Ice Lake

by John Farrow

  “They wanted a fucking name!” Honigwachs was storming. “They’re not reasonable people, Camille. They expect me to know who killed Andy. They asked me if I did it.”

  She kept her eyes on him, noting his agitation, his upset. “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them to check out Lucy Gabriel.”

  “That was good. That’s what I would’ve done.”

  “Yeah, well, it was not the right thing to say.”

  The motor was running, the car’s heater keeping them warm. “Why not?”

  “Because they already know it wasn’t her. Don’t ask me how.”

  “So what did you say?”

  He gazed down the road and declined to look at her. “Nothing in particular.”

  She studied his profile, the tension in his jaw and around his eyes. “Werner,” she asked softly, “what did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything. It’s no big deal.”

  “You stood up to the mob?”

  Honigwachs shook his open hand in the air. “This asshole was going to shoot my foot off!”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “He said I had to give him a name for his list.”

  “What list?”

  “He’s going down this list of people. The idea is, everybody he talks to has to give him another name.”

  “So he’s threatening to shoot your foot off, and you talk him out of it? You’re a brave man, Werner.”

  “I don’t think he really wanted to do it right there in my office. He was bluffing.”

  “I never knew you were so brave. You called his bluff,” she said coldly.

  “What? You don’t believe me?” Finally, he spun his head around.

  “Are you here to warn me, Wiener?”

  “What do you mean?” He looked at her for a few moments only, then stared down the block. She saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.

  “Did you give him my name, Wiener?”

  Werner Honigwachs glanced at her quickly. “I didn’t have to,” he told her.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He already had your name. It was on his list.”

  Camille weighed his words a moment. “How did my name get on his list?”

  “How should I know? Fuck! Out of the newspapers maybe. Your name got mentioned. It was your hut. That’s where you wanted to do it. Maybe Andy said your name to somebody sometime. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” she said.

  “Your name’s on the list, that’s all I know.”

  Camille nodded. “All right,” she said. “Okay. We can work through this one.”

  Honigwachs was not so sure. “These are tough boys.”

  “They want a name, don’t they? All I have to do is give them a name.”

  “Whose?”

  This time, it was Camille Choquette who was looking down the block, although nothing of interest was there to be seen. “It had to come to this.”

  Honigwachs was confused. “What do you mean?”

  Camille shrugged. She put a hand on the doorknob, preparing to leave. “I’ve got a problem in my life. It’s time to get rid of it.”

  “What does that mean? These are tough boys,” Honigwachs reiterated. “You have to be serious about this!”

  She looked into his eyes. “I’ll give them a name.”

  Honigwachs put a hand on his chest. “Not me,” he threatened. “You won’t give me up.”

  Camille smiled sweetly. “No, Wiener, I won’t give you up. How could you think that? You’re not my problem. You’re my pipeline to fast cash. You’re my walking, talking ATM. But I’ll give them a name. If Lucy’s name is no good, I’ll give them another one.”

  “Whose?” he asked, puzzled.

  “I know the perfect name. You would, too, if you had the guts to think about it. After I give them a name, the mob won’t be pressuring you. That’s all that counts.”

  First, she had told him how to get rid of Cinq-Mars. Now, she was saving him from the mob. “How? What will you say?”

  She opened the car door. “Don’t worry about it, Wiener. I’ll convince them. In the meantime, keep your shit together. Don’t sell out your friends or loved ones.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Camille.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said.

  Honigwachs watched her walk away. How had he gotten involved with this woman? He could hardly remember. He did remember watching her walk away from him once before, after the first time they’d had sex, which had been in the front seat of his car. She had taken his penis into her mouth and driven her fingernails into his thighs until he bled, then she had walked away and he had watched her go, thinking, I can do better. She’s not so fine. She’s not so pretty. The next day, he was calling her up, wanting to meet her again. Already back then, by their second date, she’d been laughing at him. She never stopped laughing at him, and he always kept calling.

  About to enter the building, Camille turned, and Honigwachs expected her to wave goodbye. Instead, she seemed to look right through him, as if neither he nor his Mercedes crossed her field of vision. Rather than wave, she pushed the door open with her rear end, spun, and vanished into the building.

  That’s what got me. That, that shadow in her.

  Honigwachs bore in mind that Camille was a woman who could hold the hands of men who were dying when she herself had participated in their deaths. She had watched him step on the back of Stettler’s head and hold it under water and shown almost no outward emotion, except, perhaps, rage at the victim for being uncooperative, or at him for having missed with his bullet. That shadow. In bed, she’d consume him one day and demand to be devoured the next, and in the early days it wasn’t perfectly clear to him if he liked that or not. But he had always called her back, and after a while the addiction had taken hold, she had taken hold, and now he believed that he liked it, that he had probably liked it all along. He knew that he needed what she did to him, he needed her intensity, the danger, her wildness, the savagery of her kisses, and only rarely had he thought that he might want out. Now he knew, through experience and the change in their circumstances, that there would be no getting out. That time had passed. There’d never be any getting free of her or free of the shadow she emanated.

