Ogrodnik

by Gary Coffin

  “If that’s the case, why wouldn’t he just tell you?” Rivka asked.

  “I’ve given this a lot of thought since yesterday. My relationship with Dad was complicated, Riv. He knew I’d been unable to cut the umbilical cord on my teaching career and move on to full-time investigation work, so he probably didn’t know how committed I was to the JFK business. Dad would not get me involved and put my life in danger unwittingly. He wanted my involvement to be a choice I made freely without being influenced. I’d only pick up on the glasses clue if I was in the process of investigating the murder and, therefore, had already made the decision to involve myself without being swayed by him.”

  “Then, why wouldn’t he get the police involved if that was the case?” asked Rivka again.

  “I can’t think of a good explanation, but I do know that Dad would have thought this through as he did with everything else. I don’t know why he didn’t go to the cops, but until I understand his reasoning, I’ll trust his judgment and follow his lead. We will not involve the authorities until we understand the situation.”

  “Do you have any theories about what may have happened?” Rivka queried.

  “It’s safe to say that whoever killed Dad had done so because they felt there were no better alternatives. Dad was not the type of person to get involved with something shady or dangerous, so we can rule out partnership gone bad situations. The only scenario that make sense to me is that Dad either stumbled across knowledge of an event that was about to occur, or an event that had already occurred, and someone killed him to keep him quiet.“

  Elliot filled Rivka in on what he’d been up to in the morning ending with his visit to the house.

  “So a thief broke into the house and stole your father’s computer but didn’t touch anything else?” Rivka restated.

  “He didn’t break in. I checked all the windows, and I know the doors were locked. The back patio door has a metal strip along the runner that prevents it from opening. It couldn’t have been from the basement because there’s a slide bolt on both sides of the basement door going down to Anne’s apartment.”

  “Not too shabby for a goy. So tell me, Maven, how did the thief get in to steal the computer?”

  “He had a key, of course.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I noticed recent scratch marks on the keys that were in Dad’s personal belongings, the type of scratches that a key cutting machine would make.“

  “The chain of custody for personal belongings in the cop shop is usually pretty tight. How do you think that process could be circumvented?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Riv,” replied Elliot. “I don’t know.”

  After they put the food away, Elliot went over the plan for the remainder of the day.

  “I’m going to phone the numbers I found on Dad’s calendar and try to schedule meetings with those people. I want you to concentrate on the killer’s vehicle. If the killer drove up to the Lookout and met Dad at the top of the trail, then someone may have seen the vehicle or, if we’re lucky, seen the killer. I need you to go up to the Lookout parking lot tomorrow before 8:00 a.m. and canvas all the joggers, walkers, and cyclists to see if they remember seeing a vehicle that was parked at the Lookout parking lot the morning of the murder. I realize it’s been a month, but if you’re talking to someone who jogs by the Lookout on a daily basis, they’ll probably remember the day of the murder. Based on the ‘crime of opportunity’ theory, we should assume that the police were not thorough in their investigation.”

  “Leave it with me. If anyone saw something, the Jewish Juggernaut will find them.”

  “Riv, one more thing. Remember when Sarah died, you were able to get me a copy of the police report from one of your contacts in the force. Do you think

  you can get me a copy of Dad’s case file?”

  “Should not be a problem, Chief. I’ll talk to Stella today.”

  When Elliot pulled the calendar out of his backpack, he noticed the newspaper he’d put in the pack back at the house. It seemed like a good time to scan and see why his father might have kept it. He flipped through the pages reading the headlines of each article in an attempt to spot a flare. Based on the books that had been moved recently, he’d keep an eye out for something pharmaceutical related. His eye was pulled over to the strip of ads running down the right-hand side of the page. One in particular caught his eye; it featured a bikinied lass throwing a Frisbee with a declaration beneath expounding the sexual benefits of a rare mollusk secretion at only $149 a vial, "if you act now." Elliot believed these types of ads probably acted as unintentional safety mechanisms in a society that ensured stupid people stayed poor so they never become dangerous. He moved on.

  Near the bottom of page four, he saw the headline for a small piece that was surrounded by the penned swirls and whorls of a habitual doodler. Elliot immediately recognized these as his father’s; he’d seen the same brand of doodling beside a lifetime of half completed crosswords. The article was a piece on a pharmaceutical company, Biovonix, and how they were poised to release a new cancer-fighting treatment that would likely usher in an entirely new

  method to treat the disease. Could it be this easy? He thought. This had all the earmarks of another breadcrumb that his father left, much like the glasses clue: another clue that was meant for Elliot.

  Satisfied that he had read every article, Elliot turned his attention to the calendar. The first relevant appointment was on February 17th with Dr. Baldwin. He phoned the number from the square, got the office receptionist and managed to schedule the first appointment the next morning with a minimum of groveling.

  The next number was to someone named Alex Banik.

  “Biovonix North America. How may I help you?” answered a voice that was trained to sound both business-like and friendly at the same time. Hearing the name Biovonix triggered an involuntary jerk from Elliot. “Alex Banik, please.”

