Barrington Street Blues

by Anne Emery

  “Let’s go across the street and take a look from there,” I said to Burke.

  The Baird Centre was a nondescript brick building constructed in the sixties for offices. I suspected the Baird people had been able to buy it on the cheap and renovate it to their own specifications. It was set back from the street with an optimistic little garden in front and a driveway running along the side. As soon as we set foot on the property a floodlight came on. I continued to the entrance, went up the front steps, and looked at the Fore-And-Aft. I could see nothing but blackness in the parking lot, which was well out of the floodlight’s range. People on the upper floors may have been able to see a bit better, but I didn’t think so.

  “We’re not going to learn anything here. Let’s call it a night.”

  †

  I could not keep Yvette’s story to myself. If the shootings were murder, and if there was a witness, I had to inform the police. I would give it one more night, then I would call the investigating officer and give him the tip. But, as it turned out, I met up with the police sooner than planned. On Tuesday night, at the Hotel Nova Scotian, there was a fundraiser for the homeless. It was hosted by one of the city’s most prominent do-gooders, Kenneth Fanshaw. Fanshaw had made some serious money in real estate development. And although — or perhaps because — he did not fancy street people lounging around outside his downtown condo developments, he had proposed the building of a new, fully-staffed shelter near the railway station and the hotel. This would complement shelters already in place in other parts of central Halifax.

  Fanshaw was greeting people at the door. A short, compact man with smoothly coiffed dark brown hair, he was dressed down for the occasion. He was usually spotted in pricey European-cut suits; tonight he had on khaki pants, a comfy sweater, and loafers. His wife, Bunnie, was at his side, her perfect teeth bared in a grin, her short blonde hair sprayed up in birdlike tufts.

  “Hey, there!” Kenneth beamed at me. “Your face is familiar, but —”

  “Montague Collins.”

  “Come right on in, Montague, and lay your money down!”

  “I’ll do that.”

  There were casino tables and other booths run by various service clubs and organizations including, I saw, the Halifax Police Department. Fate had delivered me into their hands, so I headed in that direction. I greeted the uniformed cop at the booth, Phil Riley, and we engaged in a bit of banter. Then I delivered my message.

  “I’m representing the families of Corey Leaman and Graham Scott in their suit against the Baird Treatment Centre. I received a tip that there may have been a witness. One of the local hookers. Ever come across a girl named Wanda?”

  He nodded. “Wanda Pollard?”

  “Yeah. If it checks out, this may in fact be what you guys suspected in the first place.”

  “This isn’t shop talk, I hope, gents!” Fanshaw had come up behind me. “Phil,” he said to the officer, “I have you down for a little spiel later on. About the police presence downtown, and their support for the project. That okay with you?”

  “Sure, Ken. As you know, the chief had hoped to be here.”

  “I know. Family crisis. I wished him all the best. Don’t tell him I said so, but you’re a better after-dinner speaker than he is! Must be all that Irish blarney.”

  “Hey, you just let me know how thick you want me to lay it on.”

  “Thanks, Phil.” Fanshaw turned away, and was greeted by another guest.

  “So, Monty,” Phil said, “Wanda may have seen something at the Fore-And-Aft. I’ll get on that first thing tomorrow morning. Appreciate it, especially since —”

  “Right. If it’s true, it blows my case out of the water.”

  “I’ll let you know what we come up with.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  I made my way around the room, lost a few dollars at the crown and anchor, wrote out a cheque and was given a receipt by Bunnie, then stopped for a slice of pizza from a merchant I recognized from Blowers Street. I spied one of my law partners in rapt conversation with the owner of Wigginstaff’s, the trendy, expensive bar and restaurant where I had made my maiden speech as a Q.C. Felicia Morgan laughed up in Chad Heath’s face, touching him lightly on the arm with a hand still brown from a recent trip to Cuba. Felicia had a cloud of black hair and wide-set green eyes; she spent a fortune on her clothes. Another woman approached and hailed Heath. Felicia, without turning to acknowledge the newcomer, shifted her body so the other woman would have to make an obvious effort to break in to the conversation. I recalled that our firm had handled Heath’s divorce from his second wife. He had managed, with our kind assistance, to hang onto the bulk of his assets. I avoided family law myself, but there were some who thrived on it.

