High Chicago (24 page)

S
imon Birk had landed on his back on the rutted earth, not far from a line of portable washrooms and a dumpster filled with odd lengths of wood and rebar. A pool of blood was fanning out around his head but the rest of him—his top half anyway—looked fine, good enough for an open-casket funeral. Most of the damage would be on the underside and internal: pulped organs beneath the intact skin.

“And there you have it,” Curry said. “Simon Birk’s final groundbreaking.”

We made Curry walk ahead of us toward the trailer, supporting Avi with an arm around his waist, Avi moaning and limping, all the adventurousness knocked out of him. Then Curry said, “Fuck it,” squatted and got his shoulder under Avi and stood, grunting, hefting him like a fireman would. A lot stronger than his slim frame suggested, handling Avi’s weight and staying sure-footed among the deep ruts created by earthmovers’ treads.

When we got to the trailer, he let Avi fall heavily to the ground. Avi cried out and Curry told him to quit moaning. “It’s one fucking leg,” he said. “It’s not like you were shot.”

I opened the trailer door and peered in. I could see Henry’s thin white shins peeking out where his pants parted from his socks. He hadn’t moved.

No sign of Jenn.

Just a walkie-talkie on the ground, its indicator light off.

“In back of you,” a man’s voice said.

We turned and saw Tom Barnett standing about fifteen feet in back of us, leaning against the cab of a backhoe. He held Jenn in front of himself. His powerful right arm was around her throat, with her Baby Eagle resting in his hand, its muzzle resting casually against her head. His own piece was pointed at us: yet another Beretta, the place lousy with them.

“You know the routine,” he said. “Put the guns down. Both of you, now! Drop them easy and kick them this way.”

I put the Beretta down, kicked it across the ground toward him. It would have made it all the way but it tripped up on a rut three-quarters of the way there and stopped. Ryan threw his Glock to roughly the same spot.

“They have any more guns, Francis?” Barnett rumbled softly.

“The dark guy, Ryan, he has my Beretta in a shoulder holster. And an Eagle in an ankle holster.”

Barnett told Ryan to unbutton his jacket and open it. Saw the butt of the gun. Told Ryan to take it out slow with two fingers and lay it on the ground. Made him lift his pant leg and ditch the Eagle. “Now step back.”

Ryan stepped back.

Curry stooped to pick up the guns.

Barnett said, “Uh-uh.”

“But that’s—”

“I said, uh-uh.”

Curry said, “Tommy—”

“Step back. Both of you. I want all the guns first. Then we’ll talk. You, Geller. You don’t look as tough as your friend. Take the guns and toss them over here. Carefully. I been on this job too long to say ‘or the girl gets it.’ But that’s the general drift.”

When he had all the guns in his possession—and Curry’s killing gun stowed in his own holster—Barnett shoved Jenn toward the trailer and covered us with his service piece and her Baby Eagle. Avi moaned on the ground, gripping his injured leg; if he was looking for sympathy from any of us, he’d wait till he dried up like a bird carcass.

I said to Barnett, “If anyone saw or heard Birk fall, you’ve got little to no time. You need to make a decision and there’s only one that’s going to save your neck
and
let you walk out of here a hero.”

He looked at me with interest—too much for Curry’s liking. Curry said, “Who you going to listen to, Tommy, this gaper here or your old partner?”

“The facts on the ground, old partner, are a little different than what you told me they’d be. I was supposed to put the arm on some broad named Charlaine. I not only find a fucking crowd scene when I get here, but everyone’s armed to the teeth, even Angel Face here, plus that seems to be Simon Birk mashed into the fucking ground there, Francis, with no pulse. So I say to you, old partner, what the fuck did you just get me into?”

“Do things my way,” I said, “and you’ll keep your badge. Hell, you’ll probably get promoted. You listen to Curry, there’s going to be a bloodbath. A body count you won’t be able to take.”

Barnett said, “How do you know what I can take?”

“My way, you can close half a dozen major crimes. His way, you have to cover up ten murders.”

“You’re delusional.”

“Count them, Detective. You’d have to kill everyone here,” I said. “Five of us.”

“I count four.”

