Miss Montreal

by Howard Shrier

  “Now there is three of us and two of you,” Mehrdad said. “And we will hurt you badly if you don’t go.”

  “There’s three of us too,” Ryan said, opening his jacket to show his holstered Glock. “Tell those morons to back the fuck off.”

  “Call the police,” Mehrdad said to Mehri. “Tell them a man with a gun is—”

  “No,” she said. “That won’t be necessary. They will leave of their own accord.” She looked at me, beseeching me with her eyes, glassy now with tears. “Won’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  Ryan said, “What?”

  “It’s cool,” I said to him.

  And it was. Because I had seen her slip my business card into the front right pocket of her slacks.

  No alley looks good in the rain. The wetness, the grey sky, the puddles forming in dips and potholes, the spattering of drops on weeds. And when you know a man was found there dead, his body battered and mutilated, the empty coldness is only magnified.

  We were a few blocks west of the carpet store, behind a Lebanese restaurant called Byblos. There were no physical signs that a body had been dumped there. If there had been blood, it had been washed away by hoses or rain. Anything else would have been collected by the crime scene investigators. We had no real reason to be there, but there we stood.

  “Why’d they dump him here?” I wondered aloud.

  “Let’s ask inside,” Ryan said.

  We drove around to the front and parked in one of the restaurant’s designated spaces. The door was locked. Next to it was a sign with the daily hours of operation: 12:00 Noon – 3:00 a.m.

  It was eleven-thirty. Half an hour until opening. Through the glass I could see a heavy-set man with a few strands of hair pasted across his shiny dome flapping a tablecloth out to its full size, then laying it out across a table. I knocked twice and waved when he turned.

  He looked up, checked his watch, then mouthed what looked like “Fermé,” waving his hands like an umpire calling a runner safe.

  I got out another business card and held it up to the glass. He came over and looked at it, scanning the details, and cocked his head at me.

  “Can we speak to you for a minute?” I asked.

  “We are not yet open,” he said. “Only at noon.”

  “Please,” I said. “We just need a minute of your time. About the man who was found here three weeks ago.”

  He looked undecided, then sighed and unlocked the lock and let himself out. He relocked the door behind him, as if letting us in would bring more corpses into his life.

  “May I see that card?” he asked.

  I handed it to him.

  “Not police,” he said.

  “No. Private investigators hired by the victim’s family.”

  “Quickly, please,” he said. “I get many people for lunch here.”

  “Was it you who found the body?”

  “Yes,” he said. “When I come in at seven. But more like seven-thirty, when I go out back the first time to put out garbage.”

  “Would you show me where?”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “Please, monsieur … For his family.”

  “Khoury. Rafiq Khoury. Fine. Go around back. I will meet you there.”

  He locked the front door and walked into the darkness of the rear.

  “Funny,” I said. “He took the family bait and the social worker didn’t.”

  Ryan said, “He could have let us walk through with him.”

  “Maybe you make him nervous.”

  “I haven’t said a word.”

  “Maybe that’s why.”

  It was faster to drive around to the alley than walk. When we pulled up behind the restaurant, Khoury was waiting outside the back door.

  “Right there,” he said, pointing to a gravel patch near large waste bins on wheels. “Like he was trash.”

  “How was he positioned?”

  “On his back. One arm stretched to me, where I am standing now. The other one folded across his chest.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Blue pants. Jeans. A T-shirt.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “No jacket?”

  “No. And it was still cold for May.”

  “What kind of shoes?”

  “No shoes.”

  I looked over at Ryan. He was frowning, just as I was. “No shoes at all?”

  “Or, um, chaussettes.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Oh, what are they in English? Hose?”

  Hose? Hosiery? “Socks?”

  “Thank you, yes. No socks or shoes.”

  Which could only mean one of two things: the people who had killed him had stripped his feet bare, or he hadn’t been wearing any in the first place. Which meant he’d been taken from his house and not off the street.

  “He was clearly dead by then?” I asked.

  “Yes. I saw many bad things in Lebanon before we came here, believe me. So I am not afraid to look at the dead. I stood over him to make sure he did not need an ambulance. All what I saw was the blood on his head and the, um, bruises on his face. A lot of them. Someone beat him a lot.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Something else you need? People will start arriving soon. I still have preparations to make.”

  “Why do you think he was put here?”

  Khoury shook his head. “I wish I knew. I have no enemies in this country. I left Lebanon to get away from enemies, war, invasions. Almost twenty-five years I have been here—and in all these years not one enemy I have made. Many, many friends. Zero enemies.”

  “No one has zero enemies,” Ryan said.

  “The police ask me this same question. They say, no one wants to make trouble for you? I say if we were back in Beirut during the civil war, maybe. But here, in Montreal, there is no hate.”

  Tell that to Sammy, I thought.

  To get back to the East End in time to meet Marie-Josée Boily meant getting back on the Metropolitan. “Anything else will take you more than one hour,” Khoury told us. So we gritted our teeth—Ryan in particular—as the Charger bounced from pothole to pothole.

  “No socks or shoes,” I said.

  “I didn’t like that either. Were his feet scraped in any way, do you know? Burned or cut?”

