Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (123 page)

“Back to the soda water.”

“So how are you these days, sexy?” the bartender asked, setting a glass in front of him, again declining his cash.

“Good enough,” Dan said, toying with the drink. “Do you know what I do for a living?”

The bartender looked him over and shrugged. “I heard you’re some kind of private eye.”

“That’s pretty much it. I find missing people.”

“I go missing once in a while. I’d love you to come and find me.”

Dan stopped to take stock of the situation. Here he was, being flirted with by a highly attractive man who seemed to have his head screwed on straight. Muscular chest, longish hair, goatee: he was just the right degree of scruffy.

He held out his hand. “Dan.”

“Hank.”

They shook.

“Been in the business long?”

“Ten years.”

“Did you know Yuri Malevski?”

“Sure. We all knew Yuri.”

“What did you think of him?”

He shrugged. “Nice enough, though he had a temper, I hear. Always ready with a handout for a worthy cause.”

“Any ideas what might have got him killed?”

Hank lowered his voice. “Word on the street is that his boyfriend was leaving him for a woman.”

“The Cuban?”

“That’s what I heard. He was bucking to get married for citizenship. I guess he got tired of waiting for Yuri to pop the question. What have you heard?”

“I heard he was being pressed for kickbacks. Do you ever get approached for payments so your bar isn’t inspected on certain nights? Anything like that?”

Hank gave him an assessing gaze. He ran a hand through his hair. It had just the right bounce.

“You’re talking about the police, I assume?”

Dan nodded.

Hank looked away again. “Not something I feel comfortable talking about in the bar …”

Dan nodded. “It’s okay. I get it —”

Hank cut him off. “I need a smoke. Meet me on the patio in two minutes.”

Dan smiled. “Sounds good.”

A few minutes later, Hank handed him a cup of coffee as he came through the door. They sat on stainless steel chairs at the far end, away from the other patrons.

“I remember you from way back,” Hank was saying. “I used to see you around a lot more back in the day.”

“That was a long time ago. No real desire to come downtown these days.”

“Married?”

“No, though I’ve been in and out of relationships. Just bored, mostly. You reach an age. You know. And I’ve got a teenage son.”

Hank gave him an assessing look. “Cool.”

Dan fingered his coffee cup. “Why do you remember me?”

“Besides your sex appeal? Your edge.”

“My edge?”

“Back in the day, everyone had attitude. You know — we were all too good for this, too good for that. Always wanting more. Learning a little about life along the way didn’t help either. It only made us want what we didn’t have. I know people who are still bitter, thinking that life overlooked them. But that wasn’t you. You never had that kind of vibe. You never got bitter. To me, you just seemed in a permanent state of anger. Even when you stood off by yourself in a corner, it shone like an angry halo.”

Dan laughed. “An angry halo. That sounds like me. I’m sure my son would agree. Maybe I shouldn’t find it so funny.”

“It was sexy. It said, ‘I’m dangerous — don’t get too close to me.’ So, of course we all wanted to.”

Dan nodded. “I haven’t been very good at letting people in. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever.”

Hank winked. “It’s not too late.”

“Maybe I’m just a work in progress.”

Now Hank laughed out loud. “Aren’t we all!”

“Speaking of danger,” Dan ventured. “Care to share what you know about protection money?”

Hank looked around, noting that all the others were absorbed in conversation. “I assume you’re asking for professional reasons and not just to make small talk?”

Dan nodded.

“All right. Then I can share a bit, though I keep my head down and my nose clean for the most part. If there’s something a little too spicy going on in the bar, I just duck behind the counter till it blows over. But yeah — shit gets said, and I overhear it now and then.”

He paused. Dan felt himself leaning forward, a boy anticipating a secret revelation.

“There are guys — I’m pretty sure they’re cops — who come in every once in a while. Never in uniform, of course. When they show up, the owners give me a look that says I need to disappear. I usually go down to the basement and count cases of beer. When I come back up, the till is a little emptier and the owners are a little more sombre, like they’ve just had a scare and aren’t ready to talk about it.”

