Miss Montreal

by Howard Shrier

  I wondered if he would call Micheline, revisit the love affair now sixty-three years in the past, or leave it lie as he had done for so many years.

  The only way to know was to ask him, but I didn’t want to do it over the phone. As I lay on the bed in our hotel, a baggie full of ice leaking slowly down my neck, even the idea of driving back to Toronto was painful. The X-rays had shown two fractures in my nose—one at the bridge and one an inch below—and a third in the right orbital bone. The attending physician had walked his fingers gingerly along my eye socket and said he didn’t think I’d need surgery. “Come back when the swelling is down and we’ll check it again. In the meantime, stay off your feet and keep icing it.”

  The hospital had provided a handful of Tylenol 3s, two of which I took, and I dozed for an hour or so while Ryan and Jenn went down to the hotel fitness centre to work out—that or carry out more clandestine target practice. When I woke up, I made the mistake of looking in the mirror. An ugly face looked back: darkening bruises under my eyes, the right side swollen from my eye to my chin, the right eye completely red. I looked like Mohammed’s homelier twin.

  I called Holly and told her I had to postpone dinner, and why. She said I could come to her place when she was done working and she’d take care of me. With a steady pain throbbing from my right eyebrow down to my jaw, I wanted her nestled next to me, her head against my chest. Her bare feet nudging mine. Her scent filling the air, even if my busted nose wouldn’t detect it. But Montreal’s potholed streets were too daunting a risk for my busted face. I pictured bones grinding in a jarring ride and said I was staying put.

  “Then I’ll come there as soon as I’m done,” she said.

  Ryan took Jenn to dinner in Little Italy, a place he knew up near Jarry Park where half the men in the place looked like wise guys, and the other half actually were. From there, they’d go to Holly’s apartment, where she could sleep in the bedroom and Ryan could use a pull-out couch.

  I watched Manny Pacquiao knock out opponents in all weight classes on my laptop until Holly got there around nine. Then I found an Atlanta Braves game. In between trips to the ice machine, she sat at the desk, tapping at her laptop, polishing her story on the bombing.

  The tapping of her fingers against the keyboard stopped. “How you doing?” she asked.

  “Okay.”

  “I thought I heard you grunt.”

  “I think it was more of a sigh.”

  “You need more Tylenol?”

  “Do they come in extra-large?”

  She got up and went to the bathroom to fill a glass of water and handed it to me along with two capsules.

  “Thanks.”

  “You hungry?”

  “It hurts to chew.”

  “I could order you some soup. Or make a run to Chinatown.”

  “I’m okay for now. How about you?”

  “I’m good.” She sat on the bed beside me and gently touched the left side of my face. “You know, you were a lot better looking this morning.”

  “That’s because I was naked. Come to think of it, you were naked too.”

  “I could be again.”

  “Wait till the Tylenol kicks in.”

  “You look sad, Jonah.”

  I forced a brief smile, which felt okay on one side of my face, not so good on the other. I told her how I was feeling torn about going home: wanting to spend more time with her here, letting my fractures heal; needing to tell Arthur how and why Sammy’s life had ended.

  “You don’t want to call him?” she said.

  “It’s the kind of thing I need to do in person.”

  “So go home tomorrow and talk to him and fly back here on Monday.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not? The jazz festival starts Thursday. There are Canada Day events Friday. A fireworks show. We could go down to the port, take a calèche ride through Old Montreal—all the corny touristy stuff Montrealers never do.”

  “You think they heal faces at St. Joseph’s Oratory?”

  “You’re not crippled, just temporarily gross.”

  “What about your story?”

  “I’ll finish it while you’re gone.”

  “You’re on,” I said. “As long as nothing comes up at the office.” I reached over to the nightstand and got my cellphone and checked the World Repairs voice mail box. The first three messages were all minor things Colin could handle: finalizing a contract, sending out a report on a closed file, preparing a proposal for an industrial espionage gig.

