High Chicago (11 page)

W
ill Sterling’s place was the main floor of a small semi at the southern end of Markham Street in the Portuguese enclave known as Little Azores. A realtor might have tried to get away with calling it South Annex but only someone dim enough to believe a realtor would have fallen for it. The house was more than tired-looking; it was spent. The grey porch sagged like an old couch and groaned under my feet as I stepped up to the door. The front eavestrough hung like a broken limb that hadn’t been set. Recycling bins overflowed with pizza boxes and old
NOW
magazines and empty two-litre pop bottles. The sharp stink of cat spray filled the air.

The doorbell was taped over with a note that said Knock Loud. I did. First with my knuckles, then with my car keys.

No one answered. I checked my watch. It was five-thirty. Will had said he’d be home by four—five at the latest. I used my cell to call his number but it went straight to voice mail. I peered through the front windows and saw lights on and a TV flickering in one corner. There were textbooks open on a coffee table facing the TV, with a pen and highlighter next to them.

I walked down the drive between the house and its neighbour to a side door that I figured would lead up to the kitchen and down to the basement. I knocked several times; no one
answered there either. That left the back door. I walked through an unkempt yard, the grass long and matted and covered by rotting leaves. A small concrete patio was breaking up, having heaved through many a frost and thaw since it was first laid. I climbed three steps to a wooden porch that held a barbecue pitted with rust and peered through the kitchen door. All the lights were on. The counters were covered with fast-food wrappers and plates caked with old food. The sink was piled high with glasses. I could see two slices of bread in a toaster and a peanut butter jar next to it, its lid off, a knife planted in it like a flag.

Someone was home. They just weren’t answering.

Had Will changed his mind about talking to me? Or had someone changed it for him?

I tried the kitchen door. It was locked but didn’t feel too sturdy. What the hell: I’d already broken into Rob Cantor’s house—might as well make it a double-header. I picked up a piece of broken patio stone and smashed a pane in the kitchen door. I reached in carefully and felt for the lock.

Damn it. A deadbolt that could be opened only by a key. I felt around the door jamb around eye level. Sometimes people left a key there on a nail in case they had to get out fast. Nothing. I took a step back: in for a penny, in for a pound. I tensed my core muscles and kicked the door handle. It broke away from the strike plate and swung open. I moved into the kitchen and closed the door behind me.

“Will?”

No answer.

There was no one in the kitchen. No one in the dining room, which had been turned into a makeshift bedroom. No one in the front room where the TV was tuned to Much Music. A video by Arcade Fire was playing with the sound off. There was no one in the bathroom.

That left one more room on the ground floor, a bedroom at the back next to the kitchen. I eased the door open and found
Will Sterling at the foot of his bed with a pillow over his face. The pillow was stained with blood. At the centre of the bloodstain was a black hole. Bloody feathers fanned out around his head like a headdress.

I felt his neck. It was cold but not icy and moved easily enough. Rigor mortis had not yet set in. He’d been dead less than an hour or two. I looked at his body, a cold black rage building inside me. Three dead now. Three obstacles removed. I wanted to go back out the rear of Will’s house, race down to Rob Cantor’s plush office, pull him out of his padded leather chair and dangle him out a window over Queen Street.

All the drawers had been pulled out of Will’s dresser, all his clothes thrown out of his closet and his school papers strewn everywhere. If there was anything to find, whoever had killed him had probably found it. I prowled around anyway, without knowing what I was looking for. I was about to leave when I noticed the white stains on his pant legs: this morning, I had figured they were paint or plaster, but there was no sign that any work was being done in the flat. I looked closer.

It was bird shit. Gobs of it, with feathers stuck to it—feathers that didn’t match the ones from the pillow that had been put over his face.

I backed out of the room to the kitchen, where I used Will’s phone to call Katherine Hollinger’s office.

“Jonah,” she said, “I keep telling you I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

“This isn’t personal,” I said.

“What then?”

“Business.”

“About Glenn?”

“No.”

“Then it’ll have to wait,” she said. “I’ve got a murder to clear.”

“Got time for one more?”

S
he came without McDonough, as I’d asked. Instead, she was accompanied by two other detectives, Graham Neely and Todd Gavin, who’d been assigned the case. I walked her through the flat, showing her everything I’d done, every item and surface I’d touched, as the detectives and crime scene officers examined Will Sterling’s body and set up their equipment.

