“They should make you ambassador.”
“They fucking well should.”
The first landmark I made out in the rain was the dome of St. Joseph’s Oratory, built on Mount Royal’s northwestern slope, where the crippled came in hope of leaving their crutches behind.
“I meant to ask you,” I said, “how’s your French?”
“I grew up speaking both English and Italian, so French in school wasn’t hard for me. A lot of root words are the same, them both being Romance languages, and you know there’s no one more romantic than me.”
“God, no.”
“So I don’t speak that much French, mostly since I don’t get the chance, but I understand more than I let on.”
“Good.”
“And you?”
“Same sort of story. I learned English and Hebrew as a kid, plus enough Yiddish phrases to get through a family dinner, so a third language also came more easily. Unfortunately, Hebrew and French share nothing, so I don’t have that advantage. I can speak enough to get by but I don’t think I’m going to master all the subtleties. Fortunately, I have someone who can.”
“Who’s that?”
“Beacon Security belonged to a national association of agencies. You helped investigators in other provinces when cases spilled over the borders and they did the same for you. When I was still on staff there, I worked with a guy from Montreal, Bobby Ducharme, and we clicked. Kept in touch. I called him last night and he’s going to try to get a read on the detectives working the case. I’ll call him once we’re settled at the hotel, see what he’s got.”
“What’s he like?”
“Bobby? Late thirties,” I said. “In great shape. He was a hockey player, got as far as the high juniors but never made the pros. Played with a bunch of guys who went to the NHL but he was never a good enough skater. Was mostly a goon his last few years, way more penalty minutes than points. Still built like a brick shithouse.”
“Trust him?”
“Yup. He’s a good guy and I’m sure he’ll do what he can.”
The closer we got to the city, the more we were swarmed by smaller, speedier cars darting in and out of lanes like panicked animals dashing through a canyon, uncomfortably close on all sides. I could feel Ryan tense up, take tighter control of the wheel. His eyes moved from mirror to mirror, taking in everything. He was never a man to let things go unnoticed.
“Much as I like the car,” he said, “I’ll be glad to get off this road.”
“I would have driven halfway.”
“In the old car, maybe. Not this one. And that’s for your own benefit.”
“How so?”
“It’s a brand new car. I’ve had it four whole days. And we’re on the 401, which they should rename the Highway of Idiots. Say you’re driving and one of the many idiots currently around us slams into us. Wrecks my new car while you’re driving it. Assuming we survive the crash, what’s the first thing I’m going to do?”
“Yell at me?”
“Think harder.”
I tried to put myself in his shoes. “Shoot the other driver.”
“Making you?”
“A witness.”
“If not an accessory. You get a bitchy Crown attorney having a bad hair day and suddenly you’re being arraigned. So not letting you drive now is all for your benefit, Jonah. That’s how I like to spend my time, thinking how to make your life better, safer and more stress free.”
“I should hire you full time.”
The hotel was on Sherbrooke Street west of Boulevard St-Laurent—also known as St. Lawrence, the fabled Main of Arthur Moscoe’s youth. A Holiday Inn: nothing conspicuous, just the way Ryan liked it. It was easy to find from the highway. We fed off onto the 720 eastbound, past concrete loops and overpasses, the lower parts coloured with graffiti, the tops parts grey and patchy where repairs had been done. More than a few of Montreal’s highways and bridges had shed pieces of concrete rather suddenly of late. At one point, four of the five bridges linking the island to the mainland had to be closed for inspection or repair. I hoped the patchwork held as we drove through. Montreal’s construction industry was notoriously corrupt even by the bottomed-out standards of that trade.
We got off the highway at the St-Laurent exit and went north past boarded-up stores, places that looked like hoarding would only improve their curb appeal, and cheap hot dog and French fry stands I remembered visiting late into the night. A Chinese archway marked the entrance to Chinatown, its restaurants brightly coloured and jammed with the lunchtime trade. At Sherbrooke we turned left and found the hotel a few blocks west. Ryan drove underground and parked close to an elevator. We unloaded our gear and went up three levels to the hotel lobby and checked in with my credit card. Arthur Moscoe would cover it all and I’d get the bonus air miles.
