High Chicago jg-1

by Howard Shrier

  I parked in front of Hollinger's building and entered the lobby. She was waiting there for me, her black hair tied back in a simple ponytail, leaving more of that face to savour.

  "I figured I'd save you the trouble of parking," she said. "You leave your car here for a second and they ticket you."

  All I could think of to say was hello.

  "Hello yourself," she said and leaned in and kissed my cheek. Whatever scent she wore was lightly floral; just a trace of it to cloud my thoughts. When she stood back, I took a long, slow look at her. I could see murder suspects confessing just to keep her eyes on them, just to win a smile.

  "Jonah?"

  "Yes?"

  "Shall we go?"

  "Go?"

  "They don't serve food in my lobby." We drove to the entertainment district, where old warehouses on Richmond, Adelaide and surrounding streets had been turned into massive nightclubs that turned drunken patrons out into the streets by the thousands at closing time. Spewing, pissing, weaving around in search of their cars, getting into fist fights over nothing. Occasional gunshots ringing out, usually directed at bouncers who had turfed out punks whose manhood was measured by the length of a gun barrel.

  At this time of night, though, it was peaceful, the coloured lights of restaurant signs sharp and clear in the brisk autumn air. The temperature had dropped. Hollinger had drawn her coat closer around her as we walked up John Street. I wanted to put my arm around her, warm her the way her eyes warmed me, but it seemed a little soon for that. Maybe on the way out, with a good meal and a glass of wine or two inside me.

  A black belt in karate, an expert in Krav Maga, a guy who could dismantle most opponents before they knew they were in a fight, and I felt like a hapless schoolboy around this woman.

  Man, it felt good.

  Then I saw the name of the restaurant we had stopped in front of, and my stomach dropped like an elevator whose cables had snapped.

  It was called Giulio's.

  She had said it was a place that served real southern Italian cooking. I should have asked the name. Because there was no way in hell I was going in there, not with Hollinger. One look at the owner, one hint that he and I had a relationship, and I'd be lucky if all she did was slap my face and walk out. Lucky if I didn't wind up cuffed.

  Giulio's was now owned by none other than Dante Ryan, once a notorious hit man for the crew run by Marco di Pietra. He had told me this weeks ago on the phone, thanking me for my help in getting him out of the contract killing line and into something he could live with, telling me I'd never have to pay a bill in the place. That I could put my name on a stool at the bar. He'd told me how the man who had run it for forty years, Giulio himself, seventy pounds overweight and proud of it, had finally been ready to retire just when Ryan was looking to buy a place. He said he was keeping the name, the staff and most of the menu, adding just a few dishes from his mother's own collection of Calabrian recipes.

  He said he was there every night, menus in hand, greeting guests the way Giulio did, even putting on a few pounds for the cause.

  So how exactly was I going to explain to Hollinger-a cop who'd spent the last four months pondering the deaths of the Di Pietra brothers and their associates-that Dante Ryan was a personal friend of mine.

  "Uh, listen," I said.

  "Yes?"

  "Let's go somewhere else."

  "Why? I thought you liked Italian."

  "I, um…"

  "What?"

  "I had Italian for lunch."

  "Jonah. We agreed on Italian before lunch. Why would you-"

  "I forgot."

  "You forgot?"

  "My client took me out. She insisted on Italian."

  "I can't believe-"

  "Plus this place got a shitty review."

  "Where?"

  Grab that shovel, Geller. Dig yourself a deeper hole.

  "One of the papers."

  "Which one?"

  "Come on, Kate. This street is full of restaurants."

  "All of which require a reservation, which we happen to have at Giulio's."

  "You don't feel like a good steak or something?"

  "If I did, I would have made reservations at a steak house. Jonah, what's going on?"

  "I just don't feel like Italian."

  She crossed her arms over her chest, tightening up, widening the space between us. Pretty soon I wouldn't be able to see across it. "This is not starting well," she said.

  "Greek?" I asked.

  "Fuck Greek and fuck steak. There's something you're not telling me and I don't like it. I get lied to all damn day, Jonah. I get lied to by suspects, by snitches, by reporters-Christ, half the time by my partner. I do not need it from you."

