High Chicago

by Howard Shrier

  “Like bills and things?”

  “More related to the project he was on.”

  “No,” he said. “Everything was at his office and the police took it. There’s nothing here. Nothing anywhere. Nothing left of my useless fucking life.”

  He started to cry and this time the sobs shook his small frame so hard I thought his bones would break. “What am I going to do?” he moaned over and over again, rocking back and forth as though in prayer.

  Neither of us had an answer for him. All I could think of was to wish him good luck; Jenn, being Jenn, put a hand on his shoulder and then hugged him and told him we’d find out who killed Martin.

  Walking out his door, I almost wished Perry would spring out and attack me again, so I could hit something—someone—anyone.

  CHAPTER 16

  “Homicide.”

  “Only you can make that word sound good.”

  There was a pause and then she said, “Hey, there.” Not exactly warm, but not black ice either. She said, “I’m sorry about last night. Maybe I jumped to conclusions too fast, but you really threw me.”

  “I know. You feel any different today?”

  “Not different enough.”

  “I was hoping I could buy you a coffee.”

  “I told you I’d call you. Anyway, I’m on a murder, and you know what they say about the first twenty-four hours.”

  “What if I can help you with it?”

  “How?”

  “Your victim. Martin Glenn. I know something that you should know.”

  “Like what?”

  “A motive.”

  “On the level? This isn’t some bullshit way of getting us together?”

  “I happened to see him in a screaming match with someone a few hours before he was killed.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ll buy the coffee?”

  “Jonah, you better not be messing with me.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. You can decide for yourself.”

  We met in the lobby of police headquarters at 40 College Street, at the same coffee bar where I’d first looked into those eyes last June, when the cases we were working on converged. We’d agreed to meet here, instead of her office, to escape the prying eyes of her partner, whose dislike for private investigators in general was exceeded only by his antipathy for me in particular.

  “Martin Glenn was working for a company called Cantor Development,” I said. “They’re putting up condo towers in the port lands and his company was cleaning the site.”

  “But?”

  “Something went wrong. I’m not sure what exactly, but I think he was being asked—or paid—to sign off on something that wasn’t kosher.”

  “Details, please.”

  “Like I said, a screaming match yesterday afternoon with the developer, Rob Cantor.”

  “You witnessed this?”

  “I did. Cantor was warning him, telling him to think about Eric before he did anything rash.”

  “That being Eric Fisk?”

  “I assume.”

  “What else?”

  “Eric needed money. A lot of it, more than Glenn could afford on his regular consulting fees.”

  “For what?”

  “You saw him.”

  “I did.”

  “He needs an anti-retroviral treatment that’s available in New York but hasn’t been approved here yet. He’d have to pay cash for it—thirty-five, forty thousand a year.”

  “So you think Cantor was paying Glenn to look the other way on something to do with the building site.”

  “Yes.”

  “But aside from the spat you witnessed, I don’t suppose you have proof?”

  First my brother, now Hollinger. What was it with people and their need for evidence?

  “I don’t have the authority or the means to search Glenn’s home or office,” I said. “You do.”

  “We’ve started on that already,” she said. “But this might help narrow our focus.”

  I said, “You’re welcome,” just as a loud voice behind me cackled, “Well, if it isn’t the cupcake.”

  Crap. Of all the coffee joints in all the police stations in the world, Gregg McDonough had to walk into this one.

  “I was providing information to your vastly superior officer,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “About Martin Glenn,” Hollinger said.

  McDonough lost a little of his swagger. “What would he know about Glenn?”

  “Enough to make it worth listening.”

  “You know the listening thing?” I asked. “It’s when you shut your mouth long enough to hear what other people say.”

  He was a big redhead and his complexion got redder, like a mercury thermometer heating up. “You know, Geller, I liked you last summer,” he said.

  “You hid it well.”

  “For a couple of murders, I mean. Maybe the Super has closed the books on them. Doesn’t mean I have.” And off he went to join the lineup at the coffee bar.

  “How do you work with that lunkhead?” I asked Hollinger.

  “I roll my eyes a lot. I sigh occasionally. Once in a while, I snap a pencil.”

  “There’s something else I should tell you,” I said.

  “About Glenn?”

  “Not directly. A couple of weeks ago, the developer’s daughter, Maya Cantor, supposedly killed herself.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “I don’t think she did, Kate. She went off the balcony of a high-rise and I’m pretty sure someone helped her over.”

  “I don’t suppose you have proof of that either?”

  “There’s proof she had plans for the next day.”

  “I doubt that will be enough to open an investigation. Have you seen the coroner’s report on her death?”

  “I’d like to. Think you could call their office for me?”

  “I can call,” she said. “But it’s really a family member you need to make the request.”

  “Her mother will,” I said.

  And then McDonough was back at our table. “I’ll be upstairs, boss. Working. Whenever you’re ready to get back to it.” Then he laid a paper plate down in front of me and walked away.

  On it was a cupcake. With vanilla icing and sprinkles.

