High Chicago

by Howard Shrier

  A tear rolled down his cheek and he wiped it with the back of his hand. “I just wish my sister was here to see it,” he said.

  CHAPTER 6

  I slipped through a curtain into a room that had been painted entirely black. Walls, ceiling, floor, stage, all the same flat black. A square the size of a small bedroom had been taped off on the stage. The tape glowed lightly as if radioactive.

  About twenty people were watching a young man who was sitting at a desk, reading a thick blue book, pencilling notes in its margins. A pretty blonde with dishevelled hair stood behind a line of tape and knocked on an invisible door, stamping her foot twice to provide the sound. The man looked up from his book, his face darkening, as though he’d been expecting—dreading—this visitor. He closed the book and walked to where the woman stood. He mimed opening the door and stepped aside as the woman entered. Before either of them could say anything, an older man sitting in the front row called, “Stop.”

  He was in his forties, muscular, bald with a wispy hairline of implants combed back from his crown. Theo Harris, who had been Maya Cantor’s drama teacher.

  The actor looked at him with a petulant frown. “Why’d you stop us so soon? I didn’t think we got far enough to screw up.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions, James,” Harris said. “I just want to try something here.”

  He climbed up onto the stage and took the actress aside. He whispered briefly in her ear, then went into the darkened wings and returned with something held behind his back. He slipped the object into the pocket of her coat and then climbed down and took his seat. “Once more, please.”

  James sat down at the desk and resumed reading. I moved quietly to the back row of chairs and eased into one.

  The actress stamped her foot again. James closed the book as he had before and went to the door with the same dark look on his face. He opened the invisible door but before he could look away, the actress pulled a small black revolver from her pocket and jammed it against his chest.

  James jumped back with a startled look. “What are you doing? That’s not in the scene.”

  Harris stood again. “You weren’t in the scene, James. You knew before the knock who was going to be there and why she was there. Didn’t you?”

  James stared sullenly at the black floor.

  “Joe Clay doesn’t know who’s there, does he?” Harris asked.

  “No.”

  “If he did, would he open the door? Think of what Kirsten represents to him now. To you. You’ve finally achieved sobriety. You’re finally on the road back to your self. And she is dangerous to you, isn’t she?”

  James’s jaw was set so tightly, the word “Yes” barely escaped.

  “I pulled that little stunt with Alicia because I wanted to see surprise on your face. I wanted to see the look of a man who can lose everything he has in a split second if he isn’t careful. That’s where Joe is right now, isn’t he? That’s where you are if you are Joe.”

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t guess, James. Know. Know that you are on a tight-rope with no net. All you have is the little bit of strength you’ve discovered since you started going to AA. So if it takes a gun to find it in yourself, next time she knocks on the door I want you to see that gun whether it’s in her hand or not.”

  “We were devastated when we heard about Maya. Devastated. This sort of thing happens so often with actors—they’re hardly the most stable beings on the planet—but Maya Cantor? No one saw it coming.”

  We were sitting in Theo Harris’s office one flight up from the theatre, drinking coffee. He was also wolfing down an egg salad sandwich, for which he apologized. “If I don’t eat before my next class, I’ll be tripping from hypoglycemia.”

  “What sort of student was she?” I asked.

  He mulled it over for a moment before answering. “Capable, I would say. She certainly had talent. I wouldn’t say she was gifted, not in the sense that Alicia Hastings is. If you’d seen more of Alicia’s work in that scene today, you’d know what I mean. I never should have paired her up with James. He is so mannered, so constipated emotionally. She blows him away without even speaking.”

  “And Maya?”

  “An attractive girl. An attractive person. Open to her emotions and her instrument. Some students come by it naturally and others have to work at it. Maya was more in the second category and she did work at it—more last year than this, I have to say.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  “My impression? Something else had captured her imagination. Maybe a boy. Maybe another career idea. A lot of kids come in here thinking they’re going to be the next Seth Rogen, the next Ellen Page, but they realize pretty quickly how tough it is out there. Competition for parts in our productions is fierce and to be honest, the U of T program isn’t considered among the elite. The really talented kids go to New York or to Yale or skip school entirely and get right to work.”

  “You think Maya had come to that realization?”

  “It’s possible. She auditioned well enough and acquitted herself honourably in the parts she did get, but like I said, that hardly paves the way for a career in the theatre.”

  “Did she ever seem depressed to you? Despondent about her prospects?”

  “Let me tell you something, Mr. Geller. I have seen some pretty high-maintenance people in my time. Not just as a teacher, but as a director, which I was for many years in the outside world.” He pointed at the wall behind him, where posters of his professional productions of The Threepenny Opera, Twelfth Night, Fifth of July and others had been framed. “I’ve seen actors threaten to kill themselves when they weren’t cast at Stratford or the Shaw Festival. I’ve had students who’ve dropped out—not just out of school but their very lives—when they didn’t get parts they wanted. I’ve had the drunken midnight phone calls, the sob sessions right in this office, even threats … all the histrionics they couldn’t deliver in their work. But Maya Cantor conducted herself quite professionally in everything she did. Last year, she directed Trojan Women, and she handled the cast beautifully, which was no easy task. She had a boatload of drama queens in that one and never lost her cool.”

