Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 1, 2 & 3 (Box Set)

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Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 1, 2 & 3 (Box Set) Page 10

by Robert P. French


  His voice is starting to get louder again and I signal him to keep it down. The guy at a table to my right and behind Cal is looking at us with interest. Maybe it’s because we look like the odd couple—although Cal is in his ‘good’ clothes, they are more than a little shabby and are in sharp contrast to me in my favourite Zegna suit—or maybe the guy has caught the drift of our conversation and is trying to eavesdrop.

  Cal is really fired up by his theory, I have not seen such a gleam in his eye since before he got hooked on heroin. It is not going to be easy to persuade him but I have to try.

  “But what about the suicide note he started to write, that—” I whisper.

  “I saw it, Brad,” he interrupts. “It wasn’t a suicide note, it was a shopping list.”

  “What?”

  He pulls a rumpled piece of paper from his jacket and hands it to me. I listen in silence as he relates his trip to Sandi’s office and his theory about the note being a shopping list.

  “Yes, but—”

  He cuts me off again. “There’s another thing. When I met with Sandi this morning, she did everything she could to try and convince me that Kevin killed himself. It made me even more certain that he didn’t.”

  I try to keep the concern off my face. “What did she say?”

  “She said that Kevin was conducting illegal tests of their drug.”

  Shit! She told him. The stupid bitch, why the hell would she do that?

  He’s watching me like a hawk. Cal knows me well and he’s looking for a tell on my face. To give myself time, I furrow my brow in puzzlement and I stare off into the distance before turning to him.

  The guy at the next table glances at us again.

  I lean in towards Cal. “Sandi told you that Kevin was conducting illegal drug tests?” I put as much amazement and disbelief as I can muster into the whispered words.

  “Yes. I think she said it to convince me that Kevin was overcome with guilt and killed himself. She told me not to tell you about it.”

  I buy some more time by taking a bite of the lox and artichoke pizza in front of me. “Illegal drug tests?”

  “Yes.” Cal leans in towards me. At least he’s keeping his voice down now. “She said they went wrong and that some of the addicts who were the guinea pigs died. She said Kevin couldn’t live with the fact he’d killed people.”

  Now which way do I go? If I support Sandi’s story, it provides a good reason for Cal to accept that Kevin’s death was suicide and it may be enough to stop him from pursuing his murder investigation? On the other hand, Cal may not have a badge and he may be living on the streets but he is still a cop in his very soul. Even if he stops investigating the murder idea, he will start investigating the testing itself and who knows what he will unearth then? I have to chose the lesser of two evils.

  “Kevin killed people by doing illegal drug tests on them?” I say. “That’s crazy. Sure, it would be a good reason for Kevin to have killed himself but I just don’t buy him doing anything that illegal. He wouldn’t play with people’s lives. I’m wondering why Sandi would say something like that.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she knows who killed Kevin and is trying to protect them. It was one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.”

  “It’s crazy, Cal. I just don’t believe it. Could you see Kevin doing anything like that? I don’t buy it.” My voice drops a few more decibels. “Cal, you mustn’t talk like that. Imagine what it would do to Kevin’s parents if a rumour like that got out.” Cal idolizes Mr. Wallace. It might just be enough for him to keep the story under wraps.

  “OK, OK. Don’t worry. I won’t say anything,” he assures me but I still worry that the cop in him will not hesitate to use this information if he has to.

  He digs with enthusiasm into his pizza. “So, Brad,” he says, “you’re in the business world. What do you know about QX4? What sort of people are on the management team over there? Could they have known about what Kevin was doing and decided to get rid of him permanently?”

  I am on firmer ground now. “I don’t think so. They’re a small player in the pharmaceutical business but they have a promising product. As a big part of their public relations, they had billed Kevin as the genius behind their addiction drug, Addi-Ban, so when word of Kevin’s death hit the press, their shares took a huge dive.”

  “How well do you know them?” he asks.

