Forty Words for Sorrow (21 page)

“Jesus Christ, man.” It was all Woody could manage, and he repeated it a couple of times. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Sit down in that chair.”

“No, sir. Negative. Obviously you’re pissed off, but let’s be realistic here.” There was no way in hell he was going to let himself be tied up. This was one sick weasel.

“Sit down in that chair or I’ll shoot you too.”

“He woke Gram up.” This surreal offering from the top of the stairs, where the woman now stood gripping the rail. “All his damn screaming.” She came down a couple of steps and stood over the kid. “I ought to pee all over your face.”

“He broke into your house, Edie. He was stealing your VCR.”

The woman looked at Woody. “It so happens that VCR means a lot to me. It has sentimental value.”

“Okay. I hear you. I’m just in it for the cash, know what I mean?”

“Fuck, Eric. Let’s kill him.”

“Videos, hey, I love ’em too, you know? Me and the wife’ll rent a Clint Eastwood now and again. Well, I like Clint, she likes the stuff about sisters and girlfriends and that. But, hey—a good movie, some popcorn, we love it!” Make a little conversation, get on their good side, works wonders with the cops sometimes.

“Shoot him, Eric,” the woman said with feeling. “Shoot him in the belly.”

“Listen, you guys. Edie. Eric. Obviously, I’m not welcome here, so I’ll just go, okay? I’ll just hit the road. Sorry for the inconvenience and shit. I apologize.”

“That van outside, the blue one, is that yours?”

“The ChevyVan, yeah. And the fact is, Eric, I parked in a bad spot. Snow removal. She’s gonna get towed if I don’t move her.”

The man didn’t react to this at all. He was sighting down the barrel at Woody’s belly.

“Eric?” The woman came down another couple of steps and watched them intently, her mouth open a little. There was something wrong with her face. “Why don’t you break his nose?”

Woody was gauging the distance to the gun, still in the man’s hand, still pointed at his stomach.

“It’s something I’d like to see,” the woman went on. “Hear the bone break and everything.”

The kid stirred, and the man turned and kicked his head. It was now or never. Woody shoved him hard, straight-armed the woman, and he was up the stairs, hand on the doorknob. The door was swinging open when the bullet tore into his back, somewhere near the love handles. He toppled over backward, landed on top of the kid, and hit his head a hell of a bang on the concrete floor.

A guy he’d shared a cell with once had told Woody what it was like to be shot: like a hot iron pressing through your body, man, those little fuckers are hot. And Woody discovered now that this was true.

The man was standing over him, big as King Kong. That’s how I must look to Dumptruck, Woody thought, and wondered how long before Martha started to worry.

The man’s hands were around his neck. Strong thumbs closing his windpipe.

“Break his nose,” the woman said again. “Why do you want to choke him, when you can break his nose?”

And carefully, using the butt of his pistol, the man did exactly that.

33

D
ELORME SAT IN THE HALF-DARK
of her kitchen, finishing her third cup of Nescafé. Before her was a stack of files Dyson had sent over. She liked to work in her kitchen at anything except cooking. The remains of a frozen dinner lay forgotten on her plate.

The files were also mostly forgotten; Delorme was thinking about the three Fs. If she was going to do anything with the boat receipt she had seen in Cardinal’s files, it would be through them. The three Fs stood for February, French Canadians and Florida. As anyone who has been to that particular state in that particular month can testify, the Florida gulf in February becomes the Gulf of Quebec. Miami becomes Montreal-On-Sea. Suddenly, Cuban becomes a minority accent, and every other licence plate proclaims
Je me souviens
. Come February, Florida’s waiters and bellboys polish off their seasonal stable of Canadian jokes. What’s the difference between a Canadian and a canoe? Answer: Canoes tip.

Forty-five minutes and half a dozen phone calls later, Delorme had talked to two French Canadian cops who were about to visit Florida on vacation. Neither of them, unfortunately, was going to be anywhere near the Calloway Marina. So Delorme made a few more calls and got the number of Dollard Langois, who had been in her class at Police College. They had even dated a couple of times, and Delorme was at this moment very grateful to her younger self that she had not slept with him. He had been an awkward, gangly young man, with big, gentle hands and hound-dog eyes, and one night after a movie in Aylmer he had confessed that he was absolutely crazy in love with her. Delorme had been all set to sleep with him until he said that. Dollard Langois had been one attractive guy, but he had not been about to mess up her budding career with romance. She had often wondered since, on lonely nights, how he was doing, and what would have happened if—Well, Dollard Langois was a road not taken, put it that way.

They spent a few minutes catching up—speaking English, perhaps because that had been the language at Aylmer. Yes, she told him, she was pretty happy with her career as a cop. No, she was not married.

“That’s too bad, Lise. It’s so nice to be married. Doesn’t surprise me, though—and I don’t mean that in a negative way.”

“Go ahead, Dollard. Tell me what a failure I am as a human being.”