  "Kate…"

  "What!"

  I put my hands on her shoulders. They didn't relax one bit. "I can't."

  "Tell me why. Right now and no bullshit. I have a very keen detector for it and I'm this close to calling it a night."

  "Walk with me for a minute," I said. — I don't claim to know how many people Dante Ryan killed during his time in the Mob. I do know he was in it some twenty years, and he hadn't spent his time stuffing envelopes. Then he was given a contract that required him to kill a five-year-old child, a boy the same age as his own son, Carlo, and he hadn't been able to do it. He sought me out and demanded my help in finding out who had ordered the hit, determined that the boy not be part of the price the father had to pay for trying to get free of a Mob enterprise.

  We did it, too. Saved the lives of the boy and his parents. Saved each other too. And somehow became friends. Ryan had decided by then he had to get out of his old life in order to save his marriage, his soul, and I had helped. He had helped me too, in his own way. If it wasn't for our misadventures, I'd still be at Beacon Security, working other people's cases instead of my own. And there was a spark to him you don't find in everyone, a warmth you wouldn't expect in a man who had done all that he had done in his life. An old-fashioned devotion to his family. Generosity and loyalty to anyone he considered a friend.

  I could explain it to myself, rationalize it a dozen different ways. But what could I say to Hollinger, who was searching my eyes with hers, hoping for some truth. We found a table at a small cafe a few doors down from Giulio's. The hostess told us they'd had a last-minute cancellation and took our drink orders: Black Bush for me and a vodka martini for Hollinger. It gave me a few more minutes to look for a starting point to my story. I was still looking for it when the drinks arrived.

  "This isn't going to be easy," I said.

  "Great opening, Geller. I'm brimming with confidence."

  "Do you know who owns Giulio's?"

  "No," she said. "Should I?"

  "No. But you would have if we'd gone in there."

  "Why?"

  I sighed like a shot-out tire. "Does the name Dante Ryan ring a bell?"

  There was a candle in an amber glass on our table. Its flames were dancing in her eyes, until they narrowed and the reflecting flames grew smaller. She said, "Alarm bells. Big loud ones."

  "He's the owner."

  "Okay," she said. "I get it. You were trying to protect me, is that it? You thought I'd be uncomfortable, vulnerable somehow, eating in a place owned by a mobster?"

  She had given me the perfect out. But taking it wouldn't have been right. If Hollinger and I were going to go anywhere, she needed to know the truth-at least about this.

  "There's more to it," I said.

  "How much more?"

  "For one thing, he's not a mobster anymore. He's out of the life now."

  "No one gets out of that life."

  "He did."

  "Even if that's true, I'd like to know how you know it."

  The look she was giving me made me feel like we were back in the interview room at police headquarters. "He's a friend," I said.

  "Dante Ryan is a friend of yours? The same Dante Ryan we've looked at for, I don't know, half a dozen killings?"

  If all they
'd looked at was half a dozen, it had to be because of jurisdictional issues. The other killings must have taken place in Hamilton, Peel Region, or areas covered by the Ontario Provincial Police.

  "Yes."

  She sat back in her chair, arms across her chest again. "And he's a friend of yours."

  "Yes."

  "Not just a passing acquaintance."

  "No."

  She said, "Well. This is surprising, to say the least."

  "You understand why I didn't want to-"

  "Oh, yeah."

  "I never expected it would come up. Not tonight."

  "That makes two of us. So was he out of the life when you became pals?"

  Cue the sound of a toilet flushing. Any chance I had of a relationship with her was swirling down the tank and into Lake Ontario. "No. He was still in his previous occupation."

  "Hired killer."

  "He worked for Marco di Pietra. I'll leave it to your imagination what he did."

  "Do yourself a favour. Don't."

  The waitress picked that moment to lay two menus on our table. Then she pointed to a blackboard where the evening's specials were written in coloured chalk. Pink for the meat dish, yellow for the fish, white for the pasta.

  Blue for the mood.