“You wanted proof that Martin Glenn’s murder was tied into the Harbourview project?” I said. “This is it.”

“How?”

“Will Sterling knew something about the project that was going to stop it cold.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“He knew Maya Cantor. She was trying to help him. I think they found out something they weren’t supposed to know.”

“You think.”

“Will said this morning it had something to do with PCBs.”

“But he didn’t tell you what exactly.”

“Because they killed him first.”

“They who, Jonah?”

“How about Mike Izzo?”

“Who is …”

“He owns Izzo Construction. They’re building the Harbourview condos.”

“What connects him to this?”

I gave her an abbreviated version of what happened when the two goons accosted Jenn and me in our office.

“You don’t have any proof that Izzo sent them.”

“They were working for Lenny Corazzo and he’s Izzo’s son-in-law.”

“I work in the real world, Jonah. You think I can bring in someone like Izzo for questioning or get a search warrant based on that? You should have called us when you had Tallarico in your office.”

“He told me everything he knew. And I have his address.”

She copied it into her notebook then flipped it closed. “All right,” she said. “We’ll bring him in for questioning. See if he has an alibi for Glenn’s murder. Now let us do our work here. If there’s a connection between these two killings, we’ll find it.”

“Three killings,” I said.

“Maya Cantor’s death was ruled a—”

“I know damn well what it was ruled.”

One of the crime scene techs lowered his camera and looked at Hollinger. She grabbed my elbow and steered me into the kitchen. “Listen,” she said in a low voice. “I value your opinions, I do. I respect your judgment. But don’t raise your voice or second-guess me in front of my team. I’m a Homicide detective, Jonah. I have to let the facts speak for themselves. Facts, not guesswork or theories. The most the coroner did was concede Maya could have been—
could have been
—pushed. Not that she was, not even that it was likely. We are actively investigating the links between Glenn and his work for Cantor Development. We’re looking into his bank records, his phone calls, his email. If there’s a connection to Maya, we’ll find it. And we’ll do the same thing here. If Will Sterling was killed
because of something he knew, we will find evidence of it. Evidence, Jonah.”

Her arms were folded across her chest, her lips tight, and her eyes, those eyes, whose colour always seemed to fall in the warmest part of the spectrum, looked flat and cold.

“Are you done with me?” I asked.

“Is this you pouting?”

“No, this is not me pouting. This is me asking if I’m free to go.”

“I’ll have to check with Neely,” she said. “He’s the lead on this one.”

Neely was about forty and had a brush cut that would have made a drill sergeant stand up straight. He made me go through everything from the start again: why I had been there, why I had broken in, why I thought Will’s death was linked to other deaths. He took no notes, just stared at me while I spoke. After he’d heard it all, he said to Hollinger, “You buy any of this crap?”

“We’ll check it out,” she said.

“You know where to find him?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” he said. “He can go.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“After we test him for gunshot residue.”

A
t nine o’clock the next morning, I was back at the Earth Sciences Building on Willcocks. News of Will Sterling’s murder had hit the students and administrators hard. I approached a group of people who were crying and consoling one another. One red-eyed young woman walked me over to a man in his early twenties with a mass of dark curly hair pulled back in a ponytail and a soul patch that grew two or three inches past his chin. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve when we were introduced. His name was Jason Eckhardt and he had been Will’s lab partner in their analytical chemistry course. We walked slowly down a polished hallway to a brightly lit lab with white walls, white countertops and white fluorescent lights buzzing in the ceiling like trapped, angry flies.

He sat next to some kind of spectrometer and told me to pull up a chair. “Before I say anything,” he said, “I want to know everything Will told you.”

“That won’t take long.”

“I’m listening.”

“I know that there is something wrong at the Harbour-view construction site. Will all but confirmed yesterday that it has something to do with PCBs.”

“Not just any PCB,” he said. “One of the most toxic of all,
something called Aroclor 1242. Extremely dangerous for people and other animals. A known carcinogen—that means it causes cancer—the liver being the most common target organ. It’s also a developmental toxicant, meaning it’s very bad for unborn children. And it’s suspected of causing a host of other illnesses or symptom clusters in shore birds, reptiles, amphibians and most likely humans as well.”

“Where does it come from?”

