High Chicago

by Howard Shrier

  I took Cherry Street south across the Keating Channel, a man-made canal that allowed freighters to get close enough to factories and industries for derricks to unload their goods. The port lands between the channel and the lake had long been home to heavy industry, everything from oil refineries to tire manufacturers. Any new project being built there had to reclaim the abused land. Brownlands, they were called. Turning them green was hugely expensive, which was why they’d been neglected so long. Tracts had been bought by retailers intending to build superstores, then abandoned when they realized how polluted the land really was, and how expensive it would be to treat or replace the soil.

  But some developers were clearly able to absorb the costs. Either they’d been lucky enough to find land that had been used for lighter industry, or they’d conceived projects whose profit margins made remediation worthwhile. And with the blighted Gardiner supposedly coming down, the door had never been more open to reuniting the city and its waterfront.

  I turned east on Unwin Avenue, the last road north of the lake. On the south side was the tree-lined shore of Cherry Beach and its marina, closed for the season now with empty slips and boats in dry dock, but a hive of colour and activity in the summer. There were trees and grass and gorse bushes turned a vibrant autumn red.

  But on the north side, it was all barbed-wire fences and tired-looking buildings. At the far end of Unwin, looming like a poor cousin of the Washington Monument, was the 700-foot smokestack of the Richard L. Hearn Generating Station, decommissioned and mostly abandoned now; the new Portlands Energy Centre was being built alongside it, over considerable opposition from area residents. I drove past great piles of salt and sand used for the city’s roads; hills made of gravel and aggregate; twin peaks of broken stone to be taken to landfill sites; rusted transmission towers standing like sentinels with their arms akimbo.

  According to Canadian Builder, the Birkshire Harbourview was being built on a thirty-hectare tract of land between Lake Ontario and the Keating Channel. I don’t know a hectare from Hector, Prince of Troy, but it seemed like a huge parcel to me. I had to pull close to the edge of the road to let a dump truck rumble past me, coming out of the site with a ghostly cloud of dust billowing out from under a tied-down tarp. I left my car parked outside the site and got a hard hat from my trunk. I keep a number of hats, jackets, shoes and other items there: surveillance work often calls for a quick change of appearance, and hats are an easy way to fool someone into thinking you’re not the same guy they just saw in their rear-view mirror, or behind them on a crowded sidewalk. I also took out a clipboard and a pen, and began a slow circuit around the hoarding that surrounded the site. Each panel had been papered over with images of model suites with sweeping views of the harbour and the Toronto Islands behind them or of the glittering city skyline to the north.

  Informational panels showed how the building would conform to the highest LEED standards for green living. Another showed the price range: starting at $1.5 million for a 1,500-square-foot one-bedroom and topping out at $12 million for a two-storey penthouse unit. And to think I was making do with a thousand square feet at a thousand a month. Then again, my view was every bit as good, even if it showed the city rising out of a dark ravine, and not smiling at its glittering waterfront reflection like Narcissus.

  I walked around the south side to where the park would be. An artist’s rendering on the rear hoarding showed a lush wooded parkland; all I saw was bare, fragile new saplings where said forest would be and fenced-off areas that had been reseeded with grass. The parkland as drawn would connect to Tommy Thompson Park and the Leslie Street Spit, a man-made five-kilometre peninsula jutting out into Lake Ontario, built with landfill as a breakwater and now a favourite spot for weekend walkers, birders, joggers and cyclists. It would host a variety of wildlife—foxes, coyotes, rabbit and groundhogs, cormorants, night herons and of course ring-billed gulls. Their colony just west of the spit is one of the world’s largest: the squawking from their breeding grounds in mating season sounds like a million nails being dragged down a blackboard; the spit itself looks like it’s been paved with dung and feathers.

  Coming back around the north side, I found a gap in the hoarding and got my first good look at the hole itself. The size of a full city block and five or six storeys deep, a quarry whose inner walls had been lined with wooden planks, shored up at intervals by massive timbers. A steep dirt road led down into the hole, its surface showing the herringbone pattern of heavy tires. Dozens of workmen swarmed the bottom, all wearing bright yellow hard hats. Some were on scaffolding, shoring up braces in the corners. Parked down at the centre was a crane, but at its end was a massive auger boring a hole ten feet wide. Near it were holes already finished, into which great steel caissons were being lowered, each as wide around as a fuselage. One dump truck was straining up the road to ground level; another prepared to descend and gather up the earth being dug out of the foundation. The air rang with the whine of machinery, the cries of gulls and the shouts of men trying to be heard above them.

  As I came to the main entrance, a truck with a flatbed loaded with caissons was entering. The driver had his window open, elbow out, cigarette dangling at the end of his fingers.

  “How far down do those things go?” I asked.

  “The caissons? Till you hit bedrock. A hundred and ten feet in this case, maybe one-twenty. Ask the engineer. I just drive ’em in and dump ’em.”

  I stepped away from the truck as the driver shifted into first, and almost turned my ankle in a tire rut. Diesel fumes soured the air around me. Maybe it would smell like a park one day but not today, not with dump trucks and transit mixers coming, going and idling as drivers shot the shit with each other.

