by John Moss
“I?”
“We. The death of Vittorio Ciccone. Would you believe I’ve been assigned to the case?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, before I left for the funeral, I had a talk with the superintendent. You’re on it too, when you get back.”
“I’m being reinstated?”
“Yeah, you’re not a suspect in Philip’s death. You’re a victim.”
“You’re telling me.”
“He was just playing it safe.”
“Who?”
“Rufalo.”
“Okay. Gotta go, pizza’s arriving. Elke just got out of the shower. She’s waving at you. Take care.”
Click.
Morgan stared at the phone in his hand. He was strangely lonely without Miranda around.
The phone rang again, startling him so that he nearly dropped it.
“Morgan, it’s me. You don’t think it was a Mafia hit, right?”
“That’s what I figured from the mob presence at the funeral, that’s what Francine was trying to tell me.”
“So, Morgan, what if the sniper who killed Ivan Muritori wasn’t working for them either? Why would the mob bother killing a hapless accountant? For blowing a counterfeit wine operation by accident?”
“If not, then, who?”
“We’ll have to think about it. Bye-bye, gotta run, pizza’s getting cold.”
Click.
12
The Warehouse
An hour later, Morgan was still sitting at his desk when Spivak and Stritch asked if he wanted to join them for a hamburger. As he rose to his feet, another detective, a large man with close-cropped hair, nudged Morgan as he walked by. It might have been friendly, possibly not.
“Hey, Morgan.”
“Bourassa.”
“We’re going for a burger, want to join us?” said Spivak to the other man.
Bourassa looked at Morgan and shrugged. “No, I’m busy.”
He started to walk off, then turned and faced Morgan squarely, an arm’s reach away. “Your partner — too bad about Ciccone, I guess if she was bought, the sale fell through.”
Morgan looked up at the big man, his face expressionless.
“So, Morgan, the necrophilia thing.”
“Shut up, Bourassa!” Spivak snarled.
“You got a corpse in your bed, that’s what they call it.”
Spivak glanced at Morgan. Stritch walked around beside the larger man, anticipating trouble, surprised at Morgan’s apparent passivity. No one had openly spoken about Miranda being a witness for the defense. Most felt she had no choice, no one envied her position, and most shared her relief that the Ciccone murder let her off the hook. Bourassa was not known as a dishonest cop but he was a moral simpleton. Morgan knew that. He stood still, transfixed by the other man’s appalling ignorance.
“No guts, Morgan?”
Morgan pursed his lips in a tight smile and narrowed his eyes. A personal insult was not about to set him off. Why give Bourassa the power?
“Myself, I’d rather have the black guy here than a fucking skank for a partner.”
Morgan’s fist shot out straight into the man’s face, smashing his flesh against the bone of his skull. Bourassa’s head snapped back, but his huge body remained upright. A small stream of blood slipped from the corner of his mouth. Blood filled his nostrils and sheeted over his upper lip, dripping across his chin and down the front of his shirt. His eyes glazed and he blinked as he tried to bring Morgan into focus.
“I am a sensitive man,” said Morgan as he turned and walked away. Over his shoulder, he added, “I have a good partner, and so does Spivak. We both have good partners.” And as he walked through the doorway, while rubbing his knuckles to bring back the feeling, he repeated, more to himself than to an audience, “I am a sensitive man.”
Bourassa remained immobile. Spivak glanced at Stritch, who was staring in the direction Morgan had gone with amazement, then he looked over at the superintendent’s office and caught Alex Rufalo quickly averting his gaze to the papers on his desk.
When Morgan returned to his desk with a coffee, the superintendent called him into his office. Morgan approached unapologetically, not sure how much of his spat with Bourassa had been observed.
“He’s a good detective,” said the superintendent, skipping the preliminaries.
Morgan shrugged.
“You think he’s dumb and a bully.”
Morgan shrugged again.
“He’s uncomplicated, Morgan, and he’s tenacious. If he was a dog, he’d be a bull mastiff. You want him on your side.”
“Isn’t he?”
“That’s the point, Morgan, he is. The man would take a bullet for you — you know why? Because you’re a cop.”
“Yeah.”
“After your little debate out there, he saw my door was open. He came in covered in blood and told me it was his fault. He won’t tell you that, he’d rather push your face in it, but it’s over.”
“Hey,” said Morgan, “this is why you get the big bucks. We’re cool.”
“Yes, you are,” the superintendent said. “Go home.”
“Okay.”
“And oh, you’re on the Humber River shooting, you and Quin.”
“We’re doing Ciccone.”
“We found the car where your blond friend said it would be. Lots of prints, turns out there’s a Ciccone connection. Dead guy wasn’t on the payroll, but he sometimes worked for Vittorio. She may have killed him in self-defense, but there’s more to it than that. We need the whys and wherefores.”
“Yeah, they’re elusive little buggers.”
“What?”
“The whys and wherefores.”
Rufalo smiled. Morgan had the feeling that the superintendent believed he had handled the Bourassa situation the best possible way, with cool forbearance and the surgical use of force. That’s how he had, in the preceding few minutes, come to assess his own behaviour.
