River City (36 page)

A thought, bursting from the back of his mind, proved true—the burning car belonged to him. That was his Chevrolet! Lillian, his wife, having the presence of mind to first throw on a robe, joined him outside.

“It’s our car,” he said, still shocked. “They blew it up.”

“Who’s they?” she asked, stunned also. He seemed to know. “Why?”

Their son was calling for his dad. Both parents reacted and returned indoors, but Fleury headed straight for the phone. He put a call through to Armand Touton, captain of the Night Patrol.

“They blew up my car!” he shouted the moment the man answered.

Behind him, sheltering her son’s head against her thigh, his wife demanded again, angrily this time, “Who’s ‘they’?”

“Who’s this?” asked the brusque voice at the other end of the line.

“Captain Touton! It’s me! Gaston!”

Perhaps his excited expression had made his voice unrecognizable.

“Gaston who?” Touton asked.

“Fleury! Gaston Fleury! From Policy! Captain, it’s me!”

“Somebody blew up your car?” Touton asked.

“My Bel Air! It’s on fire! I need the fire department! Send the Night Patrol!”

Touton took charge then, jotting down the particulars and telling him to settle down and stay away from the windows.

“Why?” Fleury inquired.

“In case someone’s trying to kill you.”

Fleury dropped the phone and ran out to the balcony to usher his wife and child inside, for they’d wandered out to survey the commotion. He closed the door and heaved the drapes across it and the windows. Then he returned to the phone and heard Touton calling his name.

“I’m back,” he said. “I’m here.”

“Don’t do that to me again,” Touton told him, irritated that he had suddenly vanished from the line. “Now stay put and stay calm. I’ll be right over.”

Fleury felt the concussive surge of a second blast.

“What was that?” Touton demanded.

“The gas tank?” Fleury suggested.

Upon arriving at the scene, Touton confessed to being perplexed. This sort of thing did not happen. He knew of no organization or criminal who specialized in making bombs. Cops rarely were targeted for serious intimidation or violence.

Everyone knew why.

When cops were challenged in the heat of the moment—fired upon during a bank holdup, or shot at attempting to arrest a fugitive—the department reacted with deadly force. Anyone committing violence against an officer would be tracked down by every other cop, and, if he didn’t surrender upon first warning, shot dead.

Everyone understood the rules.

A cop posed for photographers over a slain suspect, a pool of blood seeping into a gutter. “Around here,” he said, “we don’t tolerate no monkey business.”

The comment made Captain Armand Touton wince. If cops tolerated anything, it was monkey business. The comment implied that minor as well as serious infractions would be answered by bullets. Such was the culture of the times. In Montreal, cops aided and abetted the crime syndicates, but when it came to dealing with freelance hoodlums, they meted out their own justice, and the tough guys knew it and accepted it as the code of the streets.

In this environment, that a cop had had his car blown apart established a precedent.

A chilling event.

“What’ve you been up to?” Touton asked the officer from Policy.

“Nothing!” Fleury objected. He assumed that the captain was questioning his integrity, asking if he’d played a few poker hands with the bad guys and lost. “Just … you know.”

“What do I know?”

“I’ve been investigating government cars.”

Touton grunted. “I thought you’d given that up months ago.”

“I don’t quit,” Fleury proclaimed.

The captain considered this. “Maybe you’re closer to something than you realize. We’ll track what you’ve been doing. Maybe your investigation’s made somebody nervous. Federal or provincial?”

“Both. And private—on the side.”

“Figures,” Touton grunted. “Why make it easy on ourselves? How’s your family doing?”

Fleury took a deep breath. “Lillian started out okay. Now she’s getting scared. My son started out scared, but now he’s just cranky.”

The captain nodded. “See to them. We’ll let the so-called experts go to work, but don’t expect much. Nobody knows nothing about bombers. This is something new. Something new is always difficult to trace.”

Fleury’s wife appeared on the front stoop. “Captain? Telephone.”

He took the call inside and a moment later was striding quickly out of the apartment, taking the stairs in awkward bounds.

“What’s wrong?” Fleury called to him from his balcony.

“They went after my house, too!”

“Who did?” Fleury’s wife wanted to know as Touton’s car raced off.

