High Chicago jg-1 Page 5

  "Was that unusual?"

  "Let me put it this way: Very few plays have as many good female roles. Every actress in the program auditioned for it."

  "Did she say why she didn't audition?"

  "No. Not to me, anyway. I heard she was involved in an outside project-a guerrilla theatre sort of thing where actors confront politicians or business types about one issue or another-but that shouldn't have prevented her from trying for a part."

  "You weren't concerned?"

  "Not really. In retrospect, maybe I should have been. But she didn't seem down at all. Quite energized in fact. It's just that her energy was being applied elsewhere."

  "Was she seeing anyone that you know of? Anyone from her class?"

  He thought about it, then shook his head. "A lot of mingling goes on in a theatre program. People work intensely together. They fall desperately in and out of love. They're trying on new personalities, in a way. Behaving outrageously, passionately, even foolishly, as if it's expected of them as artists. Again, Maya didn't seem to go for that. She knew who she was." Harris looked down at the papers piled on his desk, snippets of drama written over the centuries, words to be spoken by students vying for their moment in the spotlight.

  "At least I thought she did."

  CHAPTER 7

  When I got back to the office, Jenn was slumped in her chair looking utterly downcast. If the cloud over her head had been any blacker, the room would have been filling with the smell of ozone.

  "How bad?" I asked.

  "Bad enough to go through the apartment of a girl who killed herself," she said. "But to do it with her mother… I can't tell you how many times she cried. My shoulders must be soaking wet."

  "Sorry you had to do it."

  "You are not. You're just relieved it wasn't you."

  "I won't argue. So what was her place like?"

  Jenn sipped from a cup of tea. "Neat for a student. Well organized. Nice enough furniture but nothing too fancy. A step above the usual garage sale look. Lots of film posters and theatre books. Lots of music."

  "Anything stand out?"

  "One thing," she said. "The kind that makes you go, 'What's wrong with this picture?' Her bed was made. I stood in her bedroom, wondering who makes their bed in the morning and kills themselves at night?"

  "Maybe someone tidied up after."

  "Nope. Marilyn said no one has touched anything since she died. Everything's exactly as it was when they found her."

  "What else?"

  "She had a laptop but Marilyn didn't know the log-on or email passwords."

  "We can get around those."

  "I told her that. She let me take it, as long as we share everything with her once we get in."

  "You bring it to Karl?" Karl Thomson owned a shop called Hard Driver, and had helped us set up our computers when we opened our agency. He could crack passwords the way other men crack wise.

  "I dropped it off on the way here. He said he'll call later today or first thing tomorrow."

  "What about her phones?"

  "A land line and a cell. Luckily they both stored recent calls, incoming and outgoing." She passed a handwritten list across the desk, with one number circled. "She got nearly a dozen calls on both phones from this one the week before she died. Called it a lot too."

  "Cherchez l'homme?" I asked.

  "Let's call and find out."

  I dialled the number and turned on the speaker. After three rings, a male answered.

  "Hi," I said. "Who's this?"

  "You called me, you should know," he said. "This a sales call?"

  "No. It's about a girl named Maya Cantor."

  "Aw, geez. She's the one who, um…"

  "Yes. Someone at this number called her a lot."

  "Not me, man. My roommate."

  "What's his name?"

  "I don't know if I should give that out. Who are you?"

  "My name is Jonah Geller. I'm working for her family. Trying to find out a little more about why she killed herself. Was your roommate seeing Maya?"

  "Seeing like in dating? No, man, I don't think they had that going on. Look, tell you what. Leave your number and I'll give it to Will. He wants to call you back, it's up to him."

  I wrote "Will" on the paper next to the number.

  "Tell me something. Is he a theatre student too?"

  "Will? Get out. He's in enviro studies. Aw shit, I shouldn't be telling you any of this. Ask him yourself if he calls you back." And he hung up. Jenn used the phone in the front room, working through her list of Maya's friends. I searched a media database for news accounts of the Harbourview project and found one critic repeatedly quoted: a developer named Gordon Avrith, president of a company called SkyHigh Development, which was building a sixty-storey tower at Bay and King.

