“Go on,” Dean said.
“The old one calls me in July,” Vanya continued. “He asks me if I have been talking about the thing with the comics. He asks me if I have been trying to do something on my own. I am very afraid. I tell him that I have said nothing. I ask him if I can expect a visit from the police. He says, no, not the police. He says someone knows and someone is trying to take money from the friend with the store. He says it is no problem. He will take care of it. But he wants to know how it is that people are talking about his business. The old man does not like that. Not at all. I told him I don’t know, and I hope with all my heart he believes me. I don’t hear from him about this again. That is all.”
Dean looked at me, and then at Tom, before turning back to Vanya.
“Okay,” Dean said. “That’s it.”
“That’s it?” Vanya asked.
“Just this. If they get in touch with you about some more work, then do it. That’s all. Afterwards the cops might show up. At that point, call me, and we’ll hook you up with a serious lawyer.”
Dean handed Vanya a card.
“Dean, are you sure you want to do that?” I said.
“Well,” Dean replied. “You just said my name.”
Shit, I thought.
I could feel Tom smirking at me.
“We both know,” Dean said to Vanya, “that you can’t be safe while the old man is out there. You know too much. Call me, and we’ll make sure you get protection. We’ll also make sure the old man can’t hurt you anymore.”
Vanya looked at the card, but said nothing more.
Once we were outside, Tom said:
“Well, you sure stuck your neck out.”
“He’ll go for it,” Dean said. “Of course he will.”
“If you say so,” Tom said.
43
Monday was the day of my big meeting with Mrs. Burke. So I dragged my fat ass out of bed, showered, put on my best suit with my lucky monkey tie. At the subway station I picked up a huge coffee and a Cinnabon, with pecans. By the time she arrived, I felt ready to go.
Mrs. Burke sat down across the desk from me. She was wearing a pink hooded Lululemon track suit and her hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail. A 100% humorless expression was on her face. Grim, I’d describe it. Like someone who was fighting a hard battle with all her strength but losing a little bit every day.
“Thanks for coming in, Mrs. Burke.”
“What is this all about?” she said. “Did you find anything?”
“The investigation is still ongoing.”
“Well that what have you got to say?” she said, her voice rising. “Are you trying to talk me out of it? After I’ve …”
“Mrs. Burke,” I said, interrupting her. “You’re a very strong-willed individual. What that means is that we haven’t had some of the basic conversations with you that we would normally have with anyone in your situation. Now I don’t feel right about that. And so even though I know you don’t like it and you don’t want to hear it, we’re going to have a chat about what your goals are. Okay? No one’s billing you for this time.”
“You think this is about money?” she said. “God! What’s so hard for you men to understand? It’s such a double standard. ‘Oh, so your husband is playing around a little. Don’t worry! That’s just guy stuff! He still loves you baby!’ Do you really say that kind of thing to men that come in here about their wives? Is that what you’d have me believe?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “we do. Most people don’t listen, whether they’re men or women. But it’s important to have the conversation up front. Do you know why?”
She glared at me without saying anything.
“Because when people do find out, they’re usually unhappy. Many of them wish they didn’t know. They’ve paid us hundreds, in some case thousands, of dollars, and they wish they could all take it back. Men and women. That’s just a fact.”
“Fine, you’ve said your piece.”
“But,” I continued, “we aren’t talking about most people, or our other clients. We’re talking about you and your particular situation.” I looked down at my hands. To tell you the truth, for all my talk about how this was a standard conversation, I really didn’t have much idea what I was going to say. “And it’s just, Mrs. Burke, it seems to me that you should just ask yourself how much you really want to know. That’s all.”
“So I shouldn’t want to know if my husband’s cheating on me?”
“Well,” I said, “we can never prove a negative. We can look and look but we can never conclusively prove that he isn’t cheating on you, right?”
“He is doing it,” she said. “I know.”
“How?”
“I can tell.”
“How, though?”
“A million little things,” she snapped. “The way he drinks his coffee in the morning! The inflection of his voice when he says he’s going out on business! The fact that he,” and here she started weeping, “he doesn’t touch me the same way anymore! I know! All right? I know.”
“So,” I said, “then just leave him. Get a divorce. You don’t need proof of adultery to do that.”
“No, I have to be sure,” she said. “I have to really know.”
I think she recognized the irrationality of what she was saying, but I didn’t point it out directly.
“But I told you,” I said. “We can never conclusively prove your husband didn’t cheat on you. So unless we catch him in the act, we’ll never know.”
“You will if you do your job,” she shrieked. “Because I know he’s cheating on me!”
I wondered what Mr. Burke would do if he could see his wife now, her face all puffy from suffering, her eyes red from crying. Was he used to it? Or did it cut him up inside? Or both?
“God,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about any more.”