“We’ve got the RCMP and CSIS involved for jumping the border, the Provincials on board for the two deaths at the winery, the local fire marshal for the way the old lady died. The American border people. The NYPD. Maybe the FBI if Elke Sturmberg was really abducted. Maybe New York State Troopers, maybe the CIA, who knows. You up to it?”
“Yeah, they won’t get in the way.” Morgan played tough when it was politically expedient or ironically amusing.
“Yeah, well, don’t cross Spivak and Stritch, they have the lead on the dead guy in Miranda’s bed. Did you talk to her? She wants to play it low-key down there. She’ll bring the Sturmberg woman back without an extradition warrant once they’re finished with her. So, go home, get some rest.”
“You too, boss.”
So Morgan went home, made himself a sandwich supper, cracked open a bottle of authentic Châteauneuf-du-Pape that he had picked up on the way, and settled back to read for awhile. He usually read non-fiction. You can’t make up stuff as interesting as real life, he figured.
Part of him recognized the absurdity of that. He had read the great novels in university and in small ways they had changed him. He read facts now, and they changed nothing. Still, he was at a place in his life, not old, no longer young, where he wanted to fill out his mind, not discover new parts of himself in parallel worlds.
He picked up Francine Ciccone’s card from the coffee table where he had dropped it when he emptied his pockets. She was one of the few links to a childhood for which he harboured little or no nostalgia. They both grew up in Cabbagetown, both were from the sub-class known as the working poor, families with sufficient income to pay rent, sufficient stamina to hold menial jobs, and sufficient diversions, mostly beer, tobacco, and television, to keep them humble amidst the affluence surrounding their small and sometimes brutal lives.
When her name appeared in the social columns, or when her husband was featured in stories relating to drug wars and crime syndicates, Morgan would remember the times they walked home from public school together
, not talking, but perfectly in tune, like two reeds vibrating in the wind. And when they got older, they sometimes gossiped or kidded about, both of them knowing romance was a dead end, both of them determined to get out of the ghetto, knowing they would get in each other’s way.
At university, they occasionally had coffee, and as scholarship students they sometimes worked together at Robarts Library. Mostly, they avoided each other. It was better like that.
When the phone rang, he knew it would be her. Still, he waited until she spoke to be sure.
“David?”
“Francine.”
“Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“No, not at all. Is your reception over? You must be completely worn out.”
“David, I am going to give you an address. It’s a warehouse in the east end, off Queen Street. I want you to go there.”
“Frankie, what are you talking about?” he asked, but he knew. “You found him?”
“Listen to me, David. You go to this place, do it tonight.” She gave him directions to the warehouse. Her voice sounded crisp and efficient, but strained from the exhaustion of entombing her husband, of losing a man who must have seemed immortal and, in spite of the trial, untouchable. There are certain things, he imagined, you have to believe. Suddenly, he’s gone. She’s a woman of immense resources or she wouldn’t be where she is, but it must be tough.
“David,” she paused. “You’re not disappointed in me?”
“We do what we do, Frankie. Are you disappointed in me?”
“For being a cop?” She laughed. “I always thought you’d end up a professor. They’re the best at disguising their past. No, I admire you. I read about you sometimes, I hear things. I think you’re living the life you always wanted, even when you didn’t know it.”
“You too, Francine.”
“Go now, and call me sometime.”
“How’d you find him?”
There was a moment’s silence while she considered whether to answer. “He was afraid of the border. He was trying to drive west, I suppose to Vancouver, or around into Minnesota, but once you get north of Superior, all roads converge. The fool, he thought wilderness spaces would give him refuge, but the north made it easier to track him. We know people up there.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yes, Morgan, or there wouldn’t be a rush, would there?”
“Thanks, Frankie. Is there a gun?”
“It’s with him. You’ll get a conviction. I want him surrounded in the penitentiary, night and day, by people loyal to Vittorio. Every minute of every day for the rest of his life, they will make his life hell. He will be glad when he dies, that’s what I want.”
Morgan felt a chill run through him. Frankie Ciccone is a woman used to getting what she wants. In this case, it’s the same thing I want, he thought, although the flaying of the shooter’s flesh until the meat of his body shrivels in the sun would please her most, and for myself, it is enough the man gets taken off the streets.
“Frankie, thanks.”
“For what? I’ve forgotten already why I called.”
Click.
Morgan stopped in at Police Headquarters on College Street for a car. He picked up his Glock semi-automatic from the gun locker and tucked it into a sheath-holster against the small of his back, which he regretted when he got into the driver’s seat since it dug in and forced him to slouch while he drove. He did not tell anyone where he was going. The superintendent had gone home and Spivak and his partner were not around. Bourassa was at his desk, working late, possibly working on an alibi to explain to his wife why his face looked like a tub of poutine. Morgan would have preferred to have Miranda with him for backup, but she was hanging out with her friends in New York.
He turned into a dark side street by the warehouse. There was a bare bulb gleaming over the small door to the side of the loading docks. There was a light on a pole casting shadows against brick walls and a tall wire fence. The night sky formed a canopy of brackish illumination overhead. But the impression was of darkness, not light.
