Buffalo jump

CHAPTER 6

The last time I’d seen Dante Ryan was outside the University Avenue courthouse, right after Mr. Justice Hugh Kelly finished ripping a nervous young Crown attorney a new one for trying to indict Marco Di Pietra and his alleged associates on the flimsy evidence presented. Ryan, Marco and a sizable entourage were lighting up cigarettes when I exited. Marco had to put on a big show, of course, calling me Jewboy, pointing his thumb and forefinger at my head like a gun, cocking the thumb and making silencer noises in his cheeks. Ryan didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The look he gave me was enough.

Now he sat in my living room, legs crossed, sunglasses up in his hair, swirling wine in his glass, watching drops slide lazily down its side. His clothes were all black, as they’d been that day outside court: an expensive linen jacket, a silk crewneck top, pleated slacks, thin dress socks, soft leather loafers. A white scar ran up through his right eyebrow and a livid purple one snaked along the right side of his jaw. His hands had knots of scar tissue on some of the knuckles but the nails had been recently manicured. His eyes were dark but not as dark as you’d expect of a man who hurt or killed people for a living. They were not without humour.

“You got a piece of cheese to go with this?” he asked.

I managed to get the cheddar I had bought from the kitchen to the living room table, along with a cutting board, two knives, crackers and a bunch of red grapes.

Wine and cheese with Dante Ryan. What next? Champagne with Karla Homolka?

Ryan sipped his wine slowly. I held my glass so tightly I thought the stem might crack in my hand.

“Mind if I ask how you got in?”

“The building or the apartment?”

“Start with the building.”

“You got a lot of old ladies here,” he said.

“It’s rent-controlled. Some of them have been here since it was built.”

“They do their shopping at the Loblaws across the street, they come back loaded with bags or pulling their little carts. A young man in decent clothes comes over to hold the door for them, they don’t ask questions.”

“And the apartment?”

“Please. You want to keep people out, shell out for a decent lock, not the cheap shit that came with the place.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”

At least it wasn’t an Ensign brand. “No.”

“Mind?”

I never let anyone smoke in my apartment but I figured a cigarette pack was the least deadly thing Dante Ryan could pull on me. I told him to go ahead and found an ashtray in the cupboard under the sink. It had been used precisely once since I’d moved in, when Kenny Aber came by with a joint of West Coast weed as his housewarming gift.

Ryan lit up with a slim gold lighter and exhaled. “I came to see you in a professional capacity,” he said.

“Mine, I hope.”

“Don’t worry, I told you.”

“It’s hereditary.”

“Whatever. You know who I am and who I work for. You know what I do. So before we go any further, let’s agree that what gets said tonight never leaves this room. Whatever you decide. We clear?”

“Decide what?”

“Are we clear?”

“I’m not like a lawyer when it comes to confidentiality.”

“I’m not talking rules and regs. If what I say to you gets back to the man I work for, his family or his crew, it will get me killed. I’m here because I got nowhere else to go. And because you owe me.”

“Owe you how?”

He dragged on his cigarette and blew two perfect smoke rings, one through the other. “You cost my boss a ton of money on the tobacco job-at least a million-and he had to make a court appearance, which is down low on his list of favourite things.”

“Then again, he walked because I fucked up. So maybe he owes me.”

“You want to tell him that?”

Point taken.

“Anyway,” Ryan said, “after the judge threw it out, we had a meeting to talk about what to do about you. Marco, as you know, is a hothead. He was all for having you killed. But there’s an unwritten rule in our thing that you don’t kill cops unless you have to. The heat is too intense. You’re not a real cop, but your boss was and he could have called in favours. In the end, cooler heads prevailed, and that’s the only reason you’re still here.”

“You were one of the cooler heads?”

Ryan smiled again. “I could say I was or wasn’t and you’d never know the difference. So let’s say I was and leave it at that.” He butted his cigarette. I reached for my wine and drank a third of it down. Red wine is supposed to benefit the cardiovascular system, at least over the long run. Short term, I just wanted my heart rate to decelerate into the low 200s, as I prepared to hear what this killer wanted from me.

It’s not like I had no blood at all on my hands. But his were soaked to the elbows by comparison.

An Ontario Provincial Police intelligence officer named Chris Cook once told me that Dante Ryan was believed to be responsible for as many as a dozen gangland murders over the years, but had never been convicted of anything worse than assault.

“Guy’s a walking arsenal,” Cook said. “I’m told he usually carries at least two guns and he does nice work with a knife too.”

Like he trimmed steaks for a living.

Cook was my OPP liaison on the Ensign investigation and laid the scene out for me the night before the bottom fell out.

Ryan had known Marco Di Pietra since childhood, Cook told me, but wasn’t a made member of Marco’s crew, and never could be, because his father wasn’t Italian. “Not that his old man wasn’t in the life, but he was Irish, one Sid Ryan, part of the West End Gang in Montreal. He spent time in Toronto and Hamilton in the late sixties, trying to work out a deal with the Calabrians on distribution rights for new drugs coming onto the scene. Only he knocked up a girl who’s a cousin to a cousin of Vincente Di Pietra, better known as Vinnie Nickels. He wasn’t boss then, still a capo under Johnny Papalia, but Sid still had to marry the girl or Vinnie would have killed him. You know these guys. They like to play the honor card when it suits them.”

