Ogrodnik

by Gary Coffin

  Elliot put the picture down and refocused. He surveyed the room from the perspective of the desk chair, but nothing jumped out at him, so he got up and inspected the bookcase and its contents. They consisted of a mix of medical journals, medical reference books, and bestsellers from the last twenty years. They were all carefully organized in an order that only his father would understand, possibly sorted alphabetically by size. He walked along the shelves pulling the occasional piece that looked like it had been stuffed into its cranny recently but didn’t find anything relevant. There was a light layer of dust on the front edge of the shelves except for the edge in front of some pharmaceutical reference books. He inspected them briefly, found nothing out of the ordinary and returned them to their original places. On the shelf below the pharmaceutical books, there was a newspaper folded and shoved in on top of the row of books. Finding a newspaper was not unusual given the assortment of periodicals his father kept stashed in the shelves, but this was the financial section of the Montreal Gazette from March 3rd, four weeks before the murder. His father didn’t have the paper delivered to the house anymore, so he had gone to some trouble to bring the paper into the house and stash it on the shelf. He folded the paper and put it in his backpack so he could examine it in detail later.

  He checked the family room, the master bedroom, and the bathroom, but noticed nothing unusual or out of place. That brought him back to the kitchen.

  Again, nothing out of place, but on the wall was one of those calendars where each day had a square in a month long grid. His father used the squares to jot down appointments and phone numbers. There were three memos jotted down, one in March and two in February.

  On February 8th, there was a memo to have supper with Elliot. He has one child, and he needs to write down his birthday as a reminder? he thought.

  On February 17th, he had an appointment with Dr. Baldwin. Since his father was out of the practice, he needed a GP, and he had chosen long-time friend and associate, Dr. Ray Baldwin. Elliot would talk with Dr. Baldwin.

  Finally, a week before he was killed, he had a phone number and the name Dr. Alex Banik; Elliot didn’t know the name. He took the calendar and put it in his backpack along with the newspaper. Having already exhausted the few places he thought might tell him about his father’s activities, he left to go back to the office.

  Elliot’s drive to the office took him from lower Westmount, where his father lived, and west along Sherbrooke Street for a mile or so. His father’s section of Sherbrooke was a mix of high-end residential and open park areas, and as he drove west, it gradually became more retail oriented. By the time he arrived at the corner of Marlowe, the makeup of Sherbrooke consisted primarily of boutique shops and family run restaurants at street level with rentals on the floors above. The JFK Investigations office was in a second-floor walk-up above a greasy spoon called Sammy’s Diner. Elliot ducked into Sammy’s to get lunch.

  “Sammy!”

  “Elliot, my friend. How are you doing? What can Sammy do for you today?”

  Sammy’s Diner consisted of a table and four chairs on each side of the door as you walked in and a counter facing that was five stools long. The air was filled with the delicious odor of fried onions and fried something else that he couldn’t put his finger on. The button stools would be right at home in any '50s diner, and he took his place on the stool at the far right.

  “Gimme one of your famous steak and pepperoni subs with jalapenos and a medium poutine to go.”

  “Coming up, mon ami.”

  Sammy was a substantial, swarthy man from undetermined Mediterranean heritage, who may have learned his English at pirate school. What little hair he had was more salt than pepper, and it matched the color of the perma-stubble that covered his face. He wore a spare tire around his middle that stretched his apron tight and provided a nice resting place for a pair of Popeye-esque forearms.

  “You missed the language police last week,” Sammy bellowed over the sizzle of the fixings for the sub on the flattop. “The little prick comes in and wants me to change my sign outside. Seventeen years I have that sign, and all of a sudden it’s illegal,” he said as he raised his shoulders up into his neck.

  “They tell me I have to take it down or get rid of the apostrophe in Sammy’s Diner. He tells me it’s not French enough. I said, 'Bend over and I’ll show you a fuckin' apostrophe.' So the prick pulls out his ticket book and says he’s going to write me up and give me a fuckin' ticket. You believe that? A ticket for having an effin apostrophe on my sign.” His voice increased in intensity, and he waved his arms. Elliot pointed at the flame starting to rise out of the sub fixings to re-focus him. Sammy flipped the pile of meat and veggies and returned to his story.

  “I tell him, wait a minute. I get my tin snips from the back, get up on a bloody chair, cut the effin apostrophe out of the sign, put it in a paper bag and say, ‘Here ya go, dickwad. Take this back to your asshole buddies at the language office, so you can all celebrate what you’ve accomplished today.’”

  Sammy chuckled at his own cleverness, and Elliot knew better than to interrupt him when he was in the middle of a rant.

  “And if that wasn’t bad enough, I had a couple of assholes here two days ago. Two bloody skinheads came in at 6:00 in the morning looking like they just walked through Moses’s fuckin' desert for forty years and wanted a Sammy Special to go. I took one look at the pricks and said, “Pay me in advance.' The ugly one, they were both ugly but the uglier one, picked up a salt shaker, threw it at me and called me a fuckin' Nazi. I chased them out of here with my cleaver, and then yesterday morning I find an effin swastika spray painted on the window! One hour it takes me to scrape that shit off, and it still looks like hell. If I see that fucker again, I’ll put his head in the goddamn sandwich press and make a Reuben out of his face!”