He could see a dull glow in the transom over the entry. When he pulled open the door his eyes were met by a sea of gloom, highlighted in the centre by a man sitting in a chair with a lamp shining on him powered by a long extension cord running off into the murky shadows.
Morgan stood still, listening.
The man seemed aware of him, although he was blindfolded. Morgan took a few steps forward and the man shrank into himself, trying to hide in plain view. He was terrified. He must have thought Morgan was one of the Ciccone people, coming back to finish the job.
Or to torture him. Morgan could see he had been brutally beaten. Dried blood was scabbed on his face, and brownish-red stains had seeped through his clothing and congealed on the surface. There was a plastic bag taped across his lap with a gun inside, the gun he used to kill Vittorio Ciccone. From the pool of blood under the gun, Morgan suspected he had been castrated or had his penis cut off. His mouth was bound with duct tape. He was struggling to breath through his nose.
Morgan knew when he ripped off the tape what he would find. The man gagged and spat out the end of his penis, coughed and vomited over himself.
Morgan saw a hose attached to a tap on a wall. He walked over and uncoiled it, turning on the tap. He walked back and hosed down the man in the chair.
He lifted the blindfold away from the man’s swollen face.
“This is your lucky day,” he said.
The man looked at him without comprehending.
“You speak English?” Morgan asked.
The man looked frantically about but said nothing.
“You’re Albanian, right? Al-bay-nee-yah, right?”
No answer.
“You’re going to need help, buddy. Help, hospital, yes?”
The man’s eyes registered an indeterminate response.
“So you do speak English. Okay, I’m police, polizia, guardia, cop, you understand?”
The man shook his head, and Morgan could see he nearly blacked out from the effort.
“You do understand, good. You killed a bad man, yes? In this country we do not kill, even people who kill people. Even bad men like Vittorio Ciccone.”
The man taped to the chair flinched violently at the name of the man he had murdered.
“Relax! I’m one of the good guys.”
The man blinked quizzically.
“You are a professional, right? Right.”
The man acknowledged with a nod.
“Well, you screwed up, my friend.”
There was no response.
“We need to talk,” said Morgan. “It’s better here. Too many people downtown. Police. Friends of Ciccone. Lawyers. You don’t have many friends, my friend. You need a doctor, understand, doctor, hospital. Better we talk a bit first, you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You understand. Good. I’m your only way out of this mess.”
“Good.”
“Yeah, good.”
“Si.”
“Okay, my friend. My goodness, you do look dreadful. A professional hit man. I’d expect better.”
“I wear Armani, Giorgio.”
“Not tonight, my friend. You look like a bucket of shit. But enough with the chatter. What I need to know is, who hired you?”
“Hired me? Paid me money?”
“Yes.”
“I do not know.”
“Good night, my friend,” said Morgan, turning and walking towards the door. “Good luck,” he called over his shoulder. “Ciao amici.”
“Per favori! Police, you come back.”
Morgan stepped out into the yard and pulled the door shut behind him. A car parked down the street started up and cruised by, turned around, and drove slowly back out to Queen Street. Morgan made no attempt to hide. He felt the reassuring pressure of the semi-automatic against the small of his back.
He heard a racket and went back inside. The man in the chair had tumbled it over, tryi
ng to break free of the tape holding him down. Morgan heaved him back into an upright position.
“Has your English improved, my friend?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s talk.”
The man glared at him through swollen eyes.
“I’ve got lots of time,” said Morgan. “I’m not the one bleeding to death through my pecker. Doesn’t look like they lopped off too much. You won’t need more than what’s left in the pen. Except for favours.”
Morgan stopped. He thought, I am a sensitive man, and he almost laughed aloud. What on earth am I doing? There’s been too much going on, too much death. This man needs help. If you can’t help your enemies, what kind of a person are you? He was genuinely upset with himself.
“I will tell you,” said the Albanian.
“Yes!”
“All I know. You will take me to hospital, please.”
“Yes, I will. You talk …” Morgan began to feel for the tape ends to release the man from his chair. “You talk to me, we’ll go to the hospital, okay. Same time.”
“I am from Albania.”
“Not the life story. Who hired you?”
“That I cannot say.”
“Why not.”
“Because then I will die.”
“You will die.”
“Yes.”
“They will kill you.”
“Yes.”
“And the Ciccone people, they almost killed you, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And you are afraid the police will kill you, yes?”
“Not police. This is America.”
“No, this is Canada. But yes, no, the police will not kill you.”
“That is good.”
Morgan had the man’s feet free and stood up to release his hands. “We cannot protect you if you don’t tell us. Who hired you? Who are you afraid of now?”
“Me,” said a voice behind Morgan. He wheeled around to confront a man who held a gun pointed directly at his head from twenty feet away.
“And you are?” said Morgan with as much calm as he could muster.
“This man’s employer.”
Morgan knew who he was. There was something cold in his voice, so mechanical, it had to be the man behind the murderous chaos at Bonnydoon, the man who violated Miranda.