“There’s a security guard tied up in the trailer. He’s tied, gagged, deaf and blind, but Curry would have to kill him too because he spoke to him on the phone tonight. That’s five.
Birk makes six. Then there’s Chuck Belkin—you remember Chuck, shot to death after Birk’s robbery. Add three homicides in Toronto that a very good sergeant is handling, that’s your ten killings, all open and active, any one of which could connect with another one, then boom, you’ve sunk everything you’ve worked for. You know there’s only one way out for you. If you’re not seeing it, it’s not because you’re not smart enough.”

Curry said, “Let me help you, Tom.”

“You know what you have to do,” I said to Barnett. “The only question is, Can you do it?”

“You’re so damn sure,” he said. He knew exactly what I meant, and that I was right because there was only one way out of this for him—to kill Francis Curry on the spot.

“It’s the only story you can sell,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Curry said. “What story?”

“Ever see
The Maltese Falcon?
” I asked.

Curry said, “Sure.” Frowning. “Everyone’s seen that one.”

“Remember they need a fall guy at the end, someone to give to the cops for the murders. They settle on Wilmer, the little guy in the coat with the two big guns. You can see his eyes getting wider and wider as he realizes Sydney Greenstreet is going to sell him out. We need the same ending, Curry. We need a fall guy. If it’s you, Barnett gets the guy who killed Simon Birk and at least three others.”

“Where does your story start?” Barnett asked.

“Birk brought Avi Stern—that’s him moaning there—up to the top of the building to show him what the view would be like. Curry was blackmailing Birk over the phony home invasion, Birk threatened to cut him off, he followed Birk and attacked him up there. Pushed him over. Stern tried to stop him and was injured. Curry was fleeing the scene when you arrived and when confronted by him, you shot him dead.”

“I just happen on a scene my ex-partner’s involved in?”

“Doesn’t have to be. You were following him. You always suspected the Birk home invasion was an inside job. You had no proof but, dedicated cop that you are, you couldn’t let it go. Now you can finally close the case that haunted you. Birk admitted it all in front of a lawyer.”

“Yeah, listen to it on tape,” Curry laughed. “You can hear Geller winging bolts at Birk while he screams his fucking lungs out.”

“Remember the broomstick Curry broke off in some guy’s ass?” I said. “The one that got him kicked off the force? This is another stick of his, Barnett. You want to be the one left holding it?”

He was looking at the guns in his hands, the Baby Eagle barely visible. “So you’re saying Francis gets shot fleeing the scene.”

“The alternative is shooting five in cold blood.”

“Nicely argued, Geller. Nicely done. If this was Toronto, someone would probably give you a gold star. But me and Francis,” he said, “we go back too far. He broke me in, didn’t you, Francis. Taught me what it was to be a cop in this city. Then he helped me learn about people like Birk.” He took out Curry’s Beretta and handed it to him. “Francis,” he said, “your weapon.”

Curry gave me a smile as cold and lethal as black ice. Eased the safety off the gun.

Barnett said, “Police, drop the gun.”

Curry looked up.

“I said, drop the gun!” Then he fired three shots from his service pistol into Curry’s chest, fast as firecrackers, sending him staggering back, his arms going like pinwheels. He fell onto his back, his head smacking hard against the cold ground, but that didn’t matter—he was already dead. The pistol lay close to his hand. Barnett kept us covered, got his body between us and the gun.

“Talk fast,” he said to me. “What does the security guard know?”

“He saw Jenn. Briefly. Could be coaxed into giving a very generic description. He heard Ryan’s voice and talked to Curry on the phone. Curry told him to go home. Which works with the idea Curry was planning something.”

“All right. Get into the trailer,” he said. “All of you.”

“We should get out of here. Someone’s going to report the shots you just fired.”

“I said, into the trailer. Now.”

“You’re halfway out of this, Barnett, don’t turn back.”

“I can’t just let you walk out of here.”

“Barnett—”

“What do I know about you people? How do I know who can keep his mouth shut? That one’s a lawyer, for Chrissakes.”

“We have no interest in pursuing you,” I said. “As far as we’re concerned, you’re Chicago’s problem. Not ours.”

“And him?” Meaning Avi.

