The Storm Murders (3 page)

He could try a well-aimed punch to the thief’s prominent jaw, except that his ribs remained sore from the horse kick and the punch undoubtedly would hurt him more. Besides, he’d not swung at anybody in decades and who knew if he could still put much behind the blow. And the guy was showing off his gun, so he might be shot for his trouble, which his wife, for one, would not appreciate. After all, it was only a bloody watch. Albeit a Rolex. So he tried something else. He stood in the doorway and didn’t let the crook out without first having a word.

“Hi, there,” he said.

“You old fuck, get out of my way,” sneered the thief, a belligerent, unwary lad.

Old
. Cinq-Mars hoped the guy didn’t recognize him and therefore wasn’t submitting a comment on his retirement. Standing in the doorway of the slightly subterranean shop a step up from the miscreant, his six-foot-three-inch frame towered above the imp who stood at a chubby five-seven. He could stare down the immensity of his impressive nose and assume that that would have an intimidating effect upon the man nervously, if defiantly, gazing up at him.

“How’re you doing?” he asked. From his pocket he withdrew a stick of gum—the miscreant flinched—casually unwrapped it, folded the stick in half to more easily drop it into his mouth, and did so. “My name’s
É
mile Cinq-Mars. What’s yours?”

Although unwilling to tell him, the jewel thief no longer insisted that he get out of his way. Cinq-Mars noticed that the man’s glance seemed to trip over his nose. His massive honker was always his particular identifier, both because it deserved to be, but also because the city’s cartoonists loved drawing his beak with comic exaggeration. In any case, the thief was undergoing a change of heart and seemed willing to talk.

“Heard you retired, I heard.”

“It’s no secret. Is that why you’re here? You think it’s safe to steal now?”

“No, but—”

“But what?”

“I got a gun. Like you can see. Do you? No, you’re retired. You done your part. So maybe you should get out of my way and go play
bocce
or something.”

He liked this jewel thief. His argument revealed a certain innate consideration for another person. “Maybe I should. Get out of your way, at least, but maybe you might want to consider a few things first. Such as, friendly advice, if you shoot me with that thing—I mean, how many cops do you know just by their names? I never showed you my shield, because you’re right, I don’t have one, I’m retired. But shoot me? Oh man. Do you have any idea the grief that falls on your head for that? Brought on by cops. By prosecutors and judges. By the man in the street, even. Your own family might not forgive you. With so many cops in jail now, you might not get a break on the inside. Don’t count on it. Cop killer? You want that on your sheet, do you?”

The thief’s posture and expression indicated that he didn’t, not really. But he came up with an idea. “I could just wound you, like. Like maybe in the leg.”

“Are you telling me that I won’t find your mug shot in a stack of jewel-thief portraits? Sure I will. No, if you’re going to shoot me, you want me dead.”

Cinq-Mars won that argument as well.

“So, you know, this is like none of your business,” the thief maintained, as if to appeal to his sense of fairness, if not of justice.

“That’s where you’re wrong. I know it’s unfortunate, this is bad luck for you, but I saw you put my watch in your bag. It’s in for repairs. I’m here to pick it up. I could tell you that it has sentimental value, but that would be a lie. Still. It’s my watch. Not yours.”

Barely into his thirties, the man’s hair was noticeably thinning. As an adolescent he had bad skin and coming of age he did some time, Cinq-Mars could tell, just by the look of his face, the pallor and texture. Twin gold rings graced an earlobe—enough of an identifier to get him back into prison for a future crime, if the guy proved smart enough to abandon this heist.

The owner of the store, bent behind a counter, seemed baffled by the exchange, but acquiesced to allowing it to play out.

“So. Why don’t I just give you back your watch then? We forget about it.”

A relatively generous offer. Cinq-Mars weighed it quickly. “At my age? I’m not going to start taking bribes now. Not after all these years. Just leave everything behind and we’ll let this one pass.”

“All of it? You want me to give back—”

“You might be holding the bag, friend, but the contents don’t belong to you.”

The crook seemed to consider his circumstances. “Then what?”

“Then walk out of here.”

“I get to walk?”

