by David Waters
At breakfast I think we were all privately concerned with an underlying issue that Mary had touched on yesterday. Gina had wanted to vindicate her father’s memory. But at what price? Like lies and injustice, truth and justice often exact a cost one does not anticipate. Was the risk to Francine Lemelin a part of the price which so far had exacted a murder, a wounding, a suicide, and who knew what else? What choice did we have? To do nothing had its own consequences: passivity, I knew, could also lead only to a limbo of living death. The phone rang in my office.
“I’ve just had a call from Gooden,” Steve Symansky said, “he’s asking for my help.”
“To do what?” My adrenaline began pumping.
“He says that Naomi had some files that may be damaging to his and my reputation. Do you know anything about this?”
“What kind of files was he talking about?”
“He mentioned a file which could contain information on Monaghan’s involvement with Bull and our attempts to spy on them. Is there any truth to that?”
“I’m not sure of the details. But Naomi’s partner has been in touch with him.”
After a pause I said, “what did he want you to do?”
“He wanted me to come to Montreal for a meeting. But first he wanted me to pass by Naomi’s cottage to make sure that Naomi’s roommate was there. Then he told me he wanted me to act as a look-out while he checked out her flat in Montreal. Is there something going down? Sounds like it to me.”
I hesitated. But he already knew too much. I decided to gamble. “Yes. But I’m not directly involved in it at the moment. So what did you tell him?”
“I hummed and hawed. Said I would have to give it a lot of thought before I became involved in anything in Canada. I reminded him that I was out of the loop now, and had been for a long time. He told me this was a private matter. Just a precautionary maneuver to protect our reputations. He told me that if he tried to do it alone, he could not guarantee anything. He stressed that anything he might ask me to do would be legal and without risk. I hesitated. Made it clear that I did not like the idea. But I told him that I would call him back. What’s going on, Webster? You know I would prefer to stay out of this.”
“Give me an hour. I’ll call you back.”
I got Phil on his car phone and explained the situation. He called Leclair, and then called me back. We decided that we had little choice but to involve Symansky now that Gooden had called him. To do otherwise created the risk that Symasnky might choose to warn Gooden that a trap had been set for him. Besides, his willingness to be involved would inevitably encourage Gooden to do what we wanted him to do. But still, Ryan and Leclair warned, Symansky was to be kept as much in the dark as possible. I called Symansky.
“If you’re willing,” I said, “we’d like you to do anything Gooden asks that is legal. Balk at anything else. We want you to confirm that Naomi’s roommate is at the cottage, and that she is alone, whether you get to actually see her or not. Her name, by the way, is Francine Lemelin.”
“Jesus, I don’t like this, Webster. Not one bloody bit! Do I have a choice?” I suspect he was referring to the article out of Washington sitting on Mel Vogel’s desk.
I could not help taunting him a bit. “You’re an American. You live in the land of the free,” I said, “but you’re co-operation is important to us, maybe even crucial.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “Sounds like I’ve been check-mated.”
I took his last remark as an admission that he would do what we wanted. I gave him a description of Francine Lemelin. “To the best of our knowledge Gooden has never seen her. When do you expect to drive by the cottage?”
“I’ll call him back. If I agree to co-operate, I’ll probably be driving by the cottage late this afternoon and be meeting with Gooden around supper time.”
The article had been the stick I threw in a reward. “We’ll keep whatever you do under wraps.” I had had no authority to make any promises, but I knew I would plead his cause with Leclair or any one else should the circumstances require it.
He sighed. “I’ll call you back.”
I went downstairs to tell Mary and Gina about the latest developments.
“Sounds like Gooden’s taken the bait,” I said.
But Mary was frowning. “What if Gooden has been smart enough to ask Symansky to check with you in order to see if there’s a trap? It may still be in Symansky’s best interest to advise Gooden to lay low until they’ve both figured a way around what’s happening.”
“We don’t have much choice,” I said, “we have to gamble that Symansky is playing it straight. Besides, there’s another possibility. Symansky may want Gooden to step into the trap.”
“It’s becoming like a house of mirrors!” Mary muttered, “where you can’t distinguish what is real and what isn’t.”
I was inclined to agree. Symansky phoned.
“Against my better judgment,” he said, “I’ve agreed to help.” The tension in his voice was palpable.
“It’s the right decision.” I told him.
He grunted. “I’ll be leaving here about four o’clock.”
“Right.”
“I presume you’ll be by your phone or checking your messages frequently?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I’m unlikely to phone. But I’ll try to get a message through to you if there’s any significant change in plans.”
“Good. We appreciate what you’re doing.”
He grunted again and the line went dead.
I relayed the conversation to Phil who said he would pass it on to Leclair. While I had been waiting for Symansky’s call, they had decided they would return Francine to the cottage long enough to make Symansky’s visit realistic. That made me uneasy.
“I hope you’re laying on extra protection.”
“Why?”
“Because for all we know Gooden may also be heading for the cottage, and once he gets the clear signal, may decide to try and eliminate Francine before going on to her flat!”
