by John Farrow
‘Not to tell me this.’
‘Why? Is it on the radio?’
‘A boy is found dead behind the wheel of his car.’
‘That was Dietmar.’
‘Oh no!’ The old man’s face had a look of sudden dismay. Then he seemed to pull himself together. ‘On the radio, they did not say his name. He was murdered?’
‘Killed when I was inside a house.’
‘You didn’t do it?’
‘Hell no!’
‘Sorry. I had to ask.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘My sorry apologies. I am in shock. This is more than a twelve, Quinn.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s like a twenty-six!’
‘I know. Maybe a fucking forty!’
‘Don’t swear. You can steal, but don’t swear. The police will learn about you, Quinn. They will talk to you. They will ask what you did today.’
‘I went for a long bus ride.’
‘Good. Good. They will want to know what you did last night.’
‘I can’t tell them that.’
‘Stealing the baseball, you can’t tell. This is a twenty-six. Or a forty.’
They sat in silence, the gravity of Quinn’s predicament binding them together. Ezra leaned in closer and whispered. ‘The baseball,’ he said, ‘must stay here. I will hide it for you. The ball, it can implicate you.’
‘I can throw it down a sewer.’
The man considered the option. ‘You never know when something that can be used against you, can be used for you.’
‘That’s what I need to learn,’ Quinn whispered back. ‘Stuff like that.’
Ezra solemnly nodded. ‘Sorry to say you will find out. Quicker than you want.’
‘I know.’
‘No. What you think you know is what you don’t know.’
As though to commence her education, he opened a drawer of the desk on his right. Removed a slim box, and from it a pair of nitrile gloves. He put them on. He asked, ‘Gloves you were wearing when you entered the house last night?’ She shook her head. ‘Why not?’
Quinn shrugged. ‘My prints aren’t on file anywhere. I can’t be traced.’
‘They are on file, and you can be. The police have no name attached to your prints, not yet. Cops don’t arrest thieves for one burglary. They wait to nail a crook for ten or twenty. Courts are not lenient on a crook who is active in his line of work. When they attach your name to your prints, they will have you for how many crimes, Quinn? One dozen? Two? Don’t answer.’
He rubbed the baseball with his gloved hands and against his shirt.
‘Do you see the name on the ball?’
‘Jackie Robinson.’
‘The other one. Mr Sal.’
‘I saw it, yeah.’
‘He’s the man who gave me my first chance. The one I lit fires for.’
‘No!’
‘Trust me. This is not good news.’
‘Why?’
‘Never mind for now. Your prints are off this baseball. As are mine. Tell me, are your prints inside the dead boy’s car?’
‘I was in the car a lot.’
‘After he was dead or only before? None of your prints with his blood?’
Quinn stared back at him. Her eyes widened.
‘Quinn?’
After his visitor departed, Ezra flipped the sign on his window to OUVERT. Once a day he dusted, to keep ahead of the game, and that day he decided to do the guitars. First, he checked his watch. He allocated exactly twelve minutes to the task. After twelve minutes to the second, he quit.
Time enough to deflect suspicion if anybody had bugged his phone. He didn’t want the visit and the phone call to be connected in anyone’s head. None of this putting two-and-two together crap. He doubted his phone was bugged, yet long ago he learned the virtue of assuming the worst. In his world, the criminal had a choice between two poisons: paranoia and prison. In his mind, one existed as the antidote to the other.
He went behind his counter and pulled his rotary-dial phone towards him. He dialed, patiently waiting for the rotor to tick back after each number. A male voice responded.
‘Drop by for a tête-à-tête,’ Ezra said. ‘Something beneficial to the situation.’
‘Tied up right now,’ the man said.
‘Hope you don’t mean literal.’
‘Not me. Can’t speak for the poor sap who sits across. Open late?’
‘As usual.’
‘I’ll come over after dinner.’
Neither said goodbye. Ezra returned the receiver to its cradle.
