High Chicago

by Howard Shrier

  “I said, into the trailer. Now.”

  “You’re halfway out of this, Barnett, don’t turn back.”

  “I can’t just let you walk out of here.”

  “Barnett—”

  “What do I know about you people? How do I know who can keep his mouth shut? That one’s a lawyer, for Chrissakes.”

  “We have no interest in pursuing you,” I said. “As far as we’re concerned, you’re Chicago’s problem. Not ours.”

  “And him?” Meaning Avi.

  “He’s in enough shit as it is.” I squatted next to him and pulled his face up by the hair. “Aren’t you, Avi? You’d like to get out of this with your life intact. Right? However much you hate me, you’re not going to bring your family and practice down in flames too, are you?”

  “No,” he muttered.

  “Okay, Barnett? Let us get out of here, now, and leave you to tell what happened. One teller, one story. Far less room for screwing up.”

  “No one’s going anywhere.”

  “You could kill us all?”

  “I’m a Chicago police detective,” he said. “Tell me what I can’t do.”

  “I’ll tell you,” said a voice above him.

  Barnett looked up into the night sky.

  Something metal fell and struck him in the face. A lunch box. He dropped without a word. He lay dazed, bleeding from a cut above his right eye, while Ryan stripped him of his guns, including a .25-calibre belly gun tucked in an ankle holster of his own.

  There was a rustling sound on the roof of the trailer above where Barnett had been standing. Then quiet, then a thud as Gabriel Cross dropped to the ground, wiping his hands of some dirt.

  “I told you not to come here tonight,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “But I’m working on not listening to white men so much.”

  We hammered it out quick and dirty outside the trailer. With Ryan’s gun nuzzling his ear, Barnett had little choice but to nod and accept our terms. Jenn and Ryan would start the drive back that night and I would fly out on the first morning plane, to stay consistent with our means of entry; three tourists going home after enjoying ever too briefly the wonders of Chicago, the Great Lakes’ finest city. Avi would go back to a life that seemed entirely predictable on one level—the good Jewish lawyer, the father of three lovely kids—and beneath it his seething hatred of me, this grudge he’d nursed all these years, this idea that if I had never come to Har Milah, he’d be happily married to a lush beauty, instead of living in clenched misery with a wife as dry as a crumbling leaf. That was his life. Let him go back to it. Neither he nor Barnett could ever implicate the other without destroying himself.

  Barnett would finally solve the Birks’ robbery. He would close the cases on Simon Birk, Chuck Belkin and Charlaine Teal, the woman who played the role of evil chambermaid, whose death he’d also ascribe to Curry. He’d even rescue Henry, the loyal night watchman.

  Gabriel Cross, of course, had vanished before Barnett regained his senses. As far as the official story went, he was never even there. Just like the rest of us. As if that night had never happened. If only.

  Back at the hotel, Ryan and Jenn loaded their few things into the car, got directions to the northbound I-94 and sped off.

  I booked a flight on my laptop, leaving O’Hare at 6:35 the following morning, then fell back on the bed and worked on slowing my breathing, getting it right with the rhythm of my heart and body, instead of the Riverdance thing it was doing.

  Advocating a man’s death the way I had, so cold and logical about it—yes, I did it to keep the rest of us alive, one life to trade for five. And it was probably a conclusion Barnett would have come to on his own. Curry had sealed his own fate the minute he threw Birk to his death. But there I’d been, like Iago whispering in Othello’s ear, a low baritone urging murder to keep the peace.

  Not exactly the kind of world repairs I had set out to make.

  I didn’t think I’d want to be back atop a tall building for a long time. No more CN Tower climbs for charity. No going out on observation decks. Being so high atop a building with another man—someone you deeply feared or mistrusted—gave you an unsettling sense of power: you could end his life with the slightest shove. Birk had clearly felt it, ordering me out on the beam, chucking bolts at me as I clung to a girder below him. And I felt it when I forced him to walk out there. When I threw a bolt at him, making him drop to his beam and cling to it like a frightened child.