Life felt grand.
Until Ryan said, “What the fuck is this? We’re sharing a room? I thought this client was loaded.”
“It’s not him, it’s the Fête Nationale.”
“The what?”
“What they used to call St-Jean-Baptiste Day. The week of June 24th, all the hotels were full.”
“You better not snore,” he said. “I sleep with a gun under my pillow.”
The room was what we needed it to be. It wasn’t some chic Montreal B&B off Rue St-Denis amid the sizzling café scene. It was a room where we would make our phone calls, sleep and work on making ourselves better grippers and stranglers.
Ryan showered when we got in. He said his shoulders were tight from the drive and he wanted to loosen up. I turned on the TV, which was set to a French news station. A guy with combed-back hair and a good baritone was reporting on les sports, but with no baseball team and the Canadiens out of the playoffs, he didn’t have a lot of sports to talk about. Then it was over to le météo, which predicted more pluie, or rain, throughout the next day. The weather person had a clear accent that was easy to follow, for the most part. She seemed to be holding out hope the low system would clear up by the big night—the Fête Nationale—and an outdoor concert at Parc Maisonneuve.
Behind her, footage rolled of work crews erecting a bandshell in the rain, tarps blowing around like they were trying to flee the scene. Then came an interview with someone at the park that went completely over my head. A sponsor of the event who spoke in a thick joual I couldn’t make out at all. It might as well have been Navajo. A stout man with a white brush cut, he was pointing at the work crews, probably saying the show would go on no matter what.
I could see my French would have to shake off its rust fast if it was going to do me any good in Montreal. Either that, or I’d need Bobby Ducharme on call night and day. Too bad the two solitudes here weren’t English and Hebrew.
The clock on the news channel said it was one-thirty. I called Bobby and got his voice mail. I told him we were in and left him our room number, along with my cell.
When Ryan was done, I showered too, just to loosen my body after six hours of sitting. I let the water hit the base of my neck awhile, then leaned away so the hot spray worked down my back. Aaah. Hot water therapy. Cures most ills. For the rest there’s always ice.
“You hungry?” Ryan asked when I got out. “Want to hunt down a famous Montreal smoked meat?”
“We had a huge breakfast three hours ago. Let’s go to Sammy’s first.”
“Which is where?”
“East and north of here. On Laval Street. Not far from St-Denis.”
“Where all the cafés are?”
“Yes.”
“So we could go to that joint on the way back, the famous one on the Main everyone talks about.”
“Schwartz’s.”
“Right.”
“Let’s see what we find at Sam’s.”
CHAPTER 04
Driving to the hotel from the highway had been easy. Going north from there was insane, especially on St-Laurent. Trucks and cars stopped without warning on either side of the street to disgorge their goods and passenge
rs, prompting the usual blast of horns that changed the usual nothing. We turned east and tried going north on St-Denis; it was a little more orderly, less abrupt than the Main, but no faster. Pedestrians were a lot like New Yorkers, crossing against lights, daring you to hit them.
Would they do it if they knew who was driving? Ryan leaned the heel of his hand on the horn a couple of times, muttering, “I am not hosing gristle out of my new grille. I am not even paying someone else to do it. It is just not happening. Move, people!” he shouted. “Does a green light mean something different here?”
“Apparently.”
“Perhaps they don’t know I’m armed?”
“Thought all your guns were packed away,”
He said, “Ahem,” and hitched up his right pant leg. His Baby Eagle was nestled there. “Ankle holster, Jonah. Ankle holster. Christ, sometimes you don’t think right.”
——
We found parking on Laval half a block south of Sammy’s flat. The buildings were all attached brick or stone duplexes with Montreal’s signature curving wrought-iron staircases on the outside. Most of these flats had been renovated, linoleum peeled away and the old wide oak planks sanded and polished. Years of plaster and wallpaper torn away to expose brick walls, where people could hang their old guitars and pieces of splashy art under warm pot lights. Some were single-family dwellings, both floors used by one couple. Some, like Sammy’s, were still separate units.
