An Ordinary Decent Criminal (18 page)

Fact: the man had lost two toes due to frostbite, he had spent a week in hospital, and, when he finally came out, he dropped the case and left town. Fact: police maintenance records showed an error of over twenty miles in Walsh’s vehicle log. Fact: Saskatchewan police had been doing the same thing to Natives since the mid-seventies, at least, with at least six deaths attributed to death from exposure.

The photocopies cost fifty cents and I went on to the next three papers.

A retiring cop telling tales about Walsh. When he was a young homicide dick, Walsh had tackled a man who had stabbed his wife. During the fight Walsh had burned out one of the man’s eyes with a lit cigar he had been carrying. The incident had been labeled accidental.

More papers, more stories. Walsh graduating from the computer course. Walsh testifying at the trial of a gang of purported drug dealers. Walsh testifying after the shooting of a bank robber. Walsh before City Council, convincing them to buy a robot to deal with “Fortified drug houses, bombs, gangs, and other areas too dangerous for police officers.” Walsh testifying in the defense of a cop accused of shooting a Native leader, who had apparently asked why he was being interrogated
by a cop on a side street at three in the morning. Walsh using his new robot to detonate a pipe bomb during a strike at an aerospace plant. Walsh setting up a computer program for the child-abuse department of the police. Walsh in a dozen pictures with the robot dealing with barricades and hostages. Walsh working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on an anti-gang task force. Walsh involved in the arrests of thirty members of the Manitoba Warriors street gang.

Other stories, more information.

The man with the burned-out eye hadn’t stabbed his wife and was acquitted. The dead bank robber had been fifteen and carrying paper and a pen, not a gun. The RCMP had asked that Walsh be reassigned, off the task force. In the end, the big gang trial had cost three million dollars and the average conviction involved the crime of being in possession of less than an ounce of grass. Some wise-ass reporter from the
Free Press
described Walsh as being a “cop who solved crimes in his spare time.”

No one had found that funny.

I noted down the reporters who were pro-Walsh and the ones who weren’t, and continued to read.

Fitzpatrick and Cairns were less reported. Old cops from old cop families, described as “true-blue” by an especially obsequious reporter. Staunch members of the Police Union and sufferers of the Blue Flu when a hundred cops called in sick after someone complained when a cop had his picture taken beating a handcuffed suspect. They were nice, solid guys, if you were a cop or a rabid law-and-order kind of citizen.

Another article about cop families told me that their uncles were cops, their fathers were cops, their grandfathers were cops, and, in one case, a mother had been a meter maid. As a matter of fact, their lineage as cops went back to 1919, when the city cops had gone over to the strikers during the great Winnipeg strike and the city had hired a whole new police force of scabs to bust heads.

For the three boys, there was nothing. About Robillard, there was
a lot. Arrested for dealing grass, charges dropped. Picked up in a sweep of fences, no charges laid. Arrested for assault and battery with weapon (a brush hook), charges dropped by the victim. Arrested for possession of unregistered shotguns, fell apart when another guy copped to it. Arrested for disorderly conduct times four in assorted downtown bar fights, paid fines in all the cases. Finally, a few brief lines that there had been a marriage ceremony three years ago linking his cart to that of one Sandra, née Simcoe.

At about ten to nine, the clerk came over and tapped my shoulder. “Time to go.”

I stretched and smiled. “Thanks.”

The rolls of microfilm went back to the desk and the librarian started to put them away. “It’s like they say: you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”

I left laughing and went home.

It was the next day, I’d talked with Claire and we had pretty much agreed that the cops, especially Walsh, looked good for at least some of our current difficulties. I was wandering around the front living room, thinking, when I heard someone coming up the path.

“Knock-Knock Ginger.”

I opened the door before the woman outside could touch the bell. She was unfamiliar to me and she stared bug-eyed with something between fear and abject stupidity. “Excuse me?”

She almost dropped the envelope she was holding.

“It was a game we played when I was a child.”

She just stared and pushed the envelope into my hands. “Here.”

She turned to walk away and her shoulders hunched as though to absorb a blow. At the sidewalk, she turned to see me standing with the unopened letter in my hands. I watched her with my head tilted to the side as she slipped behind the wheel of a new-model car and drove away fast.

Claire came up behind me while I was reading and I handed over the letter without a word. She read it quickly and snorted. “Evicted?”

Fred was wrestling with another pillow under the coffee table and the dog was chewing on a piece of rawhide shaped like a bone. I brushed my hair back with the side of my hand and headed into the kitchen for some water. Claire followed, looking at the envelope.

“There’s no postage. Who sent it?”

While the water ran to cold, I answered. “A short woman with green eyes and brown hair. She was wearing a light green pantsuit and driving a silver Lexus sedan.”

Claire made a motion with her hands.

“Did she have a lot up here?”

I grinned at the implied chest. “No. Not at all.”

“That was Ms. Gantz, our landlord. That means it’s official.”

I drank the glass of water and filled it again while I read the letter again. “So what are we going to do?”

“I’m going to work in the backyard. You wanna come?”

Baby and dog came with us, one going into a playpen and the other ending up tied to a stake by a long length of strong rope. Claire made me rearrange them and then looked around and pulled on canvas gardening gloves before tossing me a bright pink pair of rubber ones.

“Lots of work to do yet.”

I slapped the gloves against my thigh and nodded in agreement. The yard was a mess. Earlier tenants had reshingled the roof and left the trash in big piles all over the yard, where it killed off the grass and the flowers. Someone had tried to grow wildflowers in a big bed along one fence and now that corner was full of weeds and thistles. The lawn that did remain was mostly crabgrass mixed with dandelions and scarred with the treads of cars and trucks, many of them quite deep.