  I lay there in a T-shirt and shorts. The king bed was more than big enough but I knew I wasn’t going to sleep for a while, so I appreciated that the ceiling was in good overall repair: no flaking paint, no cracks, no spiderwebs. A chandelier free of dust. The chambermaid had done a good job. Got into the corners. Got the place fresh. Hadn’t slipped in with a knife so far. This hotel was all right with me. I wasn’t so all right with me.

  Maybe that would pass once I had done the last thing I needed to do to close Marilyn Cantor’s case.

  CHAPTER 52

  I walked along the side of Rob Cantor’s house in the light of a pale moon that barely showed the chink in the brick where Perry had tried to take my head off with a shovel. Like I’d ever let myself get beaten by a guy named Perry. Bad enough a Simon and a Francis had almost killed me. But not a Perry. Or an Arthur or a Skippy or a Todd.

  It had been an unusual day, to say the least. I went straight home from the airport, made myself eggs and sat in front of CNN, watching the news surrounding Simon Birk’s stunning demise. There was footage of a covered body beside the unfinished Millennium Skyline tower, surrounded by grim-looking men. There were interviews with police and safety officials, with the network’s business analysts, the Tribune’s architecture critic, Donald Trump and Birk’s other competitors. “You couldn’t really call us colleagues,” Trump said. “Simon saw everyone as competition.”

  There was even a sidebar story on Tom Barnett, the Chicago detective who never gave up on the home invasion, who always believed Joyce Mulhearn Birk deserved to be heard, even if she herself could not speak, and who finally had been forced to shoot down his former partner. The circumstances were under investigation by the Chicago Police Review Authority, but he was being spoken of in reverent tones.

  Once the news of Birk’s death got out, my phone started ringing. My mother called, relieved to hear I was back; I was relieved she couldn’t see me, banged up as I was.

  My brother called. I let his call go to the machine.

  Hollinger called. I let her call go too. What could I say to her that wasn’t offputting or outright incriminating?

  At eleven, Jenn called to say she and Ryan were on the 401 approaching the Don Valley. Ryan had done all the driving, she said, pumped up on coffee and adrenaline. I told her they should come by for breakfast, see Tom Barnett on the news.

  Rob Cantor called while I was waiting for them. “Jesus Christ,” he exploded. “What the hell happened there? Did you see him? Did you talk to him? Did he tell you anything about—”

  “Rob,” I said. “I’m going to have to tell you this in person.” Not over the phone, you idiot.

  “Oh, Jesus. Of course. Look, I’m going into an emergency meeting of our board in about three minutes. It’s going to be nuts, I can tell you, because not one of us has a clue what this means. Can you come by the house later?”

  “How later?”

  “The latest we’ll go is seven because the chair and at least two other members have to catch the last flight to New York. Make it eight to be safe.”

  Ryan dropped Jenn off at eleven-thirty. I offered him more coffee but he waved it off. “Time for me to transform back into a mild-mannered restaurateur. Drive down to the market, hope I’m not too late to get good enough veal for osso buco. And then grab a few hours sleep.” He hugged me and told me to come by Giulio’s later if I was hungry. Then he turned to Jenn, held out his arms. She clasped his right hand and pumped it awkwardly. Just as his frown started to tighten, she sparked into lau
ghter, grabbed him and held him close.

  “He behave himself in the car?” I asked Jenn.

  “You kidding? He’s not such a tough guy after all. We spent most of the drive back talking about cooking. And cooking shows.”

  He said, “Don’t start.”

  “Dante Ryan watches cooking shows?”

  Ryan said to me, “The look I’m about to give you …”

  “Not only does he watch cooking shows,” Jenn said, “he even watches the horseshit reality shows where the chefs throw tantrums on cue.”

  “Once, I told you,” Ryan said. “I watched it once. Most of the time it’s—”

  “Biba,” Jenn beamed. “He watches Biba. She cooks like his Italian nana.”

  “That’s real cooking, is all I’m saying.”

  She patted his cheek. “Thanks for the ride, tough guy.”

