High Chicago Page 14

  “You’re our client,” I said. “Finding out the truth for you is the only job we have. And if Rob is in any way dirty on this, we’ll tear up more than his cheque.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “Homicide.”

  I said hi.

  Hollinger said hi.

  A moment of uncomfortable silence followed, until I said, “I know what happened, Kate. To all of them.”

  “You know or you think?”

  “I know. All three were murdered by Simon Birk.”

  “The Simon Birk? The developer?”

  “Him.”

  “He’s not even in Toronto.”

  “But he’s Rob Cantor’s partner on this project. And when Cantor told him about the problems he was having, Birk had them removed. One by one.”

  I told her what I’d found out about Aroclor 1242 and its presence on the Harbourview site. How Rob had brought the problem to Birk—all the problems—and Birk said he’d handle them. “Even Rob thinks Birk is guilty,” I said. “He’s paying my way to Chicago.”

  “There’s still no proof his daughter was murdered,” she said.

  “What about Glenn and Sterling?”

  “We’re still looking into Glenn’s dealings with Cantor. If what you say about the Aroclor is true, it does provide a motive for his murder. But proving that Birk did it, directly or indirectly … I can hardly fly him in for questioning.”

  “What about the Chicago police?”

  “Everything we’re talking about took place outside their jurisdiction.”

  “So come with me.”

  “Jonah, please. I don’t run my own agency. I report to a new inspector who squeezes budget dollars from a stone. And even if we had the money, there are leads to follow up here.”

  “What leads?”

  “Glenn had other projects on the go.”

  “Any as big as Harbourview? With PCBs poisoning the site?”

  “He also had a $250,000 life insurance policy that Eric Fisk stands to collect.”

  “You think Eric Fisk beat his lover to death? He barely has the strength to clothe himself.”

  “He could have hired it out.”

  “He could have but not Simon Birk? And what about Will Sterling? You think Fisk killed him too?”

  “Don’t be nasty, okay? I talked to Neely today and they’re checking Sterling’s background.”

  “Did he have insurance?”

  “Jonah, I don’t have to take any shit from you, understand? I have to run my case the way I see fit. I can’t freelance like you.”

  “So let’s work together,” I said. “Let me be your eyes and ears in Chicago. If there is evidence tying Birk to these killings—any or all of them—I’ll find it. And I’ll relay it to you, directly or through my partner.”

  “As long as it’s not based on guesswork. No Crown attorney is going to indict a murder suspect—especially Simon Birk—without a solid case. He’d have to be extradited here, for one thing, and with pockets as deep as his, he can hire an army of lawyers.”

  “I’m still going after him.”

  “Then good luck. And watch your back,” she said. “If what you say about Birk is true, he isn’t shy about eliminating distractions.”

  “I’m counting on that,” I said.

  There was a moment of stunned silence on the other end of the phone when I told Avi Sternberg who was calling. “Jonah Geller?” he said. “The Jonah Geller from Har Milah? There’s a voice I didn’t think I’d hear again.”

  “Hineni,” I said in Hebrew. Here I am.

  “In Chicago?”

  “No, but I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Flying or driving?”

  “Flying.”

  “When do you get in? I’ll pick you up.”

  “A quarter to ten your time, but you—”

  “That means ten-thirty at least O’Hare time. Look for me there.”

  “I booked a rental.”

  “For what? To get lost in? Cancel it.”

  “I won’t need a car to get around?”

  “In Chicago? Unless you’re going to the burbs, you can walk most places or take a cab or the El. Where you staying?”

  “The Hilton,” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “Right downtown.”

  “Which right downtown? There’s the Palmer House Hilton and the Chicago Hilton. They’re a few blocks from each other.”

  “The one on Michigan.”

  “South Michigan,” he corrected. “There’s a lot of north-south, east-west stuff you have to figure out here. Once you get it, it’s not too bad. I’d offer for you to stay at the house, but believe me, with three kids, you’d get more sleep under the El.”

