Buffalo jump

CHAPTER 46

Her name was Christine Staples and she had the credentials to prove it, professionally presented in a genuine leather case. “I’m with the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigation. We’re the investigative arm of the agency. The FBI of the FDA, if you will.”

“A woman of letters,” I said. She suppressed any sign of finding it funny. No Katherine Hollinger, this one. All business, down to her square-toed loafers.

She asked for ID and I showed her my licence. If it provided any credibility, she didn’t show that either.

“I’ve been watching that house,” she said. “Only today I’ve been watching you watching the house. What’s your interest?”

“I’m house hunting,” I said.

“From Ontario?”

“Society is tilting too far left there,” I said.

Some people appreciate a little humour to help break the ice before intense discussions or negotiations. And some, like Christine Staples, look at you like they’re fitting you for a dunce cap. “Do you know where our office is, Mr. Geller?”

“I’m looking for residential space, not commercial.”

“We share a building downtown with the Buffalo field office of the FBI. Should we continue our discussion there?”

“You have powers of arrest?”

“No, the police and border enforcement folks do that for us. But I can have someone here real quick.”

I could have told her to go to hell. But that would likely have meant exposing Ryan to the local feds, something he wouldn’t care for in the least. I was about to ask Staples if we could talk somewhere else-give Ryan a chance to lose himself-when she surprised me by suggesting it first.

“Here’s my best offer,” she said. “We go to a Starbucks a few blocks from here and you tell me what you saw inside that house, or we go to the Federal Building and I lose your paperwork.”

“The first one sounded better.”

“Which is not to say the second won’t follow if you don’t come up with a better story than house hunting.”

“I’ll try.”

“Are you armed?” she asked.

“No.”

“Mind?”

“No.”

She ran a hand around my waist. I lifted my pant legs so she could see there was no throwaway tucked in down there. “All right,” she said. “We’ll take my car.”

It was a brown Crown Victoria with no markings on it. Not that a brown Crown needed any to scream government car.

At Starbucks we both ordered tall dark roasts. No foam, no flavours, no bullshit, each trying to show the other we were straight talkers.

“I’m going to start by giving you the benefit of the doubt,” Staples said. “I’m going to concede that you are probably- probably — not involved in a criminal way with whatever is going on in that house. I won’t say it in front of a lawyer, but that’s what I think.”

“Thank you. That’s a good start.”

She took out a small spiral notebook. “You’re here in an investigative capacity?”

“Yes.”

“On whose behalf?”

“My employer. Beacon Security of Toronto.”

“More specific, please. Who hired Beacon to look into what?”

“That’s two questions in one.”

“So answer the first one first. Who hired you?”

“That’s confidential.”

“Not in New York State, it’s not, because you’re not licensed to operate here. You want to get home any time today?”

I looked at Christine Staples with her pale suit and eyes and helmet hair. “Without divulging the client’s name,” I said, “I can tell you what’s been happening on the Canadian end. Then you tell me how it connects to Buffalo.”

“No promises on what I tell you,” she said. “And if I need your client’s name down the road, for an affidavit or whatever, you can bet I’ll get it.”

Yeah, maybe if she battered me with her hair. “Okay. Someone hired us to investigate a local nursing home where a family member had died. They thought the staff might have been negligent in handling her medication. Our investigation led in two directions. One was a company called the Vista Mar Care Group, which owns a chain of nursing homes in Ontario, including the one where the death occurred. The other was a group of independent pharmacists who own large drugstores in Ontario. Nothing has been proven in court, you understand, but it seems these pharmacists were shipping medications illegally to the States, with the help of Vista Mar, which I believe is a front for a local Mob crew.”

“As in the Mob? You’re joking.”

“I wish.”

“Why would organized crime be interested in nursing homes?”

“It kept people from getting suspicious about the quantities of drugs being ordered by the pharmacists. They would supply far more to the nursing homes than they actually needed, and there are more than a dozen homes in the chain. At least two thousand residents. They could fake hundreds of prescriptions and ship the meds down here. The medical director at Vista Mar, a guy named Bader, signed all the prescriptions.”

“And because he was director of the chain,” Staples said, “the number of prescriptions he wrote never rang a bell with anyone.”

“Right. And most of the pharmacists had wholesale licences, so they didn’t ring one either.”

“Have you actually met this Dr. Bader?”

“Yes.”

“At Meadowvale?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Staples said. “Back to Buffalo. What’s going on inside the Aiken house?”

“Aiken?”

