Up in Smoke (7 page)

CHAPTER
10

A tall, gaunt man greeted Colleen at the front door of Erie Christian Collegiate the next morning. He was wearing cream chinos and a corduroy jacket in warthog brown. He was also wearing a mauve striped shirt, black dress shoes, and a bright green belt. She reckoned he was either colour blind or the art teacher. Not even a maths teacher could be that sartorially challenged. He asked for her
ID
and checked her name against a list attached to the clipboard he was brandishing like a shield-bearing Zulu. Natasha had warned her to have her
ID
ready; this morning's meeting was restricted to teaching staff, students, families, and health-unit personnel. Good idea. People clammed up in the presence of strangers, and when you were prospecting for clues, the last thing you wanted were tied tongues.

Colleen had come early and alone so she could observe the audience arriving for the nine a.m
.
meeting. The most productive tidbits often came before proceedings started; people said the most revealing things as they took their seats and chatted with their neighbours, thinking no one was listening.

There was nothing wrong with her hearing, but she'd inserted a hearing aid into each ear before leaving home. They were top quality instruments and practically invisible, made in Denmark. And being medical devices, they were perfectly legal to wear. The remote control she kept in her purse allowed her to crank up the volume.

When she'd started as a private eye seven years ago, an old hand had suggested she learn to lip read. She took courses at the Hearing Society and didn't disabuse them of their assumption she was going deaf. Though she mastered the technique, she came to realize that even the best lip readers mistake half the words in a sentence because so many words look identical but sound different. On the lips,
lock the door
looks like
take the car
. But by supplementing lip reading with the Danish hearing aids, she could get an accurate gist of most conversations from a distance of ten metres.

Being the first to arrive, she picked a seat at the end of the third-last row. From there she would be able to see most of the audience and hear the throwaway comments from the back of the room, where people with the most to hide usually sat.

She pulled a partially knitted scarf from her handbag. She'd used the same coarse olive wool for the past seven years, ripping out and starting again each time she ran out of yarn. No one paid attention to a woman with her hair wound in an old-fashioned braid, sitting quietly in a grey housedress, wearing no jewellery or makeup, knitting a scarf.

She watched a trio who looked around the nearly empty auditorium then chose seats at the far end of a row halfway down. She didn't miss a beat of her knitting and they didn't acknowledge her. None of them was happy to be here. The mother held her lips tight across her teeth, the father kept turning around and looking at his watch, and the girl sitting between them texted on her mobile with the focus of a concert pianist. The bandage on the tip of her right index finger flashed in the overhead lights, but didn't slow her down. Every half minute or so she used the phone's screen like a mirror and fussed with a zit at the corner of her mouth.

“Stop touching it, Emily,” said the woman.

“But it's so gross,” said the girl, peering into her mirror.

“If you leave it alone, no one will notice. Keep fussing with it and you'll rub your concealer off.”

The girl glanced around to be sure no one was looking, dug a stick of something from her purse, and dabbed it on.

The woman frowned at her husband. “I know it's the cafeteria,” she said. “That new company they hired. They don't care about nutrition.”

The father shrugged. “So? Neither do the kids.”

“I'm serious, Bob. I heard they're using cheap ingredients imported from China. Doing the fries in some kind of tropical nut oil.”

“Let's wait and see what the doctors have to say.”

As the auditorium filled, the noise level increased and, between Colleen's hearing aids and her lip reading, she caught concerns about the safety of the science lab, complaints about a gym teacher, and more worries about the cafeteria. Anger and anxiety oozed from the parents. The students projected sullen hostility, as if mortified to be seen in public with the dorky adults beside them. Of course, with six of their classmates sick or already dead, the teens were bound to be frightened. But it seemed they weren't about to share their true feelings with anyone but their peers, and only via text messages.

As she observed the petty disharmonies playing out in the families around her, her mind wandered and she wondered how she would have coped with motherhood. She and Liam had three false starts — three miscarriages in as many years. If the babies had lived, by now she'd be a single parent to three kids under ten, with no living grandparents, aunts, or uncles to offer moral support or lend a hand. And she wouldn't be earning her living as a private investigator. Single mothers didn't do all-night stakeouts. Would she have been a patient mum, or would her overly practical nature have turned her into a nag, crabby and exhausted from obsessing over every little problem?

