Buffalo Jump

by Howard Shrier

  Who was he kidding? He could barely run anymore. An old lady in a walker could probably chase him down, and slap him silly too.

  The light turned green and Barry lurched through the intersection fast enough to make his back end skid on the wet pavement.

  Why did Kevin have to live on the west side? More to the point, why had he been made the new middleman? Everything had been fine the way it was before Kevin Masilek had been introduced as the new supplier. Prices had gone up, of course, to make up for this new layer of management, but not enough to warrant going elsewhere. The supply was safe and steady. Like it or not, this was the new regime, they’d been told. Barry figured, Why rock the boat when you can just keep sailing.

  He started to weigh the pros and cons of smoking the other half of his joint.

  Con: The car will stink, especially with the windows closed. Your eyes will turn redder. You could fuck up the transaction with Kevin. You could get so paranoid you’d turn around and go home to Amy empty-handed.

  Pro: You know you want to.

  The pro clearly outweighing the cons, he got the doob out of his silver case and lit up. He cracked the driver’s side window just enough to let the smoke out. Everyone else’s car windows were closed so who was going to smell it? Don’t worry so much, he chided himself. Just inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

  Aaaah.

  Barry didn’t want any toke burns in the upholstery so he powered down the window and chucked the roach even though it had a little mileage left. Then he turned onto the street where Kevin lived in a tall semi-detached frame house. He pulled up at the curb and parked, kept the wipers going as he glanced up and down the street, looking for potential assailants. There were none he could see. Maybe the rain was keeping everyone indoors. Feeling a rare moment of affection for Buffalo weather, he got out of the car and locked it. Dashed up the three concrete steps to Kevin’s door and rang. Waited and rang again. Waited some more.

  Shit. It was eleven-fifty and he had told Kevin he’d be by between eleven-thirty and noon. Hadn’t he? He briefly regretted smoking the second half of his joint, confused now—had he somehow got the time wrong? The day?

  No. Even in his buzzed state he remembered the call: he had clearly said today between eleven-thirty and noon. Barry rang again. Knocked. Fished a quarter out of his jeans and rapped it on a square glass pane in the centre of the wooden door. Still no answer. The nerves behind his sternum started to slither over each other like snakes. What if Kevin had forgotten? Christ, what if he’d been arrested? Where would that leave Barry and Amy?

  Okay, he said to himself. Breathe. Breathe and think. Which he did until he remembered the cellphone clipped to his belt. He dialled Kevin’s number and listened to it ring. Three times, four times, five, and then the voice mail kicked in. Barry disconnected without leaving a message. Maybe Kevin was having a shower, he told himself. Maybe he was on the can and unable to get to the phone. Barry pressed his ear to the glass pane in the door. He could hear music playing at the back of the house where the kitchen was, a raw bluesy sound that took him one second to recognize: the Allman Brothers Band, the classic 1971 concert at Fillmore East, before Duane died, before Berry Oakley died, before Gregg started dating celebrities and falling face-first into his pasta.

  Barry smiled. Kevin was home after all. Just couldn’t hear the bell over Duane’s moaning slide guitar and the band’s twin drum attack. He walked down the driveway to the rear of the house and went up the back stairs. He looked over at the adjoining yards and didn’t see anyone—thank you, rain— and knocked loudly. Waited. Knocked again. Waited some more. Pressed his ear to the back door, hearing Berry lead the band into “Whipping Post.” He thought he heard a door slam at the front of the house: could Kevin have gone to the front door just as he had come around back? Barry sighed and walked around the front again, hoping Kevin wasn’t at this very moment going back. They could do this all day, he thought, like some kind of bedroom farce, only without the laughs. He was relieved to see the front door was open. Thank fucking God.

  He stepped into the dark-panelled foyer.

  “Kevin?” he called. “It’s me, Barry. Hello?”

  No answer.

  Okay, so maybe he had gone out the back door to see who had been knocking. Barry walked down the hallway that led to the rear of the house, past the front parlour and dining room, the rooms all sparsely furnished. Whatever money Kevin was making was not being plowed into home decor.

  “Kevin?” he called again. “Turn down the music, man. You got company.”

  Still nothing.

  He looked down and noticed wet boot prints in the hall, heading from the rear to the front. Barry’s gut tightened. Turn around, he told himself. Follow those prints right out the door.

  And go home with nothing? Get a grip.

  He entered the kitchen and saw Kevin sitting in a round-back wooden chair: plump and paunchy, his head shaved to hide the fact he was going both bald and grey, wearing an old black T-shirt with the Rolling Stones logo on it, the red tongue lolling out of a wet-looking mouth.

  Barry stood there a moment, not moving, not breathing, taking in the scene. Then he vomited on the floor, coffee and bits of breakfast muffin splashing off the linoleum and onto his hand-tooled boots.

