Ball Park

by John Farrow

  Jim Tanner recited the address, hung up, and waited. He sat in a kitchen chair. He got up and ditched the marijuana in a cupboard. If cops thought this was drug-related they might lose interest. He sat again and waited. He had learned to fear the police. Now he wanted them in his house, pronto.

  When he answered the doorbell, only a few minutes had gone by. Almost five o’clock. Émile Cinq-Mars stood before him.

  Men ripped her panties off and strapped her to a toilet. One arm was spread out, lashed to the base of the sink. The other was stretched opposite, tied to a radiator. A woman came in after she’d been alone for a while and had peed. Hearing the flow of urine, the woman came in to flush. Quinn thought she’d been abandoned. She had not been aware of anyone out in the hall.

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘Fucking shut it, bitch. Like yesterday. Like a week ago. Do I look like I want a fucking conversation with you?’

  The woman delivered her declaration then vacated the room.

  Abandoned. Although this time she knew that someone was nearby.

  Her guard.

  Who had carried no weapon. Remember that. It might matter.

  Quinn tried to think what else she could say about her.

  Tattooed. Druggie eyes. Attitude. Long dark hair, did nothing with it. A pained look to her. She’d been abused. Don’t tell her that. She looked controlled. Probably as mean as shit and not the brightest bulb. Don’t say that. Don’t tell her she’s a moron.

  In Quinn’s estimation, in any fight between the two of them, the matter would immediately escalate from hair pulling or cat scratching. Bad enough, as the woman had wicked nails. She might die in the battle, that level of carnage, that degree of weaponry. In a fair fight she could outlast her, being younger and healthier, physically and mentally. She could outwit her. Just because she could. Remember that. Endure. And think. Keep thinking. If it comes down to stamina, Quinn, you win. You got her. In mind over matter, you win.

  You can throw things. Remember that. You’ve got an arm.

  They might kill me. Don’t let it happen. Don’t let it. Stay alive, Quinn. Oh shit, I can’t let it happen! Breathe. Come on. Panic won’t help. I’m breathing. Stay alive. Oh God, why am I on the toilet? Breathe now. Breathe. That’s it. Keep breathing. Why did they put me on the toilet? OK! Start over. Think. Breathe. Breathing. OK.

  Instinct and training told Émile Cinq-Mars he had to act fast. An abduction required speed and luck if it was to be interrupted at the outset. Once the culprits sheltered in place, they gained control. A problem: he had no idea how long she’d been gone.

  Cinq-Mars called back Touton to alert the Night Patrol. He reached Giroux, who alerted Detective Caron and Sergeant-Detective Frigault. Every hand on deck.

  They’d canvas the neighborhood for leads. If nothing else, they might establish a timeline. Jim Tanner returned home shortly before six. Quinn was last seen in the early afternoon, downtown, with the boy known as Leonard. How did Cinq-Mars know that? they asked. He was with her. What kind of time are you spending with this girl? They were detectives, they had a right to be suspicious. They were men, like him. ‘Forget it,’ Cinq-Mars warned them. ‘I’m working her through this.’

  ‘Until now,’ Caron intimated.

  ‘Yeah. Until now.’

  Caron and Frigault agreed to find the boy. Cinq-Mars didn’t have an address, but Leonard – Cinq-Mars gave them the only name useful to their cause – was an everyday peddler of soft dope. Somewhere in the system they’d know where to find a boy with a fixed address, though no identity.

  ‘Student Ghetto,’ Cinq-Mars decreed. Somewhere to start.

  ‘On it,’ Frigault vowed.

  Giroux took charge of the house-to-house canvas, calling in foot soldiers. He coordinated with Captain Honoré of the night shift from his own station but made a point not to surrender authority. Cinq-Mars gave Jim Tanner his phone number and told him to man the fort. If he ever left the house, he was to leave a message giving details of his whereabouts.

  ‘Sort of like Quinn’s goodwill list.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Cinq-Mars had scrutinized Quinn’s list. It indicated that she was going to the funeral. No update after her presumed arrival home. Her abductor had been lying in wait.

  ‘Keep me informed as to your whereabouts, Mr Tanner. Like Quinn was doing for you. In case I need to get in touch.’

  ‘I have a better idea,’ Tanner said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Let me come with you.’

