by Trevanian
“What’s the trouble now, Lieutenant?” The tone indicates that she has had run-ins with LaPointe before. She can’t imagine why, but the Lieutenant has never liked her. Not even in the old days, when she was working the streets.
LaPointe wastes no time with her. “There’s a kid who comes in here. Young, Italian, doesn’t have much English. Good-looking. Probably calls himself Tony Green.”
“He’s in trouble?”
LaPointe stares at her dully. He asks questions; he doesn’t answer them.
“Okay, I know the kid you mean,” she says quickly, sensing his no-nonsense mood.
“Well?” he says. He has no specific questions, so he makes her do the talking.
“What can I tell you? I don’t know much about him. He started coming in here a couple of months ago, sort of regular, you know. At first he can’t say diddly shit in English, but now he can talk pretty good. Sometimes he comes alone, sometimes with a couple of pals…” Willing though she is, she runs out of things to say.
“Go on.”
“What can I say? Ah… he usually drinks Strega, if that’s any use. Just another cock hanging out. He ain’t been in for the last few nights.”
“He’s dead.”
“No shit?” she asks, only mildly interested. “Well, that explains it, then.”
“Explains what?”
“Well… we had a little appointment set up for last Thursday night. And he didn’t show.”
“That was the night he was killed.”
“Just my luck. Now I’m out the fifty bucks.”
“He was going to pay you fifty bucks?” LaPointe asks incredulously. “What for? Six months’ worth?”
“No, he didn’t want me. He had me the first night or so he was here. He’s big on back-door stuff. But he didn’t seem interested in a second helping.”
“If not you, who then?”
She lifts her chin toward the bar. “He wanted to screw the kid that helps me with the music.”
Guttmann glances at LaPointe. “Christ,” he says. “A moronic kid?”
“Now wait a minute!” the dancer protests quickly. “You can’t hang anything on me. The kid’s nineteen. She’s got consent. Ask the Lieutenant. She’s nineteen, ain’t she?”
“Yes, she’s nineteen. With the mind of a seven-year-old.”
“There you are! And anyway, she seems to like it. She never complains. Just stares off into space all the time it’s going on. Look, I got to get back to my public. That butch in the front will pull her goddamned lip off if I’m late. Look, I’d tell you if I knew anything about the Italian kid. You know that, Lieutenant. Shit, the last thing I need is more trouble. But like I said, he was just another cock hanging out for a little fonne. Hey, did you notice that civilian in the suit? Now, there’s a weirdo for you. You know what he’s doing under the bar?”
“Sacre le camp,” LaPointe orders.
The dancer tucks down the corners of her mouth and shrugs, making a little farting noise of indifference with her mouth. Then she leaves for the back room, from which she soon appears without the slippers and dressing robe to clamber up onto the drum and stand, bored and impatient, while the retarded girl tries to set the needle down silently. She fails, and there is a screech before the whining music begins. The dancer darts a punitive glance at her, then begins to jiggle from foot to foot, running her thumbs around the belt of her G-string and in and out of the pouch.
The sting of the reprimand slides quickly from the girl’s smooth mind, and soon she is lost in rapt fascination, looking up at the woman dancing in the blue and orange light, all eyes on her. Show business.
Guttmann finishes his ouzo at a gulp. “I hate to admit it, but I’m beginning to agree with you.”
“You’d better watch that.”
“This Green was real shit.”
“Yes. Come on. Let’s go.”
At the door, LaPointe looks back at the dimly lit bar, small in the cavern of the unused dance floor. The man with the goatee is chewing and rolling his eyes.
They walk side by side down Rachel toward the Main, toward the luminous cross that advertises Christianity from the crest of Mont Royal.
“It’s still early,” Guttmann says. “You want a cup of coffee?”
That’s a switch, and LaPointe senses that the young man wants to talk, but he feels too fed up, too tired of it all. “No, thanks. I’ll just go home. I’m tired.”
