Dan took this in. “So who do you think did it?”
Charles looked uncomfortable and turned to Donny again.
“Tell him,” Donny urged.
Charles clasped his hands. Dan resisted the urge to tell him to stop using over-obvious court tactics and get on with the story.
Charles nodded, as though trying to convince himself. “Lionel thinks the police did it and will try to cover things up.”
“Why?”
Donny leaned forward like a spectator at a hanging waiting for the trap door to open.
“Blackmail,” Charles said.
Dan blinked. “Blackmail?”
“Payoff money. Call it what you want.”
“Payoff for what? To whom?”
Charles looked to Donny. For the first time there was a glimmer of doubt in his eyes. He turned back to Dan. “Surely you’ve heard of bar payoffs? The owners pay the police for overlooking certain violations. Overcrowding and whatnot. A regular payoff ensures your bar is not visited on certain nights of the week, that sort of thing.”
Dan looked sceptically at him over the table. “And Lionel thinks that’s why Yuri was killed? For bar payoffs?”
Charles looked deflated. “Yes.”
“Did Yuri pay them?”
“Lionel said he paid them for a while, but then he stopped paying them. That’s what the problem was.”
Dan studied the two faces watching him as though he could see clearly beneath the surface of what seemed to him a very slight mystery.
“Then why not bust him or fine the bar? Why kill him? They’re police, not hired assassins.”
Charles seemed at a loss for words.
“Maybe to send a message?” Donny suggested.
Dan gave him a jaundiced look. “That’s all very colourful. You back on Netflix again?”
Charles studied him. “You don’t think it likely?”
Dan shrugged. “All I’m saying is it sounds too much like shoddy TV. Who would they kill next? Every bar owner who put a stop payment on their blackmail cheques?” Dan let Charles squirm a bit before he continued. “Who else might have wanted Yuri dead? Did he have a quarrel with anyone? As you said, he was into questionable things. Maybe he pissed off the wrong person.”
Charles leaned back. “You’re right. There was an ex-boyfriend. He gets a checkmark in both boxes: drugs and immigration. He also knew about the payments to the police.”
“An ex-boyfriend? What’s his name?”
“Santiago Suárez. They had a big messy break-up not long before Yuri was killed. If I were a cop, he’d be my first choice in a suspects line-up.”
“Then you should have a chat with him,” Dan suggested. “Or better yet, let the police do it.”
Charles shrugged. “We would, but we don’t think he’d talk to us.”
Donny was staring at him. Dan felt that sense of futility again that said he wasn’t going to be able to avoid whatever Donny was about to ask.
He turned to face him. “What?”
“You could ask him,” Donny said at last.
“That would be interfering in police business. Why would he have any reason to talk to me?”
“Because he’s an illegal. He won’t go to the police, because they’ll throw him out of the country. You could threaten him with exposure if he won’t talk to you.”
Dan shook his head. “You want me to threaten him? What TV series is this coming from? Since when do you encourage me to be a hard-ass and go around interfering in things that are not my province and threatening illegal aliens?”
Donny shrugged. “It was just a thought.”
“I’ll say,” Dan said.
“There’s another problem,” Charles said. “We can’t find him.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
Charles shook his head. “Nobody’s seen him since we got back from Mexico. What if I paid you to look for him and then let me decide if I want to talk to him?”
Dan looked off for a moment, his training kicking in. “He could be in a million different places. If he thought the inquiry might implicate him in a murder, he very likely absconded back to … where is he from?”
“Cuba,” Charles supplied.
“Cuba. Hmm. Maybe not then. You don’t willingly go back to Cuba, from what I hear.” He considered. “Well, he’d go wherever Cuban expats go. Maybe there’s an enclave in Montreal, for all we know. Did he have money?”
“Not his own,” Charles said. “He was living off Yuri.”
“Maybe he killed Yuri and stole the money,” Donny suggested, looking more than a little excited by the thought.
“You should be the sleuth,” Dan told him.
“Thanks, but I’ll stick to fashion.”
Dan turned to Charles. “Give me some addresses and maybe a few phone numbers. Whatever you have.”
He copied the information in a small notebook.
“You’ll look into it?” Charles asked hopefully.
Their waiter passed by with a flirtatious smile. Charles palmed him a JP Morgan Palladium credit card. Private bank and an extremely high spending threshold, Dan noted. The waiter registered the card for a mere second before resuming his expression of unruffled winsomeness.
“I’ll ask around,” Dan said. “But I can’t promise anything.”
“Whatever the cost, Lionel and I will pay. Just let us know what it’s worth to you.”
Dan stood, marvelling again at the tendency of men to think their clothes and credit cards were anything like indicators of their true worth.
Two
Tall in the Saddle
The sun threw long shadows as Dan left the sake house and headed down the stairs. He passed a skinhead seated on the bottom step beside a mangy dog, some ersatz version of a pit bull. The kid’s boots reminded Dan of the Doc Martens of his youth, except these looked far more pricey. Make-believe punk. Someone born three decades too late trying to be the person he imagined himself to be. How do you liberate your inner anarchist? You could change your outer self, but not your internal reality. Dan dropped a loonie in his outstretched palm and walked on.
Richmond Street lay a good fifteen minutes south. For years he’d never been able to recall which of the one-way streets between King and Queen was which, until someone told him the city planner’s secret: boy-girl-boy-girl. King, Adelaide, Richmond, Queen. That cemented it for him.
He passed Massey Hall, that gloomy, neo-classical tribute to Canada’s premier family of days gone by. Back when Dan was growing up amidst Northern Ontario’s mining industry sprawl, the joke went that Canada had no social classes, just the masses and the Masseys. All that was long gone. In these days of rampant consumerism, the country’s social compact had splintered beyond any chance of reunification. Dan thought the old system highly preferable.
The Saddle — or more correctly the Saddle and Bridle, as it was christened — had opened at the outset of the first AIDS decade. Back then it catered to a generation of gay men who felt they’d found themselves at last, only to discover that in finding themselves many would lose their lives and