Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal

by Michael Van Rooy

  I was ready for Smiley to pop out and start shooting. I was also ready for a car to drive over across the sidewalk and slam through me. Frankly, I was ready for just about anything I could imagine and a few other things as well.

  When I found the right address I walked up to the second floor and rented access to the Internet for the princely sum of one dollar for ten minutes. I figured I was fairly safe; whenever Smiley had heard of me using the Net, it had been at a library, which might make him focus his attentions there. When I checked my new e-mail address I found a note from sexy&beatch147@ that read “Here. Missing you.”

  Made me feel good to know someone gave a rat’s ass whether I was dead or alive. “Hi Hon.” I typed slowly with two fingers. “Give me a sign that means something so I know you are you.”

  Then I went to work on another database and twenty minutes later I had the address and phone number of Smiley’s Vancouver lawyer. I copied that down along with the numbers of Winnipeg’s Crime Stoppers and the number of Mildred Pennyworth, one of Winnipeg’s dumbest television reporters. Who, by the way, had truly fantastic breasts, which had nothing to do with why the cops liked to talk with her. And it was definitely not the reason thousands of Winnipeggers liked to watch her bobbling along every night at 6:00 and 11:00.

  Back on Corydon I pulled on a pair of gloves and found a telephone booth far from any bank, convenience store, or indeed any place that might have a camera that might be surveilling me, if that was a word. Then phone call number one went to the local Crime Stoppers, known amongst cons throughout the country as one-eight-hundred-squeal. When a man answered I pretended I was James T. Kirk and made. Every. Word. Its. Own. Sentence. In the best Star Trek tradition.

  “Hi! Can I report a crime here?”

  The voice came back immediately, smooth, professional, a little suspicious and absolutely untrustworthy.

  “If you have a crime to report you should call the 911 emergency line.”

  “Can I do that and then phone you guys and ask for a reward?”

  The voice was silenced while he ran his mind over what I’d said. Crime Stoppers was supposed to involve the public in fighting crime, and towards that end they had a policy of anonymity. You called, gave your information, they gave you a number, and when a conviction was obtained then you received your payment. The money came from donations to the charity; however, the size of the reward was at the discretion of the board governing the organization. But if they were informed before a crime was reported to the police, what could they do? What would they do? Would telling them something like that make them accessories after the fact? I suddenly realized that I didn’t know the answers; perhaps I was committing a crime right now by calling them before the crime was reported to the police.

  The guy on the phone said, “Ahhhh?”

  I may have backed myself into some kind of corner, so instead I said, “Never mind.” And hung up. “Crap.”

  Picking up my bags I went downtown looking for another phone. When I found a good one I phoned Mildred Pennyworth’s station and asked to talk to her assistant. After a brief wait I was connected with a young woman who talked very fast indeed.

  “Yes? Yes? Yes?”

  “Hi! I want to give a tip about a double murder to Mildred.”

  “What? We’re not the police, you know? We’re not that crime dog, you know?”

  “You mean Scruff McGruff and that’s a US thing—the whole Let’s Take a Bite Out of Crime. Did I mention that what I wanted to tell you is an exclusive?”

  “What? What? What?”

  “The police don’t know about it yet. No one does.”

  Her voice dropped to a low intimate buzz, “Did you do it?”

  I dropped my voice too. “No. Anyhow, in the following apartment you will find the bodies of …”

  I gave her the details and hung up, walking around the corner and changing to a new baseball hat before going to find a new phone booth. On the way I bought some more hats and a very cheap blue windbreaker two sizes too large so I could wear it over my own jacket. When I finally did find a pay phone with no cameras around I was way downtown near the Red River, which made me nervous because the river cut off my retreat and limited my options. A worst-case scenario was that I called Smiley’s lawyer, who had a direct line to the cops, who proceeded to surround the area I was calling from with many, many cops. And then I’d end up arrested with a gun and three hand grenades in my backpack, which all would translate into me going away into a small place for a long, long time. I thought it through, took the chance, made my call, and talked to a professional voice.