  I make a snap decision. It’s better to stick with as much of the truth as I can and try and control what Cal knows rather than have him dig around where he shouldn’t. “Pretty well.” I admit. “It was my firm that took them public.”

  “Your firm?” That caught him by surprise.

  “The original investors had put in seventeen and a half million dollars, most of which had been spent on developing the drug. Six months ago we sold fifty percent of the company on the Toronto Stock Exchange for twenty five million dollars and the shares have done fantastically well; they pretty near doubled in price. Made a lot of people rich. On paper anyway.

  “But when they released the news of Kevin’s death on Monday, the share price dropped sixty percent by the end of trading yesterday. The investors lost all their profits and then some. Overnight, management’s stock options were worth nothing. That’s why I’m sure they would never kill Kevin. It would be in their absolute worst interest.”

  He nods. Cal never had much of a head for finance but he gets what I’m saying.

  “Sandi said that there was one major investor. Who was that?” he asks.

  “Sorry Cal. I can’t tell you.” If I did, that would put the cat among the pigeons.

  “Why? It’s public knowledge isn’t it? Doesn’t a public company have to file reports about who their major shareholders are?”

  Hmmm. Maybe he knows more about the corporate world than I thought. “Yes. But if you look, you’ll find that the major shareholder is an off-shore corporation. You’d never find out who’s behind it.”

  “OK. But you know, right?” He looks eagerly at me.

  I can use his faith in my being in the know. “No I don’t. No one in my firm knows who the actual investors are. And believe me, if we can’t find out with our resources, nobody can. But I can tell you one thing: no one involved with the company would have a motive to kill Kevin; he was key to the company’s success. Anyway, think about it, in all the time you were a cop when did you ever arrest someone for a business related murder? That’s the stuff of fiction.”

  He is silent as he digests this. He’s rubbing the inside of his arm and I see a slight nodding of his head. Now is the time to get him thinking in a different direction. He’s not going to budge from this murder idea so maybe I can send him down a road to nowhere.

  “When someone’s murdered, who do you look at first, Cal?” I ask.

  Despite the years of heroin, his mind is still as sharp as a tack. He gets where I’m going.

  “The spouse, most of the time. But are you saying that Sandi might have killed him?”

  “No. I’m just saying that it’s far more likely than a bunch of businessmen from QX4.”

  “What would be her motive?” he asks.

  If I pull back now, it will make him all the more keen to investigate Sandi. He always was a contrarian.

  “Forget it Cal,” I say. “It was stupid of me to say that. It doesn’t make sense. Not Sandi. She may not be the nicest person in the world but killing Kevin…” I shake my head.

  “Just humour me,” he takes the bait. “Let’s say Sandi did it. What motive could she have?”

  I shrug, “Maybe he dumped her. Or maybe she thought he was cheating on her. Maybe he was cheating on her. We both know that Kevin was a real ladies’ man. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done it to someone he was seeing, would it? I don’t know, maybe she was after his job.”

  He doesn’t seem to be convinced.

  “It’s pretty lame isn’t it?” I say.

  “What?”

  “This whole murder idea.” His face is
neutral. “Sandi’s a bitch, sure, but a murderer? Come on. And the idea of someone at QX4 killing him just doesn’t fly. Why would they put their own shares in the toilet? Why don’t you just drop it, Cal?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe it doesn’t make sense that Sandi or someone from work would kill him but can you think of anyone else who might have a motive?”

  “Well yeah. There is someone.”

  Now he’s all ears.

  “Who?” he asks.

  “You.”

  For a moment he is too dumbfounded to reply.

  “Me?” he takes a deep breath. “Me? Why in God’s name would I want to kill Kevin?”

  “I think you know the answer to that Cal,” I say.

  “Brad, I swear I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  I’m sure he’s not faking his response. Maybe Kevin didn’t tell him. “You mean you don’t know?” I say.

  “Don’t know what?” His voice has risen in exasperation and three chic businesswomen at another table turn to stare their disapproval.