“Run, even. That’s up to you. I don’t have a gun. Or a badge. I can’t arrest you. Put the bag down and none of this ever happened. If you don’t put it down—do you think I don’t have connections? Do you think the whole police department, or any police department anywhere in the world, won’t come down on you like a ton of bricks?” He didn’t like that analogy so took a second stab at it. “Like a stampede of wild horses?” He didn’t like that one either but gave up. “Cops gave me that watch. They won’t be impressed with you. I know you’re not too bright but you can still make a half-assed smart decision, can’t you?”

The man agreed that he could do that. He also wanted to argue the issue of his intelligence, and Cinq-Mars was thinking that that was a low blow, one quite possibly untrue, but in the end the crook let it go and put the bag down.

Cinq-Mars stepped aside.

The thief couldn’t believe it and, not fully believing it, when he got outside, he ran, kicking up his heels with something akin to glee, as if he was stealing the Crown Jewels when really he wasn’t swiping a thing. In terms of his profession he was having a bad day at work, but that perception hadn’t dawned on him as yet.

More joyful still was the jeweler. Five-two, he was barely visible above the countertops. He came out from behind their shelter and embraced the towering ex-cop, his head merely halfway up his midriff. Then he held him by the biceps at arm’s length. Gazing up at him with supreme happiness and an abject adoration, he offered him dinner. Hockey tickets in the reds. Italian wine, but more importantly, the finest olive oils. “Stuff you don’t get in stores.” Cinq-Mars declined. After all, he explained, he didn’t do anything. The jeweler hugged him again, then sneezed, then got up on his tiptoes and the ex-cop politely leaned down to be kissed on both cheeks. Cinq-Mars thanked him and the jeweler kissed both his cheeks again, then coughed, then sneezed once more and apologized for having the flu, which was transmitted to Cinq-Mars as part of his current run of bad luck and developed soon enough into a cocktail of flu, sore ribs, and finally, in a week’s time, pneumonia.

The pneumonia took longer to be gone than the ribs did to heal, although the ribs hurt like hell whenever he sneezed, coughed, blew his nose, or even evacuated his bowels.

At least he was retired. Going to work would have been a killer.

If bad things came in threes then one more turn of nasty luck lay ahead of him, yet when it arrived he could scarcely believe his misfortune. His wife, who was much younger than him and the guiding principal behind his retirement because she really didn’t want him getting himself killed on the job, now let him know that she was thinking about leaving. A head’s up. At least she’d not made a definitive decision to decamp.

Thank goodness for small mercies—he was counting on bad luck to come only in threes. He’d swallowed his full dose. He didn’t want the breakup to occur.

To that end he was staying around the house a lot, so that when the phone rang on a mild and cloudy day, a few flurries in the morning, just an inch predicted for later that afternoon, he was home to answer. He put down a crossword puzzle which wasn’t going well either. He’d never attempted one prior to retiring, and had yet to complete one. “I got it,” he called through the house.

Sandra didn’t respond. She was taking it upon herself to scrub every pot in the kitchen. Her husband chose not to question why.

“Cinq-Mars,” he said into the receiver. Sandra frequently admonished him but old habits were difficult to scuttle. She suggested that a simple hello would suffice, but in any case, if he really did feel the need to announce himself, he might include his first name, as only friends were likely to be calling now.

“And telemarketers,” he pointed out.

“Why reveal your identity to them?”

He didn’t see why not but that was another argument not worth the trouble.

“Hi there,
É
mile, it’s Bill.”

“Bill!” Mathers. His longtime partner, who inherited his rank after Cinq-Mars left the force. “How are you?”

Pot in hand, Sandra wandered through to the living room, curious about the call. Pleasantries went on as the two men caught up on department scuttlebutt, but her intuition kept her nearby. As the small-talk concluded, Cinq-Mars kept listening with the phone to his ear while Bill Mathers prattled on. She heard her husband say, “I don’t know how I can help with that,” and then he listened some more. He was growing impatient with the call, rather than intrigued, which she counted as a good thing. Finally, he conceded, “All right. Sure. Come over.… Actually, I muck out stalls at that hour. Can you make it for three?… Okay. See you then.… Yeah. It’ll be good to see you, too. Bye, now.”

He hung up.

Cinq-Mars returned to his crossword, though he knew she was watching.

“I have a very heavy pot in my hands,” Sandra mentioned. “Do I really need to bong you over the head with it?”

