Cold Comfort (2 page)

“I want to roll her now,” said Gilbert. “Let’s get a good look at her.”

Gilbert crouched by the body, memorizing all the details, wondering if there were something he had missed, something that wouldn’t show up in the photographs. She was well-groomed. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but there was definitely a groove around her ring finger; maybe it was a simple robbery. Or maybe sexual assault. Her hair was cut short, jaw length, looked well-washed, and her clothes were clean, expensive, fairly new. She wasn’t a street person. She wasn’t living on the fringe. This was a victim from the mainstream. This woman looked as if she had a job.

“Wait a minute,” said Gilbert, pointing. “Look at this.”

Lombardo crouched next to her. Hidden among the folds of her mauve sweatshirt lay several long brown hairs, caught on the fabric. The hairs were fine; they looked like hair from a woman’s head, but definitely not the blonde hairs from the victim’s head. Lombardo pulled an evidence envelope and tweezers from his pocket, bagged the hairs, and made a notation on the label.

“Can we roll her now?” asked Lombardo. “I’m freezing.”

Gilbert shrugged. “Might as well.”

The two men gently gripped the body and turned it over. The arms and legs remained stiff, frozen into position by the extreme cold, but the waist gave a little. They immediately saw the gunshot wound to her chest.

“No exit wound,” said Gilbert. “Maybe the bullet’s still in there.”

“Have you ever seen a gunshot wound like that?” said Lombardo. “Her shirt should be soaked in blood.”

Gilbert took the woman’s shirt and gently pulled it up. She wasn’t wearing a bra; her breasts were small and looked strange because they were frozen into place, stood upright, defying gravity. The wound itself was nothing more than a small blood-free hole. Both men were puzzled.

“I guess this is one for Blackstein,” said Gilbert.

He took one last look at the woman’s face. Somehow the face seemed familiar. She had a gentle face, pretty, innocent, pixieish. Some frost had accumulated on her cheeks. But underneath the frost Gilbert saw some freckles. He shook his head. Against his better judgment, he rubbed away some of the frost.

“Let’s go talk to Pompa,” he said.

Benny Pompa, a security guard with Dominion Malting for twenty-two years, a short rotund man who spoke with a heavy Italian accent, sat at his desk in the reception area. When the detectives entered, he looked up with glum apprehension. He was around fifty years old. The other employees were streaming in, casting nervous glances at Benny and the detectives.

“We won’t take much of your time, Mr. Pompa,” said Gilbert. “We just want to get your statement.”

Pompa said something in Italian to Joe; Joe responded then turned to Gilbert. “He says we’re making all the ladies nervous.”

Gilbert nodded. “Mr. Pompa, could you tell me what time you discovered the body?”

Pompa told them, in his accented English, how every morning he drove to the end of Cherry Street to gaze out at the lake while he had his first cigarette.

“Very cold this morning,” he said. “And dark. You couldn’t see a thing. I finish my cigarette and I drive back here. I start at six-thirty. I drive to the parking lot—I park in the same spot every day, down near the
Charles Lougheed
—my headlights swing by the pier, still very dark, and I see what I think is a bag of garbage, sometimes you get that, people coming down here to dump, the city won’t take it so they decide they’ll get rid of it themselves. I see any garbage, I’m supposed to take it to the Dumpster. We don’t want more seagulls and rats than we already have.”

“So this was around six-thirty?” said Gilbert.

“Around that.”

“And you’re always the first one here in the morning?”

“Always.”

“So you drove down to the end of Cherry Street,” said Gilbert. “I gather you didn’t see any other cars.”

“No,” said Pompa. “I was the only one down there.”

“And you saw no suspicious activity at all?”

“No.”

“Could you see the beach?”

“Through the trees, yes, I could.”

“Were there any cars in the parking area?” asked Gilbert.

“No.”

“So you saw what you thought was a bag of garbage by the
Charles Lougheed
. Then what did you do?”

Pompa scratched behind his ear, where Gilbert saw a mole the size of a raisin. “I went to get it. The Dumpster’s out behind here. I figure why make two trips when it’s so cold. I’ll put it in the Dumpster while I’m still outside. I’ll use my head. So I walked over and I was about halfway there when I realized it wasn’t a garbage bag. It was that poor lady. She’s not moving. So I walk right up to her. I say to her, lady? Lady, are you all right? But she doesn’t answer me. I see she doesn’t have a coat on. I touch her with my toe. Nudge her.”

