High Chicago

by Howard Shrier

  I heard the rustling of paper … “Enviro 1410,” he said. “Starts at 9:30. You know where the Earth Sciences Building is?”

  “Do tell,” I said.

  Jenn was looking at the list of phone calls Maya had made during the last week of her life. “Between calls to her mom, her dad, her girlfriends and Will Sterling, I think we’ve accounted for all of them,” she said. “Except this one.”

  It was a 312 area code—not a local call. I dialled it, listened for a moment and hung up without saying a word.

  “What?” Jenn asked.

  “That,” I said, “was the office of Simon Birk.”

  CHAPTER 8

  What are we doing wrong?” Jenn sighed.

  We were scrolling through floor plans of the penthouse units of the Birkshire Harbourview website, logged in as prospective buyers. As if.

  “Those twelve-foot ceilings … those windows … those views. And that kitchen, my God, it’s bigger than my whole top floor!”

  “We’re not doing anything wrong,” I said. “We just don’t aspire to that lifestyle.”

  She flashed me a look that was both contemptuous and somehow compassionate. “How little you know me,” she said.

  “Never mind, Ivana. Go to the part where the man himself speaks.”

  She clicked on a feed of a video Simon Birk had recorded the previous spring, when his partnership with Rob Cantor had first been announced. He stood at the top of a skeletal iron tower in Chicago, many storeys above the city, wind ruffling the hem of his overcoat.

  “My name is Simon Birk,” he told the camera. “And some of you may have heard of me.” A grin at his own joke, his capped teeth white as virgin snow. “You’ve seen my name on some of the greatest buildings on the continent. You’ve stayed in my hotels, played in my casinos, eaten in my restaurants and danced the night away in my clubs. You may think of me as a man who builds towers like this one, Chicago’s own Birkshire Millennium Skyline, scheduled to open next spring. But what I really build, my friends, are dreams.”

  The camera moved in closer. Birk was not a handsome man in any conventional sense. He had a bulbous nose, fleshy lips, bushy eyebrows, and a thick bony ridge hooding his pale blue eyes. Yet it was a face that commanded your attention.

  “What are your dreams? That somewhere in your great city of Toronto, a city I love almost as much as my native Chicago, is a residence that reflects your desires, your aspirations, your success? Built by a man who spares nothing, cuts no corners, to bring you the very best in luxury living?”

  “Think he’s impressed by himself?” I said.

  “I choose my projects carefully,” Birk was saying. “And my partners even more so. So I’m delighted to be working with Toronto’s finest developer, a man who shares my drive for perfection in every detail, Rob Cantor of Cantor Development. Together, we are creating an unforgettable domain where you’ll be surrounded by the best of everything: Indonesian hardwood, granite countertops, travertine marble and stainless steel appliances. You’ll know from the moment you visit this website—or even better, our model suite—that this is where you want to live.”

  “My kingdom for a Dramamine patch,” I moaned.

  “Shut up,” Jenn said. “My aspirations are climbing by the minute.”

  “To meet your expectations,” Birk said, “we have sought out only the finest craftsmen, the finest goods, to bring you the new crown jewel of the Toronto port lands, the Birkshire Harbourview. For a virtual tour of the complex, just click on the link below. Better yet, click on the green link to join our exclusive mailing list.”

  “How exclusive can it be if anyone can join?” Jenn muttered.

  “These magnificent residences will sell out fast,” Birk said. “We anticipate every unit to be pre-sold before completion, so—”

  Jenn had finally had enough too. She clicked off the web feed and left Simon Birk in mid-sentence. Something, I guessed, not too many people did.

  “Hey,” she said, looking at her watch. “Don’t you have a date to get ready for?”

  “Won’t take me long.”

  “You’re not going out dressed like that, are you?”

  “You been talking to my mother?”

  “Seriously. Why don’t you knock off?”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll hang here awhile,” she said. “Karl said he might swing by with Maya’s computer after he closes up.”

