Hall of Fame average, right?
But nowhere to be seen that first time up. He watched two good pitches come right in for strikes, the bat on his shoulder, then swung stiffly at an eye-high pitch for strike three.
He did no better in the fourth or fifth. Not the end of the world: each time up the bases were empty. No runners for him to strand. But he was leaving me wondering why we’d worked so hard last night, given all that blood, if he wasn’t going to do what I’d showed him.
Camp softball games went seven innings. When Sammy came up in the seventh, there was an actual rally for him to kill. We were down a run but had men on first and third, one out. I was the runner on third after a lead-off double.
He came to the plate and squared up to the plate with the bat on his shoulder. His knees weren’t bent like they should have been. He looked stiff as a flamingo. Luckily the first pitch was inside for a ball, so his inaction did no harm. But the second was a strike and he watched that too. I clapped my hands and yelled, “Come on, Sammy!” These were underhand lobs, not country fastballs. They weren’t that hard to hit. Another came in for a strike, maybe inside but the ump called it anyway. Sammy’s bat stayed inert and silent.
It was only when he had two strikes on him that he made eye contact with me and raised the corners of his lips in the slightest grin. He bent his knees, shortened his grip on the bat and shifted his weight back and forth. With two outs and two strikes I got ready to run, wishing for a wild pitch or hit batter, even though neither ever happened in lob ball.
I can still see that last pitch coming in fat as a harvest moon, Sammy waiting, his front foot shifting toward first base and the bat moving off his shoulder late. As I toe the bag at third I see his head staying down and the sweet part of the red metal bat moving across the plate, meeting the ball, lashing it up the right side just as we’d planned. Better. It doesn’t even hit the ground. It’s a true line drive, a frozen rope—both us runners take off—and it goes straight into the first baseman’s glove. He makes sure he has it, then steps on first to double off the runner there.
Ball game over. In a flash of leather.
Colour war over. White fireworks will dazzle the sky tonight.
It was all over so fast, it took me a minute to process what Sammy had done. He had played the other team all game, coming up in meaningless situations and letting them think he still had nothing going. Then with two strikes, all the pressure on, he had delivered. He’d hit what should have been the game winner. I started clapping my hands and chanting, “Sam-my! Sam-my!” until the others joined in and everyone high-fived him, even the counsellors, all of us chanting his name. By the end of the night, I had them all calling him Slammin’ Sammy and it stuck through the end of the summer.
That was the last time I had seen him, probably the last time I’d heard his name until yesterday, when his grandfather had called to say he was dead. Murdered. Beaten to death in Montreal three weeks ago. A Star of David carved in his chest.
MONDAY, JUNE 20
CHAPTER 02
I’ve been to too many strange places lately. Places completely foreign to me. New geography, new depth of feelings exposed. The Don River at night, rushing over rocks that look pink in the moonlight. An unfinished tower in Chicago, a thousand feet above concrete, where I’d make a sickening noise if I fell. A panelled hallway in Boston where gun smoke hung in gauzy blue sheets, where shotguns had boomed and automatic weapons had clattered and not one soul had called the cops.
Strange dark places with too many guns. Shots fired in Buffalo, Chicago, Boston. I’d had to use a gun again myself, the first time since my last fucked day in the Israeli army. It got so bad I hid my passport behind a kitchen drawer that has to be disassembled before you can remove it. Sliding it down there was a measure of how badly I need to stay out of the States for all kinds of reasons, including legal.
At least this new case was in Montreal, a place I know fairly well. There’s a branch of the Geller family tree there that never made the move to Toronto, cousins I used to spend holidays with. After high school, a number of friends went there for university, where my own presence had not been required. I made many a weekend drive, slept off more than a few youthful adventures in the flats of the McGill ghetto, places rambling in size but still crowded, kids coming and going down halls where they’d crashed, up and down those wrought-iron outside stairs.
It was a straight six-hour drive east down the 401.
With Dante Ryan driving his new hemi-powered Charger, maybe five.
My partner, Jenn Raudsepp, had been on leave since we got back from Boston, so the office had been both crazy busy and strangely quiet. There had been more work than I could handle alone but no one to talk to, share info with, complain to when things went wrong, laugh with when they went even worse. No one to hector, needle and otherwise abuse me. Our office manager, Colin MacAdam, who was supremely capable in many respects, was still a rural cop at heart, if not in body. Very down-to-earth. No one would ever mistake Colin for an imp. Especially not a six-foot blonde one.
On a humid morning in late June, dark grey clouds boiling up in the north, the threat of rain in the air, I walked into the office to the smell of a good dark roast and a similarly dark look across Colin’s face.
I said, “What?”
“Mr. Ryan is in your office,” Colin said. “And not in the best of moods. I asked him to wait out here and he looked like he wanted to slash the tires on my wheelchair.”
Given how big Colin’s shoulders have become since he started playing wheelchair basketball, I wasn’t sure even Dante Ryan could pull that off. In which case he’d probably shoot holes in them.