“Most commonly from coolants in electrical transformers and turbines.”

I thought of the decommissioned generating station across Unwin Avenue from the Harbourview site, the transmission towers along Commissioners Street and the other heavy industries north of the site, and wondered whether long-buried toxins could have seeped into the earth.

Jason showed me a printout from a gas chromatograph. It looked like the results of a polygraph done on someone who made wild swings between truth and lies. “Our course requires us to collect and compare soil and water samples from different sites, one clean and one dirty, analyze them and report the results. Will did most of the collecting.” Jason looked away and swallowed and sucked at the inside of his cheeks. “We were perfect lab partners,” he finally said. “I love the machines. The mass spectrometer, the gas chromatograph. Loading up the tubes and watching them cycle around. Interpreting the results and confirming the hypothesis. Will was the outdoorsman. There’s nothing he liked better than collecting samples, getting all muddy and buggy. I used to wonder if he actually rolled in the muck like a dog, he’d come back so dirty. He didn’t have as much patience for the tech side, which was cool, because that’s my thing.

“This first sample,” he said, “came from soil we knew to be contaminated with this stuff, on a site that once housed an oil refinery but hasn’t yet been cleaned. As you can see, it
clearly identifies a high level of Aroclor 1242. Dirty, dirty soil, not the kind you’d ever want to build on, not without extreme remediation.”

He laid a second sheet of paper beside it. “This was supposed to be the clean sample, the one we compare the polluted soil against. But look at these peaks and valleys, the way they scan from left to right. It’s Aroclor 1242 again.”

“Where did this one come from?”

“Down along the lake, near Tommy Thompson Park.”

“At the Harbourview building site?”

“Yes.”

“The lakefront parcel, where the park is going to be.”

“That’s why I thought there must have been a mistake, that maybe I had gotten the samples mixed up. I told Will we should collect new samples and run them again. He didn’t want to. He wanted to call the developer of the site and get in his face about it—he’s a lot more confrontational than me—but I told him our final marks depended on it. So he collected another sample. It took time to run—there’s only one chromatograph here and it’s constantly in demand—but in the end the same results came up. That’s this third sheet here. Same chemical makeup as the first two. Confirmed presence of Aroclor 1242.”

“When did you tell him?”

“Yesterday morning at class.”

Will had told me before class yesterday morning that he could guess what Maya and her father had been arguing about … that he’d know more about it later in the day.

“Did Will ever mention Maya Cantor to you?”

“The girl who killed herself? Sure. Her father is the one building those condos.”

“Did he tell her about the samples?”

“Definitely. He was hoping she could—I don’t know, pressure her dad into doing something about it. That’s why he
was so bummed when he heard she died. I think he felt like she bailed on him just when they were getting somewhere.”

Neither of them knew how close they really were, I thought. And that’s why both were dead.

“A
ccording to the Record of Site Condition that Martin Glenn filed,” Jenn said, “the southern end of the site was squeaky clean.”

“But according to the samples Will took, it’s anything but.”

“Which provides somebody with an excellent motive for killing him.”

“And Glenn. And Maya.”

“You honestly think her father killed her?”

“Why not? I read somewhere that the vast majority of children who meet a violent end are killed by their own parents.”

“How could he live with himself?”

“Let’s ask him,” I said.

“Where would we find him this time of day?”

“His office or the work site.”

“And?”

“The site is out of the question,” I said. “Full of guys who could throw us out with one hand and eat their lunch with the other. The office has a receptionist or two to get past, but I think we could handle them.”

Jenn thought about that then broke into a smile that would charm anyone who didn’t know her like I did. The smile of a fox who’d just discovered an unguarded henhouse.

“Want to mess with his head?” she asked. “I’d rather thump it a few times.” “Want to mess with it first?”

Half an hour later, she dialled Cantor’s office and asked, in a voice dripping both milk and honey, if Rob was in. “No? Well, can you get an urgent message to him? Tell him I need to see him right away. At my apartment. My name? Look at your caller ID,” she said, and hung up.

We were calling from Maya’s apartment. Jenn had played Maya’s outgoing message a few times and practised pitching her voice in a similar range. Not as spot-on as her Scary Mary impression, but it got better with each try.

It took Rob all of three minutes to call back.

Jenn picked up the phone and whispered, “Hello?”