  “He cracked her password?”

  “Like an egg, he said.”

  “That’s our boy. It’ll be interesting to see what’s on there,” I said. “Because no one so far has a clue about why Maya did it. Her mother, brother, father, even her theatre prof: can they all be in denial?”

  “It’s the same with her girlfriends,” Jenn said. “They were just as sure—insistent, even.”

  “She was a doer, Jenn. She wasn’t withdrawing from the world, giving her things away, dropping hints, crying out for help. She’d never attempted suicide before, and how many people succeed on the first try? She was energetic, involved, engaged in things. And by all accounts, she wasn’t faking it.”

  She looked at me across the desk. “Her mother said it couldn’t have been an accident, not with that high wall around the balcony.”

  “You check it out?”

  She nodded. “It’s more than waist high on me, and I’m six feet. Marilyn said Maya was five-seven.”

  We sat for a moment in silence, broken only by the hum of machinery, traffic on Broadview, the sound of our breathing, the beating of still-living hearts.

  “Why did she call Simon Birk?” I asked.

  “Maya?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s her father’s partner.”

  “What could he tell her that Rob couldn’t?”

  “Or wouldn’t.”

  “We know she had a fight with Rob the night she died.”

  “And she had a bug up her ass when it came to the environment.”

  “We know a lot of the port lands are polluted.”

  “Except they’d have had to clean the site before they started building. Wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes. You can’t break ground without an environmental assessment. The soil and water have to be analyzed and cleaned first.”

  I sat back down at my desk and went back to the Birkshire Harbourview’s web page, then clicked onto a link that listed all the partner firms involved: the engineers, architects, banks and construction company.

  The engineering firm that conducted the water and soil testing on the site was called EcoSys.

  “Check this out,” I said to Jenn.

  The founder and chief executive officer of EcoSys was one Martin Glenn.

  CHAPTER 9

  I did indeed change my clothes for my date with Katherine Hollinger. I showered and shaved and put on clean black jeans and a black shirt that I smoothed on my dresser with my hands—one day I’d buy an iron—and over that a black cashmere blazer, the one jacket in my closet that didn’t look like it had been fished out of a donation chute.

  Hollinger lived in a condo on Bay near St. Joseph. I took the Bloor Street Viaduct across the Don River Valley, watching the last light of the setting sun through the Luminous Veil, two walls of metal rods built on either side of the bridge to keep people from jumping. The viaduct had been the city’s main suicide magnet for years, the combination of the fall and oncoming Parkway traffic a guarantee of success. I doubted the Veil had cut the number of suicides, just shifted them elsewhere: another bridge, a subway, a razor or pills. Dorothy Parker had once written a poem about the many ways to do yourself in, but each had drawbacks, she wrote, so you might as well live. Maybe they should have etched those words in the stone of the viaduct, instead of spending $5 million installing the Veil’s nine thousand rods.

  I parked in front of Hollinger’s building and entered the lobby. She was waiting there for me, her black hair tied back in a simple ponytail, leaving more of that face to savour.

&nb
sp; “I figured I’d save you the trouble of parking,” she said. “You leave your car here for a second and they ticket you.”

  All I could think of to say was hello.

  “Hello yourself,” she said and leaned in and kissed my cheek. Whatever scent she wore was lightly floral; just a trace of it to cloud my thoughts. When she stood back, I took a long, slow look at her. I could see murder suspects confessing just to keep her eyes on them, just to win a smile.

  “Jonah?”

  “Yes?”

  “Shall we go?”

  “Go?”

  “They don’t serve food in my lobby.”

  We drove to the entertainment district, where old warehouses on Richmond, Adelaide and surrounding streets had been turned into massive nightclubs that turned drunken patrons out into the streets by the thousands at closing time. Spewing, pissing, weaving around in search of their cars, getting into fist fights over nothing. Occasional gunshots ringing out, usually directed at bouncers who had turfed out punks whose manhood was measured by the length of a gun barrel.