“The owners,” she said. “Barry Aiken. Fifty-five years of age, inherited the house from his father, Dr. Norman Aiken, a little over two years ago. Married to Amy Farber, aged fifty-four. Is that who you met inside?”

“Whom.”

“What?”

“Whom I met inside.”

She glared at me. Her eyes were so pale they couldn’t muster much threat, but give the girl marks for trying. “I bought you a coffee. I’m trying to be nice. It’s late and I want to get home too. So don’t play games with me.” She didn’t raise her voice a decibel when she said it, but her tone sharpened to a fine glittering edge.

“Yes, that is whom I met inside,” I said. “Barry and Amy.”

“Who else?”

“There were a few people there. A little cocktail party. I didn’t get any names.” None I was going to give her, anyway.

“A cocktail party.”

“Maybe more of a Tupperware thing.”

“Only they’re walking out with illegal prescription drugs.”

“How would I know what’s legal here?”

“I’m warning you, Geller. The coffee at the Fed is a lot worse than this.”

“Can I tell you something, Agent Staples?”

“That would be a refreshing change.”

“It’s hardly the crime of the century going on in there. If you’ve been watching the house, you’ve seen who’s going in and out. Ordinary people, a lot of them old and sick, trying to get medication they can’t otherwise afford.”

“Drug prices are not the purview of my office,” she said. “It’s our responsibility to ensure that any drugs coming into this country are safe, authentic and legally obtained. It’s not the end users we’re after. I’m not looking to fill jail cells with senior citizens. But we can’t allow it to continue either. Now what about this Vista Mar group. What evidence do you have it’s a front?”

“No hard evidence but I think a forensic audit would bear me out.”

“And whom would it lead back to?”

“An Ontario crew with historic connections to the Magaddinos here. And that, Agent Staples, is all I know. So unless you have some information that you would like to share with me, I’d like to get back to my car.”

“Give me the name of this crew.”

Making the Di Pietra name part of the official record could do neither me nor Ryan any good. “Why?” I asked. “You have no jurisdiction in Ontario.”

“I want to find out who they’re working with on this end. We have a good working relationship with the feds. I told you, we’re in the same building.”

“On the advice of my physician, I decline to answer the question.”

“You’re in no position to make jokes. Cooperate with me and you can get on your way. Keep holding out and you’re going to spend a lot more time in Buffalo than you planned. I’ll have you charged for operating without a licence and anything else I can find. Did you bring a toothbrush? Change of clothes?”

Man, this woman was hard. Not hard enough to have made me float Marco’s name if he’d still been alive. But he couldn’t touch me anymore. Maybe giving up his name could get me some needed leverage.

“All right,” I said. “You have me over a barrel. But there’s something I want in return.”

“In addition to being able to leave a free man?”

“What’s going to happen to the Aikens?”

“What’s it to you?”

It was a good question and not one I could readily answer. “They just don’t strike me as people who should be jailed for what they’re doing.”

“What makes them different from other drug dealers?”

“Come on, Staples. The only reason they got into this was the pharmaceutical industry’s gouge-fest.”

“I will not debate the issue of affordable health care with a Canadian. You just charge it all to the taxpayers and run up debt every year. That is not the American way.”

“No, you run up your debt on cluster bombs. Look, the only reason the Aikens are still in this, from what I saw, is coercion. They’re afraid they’ll be killed if they quit.”

“By whom?”

“They wouldn’t say. Not to me, anyway.”

“All right. If they cooperate, but I mean really cooperate, I’ll do my best to see they do no jail time. And I’ll take care of any threats against them.”

“And you and I say our goodbyes?”

“With no regrets,” she said with a smile. The first she had shown all that time.

“You know your organized crime figures in Ontario?” I asked.

“I pick up things around the building.”

“The name Di Pietra ring a bell?”

She sipped her coffee. “A father and two sons, if I recall.”

“Three sons,” I said. “But the father is more or less out of the picture now. He’s old and had a stroke. I’m pretty sure the brothers own Vista Mar.”

“Their names?”

“Vito, Marco and Stefano. The CEO of Vista Mar is a man named Steven Stone. I believe he and Stefano Di Pietra are the same man. His brothers have been providing the muscle.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s visit the Aikens. Hear what they have to say in their own words.”

We drove back in silence, past listless flags waiting for a breeze to lift them. Then something that had been bothering me before, something Staples said about Bader, fluttered into my consciousness, tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear.

“Did you actually meet Dr. Bader?”

“Yes.”

“At Meadowvale?”

“Yes.”

Meadowvale. I hadn’t mentioned the name. How had Staples known it?