  When I told his secretary I was calling about the Birkshire Harbourview, she put me right through.

  "What's your interest in the project?" he asked.

  "Not quite sure yet," I said.

  "But you're an investigator, so you must be investigating something."

  "Must be."

  "You could start with how he got that piece of land. I bid on that too, but somehow he walked away with all the marbles. Then there's all the variances they got from city council. Zoning, density, land use. How the OMB rubber-stamped everything despite concerns about the environmental impact."

  The OMB is the Ontario Municipal Board, the body that resolves land use and community planning issues when the parties involved can't come to an agreement.

  "How'd he get his variances?" I asked.

  "If I knew that," Avrith said, "I'd be doing the same damn thing. This business," he sighed. "Sometimes I think I'd be better off cleaning toilets with a toothbrush."

  "How well do you know Rob Cantor?"

  "I've known him since he worked for his old man. You know his father, Morton?"

  "No."

  "Christ, I've known him since he went by Mendy. It's a family business, right? Like a lot of these companies. Rob's grandfather, Abie, was a plumber, worked for a landlord that had buildings up and down Spadina. He saved up enough to buy his own building and when Mendy-sorry, Morton-was old enough to work for him, they bought more buildings. Never built any, just bought. Set up a property management company, and that's where Rob started out. Cleaning apartments. Painting when tenants moved out. Schlepping out the crap they left behind."

  "How did he get into development?"

  "He's a smart kid, I'll give him that."

  "Kid?"

  "Hey, to me he's a kid. I'm his father's vintage. Older even. I won't say how old, except to say too goddamn old for the way things are these days. Anyway, he went to school, got a degree in architecture. When his father retired, he took the company in a new direction. Sold off the old buildings and started putting up new ones. Cantor Property Management became Cantor Development. And now he's hooked up with Simon Birk and thinks the sun shines out of his ass. But I will tell you this. Something is going on with that project. I don't know what it is-and I got too many of my own problems to hire you if that's what you're looking for-but there is no way in hell he got that piece of land without paying someone off. In my humble opinion. Could have been a new addition on someone's house, a new deck at the cottage. Hell, I once got a councillor's vote by guaranteeing him a parking spot in his mistress's building. But proving it?" Avrith chuckled. "That's another story. They never leave proof, these gonifs, they leave slime trails. Anyway, you're the investigator, so go find something. And when you do, I'll buy the party hats."

  "You have something against Rob Cantor?"

  "He's competition, isn't he?" I surfed the Ontario Municipal Board website until I had grasped enough of the lingo regarding regulations, legislation and appeal process to call the office of the chairman, Mel Coren. I told his assistant I wanted information about the Birkshire Harbourview project.

  "Are you one of the parties involved?" she asked.

  "Not exactly."
<
br />   "Either you are or you are not."

  "Okay, not. I'd just like to ask Mr. Coren-"

  "Mr. Coren cannot comment on hearings or decisions of the board," she said. "The legislation expressly forbids it."

  "Couldn't I-"

  "No, you could not. Copies of all decisions are posted on our website. We recommend searching by case number. Do you have one?"

  "No. I don't suppose you could-"

  "No, I cannot."

  "Is there anyone else I can ask about the decision?"

  "No, there is not."

  Boy, who saw that coming.

  "The Board operates like the court system," she said. "Allowing staff members to paraphrase or interpret decisions creates a risk of distorting or confusing the original decision. Let ting the written decisions speak for themselves prevents ambiguity and confusion. Are you familiar with the phrase res ipsa loquitur?"

  "No, I am not," I said.

  "It means 'the thing speaks for itself.'"

  "You certainly do," I said. Jenn had reached one more of Maya's friends while I'd been getting frosted by the OMB.

  "Her name's Stacy Manning," she said, "and she's known Maya since grade school."

  "And?"

  "More of the same. Maya was the last person she thought would ever do it. She even said, and I quote, 'I'm more the type to kill myself, or at least threaten it.'"

