Buffalo Jump

by Howard Shrier

  When the LeSabre stopped behind me at the light, the SUV had to do the same. I took my first left, then another, doubling back west just as the SUV would be starting to roll east. I took another quick left the wrong way down a curving one-way street and shot down a long mutual drive that led to a garage at the rear of a house in the curve of the crescent. I turned off the engine and sat there breathing hard, my side throbbing from tension, from wrenching the steering wheel side to side. I stared straight ahead at the garage door. Whoever had painted it hadn’t used the right primer. Paint was coming away in curling strips like birchbark.

  Then a shadow appeared at my window. Someone knocked on the glass and my gut clenched like a fist. I was belted in, trapped, and in pain. I pictured a pair of thugs standing outside with guns drawn, ready to fire as soon as I rolled my window down. But there was no bulk looming there. Another knock: the sharp rap of a knuckle rather than the pounding of a fist. I powered down the window. A thin sparrow of a woman stood there, wearing a broad-brimmed hat tied around her chin with a flowery kerchief. She wore the kind of wraparound sunglasses older people wear to keep out the glare. She was at least seventy. Okay, Geller, I thought, you can take her.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. “This is private property, not some parking lot.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was—”

  “You came the wrong way down a one-way street at high speed. There are children on this street, you know. Elderly people,” she said, clearly not counting herself among them. “The way you people drive, you treat the whole city like your personal racetrack. Killing drivers, pedestrians, bystanders, cyclists, anyone in your way.”

  “I was being chased,” I said.

  “By who? The police?”

  “More of a road rage thing.”

  “The way you drive, you probably deserved it.” She held up a gardening trowel in one thin hand. “Now get off my property before I strip your paint job down to the metal.”

  I shifted into reverse. I wasn’t so sure I could take her after all.

  CHAPTER 22

  “What happened to you?” Clint asked me. I flinched and spilled coffee on my hands and the counter in the office kitchenette. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me and I was jumpy: if the guys in the SUV knew where I lived, they also had to know where I worked.

  Clint was looking at the fat lip Ryan had given me during last night’s little sideshow.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I was accosted.”

  “Accosted.”

  “Mugged.”

  “By who? Mike Tyson?”

  “Just a guy.”

  “Since when does just a guy get the better of Jonah Geller?”

  “He had a friend.”

  “So there were two guys.”

  “Yes. I didn’t see the other one at first. He came up behind me.”

  Clint sighed. “When did it become so easy to lie to me?”

  “Clint, it’s nothing, okay? Nothing to do with work. Let it go. Please.”

  He poured coffee into his mug and added a splash of skim milk to it. “If this is your way of showing me you’re ready for a case, you might want to rethink your approach.” He walked out of the kitchenette before I could respond. It was just as well. I had nothing to say but more lies.

  Andy Robb was alone in our cube farm, researching the sports memorabilia market in preparation for an undercover job at a firm that was reportedly flooding Toronto with fake sports jerseys, photos and other artifacts.

  “Check this out,” Andy said. “Remember Mickey Truman?”

  I looked up from MediaTron, where I’d been reading follow-ups on the Kylie Warren shooting. “Sure,” I said. “Played first base for the Blue Jays way back when. Good bat, no glove, as I recall. Moved like an elm tree out there. Should have been a DH.”

  “He was killed in a car crash last March, down near Dunedin.”

  “I remember. During spring training, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. They brought him back as a hitting instructor.”

  “What about him?”

  “His rookie card, in mint condition, was going for less than five bucks before he died. Now it’s up over twelve. Two hundred and forty per cent increase, just because he got himself killed. Funny how someone can be worth more dead than alive.”

  No it wasn’t, I thought. Not in the least.

