Ball Park

by John Farrow

  ‘Twenty to life,’ Frigault summed up. ‘All because the gal said no.’

  ‘Why do homicide cops fantasize about murder so much?’ Cinq-Mars asked.

  ‘Oh goodie. A riddle.’

  ‘Give the kid a break,’ Giroux butted in, bailing him out for once. ‘What’s coming, I’m telling you, is the look on your faces. The first time a woman says yes to you, if it ever happens, that’s the look. I can’t put a dollar sign on it. Why I’m paying for breakfast.’

  The pair of homicide detectives couldn’t fathom this – for some incomprehensible reason, Giroux was buying breakfast. Wary, they kept their guards up.

  ‘Armand Touton and the Night Patrol,’ Cinq-Mars started up again, ‘caught the case last night. Touton himself, in person. He’s not doling it out. Next step, he’ll tie that murder to our robbery. Not hard. The same house. After that, he’ll tie our robbery to your murder. Fingerprints the link. Also, the loot from the robbery was left in the dead guy’s car. Bottom line: Touton and the Night Patrol walk away with the whole shebang for themselves. Our poste gets nothing. They take their murder, your murder, and the burglary. Yves and me go back to bicycle theft, where you think we belong, but you go back to praying that a wife will slice-and-dice her husband so you can root around for body parts. Except it’s a fantasy. Instead, you read the headline news. You’re not in the story. Guys, you know this dance. You know the tune.’

  ‘Touton has you by the short hairs,’ Giroux piled on. ‘You don’t have the weight to stop him.’

  ‘Nobody does,’ Cinq-Mars confirmed.

  Frigault and Caron glanced at one another, then stared back at Cinq-Mars.

  ‘Grim news, hey boys?’ Giroux egged them on in their misery. ‘Wait for what’s coming. That’s not the half. Your faces. I wish I had a camera to take the picture.’

  ‘I’m going to eat the eggs you’re paying for,’ Frigault told him, his tone mildly threatening. ‘The bacon. But enough about our faces.’

  Giroux held his hands up in an attitude of mock surrender.

  Food was arriving, and they broke off their talk as the plates were put down. Cinq-Mars bit into his bagel and cream cheese while chewing on an afterthought. He had noticed Caron – the tall one with the fifth-rate Einstein hairdo and gravelly voice – taking a moment prior to commencing his meal. The tough talker, of all people, secretly said grace!

  Religious in his own unique way, saying grace was something Cinq-Mars had let drop. The real surprise to him was his reaction to Caron. He had something on him now that one day, in some bizarre fashion, he could use against him. In the meantime, he chewed on the city’s great claim to fame, the Montreal bagel.

  ‘Go on,’ Frigault encouraged him. ‘What do you want to say?’

  ‘We brought the girl in for the robbery,’ Cinq-Mars reminded them, ‘but we can’t hold her, she’s underage. I’ve started a dialogue. She’s my responsibility until she’s turned over to youth protection.’

  ‘Turn her over,’ Caron stipulated. ‘Why not?’

  The one who said grace before eating was the one who delivered the tough-guy remarks. Cinq-Mars found he was already using the man’s religious bent against him. He was taking Caron’s antagonism less seriously now.

  ‘More useful to keep a line of communication ajar.’

  ‘Are you a bleeding heart, Cinq-Mars? Are you sensitive? Out to save the world, one bad girl at a time?’

  ‘Given the two murders, the robbery, the attack on the girl’s house, keeping her under our jurisdiction is the better option. More to learn that way.’

  ‘Like you said,’ Frigault reminded him, ‘Touton’s in the driver’s seat. Winner takes all. The murder in the house puts him out front. Who he is – his weight – that does, too. Grapevine says the old boy’s retiring. I say we kill time until he leaves and get the case back then.’

  ‘That’s your plan?’

  ‘What else you got?’

  Cinq-Mars and Giroux exchanged a glance. Time for their critical move.

  ‘Touton’s not giving up the case anytime soon. Let me tell you why.’ Cinq-Mars extracted a scrap of paper from a jacket pocket and read it aloud. ‘Savina Vaccaro Shapiro,’ he said. ‘I can’t keep track of names that aren’t French. The grieving widow. Her father is Giuseppe “Joe” Ciampini.’

