by James A Ross
I wonder if we in the church do a disservice to our young by feeding them a watered-down theology in the form of Catechism and then ignoring the polishing stone of reason. Man has puzzled over the same basic questions for thousands of years: Who are we? Why are we here? What are we supposed to do while we’re here and what, if anything is next? If you’re not careful, you can disappear into your own navel trying to answer such questions. But if you’re inclined by nature to ask, as you seem to be, then it’s helpful to know the location of the stones in the path that others have tripped on before you.
Give me a call if you want to chat. I can be reached at the number on the back.
Kind Regards,
Father Gauss’
Tom flipped through the pages of the well-thumbed volume, noting the penciled underlinings and marginalia. The letter didn’t sound like a man in serious trouble had written it. But it did sound very much like all of the serious communications Tom had had from Fr. Gauss over the years: kindly, but pointed—with an undertone of challenge. Prepared to be patient if the challenge were not immediately taken up.
He put the book and letter in the glove compartment, and drove back to Joe’s cabin. “Okay,” he muttered to himself. “But not now.”
* * *
Bonnie handed Tom the phone as soon as he walked in the door. She looked as worn out as her husband.
“Tom? This is Moe Silverstein. Tanner gave me this number and filled me in on your little problem.”
“Glad to hear you call it little.”
“Poor choice of words. Look, when can you get back to New York?”
Tom glanced at Bonnie. “I’m kind of up to my ass in alligators right now, Moe.” He explained briefly about Joe being in the hospital and Mary with a broken leg.
“You can’t catch a break, can you?” Moe sympathized. “Well I hate to add to your troubles, but there’s going to be a line in tomorrow’s New York Post, Page Six gossip column about a rising star at a certain white shoe Manhattan law firm who’s got himself tangled in a nasty government procurement scandal. No names. But that’s how our DA works: soften the ground with strategic leaks to friendly columnists so there’ll be good coverage when the indictments come down.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“I need you to get back here so we can get to work. You’ve got to find everyone who was with you on that Egyptian project and get them to give affidavits that you weren’t counsel to that Eurocon subsidiary. Then you need to do an interview with a reporter I’ve got lined up who’s agreed to do a piece about your charitable fundraising. Basically, you need to get back here and get in the fight.”
Tom hesitated. “Can you give me a few days, Moe?”
“It’s your ass, Tom. But they’re already chewing on it.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
Tom looked at Bonnie. She looked beaten. “Do you have to go?” she whispered.
“I’ll put if off as long as I can.”
* * *
Joe lay on his back with an IV dripping into his arm and a thin, damp sheet stuck to his chest. A wallet and cell phone held down a pile of papers on the table next to the hospital bed. Someone had removed the line from the hospital phone and plugged it into the back of a lap-top computer. “You look like ten miles of hard road, brother.”
Joe pried open an eyelid, “Crank me up.”
Tom moved a night table that held a stack of files, and pressed a button on the side of the bed. “You moving your office in here too?”
Joe slid his torso upright. “I asked Bonnie to grab the stuff on my desk. I can’t keep my eyes open to read it, though.”
Tom pulled a plastic chair up next to the bed. “Do they know what you’ve got yet?”
“If they do, they’re not telling me.”
“Your pal, Dr. Sayed, asked me where you’d been over the last forty-eight hours. I told him what I knew, but it didn’t seem to mean anything to him.”
“They’ll figure it out.”
“He says you might have been exposed to some kind of ‘toxin.’ And Mom threw in something about the Hellers and homemade weed killer, and you being in here last month with basically the same thing.”
“Shit.” It was a sigh, not a curse.
“I didn’t tell her about you pulling more crops a few days ago. But I did tell Sayed.”
“What?”
“That you were out in the woods pulling up marijuana plants the day before I got here. You told me on the way in from the airport, remember? Before we found Billy.”
“Oh.”
“And the doctor said that one of those cuts isn’t healing.”
“Tommy…”
“What?”
“I’m not processing too well right now.”
Tom put his hand on Joe’s sheeted thigh. “Sorry. Maybe I should come back later. Go back to sleep.”
Joe took a breath, started to nod and then fumbled for the button at the side of the bed. “I need help.”
Tom reached for the side of the bed. “Up or down?”
“No. Shit. Leave it.” Joe waived at the laptop and stack of files. “I mean help with this.”
“Your mail?”
“Finding Billy’s killer.”
Tom didn’t respond—with enthusiasm or anything else.
“I can’t do it alone, Tommy. Not now, lying here puking my guts out. I can’t even keep my eyes open.”
Tom folded his arms and spoke to the uncurtained window that framed the distant view of Coldwater lake. “I have to get back to New York, Joe.” He explained about the Eurocon mess and the phone call from the white collar criminal lawyer telling him to get his ass back to Dodge.
Joe’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Does this mean you might end up living like a normal person?”
“Only if I can keep my ass out of jail.”
“Are they serious?”
“They’re acting like it. In the meantime, you’re laying here worthless and whoever killed Billy is out covering his tracks. I need to get back to New York and you need to hand this over to the state troopers before whoever killed Billy gets too big a lead.”