  I adjusted my hard hat, hefted my clipboard and entered the site. A sign said all visitors had to report to the office, a double-wide trailer standing on four cement posts. I was walking toward it when the door banged open and a red-faced man stormed down the three steps to the ground and stalked out toward the road. He had blond hair and a moustache and wire-rimmed glasses. Another man appeared in the doorway and called after the blond, “Martin. Martin! Don’t do this. Come back here and talk to me.”

  Neither man had seen me. I eased behind a fenced-in electrical supply unit that had been installed to provide power to the site. From there I got my first look at Rob Cantor, looking every bit as tall, dark and handsome as he had on the cover of Canadian Builder next to Simon Birk, just a touch of grey at the temples and a grey suit with a subtle green weave that gave it a luminous shine.

  “Dammit, Martin!” he called.

  Martin kept going.

  “What about Eric?” Rob yelled. “Have you thought about him?”

  This time Martin turned to face him. His eyes looked like they were tearing up. He unclenched his jaw and said, “I am thinking about him.”

  “Not if you’re walking away.”

  “What would you know about—”

  “I know you should come back and sort this out with me. Thoughtfully, Martin. Carefully.”

  But Martin turned away and didn’t stop walking when Rob called his name again. Rob looked like he was fishing for something else to say, then gave it up and went back inside. I waited half a minute and then knocked and entered.

  Rob said, “I knew you’d come—” then frowned when he saw I wasn’t Martin. He had a set of working drawings spread out on a counter in front of him, his cellphone holding down one side, a hard hat the other. “You from Superior Electric?”

  “No.”

  “Swifty didn’t send you?

  “No.”

  “Then who the hell are you? Swifty was supposed to have his guy here like ten minutes ago.” His cellphone trilled and he held up his hand in a stop sign. One side of the drawing rolled when he picked up the phone and he smoothed it back across the table with his other hand. He said, “Yeah?” and then it took all of two seconds for his face to crease into a frown. “What are you talking, six hundred a ton. I ca
n get rolled steel for that price. Charlie, don’t mess around with this, you’re flirting with the big time and you’re blowing it. Excuse me? No, Mr. Birk does not deal directly with suppliers, Charlie. You have to go through me and at that price, I’m telling you, don’t bother. Get back to me with a price I can live with or don’t get back at all.” He hung up the phone and looked at me. “If you’re not from Swifty—”

  “Jonah Geller.”

  “Who?”

  “Geller. We had an appointment today.”

  “You’re the guy Marilyn hired? Daniel’s brother?”

  “The same.”

  “I don’t believe this. I told Florence to cancel you.”

  “And she told me. But I was passing by so I thought I’d stop in.”

  “What do you mean, passing by? No one passes by here.” His cellphone trilled and he looked at the caller ID; picked it up and pressed answer before the second ring. The plan started to roll up again and he slapped it flat sharply, then shifted a coffee mug onto it.

  “Douglas?” he said. “Have you looked at the brochure? Yes, it’s beautiful. Have you looked closely though? Really carefully? No, I didn’t think so, because then you would have noticed that on page three—you have it in front of you? No? Get it …”

  He rolled his eyes and stared at the ceiling, his body stiff with tension.

  On top of a file cabinet behind him was a three-dimensional scale model of the final site: two point towers joined by a five-storey podium that mixed retail and professional offices. At fifty-four and fifty-five storeys, they would be the tallest buildings in the port lands—for now. The model featured a lush-looking park at the south end; small plastic children were posed as if playing on swings and a jungle gym.

  “You got it?” Cantor said. “Yes? So look at page three. See what it says? ‘Only the finest Carrara marble will grace the lobby floor’? Look again, Douglas. You spelled it c-a-r-a-double r-a. No, that’s not how it’s spelled. It’s c-a-double r-a-r-a. Yes, it’s a big difference. It’s a huge difference. What are we trying to sell people here? What does Mr. Birk stress at every meeting? Quality at every point of contact. We’re telling them this is Carrara marble from the same quarries Michelangelo used. Why bother saying it—hell, why bother getting it—if we can’t spell it right. Rip ’em up, Doug. You heard me. Rip them the fuck up and start over. And it’s coming out of your fee because you’re supposed to proof this shit. I don’t care who signed off on it here. You’re my last line of defence, are you not? Well, you will if you want to get paid!”

  He snapped the phone closed. “Moron,” he said. Then to me: “Why are you still here?”

  “Mr. Cantor, your wife hired me to look into your—”

  “First of all,” he said, “she’s my ex-wife, thank God. Second of all, I’ve got no time for this. I have a giant hole in the ground where two towers are supposed to be.”

  “I’m sorry about your daughter,” I said. “I’m sure it must be difficult to talk about. But your ex-wife just needs to know—”

  “She needs. She needs. Well, her needs are not my problem anymore.”

  “She’s in a lot of pain.”

  “You think I’m not? You think this doesn’t affect me?” He was running his hand through his hair as he spoke, finger-combing it back.

  “I’m sure it does.”

  “I just handle things differently than Marilyn. I’m not the wallowing type. I stay busy. I stay focused. It’s taken me twenty-five years to land a deal like this and I’m not taking my eye off the ball.”

