The Filthy Few: A Steve Nastos Mystery

by Richard Cain

  Nastos felt that something just as sharp was gouging into him. Something about this case was maddening, affecting him on a subconscious level that he could not quite bring to the surface of understanding. Karen sat in the back seat, dabbing a tissue to her eyes. As much as he wanted to blame the feeling of unease on her, he knew it was something else, something less obvious.

  Karen was trying to pull herself together. Listening to her sob and talk to herself the entire way to the lookout had been distracting to his driving as well as emotionally draining. He was relieved to get out of the car and talk to Jacques, who would bring some positive energy.

  Nastos opened Karen’s door and helped her out. Carscadden exited the passenger seat and went over to Jacques’ car. Jacques had taken the parking place closest to the lookout and was sipping a coffee while he enjoyed the view. Nastos brought Karen over, watching as Carscadden and Jacques reacquainted themselves.

  Jacques extended his hand. “Nice to see you again, Carscadden.”

  “You too, Jacques.”

  It was the first time that Nastos had seen Jacques in person since Madeleine’s funeral. He was grateful that Jacques didn’t bring that point up. “Good to see you again. You remember Karen Grant.”

  Jacques shook her hand. “Hey, Karen. Sorry about your friend.”

  “Thanks, Jacques. I know.”

  Jacques shook his head, in a way that conveyed how disappointed he was in what he had to say. “I wish I could say we’re going to keep you safe, but with no proof it was anything but an accident, my bosses wouldn’t sign off on protection for you. The best thing you can do is disappear. I’ll feed you information from the inside, but that’s all I can do for now.”

  Carscadden asked, “Any witnesses to say one way or the other what happened to Falconer?”

  Jacques finally lit his cigarette. He took a drag then crossed his arms and turned sideways to take in the view of the city.

  Carscadden saw the Bloor Street Viaduct, the First Canadian Place skyscraper, the Don Valley trail system and the blue sky.

  Jacques spoke. “Broad daylight, middle of the afternoon, on a busy bridge with unobstructed visibility for half a mile each way, a hundred people with a clear view, it should come as no surprise that no one saw a thing.” Jacques shook his head slightly with disgust.

  Nastos asked, “What about the bus driver?”

  “She told the cops at the scene that a woman was standing at the side of the road, a few other people there, next thing she knew the woman was on the road and she had no time to stop. She had no idea of the pedestrian’s height, age, ethnicity, clothing, direction of travel, nothing. Not even sure it was a man. She didn’t want to give a statement, wouldn’t write anything down and when the cop asked her to at least sign what he wrote down in his notebook she says, ‘I should speak to my union rep before I sign anything.’ Can you believe it?”

  Karen wiped her nose. “And I’m next. If we don’t ID these guys, one day it will be me pushed into a bus, a taxi. Run down by a drunk driver.”

  Nastos found himself wrapping an arm around her. “This is not going to happen to you, Karen. We know their names, we know who to investigate.” He turned to Jacques. “Those two cops. We’re going to follow them around for a few days.”

  Jacques eventually said, “Be my guest. There’s nowhere near enough evidence for us to start anything official. It would be an SIU investigation anyway, and as far as I know, they don’t do surveillance.”

  Nastos asked, “So how are you liking Homicide?”

  “It’s different. On the road you chase around the thugs, there’s the thrill of the hunt, excitement. In Homicide you figure out who did it in the first five minutes. That’s the easy part. In Homicide you chase witnesses. It’s like herding cats. Then you have to browbeat, intimidate, sweet talk, beg, bribe, do whatever it takes to get them to actually testify in court. It’s crazy.”

  Carscadden said, “Sounds like a pain in the ass.”

  “It’s aggravating. One percent of the population are assholes, the other ninety-nine percent, when it comes down to it, don’t want to get involved. Doesn’t leave much to work with.”