  “Paquette didn’t say.”

  “If they weren’t, then he left the house without shoes, which means he didn’t go under his own steam.”

  “Same thing I was thinking.” Which was better than thinking about him having gone in shoes, which had been removed so he could be tortured.

  “Would he give you a straight answer if you ask?”

  “Let’s see.”

  I called Paquette from my cell. As I waited for the call to go through, I saw the exit for Boulevard St-Laurent and pointed at it. Ryan signalled and moved from the middle lane to the right, just missing the back bumper of a car that had pulled out behind him and sped up to cut us off and take our lane.

  He was muttering something about hood-mounted machine guns when I heard Paquette answer. I started to say hello before I realized it was his voice mail. The outgoing message was in French; at least the beep at the end was universal.

  “This is Jonah Geller calling,” I said. “I have a question regarding the conditions of Mr. Adler’s body. I’ll be back at the Holiday Inn around one-thirty—you know the one—or you can try the cell number on the business card I left.”

  After hanging up, I said to Ryan, “You’re thinking the same thing I was. Someone set him up with that phony call to the cops, got him to answer the back door and abducted him from there. Barefoot, in the jeans and T-shirt he was found in.”

  “That’s how I’d have done it.”

  “Don’t tell that to Paquette. He’s fishing for any kind of suspect.”

  “They always fish for my kind,” Ryan said.

  We were driving south on Clark Street, the street looking dreary an
d grey. People sometimes call Toronto a forest with buildings—even streets close to the downtown core are lined with huge maples, elms and oaks. Not here. Just grey streets, brown brick buildings, black wrought iron. If there were any trees, they were artfully hidden.

  And while I mused about trees, dumb-ass that I sometimes am, it was Ryan who picked up the tail.

  “Two cars back,” he said. “Silver Lexus. Think it’s the goons from the carpet store?”

  I undid my seat belt and turned around, trying to see past the dark green Golf that was right behind us. I couldn’t see the driver of the Lexus, but I was pretty sure the passenger seat was empty. “I think there’s only one person in it. You sure he’s following us?”

  “You ever know me to be wrong about shit like this?”

  I couldn’t say I had.

  “Can you see the plate number?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then belt up or hang on to something.”

  As soon as I was facing front he sped up, moving from the left lane to the right and back again, putting more cars between the Lexus and us. The light ahead of us turned amber and he would have blazed through it, but a taxi in front of us saw a fare waving from the curb and jammed on its brakes. Ryan had no choice but to stop.

  The Lexus was right behind us. Ryan slipped his Glock out of his shoulder holster and handed it to me butt first, then powered his window down. “There’s a round in the chamber, so keep your finger outside the trigger guard unless you need to fire. And if you do, you lean forward, I lean back. Got it?”

  I had it. “Me forward, you back.”

  “Okay. Let’s see if the fucker wants some.”

  When the light turned green, the car on our left hit the gas heavy and bolted straight ahead. Ryan stayed where he was. Someone behind us hit their horn, but it wasn’t the Lexus. I held the gun down by my leg and turned as far as I could with my belt on. I could see the driver now—and he was alone. A man in his forties with dark hair and a moustache, wearing a grey suit over a black shirt, the collar open, no tie.

  Now more horns sounded. Ryan eased slowly through the intersection. The car behind the Lexus veered into the left lane and made a big show of passing us, honking and giving Ryan the finger. On any other day he might have signed his own death warrant but Ryan ignored him and drove slowly along. More cars changed lanes. Not the Lexus. Ryan put his hand out the window and waved to the driver, telling him to pass. He stayed where he was.

  “Your finger outside the guard?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He floored it, throwing me back against the seat and putting half a dozen car lengths between us and our companion. The Lexus sped up too. “Too bad we’re not on the highway,” Ryan said. “Me and my hemi would lose his asshole fast.”

  The speedometer climbed past sixty kilometres an hour—too fast for the street we were on—and was approaching seventy when I saw a truck parked in the right curb lane, its four-way flashers on.

  “Here we go,” Ryan said. He glanced at his side mirror and pulled into the left lane. As soon as we were clear of the parked truck, he wrenched the wheel to put us back on the right and hit his brakes. The Lexus had also moved left and now had no way to get back behind us. We were driving side by side. The driver looked over at us and smiled, then made a pistol of his thumb and forefinger and dropped the imaginary hammer.

  “Gimme the gun,” Ryan said.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “I won’t, fuck, okay? Just gimme.”

  I handed it back to him, glad to get it out of my hands, hoping he’d stay true to his word. And he did. He pointed it at the driver of the Lexus who lost his smile in a hurry and eased off the gas, both hands on the wheel now.

  Ryan tucked the gun back in its holster and said, “See? Very few situations a Glock won’t solve. You get the plate number?”

  “I got it.”

  The question was what to do with it: I had no contacts at the Quebec motor vehicle department.

  But Bobby Ducharme probably did.

  CHAPTER 09

  We drove east on Sherbrooke past St-Laurent, St-Denis, St-Hubert, St-Christophe and St-André before arriving at St-Timothée. I figured we’d have to drive a lot longer before we came to Rue Moses or Boulevard Rabbi Akiva.

