Greene had to find Fraser Dent. Once a top bond trader who spoke fluent Japanese, Mandarin, French, and Spanish, in his early forties Dent became a fall-down drunk and had lived on the street for more than a decade. “Just following the family tradition,” he liked to say, referring to his father and grandfather, drunkards who’d both ended up dying of liver failure.
Over the years Greene had kept him going, “lending” him fifty dollars each time they met, getting him into rehab when Dent was willing. In return, Dent funnelled Greene information from the street. When Greene was charged with murder, Dent helped him out, big-time, behind the scenes.
It had been months since they’d talked, and it could often take Greene a few days to find Dent, who didn’t have a cell phone. Greene didn’t have time to waste. He went downtown and started hunting for his old friend.
His first stop was Seaton House, the biggest men’s shelter in Canada, which housed more than eight hundred men. It was located in an area of the city that for years had had both the largest concentration of street people and new condo developments at the same time, and local politicians had often talked about renovating the shelter and moving most of the residents out to smaller suburban locations. But Greene had his doubts that the downtown clientele, some of whom had lived in the area for decades, would leave the neighbourhood, even though a flood of new money was moving in and gentrifying everything in sight.
He checked the logbook at the front desk. In spite of the chaos of these men’s lives, the one thing that they were rigorous about at Seaton House was record-keeping. No one got in without proper ID. The last time Dent had checked in was twelve days ago, and no one had seen him since.
Greene’s next stop was the Law Society of Ontario Feed the Homeless lineup. Every day at about four thirty a line of homeless men and women formed in the City Hall square. When the doors opened, they’d walk into one of the city’s most beautiful buildings that dated back to the early eighteen hundreds. There, they’d be served dinner by some of the city’s best and most high-priced lawyers.
Greene walked up and down the line, nodding to familiar faces. Chatting with some. No one had seen Dent for days. Once the hall opened, Greene walked in with the crowd and checked the sign-in sheets. Dent had last been there a week earlier.
His third stop was the Canterbury Clinic, a drug and alcohol rehab clinic that worked with street people. For years, it had scraped by on donations and bake sales, until, as the drug problem in the city escalated, the government came through with just enough funding to keep the doors open. Dent had been a client there and, when he was straight, volunteered as a counsellor.
As Greene walked out of the elevator and into the barebones waiting room, Trish, the clinic’s veteran receptionist, greeted him.
“Detective Greene, where’ve you been?”
“Keeping Toronto the Good safe, one day at a time. Is Michael here?” he asked, referring to the clinic’s dynamic, sometimes mercurial director, who had somehow kept the place afloat for years. Like his clients, he had his own paranoid peculiarities, one of which was that he never spoke on the phone. If Greene wanted to talk to him, he had to come over. Greene suspected it really wasn’t a paranoia but a ploy to make Greene show up from time to time. He didn’t mind.
Michael had spent years working with Dent, and the two had a strong, if troubled bond. Probably because they were both bright and because Michael, like many good counsellors, was himself a recovered addict.
As Dent once told Greene, “The trouble with Mike is that I just can’t bullshit him.”
“Too bad,” Greene said.
“Rough,” Dent agreed.
Trish smiled at Greene. “You know how Mike is. An hour ago one of his clients came in high as a kite. He was furious. He’d made a deal with her dealers that they weren’t going to sell her anymore stuff so the CAS wouldn’t grab her two-year-old. Mikey stormed out to go hunt them down. Who knows when he’ll come back. Can I help?”
“I’m looking for Dent.”
“It’s your lucky day. He dropped by a week ago looking clean as a whistle and Mike put him to work. Right now, he’s interviewing a Vietnamese kid hooked on heroin. Has about ten more minutes to go. You in a rush, want me to buzz him?”
“No,” Greene said, sitting down on a dusty old sofa and picking up a three-year-old Time magazine. “I’m more than happy to wait.”
Dent emerged ten minutes later. He wore a pair of green khaki pants and a clean dress shirt with the sleeves rolled down and the collar buttoned up at the neck. Greene knew the shirt was to hide his considerable tattoos. He looked clean and clear-eyed. A skinny Asian man with pink and green streaks in his black hair slunk out behind him.
Dent, who had not expected to see Greene, didn’t flinch. He winked at him as he put his arm around his patient.
“Tran, you’re doing well.” He pulled out a tiny old cell phone. “You had a bad weekend, that’s all. Something comes up, you call me twenty-four/seven.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Tran mumbled, and walked out without another word.
Dent smiled at Greene.
“You look good,” Greene said.
“Saving the world one soul at a time for fifteen dollars an hour.”
“Since when do you have a cell phone?”
“This crappy old thing?” he said, twisting it in his hand. “When I worked on Bay Street I had two full-time secretaries, my office phone, and two cell phones. Now I have this old piece of junk the clinic gave me since I’m working here more than twenty hours a week.”
“That’s great.”
“Not great, but it’s good. With all these murders, I was waiting for you to find me. Come on in to our luxurious boardroom.”
The boardroom was a square windowless room with a beat-up round table and a mishmash of chairs pulled in around it. Towers of paper towels, toilet paper, and tissue boxes were stacked high against the walls.
Dent pulled out a chair and motioned Greene to take another. He pointed at the wall. “What do you think? A modern art piece, or a donation from one of our clients—no names mentioned—who works in the grocery business?”
“People appreciate what you do for them,” Greene said.
“Once in a while. What do you need, Detective?”
“To find out what’s going on in Humber Valley. None of the homeless people will talk to us.”
“That surprise you?”
“Not one bit,” Greene said, “That’s why I smoked you out.”