Joe lifted his head and wheezed, “Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Oh for God’s sake, Tommy. I let a pack of strange dogs in here and they’ll go sniffing down every trail they find—not just the ones that might lead to Billy’s killer.”
“They’ll sort it out.”
“Don’t be a Boy Scout.”
“What are you worried about, brother?”
Joe pressed his forearms into the bed. “I thought maybe you and I could do this together, now that the gods have cut you loose.”
“I have to get back, Joe. The state troopers will be here sooner or later, regardless of what you want. As soon as they find out that Coldwater’s only cop has been lying in a hospital bed for two days with a murderer running loose, they’ll swarm you. Snarling and pissing on the high bushes wont’ scare them off, either. Not with you lying there in just a paper nightgown.”
Joe glared. “Then we have to act fast, don’t we?” He waved a hand at the stack of papers, as if the matter were decided. “There should be an address in one of those files for the lab in Montreal that Sharp mentioned. I want you to drive up there, find this Dr. Hassad and find out if there’s a connection between him and Billy.”
Tom riffled the stack of papers. Halfway down were copies of the letters he had seen in the boathouse, and beneath those, an autopsy report. He started to read it.
“Hey! Not that one! Put it down.”
Tom dropped the folder onto the bed. “You want to do this alone?”
Joe looked like he was about to say something rude, but thought better of it. “I want you to be objective when you talk to this Hassad character, keep your ears open and stick to the script. The more you know the harder that will be.” Joe sank into the pillows. “I need your help, Tommy. Hell, I can’t do anything without it now. But letting you do this wi
thout direction makes about as much sense as you letting me do the same on one of your gazillion dollar business deals.”
“You just sounded a bit too much like the old man for a second. That was never my favorite tone.”
Joe lowered his chin. “Point taken. Look, if you’re feeling ambitious, remember the three lovelies who were sitting at the back of the church at Billy’s funeral?”
“Hard to forget them.”
“They drove down from Montreal in a rented car. There’s a copy of a driver’s license they used to rent it at the bottom of that stack and a business card with the same name as the license. How’s your French? Other than ‘je t’aime.’”
Tom suppressed a salacious image of French co-counsel. “Making us work summers in Québec was one of the old man’s better ideas.”
“If you get a chance, you might also stop by and see if Billy’s friends along the rue La Fontaine have any idea who might have been angry enough to want to stuff him in a sleeping bag and dump him in the lake.”
“La Fontaine?”
“Just south of l’Université de Quebec near that place where you waited tables that summer. Le Village. Can’t miss it. Biggest gay neighborhood in North America.”
“You’re full of surprises, brother.”
Joe gestured toward the door as his head slumped into the pillow. “Watch their eyes.”
CHAPTER 18
Though Tom regularly enjoyed the hospitality of the world’s financial capitols, the city where he had spent the young-man-loose-in-the-city-summers of his late teens and early twenties was the place that still made his heart weightless. Youthful memories of summertime Montreal were his emotional touchstones: waiting tables in le Quartier Latin, sweating buckets in a third floor walk-up off the l’boulevard St-Laurent, and practicing French with a friendly mademoiselle when the opportunity arose. The corporate mega-deals and dollars that followed came a distant second.
Map Quest located the address Joe had provided somewhere in the rat’s nest of side streets off l’boulevard St-Laurent—the main route north from the harbor and the de facto dividing line between Anglophone and Francophone Montreal. Tom tucked the rental car behind a construction dumpster, stuffed Joe’s scribbled address in his jacket pocket and began to walk a pattern of expanding polygons from the last cross-street on the Map Quest directions.
Two long loops through a handful of neighborhoods killed a quick thirty minutes. One brought him to the environs of l’Université du Québec à Montréal. The other pushed into a neighborhood of head scarves, beards and covered limbs, as if the plunging temperatures soon to come had arrived there early. Signs in Roman script were at a premium. Friendly faces did not exist.
A few unmarked streets south of l’rue Coloniale, he stopped at a table piled with dried fruits and nuts, and shaded by a green and white awning that might have been new when Pierre Trudeau last campaigned through the neighborhood. The number above the door behind the table, and the name carved in stone forty feet above the street, matched the address Joe had given him.
Light behind the door seemed to promise that the shop was open for business; though there was no activity inside. Patrons wandered in and out of a coin laundry next door. A lone customer waited outside the Curry-in-A-Hurry shop on the corner. Tom picked up something that looked like a dried apple and looked around for a scoop or a produce bag. But no one came out of the shop to close the sale. He put the fruit back and tried the door.
He’d once been a frequent patron of Le Main’s neighborhood shops and eateries, ripe with exotic smells, vibrant with primary colors, jammed with boxes covered with unfamiliar writing and wallpapered with posters and calendars of dark pretty faces in modest attire. But nothing like that met him here. A few dusty boxes covered with squiggly writing lined the painted wooden shelves, and the simpering face on the Bollywood calendar behind the counter had been there for months.