  At this time of night, though, it was peaceful, the coloured lights of restaurant signs sharp and clear in the brisk autumn air. The temperature had dropped. Hollinger had drawn her coat closer around her as we walked up John Street. I wanted to put my arm around her, warm her the way her eyes warmed me, but it seemed a little soon for that. Maybe on the way out, with a good meal and a glass of wine or two inside me.

  A black belt in karate, an expert in Krav Maga, a guy who could dismantle most opponents before they knew they were in a fight, and I felt like a hapless schoolboy around this woman.

  Man, it felt good.

  Then I saw the name of the restaurant we had stopped in front of, and my stomach dropped like an elevator whose cables had snapped.

  It was called Giulio’s.

  She had said it was a place that served real southern Italian cooking. I should have asked the name. Because there was no way in hell I was going in there, not with Hollinger. One look at the owner, one hint that he and I had a relationship, and I’d be lucky if all she did was slap my face and walk out. Lucky if I didn’t wind up cuffed.

  Giulio’s was now owned by none other than Dante Ryan, once a notorious hit man for the crew run by Marco di Pietra. He had told me this weeks ago on the phone, thanking me for my help in getting him out of the contract killing line and into something he could live with, telling me I’d never have to pay a bill in the place. That I could put my name on a stool at the bar. He’d told me how the man who had run it for forty years, Giulio himself, seventy pounds overweight and proud of it, had finally been ready to retire just when Ryan was looking to buy a place. He said he was keeping the name, the staff and most of the menu, adding just a few dishes from his mother’s own collection of Calabrian recipes.

  He said he was there every night, menus in hand, greeting guests the way Giulio did, even putting on a few pounds for the cause.

  So how exactly was I going to explain to Hollinger—a cop who’d spent the last four months pondering the deaths of the Di Pietra brothers and their associates—that Dante Ryan was a personal friend of mine.

  “Uh, listen,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  “Why? I thought you liked Italian.”

  “I, um …”

  “What?”

  “I had Italian for lunch.”

  “Jonah. We agreed on Italian before lunch. Why would you—”

  “I forgot.”

  “You forgot?”

  “My client took me out. She insisted on Italian.”

  “I can’t believe—”

  “Plus this place got a shitty review.”

  “Where?”

  Grab that shovel, Geller. Dig yourself a deeper hole.

  “One of the papers.”

  “Which one?”

  “Come on, Kate. This street is full of restaurants.”

  “All of which require a reservation, which we happen to have at Giulio’s.”

  “You don’t feel like a good steak or something?”

  “If I did, I would have made reservations at a steak house. Jonah, what’s going on?”

  “I just don’t feel like Italian.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, tightening up, widening the space between us. Pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to see across it. “This is not starting well,” she said.

  “Greek?” I asked.

  “Fuck Greek and fuck steak. There’s something you’re not telling me and I don’t like it. I get lied to all damn day, Jonah. I get lied to by suspects, by snitches, by reporters—Christ, half the time by my partner. I do not need it from you.”

  “Kate …”

  “What!”

  I put my hands on her shoulders. They didn’t relax one bit. “I can’t.”

  “Tell me why. Right now and no bullshit. I have a very keen detector for it and I’m this close to calling it a night.”

  “Walk with me for a minute,” I said.

  —

  I don’t claim to know how many people Dante Ryan killed during his time in the Mob. I do know he was in it some twenty years, and he hadn’t spent his time stuffing envelopes. Then he was given a contract that required him to kill a five-year-old child, a boy the same age as his own son, Carlo, and he hadn’t been able to do it. He sought me out and demanded my help in finding out who had ordered the hit, determined that the boy not be part of the price the father had to pay for trying to get free of a Mob enterprise.

