Buffalo Jump (2 page)

“That seat was for the lady,” I said. He ignored me and shook the hair out of his eyes again.

“She needs it more than you,” I said.

“That so?” He gave me what was supposed to be a withering glare. Shook the hair. “Happens I had a rough fuckin’ night.”

I briefly entertained the idea of shaking his hair for him. “Look—”

“Just fuck off, okay?” he spat. “Just leave me the fuck alone, ya fuckin’ kike.”

Kike?
Had he really said
kike?

The old lady clutched the pole even more tightly. The businessman in the window seat buried his nose deeper in his paper. A few straphangers stepped away from us.

I guess he had.

I’m not what you’d call an observant Jew. I eat matzoh on Passover but have been known to top it with ham and cheese. My favourite Chinese dish is shrimp in lobster sauce with minced pork, the non-kosher trifecta. Truth be told, I’m an atheist, though I once flirted briefly with agnosticism. But I am a Jew to my marrow and proud of it. I believe in the people, the culture, the community. I especially believe in the concept of
tikkun olam:
repairing the world, leaving it a better place than you found it. And at that moment, it was my belief that the streetcar would be a better place without this piece of shit on it.

“It’s all right, dear,” the old lady said to me. “I’m getting off at Jarvis.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I told her. “This gentleman is going to get up now and give you the seat.”

“The fuck I am,” he said and stuck out the middle finger of his left hand.

In any fight, you take what they give. I grabbed his hand and forced it downward and held it there. “Aaah!” he said, and who could blame him? It’s a fast, simple move that causes intense pain in the wrist, all but forcing a person upward to try to ease it. As he struggled up out of his seat I kept the pressure on, my left hand free to block a punch—like he could throw one with the pain he was in.

“Feel that?” I asked.

“Aaah!”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Want more?” I pushed harder until he went up on his toes.

“Naaa!”

“We’re going to walk to the exit,” I said. “You going to make trouble?”

“Naa-uuh!”

We walked toward the rear doors, my arm tight under his left. Two men walking up the aisle arm in arm—hardly uncommon in Toronto. We could have been practising our wedding march.

“Next time a lady needs a seat, you’re going to give it to her.” He didn’t answer so I pushed the wrist back farther.

“Ah! Ah!” he said through clenched teeth. “Yes.”

“And the word
kike,
you’re going to expunge it from your vocabulary.”

“I’m what?”

“You’re going to forget you knew it.”

“Yeah. Yeah-uhh!”

The streetcar stopped at Queen Street. I marched my new friend down onto the first stair, which automatically opened the doors, and gave him a shove. He exited ungracefully and stood on the sidewalk, flexing his hand open and closed, shaking it like there was something stuck to it. There would be numbness and pain, but both would subside in minutes.

“Hey!” he whined. “I got no more carfare, ya prick.”

I dug in my pocket and flipped him a toonie and assorted small change.

“I’m still short a quarter,” he said.

“I take no quarter,” I said as the doors closed. “And I give none.”

Jonah Geller. Repairing the world, one asshole at a time.

C
arol Dunn’s smiling muscles were out of commission again. “Good morning, Jonah. So glad you could join us.”

Carol had been Beacon’s receptionist since it was founded by Graham McClintock after he retired from the Toronto Police Service. Somewhere near fifty, she presided over reception with total devotion to Clint, guarding his privacy and time as though both were more precious than air. She would take on a pack of pit bulls to protect him, and win. She hadn’t spared me so much as a grin since the Ensign case. I had caused grief to Clint and the firm, after all. And here I was waltzing in ten minutes late, without a collared criminal or exonerated innocent to show for it.

“Car trouble,” I said.

“Mm-hmm.”

Carol could have buzzed me in but didn’t. I dug out my ID card and swiped it through the magnetic reader fixed to the door jamb.

The Beacon office was open concept: in the centre area were four cube farms of four workstations each, each farm walled off by baffles for privacy and sound insulation. Around the perimeter were offices occupied by unit heads and senior
consultants. Not long ago, I had seemed destined for one. Now I felt lucky they hadn’t stuck me in a rain-soaked doghouse in the parking lot. Since returning from my four-week injury leave, I had been given nothing but supporting roles. I’d helped other consultants run background checks on prospective employees or spouses. I’d traced paper and money trails left by embezzlers, bail jumpers and deadbeat dads. I’d pored over transcripts of other people’s interviews; reviewed videotapes to be used as evidence in other people’s cases. I had done everything but lead a case of my own.