  Ryan dropped me at the café where I was meeting Marie-Josée Boily. I gave him Bobby’s cell number and the licence plate I’d memorized.

  “How long you think you’ll be?” he asked.

  “Fifteen, twenty minutes. I hope. If it’s much less than that, it means she has nothing to say.”

  “All right. I’ll wait in that park over there,” he said, pointing up the street at Parc Lafontaine. “Call my cell when you’re done or look for me on a bench if it ain’t raining.”

  Café Romarin was a small place that served crêpes, omelettes and sandwiches, and most of the tables were full. I looked for a woman with a copy of Prochain épisode by Hubert Aquin, which she told me she’d be reading. I saw women of the right age reading newspapers, checking cellphones and tablets, scanning menus.

  No one reading a book.

  I took a table for two near the window, looked the menu over while keeping watch on the front door. More people were leaving than coming in as they finished their lunches and headed back to work. The only language I heard was French, albeit with English words and phrases dropped in here and there.

  Ten to one.

  A waitress in her twenties, jet-black hair cropped short, a loop through one nostril and small metal bars through both eyebrows, asked me if I was ready to order. “Juste un café pour le moment,” I said.

  “D’accord.”

  The coffee arrived at five to one. It took five minutes to drink. No one came in with Aquin’s book.

  At one o’clock, I phoned her office. The woman who answered said something about a réunion, which I didn’t quite get.

  “A meeting,” she said. “She left for a lunchtime meeting.”

  “At Café Romarin?”

  “I am not permitted to tell you that.”

  “Please,” I said. “I’m the person she was supposed to meet and she hasn’t arrived.”

  “But she left twenty minutes ago and we are right across the street.”

  I felt a flutter in my sternum, the kind I get when my gut intuits something faster than my brain can process it.

  “Does she have a cellphone number I can try?”

  “I cannot give that out,” she said. “You must understand, not everyone we work with is satisfied with our efforts. They sometimes get angry with us.”

  “Can you call her and tell her I’m waiting here? Or better yet, give her my cell number and ask her to call me?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Please wait.”

  She put me on hold long enough to listen to half a French rock song; all I could tell was that it was about love, possibly lost forever.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said when she came back on the line. “There is no answer on her cell. I left her a message so maybe she will call you, but that is all I can do.”

  I thanked her, paid for my coffee, loitered outside the café for five more minutes, then walked to Parc Lafontaine to find Ryan.

  He was on a bench, jacket off, watching kids play on the swings and jungle gym. Maybe thinking of the son he wasn’t seeing very often. I made sure I came around from the front; surprising him from behind was not the secret to longevity.

  “You get hold of Bobby?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He has someone’s gonna run the plate for us. Probably won’t have it before tomorrow though. What about your meeting? She tell you anything?”

  “She didn’t show.”

  “She call?”

  “No. Her office told me she left to meet someone, which I assume was me.”

  “You think she got held up somewhere, or just decided she had nothing to say?”

  “She could have told me that yesterday.”

  “Maybe someone told her she had
nothing to say.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone we were meeting.”

  “She might have. Or … When you set up the meeting,” he said, “did you call from the hotel room or your cell?”

  “The room.”

  “That’s it, then. We book the fuck out of there. Now.”

  We called around to half a dozen downtown hotels on our cellphones before finding a room at the Delta. We were fortunate, the booking agent told me, that there had been a cancellation. “Otherwise …” he said, leaving unsaid whatever unfortunate circumstances he had in mind.

  We packed up in record time and checked out of the Holiday Inn.

  “Was something wrong?” the concierge asked.

  “No, just a change of plans. But I am expecting a package to arrive at the end of the day. Would you put it aside for me?”

  “Normally, monsieur, once a guest has checked out, our obligation to him has ended.”

  “I understand,” I said. “But you would be doing me a great service.”

  “I see.”

  And he did, once he took the twenty-dollar bill I palmed him.

  We drove the short distance to our new lodgings without maiming any jaywalkers. This time Ryan checked us in, using a credit card in the name of Alessandro Spezza.

  “I don’t suppose I want to know where you got that,” I said.

  “I don’t suppose you do.”

  The room was a little larger than the Holiday Inn, with a TV a foot or so larger, and mini-bar prices that would have embarrassed most black marketers. But at least we could do our business privately.

  I used my cell to call Marie-Josée’s office again. She had not returned from lunch, or wherever she had gone at noon. The only thing we knew for sure was that she had not gone to Café Romarin as scheduled.

  I called Arthur Moscoe in Toronto. It went straight to voice mail again. I left another message asking him to call as soon as he could.

  Nurses and waitresses. Every man I know has fallen in love with one or the other at least once in his life.

  In Sammy Adler’s case, it was a nurse.

  “He was riding his bike home from work,” his ex-wife, Camille, told me. She was in her early thirties, with short dark hair and milk white skin: a Goth effect without makeup. We were on the south side of the park, away from the dog run and playing fields. Her daughter, Sophie, was climbing a plastic structure that had tubular slides curving gently down to the ground, discharging one child after another into the sand.