It was easy with Max. She wasn't his mother. Like a favourite aunt, her role was to be upbeat and understanding. When things got fractious, she could withdraw to her own space. Not that she felt the need very often, but it was wonderfully reassuring to know that her condo — her private retreat and emotional safety valve — was always waiting for her. She'd lose that flexibility if she gave up her place and moved in with Zol and Max, especially if Zol went so far as to ask her to marry him. What would be her answer? That depended on how she coped with the question that plagued her every day: why had everyone she'd ever loved — even those little lost babies whose hearts had barely begun to beat — been taken away from her?

As the minutes ticked toward nine o'clock, she realized she was witnessing a phenomenon that in South Africa had seemed so natural as to go unnoticed. The audience was segregating itself into a Canadian-style apartheid. White divided from Native. The Native families occupied the back left corner. There were fewer men than women among them, and they were quieter that the Whites, but she suspected they were no less anxious. The Native kids were texting with the same fervour as their White peers.

Shorty before nine, a florid-faced man in a baggy suit led Zol and Natasha to the front row. From Natasha's description, Colleen knew he must be Walter Vorst, the gum-chewing principal with the oversized painful feet. Zol turned and caught Colleen's eye as he took his seat, careful not to give her away.

At five past nine, Vorst stood up. He faced the back of the auditorium and studied the stragglers searching for seats, then pointed at several available places and invited them to sit down. His tone was halfway between friendly and authoritative. A moment later, he leaned toward Zol and told him they may as well get started. He spit his gum into a tissue and climbed to the stage. He grabbed the lectern with both hands and looked out over the audience, his expression grave, his forehead glistening with sweat. You could have heard a meerkat fart. She turned down the volume on her hearing aids with the remote hidden under her knitting.

Vorst introduced Zol and Natasha and motioned for them to stand. Zol looked particularly handsome in his black blazer, his hair fixed in that semi-dishevelled look she knew took longer to achieve that one might think. Natasha looked adorable in her pixie cut, black and white shift, and skin the colour of Darjeeling tea with a jot of Jersey cream. Natasha never wore pants. Always a dress or a skirt with darling shoes. A cute package that kept her intelligence non-intimidating and her government-initiated investigations non-threatening. If the girl didn't have such obvious chemistry with her surgical resident beau, Colleen might have worried she had designs on her beloved Dr. Zol.

Zol took the stage, cleared his throat, and reviewed the situation for the audience. He was suitably serious but not dour, clear without being condescending, and brief. Unlike Vorst, whose sincerity seemed manufactured, Zol's came across as one hundred percent genuine. He explained the importance of finding the hidden factors linking the students with liver disease in order that the cluster — he always avoided the e-word, epidemic — could be stopped and no one else would fall ill. Promising to provide plenty of time for questions in a few minutes, he passed the microphone to Natasha, who started with a warm greeting and explained the detailed questionnaire she needed everyone to complete at home tonight and return to the front office at nine tomorrow morning. She apologized for the short deadline, but said she knew that everyone wanted to get the liver issue solved as soon as possible. Like Zol, she never let the word epidemic cross her lips.

When the question period began, the tension in the room trebled. Colleen stowed her knitting and slipped through a side exit.

She'd heard enough from the audience — Zol and Natasha were hearing a good deal more — and it was time to have a look round for physical evidence.

It was clear that this school had little in the way of an outdoor sports program. The schoolyard was too small for rugby, soccer, or gridiron football. It was large enough for volleyball, but there was no sign of a net. The spotty field was mostly gravel with patches of withering grass and dandelions past their prime. Dozens of gum wrappers, a few pop cans, and the occasional sheet of discarded homework lay where they'd blown against the perimeter chain-link fence. She followed the fence to the northeast corner of the schoolyard, where she found a large gap through which a well-worn path led into an abandoned property. She followed the path as it wound to the far side of a stand of spruce. Beyond the trees, the trail led her to an empty clearing littered with broken beer bottles. This teen hangout wasn't visible from any of the school windows, but its existence would be obvious to anyone with more than a passing interest in the comings and goings of the student body. The ground was covered in cigarette butts and gum wrappers, the air heavy with the stench of tobacco and stale beer. She picked up a battered plastic box about the size of a deck of cards. The teens wouldn't be playing bridge here. Blackjack, perhaps? Dozens of empty cigarette packages, faded and muddied, lay trampled into the dirt. She picked up two and examined them. She'd never heard of the brand: Hat-Trick. She put the plastic boxes, the cigarette packs, and a handful of butts into the large resealable plastic bag she always had handy in her purse. She didn't bother with the beer bottles.

