The front room had an electric fireplace whose false coals glowed behind an ornate metal grille. We sat in white upholstered chairs draped with cloths that looked Mexican or Central American, striped with the brightest shades of colour in the spectrum.
Fisk wiped his red-rimmed eyes and asked if we had any more news about Martin.
"What have the police told you so far?" Jenn asked.
"Just that he was beaten, and that it happened somewhere else. The woman who interviewed me, she was very nice, but the man with her… he suggested Martin had been out cruising. Cruising, like it was nineteen-fucking-eighty or something."
"McDonough," I said to Jenn.
"I got the feeling he thought Martin… that he deserved what he got," Fisk said. "Who could even think that? Being beaten to death… It's the worst way to die I can think of. Someone hitting you and hitting you. And until you go unconscious, you'd be thinking, If they just stop now. If this is the last blow. Or this one." Tears ran down his face and he wiped them with a tissue and then coughed into it: a dry racking cough that shook his body.
"Excuse me," he said, when he could catch his breath again.
"Eric," I asked. "How much do you know about Martin's business?"
"Only how hard he worked."
"Did he ever talk about the man he was working for?"
"Mr. Cantor?"
"Yes."
"I know he was very excited about landing the contract. Working with Mr. Cantor-and a celebrity like Simon Birk-we were both kind of thrilled about that."
"Did he stay thrilled?"
"What do you mean?"
"Did it seem like the relationship had soured at all of late?"
Fisk thought about it for a moment. "Martin did seem tense lately. He didn't talk about work much. And I didn't ask. Engineering wasn't my thing, to be honest. I'm a chef," he said, waving his hand in the direction of the photos on the wall. "Or was, I should say. I can't really work anymore. I haven't for over two years. Once I started to become symptomatic… People I worked with were nice to me and all, very sympathetic, but the bottom line was they didn't want someone HIV-positive working in the kitchen. Even doing beauty shots for magazines, food no one was ever going to eat. It's not like I blame them. I probably wouldn't have wanted me there either. But it was very hard going from two incomes to one. And now without Martin-my God, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'll be just like him, waiting for the next blow to land."
I looked at Jenn then back at the man seated across from us, huddled in his sweater.
"How long since you were diagnosed?" I asked.
"A little over six years. But it's only been for the last two years or so that my health has really started to decline."
"How bad?" Jenn asked.
"Pneumonia, thrush, uncontrollable diarrhea, you name it. Once your CD4 count gets below two hundred, you're a sucker for every opportunistic infection out there. I was taking anti-retroviral therapy, which helped a little, but it was a cocktail of drugs, three of them, all of which kicked the shit out of me. The side effects were so bad, sometimes, that death seemed the least worst option. But then Martin…"
"What?" I asked.
"They've just come out with a new experimental drug in New York. What's called a highly active anti-retroviral treatment-only one pill a day, and a lot fewer side effects-but it hasn't been approved in Ontario yet. Fucking Health Ministry. The Hell Ministry, I call it. So we were arranging to bring it in on the sly through friends in New York. But the cost, my God! Over three thousand dollars a month. I didn't know how Martin was going to manage it but he promised he would."
"Eric, did Martin keep any papers here?"
"Like bills and things?"
"More related to the project he was on."
"No," he said. "Everything was at his office and the police took it. There's nothing here. Nothing anywhere. Nothing left of my useless fucking life."
He started to cry and this time the sobs shook his small frame so hard I thought his bones would break. "What am I going to do?" he moaned over and over again, rocking back and forth as though in prayer.
Neither of us had an answer for him. All I could think of was to wish him good luck; Jenn, being Jenn, put a hand on his shoulder and then hugged him and told him we'd find out who killed Martin.
Walking out his door, I almost wished Perry would spring out and attack me again, so I could hit something-someone-anyone.
CHAPTER 16
"Homicide."
"Only you can make that word sound good."
There was a pause and then she said, "Hey, there." Not exactly warm, but not black ice either. She said, "I'm sorry about last night. Maybe I jumped to conclusions too fast, but you really threw me."
"I know. You feel any different today?"
"Not different enough."
"I was hoping I could buy you a coffee."
"I told you I'd call you. Anyway, I'm on a murder, and you know what they say about the first twenty-four hours."
"What if I can help you with it?"
"How?"
"Your victim. Martin Glenn. I know something that you should know."
"Like what?"
"A motive."
"On the level? This isn't some bullshit way of getting us together?"
"I happened to see him in a screaming match with someone a few hours before he was killed."
"Who?"
"You'll buy the coffee?"
"Jonah, you better not be messing with me."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes. You can decide for yourself." We met in the lobby of police headquarters at 4 °College Street, at the same coffee bar where I'd first looked into those eyes last June, when the cases we were working on converged. We'd agreed to meet here, instead of her office, to escape the prying eyes of her partner, whose dislike for private investigators in general was exceeded only by his antipathy for me in particular.
"Martin Glenn was working for a company called Cantor Development," I said. "They're putting up condo towers in the port lands and his company was cleaning the site."
"But?"
"Something went wrong. I'm not sure what exactly, but I think he was being asked-or paid-to sign off on something that wasn't kosher."
"Details, please."
"Like I said, a screaming match yesterday afternoon with the developer, Rob Cantor."
"You witnessed this?"
"I did. Cantor was warning him, telling him to think about Eric before he did anything rash."
"That being Eric Fisk?"
"I assume."
"What else?"
"Eric needed money. A lot of it, more than Glenn could afford on his regular consulting fees."
"For what?"
"You saw him."
"I did."
"He needs an anti-retroviral treatment that's available in New York but hasn't been approved here yet. He'd have to pay cash for it-thirty-five, forty thousand a year."
"So you think Cantor was paying Glenn to look the other way on something to do with the building site."
"Yes."
"But aside from the spat you witnessed, I don't suppose you have proof?"
First my brother, now Hollinger. What was it with people and their need for evidence?
"I don't have the authority or the means to search Glenn's home or office," I said. "You do."
"We've started on that already," she said. "But this might help narrow our focus."
I said, "You're welcome," just as a loud voice behind me cackled, "Well, if it isn't the cupcake."
Crap. Of all the coffee joints in all the police stations in the world, Gregg McDonough had to walk into this one.
"I was providing information to your vastly superior officer," I said.
"About what?"
"About Martin Glenn," Hollinger said.
McDonough lost a little of his swagger. "What would he know about Glenn?"