  “Can’t you just give me a few minutes?”

  “To do what?” Still combing his hair back. If he kept it up, he’d have a reverse Mohawk soon.

  “Talk to me about Maya. Tell me why she might have done what she did.”

  “You think I know?”

  Everything about the man—the darting of his eyes, the hand running through the hair, the stiffness in his body—suggested he might indeed have a clue.

  “Maya was the last person you’d expect to take her own life,” he finally said. “She was never one to mope around or feel sorry for herself. She’s—she was—like me. When she was down about something she worked through it, like I’m trying to do now. So if you’ll excuse me—”

  “What did you fight about the night she died?”

  He glared at me. “What? Who said we fought about anything?”

  “Marilyn.”

  “She wasn’t even there so what does she know? Goddammit, I wish that woman would just get on with her life and let me get on with mine.”

  “But there was a fight?”

  “Whether there was or wasn’t is none of your business. I only agreed to see you because I know your brother.”

  “But you didn’t keep the appointment. You skipped out.”

  “Skip—I didn’t skip out. Who the hell do you think you are? My construction director called in sick and I had a problem here I had to deal with. Every minute of every day generates problems on a project like this. I have electricians, architects, engineers, bureaucrats, all with questions that need answers.”

  “Which one of those is Martin?” I asked.

  He stiffened like he’d been kicked in the kidneys. “What do you know about Martin?”

  “You didn’t seem too pleased with him just now.”

  “Join the club,” he said. “Now get off my site. If you’re still here in thirty seconds, I’ll have you thrown out.”

  I held my hands up. “It’s all right,” I said, backing away. “I’m going.”

  Maybe I should have felt sorry for the man, for his unthinkable loss, but he hadn’t made it easy to do.

  Andrew Cantor’s taxi pulled up as I was walking to my car. He paid the driver, and walked toward me with the long cardboard cylinder under one arm.

  I said casually, “I could have saved you the cab fare.”

  “The company pays,” he said.

  “So spare me one minute.”

  “About Maya? Why? What business is it of yours?”

  “Your mother is trying to figure out why she killed herself. She asked me to help.”

  “What are you, some kind of therapist?”

  I had to laugh at that. When it came to therapy, I probably needed it more than anyone I could counsel. “I’m an investigator,” I said.

  “My mom hired an investigator? About Maya?”

  “She needs help.”

  “You’re telling me.” He looked down at the rutted earth around him and scratched absently at his neck, where the old acne scars were. “Look, I have to show my dad these drawings.”

  “Your dad said Maya wasn’t the type to mope about things.”

  “He spoke to you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just now. So help me out here. Help your mom. Two minutes, Andrew. Come on.”

  “You said one minute before. And there isn’t much I can tell you,” he said. “We weren’t that close lately. We used to be when we were little. When we were going to the same schools and summer camps. When we were living in the same house. But we grew apart once I got into the business.”

  “When was that?”

  “After university. I worked summers for my dad while I did my business degree—straight construction jobs, nothing fancy, so I could learn everything from the ground up. Like he did. But Maya never had the slightest interest in business. Not Dad’s, or any kind.”

  “She wanted to be an actress?”

  “Always. And she was good. I always went to see her plays. But she was into other things lately that seemed to get between us.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. All this environmental stuff, I guess. She used to look up to me when we were younger. The older brother, right? Now all of a sudden I couldn’t do anything right. She’d bug me if I was having coffee in a Styrofoam cup instead of a mug. Or because I drive instead of cycling—like I could do that in a suit—or that I don’t take public transit, which I can’t do with all the plac
es I have to be every day. I mean, I don’t care what other people do. I don’t bug them about it. But she was getting obsessive about it lately—like she wanted to impose a carbon tax on everyone.”

  “The night she died, Andrew.”

  His face darkened and his shoulders stiffened inside his coat. “I have to—”

  “Just tell me what she and your dad were arguing about.”

  “I don’t think so. Dad says what happens in the family, stays in the family.”

  “And look where it got Maya.”

  “That’s not fair. You make it sound like it was Dad’s fault she killed herself, and it wasn’t. It’s not like they had a big screaming match.”

  “But they did argue.”

  “Everyone argued. A little.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t even know you. And you’re prying into things …”

  “That hurt?”

  “That are none of your business.”

  “Doesn’t your mom have a right to know?”

  He glared at me for playing the mom card then sighed deeply. “Maya was just being Maya. Getting on Dad’s case about this project.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It started in the den. First she got into it with Nina. Don’t ask me what about. Then with Dad. I didn’t hear everything. Maya was afraid this project would have a big impact on the environment. Maybe a few ducks would lose their habitat or something. Which is bullshit.”

  He pointed to the southern expanse of the job site, where a lone Canada goose was drinking from a small stream that had formed in ruts left by giant tires. “All that is going to be parkland,” he said. “Twelve per cent of the land. And we were only required to allocate ten. There will be grass and trees and ponds.” He swallowed hard a couple of times. “It’s all going to be beautiful. The park, the marina, the residences, the shops. All of it. And we’re the ones building it.”