  The idea of making a Reuben out of the guy's face made Sammy grin as he spatulaed the innards for the sub onto the bun.

  “Okay, Chief, here’s your sub. Is the poutine for Rivka? If so, I’ll put some extra cheese in it just the way she likes it, and you tell her I did that for her special.”

  “It sounds like you have a thing for her.”

  “Elliot, I’d like her to spank me like an empty ketchup bottle.”

  “Thanks for the visual, especially right before lunch.”

  “No problem. Just so you know, I like my women the same way that I like my peanuts. Meaty enough to chew on and a little dried salt on the outside to lick off.”

  “You old smoothie. How is it that you’re still single?” said Elliot as he made his way out of the diner and upstairs to JFK.

  The JFK office furnishings were sparse. At the front of the room was Elliot’s office overlooking Sherbrooke Street. It was separated from the rest of the office by a pair of sliding pocket doors that were only closed if a client meeting was in progress. The larger area had two desks with phones and computers and a sitting area with a couch and a couple of chairs at the back right of the room. An alcove at the back left of the room hid a tiny kitchenette area and the door to the bathroom. Over on the left-hand side of the office, partially tucked into a nook, was Elliot’s pride and joy: a vintage barber chair. The padded portions of the chair were covered with green leather, and the rest of the chair was chromed metal except for the fluted stand that was painted to look like porcelain. Rivka called it his thinking chair, but Elliot liked to call it his throne of deduction. On the two walls that partially bounded the chair were an oversized corkboard that was used to pin items of interest on and a whiteboard where he could illustrate his thoughts, sit back and study them from the barber chair.

  The only art on the walls was an enormous framed reproduction of Monet’s "La Promenade." It was a famous painting of an elegant lady in the foreground standing in a field while holding a parasol and a little boy in the background looking on. The lady was looking back toward the artist with a wistful expression that made Elliot think she was sad. He knew that deep inside, there we
re psychological connections between the painting and his childhood memories, but he chose to ignore those and appreciate the painting for what it was: a beautiful piece of art.

  JFK Investigations was founded four years ago at Sarah’s urging. Most people who study criminology do so with the intent of going into law enforcement of some kind. Elliot also had those ambitions but was never able to cut his umbilical cord with the university. In retrospect, he thought that school was his safety net. His father had always wanted Elliot to follow him into medicine and, despite his father’s efforts; he had resisted and gone into his own true love, criminology. He knew that his father was disappointed in him for that decision as he was often reminded that he could be so much more than "just a cop." Elliot’s inability to pull the trigger on a career outside of the university was probably founded on that disappointment. In his mind, as long as he was still at the university, then Dad’s disapproval of his career choice could never be validated.

  Over the past four years, the business had grown to be self-sustainable. The bulk of the work at JFK Investigations was chasing down insurance claims, missing persons, or dealing with suspicious wives and husbands. That was a far cry from Elliot’s lifelong vision of dispensing justice against all odds, but it paid the bills.

  Elliot entered the office and saw Rivka from behind leaning back in her chair with her feet up on the desk while painting her nails.

  Peeking out from underneath her sleeveless shirt was the edge of a tattoo that he’d never noticed before. Although he only saw a portion of it, he knew it was a blocky letter M with a circle above that signified she was an Ironman competitor. The Ironman competition personified who Rivka was, five foot ten of stubborn tenacity with zero body fat. She didn’t look up or acknowledge Elliot when he entered; she was like that, as if she considered herself on display for all to see. He walked around the desk and regarded her as she continued to ignore him.

  Although she worked out daily, she had yet to develop the lean, sinewy look that many extreme athletes acquire and still carried herself with a gracefulness that contradicted her Ironman conditioning.

  If one looked at her face in sections, they might comment that her eyes were too far apart, her nose hooked too much, or her lips too thin, but in her case, the entire face was greater than the sum of its parts. So unusual and fascinating was her face that you’d want to stop and study it for longer than was appropriate and, having broken off your scrutiny before it became awkward, you’d attempt to resume your inspection whenever the chance presented itself thereafter.

  As usual, her hair was tied. Some days, she wore it up in a haphazard fashion like a frayed knot that, despite its chaotic mien, still managed to look like it was meticulously styled. Today, she wore a ponytail; it was her style of choice, especially when working out.

  She looked up at Elliot with a big grin when she finally acknowledged his presence and the word vibrant flashed across his mind.

  "Nice nails. Big date with Angela tonight?" Elliot commented as he noticed Rivka’s freshly painted lime green nails.

  "Not likely, we're no longer seeing each other," she said a bit too flippantly.

  "I’m sorry to hear that. You two were so good together. Where did it go sideways?"

  "You know, shite happens."

  "You dumped her?"

