Cold City Streets

by L.H. Thomson

  “Mom went for lunch,” she murmured to Cobi. “Andrea must have shown up and been waiting, and it escalated into this.”

  Cobi blew out a lungful of irritated air. “I have had about damn too much of all of this.” Before Jessie could stop him, he strode forward, ignoring any potential threat or retaliation, wading into the back of the group, grabbing one after another and tossing them to one side like they were paper. One woman fell down, another had to be caught by two men. They cried foul, yelled back. But none of them stopped him from clearing a path.

  When he got to the officer, he said, “Sorry about that. One second.” Then he turned around. “YOU’RE BLOCKING THE DAMN STAIRS,” he declared as loudly and forcefully as he could without yelling.

  The protestors all took a hesitant step backwards.

  The young patrolman smiled. “Okay, now I wish I’d taken video of that. Not that I actually saw anything. My head was turned when those idiots fell down by themselves.”

  “You’re a good man,” Cobi said. “Come on, Andrea. We’ll get you inside.”

  Rhonda got back to the office about two minutes after Cobi’s experiment in crowd control, a bag of Wendy’s in one hand and a puzzled look on her face. “What the heck happened?” she asked.

  Andrea sat with Cobi in the waiting area, their coats on the hooks by the door; Jessie was at the back of the room. She unlocked her office, put her purse down on her desk and hung up her jacket. Then she came back out to the front desk.

  “Good timing, Mom. I thought we agreed you weren’t going to go out to get lunch if I wasn’t here.”

  The phone started ringing.

  “You’re never here! And I was hungry! And ordering in costs too much! You’re just being inconsiderate, like your father.”

  “Mom, don’t bring Dad into this…”

  “It’s the Anishnaabe in you, the Ojibwe side. Your father’s Ojibwe and I’m Dakota Sioux. So you have a natural instinct to ignore my needs.”

  The phone kept ringing. “Does someone want to…” Cobi started to say.

  “Mom… that’s complete nonsense … and would you answer that, please?”

  Rhonda picked up the phone while shooting her daughter a dirty look. “Legal Assistance Society, how can I help you?”

  “Come on into my office, Andrea,” Jessie said.

  Rhonda held the phone out towards Cobi. “It’s for you, dear.”

  He took the phone from her. “Yeah?”

  “This Cobi Tate?”

  “Yeah… who’s this?”

  “I got a message. A little warning for you. You better back the fuck off the Paul Sidney case. I found you today real easy; I find out where you live, come burn your house down. Kill your family.”

  Cobi said nothing, keeping his calm.

  “You hear me, son?” the man said.

  “I hear you.”

  “You best back the fuck up, take your punk ass elsewhere, go back down south or whatever, or I’ll light you up. I know who you are and where you’re from, son. So you best know what to expect. Wait ‘til you walking down the fucking street, just light your punk ass up like it wasn’t nothing.”

  “Yeah, you a real gangsta,” Cobi said.

  “I’m a motherfucking nightmare to you.”

  The lined clicked dead.

  Cobi handed Rhonda the phone.

  “That didn’t look so positive,” she said.

  “Do me a favor: you got caller ID on that?”

  Rhonda dialed star-six-nine on the phone and got a number back. Cobi dialed it and the number rang.

  “Nobody answering. You got a browser I can borrow?”

  “Sure,” Rhonda said, moving aside.

  Cobi leaned down over the keyboard and brought up a browser, then punched in the number.

  “It’s a public payphone, at the Greyhound bus station downtown.”

  “Maybe the police can get them to check their security tape,” Rhonda said.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Cobi said “If they even took it serious, they have a million more important things. Then I’ve got to go in, fill out a statement…But that’s okay, because this tells us something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The neighborhood of our shooter, maybe. I just figured something out. Look, tell Jessie when she’s done with Mrs. Sidney that I headed down to the depot. I just want to see if I’m onto something.”

