High Chicago (23 page)

T
he way Curry told it, Birk had wanted his wife dead from the outset. He didn’t love her. He hated the way she spent his money on paintings that made no sense to him, sculptures that looked like scrap. Vases and rugs he could have bought for a tenth of the price. Like many rich men, he was tight with a dollar. He might spend thousands on a Rolex, millions on a private jet, but he begrudged the expenses Joyce piled up.

“Even this home she’s in now is peanuts compared to what she used to spend, right, Simon?” Curry sneered.

“He’s making it up,” Birk insisted. “He’s trying to save his own neck.”

“You had your chance,” I told him. “Let Curry talk.”

Curry told us Birk had come up with the idea after seeing a news report on a fraudulent home invasion in Connecticut. He approached Curry with the plan, went over all the security systems with him, lined up buyers for the artwork in Switzerland, Japan and Russia.

“The inside camera, the one in the foyer, was supposed to be disconnected,” Curry said. “But I needed insurance, in case Simon tried to pin it on me. I knew he wouldn’t hold up if the police brought any heat on him. So I kept it rolling, and it’s a fucking beauty. Nice crisp images of Simon taking a tire iron to
his beloved wife. And you know what else? Belkin was supposed to do it. I was going to break a couple of Simon’s bones and Chuck was going to do his wife. The story would be she resisted, kicked him in the nuts or something, and he lost it on her. But Simon insisted on doing it himself. Didn’t you,
boss?
He took the tire iron and looked her right in the eye. Then
whack, whack, whack
. Six, seven times in the head. She only saw the first one coming, but what an image to take to your grave. Your own husband doing you in, in the home you made together.”

“How did she survive?”

“We thought she was dead. Christ, you could see through her skull right to her brain. And we were running out of time. We had to get Simon cleaned up—he was covered in blood—and we still had to get all the shit out to the van. We were all surprised she made it. The wonders of modern medicine. Personally, I think she would have been better off dead, because she’s got no life now. But in her own way, she contributed. As long as I have that recording—and I have plenty of copies—I have a job for life. Simon can’t fire me, kill me or say anything to the cops.”

“Why worry about that?” I asked. “You have Tom Barnett on your side.”

“I wasn’t sure Tommy would go along with it. He was a pretty good cop once. Even that thing—the one that got me kicked off the force—he didn’t have much to do with that. Lucky for us he needed money to help his kid get off dope. What they charge for rehab programs, he wasn’t going to make as a cop.”

“You getting all this?” I said to Avi.

“Yes.” He looked deathly pale. I guess corporate law didn’t prepare you for sordid tales like this one.

I paged Jenn on the walkie-talkie: “Everything cool down there?”

“We’re good,” she said. “One car stopped here a minute ago but it moved on.”

“Okay. We’ll be down in five.”

I told Birk he could come in off the beam now. He crawled forward until he reached the metal deck.

“What now?” he asked.

“Francis is going to tell us where that tape is. Then we’re going to retrieve it. Then we’re going to have you charged with the attempted murder of your wife, plus whatever other counts a U.S. attorney can come up with. Even Barnett won’t be able to save you this time.”

“How do you know that tape even exists? That it’s not something Francis made up to put the blame on me?”

“Because he’s still alive and working for you. Without it, I don’t think that would be the case. Right, Francis?”

Curry nodded.

I called Avi over and asked him for the recorder. I rewound it briefly and hit play. Heard Curry’s voice: “… money to help his kid get off dope. What they charge for rehab programs, he wasn’t going to make as a cop.”

I pressed stop and handed it back to Avi.

“I heard you like to box,” I said to Birk, squaring up with him, my hands clenched.

“You’re thirty years younger than me.”

“Your wife was younger,” I said. “And I don’t have a tire iron. In fact, I have one pretty useless hand and the other hurts to make a fist.”

He kept his hands down at his sides. “Go ahead,” he said. “Hit me. Hit me all you want. The worse I look, the more people will believe this so-called confession is bullshit.”

I wanted to crush his nose, make him taste his own blood. Break his jaw so he’d have to take meals through a straw for a month. Give him a taste of what his wife had endured when the tire iron had descended on her. But I let my hands drop. “Fuck it,” I said. “Let’s take them down. Avi, let me have that recorder till we can make copies.”

Avi said no. I looked at him, wondering why he’d say that, then stopped wondering. He had an automatic pistol pointed at Dante Ryan. “Lower your gun,” he told Ryan. “Or I’ll shoot you and Jonah both.”

“Avi?” I said.

“Do it now,” he said.