  Founded largely by Scots, Toronto was once the most homogeneous of cities. A century ago, diversity meant you took your Presbyterianism through the mellowing filter of Andrew Melville instead of straight up from John Knox himself. Today, Toronto is reportedly the most multicultural city in the world, with the greatest number of countries represented among its immigrants and more than a hundred and thirty languages and dialects spoken. Driving west on Bloor near the University of Toronto, looking for a parking spot, I saw people in every skin tone you could imagine, from blue-black to coffee with double cream to the palest bleached rose. In the hot weather, many were stripped down to T-shirts and tank tops, showing off colourful tattoos and other body art.

  Toronto had been so conservative once, so buttoned-down and Victorian. Now the old girl had not only thrown off her crinolines, she’d gone and had her labia pierced.

  I finally scored a parking spot west of Spadina and walked back past stores that catered to every aspect of campus, bohemian and eco-vegan life: a copy shop, two sushi joints, a tattoo and piercing parlor, a bookstore catering to spiritual seekers, a cycle repair shop and a store that sold only products made from hemp—except, of course, the combustibles.

  The Registered Association of Ontario Pharmacists was in a Georgian mansion on Huron north of Bloor, in a block of mansions that housed medical and therapy practices, embassies, private clubs, galleries and the one true bane of the Annex: fraternity houses. The entrance to the college was framed by a large stone portico with four columns. Tall leaded windows were set in fieldstone bays. Winston Chan greeted me on the ground floor and walked me up a flight of carpeted stairs to his office.

  Chan was a heavy man in his forties, with a black brushcut and rosy patches on both cheeks that made him look merry. His office was lined with shelves that contained books, thick binders and stacks of paper. He sat behind his desk and clasped his hands behind his neck; I took the club chair facing him.

  “Like I told you on the phone, there are strict limits to what I can tell you,” Chan said.

  “I know so little, anything is bound to help.”

  He turned his computer monitor out of my line of vision and tapped in a password. “Here we go. You said his name is Silver, eh?”

  “Yes. First name Jay.”

  “Strange. I don’t have anyone by that name in our registry,” Chan frowned. “There’s a Samuel Jason Silver. Could that be the same?”

  “Is he the only Silver you have?”

  “Yup. His registered location is the Med-E-Mart on Laird Boulevard in Leaside.”

  “He’s the one.”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Geller, I’ve just told you pretty much everything I can about him.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Unless he’s been disciplined by the Association in response to an investigation.”

  “Can we check?”

  “I’m doing it as we speak,” said Chan, the bright blue of his monitor reflected in his wire-rim glasses. “Hmm,” he said after a moment. “Nope, nothing here. Looks like he’s kept his nose clean, as far as we’re concerned.”

  “How tight a rein do you keep on your members?”

  “Not as tight as I’d like. There are thousands of pharmacies in the province. We can’t inspect them more than once every three years or so, and even then we mainly look at their prescriptions for signs of irregularities. Our mission is to protect public safety; we don’t concern ourselves with business practices or anything like that. Now what’s this about? Has Mr. Silver done something I should be aware of?”

  “I don’t know. Between you a
nd me, a threat has been made against him and I’ve been asked to look into it.”

  “But not by him.”

  “No.”

  “Otherwise you’d be asking him these questions, not me.”

  “Right.”

  “Then on whose behalf are you investigating?”

  “A member of the family.” I left out the part about it being a notorious crime family. “Can I ask a hypothetical question?”

  “You can always ask,” he said.

  “Why would a pharmacist ship goods out of his store instead of taking them in?”

  “What kind of goods?”

  “Sealed cartons from the manufacturer—enough to fill a cube van.”

  Chan mulled that one over. “Well, there are circumstances that would allow for it. Some pharmacies have wholesale licences that permit them to ship quantities of drugs to other pharmacies—if they comply with federal legislation, of course.”

  “Do most of the drugs they ship go to the U.S.?”

  “They used to. It was the primary market because of the price differences.”

  “How big a difference?”

  “Depended on the drug, of course, but on brand-name drugs still under patent, it was easily three times the Canadian price. And in U.S. dollars to boot.”

  “But Canada has banned sales to the States.”