I heard his voice blustering over the other end, asking what the hell this, who the hell that.

“Please come, Daddy,” she whispered, and hung up.

“You’re creepier than you let on,” I said.

“Who isn’t?” Jenn grinned.

Jenn and I stood on Maya Cantor’s balcony, watching a long V-shaped formation of geese fly south toward the lake. The wall around the balcony came up to my waist. I was a few inches taller than Maya. It felt safe to me. Probably had to her too, until someone hoisted her over.

How many seconds to fall from twelve floors up, I wondered. Probably three or four at the most. What did she feel in those last moments of her life? Did she see scenes of her brief life flashing by? Or was she just gripped with the terror of falling, the ground rushing up at her, unyielding black pavement ready to claim her broken body?

No. It would be the horror of knowing it was her own father who wanted her dead. Whether he had done it himself,
or hired it out, she had to have known in the last cold seconds of her life that he was the one behind it.

My own father had died when I was fourteen, felled by a massive heart attack no one had foreseen. Unlike many of my friends, I never had the chance to see my dad grow old and weak. I had been spared the feelings a young man endures as his father is transformed from a giant, a hero, into an ordinary man—sometimes less than ordinary—flawed, fallible, unsure of himself. Buddy Geller would always be forty-four to me, with a full head of black hair, seemingly strong and robust. He would always be warm and loving.

He would never be my murderer.

I went back inside, leaving the sliding glass doors open, and stood facing the balcony. How had they done it? Grabbed her collar and waistband and heaved her over? Stood her up on the balcony wall and given her a strong shove?

I went back outside. “Let’s try an experiment,” I said to Jenn.

“What kind, doc?”

“Face the wall.”

“Like this?”

“Perfect.” I took hold of her belt and jacket collar and felt her whole body tense up.

“Relax,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

“Maya was, what, five-seven? A hundred and thirty pounds?”

“Something like that.”

“And you’re six feet.”

“Ask me my weight and you’re a dead man.”

“I don’t have to ask. I can feel it.”

“Was that a shot?”

“A statement. Now Rob Cantor is my size … a little taller than me.”

“In shape?”

“He works out.” I bent my knees and hefted Jenn a few inches off the ground.

“Jonah …”

“Don’t worry,”

“Jonah!” she said.

“I’m not going to throw you off.”

“I know that,” she said. “I just wanted to ask what kind of car Rob drives.”

I remembered a silver Mercedes parked at the job site: the only luxury sedan amidst a bunch of muddy pickups and SUVs. “Grey or silver Mercedes, I think.”

“Then let go of me, doc. I think that’s him down there.”

A few minutes later, a key slid into the lock on Maya’s front door. The door opened and Rob Cantor stepped inside. He stood in the doorway listening, looking around, then closed it behind him. He wore glasses with transitional lenses, darkened by the outside light, but slowly lightening to reveal the eyes behind them.

Roger Daltrey sings a Who song about a bad man behind blue eyes: how no one knows what it’s like to be him. Could Cantor be that hated man, fated to telling only lies?

I stepped out of the kitchen, where I’d been crouched behind a counter.

“You,” he said. “I should have figured you were behind this. I thought maybe your brother straightened you out, but I can see he didn’t. Well, this is one sick fucking joke, calling me from here, pretending … How did you get in here anyway? No, don’t tell me. Marilyn, right? She’s in on this too. Was that her on the phone? I mean, if it was, she’s even sicker than you are. You’re doing it for the money, I can almost understand that, but what the fuck is wrong with her?”

“Not Marilyn,” Jenn said. She’d been in the doorway of Maya’s bedroom. “Just me, Daddy,” she whispered.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“My partner,” I said.

“It figures.” He took out his cellphone and flipped it open. “Well, you’re both fucking with the wrong guy. I know a lot of people in this town, Geller. Big people. And all of them are behind this project, including your brother. They want to see it happen. And when I get through with you, you’ll be unlicensed and fucking well unemployable.”

“Are you through?”

“I’m not the one who’s through, you thick-headed—hey!”

I clamped his wrist and dug my thumb into the ligaments there. His hand opened and the phone fell into my hand. I flipped it to Jenn, who caught it and snapped the lid off.

“Normally, she rips phone books,” I said. “But sometimes a phone will do.”

“Are you out of your mind?” he said. “You just assaulted me.”

