“Then how did you know the name?”
A man out washing his car in the driveway across the street looked over at the sound of my raised voice. Staples’s eyes moved from me to him and back to me, their colour more violet than blue. “All right, Geller. But I tell you this in strict confidence and you better respect it.”
“Fine.”
“I may be more familiar with the case than I allowed. We’ve been working with our Canadian counterparts for months.”
“Why play dumb then?”
“I wanted to see if you were being frank with me.”
“And?”
“I’m satisfied you are. Now can we please get on with it?”
I rang the doorbell. Silence. Rang again. More silence. I put my ear to the door. From within the house I heard a faint sound of music. “Around back,” I said.
Staples and I went down the driveway to the rear of the house. The broken windowpane on the back door had been covered with a freshly cut piece of plywood. Through the other panes I could see Amy on a kitchen chair. She wasn’t moving. Classical music was playing: a string quartet, a minor key, the first violin threading a mournful melody line high over the other instruments. For some reason, it evoked an image of the three dead men I had seen this morning. Of what the heat would have done to them if they hadn’t yet been found.
Staples rapped on a glass pane and Amy jumped in her chair. When she saw me there she glared balefully at me. Then she saw Staples beside me with her identification pressed against the glass. She sighed deeply and opened the back door.
“You again,” she said. “And look, you brought company. You sold us out, you shit.”
“Take it easy, Ms. Farber,” Staples said. “Mr. Geller has actually been advocating rather forcefully on your behalf.”
“What?”
“That’s right. Even though he might be in deep trouble himself, he’s been quite insistent that we find a way to deal with this without you going to jail.”
“Oh.” Amy seemed slightly embarrassed by this. “Well.”
“Shall we?” Staples asked.
Amy stood aside and let us in.
“Are we alone?” Staples asked.
“Yes. I sent Barry to the movies. That’s what he likes to do when he-when there’s trouble.”
“Then let’s see if we can’t sort this out.”
“Do I need a lawyer?” Amy asked.
“Only if you want to be treated as a suspect rather than a cooperating witness. Like I told Mr. Geller, I’m not interested in sending you or your customers to jail. I want to know who’s behind it and stop it at the source.”
Amy Farber looked at me with no warmth in her eyes. There was too much fear to leave room for anything else.
“If I tell you…” she said to Staples.
“Yes? Come on. Tell me what?”
Amy stood looking down at the floor, her arms crossed, one hand reaching up to knead the muscles near the base of her neck.
“If you’re afraid you’ll get in trouble, please consider that you are already in trouble,” Staples said. “Very deep trouble. And I am your only way out.” She sat down at the table, from which all pill boxes and vials had been cleared. Amy sat down across from her. I sat next to Amy. Staples snapped open her briefcase and took out her notebook and pen. She closed the briefcase and said, “From the top. Please.”
Amy started her story with her diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis in her late thirties. “I’ve needed anti- inflammatories and other medication for years. Plus I’m going through the… um, the change now. And Barry, God bless him, he’s a delicate soul and he needs drugs for anxiety, for sleeping, for his back, you name it. But the prices are so high for everything, even with insurance. So a few years back, we all started using Canadian pharmacies that advertised on the Internet.”
“‘We all’?”
“People from the New Fifty.”
“The what?” I asked.
“It’s an association for people fifty or older who like staying active.”
“How did you go from that to this distribution racket?” Staples asked.
“It’s hardly a racket,” Amy huffed. “I was vice-president of our New Fifty chapter and I knew so many people in the same boat. We got together so we could order in bulk and get better prices. We even organized bus trips to Toronto where you could fill your prescriptions and see a show. ‘Pills and Pops,’ we called it.”
“Just stick to the story,” Staples said.
“Everything was fine until they changed the law in Canada and pharmacies couldn’t sell to us anymore. Luckily for us, Mr. Silver said he could keep sending us medications, only on the sly. We took a vote and decided to keep going. I would take people’s orders and email them to Mr. Silver, and a week or so later a van would bring them down.”
“How did Kevin Masilek become involved?”
“You know about-”
“Oh, yes. Keep going, please.”
“Mr. Silver called one day to say we had to get our orders from Kevin. No more direct deliveries or trips to his store. We didn’t like it. It cost more and we missed dealing with Mr. Silver. He was so much nicer. But he said we shouldn’t contact him anymore and that was that.”
“And what happened to Kevin?”
“He moved, I guess.”
“Just up and moved?”
“We don’t know. We can’t get in touch with him.”
“I’ll bet you can’t.” Staples tapped her pencil absently against the knuckles of her other hand. “So how did you come to take over?”
“We were… we were asked to.”
“By whom?”
Blood was draining from Amy’s face as if she’d been fatally gored somewhere below the neck. “He didn’t say. He just… just offered our medications free and we jumped at the chance, that’s all.”
Staples didn’t look like she was buying that-not at market price anyway. “Did Mr. Silver ever mention partners?”
“No.”
“No one else in Toronto?”
“No.”
“Did he ever mention a Steven Stone?”
“No.”
“A Stefano Di Pietra?”
“No.”
“Any Di Pietra?”
“No.”
“What about the men who made the delivery today?”
“The driver is Frank. The big one never talks.”
“They ever mention anyone else in Buffalo?”
“No.”
Staples made some notations in her book. “Where’s the rest?”
“What?”
“Only part of today’s delivery came here,” Staples said. “Where’s the rest?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said. “We just took what was ours and they went on their way.”