  The detectives on the opposite side of the table stopped masticating. They stared back at him with their mouths ajar. Not a civilized sight. Moments passed before they recovered sufficiently to chew and swallow.

  ‘Not the look I was waiting for, but I’ll take it,’ Giroux pronounced. He waved his fork. ‘The case is out of your league, guys. You don’t do Mafia. The kid here, that’s different. He does Mafia when he’s in the mood.’

  Once again, Giroux’s interference was neither warranted nor welcome. Cinq-Mars’s body language demonstrated as much. Giroux shrugged and shut up.

  ‘What Touton does not know,’ the younger detective revealed, ‘is that I ran the fingerprints from the passenger-side door in your murder case.’

  The breakfast guests looked puzzled.

  Frigault spoke up. ‘We ran those prints. That gave us a connection to the house break-in.’

  ‘He’s talking about the smeared prints,’ Giroux interjected.

  ‘Those prints,’ Cinq-Mars confirmed. ‘Your lab said they were useless because they were smeared. My lab worked the edges of the smear and scored a positive ID.’

  The two detectives opposite him had their mouths open again.

  Finally, with a sliver of sarcasm, and perhaps one of admiration, Frigault said, ‘Your lab?’

  ‘Private access – let’s put it that way.’

  ‘And?’ Caron asked. In his mind, results outweighed method.

  ‘An ID. Local thug. If we look at the house again – dust for prints, this time in the bedroom – and if the guy’s thumbs and his little pinkie show up, that will make him first on the payroll for the house murder and the car murder. If you arrest, what does that do for your position on the case?’

  ‘You will request the comparison,’ Frigault told him. ‘Your lab and whoever’s. You’re a cop. It’s something called your duty.’ He could be a stickler for the rules when it suited him.

  ‘Duty, duty, but is it my case? Do I want to interfere with another cop’s case? Especially when that cop is Armand Touton?’

  Frigault and Caron were beginning to grasp the train they were riding on.

  ‘He just joined us,’ Giroux put in. He flexed only one cheek while grinning. ‘He doesn’t want to step on anybody’s toes. Or on your knees. Or on your fingers while you’re clinging off a cliff.’

  ‘He has his own lab,’ Frigault reiterated. Then posed the obvious question, ‘What do you want, kid? What are you looking to get out of this?’

  Cinq-Mars was direct. ‘We processed the dead driver’s girlfriend. She’s our thief.’

  ‘We talked to her first. Before you. You were horning in where you don’t belong. Maybe it got her house firebombed. How about we give that one a dry-run through the rumor mill?’

  ‘We talked to her in person,’ Giroux reminded them. ‘Face to face. Not on a bloody telephone.’

  ‘Hey! Nobody said it was our last conversation. Only our first. You went there off-duty – off-the-case. I see nothing here we need give up to you.’

  Frigault and Giroux went at it. Cinq-Mars made eye contact with Caron, directly across from him. The man was waiting for the other shoe, or a fork, to clatter onto the floor. Cinq-Mars could tell that he knew it would.

  As the two bickering detectives went silent, Cinq-Mars declared, ‘I want to keep the robbery case for Yves and me. Full charge. I also don’t want the thief turned over to youth protection. I’ll run her myself. The DPJ will wreck any chance she can help us. I will be the only officer responsible for her case. I’ll turn her over to DPJ if things go south, but that’s my call and mine alone.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re in love, Cinq-Mars,’ Caron said. C
ontrary to his words, his inflection indicated that he wasn’t being combative. ‘A horn-dog on? Woof, woof.’

  Cinq-Mars restrained himself from telling Caron to say a Hail Mary for that.

  ‘In exchange?’ Frigault asked. He already knew what response was coming.

  ‘You get the hood’s name and a clear shot. If you make the collar, the car murder is yours. Play it right, you’ll be the daytime slugs on the house murder as well. A win-win. To top it off, like the cherry on a sundae, Giroux buys breakfast.’

  The cops opposite him shared a nod and arrived at the right conclusion. They accepted the deal. But Cinq-Mars hadn’t finished enumerating his terms.

  ‘Another thing.’

  ‘Don’t push it,’ Frigault warned him.