“Cut him some slack,” I said. “He’s going through a hard time.”
Ryan’s wife, Cara, had thrown him out after Boston. Probably for good this time. He had been trying to stay clear of his old ways, for the sake of his marriage and his young son Carlo. He’d given up contract killing and opened an Italian restaurant on John Street in the entertainment district. Now he was getting out, selling his interest to one of his old connections who needed a business to account for some of his income.
As I poured myself a coffee, it occurred to me it was almost a year to the day since Ryan had first walked into my apartment—broken in, actually—and thrown into my lap the case that would end my career at Beacon Security and lead to the launch of my own agency, World Repairs.
And oh what hilarity had ensued ever since. All year long, in and out of scrapes I needed Ryan’s help getting out of, to the point where my best friend and partner barely left her house. My long road back from post-concussion syndrome would be a jaunt compared to what she was facing now.
I opened the door to the office she and I shared and saw Ryan at Jenn’s desk, his feet up on its empty surface, his shoes, as always, worth more than everything I wore all week. He was drinking coffee out of a mug with the logo of a design firm down the hall. His face had the grim cast I associate with calls to the coroner.
I said, “Thanks for coming.”
“It’s not like I had anything else to do,” he said. “But on the bright side, I’m not the one running down to the Food Terminal at six a.m. to buy fucking romaine.”
“You doing okay?”
“If you define okay as having your balls in a bear trap.”
“Could you use a little distraction?”
“Fuck, yeah,” he said. “You got something in mind?”
“A new case I might need help with. My first murder.”
“Well, you know it wouldn’t be mine,” he said, his clouded look clearing a little, a tight grin appearing.
“You never had to solve one.”
“No, but I had to anticipate what the person trying to solve it would see. Trust me, you want me on this. Do not doubt my usefulness.”
Who in their right mind would?
“I just need to speak to the client,” I said. “Make sure he’ll authorize expenses for two.”
&nb
sp; “I’m not going to charge you, you dick.”
“I’m talking about travel costs.”
“Why? Where is this one?”
“Montreal.”
“For how long?”
“Maybe a week.”
“Cool,” he said. “I like Montreal. Used to do business with the Cotronis back in the day. So who got killed?”
“A guy I went to summer camp with. His grandfather is hiring me.”
“Summer camp? Christ, how old were you?”
“Twelve.”
“I was that age, I was stealing, smoking and running from my stepfather. Summer and winter. So when was he killed, this camper?”
“A few weeks ago. His grandfather said the police are getting nowhere.”
“Forget what they say on TV. A few weeks can still be early days.”
“Not to a dying man.”
Arthur Moscoe lived in a condo on top of a seven-storey building on Bedford, overlooking Varsity Stadium and the exploding crystal wing of the Royal Ontario Museum. A small Filipina let me in and led me to a closed room filled with light, even on a grey morning, and soft classical music playing from hidden speakers.
The man himself must have been big at one time. Even now, wasted by illness, he took up most of the king-size bed on which he lay, propped up by three pillows. The rest was taken up by assorted medical equipment, including a small tank providing oxygen through a tube up his nose. The feet thrust up beneath the bedspread like two sharp hills, the hands at the end of his bony grey wrists wide in their spread. If he played piano, an octave and a half would have been child’s play. His head was also of great size and dominated by a nose that might once have been Roman but now drooped into a hook. His ears were like ferns, the lobes flopping down below the point of his jaw.
He was eighty-three now and dying of cancer. It was the first thing he told me once his attendant had left the room. “I’ve got both leukemia and lymphoma. It’s a race to see which takes me first. That’s one of the reasons you’re dealing with me and not Sammy’s mother,” he said. “I might have months to live, but it could easily be weeks. So I don’t have time to waste. The police have had three weeks to find exactly nothing. And I’m more of a take-charge type than my daughter. You want to talk to her, my advice is call before noon. She’s a schmecker, that one.”
“A what?”
“A smoker. Dope, grass, whatever they call it these days. Started back in the sixties and never stopped.”
“What about his father?”
“Gone. Has to be three, four years now. A kind of liver cancer and he didn’t even drink, that’s the kind of luck he had. She’s remarried now, my daughter, living in Florida, and the next time her husband is of any help will be the first.”
“Siblings?”
“One sister, Sherry. Only she got religion and lives in Jerusalem. Calls herself Shira. Also not likely to be of any help to you. She and Sammy weren’t very close. So I’m the man you deal with. I have all the money you’ll need. Better than that, I have lawyers. Good ones. You need anything at all, you call Henry Geniele. I have his direct number.”
Jesus. Henry Geniele, senior partner at Geniele, Driscoll, Ross. Finding out he was at your disposal was like finding out Tom Brady just joined your pick-up football team.
“Bill whatever you have to but get results,” he said. “It’s terrible what they did to him. Beaten so badly. And—did I tell you already what else they did?
“No.”
“They mutilated him. Carved a Magen David in his chest. The police said they did it after he was already dead, but still. His mother knows. I know. I can’t get it out of my mind, the bastards.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Moscoe—”
“Everyone’s sorry. It doesn’t change what happened.”