“We’re talking about what you want,” I said. “A suspicion has taken hold in your mind. It could be right, or it could be wrong. We can’t prove it wrong, to make it go away. You have to ask yourself: so what if it is right? What does it change? Do I need to know? Really? Or can you accept not knowing? Can I accept that, and just live with this man? Do I really need to pry open this box? What’s in there that I really want to find?”
She was starting to get herself together. It looked like she knew that answering my questions hadn’t gone so well so she didn’t respond to my point.
“My mind is made up, Mr. Delacroix. Now do you want to keep working on this file or not?”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Really sure? I won’t do this again; this is your last chance. Do you want to take a day to think things over?”
“No!” she said. “Now do you want to keep working on this file or not?”
“There’s no need,” I said. “I already caught him.”
For someone who claimed to have been so sure, she sure looked awfully surprised. Stricken, you might even say.
I pushed a file folder across the table to her but she didn’t move to open it. She just looked at me.
“It’s all in the file,” I said. “He was having an affair with Anna Herowicz, a young artist who had a show at his studio. And he was meeting with her in the mornings, in the park near your house, when he was going out for his run. The pictures are in there.”
But her hands stayed in her lap and she didn’t look at the folder, or at me. She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out. Instead her lower lip started to shake and her face bunched up and she leaned her head on my desk and started to cry.
When she left, she didn’t take the folder. I put it aside for her but she never ended up coming to pick it up.
Everybody went for lunch at the Unicorn; Alan was equal parts elated and disgusted.
“You couldn’t have milked it just a little fucking longer, Hercule fucking Poirot?” he shouted at me after everyone in the office had pounded back an Irish Car Bomb (it was a special occasion)
. “You had to kill the fucking goose that laid the golden eggs? This guy’s like, fuck the firm, I’m a master detective, and this is how I roll. Well fuck you, Terrell Delacroix, you magnificent bastard. Fuck you right in your whorish mouth.”
And then he raised his glass, and I did, and everyone was laughing, even me, but part of me felt like crying. I did cry a little later that night. I had this weird feeling that things couldn’t go on like this, like something would have to give, but I didn’t know what.
44
The next day Alan gave me some more work. To my relief, they were all simple personal injury files.
Around four pm I got a call from Dean.
“Hey Terrell,” he said. “How are you doing?”
“A little off my game today,” I said. “How about you?”
“Okay, but here’s the thing. I just got a call from Vasily.”
“Yes?” I said. “Did he get the stuff?”
“Well, he says he did.”
“Great!” I said. “And that means this shit is over, right?”
“Yep,” he said. “One way or another it ends tonight.”
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“He wants to meet me up at a restaurant he owns at Yonge and Sheppard,” Dean said. “He wants me to be there at eleven pm.”
I got a bit nervous about this.
“Can’t you meet somewhere else?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Well, what if Vanya rolled on us?” I said. “What if it’s a trap?”
“I don’t think so dude,” he said. “Anyway, you and Tom can wait in the car outside.”
“Should we call the cops?”
“Oh come on, Terrell. And risk them blowing it? When we’re this close? Look man, if I don’t come back, you just go ahead and avenge my death. All right?”
I had to hand it to Dean. It had pissed me off when I thought he didn’t care about my safety, but he was just as cavalier when it was his ass on a line. So I told him sure, he could play it however he wanted to, if we were closing down the file tomorrow.
The restaurant was a little Greek place in a shopping plaza between a Laundromat and a convenience store. Dean went in at 10:45 while Tom and I waited in the white panel van in the parking lot, around the side of the building. Tom had fixed Dean up with a camera and a microphone and now he was sitting with his computer in his lap, listening through big earphones and staring at the grainy image on the screen. I was dicking around with my iPhone, feeling useless, and also hungry, despite that I’d had a twelve inch pulled pork sub for dinner.
“Anything yet?” I’d ask Tom every five minutes, and he’d smile at me and not answer.
The time ticked by until 11:30, enough time for me to get really nervous. Tom lifted up his hands to his headset and frowned. Then he looked at me.
“He’s coming out,” he said.
And indeed after a few seconds someone knocked at the door. We opened it.
“I just got a call from Vasily,” Dean said. “He’s had some car trouble and he’s parked on Sheppard just west of here. Right on the bridge over the West Don River and Earl Bales Park.”
“The bridge?” I said. “Oh, no man. That’s fucked up.”
“It’s a public place,” Dean said.
“But it’s exposed,” Tom said. “You’ll have to go alone.”
“Well, what do we do?” Dean said.
“I’ll drive by first,” Tom said. “Check it out, offer to help him out. If he doesn’t take it, I’ll park the car on the other side, head back on foot, set up somewhere underneath the bridge.”
Tom motioned to the black duffel bag he’d brought with him.
“I’ve got some things in here,” he said. “A night vision scope. I can keep an eye on things from down below.”
“Okay,” Dean said.
“I’m going with you,” I said.