“No, no. I just meant you were hell-bent on a career is all. Single-minded. It’s a good thing.”

“I can’t take any more. Tell me about you.”

He was
Sergeant
Langois now, assigned to a Quebec Provincial Police detachment twenty miles outside Montreal. Two kids, lovely wife—a nurse, not a cop—and every February they spent a week down in Florida at a place where they had a time-share arrangement. “Why’d you ask?” he wanted to know. “Awful late in the season to be looking for a share.”

“It’s for work. Something I need to trace.”

A heavy sigh travelled down the line from Montreal. “Why am I not surprised?”

“I wouldn’t ask unless it was really serious, Dollard.”

“It’s my vacation, Lise. I’m going to be with my family.”

“I wouldn’t ask unless it was serious. Do you remember me well enough to know that? We’ve got a child killer here, Dollard. I can’t leave, even for a day.”

They went back and forth for a bit. Then, as much to distract him as anything else, Delorme asked where exactly he was going to be staying. It turned out—unhappily for Sergeant Langois—that he would be staying in Hollywood Beach at a condo in the same block as the Calloway Marina. His fate was sealed, and Delorme hung up exceedingly pleased with herself.

She spent another hour with the files—early cases of Cardinal’s—and found nothing of interest. According to the files John Cardinal was exactly what he appeared to be: a hard-working cop who got the job done efficiently and thoroughly, without bending the rules. Nearly all his arrests resulted in convictions, although not in the case she was reading now, involving a ne’er-do-well called Raymond Colacott who had since killed himself. The suspect had been brought into custody along with four kilos of cocaine that Cardinal had every reason to believe Colacott was selling. But when the matter was brought to trial, the evidence had gone missing, stolen from the evidence locker. Case dismissed.

The Crown had put his own investigator on the case (file handily included, courtesy of Dyson), and drawn a resounding blank. Cardinal had not been a particular suspect; too many people had had access to the evidence locker. A report was issued, procedures were changed.

Yes, it could have been Cardinal, but for a cop in Algonquin Bay to start selling coke would be far too risky. And Raymond Colacott was not Kyle Corbett, not someone capable of putting a cop on his payroll. If the investigation at the time had got nowhere, Delorme was certainly going to get nowhere nine years later when half the personnel involved had transferred to Winnipeg, Moose Jaw, or God knows where else.

Delorme scraped off her plate and put it in the sink. She had always intended to develop an interest in cooking, maybe even take a course up at the college one day, but lack of time and enthusiasm always seemed to weigh against it. Her mother, were she still alive, would have been horrified.

She went into the living room and pulled aside the curtain. Snowbanks glittered under the street lights. She remained at the window for some time, staring through her ghostlike reflection, coffee cup in hand. Ten minutes later, she was in her car, driving with no clear intention up Algonquin toward the bypass. She made a right onto the highway, keeping the speedometer well below the speed limit. It was a peculiarity of hers, this aimless driving, and she would have been embarrassed if any of her colleagues had discovered her nocturnal habit. She wasn’t sure if it was restlessness or if it was just a way of making daydreaming a physical, as well as a mental, process.

The bypass had a pleasant sweep to it, a graceful curve that held the higher end of town in a gentle embrace. It was a great pleasure to feel the slight but steady centrifugal pull as one drove the length of the city. Sometimes Delorme just drove the bypass out to the intersection with Lakeshore and then back into town along the bay. Other times, when she was agitated, she did something rather more idiosyncratic: she drove out to the neighbourhoods of friends and colleagues, not stopping to visit, just driving by to see their lights on, their cars in the driveway. She knew it was neurotic, but it gave her a soothing sense of peace all the same.

She made a left on Trout Lake Road and drove all the way out to where it turned into Highway 63. In winter you could see right through the trees down to the houses on Madonna Road. She glanced over and saw the lights on in Cardinal’s place, even saw a dark shape at the rear window. He’d be doing dishes or having a late supper.

At the Chinook Tavern, she turned around and headed back into town by way of the college. Traffic was sparse now, and the city below her was all lit up. Thoughts of the Pine–Curry case were turning in her head, and she tried not to force them in any direction. She would just have her little drive and let things fall into place. A few minutes later she was cruising by a handsome, two-story stucco house in a not-quite-posh enclave all but hidden in the shadow of St. Francis Hospital. Dyson’s car was parked in the driveway.

Delorme stopped at the side of the street, debating whether to pull in or not.

A pretty little girl, perhaps twelve years old, came walking uphill toward the house accompanied by a boy of the same age or not much older. She clutched a collection of books to her chest the way girls do, and walked with head down, staring intently at the sidewalk. The boy must have said something funny because she looked up suddenly, laughing, showing a mouth full of braces. Then her mother, a bony, wraithlike figure, appeared in a side doorway and called her daughter away in a voice utterly devoid of affection.