His gambit required skills at the height of his powers. His own life, not to mention Quinn’s, could hang in the balance. He shouldn’t be sticking his neck out, yet he planned to do just that. Not a matter of conscience. Only partly self-preservation. Sometimes a man arrived at a place in his life when he required a purpose, and Ezra’s purpose from that moment forward – within reason – was to save Rachel Quinn Tanner from the mob. He had smoked a cigar to celebrate her birth. He’d be damned if he was going to stand by and watch her die. She didn’t know it, but nasty men soon would gun for her.
If he could save her, good. He was no saint; if he also took a cut from his good deed, so much the better. Quinn had no clue what trouble followed her now. Only Ezra knew that. He alone could save her. Best if he preserved his own neck, too, as she had exposed it.
She was worried sick about the police. Yet her problems only started there.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, mobsters would be closing in.
Quickly.
Ezra knew exactly why Quinn’s life lay in mortal peril. That made him twitchy and instilled within him a sense of urgency.
Clunker Free
(Meatballs)
Years had passed since Jim Tanner relinquished his clunker, selling it for the cost of the tow. Repair bills had been eating him alive, and parking on the streets of Park Ex in winter had become too damn frustrating. The snowbanks were mountainous. As a single dad, he accepted that he was dirt poor. No more wheels for him.
For a time, he bussed to work, until the day a coworker gave him a lift to the plant. A significant portion of employees at Continental Can lived in Park Extension. Ukrainians, Romanians, Hungarians. After that he chipped in a few bucks every week for gas and discovered that he’d landed a new pal. He had wanted a non-criminal friend. Gabor Szabo was unaware of Tanner’s background and might not have cared. He knew him as a single dad who did his job at the plant, what else mattered?
Arriving home, Tanner wanted to say, ‘Gabs, don’t stop. Keep driving.’ He couldn’t say that. He could not admit that the two men clambering out of an unmarked car up ahead struck him as being detectives. They ignited in him an urge to flee as they walked toward his front door.
When he emerged from his friend’s car, he reached back to pick up his lunch pail from the floor and looped his denim jacket over his forearm. Whatever was going on couldn’t be about him. The other option was scarier. If cops were knocking on his door, his daughter might be in trouble.
At first, he hadn’t thought of that. Suddenly, he did.
Jim Tanner strode quickly to his home. The detectives were giving up at that moment and coming away. He could let them leave without identifying himself, except that if this was about Quinn, he needed to know.
‘My house,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
‘Sir. Hello. I’m Sergeant-Detective Paul Frigault. This is Detective Marcel Caron.’
Caron, who had wild frizzy hair, extended his hand. Tanner shook it. Less willingly, Frigault did the same. Tanner introduced himself. He started in English, and both officers continued in that language.
‘What’s this about? My daughter? Is Quinn all right?’
‘Is she home, sir?’ Frigault asked him.
‘You know better than me. I just got here.’
‘She didn’t answer. Mind checking? We can talk inside.’
If they were looking fo
r her at home, that meant they weren’t about to tell him she was in hospital or a jail cell. Tanner unlocked the door and from the narrow foyer shouted through the house. ‘Quinn! You here? Quinnie!’
The three men listened to the ensuing silence. Tanner said, ‘She’s usually out when the weather’s good. What’s this about?’
The sitting room provided cramped quarters. Each detective took a seat and Tanner chose the sofa, perched forward, wary of their news.
‘Do you know a young man named Dietmar Ferstel?’ Frigault asked him.
‘No. Who’s he?’
‘You don’t know the name?’
‘I’d remember a name like that. What does he have to do with Quinn?’
‘They were boyfriend and girlfriend, some say.’
‘Who says?’
‘His family, his friends,’ Caron told him.
‘When was this?’
‘Sir?’
‘When they were ten? Last month? When?’
‘Recently, sir. Current.’
‘She hasn’t mentioned him. Maybe she was trying him out. Why does it matter?’
‘The boy was killed last night, sir.’
‘Oh God.’ Jim Tanner’s hands had been raised. They dropped to his lap.
‘To our knowledge, Quinn was the last to see him alive. We’d like to talk to her.’