  "For someone in drama school, Maya wasn't very dramatic. Did Stacy know anything about Will?"

  "Never heard the name. Speaking of which…"

  "Yes?"

  "Where's his number?"

  I passed it to her and she dialled it. "Watch how the big girls do it."

  "Hello?" she said breathily. "Is that Will? Oh… are you his roommate? Oh, hi there. He told me about you. What's your name again? Evan, that's right. Evan," she said dreamily, "when will he be in? Oh. Well, I wonder if you could do me a favour."

  Evan couldn't see how beautiful Jenn was, but her voice alone would have made me jump through flaming hoops. I half expected her to break into a chorus of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President."

  "I met Will at a party the other night and he really wanted my phone number but I usually don't give it out to guys I don't know. You know how it is… So he wrote down his number and his name-oh, geez, I can't even read his last name. Sterling? That's funny, it looks like Steeling here. So will he be in later, you think? Oh. Okay. No, I'll try him again. Thanks, Evan. What? Oh, that's sweet. I hope to meet you too."

  My eyes had pretty much rolled to the back of my head by the time she hung up.

  "Guys," she said. "They are so defenceless." "Let's hope Will is too," I said. Now that we had his full name, I called the U of T's Environmental Studies Program.

  "I'm trying to get in touch with a student named Will Sterling," I told the man who answered.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "We can't give out a student's number."

  Okay. At least he'd confirmed Will was a student there. "I'm supposed to meet him before his class tomorrow morning," I said. "Could you tell me what time it starts?"

  I heard the rustling of paper… "Enviro 1410," he said. "Starts at 9:30. You know where the Earth Sciences Building is?"

  "Do tell," I said. Jenn was looking at the list of phone calls Maya had made during the last week of her life. "Between calls to her mom, her dad, her girlfriends and Will Sterling, I think we've accounted for all of them," she said. "Except this one."

  It was a 312 area code-not a local call. I dialled it, listened for a moment and hung up without saying a word.

  "What?" Jenn asked.

  "That," I said, "was the office of Simon Birk."

  CHAPTER 8

  What are we doing wrong?" Jenn sighed.

  We were scrolling through floor plans of the penthouse units of the Birkshire Harbourview website, logged in as prospective buyers. As if.

  "Those twelve-foot ceilings… those windows… those views. And that kitchen, my God, it's bigger than my whole top floor!"

  "We're not doing anything wrong," I said. "We just don't aspire to that lifestyle."

  She flashed me a look that was both contemptuous and somehow compassionate. "How little you know me," she said.

  "Never mind, Ivana. Go to the part where the man himself speaks."

  She clicked on a feed of a video Simon Birk had recorded the previous spring, when his partnership with Rob Cantor had first been announced. He stood at the top of a skeletal iron tower in Chicago, many storeys above the city, wind ruffling the hem of his overcoat.

  "My name is Simon Birk," he told the camera. "And some of you may have heard of me." A grin at his own joke, his capped teeth white as virgin snow. "You've seen my name on some of the greatest buildings on the continent. You've stayed in my hotels, played in my casinos, eaten in my restaurants and danced the night away in my clubs. You may think of me as a man who builds towers like this one, Chicago's own Birkshire Millennium Skyline, scheduled to open next spring. But what I really build, my friends, are dreams."

  The camera moved in closer. Birk was not a handsome man in any conventional sense. He had a bulbous nose, fleshy lips, bushy eyebrows, and a thick bony ridge hooding his pale blue eyes. Yet it was a face that commanded your attention.

  "What are your dreams? That somewhere in your great city of Toronto, a city I love almost as much as my native Chicago, is a residence that reflects your desires, your aspirations, your success? Built by a man who spares nothing, cuts no corners, to bring you the very best in luxury living?"

  "Think he's impressed by himself?" I said.

  "I choose my projects carefully," Birk was saying. "And my partners even more so. So I'm delighted to be working with Toronto's finest developer, a man who shares my drive for perfection in every detail, Rob Cantor of Cantor Development. Together, we are creating an unforgettable domain where you'll be surrounded by the best of everything: Indonesian hardwood, granite countertops, travertine marble and stainless steel appliances. You'll know from the moment you visit this website-or even better, our model suite-that this is where you want to live."