The image stayed with Delorme all the way out to Edgewater Road. But somewhere between Rayne Street and the bypass a plan of action had dropped into her head. She pulled into the driveway of a Swiss-style A-frame and rang the doorbell. She had time to prepare her little speech, then forgot it all when the door was opened by Police Chief R.J. Kendall himself. “This had better be good,” was all he said.

She followed him down to the basement, the same clubby room where it had all begun. The cover had been removed from what she had taken to be a billiard table. On it tiny soldiers in uniforms of red and blue did battle along the steep bank of a papier maché river. Delorme had interrupted the chief in the pursuit of his passion, building recreations of famous battles in fanatical detail, and he was not about to abandon it for the sake of an unmannerly visit.

“Plains of Abraham?” Delorme asked, trying to ease her way in.

“Just get to it, Detective. General Montcalm is beyond your help.”

“Sir, I’ve been combing the files for anything about Cardinal. Going over old cases of his, notes and everything.”

“I assume you’ve discovered something sensational in those files or you wouldn’t be breaking every rule of protocol, not to mention common courtesy, by showing up at my home unannounced.”

“No, sir. The thing is, the files aren’t going to lead anywhere. I’m just running in circles, and it’s getting in the way of Pine–Curry.”

“Look at this.” The chief held out a smooth hand, palm up. A tiny cannon nestled in his palm. “Exactly to scale. There are twelve of them I have to fix into fittings that are barely visible to the naked eye.”

“Incredible.” Delorme responded with all the energy she could muster, but she could hear it wasn’t enough.

“The files are important. A jury will expect a pattern of behaviour.”

“Sir, that will take forever, and it will all be old stuff impossible to prove.”

“You have the Florida condo. You have the boat receipt.”

“Dyson told you about those already?”

“He did. I asked to be kept closely informed.”

“The receipt doesn’t have Cardinal’s name on it, sir.” She had been about to tell him about Sergeant Langois, but no, better to wait and see what he might turn up down in Florida. “I’ve already contacted his American bank, but they’re not exactly rushing to cooperate. What we need is something totally convincing. Something from right now. Something plain and simple.”

“Naturally. If you want to ask your partner for a signed confession, go ahead. I don’t expect you’ll see a lot of success.” He turned to her, a miniature tube of glue in his hand. “Or were you intending to interview Kyle Corbett on the subject? Excuse me, Mr. Corbett, is one of our detectives supplying you with confidential information? Gee, no, Officer, I have far too much respect for the law.”

The chief was not by nature a sarcastic man. Delorme braced herself, and plunged on. “Sir, I have an idea.”

“Please. Enlighten me.”

“What we do is we plant some information with Cardinal that he’s sure to pass along—if he’s really working for Corbett, that is. Something he’ll have to let him know. Musgrave’s crew will tap his phone and keep him under surveillance.”

Kendall regarded her coolly, then turned back to his model, a tiny soldier pinched between thumb and forefinger. “I’ll say one thing, Detective. You’ve got nerve.”

“Sir, I think this could clear the air relatively—”

The chief cut her off with a wave of the hand. “I’m rather surprised that you’re seriously—you are serious, aren’t you? Yes, I can see you are—proposing to wiretap your own partner.”

“With respect, sir. You’re the one who assigned me to investigate him. Well, you and Dyson. If you want me to stop, I’d be happy to stop anytime.”

“You see this?” Kendall pointed to a frigate parked in the midnight-blue St. Lawrence. “This assembly here, with the mainmast and stays? Just that part of this project took a week to put together.”

“Incredible.”

“Sometimes making a thing convincing takes a little time, Sergeant Delorme. A little patience. I hope you’re not entirely lacking in that quality.”

“My plan is better than thumbing through endless files. If you look at it objectively, sir, I think you’ll agree.”

“I am. Hand me the little silver tube, would you? Thank you.” Using the point of a pin, the chief dabbed a trace of glue onto a cannonball the size of a bug’s eye, and set it onto a tiny stack. “You’re still intent on leaving Special Investigations, I suppose. Hate to lose someone with a record like yours.”

“Well, Chief, you’re not losing me. I’m just moving over into CID.”

“I know, I know. But Special Investigations—one could make the case that it’s the most important part of the department. Take away Special Investigations, you’ve got a brain, certainly—all the motor functions are intact—but without Special you’ve got a brain without a conscience. And that, my young friend, is a dangerous thing.”

Delorme tucked away that
young
somewhere warm for later examination. “Sir, if we give him something no one else knows—even if we don’t get him on the tap—we’ll know he’s the guy.”

“I have one question,” the chief was bending the limbs of a soldier into a climbing position. He dabbed glue onto each miniature hand and knee, and pressed the figure into position against the face of a cliff. Then he turned to face Delorme and his gaze was suddenly almost sexual in its intensity. “Why are you bringing this to me? Why aren’t you bringing it to Dyson?”