Tanner couldn’t immediately process the news. He’d been running ahead of himself, guessing at possible scenarios that might have precipitated this visit. This one never crossed his mind.
‘Sorry, wha—? What happened? How was …? How did he die? Car crash?’
‘He was murdered.’
‘My God. Wait. Quinn wasn’t involved. She was home last night.’
‘When did she get home?’
Experience warned him to be careful. ‘I’m not sure. I hit the sack early.’
‘We want to talk to her. About the boy, about last night. Routine questions.’
‘This isn’t routine. But sure. She’s usually home for dinner. Sevenish. Oh God, that’s … bad news. I can give you a call.’
Caron was extending a card, which Tanner accepted.
‘You never heard the name, Dietmar Ferstel?’ Frigault probed again. ‘Sir, is your wife home soon?’
‘She passed. Cancer.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir.’
‘I’ll give you a call when Quinn shows up.’
Caron and Frigault were exchanging glances, as if trying to figure something out between them without resorting to direct communication.
‘Something wrong?’ Tanner asked.
Frigault made the executive decision for his cohort. ‘My partner and me, we’re already off-shift. If Quinn could call us tomorrow, we could set up a time to visit.’
‘No problem.’ He was already feeling a hundred percent better. They weren’t gung-ho to interrogate his daughter. ‘She’ll call in the morning. I’ll make sure.’
They shook hands on the stoop. Jim Tanner went back inside. He was starving and needed to think about dinner. Quinn enjoyed spaghetti. With meatballs. He had the fixings. He hoped she’d be home soon. God knows, they needed to talk.
He hoped she knew nothing about the murder. That he’d be breaking the news to her. That would be tough on her, but he hoped she knew nothing.
Jim Tanner changed from his work clothes and went into the kitchen. He put both hands on the sink to keep them from shaking. Two detectives had been seated in his house. The memories provoked were times he did not care to revisit.
Quinnie, he was thinking. Quinn.
He had to do something. He got busy on the meatballs.
Paying for the Mercy
(Touton’s punk)
Sergeant-Detective Yves Giroux thought it a hoot when Cinq-Mars explained that his exit from the Night Patrol accounted for his inebriation and rank scent. Kept busy and feeling miserable through the morning and into the afternoon, Cinq-Mars was relieved when his new boss cut him some slack and sent him home early.
A small mercy, for which the younger detective was grateful, although Giroux made things clear as he went out the door. ‘You owe me now.’ A mercy, then, that would cost him.
He was suffering in the throes of a recent romantic breakup. Not utterly brokenhearted, yet his hopes for a better outcome had been dashed. He never told Armand Touton about being dumped, not wanting him to know that it played a part in his transfer. The Night Patrol had been a tremendous springboard to his career. The guys were tough, often ruthless, yet they defended the moral high ground with their lives. In a city of corrupt cops, no one on the Night Patrol accepted an illicit dime, not if he valued the existing contours of his bone structure. A farm boy, Cinq-Mars was tall and physically powerful – no martial arts training, only strength to burn and an inherent calmness amid chaos. Yet he wouldn’t have wanted to take on Touton, certainly not when the man was younger and, out of respect, not at his retirement age, either. A tabloid’s front cover, framed and signed, hung in the old man’s office: a photograph of two fists side-by-side, Touton’s and Rocky Marciano’s. Ring rats agreed that the heavyweight champ’s undefeated record might have been in jeopardy if he’d been up against the captain in a dark alley. A debate never to be resolved. Had they fought, one man or the other might have lost a legendary reputation.
Although Cinq-Mars thrived as Touton’s protégé on the Night Patrol, a truth sailed home: working nights and sleeping days gave him little opportunity to meet the women he’d like to meet, as opposed to the ones he’d rather not. He needed to work the day shift to give his non-existent love life a chance. To Touton, he called it a career move. If the Old Man saw through the fib, he didn’t mention it.
