High Chicago

by Howard Shrier

  “Hail the conquering hero,” he cried when I entered his office. “My Jason! My Argonaut! Come here, you lumbering hunk, let me shake your hand for a job well done.”

  “I haven’t even told you what happened.”

  “You’re here, you’re smiling—that is a smile, right? It’s not gas or something?”

  “It’s a smile, Eddie.”

  “So tell me, bubeleh. Can I call Chelsea? Tell her it’s over?”

  Chelsea Madison was an American TV star filming a movie-of-the-week in Toronto. Best known for playing the squeaky-clean mom of a group of wisecracking teenagers on the sitcom Den Mother, she had complained to Eddie that a photographer named Stan Lester had been stalking her sixteen-year-old daughter, Desiree, trying to get photos of her going in and out of a rehab centre that had accepted her into a day program while she accompanied her mother to Toronto.

  “It’s done,” I told Eddie. “Lester won’t bother Desi again.”

  “You sure? Some of these guys, they just won’t stop. Forget Desi, you should see them follow Chelsea around. She’s got another seven, eight weeks to film in Toronto and she’s got the mongrel hordes all over her.”

  “I think it’s Mongol hordes,” I said.

  “Not when you speak of paparazzi.”

  “Well, Stan Lester is sidelined indefinitely,” I said. “Out for the season.”

  “Do I want to know how?”

  “No.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Spill. Vicarious thrills are the only kind I get at my age.”

  “That’s not how we work, Eddie. You only get to know the results.”

  In truth, there wasn’t that much to tell. Lester had been in his car this morning outside the rehab centre, waiting for Desi. I was parked three spaces behind watching him. As soon as she exited the building, he levelled a camera with a long lens at her. I stepped between him and his target and all he got was shots of my jacket. A frank and candid discussion then ensued about his right to take her picture versus her right not to have her picture taken by him. In the end, he saw things my way. But not right away. Not before I grabbed his lens and drove the camera body into his face, opening a cut on the bridge of his nose, then banged the heel of my hand against his head behind the ear, hard enough to set his bells ringing. Then I told him if he came within a mile of Desiree Madison again, I’d give him a colonoscopy with the widest fish-eye lens I could find in his bag.

  “Well,” Eddie said. “As long as I can tell Chelsea it’s over, and she can get back to blowing lines.”

  “You can.”

  “Well done, Prince Valiant. Well done.” He gripped my hand in a firm handshake and looked up at me with a grin. “To be your age, Jonah,” he sighed. “To be tall and strong like you. Christ, to have your hair! I’d have girls falling over me.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, Eddie. But I’d rather have my fee.”

  “Don’t worry, kid. I’m seeing Chelsea tonight at her hotel. I’ll bring it by tomorrow.”

  “In cash, right?”

  “Not a problem. You want a coffee, mighty one?”

  “Can’t,” I said. “We have a ten o’clock client.”

  “So go meet your client and send Jenn.”

  “Don’t start, Eddie.”

  “What? Start what? What did I say?”

  “I can read it on your forehead like it’s a drive-in screen.”

  “Can I help it if she’s gorgeous?”

  “Not to mention gay.”

  “The blonde hair, the blue eyes, the sweet face. And the body, my God, the body. The gayness just fades away.”

  “Just don’t give yourself a heart attack before you get my money,” I said.

  “And those legs.” He was panting, hamming it up now, dabbing his forehead with his tie. “She’s so tall, I’d have to go up on her!”

  “Eddie,” I said. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and laughed. “I’m too old to change and I’m too young to stuff and mount. Anyway, you know I’m kidding. Even if she was straight, I wouldn’t stand a chance. I’ve got daughters her age. I’m like a dog chasing a car, Jonah. What would I do if I caught one?”

  “Just don’t let her catching you talk like that,” I said. “Come on. She’d know I was kidding. Wouldn’t she?” “She’d stuff and mount you,” I said. “Unfortunately for you, in that order.”

  Eddie was right. Jenn Raudsepp exudes a wholesome sexiness that’s hard to ignore, whatever her sexual orientation. Men and women alike take note when she dashes across a street or emerges legs first from her car or smiles or tosses back her blonde silk hair. Men stammer when they approach her. They mumble into their drinks. They become stupider than they were before the drinks.

  I’ll never know her sexual side. That belongs to her longtime lover, Sierra Lyons, who’s a terrific match for Jenn and a good friend to me. Not to mention an ace nurse practitioner who can stitch wounds without commenting on how you look in your underwear. As an investigator, though, Jenn brings it all. She’s smart, she’s fun, she’s good with clients and she works as hard as I do. And as placid as she can seem when she wants, a whole other side emerges when she gets riled.

  One night, we were leaving the office late and came across a guy beating a Native woman in the laneway where Jenn had parked her Golf. He was stocky and built but clearly drunk, and when I told him to get away from the woman, he sneered at me, “You wanna do something about it?”

  “No,” Jenn said, stepping forward. “I do.”

  And she did. Unfolded those lovely long legs of hers and dropped him with a spin kick, then broke most of his ribs with a roundhouse. From there, she did everything but make him eat his car keys. I could have done it quicker but no better, and it seemed important to her that this particular world repair be done by a woman.