  Andrea looked as gaunt as her husband, a pale, wan look that suggested sleep was hard to come by.

  “Why didn’t you phone me?” Jessie asked. “You’ve got my…”

  “Phone was cut off,” Andrea said. “They’d cut off the heat and power too, ‘cept they can’t because it’s winter and it’s not legal.”

  Jessie felt guilty. Someone should have been checking in on their client’s wife, making sure she was okay. But there was just the two of them and they were so busy with the case.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize,” Jessie said. “How much do you owe?”

  Andrea’s head sunk again and she looked ashamed. “About four hundred for the utilities and another seventy-five for car insurance. We’re behind on the mortgage, too, but I’m not too worried about that. Worst they can do is take the house away.”

  Jessie hated parts of her job. Most of her clients were poverty stricken and most of the time she didn’t have the money herself to help; she’d sometimes offer groceries, or rides to look for work or get food. She’d even had a few clients leave their kids with her mom for the afternoon. But five hundred dollars? Right after Christmas?

  So much for a vacation this year. “I know a local group that helps with this kind of problem,” she lied. “They’ll provide the money for now.”

  “Really?” Andrea’s face brightened for a moment. “And I don’t have to do anything…”

  “No. It’s like a grant they offer. I’ll drop the money off at your house after work, okay?”

  Andrea let out a deep breath. “Thank you so much. Our daughter has been staying with my mother in Yorkton until this is all done, but she didn’t have the money to help, and I didn’t know what I was going to do.” She cupped her mouth reflexively and stifled back tears.

  “It’s okay,” Jessie said. “None of this is your fault, Andrea. You remember that, and don’t feel guilty.”

  “Okay, Ms. Harper,” Andrea said.

  “It’s Jess.”

  “Okay, Jess,” She smiled a little at the sense of familiarity.

  “But I am going to talk to Paul about what happens when this is all done with; once we’ve got him free. You know things have to change with him, right?” There wasn’t much point representing him without giving Paul and his wife a speech about priorities.

  “Sure.” The response was hesitant.

  “No, I mean that, Andrea. You can bet the police will be all over him after this. He’s going to have to find a real job, real work.”

  “How?”

  A fair question, Jessie knew. Paul was uneducated, his accent thick, and his mannerism different from those in his adopted province. He wasn’t a big physical specimen, and he didn’t have a trade.

  “I didn’t say it was going to be easy,” Jessie said. “But it’ll sure beat being dead or in jail.” She regretted the platitude almost as soon as it came out, but she had no other answer.

  30

  The Greyhound station symbolized a gray concrete relic of a different era, before cheap cars and cheap flights and cheap credit, when students and other poor folk relied on trains, or buses, or goodwill. It had a series of ticket windows, most of which were closed and unmanned, and an automated ticket machine that probably got more use than the few staff ever did.

  A fast-food restaurant and a small smoke shop offered meager amenities, along with a waiting area made up of orange molded-plastic chairs. Four people sat apart from one another, killing time while waiting for their ride out of town or to the south side depot. Soon, the whole thing would be torn down, replaced by a new
arena. Few would mourn its passing.

  A janitor swept up dust and dirt on the public concourse, an elderly Arabic man, thin and well-muscled.

  “Excuse me,” Cobi interupted.

  The janitor nodded towards him and smiled. “Yes, boss?”

  Cobi cringed a little inside. “You see a guy on the payphones here about a half hour ago, I’m guessing a big black guy, maybe with a basketball jersey on or something like that? Kind of a hip hop looking dude?”

  “Hip hop?” The janitor looked confused.

  “You know, dressed like a rapper. Like a gangsta.”

  The janitor smiled and tilted his head back in a knowing smile. “Ah! Gangsta Rapper! Like Snoop Doggy Dog.”

  Cobi cringed inwardly again. “Sure, something like that.”

  The janitor shrugged. “I see many people, all day many people.”

  “I ain’t going to get you in trouble.”

