Authors: Howard Shrier
“Do most of the drugs they ship go to the U.S.?”
“They used to. It was the primary market because of the price differences.”
“How big a difference?”
“Depended on the drug, of course, but on brand-name drugs still under patent, it was easily three times the Canadian price. And in U.S. dollars to boot.”
“But Canada has banned sales to the States.”
“We had to,” Chan said. “The U.S. administration wanted to protect the American pharmaceutical industry. And Canadians were afraid all our drugs would be sold to the States and there’d be nothing left for us.”
“Could a pharmacist still make money shipping drugs to the States?”
“Only if he skirted the law.”
“Anything else he could be doing with those cases?”
“As I said, pharmacies will buy products for other pharmacies, for a markup, of course. He could also be supplying a larger facility, such as a hospital or clinic.”
“A nursing home?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Who conducted Silver’s last inspection?”
Chan consulted his computer screen. “Sumita Desai. A little over six months ago. Want me to ask her about it?”
“Please.”
Chan picked up his phone and dialled a four-number extension. “Sumita? Winston here. Could you pop in for a minute? Hmm. Okay, then, quickly: early this year, you inspected a place called Med-E-Mart on Laird. Ring a bell? Okay. I have a gentleman here in my office who’d like to ask you about it, so I’m going to put you on speakerphone. No, it’s okay, he’s a licensed investigator … Sumita, I said it’s okay. Don’t be such a worrywart. He’s got my curiosity going.” Chan pressed the appropriate button and I heard “Yes, but—”
“Sumita, say hello to Jonah Geller.”
“Oh. Good afternoon, sir,” she said.
Good ahf-tuh-noon, suh,
in a deep voice with a lovely accent that blended Indian and British tones.
I said hello, then asked, “When you inspected Mr. Silver’s pharmacy, Ms. Desai, was there any indication that he had more product on the premises than he should?”
“Not at all,
suh.
Everything seemed quite in order to these eyes.”
“Was he cooperative?”
“As far as I recall. Put it this way: he didn’t stand out as being uncooperative. I would likely have noted something at the time.”
“His prescriptions were all legitimate?”
“Absolutely. As Mr. Chan probably told you, any prescriptions not written by an Ontario physician would have triggered the alarm, raised the red flag if you will. Well, maybe not both but certainly one.” The quip came with a deep rich laugh that made me want to go to the nearest bar and order something creamy and tropical.
“So he passed the inspection?”
“With flying colours. My report at the time indicates he ran a good business. Everything above board.”
Chan looked over to me to see if I had any more questions. I shook my head. “Thanks then, Sumita,” Chan said, and hung up.
I wondered how Silver could have passed an inspection so recently yet still managed to upgrade from Bayview to Forest Hill.
“There might be another way to go at this,” Chan said thoughtfully. “The pharmaceutical companies tend to get suspicious if unusual quantities are being ordered. You might check with them to see if any have concerns about Mr. Silver.”
“I’ll do that. Just for argument’s sake, what would a cube van full of prescription drugs be worth?”
“Depends entirely on the drugs and where they’re going to be sold,” he replied. “At one time, the hottest product would have been something like OxyContin, better known as Percocet or Percodan, which is widely prescribed for pain control.”
Tell me about it.
“Heroin addicts who can’t get the real thing find it a reasonable substitute,” Chan said. “Hillbilly heroin, I believe they call it. But smuggling it wouldn’t be profitable anymore because the patent expired in the U.S. and their generic versions are cheaper than ours. No, the real money now would be in medications with mass market appeal that are still under patent. Brand-name drugs for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes—all these things that affect the older crowd— especially as the baby boomers get up there in years. The market would be staggering.”
He reached for a calculator and began punching in numbers. “Take something like Contrex, which is a popular cholesterol drug. Retails for about $1.65 a pill here. Each carton would contain a hundred and forty-four vials of one hundred each. That’s about $24,000 per carton. If there are a dozen cartons per skid, each skid is close to $300,000. You said a cube van?”
“Yes.”
“Probably holds eight skids … Wow. You’re looking at a value of $2.5 million before it crosses the border. If you sold them in the States for three times the price in American dollars? You’d be looking at a profit of $6 million or more per van. Oh, and wait!” he said. “If the Canadian patent had expired and a generic version were available, but it was still under patent in the States, it could sell for up to ten times the price!” He sat up then and looked at me intently. “You think Jay Silver is involved in something like that?”
