“Places like Meadowvale get their drugs from somewhere. Often a pharmacy with a wholesale licence.”
“Which Page had?”
“Yes. He could get large quantities from manufacturers without questions, and the doctor who runs the home, Bader, could write phony scripts until his hand cramped up.”
“And sell them to whom?”
“The most lucrative market seems to be the States.”
“And who’s taking receipt there?”
“No idea,” I said. “Not yet.”
I never did get a coffee out of McDonough. He returned with one for Hollinger and one for himself. Clint had gone back to his office to take a call from Franny’s mother, Dorothee, in Ottawa. I went over everything again with McDonough in the room. He perked up at the thought that Franny might have punched me out, but Hollinger reminded him that Franny’s autopsy showed no bruising or other marks on his hands to suggest he had recently hit anyone.
Which she had known when she asked me about it. Katherine Hollinger was a girl who liked to have fun. Definitely not your average homicide sarge.
After I got back to my desk, Jenn was called in. Andy stayed focused on his research. He didn’t like to talk at the best of times, and this was anything but. I went to the men’s room, where I ensconced myself in a stall to check my wound. I untucked my shirt and held it up with my chin. The adhesive strips holding the gauze dressing in place came away easily but the pad itself stuck to the gash. I winced and sucked air and pulled until it came free. The wound itself looked good: red around the edges but no pus or other sign of infection; the gash itself warm and tender but not hot. I put the dressing back- Dr. Klein had warned me against changing it myself-and washed down two more Percocet and another stool softener. The stalemate between them was continuing apace. There’d be a reckoning at some point. Like an economy heading toward recession, maybe the best I could hope for was a soft landing.
Hollinger was waiting at my desk when I got back.
“Tuck your shirt in,” she said. “We’re going out.”
CHAPTER 27
Franny had lived in a high-rise on Carlton just east of the old Maple Leaf Gardens, where the Leafs played for sixty-odd years-some very odd-before moving to the Air Canada Centre, where corporate revenues could flow more freely. I had never been inside his place. Any time people from the office got together for drinks after work, it was usually at a bar on King or Front.
Outside his apartment door, Katherine Hollinger handed me a pair of disposable surgical gloves. “Put these on.”
“I’m not contagious,” I said.
“Or infectious,” she shot back. “You know the rule. No touching.”
“I know.”
“Not even with the gloves.”
“I get it. No touching. I’ll pretend we’re in high school.” Oy. Was it just the Percocet that made me so giddy around her?
“You see anything at all, let me know.”
“Of course.”
“More convincingly, please.”
“Of course. ” I snapped on the gloves.
“Much better.” She opened the deadbolt with a single brass key and in we went.
Franny’s one-bedroom apartment was about the same size as mine, but his windows faced south onto a blighted stretch of Carlton frequented by low-rent hookers wobbling on too-high heels and in too-tight skirts. I much preferred my view of the city skyline and the Don Valley. The Track, as this part of town was known, had a darkness all its own.
Franny’s living room/dining room combo was effectively divided into three functional spaces: a eating area, living room and office.
The eating area consisted of a round table and two chairs, over which a chandelier hung. It didn’t look like he’d dined there recently. The table was covered in newspapers from the weekend, the Sunday Clarion on top.
The living room had a black leather sofa and recliner facing an entertainment centre with a large flat-screen TV and stereo system. Next to the recliner was a small table on which rested a number of remotes and on the floor beneath that a pizza box. That’s where he probably ate his last meal. Books and CDs filled smaller shelves in the entertainment unit, along with DVDs of action films featuring muscled-up Hollywood hunks and whippet-thin fighters out of Thailand and Hong Kong.
The office was built into a corner of the living room, its centrepiece an old-fashioned rolltop desk with dozens of pigeonholes that should have been stuffed with notes, bills, statements, parking tickets, takeout menus and other detritus of metropolitan life. They were empty.
I asked, “Where is it?”
“What?”
“It. Everything. His mail, bank records, phone bills.”
“We took it all downtown,” Hollinger said. “Gregg and I will sort through it there.”
“Does he move his lips when he reads?”
“Easy, you. He’s my partner.”
“But you’re the brains.”
“Someone has to be.”
The artwork was all generic: prints of a waterfall pouring over moss-covered rocks, a hooked marlin breaking through aqua waters, red-tailed hawks wheeling over a green forest canopy, all in the same chrome-and-glass frames. They could have come from any hotel chain.
I turned to Hollinger. “Did you find a notebook on him?”
“I don’t have the complete inventory.”
“He wasn’t much for computers.”
“So we’ve gathered.”
“He usually had a black notebook in his jacket pocket.”
“Thanks. If we find it, I’ll let you know.”
The kitchen was a small galley like mine. A few basic pots and pans in the cupboards. A dish set that had to have come from Ikea. One drawer had cutlery and a few utensils, the other a thick sheaf of takeout menus. It wasn’t hard to guess which got used more.
The bathroom had the basic items a man needed to keep himself shaved, showered and reasonably well groomed, plus a few more. Grecian Formula: who knew? A tube of K-Y jelly and a box of 12 condoms, about half of which remained. A few prescription medicines, including one for arthritis pain.
The bedroom had room for a queen bed, a dresser and night table and little else. The closet had the usual mix of inexpensive suits and casual clothes, along with a collapsible ironing board and shoeshine kit. Of course he’d have those, the old-fashioned lug. A freshly pressed shirt, a shine and his pompadour in place, and he’d be ready for action in no time.
So who would murder him? There was nothing to indicate he was living beyond his means. If anything, the apartment was distressingly plain. And too much like my own. Same little kitchen and bathroom, same parquet floors, same fixtures and windows. Same little place built for one.
Was this my future? Nights alone eating in front of the TV, an array of remotes at my side? Would the ghosts that followed me home from Israel ever stop rattling their dusty bones long enough to let me settle down, fall in love again, do more than simply keep my head above Toronto’s ever-rising tide?
I turned to Hollinger. “Can I ask you something?”
“You just did.”