  The Estonian wonder girl did indeed have a pot of coffee brewing, a continental dark, and once I had a cup in hand I told her how things had gone with Stan Lester, giving her the details I had spared Eddie Solomon.

  “Eddie pay you?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “A thousand in cash.”

  “Today would have been better. Scary Mary called from the bank.”

  I shuddered. Scary Mary is the assistant manager at our branch and a devout Christian with a phone manner so artificially nice, so honeyed with false promise that each of us usually tries to pawn her off on the other. I said, “So sorry I wasn’t here to take the call.”

  “You should be. She likes you better, you know.” Then Jenn, a gifted mimic who’d once been a member of a comedy troupe, nailed Scary Mary’s breathless menace: “‘This is Mary McMurphy from Toronto-Do-min-ion calling. Is that Jonah? What a nice name. Isn’t that a Bib-lical name?’”

  “Brrr. You do her better than she does.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “If she calls back, tell her to relax,” I said. “We’ll have Chelsea’s thousand and a retainer from Marilyn Cantor.”

  “How retentive a retainer?”

  “My brother referred her,” I said. “If she knows him, she’s bound to have money.”

  “She called, by the way.”

  “When?”

  “Ten minutes ago.”

  “Please say she didn’t cancel.”

  “Just confirming her appointment.”

  “Phew.”

  “You have two other messages,” she said, a wicked grin starting to form as she slid two scraps of paper across her desk.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Like hell.”

  I looked at the two slips she’d filled out. The first was from my mother. The second was from the Homicide Squad of the Toronto Police Service.

  I looked at Jenn, at the sunbeam of a smile lighting her face.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know. Homicide. Your mother,” she said. “Just wondering who you call first.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I met Kather
ine Hollinger last summer while I was still at Beacon Security. Her investigation into the murder of a Toronto pharmacist overlapped with the case I was working on: another pharmacist whose family had been targeted for extinction. Hollinger was about thirty-six and already a detective sergeant. Five-seven with a lithe build, glossy black hair and eyes whose colour was somewhere between honey and caramel. My feelings for a woman almost always start with the eyes; I liked her from the first look and felt it was mutual. Of course, I’d been stabbed the night before by a badass mobster and was sailing along on Percocet, so my judgment could have been skewed.

  The next day one of my co-workers was shot to death and Hollinger, in addition to her many other charms, was the first to pick up on the heartwarming fact that the hit had been meant for me. She even turned up at my door late one night, supposedly to ask me about the shooting victim but really, I think, to check up on me.

  After everything crashed to a head those last hot days of June, with more than half a dozen killings in two countries to account for, Hollinger and her mouth-breathing partner, Gregg McDonough, had more than a few questions for me. The sessions were long and tense. We sat in a small interview room with four bare walls, a small table, three hard chairs and a video camera that stood above us all on a tripod, recording every question they threw at me and every poor excuse for an answer I gave back. I bobbed and weaved my way through it, telling no outright lies but providing nothing near the truth. None of the killings could be attributed to me, though I had seen and done enough that I still wake up shuddering, chasing away images of faces under water, of bullet-riddled bodies in hot closed rooms.

  Hollinger and I hadn’t spoken since. I had thought about calling her half a dozen times, asking her out for coffee. Then I’d stop and wonder what exactly we could talk about.

  How about those corpses in the Don River, Katherine? All that sorted out?

  Well, not quite, Jonah. Don’t suppose you could clear that up for me. And pass the skim milk.

  Like Hamlet and Gertrude sitting across a table from each other, plates piled high with funeral baked meats.

  Now she had called first, so I called back from the reception area—away from Jenn’s rolling eyes.

  When she answered, I said, “Hey, Sarge.”

  “Hey, yourself, Geller. How are you?”

  I liked her voice almost as much as her eyes. An alto with just a slight husk. “I’m good,” I said. “How about you?”

  “No complaints. Except people keep murdering each other.”

  “The mayor just put out a press release saying what a safe city we have.”

  “The mayor doesn’t work my crime scenes. So,” she said, “how’s the new agency?”

  “We’re doing all right. Finished one case this morning. About to start another.”

  “Good,” she said. “Okay. So … listen, Jonah. I have some news I thought would interest you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I had a meeting with Gruber this morning.” That would be Les Gruber, the new head of the Homicide Squad. “We’re closing the Di Pietra cases. All of them.”

  “With what smoke and which mirror?”

  “I wouldn’t question it if I were you. As far as we’re concerned, Ricky Messina and Stefano di Pietra were responsible for all six murders.”

  “They did keep busy.”

  “We also believe Ricky and Stefano both died as a result of injuries sustained during their fight in the river.”

  “Who came up with that? You or Gruber?”

  “It does wonders for our clearance rate.”

  “Gruber, then.”

  “He’s got his black marker out as we speak. And I’m not going to second-guess him on it. We have too many red cases as it is.”

  “So no more questions for me?”

  “Just one. How late do you work?”

  “I set my own hours.”

  “Yeah? ’Cause I was wondering if you maybe wanted to have dinner.”

  “Dinner?”