  I told Jenn what we needed to do before I went to the Cantor house. She agreed. We made the necessary phone call. The other party agreed—eventually—to provide what we asked for. Being entirely uninjured, Jenn agreed to fetch the item we had just procured.

  Everyone so agreeable.

  I took a hot bath while Jenn was gone. I could almost make fists. I tried to relax, breathe my way into a better state, but I couldn’t even keep my eyes closed. Too hyper, trying to think of everything I knew, of anything I might have missed.

  When Jenn got back, we turned off the news—CNN had nothing new to add to its reports on Birk, now packaged under the banner “A Tycoon Falls”—and played the tape she had retrieved. Played it and played it. Rewinding, fast-forwarding, pausing. Advancing frame-by-frame. Watching people’s heads, shoulders, backs, parcels. Their feet coming and going. The passage of hours. Moments in time.

  —

  I could hear Nina’s workout track going, booming bass and pounding drums getting into my chest like a defibrillator as I knocked on the French doors. And kept knocking, a good ten times over thirty seconds until the sound went down by half and she came to the door.

  She made no pretense of being glad to see me through the glass pane but she did let me in. She wore a dark purple workout suit over a black sports bra. “The shit-kicking detective,” she said. “I thought you were in Chicago.”

  “I’m back.”

  “I can see why. Is all hell breaking loose there or what? Rob is so freaked out about this. I mean, even I’ve been watching the news. Is it all true? Some lunatic pushed Simon Birk off his own building?”

  “Yes.”

  Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest, the forearm muscles well defined. “Why?”

  “Presumably because he was a lunatic.”

  “I mean, why now? Why Rob? He finally has it all in his grasp, he’s got a partner who knows absolutely everyone, every door is open, he’s stepping out in the spotlight, and boom, someone throws Simon Birk off a roof and that’s it? Because the way Rob’s talking, the whole deal is falling apart.”

  “He’s home?”

  “No, he called from the car a few minutes ago to say he was stuck on Bayview where they’re digging up Moore. He’ll be fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  “Is there somewhere I can wait?”

  She looked me up and down. “Wipe your feet,” she said. “Come on back to the gym.”

  I wiped as directed and followed her through the den, past the entertainment unit that took up all of one wall, its centrepiece a mounted plasma TV at least sixty inches wide, with speakers placed around the room to provide full sound. Hundreds of CDs, hundreds of DVDs. If Rob had set them up, they’d be alphabetical; if Nina, by the workout they provided. I noted with relief that among the many video and stereo components was a working VCR.

  In the fitness room, Nina took a white towel off a pile of them and wiped a puddle of her sweat off the base of a stair-climber, then rubbed away dark wet stains on the grips. She tossed the towel into a laundry bin, then took another from the pile to rub her arms and legs, used a third to mop her face and neck. She squatted in front of a mini-fridge next to a stack of free weights that went in pairs from five to twenty-five pounds. She took a bottle of spring water. Offered me one. I decided to match her drink for drink.

  She took a long drink of her water, half the bottle in three or four fierce gulps, wiped her mouth and said, “So do you know what really happened there? More than was on the news?”

  “I know a lot of what happened.”

  “Can you tell me without Rob here? Or is it, like, privileged or something?”

  “First of all, he’s not my client. Marilyn is. And even if he were, you’re his wife. So I think we’re on safe ground.”

  I wanted Nina talking about it. Wanted to see what she would ask me.

  She sat on a gym mat and stretched out her legs, not able to do full splits but coming close, dampness visible in all the expected places. She leaned out over each leg, exhaling slowly. “What are you going to tell Rob about Maya?” she said on an outward breath. Perspiration visible at her dyed hairline, above her lips, between her breasts. “Did they kill her?”

  I said, “Birk was desperate to finish his building in Chicago. He was late, he had hit every possible obstacle, he was jammed up, and this man Francis Curry, the one who killed him, he had made a career out of removing obstacles from Simon Birk’s path. He would do anything to keep Birk going because it kept him going too.”

  “So he killed Maya?”

