“I don’t know. Between you and me, a threat has been made against him and I’ve been asked to look into it.”
“But not by him.”
“No.”
“Otherwise you’d be asking him these questions, not me.”
“Right.”
“Then on whose behalf are you investigating?”
“A member of the family.” I left out the part about it being a notorious crime family. “Can I ask a hypothetical question?”
“You can always ask,” he said.
“Why would a pharmacist ship goods out of his store instead of taking them in?”
“What kind of goods?”
“Sealed cartons from the manufacturer-enough to fill a cube van.”
Chan mulled that one over. “Well, there are circumstances that would allow for it. Some pharmacies have wholesale licences that permit them to ship quantities of drugs to other pharmacies-if they comply with federal legislation, of course.”
“Do most of the drugs they ship go to the U.S.?”
“They used to. It was the primary market because of the price differences.”
“How big a difference?”
“Depended on the drug, of course, but on brand-name drugs still under patent, it was easily three times the Canadian price. And in U.S. dollars to boot.”
“But Canada has banned sales to the States.”
“We had to,” Chan said. “The U.S. administration wanted to protect the American pharmaceutical industry. And Canadians were afraid all our drugs would be sold to the States and there’d be nothing left for us.”
“Could a pharmacist still make money shipping drugs to the States?”
“Only if he skirted the law.”
“Anything else he could be doing with those cases?”
“As I said, pharmacies will buy products for other pharmacies, for a markup, of course. He could also be supplying a larger facility, such as a hospital or clinic.”
“A nursing home?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Who conducted Silver’s last inspection?”
Chan consulted his computer screen. “Sumita Desai. A little over six months ago. Want me to ask her about it?”
“Please.”
Chan picked up his phone and dialled a four-number extension. “Sumita? Winston here. Could you pop in for a minute? Hmm. Okay, then, quickly: early this year, you inspected a place called Med-E-Mart on Laird. Ring a bell? Okay. I have a gentleman here in my office who’d like to ask you about it, so I’m going to put you on speakerphone. No, it’s okay, he’s a licensed investigator… Sumita, I said it’s okay. Don’t be such a worrywart. He’s got my curiosity going.” Chan pressed the appropriate button and I heard “Yes, but-”
“Sumita, say hello to Jonah Geller.”
“Oh. Good afternoon, sir,” she said. Good ahf-tuh-noon, suh, in a deep voice with a lovely accent that blended Indian and British tones.
I said hello, then asked, “When you inspected Mr. Silver’s pharmacy, Ms. Desai, was there any indication that he had more product on the premises than he should?”
“Not at all, suh. Everything seemed quite in order to these eyes.”
“Was he cooperative?”
“As far as I recall. Put it this way: he didn’t stand out as being uncooperative. I would likely have noted something at the time.”
“His prescriptions were all legitimate?”
“Absolutely. As Mr. Chan probably told you, any prescriptions not written by an Ontario physician would have triggered the alarm, raised the red flag if you will. Well, maybe not both but certainly one.” The quip came with a deep rich laugh that made me want to go to the nearest bar and order something creamy and tropical.
“So he passed the inspection?”
“With flying colours. My report at the time indicates he ran a good business. Everything above board.”
Chan looked over to me to see if I had any more questions. I shook my head. “Thanks then, Sumita,” Chan said, and hung up.
I wondered how Silver could have passed an inspection so recently yet still managed to upgrade from Bayview to Forest Hill.
“There might be another way to go at this,” Chan said thoughtfully. “The pharmaceutical companies tend to get suspicious if unusual quantities are being ordered. You might check with them to see if any have concerns about Mr. Silver.”
“I’ll do that. Just for argument’s sake, what would a cube van full of prescription drugs be worth?”
“Depends entirely on the drugs and where they’re going to be sold,” he replied. “At one time, the hottest product would have been something like OxyContin, better known as Percocet or Percodan, which is widely prescribed for pain control.”
Tell me about it.
“Heroin addicts who can’t get the real thing find it a reasonable substitute,” Chan said. “Hillbilly heroin, I believe they call it. But smuggling it wouldn’t be profitable anymore because the patent expired in the U.S. and their generic versions are cheaper than ours. No, the real money now would be in medications with mass market appeal that are still under patent. Brand-name drugs for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes-all these things that affect the older crowd- especially as the baby boomers get up there in years. The market would be staggering.”
He reached for a calculator and began punching in numbers. “Take something like Contrex, which is a popular cholesterol drug. Retails for about $1.65 a pill here. Each carton would contain a hundred and forty-four vials of one hundred each. That’s about $24,000 per carton. If there are a dozen cartons per skid, each skid is close to $300,000. You said a cube van?”
“Yes.”
“Probably holds eight skids… Wow. You’re looking at a value of $2.5 million before it crosses the border. If you sold them in the States for three times the price in American dollars? You’d be looking at a profit of $6 million or more per van. Oh, and wait!” he said. “If the Canadian patent had expired and a generic version were available, but it was still under patent in the States, it could sell for up to ten times the price!” He sat up then and looked at me intently. “You think Jay Silver is involved in something like that?”
It had to be something like that. Why else would a big schmuck of a pharmacist with a nice wife and son get pushed around his place of business by a hood in a shiny suit?
“Have there been any similar cases that ended in disciplinary action?” I asked Chan. “Pharmacists who abused their wholesale licences?”
Chan looked at his monitor while clicking away with his mouse. “There was one recently,” he said. “Bit of a sad case.”
“I don’t suppose you can give me his name,” I said.
“Normally, no,” said Chan. “But in this case I don’t see how it could hurt because he was killed last month.”
As soon as he said the name Kenneth Page, I remembered the ruddy, white-haired man whose photo had appeared in the Clarion: the pharmacist shot to death in his driveway during a carjacking.
Make that supposed carjacking.
I shaded my eyes with my hand as I walked back along Bloor toward my car, wishing I’d brought a ball cap. The heat and glare were withering. At Bloor and Spadina, I stepped back into the shade to wait for the light to change. A young woman with spiked black hair, combat pants and a white tank top stood with a sign around her neck that said “Karma: 25 cents.” It didn’t say whether the karma would be good or bad, but that’s its nature anyway. You get what’s coming to you.
Years ago, Peter Ustinov famously called Toronto “New York run by the Swiss,” a tribute to its diversity, its cultural and financial clout, its safety and cleanliness. In those days, American film crews had to daub their own graffiti and spread their own garbage to make Toronto look gritty enough to substitute for an American city. Now we had more garbage blowing in the wind than they did, and every mailbox, doorway and light pole on Bloor was tagged with graffiti. This one intersection had panhandlers on all four corners. Northeast: the karma girl. Northwest: an Ojibwa man with a bandana around his forehead and a misshapen nose that had been broken many times, weaving on bowed legs directly into the paths of pedestrians with his palm up. Southwest: a grimy, grizzled old man on an overturned milk crate, shaking a coffee cup, a few coins jingling at the bottom. Southeast: a lean man slumped in a wheelchair, the stump of his left leg held straight out by a metal support. The homeless were everywhere now, holding out their coffee cups, their ball caps, their trembling hands. In the richest city in the country, where bankers, brokers and lawyers gathered in impregnable towers, men and women picked cigarette butts off the streets and foraged in garbage cans for something edible, their clothes black from sleeping on grates and in thickets. They held up hand-lettered signs asking for spare change. They spun stories: Just trying to scrape up bus fare home, brother. They muttered into their chests or barked or yipped or swore or mumbled with thick, woolly tongues.