Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (121 page)

Lionel nodded. “Yuri spent a lot of money on plants. Orchids in particular, especially rare ones. He could talk about them forever, when the mood hit him. I think he preferred plants to humans, to tell the truth.”

“The passions of the rich,” Dan concluded.

Lionel smiled. “He had a few of those. They weren’t all bad.”

“Maybe not, but one of them might have got him killed,” Dan said. “When you have a moment, I’d like the names of people who definitely had the code. I’d also like to know who was given discreet payments for the running of the club or anything to do with his house.”

Lionel gave him a questioning look. “You want a list?”

“It doesn’t have to have your name on it. Nothing official, just names and addresses if you have them. If anyone asks, I’ll say I got them from the bar’s files on my own.”

“Okay.”

“So then you’re taking the case?” Charles asked, just as his cell rang.

Dan smiled. “It would appear so.”

Charles nodded and reached for his phone. “Good. Excuse me a moment.”

He stepped out of the room.

Dan looked across at Lionel. “I assume you still want me to take the case?”

“Sure, it’s just that … well, we didn’t think you would.”

“You have to bear in mind that even if I do find this Santiago Suárez, he has no reason to talk to me, especially if he’s an illegal on the run from the police. He’s going to be very wary of any contact that would get him in trouble or thrown out of the country. I don’t know what the official policy is for Cuban illegals, but I’m pretty sure he won’t want to be sent back.”

Lionel gave a short laugh. “I can confirm that. The last thing Santiago wanted was to get sent back there. He hated his homeland. He said it was as homophobic as it got.”

“He probably hasn’t been to a Muslim country,” Dan said. “Were he and Yuri a real couple?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean was there anything more between them than sex? I just wonder why Yuri didn’t marry him to grant him full citizenship status.”

“I know there was talk of it. My guess is they just never got around to it, or else Yuri was making sure the boy was really in love with him and not just after his wealth. Santiago is very attractive, so he might have wandered off once he got citizenship. I think Yuri knew that. Also, there was a huge age gap between them. At least twenty-five years. It doesn’t mean they didn’t love one another.”

“You think he was the killer?”

Lionel shook his head. “No. I don’t have any reason to suspect him. More than Jan or the police, I mean.” He hesitated. “I guess you can’t work on assumptions, but if you do find him, please be careful.”

“I will. If only because finding missing people is sometimes like cornering wild animals. You can’t predict what they’ll do or what they’re capable of. If they don’t want to be found, anything can happen.”

“I can believe it,” Lionel said.

“What about this kid, Ziggy?” Dan asked.

“I don’t really know much about him, to tell you the truth. I thought Charles did, but apparently not.”

Dan thought this over. “Maybe it’ll come to him. Do you know if Ziggy and Santiago hung out together? They were close in age, by the sounds of it.”

Lionel laughed. “I doubt they had much in common, but you never know.”

“If anything comes to you, let me know.”

“I will.” Lionel gave him an assessing look. “It must be exciting. What you do, I mean.”

Dan smiled. “It’s mostly dull and repetitious. Anyway, I do it because I’m good at it, not because I’m an excitement junkie.”

“Good to know.”

Lionel had dressed in track pants and runners again, as though it was his habitual uniform.

“You’re a runner?” Dan asked.

“Yes, though I stopped being obsessive about it. I was up to ten k a day for a while. I’ve tapered back. I was neglecting Charles. Well, according to Charles, at least.”

“We should go running together sometime,” Dan said, hoping he wasn’t sounding flirtatious.

Lionel gave him an encouraging nod, as though to disarm the thought. “I’d like that.”

Charles came back into the room and glanced at the two of them.

“All good here?”

“Yes,” Lionel told him. “Dan’s going to take the case.”

Charles looked at Dan. “That’s great. Thank you.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Dan said.

They shook hands.

“We have to go,” Charles said. “Please keep us updated. You’ve got our numbers. Anything else you need to know, just ask.”

“I will,” Dan said. “Oh, one other thing. “I’ll need your permission to mention your names if I speak with the police.”