His was the ground-floor flat in a stone building with an iron railing that needed repainting: blisters of black had peeled away to show patches of rust. I got out the key Arthur Moscoe had provided. I also had a letter to the building management company, explaining my permission to access the place.
“Hmmm.”
“Wrong key?” Ryan asked.
“Right key,” I said. “Wrong seal over the lock.”
“Whose seal?”
“The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal.”
“Nicely pronounced. What else does it say?”
“Défense d’entrer.”
I put the key into the lock anyway, breaking the seal, and turned it.
I had the feeling there wasn’t going to be much to find in Sammy’s flat. Detective Paquette and his team had probably already taken everything worth taking—phone records, bills—to comb through at their discretion. And neither Ryan nor I had any special gift for or experience at searching places. A first-year police detective would have searched more crime scenes in six months than I have in all my cases combined. Any forensic evidence would have been gathered by pros, sorted and sealed for analysis. Most of Ryan’s stalking as a killer, from what he’d told me, was done outdoors. He followed victims to learn their habits and routes, note their vulnerabilities. Pick his spot. He rarely broke into someone’s house, before or after the job.
But we had to go through it. Forget what the cops took and take in the rest, see what was left, get a sense of Sammy the man, not the twelve-year-old camper I remembered.
Putting a key through a police seal wasn’t going to trigger an alarm and we had an official letter and a school of lawyers one call away. Still, we wanted to be quick. Bringing Dante Ryan together with the Montreal police had no upside either of us could see. He flat out does not like law enforcement, not of any stripe.
The rain was keeping most people off their sidewalks and balconies. Those who were out were hurrying along. I opened the front door and we walked into a foyer with scuffed walls, their plaster cracked here and there from the heave and sigh of Montreal winters. There were two hockey sticks by the door, both well used, the tape on them scraped and curled at the bottom. The entry hall was narrow and dark but showed a long railroad flat with two large front rooms on one side of the hall, a living room and parlour separated by an archway with elaborate moulding, and on the other side a small study. The ceilings were high by Toronto standards—ten feet to our usual eight—and the original hammered tin, painted over many times but not enough to hide the floral patterns. The rooms would be filled with light on a less gloomy day. Today wasn’t that day. It felt humid and close in there with the windows having been closed all this time, but we didn’t want to open any or turn on the lights.
We decided I would take the study, he would take the two front rooms. Then we’d trade and swap notes. Then move to the back and do the same with the kitchen and bedroom. We didn’t expect any clues to leap out and declare themselves. There’d be nothing luminous beckoning from dark corners. I figured the best thing a search could do was give us a list of questions to ask and people to ask them of. I’d go to the cops later, speak to Paquette without Ryan’s glowering presence, and see if what he told us matched up with what we found. Or didn’t find.
The study appeared to have been stripped of most things. I found empty hanging folders in his desk drawer where I imagined recent bills and statements had been. It’s what I would have wanted to see first. They would also have his laptop, tablet, phone. An agenda if he kept one. Actual paper notebooks if he still used those. Dusty gaps on his desk showed where a large blotter had been. They’d taken the whole thing. Other clean rectangles showed where things that had been there a long time had been removed.
So what didn’t they take that would help me catch a glimpse of him? A hell of a lot of reference books and dictionaries. An entire shelf devoted to books about Quebec’s roller coaster ride from the Quiet Revolution of the sixties through two referendums on sovereignty. Collections of columns by great newspaper writers and books on Muslim culture and its accommodation in Quebec. There were cardboard magazine folders exploding with sheaves of used paper, drafts he’d printed and marked with red ink, the pages looking old, years old. Old versions of stories he must have eventually finished. The brick wall of the study had more than a few awards for his writing. Nothing national, but plenty of local and regional ones for best story, best feature, best column, all published in Montreal Moment magazine.