“Christ, I hadn’t thought of that! I’ll make sure she’s adequately protected. Maybe I’ll also send someone right now to keep an eye on Gooden’s car, from a distance to be sure, in case he leaves the university early.”
By supper time, I could not stay in the house. By then we knew that Symansky had passed by the cottage and had spoken briefly with Francine. I asked Gina to monitor my phone and left to join Phil in his van. He had stationed it so that he could see the approach to Francine’s street through the tinted rear window.
“How long have you been here?” I asked as I settled into one of the rear seats.
“About three hours.” He grinned and held up a parking ticket. “Probably the first of many.”
“What do you expect to achieve from here?”
The grin evaporated. “Nothing much. I may spot Gooden’s car, and see how close he parks it. Leclair insisted I stay on the perimeter of any possible action.”
“How are we going to get pictures of Gooden if he decides to break in?”
“Leclair has commandeered an empty flat across the street two buildings away. He’s stationed someone there with experience in taking night pictures with a telephoto lens. I wanted to be there too but Leclair insisted that I hunker down here.”
“Why here?”
“Ostensibly so I can give the guys some notice if either Gooden or Symansky approach the flat this way. God, how I wish I was in Leclair’s shoes. I’d give anything to be in charge of this operation.”
It was hot in the van. The front side windows were partially open but the air outside was still. We needed a breeze. We sat in silence. I also found the silence oppressive. I decided to break it.
“Do you remember when I first called you,” I said, “you asked me to think about the answers to a couple of questions?”
He gave me an odd look. “Sort of. Yeah.”
“Come on,” I said, “you remember, you wanted to know why your wife left you? Why you had been
put out to pasture in your prime? Why you couldn’t believe in the system anymore?”
He gave me a quick sideways glance. At the moment he clearly wasn’t interested. But I went on anyway.
“I think the key mistake we made was to give our souls to institutions. Me, to journalism. You, to the police force.”
He grunted, “I didn’t give them my soul.”
“True. But maybe a significant part of it?”
“Maybe. I gave them the best I could give.”
“And so when someone asked you who you were, what did you answer?”
“I said I was a cop, goddam it, and it was true! What else did you expect me to say?”
“You could have just mentioned your family name and the name of your wife. The person you cared for most. And then mentioned your job.”
“And why the hell would I have done that? I mean, who cared whether I was married or not or to whom?”
“Because it would have indicated that your family and your wife were more important to you than your damn job.”
“Jesus!” He said, “I don’t believe this conversation!” But I could see that he was trying to assess what I had said. Maybe he was trying to figure out which one he had really cared about most. I felt a need to press the point as much for me as for him.
“When we give our primary loyalty to an institution, we pay a price for it.”
“You make it sound like a bloody sin.”
“In a kind of way, maybe it is. Who knows? Institutions are not people. And they don’t deserve the same kind of loyalty. They can’t return our love, or really care about us. When they no longer needs us: they only have to delete us from their computer memory. Finito. End of lecture.”
He gave me a baleful look, shrugged and returned his attention to the street. “Meanwhile, we have work to do,” he said immediately, and with evident relief.
I looked out just in time to see Symansky take a few remaining strides along Ste Catherine street and then, as if it was something he did every day, turn casually down Panet street. He was carrying an overnight shoulder bag. I wondered if he had spotted the van. Phil was on the phone immediately. While he passed on the message, I kept my eye on the street wondering where Gooden might be.
Part of me still found it hard to believe that Gooden would dare to break into the flat. But then Gooden was probably made of sterner stuff than I was. As I was thinking this, he seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“Look! There!” I whispered. I pointed out across the street. Gooden was approaching the corner of Ste Catherine and Panet streets from the opposite direction Symansky had used. He stopped to peer casually into a store window.
“What if he spots us?” I asked.
“He can’t. He doesn’t know the van, and he can’t see in through these tinted windows. Christ, it’s a good thing you decided to tag along,” Phil said, “I wouldn’t have recognized him from the photos!”
Gooden glanced at his watch and dialed a number on his cell phone.
“Symansky must have a portable phone with him.” Phil muttered.
“It must have been in that shoulder bag he was carrying.”
“Yeah.”
Phil spoke into his own phone. In the last ten minutes the evening light had begun to fade quickly. In a half hour it would be dark. Ste Catherine street was a busy shopping artery and was consequently well lit even at night. I realized that many of the neon store signs had already been turned on. But Panet street was strictly residential. It had only a few street lamps. And the light coming from most of the street’s tenements was minimal.
“Symansky has left the area,” Phil whispered to me. Without a moment’s hesitation Gooden headed down Panet street. “He’s on his way,” Phil muttered into his phone, “he’s wearing a dark blue suit, and he’s carrying a small, soft leather briefcase.”
We waited, Phil half-listening to his phone. I could hear only vague sounds coming periodically from the other end. Every now and then Phil grunted. At one point he covered his mouthpiece, gave me a wink and muttered, “The bastard’s now in the flat.”
“He seems to have got in easily.”