“He’s in enough shit as it is.” I squatted next to him and pulled his face up by the hair. “Aren’t you, Avi? You’d like to get out of this with your life intact. Right? However much you hate me, you’re not going to bring your family and practice down in flames too, are you?”

“No,” he muttered.

“Okay, Barnett? Let us get out of here, now, and leave you to tell what happened. One teller, one story. Far less room for screwing up.”

“No one’s going anywhere.”

“You could kill us all?”

“I’m a Chicago police detective,” he said. “Tell me what I can’t do.”

“I’ll tell you,” said a voice above him.

Barnett looked up into the night sky.

Something metal fell and struck him in the face. A lunch
box. He dropped without a word. He lay dazed, bleeding from a cut above his right eye, while Ryan stripped him of his guns, including a .25-calibre belly gun tucked in an ankle holster of his own.

There was a rustling sound on the roof of the trailer above where Barnett had been standing. Then quiet, then a thud as Gabriel Cross dropped to the ground, wiping his hands of some dirt.

“I told you not to come here tonight,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “But I’m working on not listening to white men so much.”

We hammered it out quick and dirty outside the trailer. With Ryan’s gun nuzzling his ear, Barnett had little choice but to nod and accept our terms. Jenn and Ryan would start the drive back that night and I would fly out on the first morning plane, to stay consistent with our means of entry; three tourists going home after enjoying ever too briefly the wonders of Chicago, the Great Lakes’ finest city. Avi would go back to a life that seemed entirely predictable on one level—the good Jewish lawyer, the father of three lovely kids—and beneath it his seething hatred of me, this grudge he’d nursed all these years, this idea that if I had never come to Har Milah, he’d be happily married to a lush beauty, instead of living in clenched misery with a wife as dry as a crumbling leaf. That was his life. Let him go back to it. Neither he nor Barnett could ever implicate the other without destroying himself.

Barnett would finally solve the Birks’ robbery. He would close the cases on Simon Birk, Chuck Belkin and Charlaine Teal, the woman who played the role of evil chambermaid, whose death he’d also ascribe to Curry. He’d even rescue Henry, the loyal night watchman.

Gabriel Cross, of course, had vanished before Barnett regained his senses. As far as the official story went, he was
never even there. Just like the rest of us. As if that night had never happened. If only.

Back at the hotel, Ryan and Jenn loaded their few things into the car, got directions to the northbound I-94 and sped off.

I booked a flight on my laptop, leaving O’Hare at 6:35 the following morning, then fell back on the bed and worked on slowing my breathing, getting it right with the rhythm of my heart and body, instead of the Riverdance thing it was doing.

Advocating a man’s death the way I had, so cold and logical about it—yes, I did it to keep the rest of us alive, one life to trade for five. And it was probably a conclusion Barnett would have come to on his own. Curry had sealed his own fate the minute he threw Birk to his death. But there I’d been, like Iago whispering in Othello’s ear, a low baritone urging murder to keep the peace.

Not exactly the kind of world repairs I had set out to make.

I didn’t think I’d want to be back atop a tall building for a long time. No more CN Tower climbs for charity. No going out on observation decks. Being so high atop a building with another man—someone you deeply feared or mistrusted—gave you an unsettling sense of power: you could end his life with the slightest shove. Birk had clearly felt it, ordering me out on the beam, chucking bolts at me as I clung to a girder below him. And I felt it when I forced him to walk out there. When I threw a bolt at him, making him drop to his beam and cling to it like a frightened child.

I lay there in a T-shirt and shorts. The king bed was more than big enough but I knew I wasn’t going to sleep for a while, so I appreciated that the ceiling was in good overall repair: no flaking paint, no cracks, no spiderwebs. A chandelier free of dust. The chambermaid had done a good job. Got into the corners. Got the place fresh. Hadn’t slipped in with a
knife so far. This hotel was all right with me. I wasn’t so all right with me.

Maybe that would pass once I had done the last thing I needed to do to close Marilyn Cantor’s case.

I
walked along the side of Rob Cantor’s house in the light of a pale moon that barely showed the chink in the brick where Perry had tried to take my head off with a shovel. Like I’d ever let myself get beaten by a guy named Perry. Bad enough a Simon and a Francis had almost killed me. But not a Perry. Or an Arthur or a Skippy or a Todd.