Cruisers had made it to Armand Touton’s flat ahead of him, and his heart beat high in his throat as he charged up the stairs. His wife was in the kitchen, dressed in a robe, surrounded by perspiring uniformed officers.

“Marie-Céleste!” Smiling up at him, she made a motion Touton misinterpreted. He thought she was going to faint, when in fact she was seeking his kiss. “My God! Easy! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Armand. A little shaken.”

“Is she all right?” he demanded to know of the officers.

They all answered at once, saying that his wife was unhurt. Finally, Marie-Céleste cupped his cheek to command his attention and told him, “Armand. I’m fine. I’m not hurt at all. Nobody’s been hurt. There’s no damage.”

Getting that one point straight, he was finally able to ask, “What happened?”

Vandals had smeared black paint across the front door to the triplex that contained his flat, then they’d pounded on the door and rung the bell until Marie-Céleste had awakened. The culprits ran off the moment she’d turned on the lights. She had called the police—Armand, at first, but he hadn’t been in. The first cops arriving on the scene were the ones to discover the artwork.

“Did they write any words? Any threats?” He was hoping that the act had been random—a bunch of kids, impatient for Halloween. He was hoping that the vandalism was unrelated to Fleury’s burnt-out Chevy.

“Sir, not really,” the senior of the uniforms in the kitchen said, “but there is something I want to show you.”

Touton followed him outside. Streetlights illuminated the white steel door well enough, but an officer passed the detective a flashlight. Not a great deal of time or imagination had been deployed to create the mess. Black paint only, arbitrarily slapped on with a three-inch brush. Nothing could be discerned from the design except to assume that there was no design.

“Look here,” the officer said. In his distracted state of mind, Touton couldn’t put his finger on what was unusual about the man. He was grey-haired, yet not old. Around forty, in decent physical shape. Touton’s initial impression told him he was probably a father and an honourable guy. As the man pointed to a spot on the door, he noticed the man’s wedding band, perhaps because he didn’t know what else he was meant to be observing. Then he noticed the spot being indicated. Small enough to be barely discernible, probably etched by a stick dipped in paint—a swastika.

Not for another moment would Touton think the act had been happenstance. This was indeed an attack directed upon his home.

“Thanks,” he murmured to the cop.

“Sure thing.”

Touton comprehended at that moment the odd aspect to the cop that he had missed: he was English. Among older cops, he knew a few detectives who were English, but he didn’t know any English cops who made a career on the beat.

He went back inside, and this time wrapped his wife in his arms and held her tightly. He dismissed the other officers from inside the premises and ordered two cars to patrol the neighbourhood to see what, if anything, moved. Touton assigned the senior English patrolman to guard his home until the end of his shift and commanded other officers to report back to their duty sergeant.

“You’re going back to work?” Marie-Céleste asked him once they were alone. She thought that he might make an exception on this one night.

He told her about Detective Fleury. “We got off lucky.”

“You were at work. Your car wasn’t here. That’s why we were luckier.”

“I have to stay on top of things. The homes of cops are being attacked. We can’t have that.”

“For sure. Go, Armand. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She was trying to be agreeable, but her lack of enthusiasm for his departure remained apparent.

“I’ll tuck you in,” he said. “Stay awhile. Until you sleep.”

“In this heat? After all this? I won’t be sleeping. I certainly don’t need tucking in. I’ll be lying on top of the sheets.”

Despite her protest, he saw her to bed, and kissed her good night before returning to work. The kiss was lovely. He wanted to stay.

In a drearier part of town, where hookers knelt to do their business in alleys next to pissing drunks, Detective Andrew Sloan was having to deal with a grisly mess. A murder victim had not died easily, having put up a fight. Judging by the bloodied Louisville Slugger left behind at the scene, a baseball bat had been the principal murder weapon, although punctures along the spine and through the man’s hand suggested that a thin spike had also been deployed—probably an ice pick. Electrical refrigeration was rapidly becoming universal, yet ice was still used in thousands of homes. The ice pick remained a common household utensil on the tougher streets.