  "My kingdom for a Dramamine patch," I moaned.

  "Shut up," Jenn said. "My aspirations are climbing by the minute."

  "To meet your expectations," Birk said, "we have sought out only the finest craftsmen, the finest goods, to bring you the new crown jewel of the Toronto port lands, the Birkshire Harbourview. For a virtual tour of the complex, just click on the link below. Better yet, click on the green link to join our exclusive mailing list."

  "How exclusive can it be if anyone can join?" Jenn muttered.

  "These magnificent residences will sell out fast," Birk said. "We anticipate every unit to be pre-sold before completion, so-"

  Jenn had finally had enough too. She clicked off the web feed and left Simon Birk in mid-sentence. Something, I guessed, not too many people did.

  "Hey," she said, looking at her watch. "Don't you have a date to get ready for?"

  "Won't take me long."

  "You're not going out dressed like that, are you?"

  "You been talking to my mother?"

  "Seriously. Why don't you knock off?"

  "What about you?"

  "I'll hang here awhile," she said. "Karl said he might swing by with Maya's computer after he closes up."

  "He cracked her password?"

  "Like an egg, he said."

  "That's our boy. It'll be interesting to see what's on there," I said. "Because no one so far has a clue about why Maya did it. Her mother, brother, father, even her theatre prof: can they all be in denial?"

  "It's the same with her girlfriends," Jenn said. "They were just as sure-insistent, even."

  "She was a doer, Jenn. She wasn't withdrawing from the world, giving her things away, dropping hints, crying out for help. She'd never attempted suicide before, and how many people succeed on the first try? She was energetic, involved, engaged in things. And by all accounts, she wasn't faking it."

  She looked at me
across the desk. "Her mother said it couldn't have been an accident, not with that high wall around the balcony."

  "You check it out?"

  She nodded. "It's more than waist high on me, and I'm six feet. Marilyn said Maya was five-seven."

  We sat for a moment in silence, broken only by the hum of machinery, traffic on Broadview, the sound of our breathing, the beating of still-living hearts.

  "Why did she call Simon Birk?" I asked.

  "Maya?"

  "Yeah."

  "He's her father's partner."

  "What could he tell her that Rob couldn't?"

  "Or wouldn't."

  "We know she had a fight with Rob the night she died."

  "And she had a bug up her ass when it came to the environment."

  "We know a lot of the port lands are polluted."

  "Except they'd have had to clean the site before they started building. Wouldn't they?"

  "Yes. You can't break ground without an environmental assessment. The soil and water have to be analyzed and cleaned first."

  I sat back down at my desk and went back to the Birkshire Harbourview's web page, then clicked onto a link that listed all the partner firms involved: the engineers, architects, banks and construction company.

  The engineering firm that conducted the water and soil testing on the site was called EcoSys.

  "Check this out," I said to Jenn.

  The founder and chief executive officer of EcoSys was one Martin Glenn.

  CHAPTER 9

  I did indeed change my clothes for my date with Katherine Hollinger. I showered and shaved and put on clean black jeans and a black shirt that I smoothed on my dresser with my hands-one day I'd buy an iron-and over that a black cashmere blazer, the one jacket in my closet that didn't look like it had been fished out of a donation chute.

  Hollinger lived in a condo on Bay near St. Joseph. I took the Bloor Street Viaduct across the Don River Valley, watching the last light of the setting sun through the Luminous Veil, two walls of metal rods built on either side of the bridge to keep people from jumping. The viaduct had been the city's main suicide magnet for years, the combination of the fall and oncoming Parkway traffic a guarantee of success. I doubted the Veil had cut the number of suicides, just shifted them elsewhere: another bridge, a subway, a razor or pills. Dorothy Parker had once written a poem about the many ways to do yourself in, but each had drawbacks, she wrote, so you might as well live. Maybe they should have etched those words in the stone of the viaduct, instead of spending $5 million installing the Veil's nine thousand rods.