  “Chang and McQuaid. How may we help you?”

  “My name is Smiley, shit, Hershel. I need to talk to my lawyer. It’s an emergency.”

  I tried to make my voice hoarse and coarsen it. It didn’t have to sound like Smiley; it just had to not sound like me.

  “Your lawyer?”

  “McQuaid.”

  There was a brief pause and then a man’s voice came on, “Smiley! Nicetohearfromyou.” He ran the words together fast and then said slowly, “Where’s my money?”

  “Coming. I need you to give me the address you gave me last time.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  There were the sounds of a computer keyboard being lightly manipulated and then, “Because she’s dead. Shot a lot. Would you like to talk to me about something?”

  Translation from lawyerese was, would I like to turn myself in so the plea-bargaining could start?

  “I had nothing to do with that …”

  “Uh-huh.” Flat, unbelieving.

  “… but I need her address. I lost my copy.”

  “No. Not that I ever gave you that in the past. And not that I’m admitting I ever had it in the first place.” Smart lawyer was he, playing the game for whatever listening and recording device might be attached. I figured he would have Samantha’s address; Smiley had mentioned that his lawyer was bent when he’d first shown up on my doorstep. Most bad guys don’t automatically know other bad guys. We have to have lines of communication and bent lawyers are great lines of communication because they can hide behind client confidentiality.

  And I was betting that maybe the lawyer had been the person to connect Sam with Smiley. Which meant he would probably know where Sam had lived before her untimely death.

  “I need the address. Now. And of course you never gave it to me before.”

  That should please him if anyone was recording it.

  “No can do.”

  Stubborn prick and I was getting tired. “In North Korea today they have a simple method of interrogation. First they ask you a question. Then they use crazy glue to hold YOUR…” I said it loud “… hand flat on a wooden cutting board and then use a ball-peen hammer to crush the first joint on YOUR …” loud again “… little finger, the one nearest the nail. Then they wait five minutes, timed by a clock on the table in front of you, and then they use the same hammer to crush the first joint on YOUR ring finger. And so on. Then they move on to the next joint further down and do it again.”

  “Are you …”

  I cut him off, “There are fifteen joints on each hand …”

  “… THREATENING me!”

  He roared into the phone and I went on, “… and no one’s made it past four joints on the first hand that I’ve heard of. They all cooperate before the thumb is reached.”

  “You piece-of-shit …”

  “Wanna see how long you last? You wanna break the record? Now should I stop and visit a hardware store before I come to your home? Or should I stop at a bank?”

  “I see. You’re threatening me.”

  “Yes. So tell me what I want to know, before this moves to a place neither of us wants to go.”

  McQuaid thought about it for a long time. And then he gave me the address and slammed the phone down as though he was punishing me. I hung the phone up and listened to the echoes and wondered if the lawyer would phone the
cops right away and then decided no. He could always plead he’d been frightened of me and that coloured his decision. Frankly, he struck me as the kind of guy who’d take the safe way every time.

  #47

  Ah, burglary! It was ten o’clock at night and I was right back at it for the second (or was it third?) time in a couple of days after years, positively years, of abstinence.

  I thought about it and realized I was lying to myself. I had broken into several locations when Walsh had been busting my ass that spring. Which meant it had been months since I’d broken into anywhere and now I was breaking into Samantha’s house, a simple bungalow right near the edge of town along Lagimodiere Avenue in the east end of the city. I stared at the place and weighed options as I walked up the sidewalk and tried to work out some basic assumptions. First, the house would be purchased and not rented. Second, the bungalow would not be located anywhere near where Sam was working. Third, there would be something interesting in the house that the cops had missed.