Ryan set his weapon gently on the ground. Curry went to pick it up but Avi told him to stay where he was. He stooped to pick up the gun himself, then slipped it into his trench coat pocket. “I’m going to keep it for the time being,” he said. “If it’s the gun you used on those other people, like Jonah says, it’ll make for good insurance.”

“What insurance?” Birk said. “We have a deal.”

“I know what a deal means to you,” Avi said. “The gun and the tape are worth a lot more than you’re paying me.”

Suddenly it was all clear: how Birk had been aware of my every move since I had arrived in Chicago. It was Avi Stern who had sold me out.

“Your gun, Jonah. Set it down and slide it over to me.”

I did as he asked. I watched him pick it up, smiling at me with his even white teeth, wondering what Birk could have offered him to betray me. But there was no way he would have known the connection. Which meant Avi had approached him. Which meant it wasn’t the money. He was living well enough legitimately and would certainly have all the money he needed by mid-life. It had to have been something else. Then I recalled the image of him in his den, crying as we watched the Broza concert at Masada. And I had my answer.

Dalia
.

H
e had loved her from the moment he met her at Har Milah. An awkward sweaty kid from Chicago with thick glasses and a mulish laugh, he was immediately struck by her grace, her beauty, her bright blue eyes and mass of black curls. He’d been too shy to approach her as a lover and had settled for being a pal, but each day spent near her, with her, persuaded him he was inching closer to his dream. One more day, he’d tell himself, one more night of singing and laughing and dreaming together, and she’d be his.

“Then you showed up,” Avi said, pointing my own gun at me. “Jonah Geller, fit and funny, not an ounce of fat on you, not a wrong move. You didn’t sweat just getting out of bed. You were even from her hometown. And from then on, I had to watch the two of you together, holding hands, stealing kisses, sneaking out to the greenhouse. Stealing her from me by the hour.”

“This is all fascinating,” Simon Birk said. “Maybe you should save it for your memoirs.”

Avi swivelled, put the gun on Birk.

“Or not,” Birk said.

“Hanging out with the two of you, going to the concert, into Kiryat Shmona, a happy little trio, right? Except I was dying inside. I remember David Broza singing ‘Yihyeh Tov’ at
Masada, and we all had our arms around each other. I finally had my arm around Dalia, and she had hers around me, and it didn’t matter how much I was sweating because we were all soaked through from dancing all night. It would have been perfect, but you were there on her other side. I looked over and she had her hand in the back pocket of your jeans. Fucking feeling your ass. Not me, not mine, no, just her hand on my waist. Barely touching it, like she was my sister. I hated you, Jonah. I wanted to pitch you off the side of the goddamn mountain, the way the zealots threw themselves off at the end of the siege.”

“But she died, Avi. You were there when she died. You saw what—”

“Maybe she wouldn’t have!” he yelled. “Maybe we would have left Har Milah and come back to Chicago and I could have been married to her instead of Adele.”

“Don’t do this,” I said. I took a step toward him but he stepped back and told me to stay where I was.

“So I get Adele instead. She lives from headache to headache. Music’s too loud? A headache. One of the kids cries? A headache. A glass of wine, the lights too bright, the lights too dim—a headache. And God forbid Avi wants a little action. Major headache time.”

“You going to shoot me, Avi?”

“No. But someone will.”

Curry said, “The line starts here.”

“He’ll kill you too,” I said to Avi. “Curry will kill all of us.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not with my insurance policy.” He patted his coat pocket.

“Why don’t you give me one of the guns?” Curry said. “Doesn’t have to be mine. Keep that if it makes you feel better.”

“I don’t think so,” Avi said.

“The girl down there, she has a gun too.”

“I’ll deal with her when we get down there. I think she’ll give up her gun before she lets Jonah get shot.”

“Have it your way,” Curry said. “You ready?”

“Yes.”

“You, Simon?”

Birk said yes.

We all walked over to the side of the building where the hoist waited.

“There’s just one more thing to do before we go down,” Curry said.

“What?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just grabbed Simon Birk by the shirt collar and belt and threw him screaming off the side of the building.

“W
hat the fuck!” Avi yelled. He didn’t know who to point the gun at now. He finally settled on Curry.

“Everyone needs insurance,” Curry said. His hairless, bulbous head looked pale and rubbery as an unpeeled garlic clove. “You have yours, right in your pocket,” he said.

“Birk was mine for a long time.”

“Then why did you—”

“You saw how he cracked. He would have thrown us all to his lawyers. He became a liability the minute he let Geller turn him.” He gave me a look that was mean as a snake’s, a furious cobra that would take on a mongoose to get me.

