We ended up in a neighborhood of redbrick buildings five or six storeys high with old woodwork and big pieces of wrought iron framing filthy panes of starred and cracked glass. Shards of paper blew across the sidewalks and gathered in eddies with leaves, empty paper cups, and cigarette butts raped of any shred of tobacco.
“This looks familiar.”
She lit another cigarette, this time with the car’s lighter. “Yeah. It should. This chunk of the city’s been filmed like twenty million times.”
I looked out the window and tapped the glass. “Sure.”
“Framed with Sam Neill. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. Acceptable Risk. The Adventures of Shirley Holmes.”
I turned in my seat and looked at her quizzically. “Adventures of Shirley Holmes?”
“It was good.”
I let it lie for a while but circled back to it. “Adventures of Shirley Holmes?”
“Drop it. Here we are.”
She pulled into a tunnel in the middle of a block and drove halfway down until the walls opened up on either side and we could get out of the car. The woman took a big drag on the cigarette and snapped it away to bounce off the bricks, trailing sparks like the tail off a comet.
She asked casually, “You carrying?”
“No.”
She looked at me indifferently as though she didn’t believe me but let it pass anyway. Then I added, “Do I know you?”
“I used to be a hooker and you might have fucked me. But I don’t remember you.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sandra. Now, there’s no need to be nervous here. Robillard just wants to talk.”
“Right. Adventures of Shirley Holmes. Shit.”
She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips disapprovingly. “You ever watch it?”
“Well, no.”
“So shut your mouth. It was good.”
There was a heavy-gauge steel door set into the wall and Sandra knocked on it six times slowly before it was opened by a sullen teenage boy.
“Hiya, Sandy. Thank fuck you’re here, your husband’s being a knob.”
“Good afternoon, Tom, you’re looking lovely today.”
She looked at him and smiled at the corner of her mouth. The boy glanced at me and I saw he was carrying a thin-bodied, long-barreled Colt pistol level with his crotch. He tightened the grip on the pistol with one hand. I tried to break the ice.
“Hey, nice gun. Colt thirty-eight Super, right?”
The kid nodded half-heartedly.
“Great gun and a nice round. Good and fast. Especially for the thirties, when they started making it. Not so fast these days. Kinda old-fashioned.”
The kid didn’t cut me slack, just stared, so I tried again.
“Where’s Robillard?”
Sandra turned halfway around to face me. “My husband’s downstairs.”
She walked in front of me down narrow stairs into the basement underneath the building. I followed, then the kid. Halfway down the stairs I sneezed and it echoed loudly. “Stupid allergy.”
Sandra led us into a large kitchen floored with industrial gray tiles and full of stainless steel tables, counters, and equipment. In the center of the room was a perforated metal lid over a drain and I knew that this place could be a killing room just as easy as not. The drain could carry away my blood as easy as anything else.
Looking up from the drain, I saw a fattish white man. He wore a maroon silk shirt over khaki pants and held a tall can of Olympic Ale in one meaty hand. He waved the can around when he talked and some slopped into the air and fell like molten gold to the tiled floor.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Haaviko, is it? Or do you prefer Parker?”
“Parker.”
“Excellent. Do you know who I am?”
He sounded reasonable. I took two steps into the room and waited while the kid with the Colt closed the door and leaned up against it. Sandra took three steps to the right and hitched herself up onto a platform beside a heavy cutting block.
“Robillard. You’re a crook.”
He nodded, like I was a good student. “Excellent. Yes, I am. I own parts of three or four restaurants, two garages, a pool hall, some other businesses. I smuggle, I fence, I grow and distribute weed, I lend money, I arrange for people to get hurt. I am telling you all this as a courtesy so we know where we’re at.”
My eyes went to Sandra and then back to him. “You a pimp too?”
His smile flickered like a neon light. A tremor ran through his face and subsided and his voice got louder. “No.”
He drank some beer and I saw his hand tremble a little until some beer splashed out. For a second the drops were suspended in the air and then they hit the ground.
“Sandra’s my wife. You should apologize.”
Emphasis on my. I nodded to her and spoke very softly. “Sorry.”
Robillard paused for a moment and then ran his free hand through his hair. “I am not the worst man in the city, nor am I the best. I am not a shark amongst minnows. I am a shark amongst other sharks. We all have sharp teeth and I am not to be fucked with.”
The tremors in his hands came again, stronger this time, and he took a deep breath and slowly they stopped. “Yet you are fucking with me.”
The way he spoke, the obscenity was in brackets and sounded like a preacher telling a dirty joke. It sounded out of place.
“This is about your cousin, I suppose?”
“You suppose right. Your actions show contempt.”
The kid with the Colt shifted around a little and Sandra stared at a point on the wall above my head. Robillard went on, his voice smooth now. “And if you show me contempt, then it makes it harder for me to follow my chosen profession. I will appear weak. Some other shark will try me out. Which would lead to violence. Which would lead to bloodshed. Which no one wants.”
He waited for me to say something but I didn’t.
“So I really should kill you. To prove that I am not weak.”
“That’s an option.”
His eye twitched and the tremors came back for a second. I could swear I saw Sandra hide a grin.