It had to be something like that. Why else would a big schmuck of a pharmacist with a nice wife and son get pushed around his place of business by a hood in a shiny suit?
“Have there been any similar cases that ended in disciplinary action?” I asked Chan. “Pharmacists who abused their wholesale licences?”
Chan looked at his monitor while clicking away with his mouse. “There was one recently,” he said. “Bit of a sad case.”
“I don’t suppose you can give me his name,” I said.
“Normally, no,” said Chan. “But in this case I don’t see how it could hurt because he was killed last month.”
As soon as he said the name Kenneth Page, I remembered the ruddy, white-haired man whose photo had appeared in the
Clarion:
the pharmacist shot to death in his driveway during a carjacking.
Make that
supposed
carjacking.
I shaded my eyes with my hand as I walked back along Bloor toward my car, wishing I’d brought a ball cap. The heat and glare were withering. At Bloor and Spadina, I stepped back into the shade to wait for the light to change. A young woman with spiked black hair, combat pants and a white tank top stood with a sign around her neck that said “Karma: 25 cents.” It didn’t say whether the karma would be good or bad, but that’s its nature anyway. You get what’s coming to you.
Years ago, Peter Ustinov famously called Toronto “New York run by the Swiss,” a tribute to its diversity, its cultural and financial clout, its safety and cleanliness. In those days, American film crews had to daub their own graffiti and spread their own garbage to make Toronto look gritty enough to substitute for an American city. Now we had more garbage blowing in the wind than they did, and every mailbox, doorway and light pole on Bloor was tagged with graffiti. This one intersection had panhandlers on all four corners. Northeast: the karma girl. Northwest: an Ojibwa man with a bandana around his forehead and a misshapen nose that had been broken many times, weaving on bowed legs directly into the paths of pedestrians with his palm up. Southwest: a grimy, grizzled old man on an overturned milk crate, shaking a coffee cup, a few coins jingling at the bottom. Southeast: a lean man slumped in a wheelchair, the stump of his left leg held straight out by a metal support. The homeless were everywhere now, holding out their coffee cups, their ball caps, their trembling hands. In the richest city in the country, where bankers, brokers and lawyers gathered in impregnable towers, men and women picked cigarette butts off the streets and foraged in garbage cans for something edible, their clothes black from sleeping on grates and in thickets. They held up hand-lettered signs asking for spare change. They spun stories:
Just trying to scrape up bus fare home, brother.
They muttered into their chests or barked or yipped or swore or mumbled with thick, woolly tongues.
People had always come to Toronto to seek their fortunes: from towns up north where industries die out; from Down East where the fishery has been exploited beyond renewal; from reserves that offer Natives little besides unemployment and abuse. Someone should tell them this isn’t Toronto the Good anymore, that it’s a city feeding on itself like a man on a hunger strike, devouring runaways, the mentally ill, the luckless, the reckless, anyone who can’t move fast enough to get out of its way.
Someone else was going to have to repair this part of the world. I had my hands full with the Silver family.
When the light changed, I fished a quarter out of my pocket, then another, and dropped both coins in the hat at the feet of the karma girl.
“Make mine a double,” I said.
N
o homicide detective likes outside interference. They are not given to providing confidential information to private individuals. They do not like being second-guessed by amateurs, and when it comes to murder, that’s what most of us are. In five years at Beacon, the closest I’d come to investigating a homicide was the week I spent working for a wealthy Rosedale woman who was sure her husband’s apparent suicide had been staged to cover up his murder. Fine. If that was what she believed—had to believe—she could afford to indulge it. My first three days convinced me there was no evidence to support her contention or refute the official finding of suicide. Four more days with my client—who had all the charm of a magpie—not only convinced me that her husband had in fact killed himself but that I would likely have done the same had I woken up married to her.
Nonetheless, after leaving Winston Chan’s office, I presented myself at the Toronto Police Service Homicide Squad, housed in police headquarters at 40 College Street, and asked to speak to the lead investigator into Kenneth Page’s death. I was told to find Detective Sergeant Hollinger.
