Buffalo Jump (21 page)

“Jonah?”

It was Clint who had called my name. “What part was Franny handling?” he asked.

“He was … um, looking at the big picture while I was checking facts on the ground.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” McDonough barked.

“That he doesn’t want to answer the question,” Hollinger said.

“Out with it, cupcake,” McDonough said.

Clint said, “Anything you know, Jonah, anything at all.”

“Okay. He met a woman on Sunday named LaReine. Don’t ask me where. The only thing he told me was she’s black and built. It seems they hit it off and we didn’t see much of him after that.”

“You have her contact information?” Hollinger asked.

“Check his cellphone. Her number should be one of his recent calls.”

“So anything we need to know about his case we have to get from you?” McDonough said.

“Guess so.”

He said, “Terrific,” yet I doubted his sincerity.

“Why would he have gone to that warehouse?” Hollinger asked.

“No idea.”

“Would he have known it from a previous case?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“What exactly
are
you aware of?” McDonough asked.

“From what you told us earlier,” Hollinger said, “you were doing all the work on this case while Mr. Paradis was seeing a new girlfriend.”

“That’s right.”

“You might have to explain what a girlfriend is,” said McDonough.

Hollinger made eye contact with me. I’m pretty sure her eyes rolled a little. “Gregg?” she said sweetly. “Mind getting us some coffee?”

McDonough glared at her. He was either seriously ticked or they were running an above-average good cop/bad cop routine.

I said to him, “Just a dollop of milk for me. No sugar.”

His face turned red like a match head about to ignite. Definitely ticked.

“I’ll show you where it is,” Clint said, leading him out and closing the door.

“So,” Hollinger said. “You were doing Franny’s work while he was romping around. Were you annoyed?”

“Of course.”

“How annoyed, Mr. Geller?”

“Please. Call me Jonah.”

“Are those his knuckle marks on your face, Jonah?”

You have to love a question like that, especially when delivered with a fetching smile. “No, these are not Franny’s knuckles.”

“Whose then?”

“An unrelated dispute. A misunderstanding that got out of hand.”

“And into your face.”

I shrugged.

“Your side too? Take one in the ribs?”

“Why?”

“The way you’ve been moving in your chair. You’re hurting there.”

“I hadn’t noticed you noticing.”

“You never will. What started you looking into Kenneth Page? What led from the nursing home to him?”

“I told you, it was a long shot that didn’t pan out.”

“Let’s hear it anyway. And don’t hold anything back.”

I batted my eyelashes and said, “Would I hold anything back from you?”
Oh, God, Geller, you Percocet-addled puppy, shut up. And stay shut.

“Come on,” she said. “Meadowvale. Page. What’s the connection?”

“Places like Meadowvale get their drugs from somewhere. Often a pharmacy with a wholesale licence.”

“Which Page had?”

“Yes. He could get large quantities from manufacturers without questions, and the doctor who runs the home, Bader, could write phony scripts until his hand cramped up.”

“And sell them to whom?”

“The most lucrative market seems to be the States.”

“And who’s taking receipt there?”

“No idea,” I said. “Not yet.”

I never did get a coffee out of McDonough. He returned with one for Hollinger and one for himself. Clint had gone back to his office to take a call from Franny’s mother, Dorothée, in Ottawa. I went over everything again with McDonough in the room. He perked up at the thought that Franny might have punched me out, but Hollinger reminded him that Franny’s autopsy showed no bruising or other marks on his hands to suggest he had recently hit anyone.

Which she had known when she asked me about it. Katherine Hollinger was a girl who liked to have fun. Definitely not your average homicide sarge.

After I got back to my desk, Jenn was called in. Andy stayed focused on his research. He didn’t like to talk at the best of times, and this was anything but. I went to the men’s room, where I ensconced myself in a stall to check my wound. I untucked my shirt and held it up with my chin. The adhesive strips holding the gauze dressing in place came away easily but the pad itself stuck to the gash. I winced and sucked air and pulled until it came free. The wound itself looked good: red around the edges but no pus or other sign of infection; the gash itself warm and tender but not hot. I put the dressing back— Dr. Klein had warned me against changing it myself—and washed down two more Percocet and another stool softener. The stalemate between them was continuing apace. There’d be a reckoning at some point. Like an economy heading toward recession, maybe the best I could hope for was a soft landing.

Hollinger was waiting at my desk when I got back.

“Tuck your shirt in,” she said. “We’re going out.”

F
ranny had lived in a high-rise on Carlton just east of the old Maple Leaf Gardens, where the Leafs played for sixty-odd years—some very odd—before moving to the Air Canada Centre, where corporate revenues could flow more freely. I had never been inside his place. Any time people from the office got together for drinks after work, it was usually at a bar on King or Front.

Outside his apartment door, Katherine Hollinger handed me a pair of disposable surgical gloves. “Put these on.”

“I’m not contagious,” I said.

“Or infectious,” she shot back. “You know the rule. No touching.”

“I know.”

“Not even with the gloves.”

“I get it. No touching. I’ll pretend we’re in high school.”
Oy.
Was it just the Percocet that made me so giddy around her?

“You see anything at all, let me know.”

“Of course.”

“More convincingly, please.”

“Of
course.
” I snapped on the gloves.

“Much better.” She opened the deadbolt with a single brass key and in we went.