“What do you mean?” Robillard’s voice was throaty now, full of anger.
“I’m hard to kill. Find another option.”
Without making a big deal about it, I moved to the right and turned so I could see the door and the kid with the Colt out of the corner of my eye. The woman tilted her head to the side like this whole thing was amusing her and now the smile was in the open. Robillard went on, this time talking to me and then switching to Sandra. While he talked, he opened another beer from a six-pack on the counter.
“I’ve decided I do not want to talk to you.”
She sneezed.
“I want this man dead . . .”
I interrupted. “ ’Kay. Before we do that, hear my side. Your cousin broke into my home with his friends and they were killed.”
Robillard took a swig of beer and a trail of translucent snot ran out his nose into the foam on his upper lip. He was trembling openly now, big, hard slabs of fat shaking with strong emotion and something else, an upper like cocaine or speed fanning his flames. His right hand rested right beside his front pocket, which bulged like it would if it was holding a gun. Of course, he could be holding a cell phone or a wallet but my money was on a gun.
I continued, “You would have done the same thing.”
Click-click. The kid with the Colt moved the safety on and off again and again. The woman watched what was going on and Robillard raised his voice to a yell. “Fuck that and fuck you. You killed him for no good goddamned reason.”
Sandra sneezed again.
Click-click. The kid, it was getting annoying.
“Sorry.”
Could that be what he wanted, an apology? I tried that. “Look, I’m sorry he’s dead.”
Robillard screamed, any semblance of patience gone. “That’s not fucking important!”
“Then what is?”
“Respect. Y
ou don’t show me no fucking respect.”
I had shifted weight and was looking over Robillard’s head to examine my reflection in a hanging rack of stainless steel frying pans.
Click-click. The kid had a real nervous twitch going on.
“Fuck this.” I said it out loud and everyone stared. The kid had come slightly closer and was surprised when I pivoted with my weight on my right foot with my left foot guiding. I had brought my right hand in close to my chest and drove it out open-handed to turn his nose into jelly. At the same time, I grabbed the Colt by the barrel with my left hand and then reversed the motion and handed the gun to my right hand. I thumbed the hammer back and checked the safety blindly with the same thumb. Then I pointed it in the general direction of Robillard.
“Don’t!” I said it mildly and Robillard stopped. Drinking. Talking. Even breathing.
“You too.” That was directed at Sandra, who had drawn a slim pistol out from somewhere and she froze as well. She laid the pistol down on the counter and I relaxed a little before going on like nothing had happened.
“So did I kill your guy back there or is he just fucked up?”
Robillard’s eyes were focused on the barrel of the gun. His beer fell to the ground and bounced once and the fluid boiled out.
“I said, is he dead?”
Stepping back a little, I found I could see the boy in my peripheral vision. He was collapsed against the door with his left hand pressed hard against where his nose had been. From around his fingers I could see pink meat and white bone and the healthy red of arterial blood. His nose, though, was gone. Shock had taken him away and Sandra finally answered. “Bad but not dead.”
“Oh well.”
I backed up to the boy and patted him down to find two extra magazines and a cheap folding knife. As I was doing that Sandra flexed her fingers and Robillard reached down towards his pocket. Both stopped moving when I shook my head.
“Neither of you is nearly fast enough. You got a good boy here, you know that?”
They didn’t respond and I walked over to the woman and took her gun. Up close I was struck by how much prettier she was than I’d originally thought. She was also eerily calm. Her gun was a Colt Woodsman in .22 with a six-inch barrel and the front sight filed off. A killer’s gun. Something for someone who liked working up close and who had confidence. Normally, a .22 is a useless round, you have to be really arrogant to use it. Or you have to hate the noise and recoil of a bigger gun. Or you have to have read too many detective novels.
As I took her gun I told her, “Nothing personal.”
She nodded and I got out of her space and moved over to Robillard and took his piece too before moving back. He had been packing a big Smith and Wesson revolver in .41 magnum with the barrel cut down to the cylinder and the handle wrapped in black electrician’s tape. Inaccurate. Loud. Destructive.
I went back to where I’d been and covered them both with her piece and the kid’s Colt. Robillard’s gun went into my back pocket just in case I wanted to kill a whale later on.
“Now,” I reached Robillard in two steps, “our discussion is over.”
He looked hard and drug-fueled rage opened and closed his mouth until I pressed the barrel of the Colt .22 into his eye and he backed up, and then pressed some more until he backed and finally stopped when he hit the institutional gray wall.
“Stay out of my way or you die. Stay away from my family or you die. If you interfere with me, you die. You try to do anything that affects me personally in even the smallest way and you die.”
With each word I jabbed a little harder into Robillard’s eye and then I stopped and headed up the stairs. At the top I booked it down the alley, stopping for a second to open the hood and tear a handful of wires loose from Sandra’s car. A few alleys over, I wiped down the three guns on a piece of canvas sticking out of a garbage can and dropped them one at a time into trash cans and down sewer gratings.
On the bus home I wondered about Shirley Holmes.