  And I could make these assumptions because Samantha was a career criminal and a good one. She would buy and not rent because cops could always pressure the owner of a house (if she was renting) to allow them access without having to deal with those pesky search warrants. “After all, Your Honour, we had the permission of the owner of the house and therefore could look.” The second thing she would do is live far away from where she worked because you do not want to live right beside where you work, it is too dangerous. See the rule of crooks and hustlers titled “Thou shalt not shit in thine own nest.” And the third assumption was actually supplied by my own ego and superego; I believed Sam would hide things in her house, hopefully including the hockey player’s address. And I also believed that the cops would not have found them because they weren’t bad guys and didn’t think like bad guys.

  Check out the bible, “Set a thief to catch a thief.” Or something like that.

  I used the Bionic Ear, standing in front of the house and fumbling in my bag while the machine did its job of amplifying noise. I didn’t hear anything so I put the machine back in the bag and then walked up to the front door and in. Sam had had a good lock, but the cops had used a portable ram to knock the door entirely off its steel frame, so all I had to do was pry loose the padlock they’d used to secure the place. And then I was inside in the silence and the dark with my fingers resting lightly on the butt of the pistol.

  Living room, bedroom, kitchen, pantry, dining nook, and bathroom on the first floor. Recreation room, spare room, laundry room, and bathroom in the basement. Attached garage off the kitchen. Concrete pad patio off the dining nook.

  Nobody inside, but many signs of a search, including emptied drawers and papers strewn about. I closed all the drapes, turned on the lights, and started going over everything millimetre by millimetre.

  In the basement bathroom I found one hiding place concealed behind a very large medicine cabinet in the perfectly finished bathroom. What attracted my attention was the realization that the cabinet did not match the one that was installed in the upstairs bathroom; it was a lot bigger and newer. Using a screwdriver to remove the screws allowed me to pull the whole unit up and put it in the shower stall. Behind the cabinet was the hole that had held the original cabinet cut between the two-by-four frames of the wall itself.

  There was nothing there, just a thin layer of dust and smears of grease. That probably meant that someone had gotten there first, probably Smiley, and he had found the cache and cleaned it out. Which might explain the hand grenades, if Sam had been keeping them for a rainy day. I considered the cache and liked it; if the cops brought in metal detectors, the steel frame of the cabinet and the steel nails in the walls would mess up their readings. All in all it was a great hiding place.

  With that found I kept looking; odds were that Sam wouldn’t stop with one cache, just in case the first was discovered. But I found nothing until I reached the backyard, which was surrounded by a wooden fence almost two metres high. It was there that I found six cast-iron flower pots along the edge of the lawn and the porch, each pot of the same design as the ones in the house. Which meant what, that Sam and boyfriend rotated their plants from the inside to the outside? Nothing suspicious there, but an interesting idea I decided to remember to use when Claire and I were back in our house.

  Just to be thorough, I picked up the first pot and found that there was a metre-and-a-half-long sealed length of PVC pipe twenty centimetres in diameter pushed down into a round hole. So the pot was there to distract any metal detectors, and the pipe was the cache. With a little elbow grease I managed to pull the pipes out one at a time and unscrew the tops to gain access.

  Packed inside the first PVC pipe driven into the ground was a heavily greased Chinese SKS rifle and a bandolier of thirty rounds of military hardball ammunition, each with its primer carefully covered in a dab of grease. The SKS was a good choice for an emergency rifle, cheap, reliable, powerful, small, light, and, most importantly, it fell into the non-restricted weapon category of the Canadian Criminal Code, not the restricted or prohibited weapon category which translates into longer jail time.

  The next four pipes were full of freeze-dried-food packages, a water purification kit, a Second Chance Deep Cover bullet-resistant vest that looked like a T-shirt, a big first-aid kit, an assortment of tools and other odds and ends that your average paranoid thief might need. And the last pipe held a rolled-up fisherman’s vest with many pockets. I pulled it out and patted it down to find an even thousand dollars in mixed Canadian and US currency along with five dollars in quarters. Also driver’s licences and social insurance cards for Sam and Charles, her boyfriend. Then a big ring of keys, granola bars and beef jerky, tubes of vitamins, Aspirin, Demerol, and a vial of cocaine. Then some band-aids, antibiotic gel, a good quality Leatherman multi tool (which looked like my Swiss Army knife on steroids). And the pièce de résistance, a Ziploc baggie with a small address book and pencil.