  Hollinger rolled her eyes and sighed. If she didn’t snap a pencil, it was probably because she didn’t have one.

  “You’ll talk to the coroner?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Then she paused, looked into my eyes and smiled.

  I said, “What?”

  “One last question.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have to answer.”

  “Try me.”

  “You going to eat that cupcake?”

  CHAPTER 17

  The Office of the Chief Coroner was located behind police headquarters on Grenville Street, in the same building that housed the Centre of Forensic Sciences. The phone was ringing at reception just as I arrived. The receptionist gave me the one finger/one minute sign, said “Uh-huh” a few times and jotted a few notes down on a pink telephone slip. She said, “All right then. You have a nice day too,” hung up and smiled at me. I showed her my ID and told her Detective Sergeant Hollinger might have called on my behalf.

  “Well, isn’t your timing perfect,” she said. “That was her calling. And a Marilyn Cantor called as well. Have a seat and I’ll check which coroner handled the post-mortem exam.”

  I sat in a grey padded chair, under a framed motto that said, “We speak for the dead to protect the living.” I was afraid to even look at the magazines on the table. What would be on display: Canadian Autopsy? Bone Saw Monthly? Better Hose and Table?

  About ten minutes passed before the door opened and a tall, white-haired man in his sixties peered down at me. He had a smooth, kindly looking face and a firm handshake. “I’m Brian Morrison. I understand you have a question about one of our cases.”

  “A young woman named Maya Cantor.”


  “Normally, we require an access to information request to disclose the results of a post-mortem exam,” he said. “But I spoke to the mother of the girl just now. And I understand a homicide detective called as well.”

  “Will that suffice?”

  “I asked Mrs. Cantor to fax a signed request. Meantime, come on back and we’ll see what we can do.”

  He led me through a quiet, carpeted hallway to an office that was too small and too hot for comfort. The bookshelves were packed so tightly with binders and books that he probably couldn’t have squeezed one more sheet of paper into them. Piles of papers were stacked knee-high around the perimeter of the room. A human skeleton hung from a planter’s hook in the ceiling, twisting ever so slowly in the current of air coming from the HVAC system.

  Dr. Morrison opened a file cabinet and thumbed through files beginning with the letter C. “One day,” he said, “this will all be computerized. Until then, the floors shall groan under the weight of all this paper. Ah, here we are. Cantor, Maya Arielle. Lovely name. Lovely young woman, as I recall. Or was before the fall. So unfortunate. So young to have taken her own life. You have to wonder what goes through their minds these days. One would think they’d find the world as exciting a place as we did in our twenties.”

  Personally, my world had been too exciting at that age. I was twenty-three, just a year older than Maya, when Dalia was killed by a Hezbollah rocket. Twenty-three when I enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces in a misguided search for revenge.

  “What was your question, Mr. Geller?”

  “Was there anything to suggest a finding other than suicide?”

  He frowned. “Well, we discounted accidental death from the start. Her tox results showed the presence of alcohol, but she was well below the legal limit of impairment. And given the height of the balcony wall, it didn’t seem possible that she could have fallen over. So the question then became suicide or homicide.”

  “How do you make that determination?”

  “We look at several things. The injury pattern, of course. Placement of the body in relation to the takeoff point. Presence of a note or other communications at the scene.”

  “You examined her apartment?”

  “The Coroner’s Act gives us that authority. There was no note found in this case. No signs that violence or any sort of struggle took place.”

  “What about her injuries?”

  “You have to understand, when a body falls from that height, the trauma of the impact is so severe, so widespread, that it’s almost impossible to determine whether there were ante-mortem injuries. But there has been some notable research in the field of kinetic motion analysis of late.”

  “In what?”

  “In layman’s terms, how variables such as height and velocity at takeoff determine where a body ought to land in relation to a building, bridge or what have you. If you give me a moment or two to call it up, we can review things from that point of view.”

  He tapped away at his keyboard for a few minutes then said, “Ah.”

  “Ah?”

  He swivelled his monitor toward me. The screen showed a number of parabolas and bell-shaped curves. I looked hard at them—I really did—but they meant nothing to me. That’s what I get for sleeping through high school math, when the only bell-shaped curves that interested me were the ones under Sandy Braverman’s sweater.

  “Rather ingenious, this study,” Dr. Morrison said. “They employed trained gymnasts, divers and athletes to establish the values we use to determine whether a victim simply stepped off into thin air, jumped from a standing position, took a running jump or executed a swan dive, as it were.”

  “And?”

  “In Ms. Cantor’s case, given the distance from the building and the position of her body, we know she didn’t step off and she didn’t jump feet first.”

  “She dove.”

  “Yes. Not with a running jump, of course. The waist-high balcony would have precluded that. But she did land a considerable distance from the building.”

  “So she could have been thrown off?”

  “No one could say that with any certainty. A lot of this research—and perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier—was done with divers landing in water. They tended to hit the surface head first or feet first. With actual jumpers, another part of the body may hit the ground first, which influences the distance from the building itself. In Ms. Cantor’s case, the distance wasn’t conclusive either way.”