  Felicia caught sight of me. “Good evening, Monty! You know Chad, I’m sure.”

  I shook hands with him, and Felicia continued the introduction. “As you know, Chad is the proprietor of Wigginstaff’s. I suspect you’ve spent a few nights there sampling his exquisite selection of wine and spirits.”

  “Caused a scene in there one night,” I allowed.

  “There are no scenes in Wiggie’s, surely. Monty is a partner of mine at Stratton Sommers. He handles some pretty unsavoury characters, Chad. Nobody you know, I’m sure. I concentrate on mergers and acquisitions myself. Then, when I’ve had enough of that, I peel off the pinstripes, wriggle into my bikini, and jet off to the islands for two weeks of sand, salt and, well, whatever else comes up. Now, Chad, I heard that you —”

  I eased myself out of earshot and headed for the door.

  †

  Bill Groves was out of his oxygen tent and sitting in a wheelchair when I appeared the next morning in his Camp Hill Hospital room. His hair was sparse, his face drawn and grey.

  “Mr. Groves? My name is Collins. Monty Collins. I’m a lawyer working on a case, and I’m wondering if you can help me.”

  His head, body, and chair turned as one unit. “Eh?”

  I repeated my introduction and got on with my question. “I was in the Legion looking for someone who fought in Europe in World War Two, and a Mrs. Dryden suggested I look you up. She asked me to give you these.” I handed him a carton of cigarettes, and his eyes lit up.

  “Thanks. How can I help you?”

  “I’m hoping to learn something about the Luger P-08.”

  “The Luger? I have a few of those myself. What is it you want to know?”

  “One of those pistols turned up at a crime scene. We think it was stolen, and we’d like to trace it.”

  “Better not be one of mine! Hand me that phone, will you, Colin?” I didn’t correct him on the name. I picked up the telephone and set it on his right knee. “My son lives at my place now. Might as well, eh? I can’t keep the place up if I’m stuck in here. He never paid any attention to my gun cabinet, but I’ll get him to check. Christ knows, he’s not doing anything else. Just sitting on his arse, waiting for his ship to come in. Well, there’s no ship coming in to Lower Sackville.”

  The old man stabbed at the numbers, and the phone teetered precariously on his knee. “Willie!” he shouted down the line. “Willie! Yes, fine, fine. Why wouldn’t I be? Listen. Go down to my gun cabinet and tell me if all my — tell me how many Lugers are there. Never mind that, just do it for Christ’s sake!” He held the receiver away from his ear and shook his head in irritation, then rolled his eyes as he endured the long wait for his son. This had become, instantly, the most important thing in his life. “What? Well, speak up! Yeah? Good. No reason.” He banged the receiver down, and the phone clattered to the floor. I picked it up and replaced it on the table.

  “They’re all accounted for. I have four of them.”

  “Do you know any other veterans who have this kind of gun?”

  “Not any more.”

  “Collectors?”

  “Wayne Turpin is the only one I can think of. Out in Hatchet Lake. That doesn’t mean there aren’t collectors out there with Lugers, just means I don�
��t know them.”

  “Where were you in the war, Bill?”

  “I was one of the Water Rats! Bet you never heard of them, eh, kid?”

  “Scheldt Estuary, 1944.”

  “Well, well, well! And do you know where we got that name?” I did. “Ever hear of a fellow by the name of Monty, Colin?”

  “I’ve heard of a fellow named Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery.”

  “Good old Monty! He gave us the name, you know, the Water Rats. So, are you a military buff?”