On the masthead of a back issue, I found the address of its office, which was close by on Milton Street, right in the heart of the McGill ghetto where I used to crash while missing out on education. The editor-in-chief was Holly Napier, whose direct number was listed.
Another ten minutes looking through the fringes of his writing life didn’t tell me more than I already knew, except that he’d also won an award for writing an annual report for CN Rail, but hadn’t put it up on the wall. It was down in the drawer that had held his missing financial statements, along with a copy of the report itself, a glossy hundred-page testimonial to the achievements of the company during the fiscal year in question.
I scanned the walls and hutch of the desk for photos of Sammy and anyone else in his life. There was a series of shots taken of him on Mount Royal, up near the summit, the east end of the city sprawling out behind him. One of Sammy with his arm around an older woman who must have been his mother, outside his flat. No clue as to who had taken them.
What if his grandfather was right, and he’d simply been in the wrong part of town, for whatever reason, and had been set upon by an anti-Semitic mob? My chances of adding much to the police investigation of a crime like that were slim. Mr. Moscoe would be better off putting up a reward. I had no entry into the Muslim world, and I doubted the Montreal police had much of one either. But they had to have collected some evidence: beating or kicking a man to death is messy business, and traces would be left. Enough to send someone to prison for life, if someone were ever caught.
I hailed Ryan and we switched rooms. It felt less stuffy in the parlour than in the closer confines of the study. There was a red brocade divan backed against the window, and a couple of mismatched club chairs facing it across a glass-topped table. Every available bit of wall space was taken up with bookshelves. His tastes ran to modern fiction, abrasive comedy, Jewish abrasive comedy—every novel and essay collection by Mordecai Richler, in line with his grandfather’s love for that era—more non-fiction collections and memoirs, books on film and music. Plenty of world
history and more than a few books on Israel and its recent agonies. I liked the man Sammy had become. I became curious about his music and went in search of his collection. He was old enough to still have CDs—hundreds of them—rather than an all-electronic collection. There was a little bit of classical, a lot of jazz and world music, a lot of it West African. There was a great assortment of roots artists, going back to the Band, and enough local bands, including Arcade Fire, to show his support for the Quebec scene.
More photos: Sammy in this very room, playing a mandolin, someone else partly visible playing a guitar. No face. Just an elbow in mid-strum. Another of Sammy around age five, walking with his small hand in the much larger hand of his grandfather.
“So?”
I turned to see Ryan outside the study.
“What do you think after two rooms?”
“I think I’m sad he was murdered,” I said. “I feel like I would have liked him again. Well-read guy, a lot of different music.”
“Good at his job,” Ryan said. “All the awards on his wall. Plus one I guess he wasn’t so proud of. Something for a railroad, down in a drawer.”
“Yeah, I saw that. Anything move you in any direction?”
“Not yet.”
“Me neither. Let’s try the back.”
The floors leading toward the rear were hardwood, the high ceilings hammered tin in floral patterns. Halfway down we found a bathroom and linen closet and pawed through the contents of both. Nothing interesting in the bathroom—not even a condom—and no guns, cash or looted Nazi art in the closet.
The kitchen showed plenty of regular use. It was open concept with cupboards made by Ikea or one of its competitors. The doors were all slightly off-kilter, either hanging too low or not closing all the way. The pots and pans were blackened from use, and there were dozens of spices in a tall shelving unit and a lot of different cooking sauces, mostly Asian, in the fridge. The front of the fridge was half covered with photos, slips for medical appointments, a pharmacy receipt for a steroid cream, a parking ticket. There was a sheet of paper with a list of thirty or so names and phone numbers. The names were all French, all prefaced by the initial M., which in French stands for Monsieur. There was also a photo of Sammy in a jacket and tie, accepting one of his awards. With him was a beautiful young woman with a great mess of curly red hair she wasn’t trying too hard to tame. For some reason—the chaste way she held his arm as she leaned in for the photo—I felt their relationship was professional, not personal.
Miss Montreal Page 4