So much for the fundamentalist dogma expounded by this Christian school, which the principal had promised Natasha was free of drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. It seemed he was prepared to overlook Moses' commandment about bearing false witness. The ninth, was it? And his students were clearly disregarding the fifth, the one about honouring their fathers and mothers with respectable behaviour. What other lies were Vorst, his staff, and his students hiding here?

CHAPTER
11

Zol shut the dishwasher and turned it on. Bacon and eggs made for quick cleanup after a long day of collective nail biting at the Simcoe Health Unit. He'd spoken to Hamish, but Wilf Dickinson was still fiddling with the blister specimens and couldn't say if or when he'd have more definitive results from his electron microscope. The guy sounded like a perfectionist. Every time a phone rang at the health unit, the staff froze, fearing the call was from an Emerg doc reporting more teens with liver failure. So far, so good, but waiting until Natasha finished her analysis of this morning's questionnaires from Erie Christian Collegiate was killing him. She promised she'd have something to tell him by tomorrow. He didn't know what he would do if there was no beef in her results.

He was about to ask Colleen whether she wanted to finish off with a peppermint tea or a shot of Amarula when he heard the rumble of ten-year-old feet entering the kitchen behind him.

“Hey,” he said. “You're supposed to be in bed.”

Max made a face. “I can't sleep.”

“Have you tried?”

Max cocked his head and pouted. “Why can't Colleen read me a story?”

“Because it's past your bedtime. What will Mrs. Rivers say when you start snoring in class?”

“Da-ad.”

“You need your full ten hours.”

“Awhhh, just a quick one?”

Zol checked his watch and threw Max a wink. “Tell her I said no longer than nine and a half minutes.”

Max beamed and threw his arms around Zol's chest, the soft, pyjama-clad torso pressing into him with firm, exuberant warmth. In came waves of the same soothing energy, the same indelible connection, that had overtaken him, filled him with love, when he'd held Max for the first time at a minute of age. How long would it be before Max stopped wearing pyjamas, and teenage angst tore the two of them apart? This morning, Erie Christian Collegiate's auditorium had been raw with contempt and hostility. Was a cold war between parents and their teens an unavoidable by-product of impatience on one side and the craving for emancipation on the other? If he worked on being more flexible and less cranky than his own dad had been, would he and Max stay close, no matter what?

Max let go and swept the room with a tentative gaze. “And . . . and Daddy?”

“Careful, bozo. Don't push it.”

Max's face clouded with sudden disappointment. He shrugged and the smile left his eyes. “Never mind.”

This late in the day, flexibility didn't come easily. “Sorry, son. What is it?”

Max hung his head.

“Come on, you can tell me.”

Max turned and stamped toward the sunroom. “I said, never mind.”

Zol's stomach tightened. Something was on Max's mind and he'd blown it. Like his dad used to do. Would Max bring it up tomorrow, or had the moment been lost forever?

Fifteen minutes later, Max was hugged and kissed and settled. He seemed happy enough despite whatever had been on his mind. He'd really taken to Colleen, no question about it.

Zol handed her a glass of Amarula and watched the light dance in rainbows through the crystal's pattern and onto her cheeks. From the other tumbler, a perfect match to hers, he warmed his throat with a generous swallow of Glenfarclas. He'd found the second Waterford glass on eBay to partner with the one left intact after Francine had smashed the others in a fit of pique. He'd hated the symbolism of the solitary crystal piece. Luxury and elegance were pointless unless they were shared.

“Is he okay?” Zol asked her.

“He's fine.”

“There's something on his mind.”

“He is a thinker, Zol.”

“It's just that . . . well, he's been a bit moody lately. Almost secretive.” And now spending time in his room with the door closed. He never used to do that.

“He needs his space. They all do.”

“I'm scared of the teen years. You know, after the undeclared war we witnessed this morning.”

“Which, by the way, is worse than you think.”

Shit. Was that possible? “What do you mean?”

