River City (16 page)

“I didn’t get to play hockey in my camp,” Touton admitted. “Are you telling me that you work for Houde?”

“I’m telling you no such thing. If I told you that, I’d be lying most days—maybe not every day. If I told you who I was working for today, you’d piss your pants. Trust me on this one thing.”

“Pull that door closed,” Touton instructed him, “but not all the way.”

Clément did as he was told, not comprehending what might be in store for him. “Now what?” he asked.

“Put your hands through either side of the window and hang on to the door.”

He looked at the door, at the open window, then back at the detective. “Wait a minute, my wife, my daughter—”

“I’m thinking about them—now hang on to that door!”

Clément hung on.

“Hold tight. Now step out.”

“I can’t swim! You bastard! You’re killing me here!”

“I’m not asking you to swim. I’m asking you to hang on to that door and don’t let go! Don’t let go, Roger!”

Prodded by the gun, Clément gripped the doorframe through the open window, and, stepping out of the car, swung out above the water as the door yawned open. His feet dangled forty feet above the river darkly fomenting below him, thrashing the air as if trying to find something solid on which to land his shoes. “You bastard!” he shouted out.

“Let’s not get personal here, Roger.” Touton slid down the bench seat and sat on the passenger side, holding the door open with his right foot. “I’m not asking you to jump or fall. I’m just asking you not to let go while you think about your daughter. That’s all. Just think about your family, Roger.”

“I can’t swim, I told you. I wasn’t lying!”

“Then don’t swim. Whatever you do, don’t let go of that door. Just think about your daughter.”

The two men fell silent awhile, the one dangling above the river, the other propped in the front seat of his sedan, keeping the door open.

After a long ten minutes, the thug deduced, “I can’t stay out here forever.”

“I can’t either,” Touton admitted. “But I’ve got ten, maybe twelve hours in me. How many you got in you?”

Clément waited about five minutes to answer. “Not that many,” he said.

“Who do you work for, Roger?”

“You’re one mean motherfuck, you know that?”

“Who do you work for?”

“Duplessis,” Clément told him. What was the point in haggling forever?

Touton released his leg and foot and the door crashed closed. Clément hollered as he took the blow on the shoulder and upper thigh. Getting him back into the vehicle was awkward, and risky, but in the end both men were strong enough and managed it. Then Clément was sitting in the front seat again.

“Stay here,” Touton told him.

“Where you going?”

“I gotta piss.”

Armand Touton stepped behind his car and pissed into the river. What kind of a world did he live in, he wondered, when the premier of the province used low-level hoods to smash the offices of mayoral candidates? Smashing the offices of his political rivals was bad enough, but now he was sending goons out to disrupt municipal elections—which, on the surface of things, were none of his business. What kind of a world was this?

“I told you you’d piss yourself,” Clément said as the cop got back into the car. “Can we go now?”

“There’s something you should understand,” Touton advised him.

“What’s that?”

“You work for
me
now. Do what you have to do for the people you work for—Houde, Duplessis, the mob guys … exactly who doesn’t really matter. But you work for me now. We can’t clean this town up unless people like you help out people like me.”

Clément sat quietly in the car awhile. He didn’t want to be a stool pigeon, and couldn’t think of himself in those terms, but the cop’s words had made it sound different than that. As though this was a special mission and a worthy cause. In any case, they wouldn’t be driving away soon unless he agreed to do it, and, given the alternatives—jail, the river—he had no reason not to agree.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll clean this place up. Maybe my wife and daughter, someday, they’ll be proud of me for that.”

“Now you’re thinking with your brain,” Touton said.

They drove off the docks, back to Clément’s neighbourhood.

“Did you really take out LeBrun?” the thug asked.

“One punch,” Touton confirmed, but conceded, “I got lucky. Right up under the chin, and he dropped. Took him more than twelve minutes to wake up, and when he did, his pride was gone. He wept. Something to see, LeBrun wiping tears off his cheeks. You never know how somebody will react. You think you’re invincible, and
poof!
You’re not. LeBrun never thought he’d be looking up from the floor at another man while his body felt like yellow mush. It’s tough to be a legend in your own time, I guess, when your time as a legend is over.”