Hollinger—first name Katherine—was in her mid-thirties, with glossy black hair and hazel eyes, the hair pulled
back, though not severely, and held in place by a clip inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She wore a navy suit over a white blouse and no jewellery apart from pearl studs in her ears. Her partner was Detective Gregg McDonough, built like a defensive back and dressed in a grey suit, white shirt and pale pink tie. He was about forty, with thick red hair finger-combed high off his forehead and a red chin beard salted with streaks of white.
“You have information about the Kenneth Page murder?” Hollinger asked.
“More like questions.”
“Whoa,” McDonough butted in. “You with the media?”
“No, I’m a private investigator.” I held out my photo ID but McDonough ignored it.
“A rent-a-cop,” he rasped, in a voice that probably had been coarsened by years of yelling at people in bars, arenas and interrogation rooms. “A cupcake.”
Hollinger took my ID and looked it over. “Why does Beacon Security have questions about this case?”
I hoped none of this got back to Clint, since he’d have no idea what I was doing here. “Is it still being looked at as a carjacking?”
“We’re kind of busy, creampuff,” McDonough said. “Or maybe you haven’t heard a girl named Kylie Warren got killed.”
“I heard.”
“And yet you’re still here.”
“What’s your interest in Mr. Page?” Hollinger asked. Her voice was a pleasant alto, far easier on the ears than McDonough’s aggressive bark. She smelled better too. “Do you represent his family? We’ve been in contact with them and they haven’t expressed any concerns with the investigation.”
“Which has yielded?”
“You don’t get to ask questions yet.”
“Come on, Kath,” McDonough said. “If we need a useless appendage hanging around wasting our time, I’ll call someone in from Corporate Services.”
Hollinger rolled her eyes and handed back my ID. “Come on,” she said to me. “You can buy me a coffee downstairs.”
Upon closer examination, I realized that Katherine Hollinger’s eyes were not hazel. They were a golden honey colour and looking into them was painless. We were sitting in the lobby of 40 College drinking coffees I’d bought at a Starbucks concession. She was inspecting the marks left on my face last night by Dante Ryan. “What happened to you?”
“Bumped into a door handle.”
“With knuckles on it?”
“A German design.”
She levelled her eyes at me. Pretty much levelled me too. “Why are you asking about Kenneth Page?”
I sifted through a combination of lies, omissions and half-truths, looking for the most plausible to present, then said to hell with it and started with the truth, or some of it. “We’re investigating a nursing home on behalf of a client,” I said. “He thinks they were shorting his mother on medication before she died. I’ve been doing a little research into prescription medicines and I came across the name Kenneth Page in connection with illegal exports to the U.S.”
“You’ve been to the pharmacists’ association?”
“Right before I came here. Are you still treating his death as a carjacking?”
“Have you got something better?”
“The papers said his car was found at the airport the night he was killed. Who kills a guy for his car only to dump it an hour later? I know public transit has deteriorated but that’s extreme.”
“It’s possible the killer didn’t plan to use force and panicked.”
“How many times was Page shot?” I asked.
“Twice.”
“In the head?”
“Yes.”
“Front or back?”
“Back.”
“Contact wounds?”
“Not quite.”
“But close.”
“Yes.”
“No one heard the shots?”
“No.”
“Any signs of a struggle? Defensive wounds? Skin under the nails?”
“No.”
“So the killer was calm enough to shoot Page twice in the head from close range, possibly with a silenced weapon, but he panicked when he got what he came for?”
“People,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
“Is it safe to assume you’re exploring other avenues of investigation and the carjacking angle is all you’re showing to the public?”
“Is any assumption safe?” she asked.
I
got back to the office shortly before noon. Fucking Franny hadn’t rolled in yet. I felt like a Finn in one of those wife-carrying contests, with Monsieur Paradis playing the role of the two-hundred-pound bride. I tried to turn down the slow boil building in me and put in a call to Mark Palmer, manager of stock operations at Meissner-Hoffmann Pharmaceutical, one of Canada’s largest drug manufacturers. Winston Chan had suggested him as a possible contact. Meissner-Hoffmann’s office was in an industrial park north of the city in Vaughan, so I phoned rather than subject my aching side to the rigours of driving an hour in each direction.