  ‘No can do, sir. Sorry.’

  ‘Give me one good reason why not.’

  ‘Because I plan to pull out all the stops on this. I can’t have a civilian around. That would impede me. I also don’t want a witness. You know, in case I dodge a few rules.’

  Tanner appreciated Cinq-Mars’s enthusiasm. Still, he wasn’t going to be blown off easily, and what Cinq-Mars said next didn’t help.

  ‘Sergeant-Detective Giroux will stay here. We need you with him in case they call. We don’t think there’ll be a ransom, but you never know.’

  ‘Giroux?’ queried Tanner. Then explained. ‘That day when the kid lost his legs. Giroux went behind a fence for half an hour. Vomiting. He was a total washout.’

  Cinq-Mars eyed him closely. Took note of the ramifications. Tanner had been left on his own to look after the boy until an ambulance arrived. He could have used some help. ‘Different circumstances, no?’ Cinq-Mars pointed out. ‘Look, he’s on this – no stone unturned, that mode. Maybe he wants to make it up to you.’

  Cinq-Mars could tell that in the upheaval of the moment more was coming. Would it be now or later?

  Jim Tanner chose to make it now.

  ‘Whenever I’m out at night, or at the bar or maybe at the bowling alley, Quinn always thinks I’m at a ball park, either the local kids or the Expos.’

  ‘You go elsewhere,’ Cinq-Mars concluded.

  ‘The track.’

  ‘You play the horses.’

  ‘It’s not like that. Two kinds of people are admitted to the paddocks. Horse people and wise guys, guys who are mobbed up.’

  Where was this going? And why now? ‘You’ve seen Giroux there?’

  ‘A lot. He isn’t tight with horse people. This is my daughter’s life we’re talking about here. I don’t know whose side he’s on.’

  ‘That’s fair. Look, I can vouch for him in this situation. He’s on your side.’

  Tanner kept staring back at him. His gaze as assertive as a blade.

  ‘Maybe you’ve seen me in the paddocks, too,’ Cinq-Mars said. He was catching on to where the man was coming from. ‘Never with him, though. I never noticed him there myself. I just met the guy.’

  ‘You’re hard to miss.’

  ‘I’m tall. All right, OK, my nose gives me away.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’ Tanner asked. ‘Whose side are you on?’

  ‘I’m whistle-clean. But why were you there?’

  ‘I got friends inside. Still my friends, even though I’m on the outside now.’

  ‘They’re all right, for mob guys, you’re saying?’

  ‘My excuse. What’s yours?’

  ‘Same difference. Except I’m a horse guy. My dad raised horses. Still does. I’m in the paddocks on his behalf now and then, to buy and sell. Not drugs. Not contraband. Horses. If you think hard, you’ll know that you never saw me with the wise guys, only the horse guys. I want your daughter back, Mr Tanner. I’m working for her, not against her.’

  ‘In my life, it’s hard to know. One reason I hang around with the old boys, I know who they are. Where they stand. Whose side they’re on.’

  ‘I hear what you’re saying, Mr Tanner. I accept that. But in my experience they’re not as faithful as you think.’

  The conversation provoked a thought. He placed his left hand on Tanner’s near shoulder and tugged him slightly closer to him. He spoke under his breath, confidentially. ‘How are your old skills? You mi
ght want to brush up while you’re waiting. Before this is over, I might need them.’

  Though not comprehending what was in the air, Tanner nodded.

  At that moment, word came in that Quinn had been seen entering the house around four. That meant her kidnappers did not have a massive head start.

  ‘Rush hour. Hard to get around. If they travel a distance, she might still be on the move. It’s possible—’

  ‘You got here fast,’ Tanner said.

  ‘I live in the neighborhood.’

  Then word came in from Giroux. Scouring the back yard, he found a muddiness from the earlier rain. Footprints. A slightly smaller, possibly lighter, foot was indicated amid larger ones. Two feet aligned together. As if tied together. Quinn had been taken out the back way. He sent cops to canvas the lane to find out what anyone saw.

  Word returned.

  ‘Three men with this blondie girl got into a blue van,’ an older woman, stuck in her wheelchair on an upper balcony, revealed. ‘Looked something queer to me, the way they rushing around.’ The girl’s hands, the woman speculated, might’ve been tied.

  ‘You didn’t call the police?’