It had been an unusual day, to say the least. I went straight home from the airport, made myself eggs and sat in front of CNN, watching the news surrounding Simon Birk’s stunning demise. There was footage of a covered body beside the unfinished Millennium Skyline tower, surrounded by grim-looking men. There were interviews with police and safety officials, with the network’s business analysts, the
Tribune
’s architecture critic, Donald Trump and Birk’s other competitors. “You couldn’t really call us colleagues,” Trump said. “Simon saw everyone as competition.”

There was even a sidebar story on Tom Barnett, the Chicago detective who never gave up on the home invasion, who always believed Joyce Mulhearn Birk deserved to be heard, even if she herself could not speak, and who finally had been forced to shoot down his former partner. The circumstances were under investigation by the Chicago Police
Review Authority, but he was being spoken of in reverent tones.

Once the news of Birk’s death got out, my phone started ringing. My mother called, relieved to hear I was back; I was relieved she couldn’t see me, banged up as I was.

My brother called. I let his call go to the machine.

Hollinger called. I let her call go too. What could I say to her that wasn’t offputting or outright incriminating?

At eleven, Jenn called to say she and Ryan were on the 401 approaching the Don Valley. Ryan had done all the driving, she said, pumped up on coffee and adrenaline. I told her they should come by for breakfast, see Tom Barnett on the news.

Rob Cantor called while I was waiting for them. “Jesus Christ,” he exploded. “What the hell happened there? Did you see him? Did you talk to him? Did he tell you anything about—”

“Rob,” I said. “I’m going to have to tell you this in person.”
Not over the phone, you idiot
.

“Oh, Jesus. Of course. Look, I’m going into an emergency meeting of our board in about three minutes. It’s going to be nuts, I can tell you, because not one of us has a clue what this means. Can you come by the house later?”

“How later?”

“The latest we’ll go is seven because the chair and at least two other members have to catch the last flight to New York. Make it eight to be safe.”

Ryan dropped Jenn off at eleven-thirty. I offered him more coffee but he waved it off. “Time for me to transform back into a mild-mannered restaurateur. Drive down to the market, hope I’m not too late to get good enough veal for osso buco. And then grab a few hours sleep.” He hugged me and told me to come by Giulio’s later if I was hungry. Then he turned to Jenn, held out his arms. She clasped his right hand and pumped it awkwardly. Just as his frown started to tighten, she sparked into laughter, grabbed him and held him close.

“He behave himself in the car?” I asked Jenn.

“You kidding? He’s not such a tough guy after all. We spent most of the drive back talking about cooking. And cooking shows.”

He said, “Don’t start.”

“Dante Ryan watches cooking shows?”

Ryan said to me, “The look I’m about to give you …”

“Not only does he watch cooking shows,” Jenn said, “he even watches the horseshit reality shows where the chefs throw tantrums on cue.”

“
Once
, I told you,” Ryan said. “I watched it once. Most of the time it’s—”

“Biba,” Jenn beamed. “He watches Biba. She cooks like his Italian nana.”

“That’s real cooking, is all I’m saying.”

She patted his cheek. “Thanks for the ride, tough guy.”

I told Jenn what we needed to do before I went to the Cantor house. She agreed. We made the necessary phone call. The other party agreed—eventually—to provide what we asked for. Being entirely uninjured, Jenn agreed to fetch the item we had just procured.

Everyone so agreeable.

I took a hot bath while Jenn was gone. I could almost make fists. I tried to relax, breathe my way into a better state, but I couldn’t even keep my eyes closed. Too hyper, trying to think of everything I knew, of anything I might have missed.

When Jenn got back, we turned off the news—CNN had nothing new to add to its reports on Birk, now packaged under the banner “A Tycoon Falls”—and played the tape she had retrieved. Played it and played it. Rewinding, fast-forwarding, pausing. Advancing frame-by-frame. Watching people’s heads, shoulders, backs, parcels. Their feet coming and going. The passage of hours. Moments in time.