Colleen dug into her handbag and pulled out a plastic shopping bag. “Get me a newspaper, will you? Got something to show you. And it's going to be messy.”

Zol retrieved today's
Hamilton Spectator
from the recycling box and spread it on the coffee table.

“Perfect,” Colleen said. “I've been desperate to show you this all afternoon.”

She dumped the contents of her shopping bag onto the newspaper, covering the table with squashed cigarette packs, fag ends, beer caps, and gum wrappers. The sunroom filled with the harsh smell of Native tobacco. Ringo Starr filled his head with an annoying chorus of “Yellow Submarine.” He'd never liked that track.

When Ringo had finished, he asked her, “Where'd you get that stuff?”

“The smoking den at the rear of the school.”

“Erie Collegiate provides a smoking den? But Vorst told Natasha —”

“It's unofficial. And not on school property.” She described her discovery of the hangout behind the school, screened from view by a thicket of evergreens.

She put down her drink and held up a small plastic box. Her eyes twinkled below her puzzled frown. Colleen was at her most radiant — well, almost — when facing a mystery. “Do you know what this is? I thought maybe it was for holding a deck of playing cards.”

Zol took it, looked at it quickly, then laughed. “It's for Rollies.”

Her silvery earrings twisted and sparkled as she cocked her head. “And they would be . . . ?”

“Cigarettes manufactured on the rez and sold in bulk. In Ziploc bags, two hundred at a time. People who smoke Rollies don't go in for silver cigarette cases, so they carry a day's worth of fags in a plastic box the size of a cigarette pack.” He took the box and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “Like this. See?” The weight of the plastic against his chest felt like a violation. He yanked the disgusting thing out and tossed it on the table. He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Smokers buy a dozen or so bags of Rollies at a time, store them in the fridge, and take them out as they need them.”

“The refrigerator?”

“So they don't go stale.” As if anyone could tell the difference between a fresh Rollie and a stale one.

“Is it legal?”

“To sell Rollies? Not the way the Natives do it. For starters, the Ziploc packaging breaks all the rules. And only fellow Natives are supposed to get them tax free. Status Indians are not required to pay taxes on tobacco, except for a token excise tax. Don't forget, they invented the stuff.”

“But most of the kids at Erie Collegiate are not Native.”

“Of course not. It's the biggest contraband game in the country. Billions-worth every year.”

Colleen's pupils widened. “Anyone can purchase Native smokes tax free?”

“The government estimates that forty percent of the cigarettes smoked in Ontario come from Native reserves. Unburdened by government regulations, inspection, or taxes.” A memo to the health units from the Ministry had reported a rate even higher among teen smokers.

“How much do they cost?”

“Rollies? Bought on the reserve? Ten dollars for two hundred cigarettes. Some shops throw in an additional twenty per bag.”

He watched her doing the math in her head. Her amazement was obvious. “That's about a dollar for twenty-five cigarettes.”

“Less than a cup of coffee, and ten times cheaper than premium, name brand smokes in an off-reserve store. They're made in clandestine factories that make no pretence of legitimacy.”

“Extraordinary. How do you know all this?”

“Dad harps about it all the time. He may have given up tobacco farming, but he's still plenty pissed that the industry is forced to struggle on an uneven playing field where only the brand-name companies have to follow the rules. As Dad says, the tobacco pirates do whatever they like.”

“Where do these pirates have their factories? In China, like practically everything else?”

“No, no. Right here. Grand Basin Reserve. The tobacco is locally grown and purchased under the table from willing farmers glad to have a ready market.” He put his finger beside his nose. “Cash only. Undeclared farm income. No worries about income taxes, quotas, or a tobacco-grower's licence.”

He pointed to the two empty Hat-Trick packs she'd dumped from the bag. “D'you know what a hat-trick is?”

“For goodness sake, Zol. I know my hockey terms. I earned my Canadian citizenship, remember?”

“Sorry,” he said, his face reddening. “The Hat-Tricks are made on the reserve too. Supposedly higher quality than Rollies. Still local tobacco, but maybe better leaves and fewer floor sweepings. Not quite as harsh on the throat, but little government inspection or quality control of the factories that produce them.”

“The packaging makes them look like normal cigarettes. Are they more expensive?”