  I drop my voice again. “About a week or so before he died, Kevin decided to stop letting you go there every Saturday to change.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Why would Kevin do that? Did he tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Then who did?” The famous Cal Rogan temper is rising.

  “In the mood that you’re in, I don’t think I should tell you.”

  “Brad. You can’t just tell me that Kevin was going to cut me loose and then not tell me why or how you know this. Please.” The exasperation is strong in his voice.

  I wait a beat. “Sandi told me. At the reception after the funeral. She said Kevin had decided he should stop enabling your addiction by making it easy for you to keep using drugs while still seeing Ellie.”

  He is silent, staring into the distance. A lot of things are churning through that clever mind of his but the end product is confusion.

  Finally he speaks. “Even if this were true and if I knew it, I wouldn’t kill Kevin. I couldn’t. You know that.”

  “I’d like to think that, Cal. But you know better than anyone what drugs can do to a person. And you do still have that famous temper of yours.”

  Now it is my turn to be surprised because instead of objecting, Cal just nods.

  “Cal, why don’t you just quit. You’re a strong guy, I know you can do it. You’ve just got to have a positive mental attitude about it.”

  “Come on Brad, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  The famous temper is brewing but I’m not going to let him wriggle out of it that easily. “As a matter of fact, I do know what I’m talking about.” I keep my voice quiet. “I’ve never told you this before because, well, when you were a cop I didn’t want to compromise you, but I use a little blow now and again. Y’know, just at parties and things and maybe before going on a date.” I almost laugh at his dumbfounded expression but I keep a straight face and press my case. “But I don’t let myself get addicted. I know I can stop at any time. You just need to believe the same thing. It’s all a matter of attitude and changing your belief systems. There are courses you can go on where you can get your mind working in a positive direction and actualize all your inner strength to banish the addiction from your life.”

  He sits motionless looking at me and I can’t tell what’s going on in his head but I do see a tear form in his right eye. It swells in size and trickles down his cheek. With an awkward movement, he wipes it away and stands. “I’d better get going,” he says.

  Now I feel guilty about trivializing his addiction; maybe it’s not so easy for him to change his mental attitude.

  Now he is making me doubt my own beliefs just when I need them most.

  18

  Cal

  On the restaurant’s sidewalk patio, Brad and I say our uncomfortable goodbyes. He makes his way back to his office and I, trailing my bag of possessions, head along Pender Street back towards the east side. It’s a grey day. The low clouds feel like they are crushing me and I can sense the first tendrils of my four-hourly need for heroin stir the depression that is taking hold. I check my watch and see that it’s only three hours since my last fix. Not good. I’m feeling like a street person again.

  Kevin’s words come flooding back. Cal, I need your help on something… It’s a bit difficult to talk about this but… Was Kevin really going to tell me I could no longer use his place on Saturdays? It hurts. I feel betrayed; betrayed by the one person who stood by me, never judging me through my downward spiral, then wanting to abandon me at the end, just when I’m ready to turn my life around.

  A sardonic smile comes unbidden to my lips. Turn my life around. Every junkie says that at least once a week. Who am I kidding? Kevin would have been right to cut me off… but acknowledging the fact does not reduce the hurt.

  The lunch with Brad was surreal. His revelation that he uses coke stunned me but what really upsets me is the unfairness of it all. Why should he be able to use drugs whenever he wants without getting addicted? I was hooked from the first moment I used heroin. Why me? It’s the junkie’s mantra and it brings back Sandi’s words from this morning. Kevin’s thesis was that addiction is a genetically triggered, neurochemical imbalance and that addicts are born with it. Is the fact that I’m a junkie and Brad isn’t, all one huge, unfair, cosmic joke: an accident of birth?

  However, I need to put all that behind me—before the pain of withdrawal clouds my ability to think—and analyze what really went on during my lunch with Brad.