—

I could hear Nina’s workout track going, booming bass and pounding drums getting into my chest like a defibrillator as I knocked on the French doors. And kept knocking, a good ten times over thirty seconds until the sound went down by half and she came to the door.

She made no pretense of being glad to see me through the glass pane but she did let me in. She wore a dark purple workout suit over a black sports bra. “The shit-kicking detective,” she said. “I thought you were in Chicago.”

“I’m back.”

“I can see why. Is all hell breaking loose there or what? Rob is so freaked out about this. I mean, even I’ve been watching the news. Is it all true? Some lunatic pushed Simon Birk off his own building?”

“Yes.”

Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest, the forearm muscles well defined. “Why?”

“Presumably because he was a lunatic.”

“I mean, why now? Why Rob? He finally has it all in his grasp, he’s got a partner who knows absolutely everyone, every door is open, he’s stepping out in the spotlight, and boom, someone throws Simon Birk off a roof and that’s it? Because the way Rob’s talking, the whole deal is falling apart.”

“He’s home?”

“No, he called from the car a few minutes ago to say he was stuck on Bayview where they’re digging up Moore. He’ll be fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Is there somewhere I can wait?”

She looked me up and down. “Wipe your feet,” she said. “Come on back to the gym.”

I wiped as directed and followed her through the den, past the entertainment unit that took up all of one wall, its centrepiece a mounted plasma TV at least sixty inches wide,
with speakers placed around the room to provide full sound. Hundreds of CDs, hundreds of DVDs. If Rob had set them up, they’d be alphabetical; if Nina, by the workout they provided. I noted with relief that among the many video and stereo components was a working VCR.

In the fitness room, Nina took a white towel off a pile of them and wiped a puddle of her sweat off the base of a stair-climber, then rubbed away dark wet stains on the grips. She tossed the towel into a laundry bin, then took another from the pile to rub her arms and legs, used a third to mop her face and neck. She squatted in front of a mini-fridge next to a stack of free weights that went in pairs from five to twenty-five pounds. She took a bottle of spring water. Offered me one. I decided to match her drink for drink.

She took a long drink of her water, half the bottle in three or four fierce gulps, wiped her mouth and said, “So do you know what really happened there? More than was on the news?”

“I know a lot of what happened.”

“Can you tell me without Rob here? Or is it, like, privileged or something?”

“First of all, he’s not my client. Marilyn is. And even if he were, you’re his wife. So I think we’re on safe ground.”

I wanted Nina talking about it. Wanted to see what she would ask me.

She sat on a gym mat and stretched out her legs, not able to do full splits but coming close, dampness visible in all the expected places. She leaned out over each leg, exhaling slowly. “What are you going to tell Rob about Maya?” she said on an outward breath. Perspiration visible at her dyed hairline, above her lips, between her breasts. “Did they kill her?”

I said, “Birk was desperate to finish his building in Chicago. He was late, he had hit every possible obstacle, he was jammed up, and this man Francis Curry, the one who killed him, he had made a career out of removing obstacles from
Simon Birk’s path. He would do anything to keep Birk going because it kept him going too.”

“So he killed Maya?”

“He would have, if Birk had told him to. If he’d thought of it himself. He killed at least three others I know of, two of them right here. He admitted it. He also stood by while Birk beat his wife into a coma. Helped him commit massive fraud. He admitted all that. So did Birk.”

“That’s awful.”

“He came close to getting away with it.”

She turned away from me, stretched herself out over the far leg. “How?”

“Tape. He had tape of Birk beating his wife, taken off a security camera. I learned a fair bit about these systems while I was down there. And the thing that stands out, Nina, out of everything I saw, is how much power you have over someone once you catch them doing something bad on tape.”

I figured it was as good a time as any to take the tape I had brought out of my jacket pocket and lay it on the counter above the mini-fridge, with the label facing the wall.

Nina didn’t ask what it was.

“Like I told you,” I said, “Birk and Curry did some terrible things. Admitted them … well, not exactly freely but out loud, on tape and in front of a lawyer. But neither of them owned up to Maya. No reason not to—in for a penny, in for a pound—but neither one did.”

“So she did kill herself. Is that what you came to tell Rob?”

