"Uh, listen," I said.
"Yes?"
"Let's go somewhere else."
"Why? I thought you liked Italian."
"I, um…"
"What?"
"I had Italian for lunch."
"Jonah. We agreed on Italian before lunch. Why would you-"
"I forgot."
"You forgot?"
"My client took me out. She insisted on Italian."
"I can't believe-"
"Plus this place got a shitty review."
"Where?"
Grab that shovel, Geller. Dig yourself a deeper hole.
"One of the papers."
"Which one?"
"Come on, Kate. This street is full of restaurants."
"All of which require a reservation, which we happen to have at Giulio's."
"You don't feel like a good steak or something?"
"If I did, I would have made reservations at a steak house. Jonah, what's going on?"
"I just don't feel like Italian."
She crossed her arms over her chest, tightening up, widening the space between us. Pretty soon I wouldn't be able to see across it. "This is not starting well," she said.
"Greek?" I asked.
"Fuck Greek and fuck steak. There's something you're not telling me and I don't like it. I get lied to all damn day, Jonah. I get lied to by suspects, by snitches, by reporters-Christ, half the time by my partner. I do not need it from you."
"Kate…"
"What!"
I put my hands on her shoulders. They didn't relax one bit. "I can't."
"Tell me why. Right now and no bullshit. I have a very keen detector for it and I'm this close to calling it a night."
"Walk with me for a minute," I said. — I don't claim to know how many people Dante Ryan killed during his time in the Mob. I do know he was in it some twenty years, and he hadn't spent his time stuffing envelopes. Then he was given a contract that required him to kill a five-year-old child, a boy the same age as his own son, Carlo, and he hadn't been able to do it. He sought me out and demanded my help in finding out who had ordered the hit, determined that the boy not be part of the price the father had to pay for trying to get free of a Mob enterprise.
We did it, too. Saved the lives of the boy and his parents. Saved each other too. And somehow became friends. Ryan had decided by then he had to get out of his old life in order to save his marriage, his soul, and I had helped. He had helped me too, in his own way. If it wasn't for our misadventures, I'd still be at Beacon Security, working other people's cases instead of my own. And there was a spark to him you don't find in everyone, a warmth you wouldn't expect in a man who had done all that he had done in his life. An old-fashioned devotion to his family. Generosity and loyalty to anyone he considered a friend.
I could explain it to myself, rationalize it a dozen different ways. But what could I say to Hollinger, who was searching my eyes with hers, hoping for some truth. We found a table at a small cafe a few doors down from Giulio's. The hostess told us they'd had a last-minute cancellation and took our drink orders: Black Bush for me and a vodka martini for Hollinger. It gave me a few more minutes to look for a starting point to my story. I was still looking for it when the drinks arrived.
"This isn't going to be easy," I said.
"Great opening, Geller. I'm brimming with confidence."
"Do you know who owns Giulio's?"
"No," she said. "Should I?"
"No. But you would have if we'd gone in there."
"Why?"
I sighed like a shot-out tire. "Does the name Dante Ryan ring a bell?"
There was a candle in an amber glass on our table. Its flames were dancing in her eyes, until they narrowed and the reflecting flames grew smaller. She said, "Alarm bells. Big loud ones."
"He's the owner."
"Okay," she said. "I get it. You were trying to protect me, is that it? You thought I'd be uncomfortable, vulnerable somehow, eating in a place owned by a mobster?"
She had given me the perfect out. But taking it wouldn't have been right. If Hollinger and I were going to go anywhere, she needed to know the truth-at least about this.
"There's more to it," I said.
"How much more?"
"For one thing, he's not a mobster anymore. He's out of the life now."
"No one gets out of that life."
"He did."
"Even if that's true, I'd like to know how you know it."
The look she was giving me made me feel like we were back in the interview room at police headquarters. "He's a friend," I said.
"Dante Ryan is a friend of yours? The same Dante Ryan we've looked at for, I don't know, half a dozen killings?"
If all they'd looked at was half a dozen, it had to be because of jurisdictional issues. The other killings must have taken place in Hamilton, Peel Region, or areas covered by the Ontario Provincial Police.
"Yes."
She sat back in her chair, arms across her chest again. "And he's a friend of yours."
"Yes."
"Not just a passing acquaintance."
"No."
She said, "Well. This is surprising, to say the least."
"You understand why I didn't want to-"
"Oh, yeah."
"I never expected it would come up. Not tonight."
"That makes two of us. So was he out of the life when you became pals?"
Cue the sound of a toilet flushing. Any chance I had of a relationship with her was swirling down the tank and into Lake Ontario. "No. He was still in his previous occupation."
"Hired killer."
"He worked for Marco di Pietra. I'll leave it to your imagination what he did."
"Do yourself a favour. Don't."
The waitress picked that moment to lay two menus on our table. Then she pointed to a blackboard where the evening's specials were written in coloured chalk. Pink for the meat dish, yellow for the fish, white for the pasta.
Blue for the mood.
"Please give us a minute," Hollinger said to the waitress.
"No worries," she replied.
When she was gone I said, "I never hired Ryan, if that helps."
"Be serious, damn it. Jonah," she said, trying to rein in her anger, keeping maybe half of it in check. "I'm not like you, I didn't just fall into being a detective. From the day I started in the Niagara Regional Police, I wanted to be a detective, and from the day I made detective, I wanted to be Homicide. There are thirty-two of us, not counting support staff. We're the elite. We do the best work, get the highest job satisfaction ratings on internal surveys. Wear the best suits. Life satisfaction isn't always the highest-way too many of us are divorced-yeah, me too." The first small grin. "Another cop in Niagara, a hometown boy. I left him behind when I was offered the Toronto job. The point is, they call us the Snappy Suits for a reason. It's all men, except me. There was another woman, Carol Wisnewski."
"I know the Noose."
"She's on mat leave now. So it's me and the guys. If I treat the men under me well, they think I'm soft and try to get away with everything they can. If I'm hard on them, I'm a bitch. Half the meetings I go to, I could be chairing, everyone's saying, 'Guys… get out there, guys…' You know how hard it is to make Homicide sergeant before the age of forty? Not easy for a man and ten times harder for a woman. I can't afford to get blind-sided, Jonah. Not by anyone. So tell me how on earth a man like you-or the man I thought you were-becomes friends with a contract killer?"
I was liking her better by the minute, even as she slipped farther away. "Our paths just crossed a while back," I said lamely. "By accident. He needed help with a personal matter, and I helped him."
"Aren't you neighbourly."
"Kate, I know it looks bad-"
"Looks bad? It fucking stinks, Jonah. He kills people for money. Where are your boundaries?"
"He has nothing to do with the way I live."
"Judgment, then."
"Who am I to judge anyone?"
"Well, I have to judge you," she said. "I have to be dead careful about who I let into my personal life, because the second I do let someone in, he shows up on my work screen. And you're already up there." She reached into her purse and withdrew a twenty from a zippered pocket. "That should cover the drinks."