  How he approached the matter was critical. He had to accomplish an end-around before they knew what direction he was coming from. ‘The captain of the Night Patrol and me, we trace back in time. That’s also what makes this work. My helping him keeps you on the case. Out of our long history, Touton gets to call me “kid”. There’s stuff behind that. Life stuff. Death stuff. Cop stuff. I’m fine with it, and that’s all I’ll say.’

  ‘What’s he going on about?’ Caron was legitimately confused.

  Frigault knew. ‘I’ll explain later,’ he told his partner. ‘We have a deal, Cinq-Mars. Not bad work, even if you do have a private lab.’

  Giroux was the only one at the table beaming. ‘Your faces,’ he burst out. ‘Worth buying breakfast for.’

  ‘The name,’ Frigault demanded. The last detail to seal their deal.

  ‘Arturo Maletti,’ Cinq-Mars told him.

  Highly credible. The two homicide cops knew him.

  A Painted Big Toe

  (Hands in tills)

  As his partner was putting in time on a case two months old – the theft of a painting from an octogenarian’s parlor – Cinq-Mars took the opportunity to visit his young thief, now that she was officially under his supervision.

  Home alone, she admitted him.

  ‘I’m surprised to find you in,’ he mentioned.

  ‘You rang my doorbell. How surprised can you be?’

  ‘Nice day out. Why be cooped up indoors?’

  ‘Why ring my bell if you think I’m not here?’

  ‘A starting point. Did you think of that? If you weren’t home, I’d hunt you down.’ He wanted to keep things light before getting serious. ‘Why not be outside?’

  ‘Maybe I’m grounded,’ Quinn said, then repeated his phrase back to him. ‘Did you think of that?’

  ‘Are you?’

  He caught a quick smile. ‘According to my dad, yeah.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He didn’t think it through. I told him, “You’re at work. How do you know if I’m in or out?” He’s never tried this before. He has no clue how.’

  Cinq-Mars weighed in with another concern. ‘Is it wise to be here alone? What if there’s another Molotov cocktail?’

  Quinn tried a dismissive shrug. Cinq-Mars mimicked her motion, mocking the attitude. She ceded ground. ‘My dad was worried, OK, but where do I go? If somebody’s looking for me, who? If I don’t know, I could walk right into him. Besides, my dad might be thinking it’s not about me.’

  About him, then. Cinq-Mars had wondered that himself.

  ‘You take care of yourself, is that the deal?’

  ‘Pretty much. We made an arrangement. When I go out, I write down where.’ With a painted big toe, she indicated a blank sheet of paper on the coffee table between them. ‘Coming home, I write down where I’ve been. Our version of me being grounded.’

  They shared a laugh. ‘I guess that works. Otherwise, you’re a free bird. The only constraint is to be honest.’

  ‘Not exactly a restriction. My dad tries. He means well.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Cinq-Mars suggested, ‘it’s more effective than you admit.’

  ‘Was I asking?’ Quinn challenged. Her underlying distrust leaked out. ‘Why think that way?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ Cinq-Mars reminded her.

  The day before, he and Sergeant-Detective Yves Giroux had brought her in for questioning, her dad in tow. The father waited in the detectives’ room while Quinn sat in the interrogation chamber which normally received tough punks or rowdy youths. Not many women had entered, and when they did, it was usually for hit-and-runs or shoplifting. The neighborhood notched upscale white-collar crimes, rarely anything down-and-dirty where the prime suspect was female.

  Cinq-Mars fingerprinted Quinn himself, rolling each digit to make a clear impression.

  ‘Cool,’ she said, when they were done. ‘I hope it was good for you.’

  He handed her a wet cloth to clean off the ink.

  In the interrogation room, Giroux started in on her. ‘About the break-and-entry.’

  ‘I don’t break,’ she insisted. Then more quietly, with pride: ‘I only enter.’

  ‘Not true. You cut the screens. Do you want to play smart with me?’

  ‘I can play dumb. Should I?’

  ‘Really? Are you too stupid to know the trouble you’re in?’

  ‘Are you too stupid to know that I don’t give a flying fuck?’

  Giroux’s temperature was rising. When a juvenile came into custody, the captive was usually a boy and on the verge of wetting himself. His hands would shake, his voice quaver. The kid was wary about what came next, such as the arrival of parents, or being roughed up, or spending a night in jail with degenerates.