  “You police?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know,” the man said, smiling and shrugging again. “Maybe.”

  Cobi took out his wallet and took out a twenty. “I don’t make much, you know. You see this guy or not?”

  The old man looked around to see if anyone was watching before snapping the twenty up. “Sure, there was guy. Big guy, with black leather jacket and white shirt under, like you say.”

  “Basketball jersey? You remember what team?”

  The old man seemed taken aback. “Team? I don’t know what this teams is… I don’t know. White with number on it, blue I think.”

  “Anything else about him? Anything strike you?”

  He shook his head no. “Not so good. He had a …” he muttered several words in Arabic until he knew what he wanted to say in English, “… a scarf like on his head, black.”

  “Like, tied up? With a knot in the back?”

  The old man nodded.

  “Anything else about him? Any tattoos or jewelry?”

  “He had something on his finger, some tattoo.”

  “You see what it was or what it said.”

  “Too far away. That is all I know, boss, I swear.”

  “Please try; think back to what it looked like…”

  The old man squinted and tried, but it wasn’t coming. “I think…maybe…I think maybe letters? I did not see. I swear, boss.”

  “Okay,” Jessie said as she climbed into Cobi’s old BMW outside the office. “What has you so excited? I dropped off Mrs. Sidney and when I got back, my mother said you’d been calling.”

  “I couldn’t find your cell number on my phone. Anyhow, your mother mentioned that call I got?”

  “Yeah, some sort of threat?”

  “Guy struck me as trying to put on airs, you know? Like a wannabe gangster. We reversed the phone number and that took me down to the Greyhound station. Janitor says my caller was a big guy, intimidating type.”

  “Okay.”

  “You remember the description that guy gave me on Paul Sidney’s street of what he heard? Mr. Martin?”

  “Yeah,” she said as he pointed the car towards west Jasper Avenue. “Something about a low thumping noise.”

  He pulled the car over abruptly. “Get out for a second and close the door, but just let it rest closed. Don’t pull it all the way.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Just … humor me.”

  She did as he asked, avoiding a slush puddle. “Okay, now what?” She said to the closed passenger window, gesturing with her hands as if it would somehow make her easier to hear.

  Cobi turned his stereo way up, so that she could hear it through the door, a dull thump of big bass speakers. Then he leaned across the passenger seat and pushed the door open just enough for the thump to emanate for a few seconds before closing it again.

  She got back into the car as he lowered the volume. “So someone was blaring urban music or dance, opened the door for a second…”

  “Dumped the body…”

  “And then closed the door,” she said, finishing the thought for him.

  “Add it all up: a gangster-style shooting, gun dropped behind, body dropped off, the threatening phone call. This was a gang hit, Jessie, or a dealer at best.”

  “You sound pretty certain…”

  “You don’t grow up south of Six Mile and not know the signs.”

  “So the question is ‘why?’ ” she said, as he pulled the car back out onto the street. “I have a hard time seeing Featherstone mixed up with guys like that. Unless maybe he had a drug problem no one knew about?”

  Cobi shook his head. “Players like Featherstone, they don’t go out and score themselves. They have enterprising dealers who come to their offices, their homes. If he made a guy like that angry, the guy would just come over to wherever they normally met and shoot him. Why drop him off in the northeast of the city? That’s like a statement, like ‘Don’t come around our hood,’ or something.”

  “So maybe someone hired a pro, or a semi-pro, at least,” Jessie suggested.

  “You thinking Kennedy? Maybe he wanted the company to himself. And the wife, too.”

  “No, that’s not it. It’s a public company; they’re the biggest shareholders for sure, but they’re both incredibly rich already, worth more than a hundred million.”

  Cobi made an exasperated “huh” noise.

  “What?” Jessie said.

  “Back home, everyone has this saying. They always say ‘Don’t hate the player…’ ”

  “‘Hate the game,’ ” Jess finished. “Sure. Modern urban philosophy. Take what you can.”