Touton arrived at the address he’d lifted from Roger Clément’s wallet. The single-level dwelling hunkered down between a duplex on one side, a triplex on the other. The brown clapboard home had seen better days, and in another time had overseen a backyard of hogs and chickens, perhaps a corn crop and rows of beans and lettuce. Now it would be a patch of weeds, worn to dirt where children played, fenced in, sunless by day, leading onto a lane. The roof sagged. The stoop sloped dramatically forward and crumpled to the left. Visitors quickly assessed that the stairs were booby traps for the unwary. A low, black wrought-iron fence segregated the rather sparse front patch of yard from the sidewalk, and Touton bent at the waist to find the latch and unfasten it. He stepped over the rickety stairs onto the porch, then rang the buzzer by the door.

The house remained unlit, soundless.

He could hear his own breathing.

A streetlamp allowed him to read the sign in the door’s glass: padlock your ass. Meant for cops, it carried more than a single connotation. The first reference was to the Padlock Law, which had permitted the homes of
communists and union sympathizers—and, by extension, Jews—to be barricaded by the police while the inhabitants were briefly away. The second referred to the police procedure of padlocking brothels and gambling dens after a raid. Everyone knew the scam. A brothel might have its broom closet bolted shut. One famous whorehouse had a door specially built on the street for the purpose. The door went nowhere—it opened onto a wall. After first alerting the madam, so that she could depart the premises and install her janitor to remain behind specifically to endure the arrest and pay the trivial fine, the police would ceremoniously snap a lock on the door to nowhere. In doing so, they discharged the letter of the law, while the spirit of the whorehouse remained cocky and the daily cash receipts continued unabated. The greatest inconvenience to most brothels might be to discover that their mops and buckets had been locked up, temporarily placed under house arrest.

He rang the buzzer again. This time, a light inside snapped on. Then the porch light came on, and the curtain in the door’s glass was pulled aside an inch.

He displayed his badge.

A petite, attractive woman, although not at her best in nightdress and housecoat, applied a sliding chain lock and, once secured, opened the door a crack.

“Mrs. Clément?”

“Who wants to know at this fucking hour?”

“May I come in?” Touton asked gently. “I’m Captain Armand Touton of the Montreal Police Department. I have news about Roger.”

Clearly, the woman had been geared for a more confrontational tone from a police officer. She closed the door only to unlock the chain, then let it fall wide open. Turning her back, she led Touton into the living room, where she glared at him, arms crossed. Despite the severe posture, she appeared to be shivering. “So, you’re Touton,” she stated.

A little voice piped up behind the policeman. “Mommy?”

“Anik. Come here, honey.”

Rubbing sleep from her eyes, a girl, about eight years old in pink Bambi pyjamas, moved towards her mother. She rested her head on the woman’s hip
and wrapped her little arms around her, snuggling in as her mom held a hand around her shoulder. The child looked up at Touton with dark eyes.

“Perhaps Anik should wait in her room,” Touton suggested, suddenly unsure of himself.

“She stays.” She eyed him up and down. “What do you want?”

“I have bad news.”

“No,” she said. Her face, that quickly, went pale, and the woman stepped back and found the chair behind her. She managed to pull her olive-green housecoat more tightly around herself, then gathered the child closely to her side. “Did you kill him? Were you the one?”

The cop was momentarily stunned. “No.” Then he realized that the question had probably been justified. “It had nothing to do with the police. But I’m sorry to report, Madame—”

“No—”

“That your husband is deceased.”

She said “No” twice more, yet something in her manner indicated to Touton that she was not a woman to deny the truth for long. Her body began to quake. She had to heave to catch a breath. Her chin and lips quivered a moment before she tightly clamped her jaw. The child held on to her, and he could tell by the way the woman’s head slumped forward and the pain rose up in her eyes that this day had not been entirely unexpected. She had anticipated the moment. Knowing what her husband did for a living, that he took large risks, she had lain awake through many long nights, awaiting the sound of his footsteps and a key in the lock, her heart clamped tight with dread. Only after he had fumbled with his clothing in the dark and his weight had eased down beside her would her thorax begin to unclench. This time, his footsteps would not arrive on their ramshackle stoop. This time, her fears had been confirmed.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the detective murmured.