  Kevin was tied to the chair, his hands bound behind him with duct tape. His head was tilted back over the top of the chair and a knife, a boning knife it looked like, had been stuck through one of his eyes. It stood upright like a flag atop a mountain. His face was a bruised and battered mess; his mouth bloody behind a strip of duct tape. His forearms had ugly burns on them. Barry could see a blackened knife on the counter beside the toaster. Christ, the killer had heated the knife in the toaster and stuck it to him. Barry had no idea what to do. He had watched enough Law & Order to know this was a crime scene. He shouldn’t touch a goddamn thing. But he already had: the front door, the back. He had called Kevin’s number on his cell just moments before. He could practically hear the black lady lieutenant telling the grizzled old detective, “Check the phone logs. See who called the morning of the murder.” Should he call 911 himself? Deflect suspicion? Not if it meant explaining to the cops why he was here, why his eyes were so bloodshot.

  The only thing to do was get the hell out and home to Amy. She had a better head for things like this. For crises. He started to back out of the kitchen, wondering if he should mop up his vomit. Couldn’t they test it for DNA?

  Then Barry stopped and stared at the wall behind Kevin’s tortured body, where a dozen or more cardboard cartons were stacked.

  Holy shit, he thought.

  He took the widest possible arc around Kevin’s chair, careful not to step in any blood. He ripped a sheet of paper towel from a roll on the counter and wrapped it around his hand. Then he eased open the flap of the top carton.

  “Holy shit!” he said out loud.

  He knew he shouldn’t touch the boxes, much less what was inside. Tampering with evidence was against the law.

  Well, so was smoking a joint while driving in the rain.

  In that moment, he made his decision: he was taking as much as the CR-V could hold. He hefted one carton, found it wasn’t too heavy and walked it quickly to the front door. Then he reversed direction and brought it back to the kitchen. No point loading up in plain view. He left the house by the front door, closing it tight behind him, wiping the handle quickly with paper towel. Then he backed his CR-V down Kevin’s drive. Popped the rear hatch and went back in through the kitchen door. It took less than five minutes to load the cartons into the car. His feet went out from under him once on the wet stairs, and he banged his tailbone hard on the bottom step, but he kept going, cursing and limping in equal measure. When the car was as full as it was going to get, he slammed the hatch, looked around, saw no one and went back into the kitchen. He used a long sheet of paper towel to wipe up his vomit, the smell of it almost making him spew again. Then he got the hell out.

  He drove like a nun all th
e way home, obeying the speed limit, thankful he had smoked all the dope he had because otherwise he’d be blowing one now the size of the Sunday Times.

  He could hear himself breathing loudly through his nose. Hear his own heartbeat. Hear the sound of each raindrop on his windshield and the sound of the wipers slapping side to side. He heard car horns, diesel engines, the hiss of tires on wet pavement. And something else: something he almost didn’t recognize because he hadn’t heard it for so long: the sound of opportunity knocking.

  He was so intent on that faraway sound, so happy to be hearing it again, that he didn’t notice the forest-green SUV pull away from the curb and fall in line behind him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Toronto: Monday, June 26

  Franny had the computer skills of an early hominid. He avoided typing notes or reports as often as possible, preferring to fill black pocket-sized notebooks in Palmer script, which the nuns at his school had drilled into him by dint of terror. I booted up his computer with the password he’d given me and groaned loudly when I saw the Windows desktop. Nothing had been saved to folders. There were no folders. His desktop could barely be seen for all the documents and applications scattered over its surface. Nor did his document names make any sense. They were cryptic abbreviations that might have been French, English or Esperanto for all I knew.

  I created an electronic folder called “FP DOX” and dragged all Franny’s scattered Word documents into it, save one: the standard intake Franny had filled out on his new client. Even he couldn’t escape typing and filing one because it outlined the scope of the investigation the client wanted us to undertake and, more important, what he expected to pay.

  The client was Errol Boyko, a single fifty-four-year-old civil servant who lived in North York. His mother had passed away recently in a nursing home called Meadowvale, owned and operated by the Vista Mar Care Group. Boyko wanted Beacon Security to determine whether neglect, abuse or malpractice had contributed.

  I created a new folder called Meadowvale and placed the intake form in it. Then I created a new Word document and pushed play on the tape recorder.

  Errol Boyko: All her life, Mr. Paradis, my mother was a force of nature …

  François Paradis: Franny’s fine.

  EB: Eh? Oh, sure. Franny. Mom was a big, robust, unstoppable, independent woman. When my dad passed away, she took over his hardware store and ran it better than he ever did. She didn’t retire until she was seventy-five and when she turned eighty a few years ago, she was still living on her own, doing her own tax returns, taking pottery classes, hosting a book club and putting personal ads in the Globe for a companion. The last part I wasn’t too crazy about but that was Mom.

  FP: Sounds like quite a gal.

  EB: Oh, she was. Until a year ago.

  FP: What happened?

  EB: A severe stroke. She’d had high blood pressure for years and it finally caught up with her. The stroke was devastating. She changed overnight. She couldn’t read or write anymore, couldn’t remember anyone’s name. She started having anxiety attacks if you changed the channel or got up to leave the room or a cloud passed over the sun. Anything could set her off. Her doctor gave her medication to control the anxiety but she needed more care than we could provide.

  FP: So you brought her to Meadowvale?