  “Can’t say I’m up on the military, but I’m a history buff. So, were you there right through until the liberation?”

  “I sure was, and I never met finer people than the Dutch. The welcome they gave us, you can’t imagine.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, when we went through the streets —”

  “No, go back. Clearing the Scheldt.”

  I was there for two hours. Spellbound.

  There were other things I should have been doing, but they struck me as irredeemably dull after listening to Bill. So I cranked up Dutchie Mason on the stereo and went for a drive, west on Quinpool Road through the Armdale Rotary and out through the countryside to Hatchet Lake. I eventually found a shabby brown wooden house with a built-in garage. A ferocious-looking black dog planted itself in front of the garage door and barked, baring its fangs. A man with a shaven head, a goatee, and tinted aviator glasses came out of the house.

  “Help you?”

  I opened the car door a crack and set my left foot on the asphalt driveway.

  “Don’t worry about Biff; he’s all talk.” How often had I heard that? The man turned to the dog and bellowed something at it; the dog sat and panted.

  I approached the garage and patted the dog on the way by. “Nice kitty,” I crooned. The aviator glasses turned and glinted at me, as if to say: What kind of nutbars are coming out from that city now?

  Turpin had two Lugers of his own; they were still in place, and he didn’t know who else owned a Luger P-08.

  †

  I was at Video Difference that night, picking up a couple of movies to watch with my daughter, Normie, and I noticed a new National Film Board production about Canada’s role in the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945. I tried to remember whether Bill Groves had a VCR in his room. I didn’t think so, but surely there was one available in the hospital. It was a seven-day rental so I decided to get it. Normie and I watched our shows, and bloated ourselves with popcorn.

  I stopped by Camp Hill Hospital the next morning. Bill was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, when I arrived.

  “Morning, Bill.”

  He turned and looked at me blankly for a few minutes, then wheezed: “Hi, kid.”

  “I brought you something.”

  “Oh, yeah? What?”

  “A new documentary on Holland. Would you like me to ask somebody to set it up for you? No hurry. It doesn’t have to be back till next week.”

  “Sure.”

  “I checked with Turpin about the pistols, but no luck.”

  “The Lugers, right. That’s too bad.”

  “When you brought those guns over here, did you have to —”

  “Not guns. Gun.” He paused to take a few desperate breaths. “I only brought one over myself.”

  “Is that right? I thought you had several of them.”

  “Yeah, I do. But that’s because I bought them off other guys.”

  “Oh. Other soldiers.”

  “Yeah. Frank MacInnis, Archie Campbell, another fellow I can’t remember now. MacInnis traded for another piece I had. Campbell sold me one. He had two. Used to twirl them on his fingers and aim them like in the westerns. ‘Stick em up, pardner,’ he’d say with a German accent. What a card, old Archie.” Bill went into a fit of laughter, which exacerbated his breathing difficulties to the point where I considered calling a nurse. But he recovered. “Dead now, him and Frank. Archie died back in the seventies, Frank just last year. Dropped dead in his driveway. Nobody even knew he was sick. Poor old Frank.”

  “Campbell,” I asked him, “wasn’t he the father of Darren Campbell?”

  “Who?”

  “Darren Campbell, the lawyer. Everybody called him Dice. Was Archie his father?”

  “Yeah, the son was a lawyer. Full of piss and vinegar, that kid. A bit of a bad actor, caused Archie and the wife to pull their hair out sometimes. But at least he wasn’t a deadbeat, sitting on his arse all day collecting pogie.”

  “Bill, I’m going to leave this video and I’ll ask one of the nurses about playing it for you. I’ll come by to pick it up next week. See you then.”

  “Sure. Thanks, Colin.”

  Darren “Dice” Campbell was a bit of a legend in legal and party circles in Halifax. He was a couple of years younger than I was, which would have made him forty-two if he hadn’t leapt to his death from his tenth-floor office back in 1985. If he had inherited his father’s Luger, somebody might remember it. I called Ed Johnson. His secretary told me he was out of the office, and he had a trial at the provincial courthouse in the afternoon.