This was hurting my income in equal measure to my pride. The firm billed clients by the hour, and the more hours you logged, the better you did. Put in enough overtime on surveillance or undercover jobs, and you could earn a good living. At the moment, I was being offered neither.

I shared my cube farm with Jennifer Raudsepp, Andy Robb and François Paradis. Franny was fluently bilingual and spent a lot of time on the road, working cases in eastern and northern Ontario, which had the largest francophone populations in the province. This week, he was working in town, something to do with a nursing home. Andy was a wiry little guy, five-seven and 130 pounds, and terrific at undercover work. He could blend into any setting without drawing attention to himself. He didn’t talk much but rarely missed a word other people said.

Then there was Jenn, a six-foot blonde who liked to tell people she was the shortest of four Estonian sisters. She was thirty but could pass for early twenties, with eyes as blue as a prairie sky and a smile that could make a man walk happily into a lamppost. She was also, to the chagrin of sighted straight men everywhere, openly gay. She lived with a lovely nurse practitioner named Sierra Lyons, and I got along better with both of them than I ever had with Camilla. As a trained investigator, I suppose that should have told me something.

When I first joined Beacon five years earlier, I had assumed most of the employees would be beefy ex-cops who’d put in their thirty years and wanted to top up their pensions. Clint quickly put that notion to rest.

“Cops might know how to conduct an investigation,” he said, “but they’ve always had the badge to back them up. The authority to enter someone’s home, search the place, compel them to answer questions. We don’t have that luxury. People don’t want to talk to us, they close the door and that’s that. We have to be good talkers and better listeners. If the job is surveillance or security, give me an ex-cop. If it’s money tracking, give me an ex-accountant or banker. But for undercover work or interviews, I’d hire an actor or a social worker before an old cop.”

“You were a cop,” I said.

“Yes, and after I hired myself I realized my mistake and vowed not to repeat it.”

So we had people like Andy, who before joining Beacon had been a bartender, a hot walker at Woodbine Racetrack, a warehouse worker and a night watchman. People like Jenn, who had been a member of a women’s sketch comedy troupe until she realized she’d always be looking up at the poverty line. And people like me, who’d had more false starts and accidental careers than I care to admit, including waiter, construction worker, ski guide and martial arts instructor. Among other things.

I was just settling into my chair when Andy and Jenn exited one of the meeting rooms. “Hi guys,” I said. Andy said hi—a mouthful for him—and Jenn gave me the kind of smile that made me wish she were straight or that I were Sierra Lyons.

“How you doing?” she asked.

“Not too bad,” I lied. “Where’s Franny? Monday morning flu again?”

“Haven’t heard a word.”

I fired up my computer and logged on to our media monitoring software package. If Beacon Security had been mentioned anywhere in print or broadcast media, transcripts would be waiting for me. I had customized my profile so it would also deliver stories that mentioned certain competitors, the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, which oversees our profession, and other keywords.

What my career had come to: a glorified clerk.

It wasn’t hard to predict the lead story in today’s Toronto papers: the shooting death of Kylie Warren outside the Eaton Centre, at the city’s busiest corner, in the middle of a sun-kissed Sunday afternoon. Kylie was the kind of young woman Toronto loves: athletic, blonde, an achiever from a good Leaside family with a bright future on Bay Street after completing both a law degree and the Canadian Securities Course.

Each paper had slightly differing accounts, depending on the witnesses they interviewed, but a rough consensus emerged: one group of four or five black teens walking south on Yonge came across another similar-sized group walking north. Words were spoken. Respect not paid. Shoves exchanged. Guns pulled. As one man fled across the street, another fired three shots at him. Two shots hit the wall of the restaurant Kylie was leaving. The third took most of her head off. The shooter had been identified as Dwight Junior Torrance, whose lengthy record included numerous assault, drug and weapons charges. He had been deported to his native Jamaica twice already, but kept slipping back into Canada, no doubt for the climate.