They walk on in silence.
“That Green…” Guttmann mutters.
“What?”
“I mean, come on. That’s too sick.”
“No sicker than that dancer.”
“Sir?”
“The girl is her daughter.”
Guttmann walks on mechanically, staring ahead, his fists clenched in his overcoat pockets. They cross over St. Laurent, where LaPointe stops to say goodbye. “You have a date with your girl tonight?” he asks.
“Yes, sir. Nothing big. We’re just going to sit around and talk about things.”
“Like the future?”
“That sort of thing. Will you tell me something, Lieutenant? Does anyone survive a career as a cop and still feel anything but disgust for people?”
“A few do.”
“You?”
LaPointe examines the boy’s earnest, pained face. “See you in the morning.”
“Sure.”
12
Two days pass; Guttmann has returned to Detective Sergeant Gaspard to finish out his tour as a Joan. When no new leads open on the Green case, there is talk down in homicide of closing down the investigation.
Pig weather continues to depress spirits and abrade tempers, and a popular rumor circulates on the Main to the effect that Russian and American atomic testing has done irremediable damage to the polar icecap, and the weather will never return to normal.
LaPointe’s time and attention is soaked up by typical problems of the Main. Mr. Rothmann’s butcher shop is broken into; the newspaper vendor on the corner of Rue Roy is held up for eight dollars and thirty-five cents; and the construction force demolishing a block of row houses to make way for a high-rise parking facility arrives on the site one morning to find that extensive vandalism has ruined work and tools. On a scabby brick wall, the posse of vandals has painted:
182 People Used to Live Here
On the Rothmann break-in, nothing was stolen and the only damage was to the doorframe and lock. Probably some street tramp or shelterless American draft avoider trying to get out of the damp cold of night. Once again, LaPointe advises Mr. Rothmann to install special police locks, and once again Mr. Rothmann argues that the police ought to pay for them. After all, he’s a taxpayer, isn’t he?
The holdup of the newspaper vendor is a different matter. LaPointe presses it to a quick finish because he realizes that someone might have been killed. Not the victim; the holdup man.
The paper seller could only give a description of the thief’s shoes and legs, and of the gun. Tennis shoes, bell-bottom jeans. A kid. And a black gun with a tiny hole in the barrel. The tiny hole meant the weapon was one of those exact-replica waterguns the Montreal police have made repeated complaints about, to no avail. After all, the people who sell them to kids are taxpayers, aren’t they? It’s a free country, isn’t it?
LaPointe makes two telephone calls and talks with four people on the street. The word is out: the Lieutenant wants this kid, and he wants him right now. If he doesn’t have him by noon, the street is going to become a hard place to live on.
Two and a half hours later, LaPointe is sitting in the cramped kitchen of a basement flat with the thief and his parents. The father admits he doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with these goddamned kids these days. The mother says she works her fingers to the bone, never sees anything but these four walls, and what thanks does it get you? You carry them under your heart for nine months, you feed them, you send them to Mass, and what does it get you?
The kid sits at the kitchen table, picking at t
he oilcloth. His eyes lowered, he answers LaPointe’s questions in a reluctant monotone. Once he makes the mistake of sassing.
In two steps, LaPointe crosses the room and snatches the kid up by the collar of his imitation-leather jacket. “What do you think happens if a cop chases you and you flash that goddamned water pistol? Hein? You could be killed for eight lousy bucks!”
There is fear in the kid’s eyes; defiance too.
LaPointe drops him back into his chair. What’s the use?
It’s a first offense. The Lieutenant can make arrangements, can find a job for the kid swabbing out some restaurant on the Main. The boy will pay the newspaper vendor back. He will have no record. But next time…
As he leaves, he hears the mother whining about carrying a child under her heart for nine months, and what thanks does she get? Heartache! Nothing but heartache!
There will be a next time.