16
When I walked into the house both my knees were immediately bruised black by a charging dog’s head. After I had untangled a very happy Renfield from my lower torso and stopped him from loving me to death, I called out, “Hi, honey, I’m home. What’s for dinner?”
“Very funny and very original.”
Claire came around the corner from the dining room on her hands and knees with Fred balanced precariously on her back. He looked somewhere between amazed and terrified as he clung to her shirt. She paused and Fred dug his heels into her ribs and chortled.
“And how was your day?”
Before I opened my mouth, I decided to omit any reference to the kid, Robillard, or his ex-whore wife with the very professional .22. “Boring and kind of fun, how about yours?”
She motioned so I knelt down to hear her whisper while Renfield took the opportunity to lick my ear with considerable force and enthusiasm. “The bastards are grinding me down.”
Fred switched to my back without too much fuss and the three of us headed into the kitchen, me crawling and Claire finally getting to walk.
“I’ve been doing that for too long. Dinner will be ready in about two hours. I’ve made lasagna, I hope it’s good. I’ve never made lasagna before, so even if it’s bad, pretend it’s not. So, what about your job?”
I dumped Fred in his playpen in the dining room and poured a glass of water.
“It’s a convenience store about six blocks away. The customers are mostly jerks, local assholes mixed with a few lost tourist-type assholes. On the plus side, the work is easy and the owner’s medium smart. The cash register’s a bitch, though, very old and crotchety.”
“Much like you. When do you work again?”
“Tomorrow, same time.”
Claire checked the oven and adjusted the temperature. “So, would it be okay if I went out tomorrow night?”
That made me feel odd and I answered with artificial bonhomie. “Of course.”
She sighed and wiped her hands on her jeans. “It bothers you, doesn’t it?”
First rule of interpersonal relationships, when in doubt, lie. “No, of course not.”
She just sighed again and rested against the counter. “It won’t work, you know, I can tell when you lie.”
Second rule of interpersonal relationships, when caught in a lie, lie again. “No, really.”
She stared at me silently until I wilted. “Oh. Well. Maybe it bothers me somewhat. I’m feeling insecure right now.”
She smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll come back. It’s just that Elena invited me out for a coffee and I’d like to go.”
“Elena? The cop?”
“Yes.”
“By all means, go. Fred and I will have a fine time, we don’t need you, just see if we don’t.”
She shook her head and bit her lower lip. “There is one other thing. I didn’t want to tell you but now I’m not sure.”
“What?”
“I’ve been getting threats, very vivid notes. Apparently the three guys had friends.”
Renfield had come in with his Frisbee and I rubbed his ears until he began to twitch and spasm in canine ecstasy.
“Everyone has friends. Even I have friends. Did you keep the notes?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Four. They’ve been coming in since you were in the hospital.”
They were in a jar on top of the fridge and I laid them out on the kitchen table and read them. They were all similar, butcher’s paper or sheets cut from a brown lunch bag and crayon with the words spelled out in capitals with no space between the letters. Out of curiosity, I went up to our room and retrieved the notes that had come with the liquor bottle and the tape and laid them out beside the ones in the kitchen. Claire read over my shoulder and I read them out loud.
“LEAVE, BABY KILLER.” “STAY AWAY.” “MURDERER.” “GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM.” “DRINK ME.” “LISTEN TO ME.”
I said, “Two diffe
rent people, at least.”
“How can you tell?”
“The last note and the one before that, the second-last one especially. The paper is different in those two cases and a pen is used instead of crayons. It’s also not smudged or marked up in any way. That indicates two people and maybe more.”
I yawned and Claire patted my hand. “You should have been a cop.”
I yawned again and stretched.
“No. Even with the bribes, the pay isn’t enough. Can I have a nap? After supper I’ll go around and make sure the house is sealed tight. Maybe I’ll even find our note-wielding maniac.”
She patted my hand and sent me off.
“Oh, can you turn on the radio?”
We had put an old AM/FM radio with a cassette player on a shelf near the door and I flipped it to a local station that played old rock from the fifties and sixties, the only kind of music we could agree on.
“. . . this just in; a local man has barricaded himself into his home on Ridge Road and fired several shots. Winnipeg police are on the scene and are currently waiting for the Emergency Response Team. Neighbors are unsure whether the man has hostages although he does live with his wife and two teenaged daughters. Just a minute . . .”
Claire looked at me and then I went back to my chair and sat down to listen to the breathless announcer.
“. . . a black panel truck has just driven up and heavily armed police officers are debarking . . .”
Claire looked at me and mouthed “debarking?”
“. . . prominent among them is Detective Sergeant Enzio Walsh, the commander of the ERT . . .”
I looked at Claire and shook my head.
“More news to come.”
So we waited, my nap forgotten. We waited and we listened to light music, scanning the dial occasionally for more news. The incident was being covered by all the local stations to one degree or another. Claire listened and shook her head. “I never will understand that.”
“Hmmm?”
She had poured a glass of water and sipped it idly while I sat beside the radio and tried to make sense out of what was happening.
“Suicide by police. Kill your wife or kids and then get shot by the cops. Why? You’re a man, you tell me why.”
An Ordinary Decent Criminal Page 10