  “What about the last month or two?”

  “She wasn’t as focused on her work. A few weeks before she died, we held auditions for a production of Women in Transit and she didn’t sign up.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “Let me put it this way: Very few plays have as many good female roles. Every actress in the program auditioned for it.”

  “Did she say why she didn’t audition?”

  “No. Not to me, anyway. I heard she was involved in an outside project—a guerrilla theatre sort of thing where actors confront politicians or business types about one issue or another—but that shouldn’t have prevented her from trying for a part.”

  “You weren’t concerned?”

  “Not really. In retrospect, maybe I should have been. But she didn’t seem down at all. Quite energized in fact. It’s just that her energy was being applied elsewhere.”

  “Was she seeing anyone that you know of? Anyone from her class?”

  He thought about it, then shook his head. “A lot of mingling goes on in a theatre program. People work intensely together. They fall desperately in and out of love. They’re trying on new personalities, in a way. Behaving outrageously, passionately, even foolishly, as if it’s expected of them as artists. Again, Maya didn’t seem to go for that. She knew who she was.” Harris looked down at the papers piled on his desk, snippets of drama written over the centuries, words to be spoken by students vying for their moment in the spotlight.

  “At least I thought she did.”

  CHAPTER 7

  When I got back to the office, Jenn was slumped in her chair looking utterly downcast. If the cloud over her head had been any blacker, the room would have been filling with the smell of ozone.

  “How bad?” I asked.

  “Bad enough to go through the ap
artment of a girl who killed herself,” she said. “But to do it with her mother … I can’t tell you how many times she cried. My shoulders must be soaking wet.”

  “Sorry you had to do it.”

  “You are not. You’re just relieved it wasn’t you.”

  “I won’t argue. So what was her place like?”

  Jenn sipped from a cup of tea. “Neat for a student. Well organized. Nice enough furniture but nothing too fancy. A step above the usual garage sale look. Lots of film posters and theatre books. Lots of music.”

  “Anything stand out?”

  “One thing,” she said. “The kind that makes you go, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ Her bed was made. I stood in her bedroom, wondering who makes their bed in the morning and kills themselves at night?”

  “Maybe someone tidied up after.”

  “Nope. Marilyn said no one has touched anything since she died. Everything’s exactly as it was when they found her.”

  “What else?”

  “She had a laptop but Marilyn didn’t know the log-on or email passwords.”

  “We can get around those.”

  “I told her that. She let me take it, as long as we share everything with her once we get in.”

  “You bring it to Karl?” Karl Thomson owned a shop called Hard Driver, and had helped us set up our computers when we opened our agency. He could crack passwords the way other men crack wise.

  “I dropped it off on the way here. He said he’ll call later today or first thing tomorrow.”

  “What about her phones?”

  “A land line and a cell. Luckily they both stored recent calls, incoming and outgoing.” She passed a handwritten list across the desk, with one number circled. “She got nearly a dozen calls on both phones from this one the week before she died. Called it a lot too.”

  “Cherchez l’homme?” I asked.

  “Let’s call and find out.”

  I dialled the number and turned on the speaker. After three rings, a male answered.

  “Hi,” I said. “Who’s this?”

  “You called me, you should know,” he said. “This a sales call?”

  “No. It’s about a girl named Maya Cantor.”

  “Aw, geez. She’s the one who, um …”

  “Yes. Someone at this number called her a lot.”

  “Not me, man. My roommate.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know if I should give that out. Who are you?”

  “My name is Jonah Geller. I’m working for her family. Trying to find out a little more about why she killed herself. Was your roommate seeing Maya?”

  “Seeing like in dating? No, man, I don’t think they had that going on. Look, tell you what. Leave your number and I’ll give it to Will. He wants to call you back, it’s up to him.”

  I wrote “Will” on the paper next to the number.

  “Tell me something. Is he a theatre student too?”

  “Will? Get out. He’s in enviro studies. Aw shit, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. Ask him yourself if he calls you back.” And he hung up.

  Jenn used the phone in the front room, working through her list of Maya’s friends. I searched a media database for news accounts of the Harbourview project and found one critic repeatedly quoted: a developer named Gordon Avrith, president of a company called SkyHigh Development, which was building a sixty-storey tower at Bay and King.

  When I told his secretary I was calling about the Birkshire Harbourview, she put me right through.

  “What’s your interest in the project?” he asked.

  “Not quite sure yet,” I said.

  “But you’re an investigator, so you must be investigating something.”

  “Must be.”

  “You could start with how he got that piece of land. I bid on that too, but somehow he walked away with all the marbles. Then there’s all the variances they got from city council. Zoning, density, land use. How the OMB rubber-stamped everything despite concerns about the environmental impact.”

  The OMB is the Ontario Municipal Board, the body that resolves land use and community planning issues when the parties involved can’t come to an agreement.