  “We had to,” Chan said. “The U.S. administration wanted to protect the American pharmaceutical industry. And Canadians were afraid all our drugs would be sold to the States and there’d be nothing left for us.”

  “Could a pharmacist still make money shipping drugs to the States?”

  “Only if he skirted the law.”

  “Anything else he could be doing with those cases?”

  “As I said, pharmacies will buy products for other pharmacies, for a markup, of course. He could also be supplying a larger facility, such as a hospital or clinic.”

  “A nursing home?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Who conducted Silver’s last inspection?”

  Chan consulted his computer screen. “Sumita Desai. A little over six months ago. Want me to ask her about it?”

  “Please.”

  Chan picked up his phone and dialled a four-number extension. “Sumita? Winston here. Could you pop in for a minute? Hmm. Okay, then, quickly: early this year, you inspected a place called Med-E-Mart on Laird. Ring a bell? Okay. I have a gentleman here in my office who’d like to ask you about it, so I’m going to put you on speakerphone. No, it’s okay, he’s a licensed investigator … Sumita, I said it’s okay. Don’t be such a worrywart. He’s got my curiosity going.” Chan pressed the appropriate button and I heard “Yes, but—”

  “Sumita, say hello to Jonah Geller.”

  “Oh. Good afternoon, sir,” she said. Good ahf-tuh-noon, suh, in a deep voice with a lovely accent that blended Indian and British tones.

  I said hello, then asked, “When you inspected Mr. Silver’s pharmacy, Ms. Desai, was there any indication that he had more product on the premises than he should?”

  “Not at all, suh. Everything seemed quite in order to these eyes.”

  “Was he cooperative?”

  “As far as I recall. Put it this way: he didn’t stand out as being uncooperative. I would likely have noted something at the time.”

  “His prescriptions were all legitimate?”

  “Absolutely. As Mr. Chan probably told you, any prescriptions not written by an Ontario physician would have triggered the alarm, raised the red flag if you will. Well, maybe not both but certainly one.” The quip came with a deep rich laugh that made me want to go to the nearest bar and order something creamy and tropical.

  “So he passed the inspection?”

  “With flying colours. My report at the time indicates he ran a good business. Everything above board.”

  Chan looked over to me to see if I had any more questions. I shook my head. “Thanks then, Sumita,” Chan said, and hung up.

  I wondered how Silver could have passed an inspection so recently yet still managed to upgrade from Bayview to Forest Hill.

  “There might be another way to go at this,” Chan said thoughtfully. “The pharmaceutical companies tend to get suspicious if unusual quantities are being ordered. You might check with them to see if any have concerns about Mr. Silver.”

  “I’ll do that. Just for argument’s sake, what would a cube van full of prescription drugs be worth?”

  “Depends entirely on the drugs and where they’re going to be sold,” he replied. “At one time, the hottest product would have been something like OxyContin, better known as Percocet or Percodan, which is widely prescribed for pain control.”

  Tell me about it.

  “Heroin addicts who can’t get the real thing find it a reasonable substitute,” Chan said. “Hillbilly heroin, I believe they call it. But smuggling it wouldn’t be profitable anymore because the patent expired in the U.S. and their generic versions are cheaper than ours. No, the real money now would be in medications with mass market appeal that are still under patent. Brand-name drugs for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes—all these things that affect the older crowd— especially as the baby boomers get up there in years. The market would be staggering.”

  He reached for a calculator and began punching in numbers. “Take something like Contrex, which is a popular cholesterol drug. Retails for about $1.65 a pill here. Each carton would contain a hundred and forty-four vials of one hundred each. That’s about $24,000 per carton. If there are a dozen cartons per skid, each skid is close to $300,000. You said a cube van?”

  “Yes.”

  “Probably holds eight skids … Wow. You’re looking at a value of $2.5 million before it crosses the border. If you sold them in the States for three times the price in American dollars? You’d be looking at a profit of $6 million or more per van. Oh, and wait!” he said. “If the Canadian patent had expired and a generic version were available, but it was still under patent in the States, it could sell for up to ten times the price!” He sat up then and looked at me intently. “You think Jay Silver is involved in something like that?”

