The nearest parking spot we could find was around the next corner, on Bedford Avenue. “Hope we don’t need to make a fast exit,” I said.
Ryan got out and opened the trunk of his car. He said, “First rule of a fast exit? Make sure there’s no one left to chase you.” He opened his metal gun case and slipped his Glock 20 into his waistband. He also took out a yellow hard hat and a clipboard.
He said, “I don’t want to be seen walking with you, so I’ll go first and walk down around the back. See if there’s a way in.” He put on the hard hat and held the clipboard smartly under his arm. “Anyone sees me, I’m Mr. City Inspector, looking at the wires and going uh-huh a lot.”
“It would look better if you had a pen, Mr. C.I.”
“I don’t carry one. You saw what happens to guys who write shit down.”
I gave him my pen.
He said, “See if you can get in the front. I’ll hang out back. You need me in there, whistle sharp.” He walked slowly toward the house, stopping occasionally to look up at telephone wires and make notations on his clipboard. I waited until he was out of sight down the driveway, then began walking toward the front entrance. As I approached the house, a dark-coloured SUV pulled up alongside me. My sphincter pursed momentarily, but the driver in no way resembled an assassin, unless they’re hiring clean-cut young women who look like they’re off to the library. I scanned the street. No other cars coming in either direction. No one on foot.
I was walking up the stairs, pondering entry strategies, when the front door opened and a sporty-looking fellow in his sixties emerged. He wore slacks and a blazer and a pressed golf shirt, with white hair swept back from his tanned face. He had a large canvas shopping bag in each hand, which he set down to pull the door shut behind him.
“Let me get that for you,” I called and bounded up the last steps.
“Thanks,” said the man. “Hope you’re in no rush, though. They’re quite a bit behind schedule today. I’ve never seen it this busy.”
Great. A peanut gallery full of witnesses.
I stepped into the house and locked the door behind me. I was in a small foyer made smaller by a huge fern growing out of a brass umbrella stand. I brushed past it into a wider hallway that had a hardwood floor scuffed grey down the middle by years of traffic. On my right was a wide staircase going up to the second storey. On my left an empty den, lit only by a desk lamp. I could hear music and voices coming from the back half of the house, though. A lot of voices, men and women both, an ongoing din punctuated occasionally by laughter and friendly shouts.
Spare me, I thought. They’re having a goddamn party.
“Hey,” a man’s voice called to me.
I braced myself and looked up to see a stocky fellow in his early fifties, his close-cropped dark hair and beard showing traces of white near the temples and around the mouth. He carried two cardboard cartons over which he could hardly see. A petite woman of about eighty walked beside him, gripping his arm tightly as she took small delicate steps.
“Mind getting the door?” he asked me.
“Not at all.” I unlocked the front door and flattened myself against the wall so they could pass.
“Thanks, Ted,” the woman said. “If you get me as far as the sidewalk, I’ll be fine.”
“You’re still driving?” he asked.
“Don’t be silly,” she giggled. “I haven’t driven since the first President Bush was in office. Amy was kind enough to call a taxi.”
“You have someone on the other end to help you unload?”
“My grandson lives in the basement,” she said. “He’ll look after me.”
I closed the door behind them, locked it and ventured farther down the hall. An archway on the left opened into a large living room with a marble fireplace and mantel. About a dozen people were standing by the fireplace or sitting on sofas that faced each other across a glass coffee table. A few looked me over and went back to their conversation.
A second, wider archway led from the living room to the dining room, where another fifteen or twenty people stood around a table that had wine, light beer, soda and other drinks. There were platters of fruit and cheese and a basket of bagels, surrounded by bowls of cream cheese and a plate of thinly sliced smoked salmon, garnished with onion, capers and lemon slices.
Most of the people ranged in age from late-forties to mid-sixties, the split between men and women about equal. Most were dressed casually yet expensively. The snatches of conversation I could hear revolved around the heat, plans for the long weekend, the exhibition of Chuck Close portraits at the Albright-Knox and the fickle nature of real estate.
I didn’t see the long-haired guy who’d been unloading the truck. I was trying to figure out who Amy might be when a woman’s voice said, “You’re new.”
I turned to see a trim fortyish woman in a mauve linen jacket and faded jeans. Long Navajo-style earrings dangled amid her feathered hair, a shade of red that wasn’t her own but suited her blue eyes. As she held out her hand, a bracelet in the same style as her earrings slid down her forearm. “Cassandra Lawson. But everyone calls me Cass.”
I took her hand. “Joel,” I said. When lying about my name, I always choose something that sounds like my own.
“What’s taking so long?” said the older man I had seen pushing his cart up the walk. He was reclining in a maroon leather Queen Anne knock-off. He was grossly overweight, his ankles puffy and purple above his socks. “It’s nice they put out a spread and everything, but there’s not a damn thing here I can eat.”
“So have a drink, Harv,” Cass said.
“The only thing I can drink is water, hon, and if I have one more glass I’ll have to pee ten times tonight instead of the usual five. Did Barry say why everything’s upside down today? Normally I come when they tell me, I’m in, I’m out, goodbye, go home.”