“I told you before, Geller, I’m ex a lot of things. I had to scramble plenty of years after I left the force, believe me. Low-paying security jobs, personal protection gigs, but nothing I could seriously live on, until the day Simon Birk beat his wife into a coma on camera and I got a job for life! An easy two hundred a year,” he said. “And I mean easy, feet-up easy, an occasional walk around his buildings, a few drive-by checks, a very good lunch most days,
plus
every expense I could dream up. But,” he said to Avi, “he would have sold me out faster than you sold out your friend Geller. Now you take my advice, Stern. You come to a dance like this, you stick with the one that brung
ya. You stick with me if you want to resume a normal family life after tonight. You quit waving that piece around and let me do what needs to be done.”

“Avi,” I said. “I understand how you felt about Dalia—”

“How I feel,
haveri
. How I feel.”

“But it’s not just me now. You think you had a right to sell me out, fine! But you’re going to have to kill four of us now. You have enough revenge in your heart for that?”

He stood there silent as a dead man. I searched for light in his frosty blue eyes but saw none. “Four,” I said. “There’s me, Avi. You were okay with that, I was the guy who took your girl. But now there’s also Ryan and Jenn. You didn’t know about them till today, you couldn’t have predicted it, but here they are. The three of us plus you have to throw in Henry.”

His lips pursed and his eyes narrowed as he said, “Henry?”

“The old rent-a-cop down there. You’re not a killer, Avi. Give me the gun.”

“I think I’ll just stick to the plan for now,” he said.

“I’m your only chance to get out of this with anything,” I said.

“You’ll get more from me,” Curry said.

Ryan said, “If I got anything to say about this—”

“Jonah!” Jenn’s voice came crackling in over the walkie-talkie hooked to my belt. “Jonah, come in! I thought I saw somebody fall.”

I reached for the walkie-talkie. Avi levelled the gun. “If I don’t answer,” I said, “she’ll know something’s up.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “Tell her there was an accident and we’re coming right down.”

He watched me as I unhooked the walkie-talkie from my belt.

“Jenn,” I said. “It was an accident. Birk fell over the side. I repeat, an accident. Over.”

“What should I do?”

“Stay in the trailer,” I said. “We’re coming down.”

I looked at Avi as if to say, Okay?

“Turn it off,” he hissed.

“Over and out,” I said. I held up the unit and made a show of turning it off, then flipped it to him underhand. Only I flipped it a little to his left where he’d have to step over and catch it. He did and there was a loud cracking sound as all of his weight came down on a sheet of plywood bridging two sections of corrugated metal, the same one that had bent under him before. This time it broke in half, and his right leg plunged through it. As he fell, his hand hit the deck and the gun clattered away. Curry went for it without hesitating. I went too, launching myself off a bruised knee, trying to drop him with my shoulder. But I hit him with my bad side, my shoulder barely holding together, and he bodied me aside, ahead in the race for the gun. He was closing his hand on it when Dante Ryan said, “Don’t.”

His pant leg was pulled up to reveal an ankle holster and he had a Baby Eagle in his hand: the same model he had given Jenn. I remembered from our earliest meetings that he rarely travelled without at least two guns, along with his favourite stiletto.

Curry took a long look at Ryan and didn’t like what he saw. He let the gun lie, sighed and shook his head.

Avi let out a low moan. “I think my leg is broken,” he said.

“Give me a minute,” Ryan snarled. “I’ll break the other one too.”

Ryan told Curry to get Avi out of the hole he was in. “And don’t throw him over,” he said. “There’s got to be a limit to how many people you can toss off a building.”

Tears were running down Avi’s face. His right leg was bleeding through his pants. I picked up the Beretta from the floor and pointed it at him.

“I’ll take the recorder,” I said.

He took it from his pocket with a shaking hand and gave it to me. I wiped it on my jacket front and stowed it in my pocket. “You still sweat like a pig,” I said. Then I picked up the walkie-talkie and turned it on. “Jenn?” I said. “Sorry, we were turned off for a minute. We’re all okay.”

There was no answer. Just a hiss and crackle.

“Jenn? Come in, Jenn.”

Still no answer. Then the hiss and crackle died. Either her batteries had suddenly died or her unit had been shut off. I looked at Ryan. “Nowhere to go but down.”

Once again, we divided up guns. Ryan put Curry’s Beretta in his shoulder holster for safekeeping. It was a mess as far as prints went, because all of us had handled it, but Hollinger could at least test it against her Toronto homicides, settle once and for all on the idea that Curry was her killer.

Ryan gave me back my Beretta, the 92FS, and reholstered the Baby Eagle. We all got into the elevator and pulled the gate down. I kept a gun on Avi; Ryan kept his Glock on Curry. The hoist slid down the track, gusts of wind blowing through the sides, rattling the Plexiglas sheets in their frames.