About the vandalism at the building site, LaPointe does nothing, although this is not the first time it has happened. He goes through the motions, but he does nothing. His sympathy is with the people who are losing their homes and being shipped out to glass-and-cement suburban slums high-rising from muddy “green zones” dotted with emaciated twigs of one-year-old trees tied by rags to supporting sticks.
Corners, whole blocks of row houses are being torn down to make room for commercial buildings. Narrow streets of three-story Victorian brick with lead-sheeted mansard roofs are falling prey to the need to centralize small industry and commerce without threatening land values and the quality of life in the better neighborhoods. The residents of the Main are too poor, too ignorant, too weak politically to protect themselves from the paternal tyranny of city planning committees. The Main is a slum, anyway. Bad plumbing; rats and roaches; inadequate playgrounds. Relocating the immigrants is really for their own good; it helps to break up the language and culture nodes that delay their assimilation into New Montreal: Chicago on the St. Lawrence.
Although LaPointe knows that this blind striking out at the construction sites will change nothing, that the little people of the Main must lose their battle and ultimately their identity, he understands their need to protest, to break something.
More subtle than these dramatic attacks on the Main are the constant erosions from all points on its perimeter. Individuals and organizations have discovered that protecting what is left of old Montreal can be a profitable activity. Under the pretext of preservation, rows of homes are bought up and gutted, leaving only “quaint” shells. Good plumbing and central heating are installed, rooms enlarged, and residences are created for affluent and swinging young lawyers, pairs of career girls, braces of interior decorators. It is fashionable to surprise friends by saying you live on the Main. But these people don’t live on the Main; they play house on the Main.
LaPointe sees it all happening. In his bitterest moods he feels that this bubble in his chest is consonant with the rest of it; there wouldn’t be much point in surviving the Main.
When he arrives at the office Thursday morning, his temper is ragged. He has picked up word that Scheer is bragging about being back on the street before long. Obviously, the Commissioner has reported to his political acquaintance.
After scanning the Morning Report, he paws about in the three days’ worth of back paper work that has accumulated since Guttmann’s departure. Then he comes across a memo from Dr. Bouvier asking him to drop down to Forensic Medicine when he has a free moment.
As always, the smells of wax, chemicals, heat, and dust in the basement hall trigger memories of St. Joseph’s: moue, tranches, the Glory Hole, Our Lady of the Chipped Cheek…
When LaPointe enters his office, Bouvier is just drawing a cup of coffee from his urn, his finger crooked into the cup to tell when it is nearly full.
“That you, Claude? Come in and be impressed by one of my flashes of insight, this particular one focused on the case of one Antonio Verdini—alias Green—discovered one night in an alley, his body having acquired a biologically superfluous, and even detrimental, orifice.”
LaPointe grunts, in no mood for Bouvier’s florid style.
“My ingenious filing system”—Bouvier waves toward his high-heaped desk—”has produced the interesting fact that our Mr. Green’s uncommon appetite for ventilation was shared by”—he cocks his head in LaPointe’s direction and pauses for effect—”the victims of two other unsolved murder cases.”
“Oh?”
“Somehow I had expected more than ‘oh?’.”
“Which cases, then?”
“Men known to the department, and therefore to God, as H-49854 and H-50567, but to their intimates as MacHenry, John Albert, and Pearson, Michael X. This X indicates that his parents gave him no middle name, doubtless in a spirit of orthographic economy.” Bouvier holds the two files out to LaPointe and stares proudly at him with one huge eye and one nicotine-colored blank. The Lieutenant scans rapidly, then reads more closely. These are Bouvier’s personal files, fuller than the official records because they include clippings from newspapers, relevant additional information, and certain scribbled notes in his large, tangled hand.
One file is six years old, the other two and a half. Both stabbings; both males; both without signs of robbery; both at night on deserted streets.
“Well?” Bouvier gloats.
“Could be coincidences.”