  "Please give us a minute," Hollinger said to the waitress.

  "No worries," she replied.

  When she was gone I said, "I never hired Ryan, if that helps."

  "Be serious, damn it. Jonah," she said, trying to rein in her anger, keeping maybe half of it in check. "I'm not like you, I didn't just fall into being a detective. From the day I started in the Niagara Regional Police, I wanted to be a detective, and from the day I made detective, I wanted to be Homicide. There are thirty-two of us, not counting support staff. We're the elite. We do the best work, get the highest job satisfaction ratings on internal surveys. Wear the best suits. Life satisfaction isn't always the highest-way too many of us are divorced-yeah, me too." The first small grin. "Another cop in Niagara, a hometown boy. I left him behind when I was offered the Toronto job. The point is, they call us the Snappy Suits for a reason. It's all men, except me. There was another woman, Carol Wisnewski."

  "I know the Noose."

  "She's on mat leave now. So it's me and the guys. If I treat the men under me well, they think I'm soft and try to get away with everything they can. If I'm hard on them, I'm a bitch. Half the meetings I go to, I could be chairing, everyone's saying, 'Guys… get out there, guys…' You know how hard it is to make Homicide sergeant before the age of forty? Not easy for a man and ten times harder for a woman. I can't afford to get blind-sided, Jonah. Not by anyone. So tell me how on earth a man like you-or the man I thought you were-becomes friends with a contract killer?"

  I was liking her better by the minute, even as she slipped farther away. "Our paths just crossed a while back," I said lamely. "By accident. He needed help with a personal matter, and I helped him."

  "Aren't you neighbourly."

  "Kate, I know it looks bad-"

  "Looks bad? It fucking stinks, Jonah. He kills people for money. Where are your boundaries?"

  "He has nothing to do with the way I live."

  "Judgment, then."

  "Who am I to judge anyone?"

  "Well, I have to judge you," she said. "I have to be dead careful about who I let into my personal life, because the second I do let someone in, he shows up on my work screen. And you're already up there." She reached into her purse and withdrew a twenty from a zippered pocket. "That should cover the drinks."

  "So that's it? Guilt by association?"

  "Not just any association. Don't you get it? Dante Ryan is the kind of man I live to put away. Day in, day out, I work this job of mine. I see kids being shot by other kids because they gave them the wrong look. Husbands who kill their wives because the pork chops burned. And men found in the trunks of their cars because they got involved in organized crime. Dante Ryan kills people-not in passion or anger or on the spur of the moment-but for money, plain and simple, and if I had anything to say about it, he'd be doing life in Millhaven, not running a restaurant that I almost took you to."

  "If you knew the truth…" And then I had to cut myself off, because there was no way I could tell her the truth about Ryan and me without including the nasty ending in the Don River Valley.

  I'm not sure what would have happened next-would she have walked out on me? — because her cellphone rang. She un-clipped it from her belt, drawing a dirty look from people at the table next to us, and answered with a terse "Yes?" Pause. "Hey, Gregg."

  McDonough, her throwback partner. I was glad he couldn't see us. He would have had a hoot if he knew who was sharing her table.

  "Where?" she said. "How far away are you? No, I'm closer. I can be there in fifteen minutes. All right. See you there."

  She snapped the phone closed. "I have to go."

  "You were leaving anyway."

  "I'm sorry, Jonah. Can you at least understand why I have to be careful?"

  "We all have to be careful when we meet someone we like," I said. "You were the first door I opened in a long time. I didn't expect everything to be easy between us. But I was willing to try."

  "I still have to go."

  "Where?"

  "Church and Wellesley," she said. "A man was beaten to death."

  The heart of the gay village. "A bashing?" It wouldn't be the city's first but doing it in the heart of the village was beyond audacious.

  "I'll see what the scene has to say when I get there."

  "Let me drive you."

  "I don't think so."

  "Please. It's ten more minutes out of your life. What if there was something I could tell you that would help us get over this hump?"

  "I can't imagine what that would be." I took Adelaide across the lower part of the city, through the deserted financial district, tension filling the car like secondhand smoke.