Charles looked alert. “What will that entail?”

“Simply that I’m talking to you. I won’t divulge anything sensitive.” Dan looked at the two faces staring at him. “In strictest confidence, of course, especially given the nature of the situation.”

“No, I can’t authorize that,” Charles said.

Dan waited. “Okay. But seeing how I’ll be working for you, I have to make sure I don’t step on anybody’s toes at headquarters. They don’t take kindly to outside investigations, as you can probably imagine.”

“I never really thought about it,” Lionel told him.

“Occupational hazard,” Dan said.

Charles shook his head. “Please keep our names out of it.”

“All right.” Dan nodded. “You have my promise. I won’t say or do anything to jeopardize either of you.”

Seven

Slow Train Coming

Dan’s day-timer lay open on his desk. The page was blacked out from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. that afternoon, as it was every Tuesday. It was time for his weekly meet-up as he accompanied one of his oldest friends in the city while she endured her chemotherapy appointment.

He got in his car and headed downtown. No matter what time of day he arrived, shadows covered the outside of the hospital on Elizabeth Street, the least interesting of several medical buildings on hospital row, like a plain elder sister ignored in favour of her younger, prettier siblings.

The elevator was crowded with worried-looking faces. Dan imagined cartoon thought-bubbles over the heads of the various riders, with words like:
Please God, I can’t live without him!
Or
This can’t be happening to me
, or
I hope she dies soon — I need the money.

They rose in silence as the elevator made its way to the sixth floor. A bell pinged and the doors opened.

“Chemo ward,” someone called out a little too cheerfully.

Several faces looked up, disconcerted by the announcement. They’d all breathe easier once the doors closed on them again, Dan knew. He made his way down the hall to a large room at the very end. Here the faces were grimmest of all. He recognized a few regulars, the stalwarts who came each week.

He saw Domingo’s shock of white hair over by the far wall. It hadn’t always been that colour, he recalled. It had grown in that way after the first round of chemo six years earlier.
My first reprieve
, she called it. This was her second.

At her side sat the stern, disapproving Adele. If Domingo was a playful balloon, her girlfriend Adi was the lead weight attached to its string. She exuded joylessness and disapproval at every opportunity. At least now, Dan thought, she had a reason for it.

While there were days when Dan didn’t think highly of human beings in general, Adi made a habit of disliking men explicitly at all times. Domingo, on the other hand, seemed to like everyone. She made being joyous her primary aim in life.

“I hate men,” Adi told Dan when they first met, whether as fair warning or a challenge to make her like him, he couldn’t tell.

“Any particular reason?”

“Because men oppress women. Because they’re violent. And because they run the world and they do it badly,” she answered.

“No argument there, but by that reasoning, we should hate all straights. They oppress us every day of our lives. The world is preset for heterosexuality. But oddly, I don’t hate them.”

“Maybe you’re a coward,” she said with a humourless smile.

Further discourse seemed pointless. Dan endeavoured to meet Domingo on her own after that. In fact, he’d spoken to Adele fewer than half a dozen times in all the years they lived in the same neighbourhood. Despite their disparate natures, however, the two women had remained together for more than twenty years. If nothing else, he would respect their love for one another.

Adele looked up at Dan and raised a finger to her lips, as though she would like to shush the entire world. She nodded over to the bed, where Domingo lay sleeping.

Domingo stirred as though she felt his presence. She opened her eyes and smiled. Dan went over and took her hand. Adele watched him like a guard dog watching a stranger approach its master.

“It’s okay, Ad. Why don’t you go have a coffee?”

Adele stood and looked down at Domingo.

“All right. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

Dan understood her reluctance. When your beloved is possibly in the last stage of life, you would want to be there every moment. On the other hand, the emotional toll it took was impossible to calculate. A coffee break would have to be a good thing at some point. She left with one last look around the room, as if she might later need to recount these details to a police officer asking for specifics of the last time she saw her partner alive.