He moved into new digs in Park Extension, an area known to him when he first arrived in the city. The bedroom was cramped, the living room constricted his limbs. The kitchen was fitted out in miniature, and the bathroom had been constructed for elves. Technically, he had a tub. If he stooped, it could be used as a shower. Something he did not want to admit: the monkishness of the space appealed, as if, having failed lately at romantic love, he’d been thrown back into the cloister.
Cinq-Mars showered when he arrived home. Refreshed, he lay down nude upon his bed. The window behind the blind was open, but not a whiff of breeze stirred. Much later, half-dead to the world, he struggled to pull a sheet over himself.
The time of day conspired to deprive him of a lengthy snooze. Light shone around the edges of the blind, kids were noisily at play, and cars were on the move. Three hours after lying down, he sprung up again.
Partly, he was hungry. He also wanted a smoke. Quitting did not come without challenges.
Cinq-Mars alleviated his hunger pangs by reheating meat loaf. The sort of meal that was easy when coming off a 6:00 a.m. shift. He was counting on the essential aspects of his life – sleeping, eating, dating – to take on a measure of normalcy once he was ensconced on the day shift. Day One, he was chowing down leftovers and sleeping at a ridiculous hour, fitfully at best. Like always.
He went down the block to buy smokes.
He planned to stay in for the night. The evening air and the toxic energy that zapped through him when he bore away from buying cigarettes conspired to undermine the notion. His brain stirred. Thoughts buzzed like the itch in his bloodstream and started coming together. He focused on the robbery, the murder. Outside his flat, he shoehorned himself into his Volkswagen Beetle and drove to his new poste in the Town of Mount Royal.
The affluent suburb was situated within the confines of the larger city, a short hop from downtown and surrounded by poorer, congested districts. His new station reflected its location. A fire hall took up most of the building, next door to hockey and curling rinks. At its back shone a baseball diamond, and beyond that the high school’s football and track field. The school itself stood south of these playgrounds, with City Hall to the north. Open air, open sky. The interior augmented the theme: more office space than he’d ever known as a co
p, the desks sitting wide apart. The privileged few with offices of their own enjoyed spacious rooms. In the shank of the evening, his impression was of a clubhouse exhibiting the serenity of a library.
Murder within the Town of Mount Royal was colossal news. The homicide contingent stationed there would idly twiddle their thumbs most days were it not that they served a significantly broader territory. Usually, the Town’s troubles pertained to a socially advantaged class rather than a criminal element. The kids had access to drugs, cars, money and alcohol, in that order, with a penchant for raising Cain. Cinq-Mars expected that he might have to be a glorified babysitter. Compared to what he’d been through on the Night Patrol, when the whole of the city had been his turf between dusk and dawn, this new posting struck him as being a walk through a nicely shaded park.
To begin with a robbery and a murder put the kibosh on that expectation.
Which pleased him.
The night-shift captain was chewing an unlit cigar in the common room.
‘Captain Honoré, sir, I’m Émile Cinq-Mars, the new guy, days.’
‘Touton’s punk.’
His reputation could be a problem.
‘Not anymore,’ Cinq-Mars replied.
‘Are you confused, Cinq-Mars? Can’t break the habit?’
‘Sir?’
‘It’s night. You work days now.’
‘Just came in to access information.’
‘Like what?’
‘Fingerprint analysis for the robbery I’m working on with Sergeant-Detective Giroux. It might’ve come in by now. I’d like to check.’
‘Planning to book overtime? Don’t.’
‘I wasn’t thinking that way, sir. I booked off early. I owe hours.’
‘No sweat up my crack. Do you know where to look?’
‘Giroux’s desk. I didn’t want you to come across a stranger shuffling through his papers.’
‘Usually I shoot those people. No, wait. I ignore them. No, wait, nobody’s done that before. I don’t know what I’d do. Good plan, talking to me first.’
Maybe he was trying to be funny, or maybe he thought he was being savvy. Cinq-Mars felt stymied in the man’s company and waited to be dismissed.
‘What?’ The captain barked with the unlit stogie still wedged in his mouth. ‘Do you require a guide to get lost?’