“Yeah. Symansky probably told him what kind of lock to expect. Remind me to tell Francine.” He gave a knowing chuckle. “She’s got the kind of lock a pro could pick in thirty seconds. How dumb can people get! Still, it indicates he knows what he’s doing. Adds supports to Hendricks’ claim about his RCMP links. Maybe the bastards trained him!”
I nodded. The very thought raised the level of my anger.
Time dragged. Tension alternated with boredom. A half hour later Phil got the message that Gooden had now left the flat.
“Now what?” I asked.
Phil took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “We wait and see if he heads for Naomi’s cottage.”
“How will we know?”
“Leclair has someone stationed at the bridge to the auto-route. They have a description of Gooden’s car. Unfortunately Leclair has asked us to stay away from the area near the cottage.”
“So what do we do?”
Phil shrugged, “he’s not my boss.”
“But you agreed to let him make the key decisions.” I reminded him.
“Sure. But I was careful not to say that I would obey them all.” He gave a deep sigh. “This morning,” he said, “I studied a map of the area. I want to get as close to the cottage as I can without getting in the way. The only question is whether you want to come with me.”
“How close do you plan to get?”
“There’s a small town called Mansonville about twelve miles away from the cottage. I want to check into a motel near there. One where we can park in a way that keeps us well clear of Gooden’s trajectory, but one that’s close enough so I can be on the phone to our guys who are staking out the parking lot half way up Owl’s Head mountain.”
“How soon do you plan to leave?”
“How about now. He may already be on his way. So? Are you coming?”
I hesitated. I had found the last few minutes depressingly anticlimactic. All the tensions I had felt earlier had dissipated, but they had not been satisfied. I mentioned this to Phil.
“It’s in the nature of the job.” He shrugged, “after months of slogging you finally zero in on a serious law-breaker. At best, there’s a slight high when you book him. Partly because some of them suddenly look like the sky has fallen in on them.” He grinned, more to himself than to me, but his eyes looked sadder than a bloodhound’s. “And then you think, in a couple of hours the son-of-a-bitch if he has money will have talked to his lawyers, and he will be smugly assessing a system that he already knows he can probably beat.”
I stared out the van’s window at the flashing neon lights which were designed to attract people like moths towards the window displays.
“And then,” Phil muttered, “all the goddamn lawyers move in and make pots of money. And the taxpayer pays. Win or lose. Yeah, it’s anticlimactic all right! It takes the stuffing right out of you. But it’s the only system we’ve got.”
“So why don’t we just go home,” I suggested, “leave the rest to Leclair. After all, he’s the one on the public payroll, not us.”
“In my case, for one good reason,” he said, “I want to see Gooden’s face when they slap the cuffs on him and put him into the back of a police car for the long ride to a station he doesn’t control. The satisfaction may be small, but I want it.”
I had to smile. It was a moment of satisfaction I too wanted.
Then I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten, since leaving home, to check to see if Symansky had left a message. I used Phil’s phone and called Gina. But there were no messages. I explained that everything so far had gone according to plan and that Phil and I were heading in the general direction of the cottage. I promised that I would phone at some point later in the evening but that neither of them should stay up waiting for my call.
“Fat chance!” Gina retorted, “I’ll be staying within ten fee
t of the phone. Besides,” she said, “I’ve got Phil’s cellular phone number. So you’d better phone.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The motel we checked into was modest. Ten units, built at least thirty years ago. Upgrading had been kept to the bare necessities. There were two single beds. A scatter rug had been placed near the entrance where the original wall-to-wall carpeting had become threadbare. It had a phone which went through a personal switchboard. A small color TV was sufficiently dated that the channels had to be changed manually. But it still suited Phil’s purpose. Before he rented it, he tested both his car phone and his portable cellular phone, and both provided clear transmission to the private detective we had hired who was stationed in the parking lot only about eight miles away as the crow flies. But the road to reach either him or the cottage meandered, and would take at least twenty minutes to travel.
Having booked into the motel, I called to check in with Gina and Mary. Gina answered after the second ring. She told me my only phone call had been from Mel Vogel, and that she had taken the liberty of telling him that I had been hard at work on an article and that she was under the impression I would have something for him in a day or two. I brought her up to date, and I gave her the telephone number at the motel. She told me that she had taken the liberty of inviting Linda over to discuss the implications of Hendricks’ last will and testament. I had forgotten their desire to see that Linda was compensated in some way for having been wounded by Hendricks. It reminded me that I had yet to hear from my lawyer. I had hoped that Gina might have asked me whether I wanted to speak to her mother. But she didn’t.
On the way to the motel, Phil and I had eaten at a fast food stop on the road, and had also stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts where we had bought a large thermos full of coffee and had stocked the van with a dozen sugar coated cinnamon twists. We had selected a spot at the back of the motel where we could sit in the van unobserved from the road or from the office. Through the van’s open window we could hear an incessant chorus of crickets in the field beyond.
Phil was already taking a sip from his thermos. “We should have got some Cognac to spike this coffee later! We probably have a long wait.”