me if he got the chance. I've caught him checking me out."

  "There was only one way to know who went into Maya's building that night and came out minutes after the fall. And that was to look at the tape."

  She looked at the cassette on the shelf, then at me, smirking, "There's no camera in Maya's building. It's like a student dump."

  I swivelled the tape around so she could see the typed label. "It's not from Maya's building," I said. "It's from the College View Apartments next door, from the night that Maya was pushed to her death. The security firm keeps digital recordings for thirty days and they let us copy the footage from that night. And we're going to watch it when Rob gets home."

  Nina looked at me, her face impassive. "Sure," she said. "Let's watch your tape. We can set it up in the den. I can even nuke some popcorn."

  "Were you there that night?"

  "The night she died?"

  "Did you go to her building?"

  "Watch the tape," she said. "You can see for yourself."

  I took the tape and my bottle of water into the den.

  "Don't sit in the recliner," she said. "That's Rob's when he gets home. And put a coaster under the water, 'kay?"

  I sat, keeping the cassette beside me. I didn't want to play it. Truth was it showed fuck all. I had thought it would show Nina going in. I had feared it might show Andrew Cantor. But the camera didn't pan far enough to show the full entrance to Maya's building: you could see anyone who exited the building and turned to their left, or south. You could see the backs of people going in that way. You couldn't see anyone who would have exited to the north or come in that way.

  Neither Nina nor Andrew nor anyone else I knew had been captured on the tape. If they had been at the building they had come from the north.

  Nina was strong enough to have thrown Maya over. I saw how much weight she'd bench-pressed with Perry. I had looked at her rangy muscled body, saw the sweat she could generate. But I had screened the video three times and there wasn't a frame conclusive enough to force her hand if we did sit and watch it with Rob.

  I was sitting on the couch with my water bottle neatly beside me on a coaster as directed. A good guest, someone you'd invite back. For my trouble, Nina came up behind me and slammed something hard and heavy into the back of my head, bang on the occipital bulge. I pitched forward and banged my bad shoulder hard on the edge of the coffee table in front of me. My vision went blurry and I felt nauseous. When I tried to push up on my hands, the floor fell further away. I was concussed and good, like Eric Lindros after a Scott Stevens open-ice hit, looking for the right bench to collapse onto.

  I turned my head and saw Nina with a weight in her hand, a fifteen-pounder by the look of it, one end shiny with blood.

  Seeing it, taking in the red end of it, made me realize the back of my head was bleeding and that I'd better try very hard not to pass out.

  "She was going to fuck it all up," I said thickly.

  "That she was," Nina said, coming around the couch, her hand flexing around the bar of the weight.

  I made it to my feet, wobbling like a bandy-legged vaudeville drunk. I grabbed a framed picture of Rob and Nina off a shelf and threw it at her. Didn't hit her. Didn't come close or slow her down. She advanced. I rambled backward. Mumbled, "What happened here that night? What'd you catch her doing?"

  "Going through Rob's briefcase. I don't know what she was looking for but she was looking."

  She didn't know much of anything, Nina. Only what she wanted. It haunted the room like cold breath in a morgue.

  "She was serious about stopping him," Nina said. "About sticking to her principles even if it meant bringing her own father down. So stupid for someone supposedly smart. If she knew a tenth of what she thought she knew, she'd be alive today. But she was twenty-two years old and didn't know a fucking thing. Do you have any idea what I already knew at twenty-two? What I already was?"

  She hurdled the corner of the coffee table and tried to bring the weight down on my head. I lunged away and kept my feet somehow and lurched left to keep the coffee table between us. But she was faster than me. She got a leg behind mine and shoved my chest and I fell onto my back. She tried again to crush my head but I rolled away. She leaped astride me, holding the weight easily with one hand while trying to push my hands away with the other, to get a clear shot at my head.

  So fucking weak I was. Such a dazed head. A sure skull fracture. I couldn't buck her off. My limbs flapped like useless fledgling wings. Only the length of my arms was keeping the weight from pulping my skull. Couldn't scratch or bite her. Couldn't reach a weapon. I could feel a throb now in the back of my head, wetness on the back of the neck. Getting harder to focus, seeing four hands above me, two weights to fight off, four cold eyes staring down.

  Then a roaring sound: a voice calling Nina vile names, asking how she could do it-the voice raging with hurt and hatred, surging with violence.

  It wasn't me. I wanted to say those things to her. Wanted to ask how she could have done it. But it was a different voice. A man but not me. Then he stormed into view past me, moving so much faster than I could imagine moving-Rob Cantor, lifting Nina off me and slamming her into the entertainment centre. The weight dropped from her hand. Shelves rattled and compact discs poured out of the shelves around
her. She put her arms up in front of her face, some stance she'd learned from Perry or some other trainer, but Rob was much taller and outweighed her by at least sixty pounds and had the full strength of rage. He simply punched through her hands and landed a solid blow to her nose, then banged her hard on each bicep, breaking down her defence. Slammed a fist in her gut. Then he hit her in the face again, holding nothing back. I could make out his words-"How could you?" — as he landed each blow.

  I remember her slumped and weeping against the trashed entertainment unit, blood pouring out of her nose and a vertical gash in her upper lip.

  I remember Rob turning to me with his fist still cocked, as if asking me if I thought she'd had enough.

  I think I remember saying, "One more couldn't hurt."

  EPILOGUE

  I still get headaches. I get them when I stand too fast, when I stand too long, sometimes just when I stand. Working out is out of the question-has been for two weeks. Some of the headaches are sick ones and I lie on my bed or the couch like a stricken woman in a Tennessee Williams play, waiting for someone to mop my brow with a cool linen handkerchief and say, "There, there."

  No one has done that so far, though Jenn has visited every day and her partner, Sierra, has come with her at least half the time. She's dedicated to her craft and, in typical Sierra fashion, has been swamping herself with information on post-concussion syndrome so she can distill it into a cogent, caring analysis and approach, all of which has gone for fucking naught. I feel gnarled and depressed. It doesn't help that we're losing light by the day, that what little we have is flat and cold as nickel.

  Other people have come and gone to help out, to keep me company, to steer me through some of the touchier legal matters that followed me home from Chicago like flies around my fruit. Luckily I am on medication for pain, so little that I say can be held against me.

  It had been hard enough to keep all my stories straight before sustaining a Grade 3 concussion, but I think in the end it went something like this.