“Know him well?” Sloan asked the beat cop, Lajolie, a surly character with a dark reputation. He usually came in from his shifts with his knuckles bloodied. He liked it that way, relished getting physical with garbage scroungers and young toughs. He wasn’t into talking to the riffraff much, preferring instead to shove guys into a wall to get them moving. Nobody suggested that he wasn’t a ballsy scraper, somebody to have on your side if negotiations got feisty. But some bad talk went on around him, that he preferred to work the Main because he made the whores pay a toll in kind. Others suggested that he seemed to spend more money than the average beat cop earned. So far, the department had let it go.

Lajolie shrugged. He didn’t like this detective. Sloan worked on the Night Patrol, and those guys were serious about cleaning up the city. A wacko squad. The way Lajolie looked at it, a dirty city was good for business. Besides, nobody trusted Armand Touton, the head of that bunch. He was a reformer, and reformers were suspected of selling their own kin down the St. Lawrence River.

The joke that went around the locker room suggested that the reformers even sold out their own, but at a discount.

“Don’t know him?” Sloan persisted. He couldn’t accept that Lajolie wasn’t on a first-name basis with everyone down here.

“I know him a bit. Used to be a doorman at the Copa. Doorman—call it what you want. Different name, same shit. He’s a leg-breaker. He’s got a record, but something’s odd in his story. In some strange way, it’s like he’s connected to the Church. Some people called him ‘The Bishop.’ He hasn’t caused any trouble in a while that we know about, but he hangs out with the same guys we spot around polling booths at election time. If he was voting, he wasn’t doing it only once.”

“He’s got a name?”

“Michel Vimont.”

“Seen him around lately?” Sloan asked.

“Not so much. One time. Outside some club. Leaning on a car. Some limo. I told him not to scratch the paint. He laughed. Said it was his new profession.”

“What profession?”

“Driver. Chauffeur. Different name, same job, you know what I mean?”

This time, Sloan wasn’t sure. “What do you mean?”

“Once a thug, always a thug. ‘Chauffeur,’ it’s another word for bodyguard … an arm-breaker.”

Sloan got it. “Who for?”

Lajolie shook his head. “Never waited around for the fat-ass to come out. Assholes who can’t drive their own cars, they’re all the same to me.”

“The limo … was it black?”

Lajolie thought the question was stupid. What did it matter? “Yeah. Black. Think so. Probably black. Just don’t bet the paycheque on that, okay?”

Sloan nudged his fedora higher on his head. “Okay,” he said. “Ask around. Work your contacts on the street. I’d like to know who his boss was. Keep on it until you find out.”

“You bet.”

The alley was a good place for muggings and murder. Garbage cans rattled around at night, fed by the greasy-spoon restaurants or knocked over by drunks. Roughhouse noise rarely alerted anyone. He’d canvass the neighbourhood, but finding a witness did not look promising. As well, the incident had
occurred around closing time—the blood on the pavement hadn’t fully coagulated—so the street had been noisy, the pedestrians drunk—a good time for a bloody brawl to the death.

Sloan walked over to a second uniform—Lajolie’s partner for the night, a rookie by the name of Leduc who was filling in for the regular guy on his summer vacation. Just that short walk was messy, the slime of rotten vegetables underfoot and the stink of piss and vomit and cat spray. Old newsprint was stuck to the pavement, pressed down under organic compost that may have included human excrement as well as dog feces.

“Who the hell found the body way back here?”

“Blow-job Granny. We let her go.”

“Who?”

“She blows old guys for draft beer. Lajolie told me that anyway. She’s old. Seventy, maybe. Looks a hundred and two. Her johns must be totally smashed.”

“So she took some guy back here?”

“That’s the story. She had no reason to lie.”

“You let her go before she talked to a detective?”

“Lajolie says she won’t go far. She never does. She’s real loony, Detective. And a little disgusting. We didn’t exactly want her around.”

“What about the guy she was with?”

“Lost his cookies and beat it. Lajolie paid Granny a buck for giving us a call.”

“Okay. Is there a telephone around some place?”

Over the phone, Sloan was informed that his boss wasn’t available, that he’d gone off on a pursuit of his own. He then asked to have the victim’s record run down. “Michel Vimont, that’s the name.” He also wanted to know who the coroner was going to be, which was not usually his business, and when he wasn’t satisfied with the answer he requested a replacement.