  EB: It’s not like I wanted to. I had to. My brother lives in Vancouver and has no interest in moving back. My sister’s in Toronto but she’s an alcoholic and God knows what else. She can barely take care of herself. I tried at first to keep Mom in her apartment with a caregiver. I was still hoping she would improve, you know? Regain some functioning. But it cost a fortune and she was getting no stimulation. The two of them sat in front of the TV all day. The woman was knitting sweaters she sold on the side and Mom was staring into space. Finally my brother and I decided a residential setting would be better for everyone.

  FP: How did you choose Meadowvale?

  EB: I called the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. They assigned me a case manager and she made the recommendation based on Mom’s needs.

  FP: Her name?

  EB: Darlene Tunney.

  FP: Did you check it out yourself?

  EB: Absolutely. I did my homework. I went on a tour and I called a good friend of mine who had placed his father there a few years ago. He had nothing but good things to say about it. Mind you, that was before it was taken over by this Vista Mar group.

  FP: When did your mother move in?

  EB: Early in the new year.

  FP: And when did she die?

  EB: A month ago.

  FP: We’re very sorry for your loss.

  EB: Thank you.

  FP: You okay?

  EB: Yes.

  FP: Get you some water? Cup of coffee?

  EB: A glass of water would be fine.

  FP: As long as you don’t mind it in a mug … here you go.

  EB: Thanks.

  FP: So what brought you here today, Errol? Why an investigation? The more specific you can be, the better.

  EB: Are you close with your mother?

  FP: Me?

  EB: Yes.

  FP: Well, we’re a very big family, you know, I’m the second youngest of eight, so my mother always had her hands full, but we get along well. Iguess I try to call every Sunday.

  EB: My mother and I were very close. Always. I was the baby of three and kind of her favourite. There was always trouble with my sister and my older brother is what you’d call aloof. It fell to me to look after her. I took on that responsibility, Franny. I took it very seriously. I gave it everything I had, everything, and I …

  FP: There’s some tissues behind you.

  EB: Where? Oh, thanks. I’m sorry.

  FP: Happens all the time. That’s why we keep ’em there.

  EB: Thanks. I guess what I’m saying is I need to know if they did anything to cause her death.

  FP: What makes you think they did?

  EB: At first, her doctor handled all her medication, in consultation with a neurologist, and things were fine. Mom didn’t get any better but she was stable. Her blood pressure was under control. So were the anxiety attacks. Then the medical director at Meadowvale, Dr. Bader, persuaded us that he should take over her care. You know, being on the premises and everything. It made sense to me because—well, you know how it is trying to get a doctor to see you these days. Like trying to see the Pope. So I agreed.

  FP: And things changed?

  EB: Not at first. Or I should say not that I saw. I couldn’t visit as often as I wanted. I’m an analyst at the Ministry of Finance and the months leading up to a budget—well, as bad as they normally are, they were even worse this year because of the size of the deficit we were projecting. So I only saw Mom on Sundays. She’d generally be okay—not too anxious, her colour good. I felt we had made the right decision. But a month or so before she died, I took a day off midweek to make up for all the overtime I’d been putting in and dropped by unannounced. It was like a bad movie. All the way down the hall toward her room, I could hear someone calling out, ‘Help me, help me,’ and I’m wondering, Who is this madwoman? Franny, it was my mother. She was hyperventilating, flushed, her eyes wild, half out of her mind. I called for a nurse and one came running, and the thing I remember is that she didn’t seem concerned so much as scared.

  FP: Scared of what?

  EB: Of me. Of seeing me there. I asked what was going on and she wouldn’t say a thing, just that she had to call Dr. Bader. A minute later Bader showed up with one of those little plastic cups with pills in it. Mom took them and eventually calmed down. He took her blood pressure and it was high as a damn bowling score, but he said it would come down soon. I demanded an explanation and he gave me some long, convoluted story about trying a promising new medication and needing to fine-tune the dosage. But the more I asked about it, the more evasive he got.

  FP: Specifics, please.

  EB: I asked to see Mom’s file, because each medication is suppo
sed to be logged, and he gave me a song and dance about how her records had been shipped by mistake to their archives and he’d have to fill out requisition forms to get them back. That made it two mistakes: one with the medication, one with the records.

  FP: Okay. So mistakes were being made. Some of these places, you hear they’re understaffed or—

  EB: It wasn’t just the mistakes, Franny. Mistakes I could live with. But like I said, I’m a budget analyst. All day long I look at income statements, balance sheets, expense reports, looking for the things that don’t fit, that look inflated, that are just—out of proportion, I guess. And that’s all I can say about it. The nurse’s reaction seemed out of proportion. And so did Bader’s. He was covering something up, I could feel it.

  FP: Feelings aren’t the best way—

  EB: Then I know. I know something’s going on. She wasn’t getting her medication like she was supposed to.

  FP: But why? What you hear about some places, they over-medicate to keep people, what’s the word … manageable.

  EB: I don’t know why. Maybe they sell them to someone else.

  FP: What kind of meds was she on, may I ask?

  EB: Oh, God. All kinds. For her blood pressure, her anxiety, plus diuretics, anti-seizure meds …