  ‘Not my look-out, is it? Whoosh! Like that, they’re gone. They might’ve been the police for all I could tell. They backed up. Most cars go straight. That one backed up.’

  A blue van. Helpful. Barely.

  ‘Put it out there,’ Giroux ordered. ‘Broadcast the info.’

  Cinq-Mars headed out.

  ‘Where to?’ Giroux inquired.

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘Come on, work with me on this, Cinq-Mars.’

  ‘Downtown, OK? But who wants to know? Keep it to yourself.’

  ‘How do I reach you?’

  ‘Night Patrol. Leave a message.’

  Cinq-Mars told him the essentials. Where he was going and whom he’d contact. Giroux chose not to stand on jurisdiction. Possibly he approved. Night was falling fast. Bringing in the Night Patrol was the right thing to do.

  Cinq-Mars piled into his Volkswagen Bug and ripped downtown at speed.

  The Prodigal Mouse

  (Blaze of glory)

  At HQ, Cinq-Mars burst into Touton’s office, finding it vacant. Officers in the main room had no clue where he’d gone. A miscreant brought in for throwing a punch at his barber listened to the cops discussing the matter, then piped up, ‘He went to the morgue.’

  Not knowing the charge against this man, only that he was cuffed and sporting a bizarre haircut, Cinq-Mars asked, ‘Ours? The basement morgue?’

  The man shrugged. ‘He told me he’d be in the morgue. Like he wanted me to know. Weird. I don’t think it was a suicide note, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘What happened to your hair?’ Cinq-Mars asked him.

  ‘Only my barber knows for sure. He might be conscious by now.’

  Cinq-Mars tore off to the bowels of the building, praying to high heaven that if a newly arrived corpse had been dropped off it wasn’t Quinn’s.

  The dead person turned out to be male, mid-fifties. A jumper. Lazy in his preparations for death, he’d botched the job. Instead of hitting the river off the Jacques Cartier Bridge, he’d done a belly-flop onto solid earth. The gruesome carcass was less the center of attention than an unrelated conversation, with raucous laughter, involving Touton, Huguette Foss and Dr Eudo Lachapelle.

  They didn’t notice Cinq-Mars enter and looked up only when he announced himself, loudly. ‘Hey!’

  ‘Look what the cat’s dragged in!’ Huguette exclaimed. ‘The prodigal mouse. I mean, detective. The prodigal detective.’

  The remark might have instigated a fresh round of repartee, except that Touton knew his former junior officer had a situation on his hands.

  ‘What’s the verdict?’ Touton pumped him. His tone abrupt, intent.

  ‘The girl’s been abducted. Confirmed. An APP is out on a blue van. We got nothing else. Looks pro.’

  ‘Ciampini, you think?’

  ‘Over a baseball?’

  ‘That ball could mean his life.’

  ‘You two have been around the block.’

  ‘All right,’ Touton consented, ‘I’ll talk to him. Do you get what’s going on? He’s not worried about me or concerned about the law. His mob cousins in New York irritate him more. If they receive confirmation that in the old days he took out their favorite uncle, we’ll be videotaping his funeral.’

  Cinq-Mars agreed. ‘That’s why we need more than a chat with him.’

  Nearby, Huguette was revisiting the jumper’s corpse. He had to look away. One unholy horror.

  ‘I can make our displeasure known,’ Touton said. ‘Twist the blade once it’s in.’

  ‘A reprimand won’t make him give the girl back.’

  ‘What’s your thought?’

  ‘Blaze of glory, Captain.’

  Touton gazed back at him. He had an inkling of what was fermenting in Cinq-Mars’s head.

  Huguette ceased her ministrations.

  ‘Some new trick?’ Touton inquired.

  ‘Armand, we’ve talked about it, but never gave it a name. Wouldn’t it be great, we said, to go full throttle? Disrupt his night clubs. Shut down his bookies. Plow his drug pushers under the sidewalk. You know what I’m saying. Round up his addicts, bugger his clients, give his restaurant patrons indigestion.’

  ‘Cinq-Mars—’

  He wasn’t finished. ‘Disorient his hookers, scoop up their johns. Drive the pimps so deep manhole covers will be their rooftops. Maybe that time has come.’

  ‘What is it with you and this girl?’