  "No! I didn't dump her,” she blurted. “We came to a point where we wanted different things in our relationship, that’s all."

  "You wanted different things so… you dumped her."

  "No!"

  "Well...."

  "She had commitment issues."

  "She didn't want to move in with you?"

  "No. That wasn’t it.”

  "She wanted an open relationship?"

  "No."

  "She didn't want to give you a drawer in her dresser?"

  No response.

  "That's it. She wouldn't give you a drawer in her dresser, so you dumped her?"

  "Kutas! It was me! I didn't want to move in with her."

  "Oh. That sounds like your commitment issues, not hers."

  "I liked the relationship the way it was. Angela wanted more, you know, a condo in the village, hers and hers bikes in the driveway, 2.3 cats. That isn’t for me.”

  “Well, I can’t argue you with you, Riv. You want what you want.”

  “Now that you’re finished deconstructing my personal life, can we get down to business? Tell me about your father’s case.”

  “Before we start, did you follow up on the Jablanski case? $50k is a lot of money for a missing person gig, even if it is his wife. “ 

  “Yeah, well, normally I'd say he must really love her, but in this case, I'll not go there,” Rivka replied.

  “Tell me more.”

  “I talked to Mr. Jablanski a couple of days ago,” Rivka started. “He lives in Toronto and is looking for his missing wife and daughter. The wife ran away a couple of years ago and took the teenage daughter with her. Two weeks ago, a mutual friend saw the wife while visiting in Montreal. After we had talked, Jablanski sent me an old photo of the wife along with a short bio.”

  She passed over the folder as she talked, and Elliot pulled out the photo of the missing wife. The wife wouldn’t be pleased if she saw it. It was a black and white photo like you used to see of Hollywood movie stars. It showed a thirty-something woman who may have been good looking if she invested more effort into her looks. Her blond hair was pulled back so tightly that the shape of her head was evident, and the ear that was visible had a row of small studs from the top of the outer ridge all the way down to the lobe that guided the eye down to a tattoo of a butterfly on her neck beneath the ear. It wouldn’t have mattered how pleasant her features were because one couldn’t help but focus on her mouth. In order for all her teeth to fit in her mouth, they grew in sideways or on top of each other and reminded Elliot of a British lamprey. On the bottom of the photo was a signature in pink felt pen that spelled Nikki and the i’s were dotted with stars.

  “Nikki. I guess that name is no longer being used,” Elliot asked.

  “No, and Jablanski didn’t know of any aliases she might be using, at least none that he hadn’t already searched for.”

  “What do you know about Mr. Jablanski?”

  “I had Stella run a background check on him,” Rivka replied. “He owns two peeler joints in Toronto and has a long history of marginal behavior. He has been charged three times with aggravated assault on the dancers but has never been convicted. The dancers always withdrew the complaint. Oh yeah, and he’s never been married.”

  “Sounds like a nice guy,” he said.

  “He is also alleged to have connections to the Polish mafia.”

  “Poland has a mafia?” Elliot asked. “What, there’s a black market for cabbage rolls now?”

  “Feh. They deal in the trifecta of criminal activities that fuel all organized crime: drugs, gambling, and prostitution. They’ll bring young Eastern European girls into the country illegally to dance in their clubs with the promise of a new and better life in North America. The girls get here, and by the time they realize that they’ve been duped, it’s too late. They are here illegally, so they have no legal recourse. The club owners are little more than glorified pimps, and no matter what abuse they put the girls through, the girls have no other options. When the girls start losing their looks, they are shipped back with nothing more than some pocket money and a drug habit. My bubbe in Israel has a name for guys like this,” said Rivka with an edge in her voice.

  Elliot looked at her and raised his eyebrows waiting for her response.

  “Assholes,” she said.

  “She looks too old to be a stripper,” said Elliot as a question.

  “She’s probably an ex-stripper. Strip club owners often keep one of the ex-dancers they trust to manage the girls. Because of their dancing background, these handlers are accepted by the girls, and the owners let the handlers run the operations portion of the dancing business.”


  “If that is the case, then it sounds as though this one may have been more than just his manager. More like lover and mother of his child. Fifty grand is a nice finder’s fee, but I don’t want to pursue this one. Why do you suppose he sent the letter to us? And why not phone the office?”

  “The original looks like a form letter. He probably sent one out to every PI in the city. “

  “File it, Riv. Let someone else waste their time on that one.”

  “Too bad. I’d like to meet this guy,” she replied.

  They ate as Elliot filled in Rivka about his father’s case starting with the conversation he had with Detective Renaud.

  “Why do you think the glasses were in your dad's pocket?”

  “The only logical explanation is that he was expecting violence, and he was sending a message by putting them in his pocket. Since I would be the only one who would understand the significance of that action, it had to be a message to me. I think he was telling me that he was in trouble,” Elliot said “and that his life was in danger and, if something did happen to him, I needed to investigate it. Not only was he involved in something that had put his life in danger, but he felt that I was the only person who should look into it.”