  “He would have, if Birk had told him to. If he’d thought of it himself. He killed at least three others I know of, two of them right here. He admitted it. He also stood by while Birk beat his wife into a coma. Helped him commit massive fraud. He admitted all that. So did Birk.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “He came close to getting away with it.”

  She turned away from me, stretched herself out over the far leg. “How?”

  “Tape. He had tape of Birk beating his wife, taken off a security camera. I learned a fair bit about these systems while I was down there. And the thing that stands out, Nina, out of everything I saw, is how much power you have over someone once you catch them doing something bad on tape.”

  I figured it was as good a time as any to take the tape I had brought out of my jacket pocket and lay it on the counter above the mini-fridge, with the label facing the wall.

  Nina didn’t ask what it was.

  “Like I told you,” I said, “Birk and Curry did some terrible things. Admitted them … well, not exactly freely but out loud, on tape and in front of a lawyer. But neither of them owned up to Maya. No reason not to—in for a penny, in for a pound—but neither one did.”

  “So she did kill herself. Is that what you came to tell Rob?”

  “No. I wouldn’t tell him that. No one still believes that.”

  “Well, I do. Everyone did, till you came around.”

  “Someone threw her off the balcony, Nina. Someone hoisted her over and gave her a good start off her balcony. Maybe they stunned her first. Choked her out. I thought maybe Rob had, because he had the most to lose if Harbourview went bad.”

  “That’s crazy,” she said. “He would never.”

  “But somebody did. Someone else who wanted that building to keep going up and up. And I came back from Chicago convinced no one there had anything to do with it. I thought about her brother Andrew,” I said. “He’s definitely strong enough to have done it and he’s devoted to his dad and that building. It was a big part of his future.”

  “He never says very much,” Nina said. “At least not to me. Although I’m pretty sure he’d fuck me if he got the chance. I’ve caught him checking me out.”

  “There was only one way to know who went into Maya’s building that night and came out minutes after the fall. And that was to look at the tape.”

  She looked at the cassette on the shelf, then at me, smirking, “There’s no camera in Maya’s building. It’s like a student dump.”

  I swivelled the tape around so she could see the typed label. “It’s
not from Maya’s building,” I said. “It’s from the College View Apartments next door, from the night that Maya was pushed to her death. The security firm keeps digital recordings for thirty days and they let us copy the footage from that night. And we’re going to watch it when Rob gets home.”

  Nina looked at me, her face impassive. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s watch your tape. We can set it up in the den. I can even nuke some popcorn.”

  “Were you there that night?”

  “The night she died?”

  “Did you go to her building?”

  “Watch the tape,” she said. “You can see for yourself.”

  I took the tape and my bottle of water into the den.

  “Don’t sit in the recliner,” she said. “That’s Rob’s when he gets home. And put a coaster under the water, ’kay?”

  I sat, keeping the cassette beside me. I didn’t want to play it. Truth was it showed fuck all. I had thought it would show Nina going in. I had feared it might show Andrew Cantor. But the camera didn’t pan far enough to show the full entrance to Maya’s building: you could see anyone who exited the building and turned to their left, or south. You could see the backs of people going in that way. You couldn’t see anyone who would have exited to the north or come in that way.

  Neither Nina nor Andrew nor anyone else I knew had been captured on the tape. If they had been at the building they had come from the north.

  Nina was strong enough to have thrown Maya over. I saw how much weight she’d bench-pressed with Perry. I had looked at her rangy muscled body, saw the sweat she could generate. But I had screened the video three times and there wasn’t a frame conclusive enough to force her hand if we did sit and watch it with Rob.

  I was sitting on the couch with my water bottle neatly beside me on a coaster as directed. A good guest, someone you’d invite back. For my trouble, Nina came up behind me and slammed something hard and heavy into the back of my head, bang on the occipital bulge. I pitched forward and banged my bad shoulder hard on the edge of the coffee table in front of me. My vision went blurry and I felt nauseous. When I tried to push up on my hands, the floor fell further away. I was concussed and good, like Eric Lindros after a Scott Stevens open-ice hit, looking for the right bench to collapse onto.