Gilbert nodded. “Where did you nudge her?”

“I nudged her foot. And that’s when I saw she was dead. So I came in here and called you guys.”

The detective from the Auto Squad arrived five minutes later. He was a large man, in a ski jacket, about sixty years old, close to retirement, with stooped shoulders, a large nose, and watery blue eyes. His name was Laird, and he carried himself with a brusque efficiency few men mustered at his age. He glanced at the body then crouched by the nearest tire track. The wind brought two angry red spots to his face, while his nose was already webbed with a tracery of crimson varicose veins. His hands, ungloved, looked permanently stained with car grease.

He turned his head one way, then another, then took out a small pocket tape and measured the width of the track.

“That would be a Michelin XGT,” he said, without preamble. He spoke with the remnants of a Scottish brogue. “Has to come from a big car, a luxury sedan. We see that particular Michelin on the Lincoln Town Car, the Crown Victoria, the Mercury Grand Marquis, the Buick Roadmaster…” He shook his head. “You see it on a lot of the larger luxury cars, about a dozen in all.” He stood up and looked at the contralateral track. He measured the distance between the tracks. He slid his tape measure back into his pocket, took out a pack of Players Light, stuck one in his mouth, and lit up with a bulky brass lighter. He took a large pull and rubbed his nose with the back of his thumb, as if in this cold he had to make sure his nose was still there. “You give me the photos. I’ll do some comparisons back at the shop. I might be able to narrow it down for you, but I doubt it. You’ve got a tough one here.”

Gilbert and Lombardo watched the ambulance attendants slide the corpse onto the stretcher and cover it with an orange blanket. He would go home tonight to his wife and two daughters, and he would have a hot meal, and watch some television, and maybe browse through the latest issue of
National Geographic
. This woman would spend the night in the morgue. And once the girls were settled, and the furnace was humming in the basement, keeping them all warm, he and Regina would make love. And Regina’s body would be soft, and her breasts would be pliant, and she would be breathing, and her heart would be pumping. She would be alive. This woman was dead. Even when they finally thawed her out she would still be cold. As he watched them load the woman’s body into the back of the ambulance, he felt the old darkness coming back, his cynicism, and the sense that no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t make a difference. This woman would never breathe again. And the blood would never move through her veins. He shook his head. There would never be any comfort for this woman ever again.

Gilbert stood at the fourth-floor window of the duty room staring at Addison Cadillac and Buick across the street, listening to the detectives of the Homicide Squad gather behind him. He wasn’t sure if he liked the new building here on College Street; he missed Jarvis Street. His eyes strayed to the corner, where cars, trucks, and buses rolled ceaselessly by on Bay Street. He missed the sense of community on Jarvis Street. He missed his coffee and brown toast at the Carlton Grill. He even missed the hookers on Isabella. Here on College Street, a few blocks from the Parliament Buildings, with the Coroner’s Office just across the street, the sidewalks at lunch hour were thronged with civil servants. He missed all the old bag ladies with their bundle buggies, the panhandlers asking for change on Sherbourne Street, and the bright young kids from Jarvis Collegiate Institute.

He turned around. Lombardo approached with two cups of coffee. The young detective looked worried. His heavy brow had settled into an even line and his dark Piedmontese eyes smoldered with quiet wrath as he handed Gilbert his cup.

“I don’t like it when Marsh calls a meeting out of the blue like this,” said Lombardo.

Gilbert shrugged. “We’ve got to have meetings, Joe,” he said.

“Why don’t we have them in the office?”

“Because the office is too small.”

Staff Inspector Bill Marsh, head of Homicide, entered the duty room carrying a few sheets of dog-eared paper. He was an older man, barrel-chested, with hair combed severely to the left, his face heavily wrinkled from years of liquid lunches. Today he wore meticulously creased grey flannels, black brogues, and a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, black tie loosened, tufts of grey chest hair spilling from the undone button at the top.

“Move in, move in,” ordered Marsh. “I don’t want to shout. Gilbert, Lombardo, get up here.”