  I was impressed; the pipe was a great cache. You could buy them in varying sizes and lengths at any hardware store along with the tools to cut them, the glue to seal them, and the end caps. You could also buy a posthole digger, which made installing them relatively easy, and the pipes were pretty much impervious to the weather. And if you stored your illegal stuff outside your home, it made the prosecutor’s job that much harder, as long as you didn’t leave fingerprints.

  “Your Honour, I had no idea those things were hidden near my house because they certainly were not in my house …”

  Right? Wonder if the judge would buy it.

  I kept the bullet-resistant vest, the money, the Leatherman knife (which I had lusted after in the past), and a plastic jar of dry roasted peanuts. With difficulty I left the cocaine and Demerol, although the monkey on my back felt it would be a great idea to take that with me.

  I might need it.

  I might want it.

  It might be a clue.

  I took the rifle and bandolier into the basement, where Sam and her boyfriend had kept their tools, found a hacksaw and a heavy-duty file, and took twenty minutes to saw off a chunk of the barrel and the buttstock. That left me with a seventy-centimetre-long, fundamentally inaccurate monstrosity that I could tuck into my backpack. Fully loaded, the gun held ten 7.62x39 mm rounds of ammo, all solid military bullets that would go through an engine block without slowing.

  Then I left, walking the six blocks south until I found a bus stop, and headed back downtown on the last bus running. On the bus I went through the little notebook and found a long list of names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and even a few physical addresses. Most of them, however, were area codes from Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver; only two were in Winnipeg.

  After another lousy night in a new lousy hotel I was ready to check out my addresses. The first one was the hotel where Smiley and I had braced Sam and company. The second address was in a run-down housing development downtown, rows of brick houses built side by side and maintained by the Manitoba Housing Aut
hority. I looked at it curiously and went off to find a different library where I could use the Internet. In the e-mail box was a brief note: “Six reasons you never told me about.” Smiling, I typed “Wild pig.” Then I typed some more: “Our friend came back and gimmicked our crib, trashed it, could’ve hurt the next person in. It’s fixed now. Stay loose but stay away from it.”

  After I closed the computer down I went back to the Housing Authority and walked past the address I was interested in. In the parking space right in front of the brick building was a big, ugly purple T-bird car, so I wandered a hundred metres away and found a bench in a tiny, decrepit park. No one was there, so I took out the binoculars I’d gotten from the surplus store and watched to see what would happen next.

  At a little past noon the hockey player came out of the front door and carefully locked the door behind him. He had his right arm in a cast, from the tip of his fingers all the way to his shoulder and then across to the other shoulder, with a brace on his neck as well. He also had his left foot bandaged and walked with an aluminum cane as he moved down the sidewalk towards the T-bird. I still didn’t know his name, but I was up and moving, weighed down with my packs but moving pretty fast on adrenaline and anger.

  “Hey!”

  He turned slowly to see me coming across the parking lot and sputtered, “You!”

  His left hand reached into his jacket and pulled out something. Before it had cleared his pocket, though, I opened the jacket and showed him the butt of the pistol. His fingers opened slowly and whatever it was fell to the ground with a clank.

  “Now don’t move.”

  I moved over to him carefully, watching his hands and his feet and his eyes for any hints of ill intention. The casts didn’t impress me; Ted Bundy had worn a fake cast to elicit help and sympathy from the women he was going to rape and murder, and many true crime writers had written about that, so maybe the casts were real and maybe they weren’t. Up close the hockey player stank with the reek of old sweat, unwashed dirt, reefer smoke, and stale beer. He hadn’t shaved for a long time, either, and his fingers trembled as he swayed from side to side.