I stepped forward and slapped him hard across the face. It felt even better than slapping Perry had. “
Now
I assaulted you,” I said. Then I shoved him hard in the chest. He staggered backward, arms flailing, and landed on a brown corduroy couch.

“Three people are dead because of you,” I said.

“You’re crazy!”

“Shut up and listen,” I said. “I am this close to beating the living shit out of you.”

“You can’t!”

“I think he can,” Jenn said. “Hell, I could and I’m the minority owner.”

His mouth opened. I raised my hand. He shut his mouth. He looked at Jenn, then back at me. He looked at his broken phone, as if willing it to ring so he could take a call and end this nightmare.

“Martin Glenn was murdered,” I said, “because he didn’t want to fake a Record of Site Condition. It wasn’t a random
act of violence, a mugging gone wrong, a gay-bashing or a lovers’ quarrel. He was murdered because of what he was doing for you. Last night,” I went on, “Will Sterling was shot to death—rather professionally, from the looks of it—because he took soil samples from your work site and they have enough PCBs in them to give liver cancer to kids who aren’t even born yet.”

“Will Sterling is dead?”

“That’s right. Two people murdered in two days to keep this precious building of yours going.”

“And you think I killed them?”

“I don’t know that you’d have the guts to do it yourself, but you’re awfully good at picking up that phone of yours when problems crop up. Yesterday, for instance, two goons showed up at our office and threatened bodily harm against my partner and me.”

“Grievous bodily harm,” Jenn said.

“I didn’t send anyone to hurt you,” he said weakly. “I wouldn’t know who to send.”

“But Mike Izzo would. Maybe you called Mike, who called his son-in-law Lenny, who called the two morons who stuck a gun in my face and held a knife to my partner’s throat.”

Rob stared at Jenn as if picturing the blade itself; a latter-day Macbeth envisioning the dagger before him.

“They threatened to cut off my breast,” Jenn said.

“But you’re okay.”

“I’m terrific,” she said. “Thanks a bunch.”

“Look,” he said. “You’ve got all of this wrong. I was upset with Martin because we had agreed on something and he wanted to go back on it. But I didn’t kill him or ask anyone else to kill him. And this Sterling kid, I spoke to him once on the phone. Maybe twice. I don’t even know what he looks like. I honestly have no idea what happened to him. I swear on my life.”

“Like that’s worth a lot right now,” Jenn said.

“I’m telling you I haven’t done one thing wrong!”

I leaned in close to him and grabbed his tie and pulled his face so close he felt the spray when I hissed: “Three deaths, Rob.”

“That’s what you said before. But you never even said who the third person is.”

“Like I have to, you worthless sonofabitch.”

I pulled him up by the tie and grabbed hold of him, just like I had done to Jenn moments before. She came around and took his other arm and together we frog-marched him through the doors and out onto the balcony. “Look down!” I said.

I held the back of his neck so he had no choice. “See the pavement?” I said. “Imagine it rushing up to meet you, Rob. Knowing that when you hit, it’s all over.”

“You going to kill me?” he said. “It won’t change anything. I didn’t kill Martin. I didn’t kill Will. I didn’t do it and I didn’t ask anyone else to do it.”

“But you killed her, didn’t you?”

“Who, goddammit?”

I hoisted him up off the ground, bending the upper half of his body over the balcony wall. His glasses fell off and sailed down to the parking lot where they landed with barely a sound.

“Your own daughter, you bastard.”

“No!” he yelled. “No. Please. I didn’t. Don’t let me go. Please don’t let me go.”

“Was it like this?” Jenn whispered. “Huh, Daddy? Is this how you had her before she went?”

“I loved Maya, you sick bastards. Loved her. I cried all night when she died. Ask Nina. I cried like a baby, like an animal.”

I looked over at Jenn behind Rob’s back. She shrugged.

“Pull me up,” he pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything. I will, I swear. I’ll tell you about Martin. About Sterling.”

“And Maya?”

“I never touched her. She killed herself.”

I leaned in close and said, “Rob, your daughter did not kill herself. She was murdered. She was thrown from this balcony. And if you didn’t do it, you better help us find out who did.”

Tears ran down his smooth cheeks, and fell like rain toward the pavement. “Please pull me up,” he said softly. “I think I’m going to be sick.”