  Nastos took a step closer to the edge of the lookout. The line between the strength of land and free fall of sky was imperceptibly small and something only clearly identified after you crossed it. He spoke with his back to them. “This is a point of no return. We’re investigating two cops for two murders. Turning on cops is a stink that never goes away. If this backfires, Jacques, if we’re wrong, you’ll never be trusted again no matter what. You’ll be a rat, a threat to the brotherhood.” He turned around.

  Jacques met his gaze without a flinch. “If these guys did this, I don’t want them carrying around the same tin in their back pocket that I have in mine.”

  Jacques said to Karen, “You know I never heard back. The pictures of the two cops I sent, did Falconer give a positive ID that those were the guys who shot Rob Walker in Trinity Bellwood?”

  “No. I never had a chance. I asked her about detox and she freaked. She grabbed her purse and headed out the door. She was going to hook for as much money as she could get and take a bus as far away as she could get, then do it again town to town. I chased her down the hall, we were shouting at each other. She was so scared.”

  Jacques asked, “Is that when you got the scratches on your arms?”

  Nastos looked down and saw that Karen had a red gouge along her left forearm. There were scrapes on her other wrist. He didn’t know why he didn’t notice it before, other than that he had been preoccupied with her emotional state and trying not to get dragged too far in. When a cop sees arm injuries he thinks defensive wounds.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That was at the elevator. I tried to pull her out as the doors closed. It was the last time I ever saw her. She was so mad at me, I had such a bad feeling, but it’s like she had Oppositional Defiant Disorder. You couldn’t reason with her and you couldn’t force her to do anything, even if it was for her own good.”

  Nastos reached out to Karen. “Can I see your cellphone?”

  She brought it out of her purse. “Why?”

  Nastos took out the battery and SIM card. “The phone stays here in a garbage can. You don’t reinstall the SIM card until these guys are in police custody. There’s an apartment over Carscadden’s office. If that’s not good enough you can get a hotel. If it wasn’t for Josie you could stay with me.”

  She nodded. “No need to explain, I understand.” She turned to Carscadden. “I’ll take the apartment, if that’s okay?”

  Jacques straightened up from his position of leaning on the car. “Well, I’m going to get back into work. I’ve already asked my boss to give me the Falconer case. It might come off as a little suspicious that I asked for a jumper, but when it comes down to it, they have to assign it to someone so it may as well be the idiot who volunteered. I’ll keep you guys up to speed. Doesn’t look like the bus camera caught anything. There’s no traffic cameras along there and like I said the witnesses have spread to the four winds. If you want to kill someone, broad daylight isn’t the worst option in Toronto.”

  Nastos and Carscadden shook hands with Jacques and left with Karen. She opened her purse and searched for something. She was beginning to get frantic when she opened a side pouch and exhaled long and hard.

  Carscadden asked, “What is it?”

  She leaned forward from the back seat. “Everything I have on Falconer, the video interviews, the stories I’ve started developing, I have most of it here. The rest I already uploaded to a secure server and the password is in a text file in the main folder.”

  Nastos said, “You’re thinking of work? At a time like this?”

  “You’re one to talk. And if I’m going to be holed up in an apartment for god knows how long at least I can get the story together. All I need is to get to a store to buy a new la
ptop. Ann tossed mine over the balcony.”

  The drive to the office was silent. Carscadden and Nastos dropped Karen off outside, watching as she safely walked up the steps and disappeared through the door. Nastos said, “Too bad she’s crazy and wanted by two dangerous murderers.”

  Carscadden offered a quiet wolf whistle. They drove in silence for most of the drive up to Frankie’s. Nastos tried to decipher what it was about the case that had become so maddening to him, what felt like a thorn gouging into him.

  He tried to talk it out with Carscadden the way he would have with Madeleine or Dr. Mills. “I wanted to be a cop since as far back as I can remember.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Carscadden looked over.

  “That people who wore the same badge as me could be doing these awful things, killing innocent people, for what, money? Something as petty as money?”