  “May I ask who is speaking and the nature of your call?”

  “My name is Elliot Forsman, and I have personal business to discuss with Dr. Banik.”

  “There are many demands on Dr. Banik's time. You’ll have to be specific about the nature of your call.”

  “My father recently passed away, and I’m trying to backtrack his activities before his death. I’m calling because I see that he had a meeting with a Dr. Banik last month.”

  “And you father's name is?”

  “Hubert Forsman. I believe he met with Dr. Banik on March 24th at 2:00 p.m.”

  He could hear the staccato sound of keyboard firing near the receiver. “Yes, I see it here. What did you say you were looking for, Mr. Forsman?”

  “Is it possible to schedule a meeting with Dr. Banik? It’s urgent.”

  He heard more clacking from the keyboard, “Dr. Banik has an opening Tuesday afternoon at 4:00 p.m.”

  “That would be fine,” he said thinking that he had a day to prepare himself for the meet.

  Elliot sat back on the throne and mentally ran through the day’s discoveries. His father was researching a pharmaceutical company, Biovonix, in the weeks before his death and then went to visit the Sr. Vice President at that company. He felt that this particular avenue had legs.

  He knew that solving mysteries was usually accomplished by making slow, incremental progress punctuated by periodic "A-ha!" moments where previously unrelated facts could be connected. This was the first A-ha moment in the case. He spent the next few hours researching pharmaceutical companies and how they operated as well as digging up any scoop he could find on Biovonix and Alex Banik.

  He was now extremely interested in hearing what Alex Banik had to say.

  “Banik, Yilmaz here.”

  “What do you have for me?”

  “We’ve been through the computer; there’s nothing on it,” Yilmaz replied with the remnants of an Eastern European accent that had long ago lost its edge.

  “Did you go through all the email?”

  “
Yes. We went through the inbox, deleted and sent items. We found the original email from three years ago that we already knew about. His browser history confirmed that he’d been researching Biovonix and Isotin recently as well pharmas in general, but that was all public information.”

  “What about paper files?” Banik asked.

  “We grabbed everything; again, nothing relevant.”

  “We need to know what started the old man poking around. Something tipped him off.”

  ”All we can do is keep looking.”

  “Pull his phone records. We need to contain this. If he told anyone, we need to know about it, and keep an eye on the son just in case.”

  Elliot was still agitated about the theft at the house and had a craving for a cold beer. When he arrived home, he cracked a cold can of Bud before spreading the case file out on the dining room table. He took stock of what little he had and decided that it could wait until the morning. The phone almost dialed itself when he picked it up to get a fresh circle of pizza. He cracked another beer and watched the bubbles rising out of the sunken treasure chest in the aquarium while he waited. The aquarium was Sarah’s idea many years ago. He sometimes asked himself why he still maintained it but never dared answer. A part of him knew that the aquarium was one of the things that tethered him to his old life, the life he was trying desperately to cling to.

  The pizza arrived, and he plowed through three slices in no time. He tried and failed to stifle a yawn. The sudden intake of greasy pizza on top of the beers had slowed him down, and he felt lethargic. He decided he’d lie down, but his mind was too active to fall asleep, so he picked up the book he’d started reading the previous week. It was an early Harry Bosch novel written by Michael Connelly called The Concrete Blonde. Harry Bosch was a hardnosed LA cop who lived by a code and a set of uncompromising values to the detriment of the bad guys, himself, and anyone close to him. Bosch was pure old school and did things and spoke to people the way we wish we could but know we can’t. The Concrete Blonde was a good mix of police procedural and courtroom drama, and he loved the way Bosch would systematically disassemble the facts in a mystery and put it all back together so it made sense. He liked the Bosch books for many reasons, and the fact that he identified with the Bosch character in some ways made them even more appealing. Elliot’s mother, like Bosch’s, was murdered when he was young.

  * * * * * * * * * * *

  Elliot thought back to the day that defined his life. His attempts to hold the memories at bay failed as images of the two gun-toting ski masks came flooding back, one at the cash and the other with his gun trained on the customers.

  ..the white kid at the front rifling through the cash drawer and his black accomplice barking orders for us to get on the floor. His gun waving back and forth and a look of wild elation in his eyes as if it were the first time he felt truly alive. Me, only twelve at the time, paralyzed, my feet rooted to the floor, unable to move, understanding the command to get down but unable to comply. My body frozen, unwilling to accept orders, but my mind was racing, processing the scene as it unfolded before me. Hearing my mother shout for me to get down, seeing her get up to drag me to the floor, to remove me from harm’s way. Feeling the blast of discharge on my eardrums and then the spasm in her body as the bullet struck home.

  I was able to provide the officers a detailed description of the robbers. Height, weight, age. The scuff on their shoes told me they were boarders, and the quality of their wear told me they were from different sides of an economic divide but that they likely shared a portion of their very different lives on the asphalt plains of a skateboard park. I described the gold ring with a square garnet on the gun hand of the white kid, the cheap Timex watch on the wrist of the black kid, and a tattoo of a pair of dice above the wrist that I learned years later was the mark of a street gang called the Boxcars. No detail had escaped my eye, but the killers were never caught.