“Do they ever ask you to give anything out if they’re not around? Maybe an envelope?”

Hank made a face. “No. And I hope they don’t ask.”

“Why do you think the guys who come in are cops?”

Hank gave a rueful shrug. “Because every time they come in, the owners get slack about the head count for the next few weekends. Like they’ve been told they don’t have to bother with all the bodies in the place. Meaning they can let a lot more people in. Sometimes we go over the legal limit, which in turn means more beer sold, which also means they can start to make up for whatever payments they just handed out.”

Dan nodded. “A nice, clean system. So in the end, nobody really loses out.”

“You might say it’s a win-win situation.”

“Until there’s a fire. But so far as you know, the payments have always been made?”

Hank’s brow wrinkled. “Couple of years ago, when things were slow, I know we weren’t doing so well. I think the payments were smaller. The bar was fined a few times. Once it was a long weekend. We had a full house. Wall to wall people. We got closed for a week for overcrowding, but I got the feeling they were just testing us. Just showing us what it would be like if we didn’t go along with their scheme.”

“It sounds like what was going on at the Saddle. What about the other bars? Are they getting tapped, too?”

Hank’s smile was grim. “I think we all are. But the Saddle, especially. They were always over the limit and everyone knew it. It wasn’t just luck that they got away with it again and again.”

“You think they pick on gay bars in particular?”

Hank gave him a funny look. “You mean, because we’re minorities the cops think we must be knock-overs? That sort of thing?”

Dan waited.

“I guess it might be true, but then again we’re known as a successful bar. If they were after minorities, they’d be hitting up some of those small Jamaican bars on Vaughan Road. But they don’t, unless they’re making money. Why squeeze someone who isn’t worth tapping into, right?”

Another of the bartenders came out to the patio, knocking butts into a pail. He glanced at Hank, nodded, and left.

“One of your big fans from downstairs,” Hank said with a laugh. “You should start a club. Or maybe I’ll start one for you.”

Dan grinned. “Did you ever recognize any of the cops who came in to the bar?”

Hank looked away for a long while then turned to face Dan.

“There’s one who comes in sometimes. Not often. I haven’t seen him in months, but I wouldn’t forget him. Thin, muscular. Wiry build. Intense black eyes. He made a scene one night. I remember he was very drunk. That’s when I learned he was a cop. He looked as though he could get out of hand if you pushed him. One of those mean drunks you hear about.”

“Was his name Trposki?”

Hank thought it over. “Yeah, that sounds right. Take my advice — stay as far away from him as you can.” He stubbed out his cigarette and stood. “Gotta get back, sorry.”

“Thanks for your time.”

Hank nodded. “I could probably find out more, if you’re interested. Of course, you’d have to come over to my place for supper to continue the conversation.”

Dan smiled and looked at Hank’s muscular forearms, his facial hair. “I wouldn’t say no to a dinner date.”

Nine

The Approach

Dan left the bar thinking about everything he’d just learned. A lot of fingers seemed to be pointing to an Officer Trposki of the Toronto Police. A gay cop hitting up a gay bar for protection. He took out his wallet and fiddled with the blue-and-white-striped card he kept hidden in its soft folds. So far he hadn’t used it, but once the chief of police had asked for his help. With reluctance, Dan had given it. Maybe it was time to ask for a favour in return.

He pulled out his cellphone.

Not exactly friends, still they were allies in an undefined way. The conversation was brief. Dan had no hesitation saying precisely what was on his mind: police officers were taking kickbacks from bars in the gay ghetto.

The chief didn’t insult him by denying it. In fact, he surprised Dan by being forthright.

“Does this have anything to do with the Yuri Malevski case?”

“That’s it,” Dan told him.

“
Quid pro quo
. What do you know about it?”

“Not much, but I’ve been told the official investigation may run into some roadblocks because of the bribery allegations. Cops don’t rat on cops.”

“You know I don’t like hearing that kind of talk.”

“I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.”

The chief mulled this one over.

“I’d like you to talk to someone,” he said at last. “Have you got a pen?”

“Shoot.”

Dan wrote down the name and number.