“No. I wouldn’t tell him that. No one still believes that.”

“Well, I do. Everyone did, till you came around.”

“Someone threw her off the balcony, Nina. Someone hoisted her over and gave her a good start off her balcony. Maybe they stunned her first. Choked her out. I thought maybe Rob had, because he had the most to lose if Harbourview went bad.”

“That’s crazy,” she said. “He would never.”

“But somebody did. Someone else who wanted that building to keep going up and up. And I came back from Chicago convinced no one there had anything to do with it. I thought about her brother Andrew,” I said. “He’s definitely strong enough to have done it and he’s devoted to his dad and that building. It was a big part of his future.”

“He never says very much,” Nina said. “At least not to me. Although I’m pretty sure he’d fuck me if he got the chance. I’ve caught him checking me out.”

“There was only one way to know who went into Maya’s building that night and came out minutes after the fall. And that was to look at the tape.”

She looked at the cassette on the shelf, then at me, smirking, “There’s no camera in Maya’s building. It’s like a student dump.”

I swivelled the tape around so she could see the typed label. “It’s not from Maya’s building,” I said. “It’s from the College View Apartments next door, from the night that Maya was pushed to her death. The security firm keeps digital recordings for thirty days and they let us copy the footage from that night. And we’re going to watch it when Rob gets home.”

Nina looked at me, her face impassive. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s watch your tape. We can set it up in the den. I can even nuke some popcorn.”

“Were you there that night?”

“The night she died?”

“Did you go to her building?”

“Watch the tape,” she said. “You can see for yourself.”

I took the tape and my bottle of water into the den.

“Don’t sit in the recliner,” she said. “That’s Rob’s when he gets home. And put a coaster under the water, ’kay?”

I sat, keeping the cassette beside me. I didn’t want to play it. Truth was it showed fuck all. I had thought it would show
Nina going in. I had feared it might show Andrew Cantor. But the camera didn’t pan far enough to show the full entrance to Maya’s building: you could see anyone who exited the building and turned to their left, or south. You could see the backs of people going in that way. You couldn’t see anyone who would have exited to the north or come in that way.

Neither Nina nor Andrew nor anyone else I knew had been captured on the tape. If they had been at the building they had come from the north.

Nina was strong enough to have thrown Maya over. I saw how much weight she’d bench-pressed with Perry. I had looked at her rangy muscled body, saw the sweat she could generate. But I had screened the video three times and there wasn’t a frame conclusive enough to force her hand if we did sit and watch it with Rob.

I was sitting on the couch with my water bottle neatly beside me on a coaster as directed. A good guest, someone you’d invite back. For my trouble, Nina came up behind me and slammed something hard and heavy into the back of my head, bang on the occipital bulge. I pitched forward and banged my bad shoulder hard on the edge of the coffee table in front of me. My vision went blurry and I felt nauseous. When I tried to push up on my hands, the floor fell further away. I was concussed and good, like Eric Lindros after a Scott Stevens open-ice hit, looking for the right bench to collapse onto.

I turned my head and saw Nina with a weight in her hand, a fifteen-pounder by the look of it, one end shiny with blood.

Seeing it, taking in the red end of it, made me realize the back of my head was bleeding and that I’d better try very hard not to pass out.

“She was going to fuck it all up,” I said thickly.

“That she was,” Nina said, coming around the couch, her hand flexing around the bar of the weight.

I made it to my feet, wobbling like a bandy-legged vaudeville drunk. I grabbed a framed picture of Rob and Nina off a shelf and threw it at her. Didn’t hit her. Didn’t come close or slow her down. She advanced. I rambled backward. Mumbled, “What happened here that night? What’d you catch her doing?”

“Going through Rob’s briefcase. I don’t know what she was looking for but she was looking.”

She didn’t know much of anything, Nina. Only what she wanted. It haunted the room like cold breath in a morgue.

“She was serious about stopping him,” Nina said. “About sticking to her principles even if it meant bringing her own father down. So stupid for someone supposedly smart. If she knew a tenth of what she thought she knew, she’d be alive today. But she was twenty-two years old and didn’t know a fucking thing. Do you have any idea what I already knew at twenty-two? What I already was?”