Franny’s one-bedroom apartment was about the same size as mine, but his windows faced south onto a blighted stretch of Carlton frequented by low-rent hookers wobbling on too-high heels and in too-tight skirts. I much preferred my view of the city skyline and the Don Valley. The Track, as this part of town was known, had a darkness all its own.

Franny’s living room/dining room combo was effectively divided into three functional spaces: a eating area, living room and office.

The eating area consisted of a round table and two chairs, over which a chandelier hung. It didn’t look like he’d dined there recently. The table was covered in newspapers from the weekend, the Sunday
Clarion
on top.

The living room had a black leather sofa and recliner facing an entertainment centre with a large flat-screen TV and stereo system. Next to the recliner was a small table on which rested a number of remotes and on the floor beneath that a pizza box. That’s where he probably ate his last meal. Books and CDs filled smaller shelves in the entertainment unit, along with DVDs of action films featuring muscled-up Hollywood hunks and whippet-thin fighters out of Thailand and Hong Kong.

The office was built into a corner of the living room, its centrepiece an old-fashioned rolltop desk with dozens of pigeonholes that should have been stuffed with notes, bills, statements, parking tickets, takeout menus and other detritus of metropolitan life. They were empty.

I asked, “Where is it?”

“What?”

“It. Everything. His mail, bank records, phone bills.”

“We took it all downtown,” Hollinger said. “Gregg and I will sort through it there.”

“Does he move his lips when he reads?”

“Easy, you. He’s my partner.”

“But you’re the brains.”

“Someone has to be.”

The artwork was all generic: prints of a waterfall pouring over moss-covered rocks, a hooked marlin breaking through aqua waters, red-tailed hawks wheeling over a green forest canopy, all in the same chrome-and-glass frames. They could have come from any hotel chain.

I turned to Hollinger. “Did you find a notebook on him?”

“I don’t have the complete inventory.”

“He wasn’t much for computers.”

“So we’ve gathered.”

“He usually had a black notebook in his jacket pocket.”

“Thanks. If we find it, I’ll let you know.”

The kitchen was a small galley like mine. A few basic pots and pans in the cupboards. A dish set that had to have come from Ikea. One drawer had cutlery and a few utensils, the other a thick sheaf of takeout menus. It wasn’t hard to guess which got used more.

The bathroom had the basic items a man needed to keep himself shaved, showered and reasonably well groomed, plus a few more. Grecian Formula: who knew? A tube of K-Y jelly and a box of 12 condoms, about half of which remained. A few prescription medicines, including one for arthritis pain.

The bedroom had room for a queen bed, a dresser and night table and little else. The closet had the usual mix of inexpensive suits and casual clothes, along with a collapsible ironing board and shoeshine kit. Of course he’d have those, the old-fashioned lug. A freshly pressed shirt, a shine and his pompadour in place, and he’d be ready for action in no time.

So who would murder him? There was nothing to indicate he was living beyond his means. If anything, the apartment was distressingly plain. And too much like my own. Same little kitchen and bathroom, same parquet floors, same fixtures and windows. Same little place built for one.

Was this my future? Nights alone eating in front of the TV, an array of remotes at my side? Would the ghosts that followed me home from Israel ever stop rattling their dusty bones long enough to let me settle down, fall in love again, do more than simply keep my head above Toronto’s ever-rising tide?

I turned to Hollinger. “Can I ask you something?”

“You just did.”

“Do people call you Kathy?”

“Not since they issued us Glocks.”

“Kate?”

“Friends and family only.”

“So it’s Katherine then?”

“No, it’s Hollinger. Detective Sergeant Hollinger if you want to be formal.”

“Okay, Hollinger. Why’d you bring me here? You’ve carted out everything that matters.”

“How do we know what matters?”

“How would I? I’ve never been here before and I didn’t really know him outside work.”

She pursed her lips and looked down and shifted her weight from foot to foot. When she had made up her mind about whatever she had been pondering, she said, “Sit.”

We sat on the leather couch.

She snapped off the gloves and indicated I could do the same.

“I hate these things,” she said. “Even the powdered ones make my hands clammy.”

“So why were we wearing them? If you’ve removed all his documents, surely you’ve processed the place.”

She held my gaze with hers, held it more gently than any cop in my experience ever had, and asked, “Who wants you dead?”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought I spoke clearly. Who wants you dead?”

“I’m not following.”

“Then you’re not trying. Your colleague, Ms. Raudsepp, provided an interesting piece of information this morning. Something you couldn’t have known.”

“Why?”

“Because it happened after you left the office Tuesday.”

“What happened?”

“According to her, Mr. Paradis came in sometime after three o’clock. He was there until at least seven. Just after six this call came in.”

Hollinger pulled a small chrome tape player from her briefcase. “All incoming calls to Beacon Security are recorded, correct?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Then have a listen,” she said, and pressed play.

And then the line went dead. The caller had suckered Franny cleanly, lowering his price until it was no obstacle, then making his information sound so tantalizing—
the ex-employee who knows what really went on
—that Franny had followed it blindly to his death.

“Jonah,” Hollinger said.

“Yes, Kate?”

Her smile all the way gone now. “The call came in on your line. Your buddy François answered it for you. Maybe he wanted to pay you back for everything you’d been doing for him. So let me ask again: who wants you dead?”

I said, “The voice on the tape sounded American. ‘You’ll
salve
your case hands down.’ Like from Chi-
cah
-go.”

“Or Buffalo,” she said. “They’ve got that Midwestern
ah
sound too. Does that ring any bells?”