  “Just picking me up is great. You sure it’s not an imposition?” “For Jonah goddamn Geller? Nothing’s too much, believe me.”

  Later that night I sat at my dining room table, using my laptop to scroll through notes Jenn had pulled together and uploaded to our server. Anything new would be posted there for me to download once I was safely installed at the Hilton.

  Simon Elliot Birk had been born in Chicago sixty-one years ago. His father, Ralph, had been a lawyer who initially helped businessmen and developers close their real estate deals, before finally seeing the light and becoming a developer himself. Well schooled in the art of local politics, Ralph had always backed the right mayor, which generally meant a Daley, as well as every other politician whose vote could help swing a zoning decision his way. He had died three years ago, aged ninety. Birk’s mother, Pamela, was variously described as a socialite, hostess, arts patron and power behind the throne. She had died of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates, presumably by accident, when Birk was just sixteen.

  A lot of the biographical material had come from a Chicago Tribune business writer named Jericho Hale. Judging by the tone of his articles, he had no great fondness for Birk. Jenn had also posted a lengthy profile from Forbes, another from Vanity Fair—which focused more on Birk’s marriage, art collection and social life than on his business—as well as dozens of articles dating back to the nineties, when Birk had suffered some of his greatest reversals in real estate, prior to his phoenix-like comeback.

  I read it all. I needed a three-dimensional image of the man, a weakness to probe, a gap in the armour, somewhere to stick in a crowbar and heave.

  He was a teetotaller, according to press reports. Never touched a drop, not even champagne to toast a new deal. I imagined a sixteen-year old boy, pledging through tears that he would never taste the poisons that had killed his mother.

  He had a brilliant mind for numbers, according to both friends and enemies. “He’s unbelievable,” a former director of construction told the Tribune. “It’s not just that he can calculate them faster than a machine, which he can, he also grasps the context at the same time. You put a thirty-page prospectus in front of him, he scans it like a dinner menu, and then asks all the right questions, as if he’d had all the time in the world to study it.”

  He had a gift for languages: at last count, he spoke fluent French, Italian, Spanish and German, and could acquit himself reasonably well in two or three other tongues.

  He was an arrogant sonofabitch. An advisor had once prefaced a remark with “If I were you, Simon,” and before he got another word out, Birk had retorted: “If you were me, Thomas, it would signify the largest single jump up the evolutionary ladder since the first amphibian crawled onto a beach.”

  He did not suffer fools gladly. According to a Tribune story by Hale, Birk fired a long-time employee who mistakenly calculated an offer in Canadian dollars instead of American, even though the mistake wound up making Birk money.

  He told the Vanity Fair profiler that Jack London had been his favourite author as a young boy. “But I always favoured Call of the Wild over White Fang,” he had said. “Far more interesting to see a house dog turn into a dominant beast than to see a wolf tamed to a house dog, don’t you think?”

  He was
married to Joyce Mulhearn, fifty-four, if you could call theirs a marriage. She had been in an irreversible coma for more than two years and was currently housed in an extended-care facility called Nova Place. If he dated other women, no one had written about it.

  He and his wife had owned a home on North Astor Street, a Georgian masterpiece designed by David Adler, filled with art collected by Mrs. Birk, whose tastes leaned toward Impressionists, neo-Impressionists, Fauvists and art deco—stuck in the early twentieth century. Both Mr. and Mrs. Birk had been savagely beaten during a home invasion, in which the house was looted of some of its most valuable art and jewellery. Joyce had suffered grievous head injuries—the cause of her comatose state—and Birk’s nose, collarbone and right hand had been broken.

  Birk sold the house not long after the attack and moved to the Birkshire Riverfront, where he already had his offices on the upper floors, overlooking the winding Chicago River and the many bridges that crossed it in the downtown area. Though he stood just five-five, he was considered strong for his size and had been an avid boxer in his younger days, and he worked out daily in his private gym.

  His net worth was roughly $1.5 billion. Not exactly Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, but you weren’t going to see him sleeping on a sewer grate either.