“The delivery was much bigger than usual,” Cass said. “And it didn’t come packed the way it normally does. It was just bulk cases. Amy has to open them up to fill the orders, unless you’re willing to take a whole case of something.”
“I already got a case of something!” Harv roared. “Why the hell else would I be here!”
“Can you tell me where Amy is?” I asked Cass. “Or Barry? I need to talk to them a minute.”
“You’re not from here,” said Harv. “I can hear it in your voice. Canadian, eh?”
“I’m from Toronto,” I said.
“Then why the hell are you buying medications here?” Harv asked. “The whole point is to get them cheaper from Canada.”
“That would be illegal,” I said, with all the innocence I could manage on short notice.
“Illegal! We can’t have that, could we?” Harv laughed until the laugh turned into a rolling cough that ended with him clearing his throat and hawking something into a napkin. He took a couple of deep breaths and tucked the napkin into his jacket pocket. “Listen, kid,” he wheezed, “I don’t know what you’re doing here. You look healthy enough to me. But I take ten medications a day—ten—between my heart condition and diabetes and cholesterol. Even with insurance, you know what the co-pay is?”
“Come on, Harv,” a man cut in. He was dressed casually enough in jeans and a black silk shirt, but the watch on his wrist probably cost more than my Camry. He looked very fit for his age, which was early fifties. “I bet Medicare covers most of what you need.”
“What do you know about Medicare, Marty? You got more money than the rest of us combined. I don’t know why you even come here.”
“I don’t like paying full price for anything,” Marty said.
“But you could if you had to. I can’t. I went to a presentation on the Medicare guidelines last week, and I didn’t understand half of what the guy was saying. And neither did he. Every question I asked him, he’d say, ‘Well, I’ll have to check that and get back to you.’ I taught high school mathematics for thirty-two years, my friend, and the guidelines might as well have been in Greek.”
“Hey, Harv,” a voice called out behind me.
Harv’s eyes widened and his face broke into a grin. I turned to see the grey-haired man in the Jerry Garcia shirt. He had a carton in his arms. He said, “Want me to take this straight out to the car for you?”
“Barry!” Harv said. “You’re an angel.”
“Just the one carton?”
“That was all the cash I could raise on short notice. If there’s anything left on Monday, I’ll see what I can do.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Barry said. “Amy wants everything out of here as fast as possible.” Then his eyes settled on me. Settled and narrowed to suspicious-looking slits. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Do I know you?”
“He’s new,” Harv said.
“I can see that.”
“My name is Joel,” I said.
Barry set the box down and walked over to me. He was about my height and heavier. I hoped it wouldn’t lead him to start something. Busting up his place—or him—wouldn’t help any.
“If I don’t know you,” Barry said, “what are you doing in my house?”
“Can I speak to you privately?” I asked him.
“No.”
“It will only take a few minutes,” I said.
“What are you, a cop? A narc or something?” People were stopping their conversations, looking our way, moving toward us. Marty in particular was glaring at me.
“I’m not a cop,” I told Barry.
“Then get out,” he said. “This is a private party.”
“As soon as we’ve had our conversation.”
Marty walked over to Barry’s side, about Barry’s size but in better shape. “Why don’t you get out like he asked?” he demanded. A man used to getting his way.
“If you’re a police officer, you have to tell me, right?” Barry asked.
“I’m not a police officer, so I wouldn’t know.”
“FDA?”
“What?”
“Food and Drug Administration.”
“No. I’m from Toronto.”
He looked at me for a long moment, making up his mind. Maybe he was picturing the damage that might occur if his friend Marty and I got into it. “Okay,” he said, nodding toward the back of the house. “In the kitchen.” He asked Marty to help Harv out with his carton.
Marty looked disappointed, like he’d missed his chance to impress someone. Maybe himself. “You sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“I can handle it,” Barry said and led me back to a large eat-in kitchen with a round oak table on ornate ball-and-claw legs. A woman sat at the table, surrounded by dozens of pill vials and boxes of all sizes. About a dozen cartons were stacked near the rear door behind her. I looked out the door; no sign of Ryan through its glass panes.
The woman, whom I presumed to be Amy, looked about fifty, with long grey hair pulled into a loose braid and striking grey-green eyes. She wore her clothes baggy and loose: wine-coloured harem pants and a billowing white linen blouse. If she was trying to hide her body, it wasn’t working. Her curves were apparent and sweetly placed. “Who’s your friend?” she asked Barry.
I took out my wallet and showed her my identification. The warmth in her eyes was replaced by a flinty glare. I let Barry look at it too. Amy’s mouth tightened as she looked at her husband. “You walk an investigator right into our kitchen?”
“I’m strictly private,” I assured her. “I’m not connected to the police or the FDA or any law enforcement agency in the U.S.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Information.”
“What kind?”
“This venture of yours has had ramifications you may not know about. At least I hope you don’t.”
“Go on,” Amy said.
“A pharmacist was murdered in Toronto last month. He had been supplying Canadian medications to people here in Buffalo.”
Their voices chimed in together: “What! Who?”
“Kenneth Page.”
Neither showed any sign they knew the name.
“Now another has been targeted,” I said. “A man named Jay Silver.”