Madame Clément pushed her child away from herself gently to dab her eyes on the sleeve of her housecoat. She gazed upon her daughter, her eyes filling with tears again, her anguish apparent. At the sight of her mom in such distress, the girl also wept, although she did not know why. For her, “deceased” held no meaning.

“Your papa …,” the woman said, then could go no further.

Confused and distressed now, the daughter, Anik, placed her small head against her mom’s and held her tightly, as if to squeeze the tears and the obvious pain right out of her.

Touton sat down opposite the mother and child. He had felt uncomfortable looming above them, unable to approach.

“What happened?” the woman managed to ask. Her voice was barely audible.

The captain of the Night Patrol explained what he could, letting her know that her husband had been stabbed and that the case would be given the full attention of the police. He described the murder weapon, but refrained from suggesting that Roger himself might have been the thief who took the knife from the Sun Life Building. He had no evidence of that, and this was not the time to be accusing her dead husband of criminal activity.

Instead, he asked the most routine of investigative questions. “Do you know anyone, Madame, who might want to do such a thing to your husband?”

She had further difficulty breathing a moment, but commenced to pull herself together. As she spoke, she absently combed her child’s hair with her fingers, an unconscious habit, and the girl faced Touton while sitting in the chair alongside her mom.

“You, or any cop, that’s my first choice. Second choice, goons from this or that mob … take your pick. Politicians—municipal, provincial, federal—they’d be next on my list. You should investigate any businessman who has it in for unionists, even if he’s hired Roger to bust up strikes in the past. So, yeah, cops, goons, politicians, businessmen. More or less in that order. I don’t think the Church had anything against him, so I’ll rule out priests, but you never know, and working people were on his side. Every friend he’s ever had would die for him, so it was none of them. Does that narrow it down, Captain?”

Touton knew a few things about Carole Clément. Roger had talked about her often, his love for her clearly impassioned and devoted. As well, the cop had culled information from her police record. She had been in jail for organizing strikes among seamstresses. The trade offered the lowest-paying jobs for women, in the most difficult conditions, and usually only immigrants
took the work. The sweatshops were primitive, the labour physically debilitating, the threat of dismissal for the slightest fault ever-present. After she had become a mom, Carole had taken on piecework at home, partly to be close to her daughter, Roger had said, but also because no one in the industry would knowingly hire her. Friends had seen to it that she found work without the bosses being aware of who actually performed the labour.

“Piecework’s no better,” Roger had told him. “You get paid for what you do dead perfect, not for your time. The bosses? They know a woman’s got to be home to look after her kids, that they don’t got options in life. The good part is, no boss is looking over her shoulder now, checking a stitch, or feeling up her tits—if anybody does that now, it’s me—but at the same time, she’s got to work fast and accurate or she won’t earn a dime. Rights? Hunh? What rights? Carole’s organizing pieceworkers now, but in secret. Everything’s secret or the work gets cut off. It’ll be one mean, long fight.”

“As you know, Madame,” Touton spoke in a low, gentle voice, “your husband had a tough job. He made enemies. That’s what I’m asking about. Who carried a grudge? Anyone? Also, his business partners, shall we say, they might have gone against him. Was he worried about anything like that?”

“You mean, was he worried that his business partners—what you call them—maybe found out he was a stool pigeon working for you? Yeah, he worried about that. Did anybody find out? How would I know? The first clue for something like that would be Roger gets a knife stuck in his chest.” The words had come out defiantly, but once they were spoken she collapsed into tears. This time, the daughter was alert to a dire possibility. “Is Daddy coming?” she asked.

Carole responded with tears and hugs, and Armand Touton steeled himself so that a surprising tremor wouldn’t trouble him as well. The daughter’s presence—prompting him to remember all that Roger had said about her—broke his heart.