  ‘Shall I pick up the phone, Miss Tanner?’ Giroux taunted. ‘Turn your ass over to youth protection? The neighborhood you live in, you’ve talked to kids. You know what it means.’

  ‘I talked to boys about it. Girls? The only trouble they know is getting knocked up. The Boys’ Farm, yeah, I heard about it. Is there a Girls’ Farm? Oh, never mind. I’ll go to the Boys’ Farm. I don’t have to worry about the counsellors there. They prefer dicks to chicks, I hear.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘If you don’t know, I’m not telling. You’re probably one of them.’

  ‘If you’re saying what I think you’re saying …’

  ‘No biggie if you’re queer. My best friends are. Helps me out in a way.’

  ‘Cinq-Mars,’ Giroux stated, ‘should we haul her downtown? Lose track of her for a couple of nights? We can slip her in with the drunks and lunatics. I’ll send you to pick up whatever bones are left.’

  Quinn responded with a smirk.

  ‘What?’ Giroux pressed her. ‘You don’t think I’m serious?’

  ‘With my dad outside? I know you’re not. I think you’re so full of shit there’s probably nothing left of you after a dump. Be careful when you sit down on the can, Mr Detective. You might flush yourself away.’

  ‘Girl, you need to smarten up in a hurry.’

  ‘I like to take things slow in life. My motto.’

  ‘I’m making that call.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Cinq-Mars advised him.

  He got up and left the room. He returned with Quinn’s father. Jim Tanner sat quietly in a corner. Quinn now had to speak her sass in his presence or mind her manners.

  ‘Let me talk to her,’ Cinq-Mars offered.

  ‘Be my guest. I’ve got a sour taste.’

  He sat opposite Quinn. He let her stew under his gaze down the lengthy line of his hawk-like beak. She began to squirm.

  ‘What?’ she said. She could not protest more than that, or hurl insults, not with her father ensconced in the corner.

  ‘I was wondering,’ Cinq-Mars said, ‘if Dietmar Ferstel had girlfriends before you? What about you, did you have boyfriends before Dietmar? Were any of them, the girls or the boys, upset when you two got together?’

  Quinn was twice defeated. In the first instance, her dad was in the room. She could not misbehave in his presence. Then the question took the focus off her onto the curious matter of the dead boy. The query motivated her to participate in the discovery of wh
at happened to Dietmar. She was up for that, and Cinq-Mars hoped to ease her into helping him and helping herself. Her culpability could still be drawn out, perhaps without her noticing.

  Giroux remained quiet, observing the new guy’s progress. He kept an eye on the clock, though, and after fifty minutes wrapped up the discussion to send everyone home. He and Cinq-Mars were working voluntary hours and he’d predetermined a limit.

  In her home the next day, Cinq-Mars again caught her off-guard. ‘Yesterday,’ he reminded her. Her father, in concocting a scheme where she filled out a sheet of paper to record her whereabouts, had created a restraint as effective as any. Quinn would avoid abusing his trust if she could help it. Jim Tanner knew that, and Cinq-Mars had learned that that was true. Quinn couldn’t step around it.

  ‘What do you want to talk about?’ she asked. The question lacked her customary impertinence. ‘I thought we covered the whole gamut yesterday.’

  ‘We barely got started. Your life as a thief, Quinn. We’ll begin there.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘Dead serious. I’ll give you immunity so long as nobody died. Spill the beans.’

  He could tell, as she spoke, that despite her outward reluctance, she was proud to do so. Her rundown was brief and to the point, although he noticed that she was careful to blur incriminating details.

  ‘Any idea why somebody tried to burn your house down?’

  That kept her onside as well, as she’d wrestled with the question on her own.

  ‘Maybe my dad’s in trouble. I don’t know.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘With his union, maybe.’

  ‘I see. Quinn, here’s the deal. I’m officially overseeing your situation. I am now the only person who can send you into youth protection, and the only one who can keep you out. Obviously, your cooperation is necessary for me to keep you out. You want that, whether you know it or not. Why do you think that is?’

  She wasn’t sure. She broached a different issue, her defiance rising to the fore again. ‘If you want to do something bad to me, you can’t scare me with youth protection. I’ll go to youth protection if you try anything.’