  “How’d he get his variances?” I asked.

  “If I knew that,” Avrith said, “I’d be doing the same damn thing. This business,” he sighed. “Sometimes I think I’d be better off cleaning toilets with a toothbrush.”

  “How well do you know Rob Cantor?”

  “I’ve known him since he worked for his old man. You know his father, Morton?”

  “No.”

  “Christ, I’ve known him since he went by Mendy. It’s a family business, right? Like a lot of these companies. Rob’s grandfather, Abie, was a plumber, worked for a landlord that had buildings up and down Spadina. He saved up enough to buy his own building and when Mendy—sorry, Morton—was old enough to work for him, they bought more buildings. Never built any, just bought. Set up a property management company, and that’s where Rob started out. Cleaning apartments. Painting when tenants moved out. Schlepping out the crap they left behind.”

  “How did he get into development?”

  “He’s a smart kid, I’ll give him that.”

  “Kid?”

  “Hey, to me he’s a kid. I’m his father’s vintage. Older even. I won’t say how old, except to say too goddamn old for the way things are these days. Anyway, he went to school, got a degree in architecture. When his father retired, he took the company in a new direction. Sold off the old buildings and started putting up new ones. Cantor Property Management became Cantor Development. And now he’s hooked up with Simon Birk and thinks the sun shines out of his ass. But I will tell you this. Something is going on with that project. I don’t know what it is—and I got too many of my own problems to hire you if that’s what you’re looking for—but there is no way in hell he got that piece of land without paying someone off. In my humble opinion. Could have been a new addition on someone’s house, a new deck at the cottage. Hell, I once got a councillor’s vote by guaranteeing him a parking spot in his mistress’s building. But proving it?” Avrith chuckled. “That’s another story. They never leave proof, these gonifs, they leave slime trails. Anyway, you’re the investigator, so go find something. And when you do, I’ll buy the party hats.”

  “You have something against Rob Cantor?”

  “He’s competition, isn’t he?”

  I surfed the Ontario Municipal Board website until I had grasped enough of the lingo regarding regulations, legislation and appeal process to call the office of the chairman, Mel Coren. I told his assistant I wanted information about the Birkshire Harbourview project.

  “Are you one of the parties involved?” she asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Either you are or you are not.”

  “Okay, not. I’d just like to ask Mr. Coren—”

  “Mr. Coren cannot comment on hearings or decisions of the board,” she said. “The legislation expressly forbids it.”

  “Couldn’t I—”

  “No, you could not. Copies of all decisions are posted on our website. We recommend searching by case number. Do you have one?”

  “No. I don’t suppose you could—”

  “No, I cannot.”

  “Is there anyone else I can ask about the decision?”

  “No, there is not.”

  Boy, who saw that coming.

  “The Board operates like the court system,” she said. “Allowing staff members to paraphrase or interpret decisions creates a risk of distorting or confusing the original decision. Let ting the written decisions speak for themselves prevents ambiguity and confusion. Are you familiar with the phrase res ipsa loquitur?”

  “No, I am not,” I said.

  “It means ‘the thing speaks for itself.’”

  “You certainly do,” I said.

  Jenn had reached one more of Maya’s friends while I’d been getting frosted by the OMB.

  “He
r name’s Stacy Manning,” she said, “and she’s known Maya since grade school.”

  “And?”

  “More of the same. Maya was the last person she thought would ever do it. She even said, and I quote, ‘I’m more the type to kill myself, or at least threaten it.’”

  “For someone in drama school, Maya wasn’t very dramatic. Did Stacy know anything about Will?”

  “Never heard the name. Speaking of which …”

  “Yes?”

  “Where’s his number?”

  I passed it to her and she dialled it. “Watch how the big girls do it.”

  “Hello?” she said breathily. “Is that Will? Oh … are you his roommate? Oh, hi there. He told me about you. What’s your name again? Evan, that’s right. Evan,” she said dreamily, “when will he be in? Oh. Well, I wonder if you could do me a favour.”

  Evan couldn’t see how beautiful Jenn was, but her voice alone would have made me jump through flaming hoops. I half expected her to break into a chorus of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

  “I met Will at a party the other night and he really wanted my phone number but I usually don’t give it out to guys I don’t know. You know how it is … So he wrote down his number and his name—oh, geez, I can’t even read his last name. Sterling? That’s funny, it looks like Steeling here. So will he be in later, you think? Oh. Okay. No, I’ll try him again. Thanks, Evan. What? Oh, that’s sweet. I hope to meet you too.”

  My eyes had pretty much rolled to the back of my head by the time she hung up.

  “Guys,” she said. “They are so defenceless.” “Let’s hope Will is too,” I said.

  Now that we had his full name, I called the U of T’s Environmental Studies Program.

  “I’m trying to get in touch with a student named Will Sterling,” I told the man who answered.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We can’t give out a student’s number.”

  Okay. At least he’d confirmed Will was a student there. “I’m supposed to meet him before his class tomorrow morning,” I said. “Could you tell me what time it starts?”