“Oh my God,” Amy said.
She knew him. The possibility of his murder was clearly a personal horror, not abstract. Barry motioned her not to say anything but she cut him off with a downward slash of her hand.
“And it’s not just him,” I said. “His entire family will be killed. His wife and five-year-old son too. Jay, Laura and Lucas, all of them.” Listen to their names, I thought. Know them.
“But all he’s done is help people like us get prescriptions without going broke. Why would someone kill him?”
“Because he knows who murdered Kenneth Page and they can’t trust him not to talk. And because the drugs in his store were worth millions. The truck that just left here—that entire load—was from his store. They basically looted it. They weren’t afraid to, Amy, because they don’t expect Silver or his family to live long enough to do anything about it.”
“He’s bullshitting us, Ames. Next he’s going to tell us he should take the product off our hands. Get the fuck out of my house, man. I don’t want to tell you again.”
“You’re going to get yourselves killed.”
“Only if we talk,” Amy cut in.
“Whether you talk or not.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Because the killing has started. Not just Kenneth Page, not just Silver and his family, but also a guy I worked with, another investigator. He was killed Monday. A witness—a retired old man—was beaten half to death on Wednesday. Someone has to stop them and it seems to have fallen to me. So help me. Please. Tell me who you work for.”
The two of them stayed silent, looking at each other. Then Barry walked over to the table and put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. She covered it with her own. “I’m sorry, Mr. Geller,” Amy said. “I like Jay Silver. I hope nothing bad happens to his family, I really do. But it would be best if you left now.”
I looked at her when I said, “You’ll stand by while a family is killed?”
“He’ll kill us if we talk.”
“Who will?” I asked. “Ricky Messina?”
The fear in her eyes was palpable. “You do know him …”
“Yes,” I said. “But I am not on his side. I can help take him off your backs.”
“You and what army?” Barry scoffed. He drew himself up to his full height and stepped between me and Amy. “That’s enough,” he said. “Get out now.”
“Barry—”
“We have to look out for ourselves. Now for the last fucking time, get out!”
I heard footsteps coming down the hall. A dozen men and women crowded into the doorway, Marty at the front of the pack. I moved toward the back door so none of them could get behind me.
“Everything okay?” Marty asked.
“Fine,” Barry said. “He was just leaving.”
I didn’t move. The room became eerily quiet. Not a word was spoken; there was just the hiss of a candle in a cylindrical glass holder on the window sill.
“I can’t go,” I said.
“You heard Barry,” Marty said. “Out of here, now.”
He put a hand on my left shoulder, squeezed it and said, “I’ll bounce you down the steps if you’re not out by the time I count three.”
Counting three. What did he think this was, a schoolyard? I drove my fist up into his armpit. There’s a cluster of nerves in there that doesn’t much like getting hit. It numbs the arm completely. Marty’s grip loosened and he sank to the floor, his face as pale as marble. Then came the sound of breaking glass behind us. Amy’s head snapped around. The kitchen door had nine glass panes in three rows of three. The pane closest to the doorknob had been shattered and a gloved hand was reaching in through the broken pane and turning the deadbolt.
Amy’s eyes grew as wide as those of a horse in a barn fire. She stood up so fast the heavy oak table went up onto two legs, sending vials of pills of all colo
urs rolling to the floor.
“Oh God,” she gasped. “It’s Ricky. Barry, it’s Ricky. Don’t let him in. Don’t let him touch me. You promised, Barry. You swore.”
Barry started toward the door but it banged open before he was halfway there and Dante Ryan stepped into the kitchen. His right hand was inside his jacket. Barry stopped where he was. Amy’s breathing still came fast and shallow, but the fear in her eyes began to ebb. A strange, threatening man had just broken into her kitchen, but it wasn’t Ricky. I wondered what he had done to get so far under her skin.
“It’s okay,” I said to Ryan. “One guy just got excited.”
“Asshole,” Marty rasped, his forehead beaded with sweat.
“You’ll be all right,” I told him. Then I went to Amy and said quietly, “I told you I wasn’t with Ricky. This man and I are very much against him, in fact. I think he killed all the people I mentioned and tried to kill me. So talk to me. Help us get Ricky out of your life.”
“How?” she whispered. She was trying hard to find some kind of centred calm, but the faint billowing of her blouse showed how shaky she was. “By reporting him to the police? Even if he got life in prison, he’d kill me the day he got out. Slowly, with his knife. He told me. He showed me.” Her hands went to her belly and stayed there as if they were the only thing preventing her insides from spilling out onto the floor.
“Who said anything about prison?”
She looked into my eyes for a long moment. She was searching now to find what could live inside me that could take Ricky down.
“You think you can kill him?” she asked.
It wasn’t a question I could answer out loud. I could only hold her gaze and hope she would see in Ryan the tacit but unspoken fact that it would be his professional and personal pleasure to clip Ricky Messina.
“Then do it,” she said. “When he’s dead I’ll tell you every last thing. Until then I have nothing to say.”
Ryan and I didn’t want to be seen leaving the house together, so he stayed in a dark corner behind the garage. I told him I’d wait for him at the car.
Buffalo Jump Page 27