“Hat-Tricks are two or three times the price of Rollies, but a terrific bargain all the same.”

“And tax free?”

“Almost, but not quite. The Native producers of the nicely packaged cigarettes have an arrangement with the federal government. They collect the small excise tax the law says everyone, Native and non-Native, has to pay.” He picked up a Hat-Trick pack and showed it to her. “See, that's the excise stamp they put on every pack. It keeps the feds happy and lets everyone delude themselves into thinking they've bought fully taxed cigarettes at a bargain-basement price.”

“Only they haven't?”

“Not even close. Anyone without a Certificate of Indian Status has to pay all the other federal and provincial taxes — amounting to about fifty dollars a carton — whether they purchase cigarettes on or off a reserve.”

Zol sipped his Glenfarclas. It slipped down his throat like warm honey. “Native smoke-shop operators figure they're doing business on sovereign territory, where they refuse to collect taxes on behalf of a foreign government. They leave it up to the non-Native buyers to own up and pay the various taxes owing when they leave the rez.”

“Could honest smokers do that, pay the taxes due, if they wanted to?”

“That's the rub. The taxes are complicated and multi-layered. And different in every province. There are federal excise duties, federal tobacco taxes, provincial tobacco taxes, federal goods and services taxes, provincial sales taxes. Even if you wanted to be a model citizen, where would you go to pay the taxes on that carton of smokes you purchased on the rez?”

He pictured a guy with five bags of Rollies in one hand and a wad of ten-dollar bills in the other, standing in line with people renewing their drivers' licences.

“And of course,” he continued, “the police don't set up checkpoints at the exits to the reserve and confiscate smokes from non-Natives as they drive out.”

There were many reasons for such inaction on the part of the police. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for starters. You couldn't go searching people and their cars without a good reason. And a warrant.

“Can you imagine the hue and cry,” he said, “if the police set up road blocks outside every Native reserve in the country?”

“Sorry, you've lost me. Every reserve in the country?”

“Sure, smokes get shipped by the millions from cigarette factories in large reserves like Grand Basin to tiny reserves located in every nook and cranny of the country.”

“Rollies and Hat-Tricks are sold coast to coast?”

“Yep. In any of the six hundred First Nations reserves across the country. Quite the network, eh? Sort of like Walmart. Cheap Smokes R Us.”

Colleen gathered her evidence and swept it back into her bag. “My God, this stuff stinks.”

He dipped his nose into his glass and breathed deeply, erasing the stench of tobacco and stale mint. He closed his eyes and Joni Mitchell sang softly in his ears, “A Case of You.” Sometimes, Joni was the best part of two fingers of Glenfarclas. He savoured a deep drink.

“But it gets worse,” he told her. “A good portion of the tobacco trade originating from reserves isn't controlled by Natives.”

“Do I want to hear this?”

“No one knows what really goes on, but my dad and the other tobacco farmers are convinced that the factories making most of the Rollies on Grand Basin are operated by Asian gangs.”

Colleen swirled the ice in her Amarula and stared into the glass for a long time. Finally, she took a sip. “I suppose that makes sense. The Asians put up the start-up money, pay the local Natives a royalty, and reap most of the profits.”

“Yep. Most of the local guys in the Rollies trade are factory owners in name only. They could never finance such a large operation or have access to the expanded off-reserve market.”

“Off reserve?”

“Korean and Middle Eastern convenience stores that sell rez cigarettes under the counter. And pushers hanging around schoolyards and welfare offices. Even when middlemen take their cuts, Native smokes are way cheaper than the brand names.”

“And what about the Hat-Tricks? Controlled by Asians as well?”

Zol shook his head and told her how the best of the packaged cigarettes were made by Watershed Holdings, an outfit owned entirely by a Native guy named Dennis Badger. “He's a smart fellow. Well, cunning's more like it. And now insanely rich.”

“You know him?”

“He was a year ahead of me in high school. That's where he started calling himself the Badger.”

“Tough guy?”

“No more than the other kids from Grand Basin who got bussed to our school from the reserve.”

“How well did they get along with the Whites?” Colleen asked.

“Hard to say. They mostly kept to themselves. But they did make our hockey team the regional powerhouse.”

“Which was good for their currency on campus?”

“Never thought about it that way at the time, but I guess you're right.”