“Allez! Ferme!” The shout came from a doorway that lead to a lower level. The shouter wore a salt and pepper beard and mouth full of crooked teeth. Behind him came another man waving a short piece of pointed metal. Both wore flip flops and stained off-white garments which covered them from neck to ankle. Tom focused on the one waving the piece of pointed metal. That it had an electric cord dangling from the handle didn’t make it less threatening.
“Nous sommes ferme!”
“Hello to you too,” said Tom, his voice deliberately calm and nonthreatening. “I’m looking for Dr. Hassad.”
“Closed,” said the other, switching to a thick, guttural English.
Tom shrugged. “He gave this as his address. Also something called U-Labs. I have a message for him.”
The shopkeeper’s thick, dark eyebrows compressed into one. For several seconds his flat brown eyes held Tom’s. “Nous sommes ferme,” he repeated.
Joe might have dragged the pajama-boys into the back room and taught them some manners. But Tom had already achieved what he came for-–the address, the layout and a couple of warm bodies to go with it. What more was he going to get by getting into the mine is bigger than yours confrontation?
Taking a card from his wallet, he scribbled his cell phone number on the back and held it toward the one whose hands were free. “Dr. Hassad is going to want this.”
The two men looked at the card, but neither moved to take it.
“Suit yourself.” Tom laid the card on the counter with the NEUROGENE logo and the name of the company’s owner, Dave Willow, face up. Then he backed slowly out of the store.
* * *
Once outside, Tom paused to get his bearings before heading back toward the street of patisseries and internet cafés he’d passed earlier. As he got closer to l’Village, the scenery began to change from scarves to halter tops and his mood lightened with the couture. At an internet café near the Berri-UQAM metro, he passed a half-hour sipping latte and Googling variations on the names Hassad and U-Labs. The computer spat out the same address that Joe had found, plus a short list of other Hasads and Hassads with Montreal addresses. The one at L’Université de Québec a Montréal seemed a logical place to start.
Tom knew that UQAM did not have a central campus in the Anglo/American model. Like the urban universities of Europe, its buildings cluster in connected neighborhoods, with maps mounted outside the principle buildings to guide disoriented visitors and new matriculates. He stuffed the Hassad addresses in his pocket and went in search of an outdoor map that would show him where to find L’Académie Biochimique.
Joe’s instruction was simple: find out if there’s a connection between Dr. Hassad and Billy Pearce. But Tom wondered about Joe’s assumption that his lawyer brother could conduct a meaningful investigation. Tom knew how to examine a witnesses under oath, prepared and represented by competent counsel. That was a bloodless chess game where the moves are known in advance and the outcome is a matter of who uses them more skillfully under pressure. But the cop game could be the antithesis of bloodless, which Tom well knew from having grown up around it. Sometimes preparation wasn’t possible and trouble could come from any quarter. The minor standoff in the grocery store was a reminder of the difference between a corporate game and a genuine blood sport. The skills needed to excel in one might overlap the other, but they were not identical. Then, as if in response to these directionless musings, came the memory of one of MadDog’s early hunting pointers. You don’t sneak up on rabbits, Tommy. You stomp on the brush pile until they run.
L’Académie Biochimique turned out to be a four story, white brick office building on the south side of boulevard de Maisonneuve about five blocks from the St-Laurent metro. Tom positioned himself across the street and observed several groups of students enter the building past a lone security guard sitting behind a desk with his head buried in a newspaper. When the guard didn’t look up, even to observe a trio of UQAM hotties, Tom crossed the street and entered the building, feeling like the proverbial dog who had chased a car and caught it. Now what?
He gave the thi
rd floor receptionist’s one of Willow’s business cards and announced that he had a package for hand delivery to U-Labs. She picked up the phone and punched a few buttons. “Il-y-a quelqu’un ici a vous voir professer.” She read from the card. “Monsieur Willow de NUROGENE.”
She looked Tom up and down. “2 mètre. 85 kilo. Cheveux brun.
“Black,” Tom muttered to himself.
She gestured toward a corner office at the end of the hall where an unsmiling man stood behind a desk just inside in the doorway. Hassad stood about six feet tall, hollow cheeked with jet-black hair combed back from a high forehead, and was wearing a pressed, charcoal gray suit and Hermes tie that looked absurdly out of place in a cramped academic office. He did not hold out his hand for a package and did not ask Tom to sit. “Qui est vous?” he demanded.
“My apologies for the subterfuge,” said Tom. “I’m here in connection with a police matter in the United States.”
Hassad switched to a crisp British-accented English. “Do you have any identification?”
“None that would mean anything to you.”
Hassad lifted the receiver from the desk phone and murmured into it.
“You’re going to want to talk to me, Professor.”
Hassad held the phone to his ear and waited for the campus operator to retrieve the phone number for university security. “You Americans are a global pestilence.”
“Suit yourself. But you’ve obviously taken care to obscure the connection between you and the names that got me in here. Make that phone call and that obscurity is history.”
Hassad tucked the receiver against his shoulder and scribbled some digits on a pad. “Merci.” He replaced the phone, but remained standing. “And what is this police matter?”
“A homicide investigation.”
“And why do you think I might be helpful?” The voice was snotty, but wary.