  He gave donations to both the Democratic and Republican parties.

  He built casinos but never played in them. “I save my gambling for business,” he had said, “because in real estate, I have the longest arms in the house.”

  He had something like six thousand people working for him, or 5,999 more than I did.

  Taken together, his holdings amounted to sixty million square feet, which was probably sixty thousand apartments like mine.

  He held season tickets for the White Sox, the Blackhawks and the Bears. “I would have bought Cubs tickets too,” he had said, “but in this town you go with one ball club or the other and I’m not much for underdogs.”

  Birk had no children. No heirs to the empire. Finally, a tally I could match.

  So: I wasn’t going to beat him by getting him drunk, outfoxing him on numbers, conning him in any of the Romance languages, outspending him or being a bigger prick. I couldn’t hire him, then fire him. Couldn’t get to him through his wife or kids. I could outbox him, but there’d be the small matter of getting him to agree to put on the gloves. I might prove his equal in Blackhawks trivia—does hockey not course through the blood of every Canadian?—but I had to assume he’d have me beat on the Sox or the Bears, or even the lowly Cubs, for whom he professed no love.

  Maybe I’d just have to beat him senseless with a golf club, throw him in the trunk of a cab and tell the driver, “Canada—and hurry.”

  At ten-thirty, I turned off my laptop and got my suitcase out of the hall closet. I packed enough clothes to last a week and added hats, scarves and accessories I might need for surveillance. I threw in an extra sweater, in case the famous wind off Lake Michigan began blowing as advertised.

  I did not pack my Beretta Cougar, much as I might have liked to. No point in starting my trip with a strip search.

  Before I went to bed, I went out onto the balcony and stared out at the stunning skyline and thought, Take that, Simon Birk. My view’s just as good as yours.

  I’m working late at the office, alone, when there’s a knock at the door. Just shave-and-a-haircut. No two bits.

  I know that knock. I’ve always known it.

  I rush to the door and fling it open and there he is. My father, Buddy Geller, looking the way he did the year before he died. Black hair gleaming, flashing a smile that Willy Loman would have envied on his best day. I open my arms for a hug but he holds out his hand for a shake instead.

  “Mr. Geller,” he says. “I’m glad you could see me. You won’t regret it, I can promise you that.”

  “Please, Dad,” I say. “Call me Jonah.”

  “Why, thank you,” he says. “Jonah it is. That’s a good start. Now, Jonah, I have a proposition for you and I think—I know—you’re going to like it, so hear me out.”

  “Of course, Dad.”

  “I need you to write me a cheque. Not a big one, just a G-note. Wait. Did I say a grand? Better make it two and I’ll tell you why. Because I want you, Jonah Geller, to profit on this every bit as handsomely as me. How profitable, you’re asking yourself? How about a twenty-to-one payoff? Maybe even better by post time.”

  “Aw, Dad, not a horse.”

  “A horse, you say, like it’s any horse. Look at the name. Take a good look.” He pulls a racing form from his pocket. The name is circled in a great flourish of ink. Chicago Fire.

  “Huh?” he says. “Is that not a sign? Tell me you’re in, Jonah. A thousand for you and a thousand for me. And if you’re not interested for yourself, then at least the thousand for me. Please. I don’t ask you for much, do I?”

  I have to admit that’s true. I write him a cheque—but just for his thousand.

  “You’re sure?” he says.

  “I’m sure, Dad.”

  “Not the gambling type?”

  “Not tonight.”

  Next thing I know we’re at the track. He signs the cheque over to a teller, holding down a fedora against the wind. I don’t remember him wearing a hat at my office. Now it’s all he can do to keep it on his head. We find our seats and await the start of the race. Then they announce that Chicago Fire is missing, gone from his paddock without a word. His trainer is frantic, his owner demanding an investigation.

  “You find him!” my father shouts.

  So off I go into the windy night, searching hospitals, police stations, drunk tanks and detox centres. No sign of the horse.