  The events of that day influenced my future in ways I would never have guessed. In retrospect, it was guilt that had turned me away from medicine and toward criminology. My inaction had caused the robber to shoot. I didn’t pull the trigger, but I might as well have. I was responsible for my mother’s murder.

  The case file is sitting in a warehouse somewhere gathering dust along with boxes of other cold cases. It’s been thirty-two years, and that case file still calls out to me. I often hear it in my dreams.

  Elliot woke up the next morning with The Concrete Blonde still on his chest. He looked at her affectionately and then set her aside before jumping into the shower. Two days of sweat and dirt were already too much, and he didn’t want to carry around a third. He got dressed and then read the news online with a side of Cheerios and coffee.

  ​He looked over at a printout of a news article he had left on the table a couple of days prior. It told the story of a teenage girl, Danielle Estoban, who was caught in the spray of a drive-by shooting out on the West Island. The article speculated that it was part of an ongoing territorial feud between the 53ers gang and the upstart BSJ gang. He knew the 53ers well; they were named for the bus route that ran through their territory, and he'd already gathered extensive data on their personnel and operation. They were involved in small-time robberies and theft, but most of their income came from peddling drugs at street level for one of the local biker gangs, Hades Henchmen. He didn’t know much at all about the BSJ gang except that they were named for the major street that ran through their territory, Boulevard St Jean.

  Elliot made it a point to follow the activities of the local street gangs and, in particular, any violent crimes attributed to them. The police had little luck in solving these types of crimes because the victims would rarely talk, and witnesses were non-existent. In this case, an innocent teenager was shot and killed; there were no witnesses, only vagaries about hearing shots and seeing a non-descript car speeding away.

  Over the years, he had invested and cultivated a small core of informants. These were people on the periphery of the street gang world, people who didn't like what was happening but were afraid to speak out; people who were victims and had seen firsthand the suffering caused by the gangs; people who had learned to trust Elliot and, for a price, would send him information. The intel he received was often material that the police were not able to collect, information that could be used to identify guilty parties.

  There was no set process for what Elliot would do with his intel. He was, by nature, an analyzer, a gatherer and distiller of data. Sometimes he would send information anonymously to the Gangs & Guns unit for them to pursue; sometimes he just kept it for his own purposes.

  He unlocked the credenza and pulled out a thick, accordion file folder with four partitions, each labeled neatly in blue marker. He slipped the Danielle Estoban printout into the last partition, the one labeled "Open," and put the accordion folder back into the credenza. 

  Elliot was anxious to see what Riv had discovered this morning on the mountain but couldn’t wait around with his thumb sphinctered, so he headed out to see Dr. Baldwin.

  Ray Baldwin practiced out of a low-rise clinic in a district west of downtown called NDG. His father had been a mentor to Dr. Baldwin and had taken him under his wing as he was coming up through the system, so when his father retired, Ray Baldwin took his father on as a patient. The only time he’d met Ray Baldwin was at his father’s funeral. It was a quick, “Sorry for your loss/Thank you for coming” exchange, so Elliot could not say that he knew him. The calendar on his father’s wall indicated that he had an appointment with Baldwin on February 17th. He checked in at reception and was ushered in without delay.

  “How do you do, Dr. Baldwin?”

  “I’m fine, Elliot, and please, call me Ray. Your father did.”

  “Okay, Ray. You’re probably wondering why I wanted to meet today.”

  “Let’s not dally then,” he replied. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I know the police consider Dad’s death a robbery gone bad, but
I’m not satisfied with that theory, so I’m conducting an investigation on my own. I thought I’d start with the people with whom he’d met in the weeks before his death, and your name was on his calendar. So here I am looking for any help you can give me.”

  “By all means, I’ll answer any questions you have.”

  “My interests are on any casual conversations you may have had with him. Did he mention something he was working on or someone he was working with? “

  Dr. Baldwin raised his eyes to the ceiling trying to remember the nature of their conversation that day. “I don’t recall him mentioning that he was involved in anything. To be honest, that appointment was two months ago, so I can’t remember specifically what we talked about that day. We usually chit chatted about hockey and the weather, and he was always interested to hear any gossip about our mutual comrades in the medical field, but I can’t think of anything that would have been of interest to you. “

  “Ray, did Dad mention anything regarding drugs or pharmaceutical research he might have been working on?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  He could tell the doctor was busy processing something, thus, he kept quiet until the doctor was ready.

  “Your father’s visit to me was not routine,” he said cautiously and waited for me to look at him. “Were you aware that he was dying?”

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t sure if you knew,” the doctor continued. “Yes, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor six months ago and was given a year to live at that time.”

  Elliot was stunned into silence. His mind raced through the previous months trying to remember instances where his father may have exhibited symptoms or inadvertently let it slip in conversation.