  ‘I’m dead serious, Armand.’

  ‘I see that.’ Touton folded his arms across his chest, leaned back against a gurney. ‘OK, we talked about it, or was that the whisky talking? The case against full throttle hasn’t changed.’

  ‘One thing has.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Your retirement. Except for the back of your heel, you’re already out the door. What does it matter if they give you the boot early? What’s a few weeks?’

  Touton understood the parameters. A blaze of glory. By the time department heads and political elites got wind of the operation, he and Cinq-Mars might have accomplished what they were setting out to do. They could put the business operations of Joe Ciampini through a meat grinder and inflict severe damage to his reputation in places where his reputation mattered.

  ‘Doesn’t mean we get to nail his tail to the wall,’ Touton noted. ‘He gets mad. Releases the girl to put an end to it. Maybe. Best case. We still don’t come away with an arrest. Ciampini walks.’

  ‘Let him walk. I promise to take up the cause after you stroll off into the sunset. He walks. So does the girl. Quinn deserves to live. We show Ciampini who’s boss. We let him know that if she disappears, it’s the end of him.’

  ‘It won’t be. The end of him. If she dies.’

  Cinq-Mars twisted in the wind right where he stood, wrestling with that reality. ‘He doesn’t need to hear it from me,’ he determined. ‘Convince him otherwise.’

  Touton mulled things over. Cinq-Mars had learned that Touton forged big decisions slowly. Patience was required to push him in a new direction.

  ‘If I’m the colossal idiot you think I am and buy shares in your cockamamie blaze of glory,’ the senior cop determined, ‘it still won’t be enough. He’ll knuckle down. He needs the baseball. It follows that he needs the girl. If she has something to say, she’ll talk. Then what? Poof! We’re fishing her out of the river.’

  ‘I hate those,’ Huguette Foss chimed in. No one was keen on her dark tone or wanted her to explain.

  ‘You understand my point,’ Touton reiterated.

  Cinq-Mars did. ‘We need her to keep her mouth shut as long as possible. Let’s pray she buys us time. That’s why I need the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal in its full glory, armed, dangerous, and royally pissed off, to shake out the cobwebs and hit the streets hard. I need Ciampini’s head snapping back with
the sheer brute force against him. Shit hitting the fan non-stop might keep Quinn alive for more than a few hours.’

  ‘Émile—’ Touton tried to sneak in a word of caution.

  Cinq-Mars didn’t let him. ‘Keep Ciampini occupied. I’ve got a plan. We’ll put it into play and maybe get the baseball back. Then we deal. When you’re holding his balls – metaphorically a pair, but specifically a baseball – in the palm of your hand, then you talk to him.’

  ‘You lost me at “metafork”. Was that the word? So, how—’

  ‘You don’t want to know. Don’t ask.’

  ‘Really? This blaze of glory thing I’m supposed to pull off – which, I don’t mind telling you, has balls – it’s your blaze, too? You go out with a big bang too? Not just me? My retirement is coming fast. You want to risk your career? I don’t like that.’

  ‘It’ll be fine if it works. If not and the girl’s dead, who cares if my career’s still alive? I’ll sell horses with my dad.’

  ‘You’re more likely to check into a monastery. How’s that girlfriend of yours?’

  ‘I lost her.’

  ‘I knew that.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘Really? You think I don’t know why you left the Night Patrol? You’re a heartbroken sap. Rather than lose you altogether, I let you slide to the day shift. I didn’t want you sabotaging what’s left of your career over some girl you lost, and I don’t want you to do it over a girl you might lose tonight. Follow me? You want a front-line assault on all things Ciampini? Promise me, here, right now, you won’t toss your career off a bridge like this joker on the slab. I got more invested in you, Cinq-Mars, than that. Whatever you’re planning – legal, illegal, that part I don’t give a shit – make it work. Follow me on that, kid?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Touton had still to give his approval. His mind was made up, but he needed to take his time, to consider the downside.

  ‘Last chance,’ Cinq-Mars urged him. ‘One final fling. Like in the old days, with the old ways. Do we get our blaze of glory?’

  Touton nodded. He spoke quietly. ‘A fucking bonfire. He’ll think his house is burning. He won’t know what hit him. He won’t know if it’ll ever end. If I talk to him, it’s because he’s calling for the meet, not the other way around.’