“No way,” Dean said.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m fucking going. You’re not leaving me behind. I’ll sit in the back. But someone’s got to be there in case they try to throw you off, and try to make it look like just a lonely man taking a jump cause he’s been fighting with his wife.”
“He’s right,” Tom said, which surprised me a bit.
Dean looked at me and grinned.
“My man,” he said.
“We shouldn’t be doing this at all,” I said.
“Come on, come on,” Dean said. “We’re almost done.”
45
Tom drove off in the van and I slouched down the backseat of Dean’s car.
“Seriously, this is fucked up,” I said.
“Hmm,” Dean said, as he drummed his fingers on the wheel. Then he said: “Funny you should mention my marital difficulties. Tina went back to California yesterday, took both the kids.”
“Fuck.”
“She said I was welcome to come down with her if I wanted to try to sort things out,” Dean said. “I’m still licensed to practice law in California.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Dean replied. “There’s going to be plenty of time to figure everything out soon.”
We waited for a while.
“Dean,” I said. “Do you remember that story you told me? About the guy who thought he could taste the chemicals in McDonalds coffee?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“And you just let him go on believing it?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you ever wish you could do that to yourself? Just let yourself keep believing a lie?”
He didn’t say anything for a while. I was worried he was pissed at me. When he spoke, his voice was very, very small.
“Sometimes,” he whispered. “Sometimes.”
A minute later his phone buzzed and he picked it up.
“Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We’ll give you another couple of minutes and then we’ll head down.”
Dean put the phone down.
“Vasily’s parked on the south side, the eastbound side of the bridge with the hood of his car popped up. Tom asked if he needed any help but Vasily said his friend was coming to pick him up. Now Tom’s heading down into the park, said he just needs a few minutes to get ready.”
“Okay,” I said. “Dean, do you ever think that maybe, I mean, it’s kind of what’s cool about you, that skepticism, but maybe in the long run …”
“Terrell,” he said. “Here is the fact of the matter. You can’t go back. Okay? Once that doubt sets in, then you have to know. There’s no turning back. Once you get that doubt. And I get it all the time. What can you do? That’s life.”
Dean started the car. We drove west on Sheppard. Eventually we came to the bridge, crossing over yet another one of the ravines that dissected the city. I couldn’t see where we were going because I was crouched down behind the seats, but I felt the car pull over onto the left hand side of the road and then roll to a halt.
“Here goes nothing,” Dean muttered, and he stepped out of the car. I heard him say: “Hey man! What’s up?”
And then there was silence. No matter how hard I strained, I couldn’t hear anything, until the tap at the window. I looked over to my right and saw Vasily staring right at me. He had a gun, and he was motioning for me to get out of the car.
46
Once I was standing next to Dean at the edge of the bridge, Vasily popped the hood of our car. Meaning that we were standing between two parked cars, both with their hoods popped, so we were sheltered from prying eyes from both directions. Boris and Vasily stood facing us with their backs to the road. To anyone driving by, we just looked like two vehicles stopped for a quick jump start
I had never been so frightened in my life. I was literally shaking under my jacket.
Dean, on the other hand, looked locked in, and he never took his eyes of Boris’s face.
When Boris spoke, I was struck again by his lack of an accent.
“Where’d your friend go?” he asked. “The technician?”
&nbs
p; And then we heard it drift across the air to us, sounding more like a pop than a bang really: gunfire.
Boris allowed himself the briefest of smiles.
“There,” he said softly.
And suddenly I knew we were going to die. He wasn’t going to stand here and explain his evil plot. He wasn’t going to put us in some elaborate death trap and then walk out of the room. He was just going to shoot us. This was the end. This was it.
And then Dean spoke:
“Want to know where the money went, Boris?”
Boris said nothing, but he didn’t shoot us either.
“Brucie didn’t have it. The day he died, he called up his cleaning lady in a panic asking about a missing black box. What was in the box? The money of course. Where did it go? Someone took it, right? Who? But then, what do you care? It wasn’t yours. Two-hundred-and-fifty grand is a lot of money, but so what, right?”
At the mention of the number, Vasily jerked in surprise. Boris said nothing. Every now and then a car would pass behind them and I would consider bolting, or screaming for help, but Boris’s gun was trained right on my chest and I didn’t move.
“Let me tell you what you really wanted to know: how Brucie found out about the restored comics. Am I right?”
“Are you stalling?” Boris said. “Men like you are always too clever to just beg.”
“And you still don’t know how he found out,” Dean said. “Or else you’d have shot us by now.”
“So you’re bargaining,” Boris said.
Vasily said something nervous to Boris in Russian.
“So who told? Well, someone who knew about the comics, obviously. And someone who was short some cash this summer because of, say, a poker debt. Someone who’d met Brucie because they had a similar taste in women.”
And after this last sentence, Boris looked at Vasily carefully, out of the corner of his eye. You could tell that the final piece of the puzzle had just clicked together for him.
Vasily said something urgent in Russian.
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