“One of my best. She’s in charge of an internal investigation into police corruption. You can talk straight with her. She’ll treat you the same.”

Dan hung up and left a message with Inspector Lydia Johnston. She phoned back within five minutes, asking to meet. Half an hour later he was sitting across from an attractive, forty-something woman with shoulder-length brown hair, sporty build. She beamed confidence. They were at Fran’s Restaurant on College, one of Toronto’s culinary institutions whether you were a connoisseur of diners or not. Johnston glanced around at the other customers. “I like to chat here,” she said. “It’s always so loud and busy that no one can overhear you.”

Dan smiled. He’d wondered about the wisdom of talking in public, but she was right. The buzz was deafening. The only drawback, as far as he knew, was that the coffee was nearly undrinkable. “Burned” and “scorched” seemed to be the only noticeable flavours it possessed.

Inspector Johnston put him at ease at once. She didn’t carry that tough outer persona most cops projected on the job, and which more often than not seeped through to their private lives until friends and family found it difficult to distinguish one from the other. But he’d been given access to her through the chief of police, so perhaps she felt it was in her best interests to impress him.

Dan told her the little he knew: word on the street was the police had been taking bribes from the Saddle and Bridle, milking Yuri Malevski through various employees designated to put money in other hands for a dubious form of protection.

“And you know this how?” she asked.

“Through one of his employees.”

“Name?”

Dan hesitated.

“If I’m going to trust you, then I’d like you to trust me.”

She wasn’t hard-balling him, just stating her position. There was no aggression or intimidation in her voice.

“I’m sorry. I promised my source anonymity.”

She nodded. “Okay. Fair enough, but the more you tell me, the more I can help you. Let me be frank: I can’t prove that whatever you tell me is safe, but I want you to know my aim is to rid the police force of corruption inasmuch as that is possible in a force this large. I have no hidden agenda. The bars are part of it. There are drug deals, as well. Lots of messes to clean up. But I don’t screw around with confidential information or the lives and reputations of police officers. I’ve merely been assigned a task and I’m trying to carry it out as well as I can. We will all benefit from a cleaner police force. Do you have any questions?”

Dan liked her so far. “Where do you get your zeal? What makes you suitable for this job?”

Her gaze was unblinking. “My father. He was a good cop. One of the best. He taught me to be honourable in all things. He taught me that although there are unjust laws, there are a lot of good and meaningful laws on the books. You don’t break laws simply for your own convenience and especially not for personal gain. My father didn’t like graft and corruption. I don’t either.”

Dan started to speak, but she cut him off.

“And in case you think that’s a pretty speech, I’ll tell you that my father died in the line of duty. I don’t take his memory lightly.”

“Okay, I believe you,” Dan said. “Forgive me if I don’t name names. I gave my word, and that means something to me. In fact, it means everything to me. I will ask for permission to spell things out to you personally, but give me credit that for now I simply cannot.”

“Cool. Let me know when you can.”

“For the moment, however, I can give you the name of one of your own: Trposki.” He caught a flicker of interest behind the self-assured gaze. How deep the interest went, or why, was impossible to guess with certainty.

“What about him?”

“I’m told he was one of the officers who might have received bribes from the Saddle and Bridle.”

“And this comes from your source?”

“Yes.”

Her mood had darkened, but only slightly. He saw the outward signs, and was glad he hadn’t revealed everything. Obviously the name meant something to her. Dan recognized the look. He’d seen it in his clients, the ones with things to hide. They didn’t necessarily turn away when you asked the hard questions about why someone might have vanished:
Did you ever hit her? Were you having an affair?
These were the sort of questions that made most people blink, though a few had played poker long enough to know that an averted gaze was as good as an admission of guilt. But there were others, like Superintendent Johnston, whose aversion tactic was barely discernible. Dan thought of it as lips being out of synch with the words in a film. Something was mismatched. If asked to describe it, he would have said she seemed to be thinking one thing while saying another, the words going in one direction while the flickering traces of thought on her face went elsewhere. It was his own internal polygraph, but he’d never known it to be wrong. A lie was a lie, no matter the reason for telling it.