“There’s a limit to antichance. Notice that both happened on the edges of what you call your patch—although I hear there is some difference of opinion between you and the Risen Cream as to the extent of that realm, and of its monarch’s authority.”
“What’s all this business here?” LaPointe puts one report on Bouvier’s desk, keeping his finger on a passage scribbled in the doctor’s hand.
Pressing the bridge of his broken glasses to hold them in place, Bouvier leans over, his face close to the page. “Ah! Technical description of the wound. Angle of entry of the weapon.”
“Identical in all three cases?”
“No. Not quite.”
“Well, then?”
“That’s where you discern the touch of genius in me! The angles of entry are not identical. They vary. They vary in direct proportion to the heights of the three men. If you insist on playing the game of coincidence, you have to accept that there were three killers of identical height, and who held a knife in the identical way, and all three of whom were most gifted in the use of a knife. And if you want to stack up coincidences with the abandon of a Victorian novelist, how’s this? Pearson, Michael X., made love shortly before his death. Once again, that nasty habit of failing to wash up. A professor at McGill, too! You’d think he’d know better. The other fellow, MacHenry, John Albert, was an American up here on business. There is every reason to believe that he also made love shortly before contributing his personal dust to the Universal Dust. He washed up within an hour of his death. Not a full bath; just the crotch area. There’s the American businessman for you! Time is money.”
“Can I take these with me?” LaPointe asks rhetorically, already on his way out with the reports.
“But make sure you bring them back. I can’t stand having my files in disorder!” Bouvier calls after him.
Read and reread, Bouvier’s dossiers rest on LaPointe’s desk, covering the unfinished paper work. He links his fingers over his head and leans back in his swivel chair to look at the large-scale city plan of Montreal tacked up on his wall, finger-smudged only in the area of the Main. His eye picks up the places where the three men were found—stabbed, but not robbed. The Green kid… there. In that alley almost in the center of the Main district. The American businessman… there. On a narrow street off Chateaubriand between Rue Roy and Rue Bousquet, on what LaPointe would call the outer edge of his patch. And that professor from McGill… there. Well outside the Main, on Milton Street between Lorne and Shuter, normally a busy area, but probably deserted at… what was it?… estimated time of death: between 0200 and 0400 hours.
Probably the
same killer. Probably the same woman. Jealousy? Over a period of six years? Hardly what you would call a flash of jealous anger. One woman. One killer. Perhaps the woman was the killer. And… what kind of woman could unite a Canadian professor, an American businessman, and an illegal Italian alien with sperm on his brain?
The freshest of these old cases is thirty months old. All traces would be healed over by now.
He sighs and puts the files into a thick interdepartmental envelope to send them over to Gaspard in homicide. LaPointe can picture Gaspard’s anger when he discovers he has inherited a set of killings with a sex link. Just the kind of thing the newspapers salivate over. Unknown Knife Slayer Stalks… Police Baffled…
All the while he is eating in a cheap cafe, unaware of what is on his plate, all the while he walks slowly through the Main, putting the street to bed, LaPointe carries the details of the two files in the back of his mind, turning over the sparse references to personal life, looking for bits that match up with what he knows about Tony Green. But nothing. No links. He is standing outside his apartment on Esplanade, looking up at the dark windows of his second-story flat, when he decides to return to the Quartier General and muck around with late paper work, rather than face a night alone with his coffee and his Zola.
“What in hell are you doing here?”
“Jesus Christ! You startled me, sir.”
“You leave something behind?”
Guttmann has been sitting at LaPointe’s desk, his mind floating in a debris of problems and daydreams. “No. I just remembered that you have a map of the city on your wall, and I still had my key, so…”
“So?”
“It’s about that packet of files you left for Sergeant Gaspard.”
With a jerk of his thumb, LaPointe evicts Guttmann from his swivel chair and occupies it himself. “I’ll bet he was happy to find three closed cases suddenly reopened.”