  “Tonight, if you’re free.”

  I said, “Tonight?” Smooth, Geller. Smooth as shrapnel.

  “It opened up just now. I took it as a sign. If you don’t want to …”

  “No,” I said. “I mean yes. I do.”

  “You sure?”

  “Very sure.”

  “You like Italian?”

  “Of course I do,” I said. “Scratch a Jew, find an Italian. Except on Sunday evenings, when we all convert to Chinese.”

  “A friend of mine recommended a place that has real southern Italian cooking and decent prices.”

  “Won’t leave us much to complain about.” “It’s Toronto,” she said. “There’s always weather and real estate.”

  Call number two.

  “So you’re seeing Marilyn Cantor today?”

  “Any minute, Ma.”

  “Such a tragedy,” she said. “I went to the shiva and she was a broken woman.”

  “I didn’t know you knew her that well.”

  “I don’t really,” my mother said. “She was on the board of volunteer services at Baycrest when I chaired it a few years ago.” My mother makes her living—and a good one—as a real estate broker, but she’s also one of those dynamos who manage to sit on half a dozen boards of arts, culture and community service organizations. How anyone in Toronto gets along without her is beyond me. “But a situation like this,” she said, “you pay your respects. If you were more connected to the Jewish community, you’d understand.”

  And there it is, ladies and gentlemen. The first shot across my bow.

  “I don’t know that much about her situation, Ma.”

  “Daniel didn’t tell you?”

  “I didn’t speak to him.”

  “But he referred her to you.”

  “Not directly. His assistant set it up.”

  “And you didn’t call to thank him?”

  Shot number two.

  “I was going to, Ma. Right after I meet Marilyn.”

  “Jonah,” she said. “Honey.”

  Oh, God. Not the “honey.”

  “You have one brother.”

  “So does he.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means he could have called me himself, instead of having Sandra do it.”

  “So take the high road. Call and thank him. It’s not as if your business is booming.”

  “Ma—”

  “Is it?”

  “I wouldn’t say booming but we’re doing all right.”

  “Are you, dear? Really?”

  “Yes, Ma.” Stretching the definition of all right, perhaps, but this was my mother. Telling her how close to the bone we were would only send her to that place we’ve been too many times before: unwanted career advice, which ranked right up there with matchmaking.

  “I wish I knew what it was with you two.”

  What it was—what it had always been—was that Daniel was more successful. A lawyer, and a highly esteemed one at that, senior partner in the firm of Geller, Winston, Lacroix. Married with two adorable boys. A shul-goer, on the board of Young Israel congregation, and a contributor to charity. All the things a mother hopes for or, in the case of a Jewish mother, demands. All the things I wasn’t and felt I’d never be.

  “I’ll call him the minute Marilyn leaves,” I said. “Before the door swings shut.”

  “Just be good to her,” she said. “Do right by her. Her youngest child killing herself … she’s had such a terrible time.”

  “Her husband hasn’t?”

  “Her ex-husband,” my mother said. “And him, you never know what he’s feeling. Half the time I was there, he was taking phone calls. During shiva!”

  “Listen, Ma, I think that’s her at the door,” I said. And no lightning bolt struck me down.

  “At least it’s just a family matter,” she said. “This business you’re in, I worry so much about what could happen to you.”

  “I know, Ma.”

  “No, dear
. If you knew—if you really knew—you’d get into something safer.”

  “That’s definitely her at the door,” I said.

  “You’ll call Daniel?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll be careful?”

  “Like you said, Ma, it’s a family matter. How dangerous could it get?”

  CHAPTER 3

  Marilyn Cantor’s knock, when it came, was barely audible. Two soft taps, a pause, then a third tap. I wouldn’t have heard it had I not been in the front reception area.

  I opened the door and saw a woman of about fifty, dressed casually, comfortably and expensively in jeans and a maroon suede jacket. Five-four, slim, with auburn hair and blue eyes. Deep indigo smudges under her eyes, as dark as if she had recently broken her nose. But I knew from what my mother had told me that she’d endured far worse.

  I introduced myself and Jenn and got Marilyn seated in one of our guest chairs. She declined coffee but when Jenn offered to make tea, she gratefully accepted. “Something decaffeinated or herbal, if you’ve got it,” she said. “I’m having trouble sleeping.”

  As if the dark pouches under her eyes hadn’t told us that.

  “I almost didn’t make it,” she said. “Here, I mean.” She was having trouble making eye contact. Looking around the office, out the window, at the mismatched file cabinets and desks we’d bought at a school board auction. “I spent all morning wondering why I made the appointment. What I hope to accomplish by it. Whether there’s anything to be gained.”

  “Is that why you called to confirm?” I asked. “Most people don’t bother.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think you’re right. I needed to push myself out the door. I needed someone to be expecting me.”

  The kettle came to a boil and Jenn placed a mug in front of her, a bag of decaf English breakfast bobbing on the surface.

  “Tell us about your daughter,” I said. “And what you think we can do to help.”

  It didn’t take any more than that to make her eyes well up. I pushed a box of tissues toward her from my side of the desk. The tears she could wipe away; the dark pouches seemed there to stay.