“Where do you want to start?”

“Nowhere. We’ve been evicted, remember?”

Claire nodded politely and went to work in the flowerbed, ripping the weeds out and stuffing them in a garbage bag at her feet.

“Suit yourself.”

In places she’d stop and kneel down close to the earth. Sometimes she’d leave the plant alone; at other times she’d rip it up as well and add it to her sack. When I wandered over, I couldn’t see much difference between what she considered weeds and what she considered valuable plants. The smells of the fresh earth and the greenery mixed and I picked up my own bag.

Our neighbors on both sides had headed indoors the moment we had come out, so we had the space to ourselves, which was fine. The yard was about fifteen yards long and ten wide and was covered with grass up to the last five yards before the back alley, where gravel and scabs of concrete started. Someone had driven over a small stand of bushes so I started with them.

“Can I toss these bushes?”

“Let me see.”

Claire came over and looked at the ruins carefully. Finally she bent down and broke off one branch and sniffed the end. “Yeah. They’re dead.”

Removing the hedge was harder than it looked but eventually I managed to dig up the roots of the bushes and manhandle them into garbage bags. While I was working, a police car cruised up the alley and paused next to me. In it were two young white men with handlebar mustaches. They turned in unison to look at me through eyes concealed behind expensive mirrored shades.

“Good afternoon.”

They were silent.

“Or is it evening?”

The cop who was driving carefully peeled the Saran Wrap off a toothpick and put it between his front teeth. He said something unintelligible to his partner and then they drove away.

“Nice guys, you know.”

Claire had ignored them and worked. She had cleared half the flowerbed and was working on the verge along the outside. She looked at me and then at the departing car. “Morons.”

She planted the root back in the garden itself and I went to work on the shingles near the house. They had been there long enough to begin to molder, and white slugs as big as baby carrots were busy among the dead leaves and pale plants next to the ground. When I was finished, I brushed the dirt off my hands and dumped the bag with the others near the alley.

“You still haven’t told me why we’re doing this.”

She shrugged and went to wrap Fred up in a blanket. He had fallen asleep and was happily drooling.

“It has to be done.”

Renfield had found something in the grass and was rolling around in it with much glee. She patted him as she went past and then started working again. When she spoke again, she was very precise. “Do you want to leave?”

I thought about it and snarled, “No.”

She went back to tearing up the foilage and I filled two more bags and was raking up the remaining litter before she spoke again. “What would you have done before?”

The rake wasn’t working so I was reduced to picking up armloads of mold and filth and dropping them into the bags. “Before, before? You mean, in the before time? When I was single and life was great?”

“Yes, smart-ass.”

She lowered her head and looked at me from under her bangs. The street lights had come on and we were both bathed in their harsh light. The difference between her and me was that she was beautiful.

“I would have left. It would’ve been a fight to stay, that wouldn’t have mattered to me. I mean, what’s a home for someone like me? No roots, no nothing.”

She nodded and tied another bag shut. I was pretty much finished so I went into the back porch and came out with a six-foot length of copper pipe a quarter-inch in diameter. I’d found it in a corner of the basement when I’d been cleaning, and I’d soaked it in soapy water in the bathtub to remove some of the grit and verdigris. I rolled it back
and forth between my hands and thought some more as Claire went on. “And if the fight was worth fighting for?”

I’d put a piece of string aside and now I tied a nut to the end and dropped it down until it emerged from the other end of the pipe. When I had both ends of string I tied a bit of fine cotton cloth to one end and slowly pulled it through. The cloth came out filthy and I put on a new one and tried again. After a couple more pulls, the cloth started to come out unstained and I dropped them into the garbage bag at my feet.

“Do you mind if I leave the crawl space under the porch ’til tomorrow?”

“Go ahead. Don’t change the subject, though.”

I put the pipe back into the house and came back out.

“All right. If the fight was worthwhile, then I’d do whatever was necessary in order to win. Lie, cheat, steal.”

“So. Do you want to keep living here?”

“Yes.”

“Then you have to fight. But. You can’t slide back to your past behavior, that would be self-defeating.”

“Right. Returning to the past behavior would nullify the present course.”

Claire stood up and dusted her hands. I knelt down and checked angles, and when I was satisfied, I picked up a shard of broken mirror I’d found and put it near the fence. From under the back porch I’d be able to see the mirror clearly and the door reflected within it.

“You are snotty and overly precise, but an essentially correct prissy bitch. So that means no violence.”

She was grinning when she said that and so was I and she added, “Well, how about this for a rule? Don’t kill anyone.”

We hugged and traded dirt.

I slept until 3:45 in the a.m. and slid out of bed. Over the years I’d trained myself to wake up when necessary and the skill remained.
When I was up, I took a few minutes to stretch before heading downstairs into the basement. I’d chained the dog up in the front this time and left the back undefended. I hoped the note passers would notice that.

The piece of pipe was where I’d left it, along with a shorter piece of heavy hardwood the size of a police flashlight, good-sized for cracking heads and breaking bones. I found both items in the dark and moved slowly and carefully. I’d tied a string around the pipe, and attached to that was a cork into which were stuffed nine darning needles, four inches long, with a tuft of cotton glued to the end and a second tuft glued midway down for stability.

Moving through the dark basement was difficult but I’d strung a length of clothesline from the end of the stairs to the rear window, and by holding the rope in one hand, I could move almost soundlessly. At the window I listened but couldn’t hear anything, so I opened the dirty pane of glass on freshly oiled hinges and listened again to nothing.