The two detectives moved forward. Gilbert looked around the room, caught Bob Bannatyne’s eye, nodded, then scanned the rest of the room. The members of his team—Jim Groves, Petro Halycz, Gordon Telford—were staring at him, each of them looking to some extent as if they had been betrayed, as if they believed Gilbert had been holding back on them. Gilbert shrugged, trying to look puzzled.

“Are we all here?” asked Marsh. “Where’s Birnbaum?”

“He’s out on a case,” said Hetherington.

“All right,” said Marsh. He had a rough voice—too many years of smoking. “I’ll tell him later.” Marsh put his papers on the table; he looked out of place in this new modern building; he looked more at home in the dirt and clutter of the old one. “I’ll give you the straight goods,” he said. “Homicide has been asked to take a cut. We knew things were going to change once we moved up here. I’m sorry, but we don’t have a choice. They look at our case clearance rate, and how it’s dipped in the last few months, and they find their justifications. There’s nothing I can do. Some of you are going to have to go.”

Marsh stopped and looked at each and every one of the squad sergeants, Gilbert included; he perhaps looked at Gilbert longer than anyone.

“Ling calls me to his office, and he asks me, what’s with these low clearance rates in Homicide? Why aren’t you guys arresting anybody?”

Bob Bannatyne, one of the squad’s veterans, spoke up. “You tell Ling, give us more manpower and we’ll solve more murders. We haven’t increased staff here in five years. But now we have more than double the murder rate. Tell him he can’t read the numbers the old way anymore.”

“You think I haven’t told him that?” said Marsh. The Staff Inspector put his fists on his hips. “He says you got to work harder. They all think that way now. Ever since Tom Webb came down with his package last fall. Ling says to me, don’t look at it as a cutback, look at it as a challenge. Don’t look at it as more work, look at it as an opportunity.”

Detective Fanshaw, from Kilbourn’s quadrant, spoke up. “And meanwhile we haven’t had a raise in five years. Meanwhile, they jack up the price of our long-term disability and completely discontinue our drug formulary so every time my little girl gets an ear infection I’m out twenty-five bucks for penicillin. And Ling says look at it as an opportunity?”

Marsh shrugged. “What do you want me to do?” he said. “I didn’t vote Tory. I knew the Tories were going to do this from way back. You get a guy like Webb in there and you know the axe is going to fall.”

Gilbert asked, “So how big a cut are we looking at?”

Marsh looked at him, then at all the other detectives.

“Eighteen percent over the next three years,” he said. “And that’s for everyone. Burglary, Vice, Sex Crimes, the SIU, the Bomb Squad, everybody. Some of you guys are going to be bumped, maybe back to patrol, maybe somewhere else. And I’m sorry, but some of you will just be canned outright, so you better start working on your resumes. Seven percent by April, six percent next year, and five percent the next. That’s the way it is. That’s what we got to deal with.”

When Gilbert left the duty room and went back downstairs to the office, Carol Reid, one of the squad’s secretaries, handed him a message slip: Dr. Blackstein. Please call.

He looked at Carol Reid as she weaved among the cubicles back to her own desk; her phone was ringing.

“Did he say?” asked Gilbert.

Carol glanced over her shoulder; her square-rimmed glasses magnified her milky blue eyes.

“Something about the new Jane Doe,” she said.

Gilbert walked to his own desk, much larger than the one he had on Jarvis Street, and called the Office of the Chief Coroner of the Province of Ontario. Got Dr. Blackstein’s voice mail. Damn. He was curious now. An identification? Maybe. One thing about the new building, it was convenient to the Coroner’s Office. Blackstein was always happy to see him. He put the phone down and pulled on his coat.

He caught Lombardo standing at the security access doors next to the third-floor elevators with a couple of other young detectives; they all looked worried. And Lombardo looked more worried than the rest. His easygoing Mediterranean charm had deserted him. It wasn’t the money with Joe; it was the job. He loved the work, would never want to give it up. Gilbert touched his sleeve.

“I’m going to the coroner’s,” he said.

Lombardo’s eyes widened. “What’s up?”

“Don’t know,” said Gilbert. “Something. You want to come?”

Lombardo shook his head. “Wish I could,” he said. “I’ve got to see that social worker. The Wesley Rowe case?”

Gilbert’s mood soured. “She’s going to show you fake documentation.”

“I know.”

“Remember, she’s not a typist, she’s a social worker. You’re going to see that in anything she gives you.”