  It had to be something like that. Why else would a big schmuck of a pharmacist with a nice wife and son get pushed around his place of business by a hood in a shiny suit?

  “Have there been any similar cases that ended in disciplinary action?” I asked Chan. “Pharmacists who abused their wholesale licences?”

  Chan looked at his monitor while clicking away with his mouse. “There was one recently,” he said. “Bit of a sad case.”

  “I don’t suppose you can give me his name,” I said.

  “Normally, no,” said Chan. “But in this case I don’t see how it could hurt because he was killed last month.”

  As soon as he said the name Kenneth Page, I remembered the ruddy, white-haired man whose photo had appeared in the Clarion: the pharmacist shot to death in his driveway during a carjacking.

  Make that supposed carjacking.

  I shaded my eyes with my hand as I walked back along Bloor toward my car, wishing I’d brought a ball cap. The heat and glare were withering. At Bloor and Spadina, I stepped back into the shade to wait for the light to change. A young woman with spiked black hair, combat pants and a white tank top stood with a sign around her neck that said “Karma: 25 cents.” It didn’t say whether the karma would be good or bad, but that’s its nature anyway. You get what’s coming to you.

  Years ago, Peter Ustinov famously called Toronto “New York run by the Swiss,” a tribute to its diversity, its cultural and financial clout, its safety and cleanliness. In those days, American film crews had to daub their own graffiti and spread their own garbage to make Toronto look gritty enough to substitute for an American city. Now we had more garbage blowing in the wind than they did, and every mailbox, doorway and light pole on Bloor was tagged with graffiti. This one intersection had panhandlers on all four corners. Northeast: the karma girl. Northwest: an Ojibwa
man with a bandana around his forehead and a misshapen nose that had been broken many times, weaving on bowed legs directly into the paths of pedestrians with his palm up. Southwest: a grimy, grizzled old man on an overturned milk crate, shaking a coffee cup, a few coins jingling at the bottom. Southeast: a lean man slumped in a wheelchair, the stump of his left leg held straight out by a metal support. The homeless were everywhere now, holding out their coffee cups, their ball caps, their trembling hands. In the richest city in the country, where bankers, brokers and lawyers gathered in impregnable towers, men and women picked cigarette butts off the streets and foraged in garbage cans for something edible, their clothes black from sleeping on grates and in thickets. They held up hand-lettered signs asking for spare change. They spun stories: Just trying to scrape up bus fare home, brother. They muttered into their chests or barked or yipped or swore or mumbled with thick, woolly tongues.

  People had always come to Toronto to seek their fortunes: from towns up north where industries die out; from Down East where the fishery has been exploited beyond renewal; from reserves that offer Natives little besides unemployment and abuse. Someone should tell them this isn’t Toronto the Good anymore, that it’s a city feeding on itself like a man on a hunger strike, devouring runaways, the mentally ill, the luckless, the reckless, anyone who can’t move fast enough to get out of its way.

  Someone else was going to have to repair this part of the world. I had my hands full with the Silver family.

  When the light changed, I fished a quarter out of my pocket, then another, and dropped both coins in the hat at the feet of the karma girl.

  “Make mine a double,” I said.

  CHAPTER 23

  No homicide detective likes outside interference. They are not given to providing confidential information to private individuals. They do not like being second-guessed by amateurs, and when it comes to murder, that’s what most of us are. In five years at Beacon, the closest I’d come to investigating a homicide was the week I spent working for a wealthy Rosedale woman who was sure her husband’s apparent suicide had been staged to cover up his murder. Fine. If that was what she believed—had to believe—she could afford to indulge it. My first three days convinced me there was no evidence to support her contention or refute the official finding of suicide. Four more days with my client—who had all the charm of a magpie—not only convinced me that her husband had in fact killed himself but that I would likely have done the same had I woken up married to her.