  The fourth was from Arthur’s lawyer, Henry Geniele. He left three numbers I could try, including his home, which is where I reached him.

  In a sombre voice he told me Arthur Moscoe had died of heart failure the previous night.

  I had never felt so deflated after a case. Everything we had done that week, we had done so Arthur would know what had happened to Sammy. So he could die knowing he had done everything possible for his grandson’s memory. Maybe he had died peacefully anyway. But peace eluded me, as it so often does.

  Jenn and Ryan flew home Sunday. He said he’d figure out his car situation later.

  She said she’d be in the office when I got back.

  I stayed with Holly. When she went to work, I typed my report for Henry Geniele, summarizing the investigation, detailing our expenses, suggesting avenues for follow-up with Reynald Paquette. I emailed it to him and got a reply thanking me for my efforts. “I only wish Arthur had lived one more day, so he could have known what happened,” he wrote.

  Him and me both.

  I debated flying back for Arthur’s funeral but I didn’t want to complicate the family’s grief by immersing them in the details of Sammy’s murder, or by sitting there with a face that invited questions or morbid curiosity. I logged on instead to a website set up for the family by the funeral home and left a brief message of regret: “May he rest in eternal peace,” it said. “May his memory be a blessing.” Both standard formulas of condolence in Judaism. Then I added: “May all his family everywhere be comforted knowing he passed away without pain.”

  Even Laurent Lortie.

  On Monday, I spent two hours in the office of Reynald Paquette, working on my official statement. It wasn’t exactly reciprocal. I told him everything I knew about Luc; he told me almost nothing about how the police would proceed from there. Neither the police nor the media had yet identified Luc as the person who had detonated the bomb, but it was going to come out soon enough. In Montreal Moment if nowhere else. I kept Ryan’s name out of it; when asked about Alessandro Spezza, I said only that I had hired a driver by that name and that the police were welcome to contact him at the address on his driver’s licence. And good luck with that.

  The trickiest part, it seemed, was connecting Luc in any official way to Sammy’s murder. Paquette wanted to close the book on it, but the only evidence supporting the theory was his purported confession to me on Boulevard Rosemont.

  “Of course,” he said, “if anyone else heard it, that would be more favourable.”

  Which brought us back to Ryan, which meant it wasn’t going to happen.

  I went back to the hospital on Tuesday morning. By then the swelling had gone down enough that a consulting surgeon confirmed my orbital fracture was not displaced and no surgery would be needed. He inserted a metal rod into my right nostril, rebroke my nose, packed it with gauze and taped it down. Now I really looked like shit. Scary shit, the right side of my face dark purple. Half man, half eggplant. I doubted Holly would want to look at me, let alone kiss me.

  But she did. We made love every day when she came back from work and every night before we fell asleep and every morning before she left. Gently. Me on my back, mostly, to keep my face from throbbing.

  On Thursday we went to the jazz festival and listened to free outdoor concerts near Place des Arts. Being jammed into the streets with thousands of other people made me feel uneasy; it was too much like the Fête concert that had almost ended in disaster.

  O
n Friday, we hammed it up and took the promised calèche ride through the old city. I felt the bones in my face jar as the horse-drawn buggy bounced over the cobbled streets, but it was worth it to have Holly close to me, her breast swelling against my ribs with every breath. We walked through the port area and watched fireworks light up the sky over the St. Lawrence River on Canada Day. It was more subdued than the Fête Nationale; no one had their faces painted red and white and no fervour surged through the crowd. Which was just fine.

  We went back to the jazz festival on Saturday but opted for one of the ticketed events: Richard Galliano, who made an accordion do things I had never thought possible.

  When we got back to her apartment, I booked a flight back to Toronto for the next morning. Later that night, she thumbed through her CD collection until she found Blue Rodeo’s Casino, and skipped ahead to “Montreal.”