  We did it, too. Saved the lives of the boy and his parents. Saved each other too. And somehow became friends. Ryan had decided by then he had to get out of his old life in order to save his marriage, his soul, and I had helped. He had helped me too, in his own way. If it wasn’t for our misadventures, I’d still be at Beacon Security, working other people’s cases instead of my own. And there was a spark to him you don’t find in everyone, a warmth you wouldn’t expect in a man who had done all that he had done in his life. An old-fashioned devotion to his family. Generosity and loyalty to anyone he considered a friend.

  I could explain it to myself, rationalize it a dozen different ways. But what could I say to Hollinger, who was searching my eyes with hers, hoping for some truth.

  We found a table at a small café a few doors down from Giulio’s. The hostess told us they’d had a last-minute cancellation and took our drink orders: Black Bush for me and a vodka martini for Hollinger. It gave me a few more minutes to look for a starting point to my story. I was still looking for it when the drinks arrived.

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” I said.

  “Great opening, Geller. I’m brimming with confidence.”

  “Do you know who owns Giulio’s?”

  “No,” she said. “Should I?”

  “No. But you would have if we’d gone in there.”

  “Why?”

  I sighed like a shot-out tire. “Does the name Dante Ryan ring a bell?”

  There was a candle in an amber glass on our table. Its flames were dancing in her eyes, until they narrowed and the reflecting flames grew smaller. She said, “Alarm bells. Big loud ones.”

  “He’s the owner.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I get it. You were trying to protect me, is that it? You thought I’d be uncomfortable, vulnerable somehow, eating in a place owned by a mobster?”

  She had given me the perfect out. But taking it wouldn’t have been right. If Hollinger and I were going to go anywhere, she needed to know the truth—at least about this.

  “There’s more to it,” I said.

  “How much more?”

  “For one thing, he’s not a mobster anymore. He’s out of the life now.”

  “No one gets out of that life.”

  “He did.”

  “Even if that’s true, I’d like to know how you know it.”

  The look she was giving me made me feel like we were back in the interview room at police headquarters.
“He’s a friend,” I said.

  “Dante Ryan is a friend of yours? The same Dante Ryan we’ve looked at for, I don’t know, half a dozen killings?”

  If all they’d looked at was half a dozen, it had to be because of jurisdictional issues. The other killings must have taken place in Hamilton, Peel Region, or areas covered by the Ontario Provincial Police.

  “Yes.”

  She sat back in her chair, arms across her chest again. “And he’s a friend of yours.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not just a passing acquaintance.”

  “No.”

  She said, “Well. This is surprising, to say the least.”

  “You understand why I didn’t want to—”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “I never expected it would come up. Not tonight.”

  “That makes two of us. So was he out of the life when you became pals?”

  Cue the sound of a toilet flushing. Any chance I had of a relationship with her was swirling down the tank and into Lake Ontario. “No. He was still in his previous occupation.”

  “Hired killer.”

  “He worked for Marco di Pietra. I’ll leave it to your imagination what he did.”

  “Do yourself a favour. Don’t.”

  The waitress picked that moment to lay two menus on our table. Then she pointed to a blackboard where the evening’s specials were written in coloured chalk. Pink for the meat dish, yellow for the fish, white for the pasta.

  Blue for the mood.

  “Please give us a minute,” Hollinger said to the waitress.

  “No worries,” she replied.

  When she was gone I said, “I never hired Ryan, if that helps.”

  “Be serious, damn it. Jonah,” she said, trying to rein in her anger, keeping maybe half of it in check. “I’m not like you, I didn’t just fall into being a detective. From the day I started in the Niagara Regional Police, I wanted to be a detective, and from the day I made detective, I wanted to be Homicide. There are thirty-two of us, not counting support staff. We’re the elite. We do the best work, get the highest job satisfaction ratings on internal surveys. Wear the best suits. Life satisfaction isn’t always the highest—way too many of us are divorced—yeah, me too.” The first small grin. “Another cop in Niagara, a hometown boy. I left him behind when I was offered the Toronto job. The point is, they call us the Snappy Suits for a reason. It’s all men, except me. There was another woman, Carol Wisnewski.”