A month after his son was born, Sid’s standing with the local mob apparently fell in a big way and he returned to Montreal. Legend had it he went back in two hockey bags.

The other interesting thing Cook told me was that an epic power struggle was shaping up within the Di Pietra family. Vinnie Nickels had inherited the mantle of leadership when Johnny Papalia was ushered into retirement by a hitter who shot him twice in the head outside his place on Railway Street in Hamilton. But Vinnie Nickels, given the name because he had logged five murders by the time he was made, was himself in failing health now, advanced prostate cancer riddling his bones from the inside like an army of termites.

“On paper,” Chris Cook said, “Vinnie’s still in charge but from what one snitch told us, it’s like King fucking Lear in Hamilton. Vinnie has three sons: Vittorio, the eldest, known as Vito, then Marco and Stefano. Vito and Marco are the real shit-heads. Known to police, as we say.”

“And Stefano?”

“He’s the straight man, as far as we know. Has an MBA and weighs a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet. Vinnie has him handling the legitimate investments, the real estate, the offshore accounts and all that. Wears a nice grey suit.”

“So they’re Regan and Goneril and he’s playing Cordelia.”

“If you say so. Anyway, Vinnie Nickels doesn’t have long to live but he hasn’t named a successor. He’s playing it close to the vest and it’s creating a lot of drama on the street.”

“Who’s the favourite?”

“Vito’s oldest, so he expects to be. Anything less is a slap in the face. But he’s a little dim. No one sees things thriving under him. Marco, on the other hand, is a mad motherfucker: no gift for long-term vision or diplomacy, but definitely has the skillset to run crews.”

“So what’s going to happen?” I asked. “Civil war?”

“Me, I’d like nothing better. Let the mutts take each other out. Marco looks like he’s getting ready. He’s out there muscling up, working his crew, building a war chest. He’s calling in markers, kicking ass all over town, taking a piece of anything he can. If it comes down to him against Vito, he wants people on his side. And that’s going to take cash, ’cause Marco doesn’t have a winning personality. Guy’s a Rottweiler, only not as cute.”

“I need you to find someone,” Dante Ryan said.

“You’re hiring me?”

“Yeah. Except I’m not paying you.”

“Then you’re not hiring me.”

“Okay, then. I’m engaging you. I’m involving you. I told you you owe me, and that’s not a position you want to be in.”

“What am I supposed to do? Find someone so you can kill him?”

“Believe it or not, I’m trying to help someone here. When you have all the information, you’ll understand.” He refilled his glass and held the bottle up in my direction. I nodded and he topped me up.

Ryan lit another cigarette and blew a stream of smoke toward the window. Mr. Considerate. “In the course of my duties,” he began, “if and when I’m called upon to take someone out, it’s usually because he’s ripping Marco off or pissing on his turf or generally displeasing him in some other manner. Like that.”

Just like that.

“But Marco also takes jobs on behalf of other people and subcontracts them to me. The tougher the job, the higher the price. Deals like this, I never know who put out the contract. Marco’s the only one who knows and he doesn’t tell. In theory, it’s voluntary on my part. I mean, I work for Marco but I’m not formally in his crew. So I could say no to a job-in theory. But when Marco really wants something done, you do it. You don’t want him thinking you’re soft and you don’t want to deny him the opportunity to earn. Especially these days.”

Ryan took a manila envelope out of his jacket. He laid it on the coffee table but didn’t open it. “Few days ago, Marco hands me this package and the biggest down payment I ever seen. He’s giving me fifty grand for this job, which means he’s charging a hundred at least, ’cause Marco never takes less than half of anything.” Another drag on the cigarette, two more smoke rings floating toward the window. “I could use the money, Geller, I really could. But I don’t have the stomach for this job. All the things I done in my life, all the guys I’ve done, I can’t do this one. I swear to God I’d lose whatever bit of my soul I have left.”

He took a photo out of the envelope and slid it across the coffee table to me. There were three people on the sidewalk in front of a large Tudor house: a big bear of a man with thinning dark hair, a pretty woman with brunette curls, and a small boy who looked to be four or five. The boy was on a multicoloured plastic tricycle with a long handle at the rear. The man stood behind the bike, handle in hand, ready to push, squinting in a way that made him look worried. The woman knelt by the boy, adjusting a helmet atop his brown curls. He was looking up at her adoringly.

“What did he do to get a contract put on him?” I asked, indicating the man.

“No idea,” Dante Ryan said. “But it must have been bad because the guy who ordered the hit doesn’t just want him dead.” He pointed at the woman in the photo. “Her too,” he said. Then his finger slid over to the boy looking up at his mother with that open look of love. “And him.”

“The kid?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “And he’s supposed to go first. The kid, then the mother, then the guy.”

“Then the father is the real target,” I said. “What in God’s name did he do?”

“What I need you to find out,” Ryan said, “is who he did it to.”