  We met in Montreal

  Far from the crime

  Moving in circles

  Running with so little time

  Sat and we talked

  About rumours and lies

  Stayed til the sun hit the floor …

  Late in your bed

  You said don’t you be sad

  Think of how lucky we are

  For the things that we’ve had

  Life that’s around me I’m letting it go

  But you stay up here in my head

  Those were the times

  That was our life

  I probably wouldn’t change

  One little thing if I tried

  Moments together mapped out

  Like the stars in the sky

  Now you’re in the things that I do

  Still I miss talking to you.

  And we danced.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Alert readers might note that the passage of time in the Jonah Geller series is somewhat compressed. The first four novels have been published over a six-year span (2008-13), yet Jonah has aged just one year, and makes reference to the fact that he only met Dante Ryan the previous June. This is a deliberate distortion on my part, as I do not want Jonah to age too quickly—he is no more ready to turn forty than I was—and want his cases close enough to each other chronologically that the effects of one spill over to the next. I have also taken the occasional liberty with geography, such as the exact location of the bandshell at the Fête Nationale concert in Parc Maisonneuve and the existence of a certain lake east of St-Sauveur.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing crime fiction is a dream come true for me. Without the love and support of my wife Harriet, and my sons Aaron and Jesse, the dream would have remained just that. Thank you so much. It hasn’t always been easy but I like to think it’s been fun.

  Thanks as always to my agent, Helen Heller, for her ongoing support and advocacy on my behalf; publishers Anne Collins (Knopf Random House Canada) and Marion Garner (Vintage Canada) for believing in Jonah Geller; editor Paul Taunton, for making the book leaner and stronger; copy editor Barbara Czarnecki, who helped me deal with an alarming case of geographic dyslexia; and publicists Sheila Kay and Dan Sharpe, for helping to spread the word.

  Very special thanks to my sister Barbara and my lovely niece Isadora for proofing the French parts of the book. It’s been nearly thirty years since I’ve lived in Montreal and my French is rustier than a tin man left in the rain. They probably had a good laugh at some of my mistakes but corrected them patiently and thoroughly. My dear friend Jeffrey Harper also provided his usual insight and support, not to mention the occasional bed in New York. Attorney Doreen Brown clarified certain aspects of adoption law in Quebec. Thanks always to my mother and father for supporting my mid-career shift into crime writing; and to my uncles, Harold and Gerald Seidman, for employing me as a shipper in their clothing factory in my youth, which gave me the backdrop of young Artie Moscoe’s world.

  Most of the draft of Miss Montreal was written at the Toronto Writers Centre, a great haven for authors who need a little human contact while they work. Thanks to Mitch Kowalski and all the writers who have made me feel at home there.

  I suppose I should thank Pauline Marois, leader of the Parti Québecois; François Legault, leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec; and Jean Charest, leader of the Liberal Party of Québec, for staging an election that would have been achingly funny had it not been so blindingly sad. Guys, you were the collective gift that kept on giving.

  And finally my thanks to René Balcer, Linwood Barclay, Sean Chercover, Rob Cohen, Lee Gowan, Kirsten Gunter, Harold Heft, Sarah Heller, Avrum Jacobson, Jon Mendelsohn, Deon Meyer, Jim Napier, Suri Rosen, Will Straw, Beth Sulman, Bill Zaget and Dave Zeltserman: in different ways, over the past year, you helped me keep the fire burning.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Howard Shrier is the author of four acclaimed novels featuring Toronto investigator Jonah Geller: Buffalo Jump, High Chicago, Boston Cream and Miss Montreal. The only writer to date to ever to win consecutive Arthur Ellis Awards for Best First Novel and Best Novel, his novels have been optioned for a proposed television series by Toronto’s Media Headquarters. Howard was born and raised in Montreal, where he earned an Honours Degree in Journalism and Creative Writing at Concordia University. He has since worked in a wide variety of media, including print, magazine and radio journalism, theatre and television, sketch comedy and improv, and corporate and government communications. Howard now lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons and teaches writing at University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.

  www.howardshrier.com