  Johnson was slouched against the wall of the courtroom when I arrived. He looked hungover.

  “Ed. You’re not a well man.”

  “A long night of booze, smoke, and bad cards. I get the shakes just thinking about it. Maybe I’ll plead my guy guilty and go home for a snooze.”

  “You might be doing him a favour.”

  “For sure. So, what’s up?”

  “You knew Dice Campbell, didn’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean, what do I mean? You knew the guy, right?”

  “Didn’t everybody?”

  “Well, didn’t you do some cases with him?”

  “Yeah, a couple.”

  “You guys did some partying together?”

  “Early on.”

  “Early on in what?”

  “I mean Dice’s parties got a little, well, I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Johnson. Maybe your client should throw himself on the mercy of the court before it’s too late.”

  “It’s just that, yeah, Dice and I and some other people used to drink and party together once in a while but then I heard the parties got a little out of hand.”

  “And a blushing wallflower such as yourself would not want to be present for anything too outré.” Or you wouldn’t want your wife to know you were there. “But it’s not Dice’s party escapades I’m interested in.”

  I thought I could read relief in his thin, pallid face. “So, what’s all this about Campbell?”

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “Whoa! Where did that come from?”

  “Just, do you know whether he ever had a gun?”

  “He did have a gun. Or I heard he did. Dicey all looped up, waving a gun around. I was just getting over the shakes and now I have to deal with an image like that.”

  “What kind of gun was it?”

  “How the fuck would I know? Do I look like some kind of gun goon?”

  “You do, actually, now that I think of it.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “But you’d know a handgun from a long, pointy thing like a rifle or a shotgun.”

  “What I heard, it was a handgun. No idea what kind. Why this interest in Campbell and his weaponry?”

  “The Leaman case. The weapon was an old German pistol, a Luger. Dice Campbell’s father had a Luger that he brought over from the war.”

  “I gotta go, Collins. You’re making even less sense than I am. Tramaine?” Johnson had spotted his client. “Get rid of that headgear and divest yourself of all that gold. Lose the pager. We’re claiming you’re not a drug dealer. Remember? Not a drug dealer.” Johnson waved me off and advanced on his client.

  So Dice Campbell had owned a gun. It may or may not have been his father’s Luger. Until I learned otherwise, I would proceed on the assumption that it was. That
left me with a big coincidence: a murder-suicide effected by the same type of German handgun that had been owned by someone who had also, a few years back, committed suicide. Of course, Campbell had not used the gun to kill himself. Why not? I couldn’t recall any questions being raised about the lawyer’s death, and I had no reason to raise any now, but it did strike me as odd. And I wanted more information about Dice Campbell’s gun.

  †

  Mavis Campbell was a real case. Until that Thursday afternoon I had known Dice Campbell’s widow only by reputation. Now I was sitting across from her in the bar of the Holiday Inn on Robie Street. We were at one of the low tables along the bar’s enormous windows overlooking the Halifax Commons. She was obviously a regular; when I called her she said: “I assume you know where to find me when the five o’clock whistle blows.” She was already in place, with a double Scotch in front of her, when I arrived. I ordered a beer.

  “So. Mavis. I’ll try to explain why you might be able to help with this murder-suicide. You didn’t want to meet in my office.”

  “Do you keep a bottle of Glenfiddich in your desk drawer?”

  “Used to, but I just couldn’t keep it in stock.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” She sipped her drink, and sipped it again.

  The widow was about five feet four inches tall, with a hefty build that must have been voluptuous a few years back. Mavis’s hair was an unlikely shade of red and was pouffed to look as if it had been blown by the wind. Her eyes were done up with gobs of mascara, her large mouth painted a fire-engine red. She had an elaborate scarf draped over her shoulders.