  I go into every bar I can find, from upscale piano bars to raunchy gay bars to sleazy country-and-western dives where last week’s beer is still stuck to the floor. I show pictures of the horse to bartenders, drinkers, hustlers, house band players. Nothing.

  When I get back to the track, my father is slumped in his seat, tears mixing with a cold rain that’s falling hard on the open grandstand. His thousand—my thousand—is gone and he’s too ashamed to speak to me.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I say. “I’m just glad to see you.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s not too late for you to be out? Isn’t it an hour later here?”

  “Where, Dad? We’re home.”

  “Doesn’t feel like home.” He holds out his hand and we shake. As I start walking away, he calls out, “Say hello to your mother. Tell her I’m sorry I can’t make it tonight.”

  “What about Daniel?”

  “Who?”

  On my way out, I stop at Chicago Fire’s paddock and there he is, safe and sound, munching an apple.

  “Where was he?” I ask his trainer.

  “I don’t know,” the trainer says. He’s a big man, strong-looking, wearing safety boots and a hard hat. “He won’t tell me a thing.”

  “He cost me a bundle.”

  “It was your dad that bet,” the man says.

  “It was my money.”

  “Who told you to mix in?”

  “He’s my father,” I say.

  “Mix out of other people’s business,” the man says. “Sooner you learn that, the better.”

  “Goddamn horse,” I say.

  “Up yours,” the horse replies, spitting bits of apple in my face.

  “Watch your mouth,” I say.

  The horse laughs, showing me yellow teeth. “Make me,” he snorts, and more bits of apple spray into my face.

  PART TWO

  “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”

  J. Paul Getty

  CHAPTER 27

  Check-in time at the Chicago Hilton wasn’t until three o’clock, so I stowed my luggage with the concierge and bought two coffees from a Starbucks concession for me and Avi Stern. “I wish I had time for lunch,” Avi said. “Kitty O’Shea’s h
as a great shepherd’s pie.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Other end of the lobby,” he said with a laugh.

  We drank our coffee in club chairs in a naturally lit alcove off the main lobby. He dispensed some lawyerly doubts about my case against Simon Birk—“We have this concept here known as the burden of proof”—but he at least agreed to call a friend who practised real estate law to find out what he could about Birk’s recent dealings.

  “I know there have been lawsuits against him, but they’ve all been civil cases,” he said. “He’s pissed off a lot of people in his time. Business partners. The banks, when real estate swooned in the nineties. But he’s won more civil suits than he’s lost and there have never been any criminal charges that I recall.”

  “What about the fatalities on his job site?” I asked.

  “He’ll pay for those,” Avi said. “But in dollars, not jail time. Unless someone can prove he knew that crane was going to tip over and did nothing to prevent it.”

  He checked his watch and said, “I have to get back to the office. You have dinner plans tonight?”

  “No.”

  “You do now,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “You’re in my town. What am I supposed to do, let you eat alone in a hotel?”

  “Your wife won’t mind?”

  “Let me worry about her.”

  There was a story in the news a while back about some young men who taunted a tiger at a zoo, throwing bottles and sticks at it until it became so enraged that it leaped over the fence and meted out some jungle justice.

  Not the best way to deal with a tiger but better than no way at all.

  Armed with a fold-out map and directions from the concierge, I walked north on South Michigan until it became North Michigan.

  The city splits its north-south addresses at Madison, east-west addresses at State.

  Avi had drilled me on it before leaving.

  Even the most mundane businesses on Michigan—Radio Shacks, 7-Elevens, sub shops and T-shirt emporia—were housed in magnificent stone buildings. Many a fluted column, many a looming gargoyle, heroic figures on straining beasts, all free of graffiti and litter. And this wasn’t even the Magnificent Mile yet. On my right were the green expanses of Grant Park and beyond it the hard bright water of Lake Michigan. At Monroe, after a stretch of streets named after largely mediocre presidents—Polk, Harrison, Van Buren—I turned into Millennium Park.