Dan looked around. Chemical pouches were strung up on metal racks like plump purses on lean scarecrows. He sat on the edge of the bed and tried not look at the PICC line. On his first visit, Domingo showed him the port valve protruding from her right biceps. He flinched when she told him she had twenty-nine centimetres of plastic tubing embedded in her arm. During the course of treatment, the nurses cheerfully showed her the bags with her name affixed to labels, letting her know the timing for each solution.
This bag will take forty-five minutes, the next one will only take thirty-five.
Dan and Domingo sat together while the solutions drained silently into her body on the off-chance that a small percentage of the chemicals would target cancer cells and stem the tide of illness.

The room was hushed and dim, while the day outside was bright with the promise of spring. The sky seemed to beckon Dan onward, tempting him to run away rather than spend the afternoon in this theatre of sickness and death.

“So what’s the good news today?”

Domingo smiled. Her normally bronzed skin was pale and taut. She’d lost weight since their last visit.

“Glad you asked. My white cell count was up this morning.”

“Which means they let you do the chemo.”

“If you like to put it that way. I prefer to think of it as now I can’t get out of doing it.”

He nodded.

“Tell me how you’re feeling,” she said, as though he were the one to be concerned for. “How’s Ked? Everything okay at home?”

He knew she just wanted distraction. She didn’t care if he said anything relevant or simply rambled; it was all the same to her. She had little energy left over from the combined assault of cancer and the chemicals that made her shiver and feel cold all the time. She was grateful it was coming up to summer. At least it would be warm outside.

“Everything’s good. I got a couple of new clients today. Friends of Donny’s. He said to say hi.”

“Ah! The lovely Donny. Hi back from me.”

He filled in the details of the case for her.

“That’s good news,” she said. “I know your restless mind. You need to keep busy. Speaking of, how are you finding the meditations?”

Dan shrugged, half shy, half embarrassed. “Not that great.”

Domingo studied his face. “Tell.”

He hesitated. He wasn’t about to admit he hadn’t done any of the exercises she had prescribed to counter the effects of a recurring post-traumatic stress disorder.

She sighed. “Look, Danny. You know this helps me, too, so don’t be stingy with the details.”

“Sorry, I forgot.”

“What about the dream? The one with the rusty pail with the hole in the bottom?”

It had haunted him, leaving him with a feeling of despair each night as he lifted the child’s pail and saw water gushing out.

“No, that one ended when I stopped dreaming about my mother. I can’t really remember any others.” He smiled hopelessly and shrugged. “Sorry, I’m useless. How about you? Anything good to tell?”

“Depends how you define good.”

“Good as in ‘positive,’ ‘encouraging.’”

“No. Not in that way.”

“Then what way?”

“These days it’s almost always the tunnel, following the train station.”

She’d told him when she had the first dream of a train, convinced it meant her cancer would recur. In fact, she was right. A month to the day, her test showed positive. Her prescience always unnerved him, to the point where he’d had to sever the friendship for a while, rekindling it only in the past few years.

“So you were on the train again?”

She nodded.

“Yes. I’m on the train and hesitating at the station, trying to decide whether to get off, but I wait too long and the train starts to move again. At first I feel panic, but then I realize it isn’t so bad. The train continues and in the distance I see a beautiful mountain. It looks like the train is going to crash right into the mountainside, but at the last moment a tunnel appears and the train is swallowed up in darkness.”

Her gaze was far off, looking at something over his shoulder.

“I can’t see a thing inside. All I can hear is the whistle screaming above as we race along in the darkness. Finally, the train throws a stray light ahead of it, illuminating everything in its path. That’s usually when I wake up.”

She’d had visions since she was a kid, insisting they were psychic insights into the future. She tried to describe them to him once.
It’s like a door that opens and things flash past and I glimpse the scene inside before it closes again
. She waved her hands before her eyes, indicating the door as it opened and closed again. Dan tried to joke with her. Was it big and wide or more like a narrow screen affair? Did it have a window at the top and a doorbell to one side? If there was a party going on when it opened, would you ask to be let inside? What about a sex scene, possibly accompanied by gasps and a rude slamming in her face?