  “Hypothetically, then.”

  “You have to understand, Mr. Geller, that this office has been through a very difficult time since the revelations of the Pappas Commission. We’re rather loath to speculate on anything that can’t be proved.”

  Just a few months ago, Justice James Pappas had been asked to investigate how one rogue pathologist with an agenda of his own had been responsible for dozens of people being accused of killing children in their care, when in fact the deaths had been of natural causes. Some had lost custody of their children while under investigation; some had been convicted of homicide and served hard time before their cases were reopened.

  “Let me rephrase it then,” I said. “Is it possible, given the position of her body and the distance from the building, that she could have been thrown or pushed off her balcony?”

  “I think I can grant you that much.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Technically speaking, I still had an appointment with Rob Cantor that afternoon. But I saw no point in keeping it. He’d have nothing to say to me, and I needed more proof—something, anything—before confronting him further. Maybe once I’d spoken to Will Sterling, I’d have what I needed.

  I stopped at the New Yorker Deli on Bay Street and picked up sandwiches, potato salad and coleslaw and drove back to the office. I figured Jenn would be hungry and I certainly was, since Hollinger had commandeered my cupcake.

  I parked in back of our building and took the stairs up, carrying two bags of food. The front door of our office was locked and I wondered if Jenn had gone out. I gripped the bags in one hand and unlocked the door. There was no one in the front room.

  “Jenn?”

  There was a pause before she said, “Back here.”

  “I’ve got lunch,” I said. “And news.”

  I went into the back office and saw Jenn sitting stiffly in her chair. A thirtyish man in a hoodie and jeans too tight for his thick build was standing behind her, his fist curled in her hair. His other hand held the edge of a hunting knife against her throat. The door closed behind me and I saw another man, older, more my age, in a leather coat pointing a gun at me. His jet-black hair was greased back from a widow’s peak halfway down his forehead and he wore a thick gold cross on a chain that hung down to his sternum.

  “What’s for lunch?” he said.

  Eidan Feingold had taught me ways to take a gun away from a man. But the lessons had never included a scenario where your partner was being held at knifepoint.

  “Put the bags down,” he said. “On the desk.”

  I set them down. “There’s roast beef,” I said, “or tuna salad. Take your pick.”

  “Shut up,” the gunman said. “We’re all going to go out that door now. Down the hall to the stairs, quiet as mice. Out into the parking lot and into the car on a drive. You got that, lunch boy?”

  “Crystal clear.”

  “You act nice, you won’t get hurt. We’ll go somewhere, we’ll talk to some people, then we’ll let you go.”

  Sure they would. And a fairy godmother would pave the way back with candy.

  “You do anything stupid,” he said, “and Blondie’s gonna get sliced.”

  “I’ll cut her fucking tits off one at a time,” his buddy said. He had angry red blotches on his face and bad teeth that showed when he grinned. He slipped his free hand inside Jenn’s blouse and cupped one breast. “And wouldn’t that be a shame. She has nice ones. A real handful,” he said and squeezed her breast hard. She grimaced and bit her lips rather than let hi
m see her in pain.

  “Where we going?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” the gunman said. He stepped back and levelled the gun at my chest. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “No thinking,” I said. “Not me.”

  He opened the door and backed out into the anteroom. His partner took his hand out of Jenn’s blouse and stood her up roughly.

  “Walk,” the gunman said to me. He backed his way to the front door and felt for the handle. “Just remember what happens if you fuck around.”

  He kept the gun on me as he opened the door. I tried to keep the surprise out of my eyes.

  Eddie Solomon was standing there with a tray in his hands. It held a steaming carafe and three coffee cups.

  “Ahem,” Eddie said.

  When the gunman wheeled, Eddie threw the tray in his face. The gunman screamed as the hot coffee splashed over him. The heels of both hands went up to his eyes and it was easy for me to grab his gun hand, turn the arm toward the floor, pivot and drive my opposite knee down into it. It broke with a lovely snap, better than I could have hoped for. The arm wouldn’t move again till spring. The gun fell to the floor. I grabbed it before it could bounce and turned to point it at his buddy.

  No need.

  While he gaped at his partner going down, Jenn pinned his knife arm against her chest with both hands, leaned back into him, lifted her heels and brought them down hard on the thigh of his front leg. He howled, charleyhorsed but good, and fell to the floor on his back. The knife clattered away and as he writhed on his side, she rolled onto her knees and socked him hard where his jaw met his chin, all her weight behind it. His eyes closed and his mouth formed an oval. When he tried to stand up she put her boot on his shoulder and sent him sprawling into the chair she’d been in.

  “Who’s the bitch now?” she asked him. “Who’s the bitch now?”

  “Jonah!” Eddie cried.

  I turned to see the gunman barge past him and run for the stairs, cradling his broken arm. I could have shot him, I suppose. But the carpet was already stained from Eddie’s spilled coffee.

  “Lock the door,” I said to Eddie. “And get behind the desk.”