  “I always hated that expression,” Cobi said. “And I was the player at one point. You know why?”

  “I figure you’re going to tell me.”

  “It’s because it’s the coward’s way through life. That’s what my old man used to tell me. Without the players, there is no game. I figure when it’s a guy like Kennedy, running scams like Au-rex? Man, I hate the player and the game, all right?”

  “We should go talk to him again. Right now.”

  “And ask him what?”

  “Not ask, tell,” Jess said. “We tell him that if he’s telling the truth and he didn’t have Brian Featherstone killed, then he’d better watch his back, because someone did. That’ll make him nervous and put us in his good books with respect to getting some help finding out who’s actually behind this.”

  “And if it’s him?”

  “Over a woman? A guy like that? I don’t think so,” Jess said. “But even if you’re right, at worst he knows we’re closing in on what really happened. And that will force his hand.”

  “Long as it’s not holding another gun,” Cobi said, “I’m good with that.”

  31

  Peter Kennedy’s secretary had been effective at holding Cobi up on his previous attempt to talk to the local mogul. So Jessie suggested another route.

  Cobi stared up at the legislature building from its side parking lot. It was like several he’d seen in the States, a giant tiled dome on top, pillars out front, a concrete monument to political process that suggested something more, something better. “So we’re just going to stand here?” he said.

  “Sort of. We’re going to stroll over to the side of the building and stand there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that parking spot right next to the side door is where Kennedy’s limo picks him up every day, usually right around five o’clock, when the house is in session.”

  “That’s smart. Are we supposed to be over there?”

  “Probably not. But there’s a guard in that booth reading a newspaper and he hasn’t bothered to even move. So how were we to know?”

  Fifteen minutes passed, and aside from some passers-by, no one paid attention to either of them. Kennedy’s limo pulled up and the driver eyed them warily.

  Five more minutes passed.

  The door opened and Kennedy walked out with another man, shorter, older and stockier, both of them in dark grey business suits. />
  “And by Thursday, they should be ready to…” Kennedy stopped speaking when he saw them. “Mr. Tate. I presume this must be Ms. Harper. Tom, if I could have a moment…?”

  “Of course, Peter,” the other man said. He went back inside on his own, looking unhappy.

  “Now, I should mention that I can’t stay and talk, I have an appointment. But if the two of you would like to call …”

  “We know you’re sleeping with Deidre Featherstone,” Cobi said, hoping a blunt statement would get a reaction.

  Kennedy’s mouth dropped open slightly. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response, and I’m certainly not going to talk to the two of you about my personal life.”

  “You want to end up like your partner, you will talk to us,” Cobi said. “Because we know things you don’t. But if you’d like, we can just walk on out of here…”

  “No…Look, perhaps we should talk,” Kennedy said. “We’ll use my car.” He gestured towards the limo, where the driver waited by the driver’s side door, hands in front of him. He took the cue and moved around to the rear passenger door, opening it.

  Kennedy ordered the driver to use the back road from the Legislature grounds to River Valley Road, a less busy route. “Now, Mr. Tate, perhaps you can enlighten me with respect to Brian. Because it seems you know more than I do.”

  “We think he was killed by a professional, which means someone was pretty damn angry at the man. He was definitely killed and moved. The best of many reasons for it that we can find so far is Au-rex.”

  Kennedy chose his words carefully, fingers arched, lips pursed as he tried to appear circumspect. “While I certainly feel very sorry for those poor souls who lost their life savings…”

  Cobi pushed down an urge to punch him in the mouth.

  “The facts are what they are,” Kennedy said. “We took a substantial loss…”

  “An income tax write-down, somehow?” Jess guessed.

  “And we are in no way responsible for people who chose to follow the advice of a rogue geologist. We are victims here.”

  “Uh huh. That’s not what we heard,” Cobi said. “We heard you got out early, helped some of your friends get out early, too. Only way that happens is if you and Featherstone knew before you told everyone else that the stock was toxic.”