  “You think it’s money?” Carscadden asked.

  “What else can gangsters offer? After the settlement I have all the money I could ever want. And I’d give it back in a second if I could have Maddy here with me. She was totally innocent. Now we have cops killing innocent people, the most vulnerable people in our society? Walker and Falconer weren’t worthless throwaways.”

  “No one said they were.”

  “Just because no one loved them doesn’t make them worthless.”

  Carscadden seemed confused. “No one said it did make them worthless.” His voice trailed off. “Why, is that how you feel? With Maddy gone? Like no one loves you, so you’re worthless.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Hey, I know it’s not what you meant to say, but it is what you said.”

  11

  Nastos and Carscadden sat in the idling restaurant delivery van that Viktor had donated. Viktor wasn’t a smoker but whoever usually drove this truck was. There were nicotine stains on the roof, a burn hole in the sun visor. The white padding behind the vinyl was beginning to darken from exposure to the elements. They were pulled over to the side of the road at Bloor Street near Dufferin in Bloordale Village. The last time Nastos had been in this part of town was for a street-level robbery where the suspect made off with a man’s briefcase and wallet. For some reason the suspect returned specifically to blow the victim’s face off with a shotgun. It was never solved. Since then the area was desperately trying to rebrand itself as an up-and-coming arts community. Most of the native languages, Italian, Portuguese, Ethiopian and Hindi, had now disappeared, and the hole-in-the-wall authentic restaurants were being replaced by Subways, Tim Hortons and Popeyes franchises.

  There was one holdout against the community’s modernization, the Big Red Tattoo Machine. Carscadden and Nastos had watched Radix and Morrison casing the place for two hours. Carscadden passed time flipping through the photographs that they had from Jacques. “So Morrison is the taller one. He looks younger. Where’d you put the other pages?”

  Nastos torqued around to the back seat and handed them over. He noted a black pouch on the floor behind the passenger seat. “I’d like to pull out the binos to see what they’re waiting for but don’t want to take the chance that they’d catch the glint.”

  Carscadden grunted a response as he read the Morrison and Radix bios. He put the pages aside and brought out his BlackBerry. After a few minutes of Googling he turned to Nastos. “I’m getting a sandwich from the back, want one?”

  “I can’t believe you.”

  “What?”

  Nastos shook his head. “You’re missing the whole point of stakeouts. You’re not supposed to pack a lunch. You’re supposed to have to live on the fly. Duck into restaurants to take a leak, scarf down street meat while driving the wrong way through traffic. It’s supposed to be about the stories from the stakeout, not the stakeout itself. What kind of story will this be one day if all we do is eat gourmet sandwiches and sit in an air-conditioned truck with plenty of legroom? You’re depriving yourself of the very excitement you always complain about missing.”

  Carscadden paused for a moment considering what Nastos had said. “Hopkins used a sweet heat, Dijon mustard on rye bread she bought from the Portuguese bakery. And it’s real turkey, not the processed stuff.”

  Nastos winced. “Better get me one too.”

  Carscadden slipped between the seats into the cargo area. Back there they had overalls, reflective safety vests and traffic cones, supplies for any contingency. Carscadden came back to the cab, bringing with him a hard plastic lunch bucket and two Coke Zeros dripping with water from the back cooler. “If we’re here any longer we should put out the traffic cones.”

  “That works both ways. If we had another team I’d be all for it, then when the rabbit car takes off we can just stay here and they can run the tail. If they see us everywhere else they go today they are going to know that they have attracted heat.”

  “They don’t seem heat conscious”

  Nastos considered it. “No, they seem nervous, like they know they are being followed but doing it anyways, as crazy as that sounds.”

  Carscadden cracked open the lunch box and doled out the sandwiches. “So when cops do surveillance —”

  “We call it spin.”

  “Right, spin. Do they use cellphones? Like if they were worried about being followed, what would they do?”