  He definitely had an agenda but what was it? I need to force myself to look at it through a cop’s eyes. First, he wanted to convince me that Kevin’s death was suicide. Then his reaction to Sandi’s bombshell about Kevin’s illegal drug testing was odd. He denied knowing about it and he didn’t give any obvious tells that he might be lying, but he worked a little too hard to repudiate that Kevin would do such a thing. Yet would Sandi make up a story like that? She’s way too smart not to know I could easily disprove a lie which was so enormous.

  Then Brad wanted to divert me away from investigating the people at QX4. I’ve got to admit that it doesn’t make sense for any of them to kill Kevin if it’s going to make their share price drop sixty percent, but somehow Brad was just a little too keen to turn me away from the management and shareholders, even to the extent of pointing me at Sandi as a suspect. My gut tells me Brad is up to his ears in this whole thing. There’s no way he would have done anything to hurt Kevin but he is hiding something big and I need to find out exactly what that is.

  And I need to talk to Roy. I spent most of yesterday looking for him but I guess he didn’t want to be found. I want to see if he’s ready to talk to me about Tommy’s death. Assuming Sandi’s story is true, it seems just beyond coincidental that Tommy died at the same time as Kevin’s guinea pigs were dropping like flies.

  My thoughts are interrupted by a very British voice behind me. “Can I buy you a postprandial coffee, Mr. Rogan?”

  I turn to face Arnold, Mr. Wallace’s personal assistant. His tall and powerful frame is dressed in an immaculate, charcoal grey, pinstripe suit, a dazzling white shirt and a military tie. He makes me feel shabby.

  “Arnold… hi.” I am surprised and, for some reason, pleased to see him here in the downtown core. Is this a chance encounter and, if it is not, how in heaven’s name did he track me down? “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “Let’s get a coffee and talk.” Without saying more, he crosses Pender and leads me down to an organic coffee-shop half a block north on Granville. He rebuffs my attempts to engage in conversation and the peremptory way in which he strides ahead of me stirs an irritation. He does not say a word until we are seated at a table with giant take-out cups of pungent Kenyan steaming in front of us.

  Without any pleasant preamble he says, “I quite literally owe my life to Mr. Wallace and I repay my debt with loyalty to him and his family. Absolute
loyalty, Mr. Rogan. I will do anything to protect them and the honour of their family name. So when he asked me to help you find Kevin’s supposed murderer, I of course complied. You, however, should know that I do not do so with any great enthusiasm.”

  Arnold is displaying a hard edge I have never before encountered in him; sign of a sea-change in our relationship.

  “My instructions from Mr. Wallace are clear. I am to help you in any way I can except that I am not to give you money, but that I may buy items for you such as you might need. He has further instructed me that I am to get regular updates from you on your progress. It is why I am here now.”

  He takes an incongruously delicate sip of his coffee and eyes me over the brim. His raised eyebrows indicate it’s my turn to speak now.

  Suppressing my irritation, I tell him a very abridged version of what I know or suspect and he takes it all in without breaking eye contact for an instant, which I find disconcerting. He is sitting, leaning forward with one elbow on the table, his thumb under his chin and his fingers beating a silent tattoo on his lower lip; I find myself rubbing the itchy spot in the crook of my left arm in unison. It has become infected and I think of the Lion Hotel and my needle sticking out of a wad of used bubble gum.

  Arnold lets me finish my explanation without interruption, asks no question, offers no comment. He is silent for a long time.

  “So, to summarize, Mr. Rogan: Kevin was killed five days ago and all you have are some suspicions; the girlfriend”—the word comes out as a sneer—“is a possible suspect; Brad knows more than he is telling you and you do not have a viable theory of the crime.” I feel my face flush. Put that way, it makes my efforts sound pathetic but I’m not sure if the flush that comes to my face is from shame or from anger.

  “So what’s your theory of the crime?” I counter. It comes out more aggressively than I intended, fuelled by the growing pains of withdrawal.

  “My theory?” His voice betrays nothing but I sense an anger in his eyes. “My theory is that there was no crime. Kevin quite simply killed himself.”

 

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