  "There's a lot I can't tell you about Ryan," I finally said, "for your sake as well as his, but I can say this: we came together because he was trying to make good on something and he needed my help to do it. He was trying, believe it or not, to save a life. Not to take one, Kate. To save one. He was trying to prevent something truly horrible from happening. Whatever you might think about him, he was trying to do something good, and he did. And I helped him. I paid a price for that. A high one. And I've been paying for it ever since. But I'm not sorry he came to me, and I'm not sorry about what we had to do. The only thing I am goddamn sorry about is that it came between us tonight."

  We were heading north on Jarvis, which had more lanes and less traffic than Church. When we got to the corner of Maitland, Hollinger said, "Drop me here, please."

  "You sure?"

  "I have a crime scene to work and I need to arrive there on my own. I don't want to be teased or distracted by anyone or anything."

  I pulled over and shifted into park. She snapped her seat belt open and put her hand on the door handle. Then she paused. She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, but her voice seemed to warm a bit when she spoke. "I'm sorry if I seem paranoid about this. I was so ready for a nice evening with you, Jonah. I really was. I thought because the Di Pietra cases were all closed, the time was right, but hearing about Ryan-knowing his association with that crew-it threw me."

  "No kidding."

  She turned to me and surprised me with a smile. Nothing that lit up the night, but a smile. "Give me some time to process this. Maybe after I've slept on it, it won't seem so bad. If it doesn't, then maybe I'll give you a call."

  Two maybes. Hardly ironclad.

  She got out of the car and walked toward the alley that ran south off Maitland, where a man's life had ended. I drove one block farther south and parked. I didn't want to crowd Hollinger, but I was curious to see her work a crime scene. I put on a ball cap from my trunk, slipped an old raincoat over my blazer and walked back to the alley.

  It was brightly lit-unnaturally so-by halogen lights mounted on
stands. Crime scene investigators on TV might walk around with dinky penlights, but in real life they tend to flood scenes with light so as not to miss anything. A crowd had gathered outside the tape that crossed the mouth of the alley. I stood at the back where Hollinger couldn't see me. She was squatting beside the body of a blond male in a grey overcoat, talking to a uniformed officer, probably the first on the scene. After noting how the body had been found, she snapped on a pair of latex gloves and reached carefully into the dead man's pockets. From the breast pocket of his jacket she withdrew a wallet, examined the contents, made a few notes in a spiral notebook, and put the wallet back. A medical examiner came over and lifted the man's head and showed her something at the back. She frowned and touched the area gingerly. The tip of her gloved finger was bloody when she removed it.

  She sighed and got to her feet and nodded to two men waiting with a body bag and a gurney. They laid the bag on the ground and unzipped it. One knelt by the victim's head, the other by his feet. When they lifted him over the bag, his head flopped forward and I got a clear look at his face. I gasped loud enough to make people around me turn.

  Good thing I was standing near the back.

  The dead man was Martin Glenn.

  CHAPTER 10

  World Repairs pays handsomely to subscribe to a variety of databases, one of which is called BizServe. I logged on remotely to the office server from home and read everything it had on EcoSys then moved on to the company's own website. Between the two of them, I got a pretty good picture of the work that Glenn had done.

  He was an engineer by training and had worked for more than a decade for the Ministry of the Environment, helping it define and develop its site assessment policies. At the height of his career, he did what many civil servants do: resigned so he could offer the same services back to the private sector at a consultant's rate, instead of as a modestly paid government drone. Glenn and his associates helped clients assess the level of groundwater or soil contamination of their property and whether it was worth the cost of reclamation. If so, they would create a remediation plan. Restore soil to levels that matched samples taken from non-polluted sites. Build underground barriers to prevent toxins from seeping into or out of the site. Treat ground-water so polluted you wouldn't use it to put out a fire. Guide clients through the maze of government ministries that might be involved in a large project: the Ministry of the Environment, of course, but also Natural Resources, if a project posed an ecological risk to wetlands and other sensitive areas; and Finance if there were potential tax breaks to be had.