The widest coverage was in the city’s only tabloid, the
Clarion,
since the shooting brought together three of its most urgent concerns: guns, good-looking girls and the ineffectiveness of the left-leaning latte-loving mayor and Toronto elite. “Year of the Gun!” the headline screamed. The coverage included a two-page spread in which every person shot to death in June—a record twenty-six—was memorialized. Almost every
face was young and black. Some darker-skinned, some lighter. Some with shaved heads, some with dreads or braided rows. Apart from Kylie Warren, there was only one other white face: Kenneth Page, a fifty-two-year-old pharmacist with a glorious head of grey hair and ruddy complexion, shot to death in a carjacking. Killed for nothing, like Kylie.

Until very recently, guns had been relatively rare in Toronto, whose citizens tended to kill each other with knives, beer bottles, fists, boots or any blunt object at hand. But guns were everywhere now, sweeping out of pockets, waistbands, glove compartments, backpacks and school lockers, bearing down on people like Kylie and Kenneth Page. Like me and Colin MacAdam.

I’d been on the other side of guns once—the shooting side—and hadn’t liked it any better. I knew all too well what guns could do, to both the victim and the shooter. I told Clint when I took the job that I wouldn’t accept any assignment that required me to carry a gun. He laughed and told me to relax, that Toronto wasn’t L.A.

Of course, he probably wouldn’t trust me with a stapler now, but that was fine with me.

It was lunchtime by the time I finished the media review, including all the weekend editions. I ordered in a roast beef sandwich from the deli on the corner and was just tucking into it when François Paradis made his entrance.

He was a big physical presence, Franny, with a grand black pompadour he vowed never to change and a booming voice that switched effortlessly back and forth between English and French, joking and cursing eloquently in both official languages. He was a few years older than me, kept fit at the gym and seemed to enjoy his life as much as anyone nearing forty without much to show for it. Which could be me if I didn’t pick up my game soon.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Like hell,” he groaned.

“So what is it today? Flu? Asthma acting up?”

“Neither,” he winked. “Her name is LaReine,
maudit Christ,
and she rode me all night like a bull. Big black girl, eh, has an ass like two melons.
Sacrament,
I never had it like that before. I’m afraid to take a leak, eh? My thing’s so tired he can’t lift his head to see the toilet. I’m afraid I’ll piss all over my shoes.”

“Not the Bruno Maglis.”

“Any coffee going?” he said. “I need one bad, my friend.”

“Might be some in the kitchen.”

“Don’t suppose you’re heading that way.”

“Don’t suppose so.”

“Listen,” he said, leaning forward and dropping his voice. “Can you help me out with one thing?”

“Like?”

“The case I’m on, this nursing home thing. I met the client Friday and I was supposed to type up my notes but I had a date Friday after work—”

“With LaReine?”

He looked puzzled. “What? No, no, I met her just last night. Friday was this girl Micheline, friend of my ex-wife. I always wanted to plant her when I was married but I was trying to be a good husband back then. Stupid me, eh? So I ran into her at the track and I went for it,
tabernac,
and she was everything what I hoped for. Now I just have to make sure my ex finds out about it.”

“Which ex?”

“Eh? Oh, Mireille, of course. Vicki doesn’t give a crap anymore.”

“So you ran into this girl at Woodbine?”

“Best luck I’ve had there in weeks. I even hit a four-hundred-and-twenty-dollar trifecta.”

“But you said you had a date.”

“When?”

“You said you couldn’t type up your notes because you had a date. But your date was someone you ran into once you were already at the track.”

Franny slumped in his chair and threw up his hands with a smile. “You got me,” he said. “Caught me in my own lie. That is why you are a rising star—”

“Was.”

“Come on. See how you picked up my little fib?”

“Butter the other side later, Franny,” I said. “You bugger off to the track and I have to type up your notes?”

“Clint said you were here to help if I needed it. And I do.” He wheeled his chair closer. I could smell a musk of cologne, booze, coffee and, presumably, LaReine. He handed me a chrome microcassette recorder and said, “Double-spaced, please. Before end of business today is fine.”