  “Like counter-surveillance? What do the professional criminals do? This smells so good.” Nastos opened the wrapper, breathed in the Dijon mustard and took a big bite. He hadn’t been so hungry until Carscadden recited the ingredients.

  Carscadden choked down a big bite. “Yeah.” He asked, “What would high-end drug dealers or organized crime guys do to thwart a surveillance team?”

  Nastos didn’t have to think to answer. “First they have scanners hidden in their dashboards, hooked up to the car radio to listen to what’s going on out there. Spin teams use either Pig Latin or a deep level of jargon.”

  “Pig Latin?”

  “Yeah, sounds like gibberish, especially when you use it on the jargon codes, although some targets actually hear it so much they decipher it. The rabbits get familiar with even just our voices. Pretty soon they begin to wonder why a Pig Latin speaking construction crew with one-mile-range radios seems to always be driving within range of their car. Doesn’t take a genius for them to figure out that they have heat. Most targets do a lot of U-turns, wrong-way streets, stuff like that. They wait on left-turn lights and don’t go until the last minute. Chase cars have to run reds to follow, so if these guys are checking their mirrors and keep seeing guys driving like freaks behind them, they kinda notice. Once I was on a team following two bikers. At every red light the passenger would get out with a video camera and record all of the cars stopped in traffic behind them. They’d obviously check the tapes later and look for repetitive faces. Professional criminals are paranoid narcissists so they can be impressively self-preserving.”

  Nastos checked the time on the truck’s dash. He wondered how much longer they would have to sit there. He cracked open the tab on his Coke and it foamed up over the brim. He had to slurp the top to prevent it from spilling into the cup well.

  They ate in silence other than Nastos slurping from his pop can. Carscadden asked, “If this is a Hells Angels tattoo parlour, why don’t the cops just get a bylaw to shut it down?”

  Nastos took a large bite. “Too busy. They might have it wired, who knows.”

  “You don’t think our guys are —”

  “No. These guys have no idea what they’re doing. They stand out. If they’re doing this it’s on their own time. Whatever the hell it is they’re actually doing.”

  Carscadden leaned into the back to put down the lunch box then took a long slug of his drink. “In the bios these guys only have a couple years on.”

  “Yeah. I’d love to know what the hell is going on in their minds.” Nastos raised a finger. “Check that out, it looks like they�
��re arguing.”

  Carscadden leaned forward, squinting. “How long do these morons think they can keep their business under wrap?”

  Nastos turned the radio on, listened to about a second of music then turned it back off. “Everyone has cell cameras with HD video. The internet can track the phones, tell you who owns them and where they are. Facebook has GPS feeds. The days of secrets are over.”

  Carscadden glanced at him then turned away. The sound of a siren became louder, eventually an ambulance drove by, the medic in the passenger seat was surfing the net on his phone, his foot up on the dashboard. “Not all of the secrets are over. You’re still holding back a few whoppers.”

  Nastos perked up. “Like what?”

  “You know perfectly well like what, Nastos. You’ve still never told me where you were the night at Cherry Beach when the dentist had his brains smashed in. I guess you forgot your alibi on the most important night of your life?”

  Nastos leaned his head back, looking up at the nicotine stains.

  “Earth to Nastos, where the hell were you?”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  “Yeah, well, unless you responded via brain waves, you didn’t answer the first time. Come on. Spit it out. If you had given me an alibi, the whole trial could have —”

  “Karen. I was with Karen.”

  Carscadden stared back, his mouth open. He remained silent.

  Nastos shrugged, “Hey, it was my fault, not hers.” He paused, picking up his can of pop. It was still sweating with condensation. “It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I could go public with. I kept my mouth shut and you pulled me out of the fire anyways. Just like you did with Viktor Kalmakov, the Russian philanthropist and mass-murdering gangster.”

  “Shouldn’t say that about a guy nice enough to lend us his van.” Carscadden shrugged. “I was lucky with Viktor.”