“That was Bill. Mathers.”

“I know who it was. What does he want?”

Cinq-Mars folded up the paper neatly and put it down at his hip. No easy way out of this. “He’s coming over at three. He wants to consult with me, but he’s vague about the details. Needs to talk to me in person, apparently. So I said fine. It’s not likely that I’ll be going in to the office or anything like that.”

Sandra continued to dry the heavy pot in her hands. “Okay. Consult. I’ll put something out for you.” She turned back to the kitchen.

“Ah.” Cinq-Mars started to say something, then stopped.

Sandra also stopped, and faced him again. “What now?”

“He’s not coming alone. Another man will be with him.”

“Who?” she asked.

“No one I know.”

“Who?” she asked again.

Cinq-Mars pursed his lips. “Sandra, it’s only a consultation.”

“Who,
É
mile?” she insisted.

He sighed. “Some FBI agent, apparently. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Sandra seemed to receive the news as if she expected it. “Lovely,” she said.

“Sandra—”

“
É
mile.”

“It’s a consultation!”

“It’s fine. I’ll put something out for the three of you. Unless the FBI is bringing in the marines?”

She returned to the kitchen, and Cinq-Mars, eventually, to the crossword. He didn’t know how people got through these things. He was smart, he was well-read, adept at the language even though he was working in English and not his mother tongue. How did people get their heads around these infernal things? He was stumped by the next word and put his pencil down.
What’s a five-letter word for nincompoop
, he wanted to ask, but he was really thinking that whatever it was that Bill wanted, he was going to have to turn him down flat.

Anyway, Sandra would probably suggest an answer:
É
mile
.

THREE

The former Montreal city detective weighed more than his wife’s concerns about his imminent and violent death before choosing to retire. He sharpened a pencil and composed a pair of lists. A “Why Not Stay On Forever?” list and a “Get Out of Dodge While You Can!” list. On the latter he wrote:

1. Most of the time, Sandra wants me more alive than dead.

É
mile Cinq-Mars put a star beside his first selection, which remained his singular choice for quite a few days before he got into the swing of things and added further items. In time, he erased the star. He also decided that a numerical system was not indicative of the order of importance, only the order in which his thoughts occurred to him, for although his first choice was probably the most important reason to quit, he failed to differentiate among the other entries as to which ones were more, or less, vital than the next.

2. The long commute.

He considered adding subcategories, such as the long commute in winter, but realized that hot summer days, the traffic made worse by highway, overpass, and bridge construction, were more tedious and no less dangerous, and the drives in winter were sometimes so magical he wanted those trips to never end.

3. The new idiots at the top.

Dwelling on that one, he thought it might become his most emphatic and irrefutable motivation to retire, except that it soon got into a toss-up with another competing issue regarding police personnel.

4. The new idiots at the bottom.

New recruits were not necessarily dumber than they used to be, and in fact they seemed generally brighter, but they also carried a greater sense of entitlement and were far less malleable. They were less willing to be taught a damn thing, and he no longer possessed the patience to come up against that hurdle when dealing with them.

5. I no longer have the patience.

6. I can spend more time with the horses.

7. I can spend more time with Sandra.

This is when he decided that the numerical order was merely random and he erased the star from Item 1 and made a mental note to himself not to show the list to his wife in its current state.

8. Quit now and avoid a possible promotion.

9. Quit now and avoid a possible demotion.

10. If my brain or my eyesight don’t fail me first, my back might.

A compelling argument. His brain and his eyesight were fine, and even his long-standing arthritis wasn’t so bad, but his back was becoming a chronic, growing and cantankerous issue. During any flare-up on the job he was incapacitated, and he hated that. Which is why, when Sergeant-Detective William “Bill” Mathers arrived on his doorstep in the company of an unknown FBI agent from south of the border, Cinq-Mars was down on his living room carpet faithfully performing gyrations taught to him by an osteopath. Sandra answered the bell while he remained stationary, one leg straight out behind him, the arm on his opposite side straight out before him, his weight on the other hand and on one knee, eyes front like a pointer with a duck dead in its sights. Sphincter and tummy muscles tucked and taut, he sustained the position for a requisite ten-count, then relaxed and remembered to breathe.