“What else have the police told you?”
“He was kicked to death, they think. Probably with steel-toed boots. They broke his head open, that beautiful head of his, full of stories. You ever heard the expression, Jonah, God invented man because he loves stories? If that’s true, he would have invented Sammy over and over. There was nothing he couldn’t turn into a story, even when he was a kid. And his columns—every week something caught his eye, his funny bone, his high horse. My girl prints them out for me from the computer. But then they kicked his head to pieces. Broke his neck too. Put an end to the stories.”
Hearing that he’d died of blunt-force trauma to the head sent a chill over me. I had suffered my own brain injury seven months earlier, and I was still leery of anything remotely close to that. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
“I don’t need your sympathies. I need your professional help.”
“What else did the police tell you?”
“I dictated a letter to my lawyer after I spoke to the detective there, while it was still fresh. I have a copy for you. Otherwise, it’s probably best you speak to them yourself. Get it first-hand. You speak French?”
“Some.”
“Some may not get you far enough. They’re all French, the Montreal cops, always have been.”
“Who did you speak to?
“A Detective Paquette. Reynald Paquette.”
“In French?”
“Ha. I’m the first to admit, Jonah, my generation didn’t learn much French in Montreal. We were part of the problem, looking back. But Paquette’s English is fine. It’s his judgment I question.”
“Why?”
“They found Sammy in Ville St-Laurent, out by Côte-Vertu. You know Montreal?”
“Parts of it.”
“Not this part, I bet. It’s all Arab now. It wasn’t in my day, but you drive past there now, it’s halal this, Islamic that.”
“You think Muslims attacked him?”
“They’re Jew haters, aren’t they? Who else would kick a Jew to death and do what they did after? I told this to Paquette. Connect the dots, I told him. You don’t have to be a genius. He said they had to consider all leads. I don’t know if he was really clueless or being politically correct. Since then, I haven’t heard much that’s new. No suspects they’ve identified, certainly no arrests.”
“When was he found?”
“May 29th. Early, just after seven. Guy opening his restaurant found him in the laneway behind. Also some kind of Arab. The address is in that envelope on the side table.”
“Any idea what Sammy was doing there?”
“What did I know of his day-to-day life? He was my grandson, living in another city. There was some kind of call to the police that night, I know that much. They went to his place, but Paquette says it was a mistake. Maybe a prank call.”
“I’ll check into it. Anything else?”
He opened his mouth, about to speak, then closed it and looked out the window.
“Mr. Moscoe?”
He looked back at me: “We spoke maybe once a month, saw each other a few times a year. If it wasn’t the Arabs, then maybe it had to do with his work.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because he wasn’t a wild man, Sammy. Didn’t run around. He was very devoted to his little girl, my first great-granddaughter. He got along with his ex-wife. He loved what he did. And he worked hard at it.” He sighed deeply and said, “The little girl. Sophie. She’ll be raised completely in French now. Not that it matters to me, I’ll be gone soon. But she’ll be lost to the family. Maybe there’s one or two cousins she’ll stay in touch with, but that’s it.”
“Do you have Paquette’s email or phone line?” I asked.
“In that envelope. It has his direct line and cell, your retainer, Sammy’s address, his ex-wife’s number, the key to his flat …” He looked away and I could see teardrops pooling in the deep sockets of his sunken eyes.
I didn’t force eye contact. I gave him the time he needed.
“There’s a picture too,” he finally said. “Take it out and look at it.”
I picked up the envelope and slid out a five-by-seven print of a young man with light br
own hair, thinning above the temples into an inadvertent pompadour, warm brown eyes behind glasses, a thin nose and a slightly weak chin.
Sammy? Is that you? Remembering the gawky kid I had tried to turn into a hitter.
Could someone look at a picture of me when I was twelve and see the man I was today? Were there hints, even then, of any of the darkness to come?
“You know,” Mr. Moscoe said, breathing as deeply as his weak old lungs would allow, “I wish I’d never opened my mouth to him. About Montreal, I mean. He went there for school, I know, to the writing program at Concordia, but if it wasn’t for me, maybe he would have come back here to live.”
“Why do you say that?”
The old man’s lips spread into a smile that moved from his dry lips to his eyes, still some brightness in them. “He’s the one I told all my stories to. My Montreal stories. He ate them up. Of all my grandchildren, he was the one who took an interest. Always asking about the streets we came from, the characters, the fights, me and my exploits. You see me here now, running out of gas, but Montreal was my town for a long time. From the early fifties until the separatists came in, that’s twenty-five years. And in those twenty-five years I went from nothing, less than nothing, to the owner of a company that set this family up pretty good. You’ve read Mordecai Richler? His books about St. Urbain Street?”
“Sure.”
“Well, they were rich compared with us, that’s all I can say. More than one step above. They were west of the Main, for one thing. You know St. Lawrence Boulevard?”
“Yes.”
Miss Montreal Page 2