  As he drove away, it still wasn’t perfectly clear to him if he liked that or not.

  Later the same day, Monday, February 14, 1999, after dark

  Feeling fine and having enjoyed a pleasant dinner, Cinq-Mars drove back into the city. He stayed north, and carried on into a neighbourhood he had not visited in a long time.

  Little had changed here, and he took some comfort in that. North Montreal had long been home to Italians, and they kept their language active on the streets, in the restaurants and stores. As a cop on the beat, Cinq-Mars had worked this neighbourhood during the Mafia heyday, when the bad boys operated out of an ice-cream parlour where they decided who would live and who would die and masterminded international drug deals. In uniform, Cinq-Mars would walk right into the parlour on a hot summer day and the place would go quiet. Only the big whirring fans and the squeaky refrigeration units made noise. Card players cut the deck with an exaggerated slowness. Mirrors on each wall multiplied the eyes watching him as he’d order a double praline on a sugar cone, then sit in the coolness of the shady store, the big fans blowing, licking his ice cream and consuming the cone while Frank “Ice Cream” Vanelli himself, rotund, sleepy-eyed and sullen, slouched against the doorjamb, his usual post and posture.

  Vanelli was the number-two man, and Cinq-Mars knew that, although for a long time that theory was in dispute. When the number-one guy lived in high style among the rich, the police brass had a hard time believing that the number-two hung out with working lugs scooping ice cream. Cinq-Mars tipped off the anti-gang squad about the Mafia’s one and only weakness. Ice Cream Vanelli was cheap. Even though he was doing hundred-million-dollar deals, he maintained his ice cream parlour on a budget, keeping ancient refrigeration u
nits running forever. Several times a year, usually on the hottest days of summer, technicians were called in for emergency repairs. On one of those occasions, the technician left listening devices behind, a tap that would provide information to the authorities for five years. Having been promoted and assigned to a different neighbourhood, Cinq-Mars was out of the operation when he saw the photo of Ice Cream Vanelli—who, awaiting trial, had been lounging in the doorway to his parlour in his usual style—face down, bullet-riddled, on a hot August day. That’s what being cheap cost him. That was the cost of his negligence in allowing bugs into his parlour.

  Cinq-Mars had enjoyed his time in the neighbourhood. The summers had been festivals of chatter and noise, with groups of old men playing bocce and kids rampaging with the joy of being young. He did not have language or culture in common with these new arrivals to the city, but he did have religion, and he appreciated how the rituals and feast days so common in his own childhood were faithfully observed by Italians. He knew the Mafia to be a warring spirit tucked amid an effervescent and industrious people, and he considered himself, in his youth and naivete, to be a protector of the faith and of the old virtues in their midst. Cinq-Mars had made it his personal mission to keep as many of the troubled street toughs out of the clutches of the Mafia as possible.

  Since those days, the Mafia’s authority had waned. That might have been good news, but the new criminal alliances were worse—better organized, richer, more vicious. He was pleased, though, seeing the storefronts again, getting a sense of the vitality of the place, though it was dormant now on a winter’s evening. He drove to Andrew Stettler’s house.

  He walked up the inside staircase. The key, Charles Painchaud had told him, had been left by SQ, officers above the door on a small lip, right side, which Cinq-Mars located easily.

  He entered without expectations. Police had already scoured the premises, and if they’d come across anything of interest, they’d presumably taken it with them for further study. As he had told Painchaud, his point was not to show up other cops, but just to get a feel, an impression of the dead man, who he was, what he was about. Essentially, he wanted to sense why the man was dead.

  The apartment was remarkably nondescript. Closets and drawers were of interest though, for they housed both a working man’s clothes and those belonging to someone who was prosperous. He had a squash racket, for instance, and tennis whites. Several suits. A variety of ties. Half a dozen pairs of black shoes, as well as a collection of winter boots that would be in fashion at any exclusive ski resort. The furniture was also a grade higher than Cinq-Mars would have predicted. While Andrew Stettler might have shown up at Hillier-Largent Global as a destitute lab rat, and while he was living in a modest duplex in a modest neighbourhood, clearly he was not impoverished and had not been for a while.

  His reverie was interrupted by a gentle rapping, almost a signal, on the front door. Two taps, a pause, two more taps, a second pause, one final hard knock.

  Curious, Cinq-Mars chose to answer.

  The woman on the other side of the door was wearing a gaudy, multicoloured cape, sprinkled with beading, and a skull-fitting cap of a similar design. The predominant background for the cape was white, giving her the appearance of a priestess, an impression enhanced by the tufts of wild, grey hair poking out from under her cap.

  “You are?” Cinq-Mars inquired.

  “I am who I am,” the woman responded. “Whom would you be?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What are you doing in my son’s apartment?” she demanded. “Is he here?”

  The apparition before him took on a different aspect. On first impression, she’d been an eccentric neighbour. Now he understood that he was being presented with a difficult situation.

  “You’re Andrew’s mother?” he needed to confirm.

  “Yes.”

  “Andrew Stettler?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And no one has spoken to you?”

  “About what?”

  “Come in.” Mrs. Stettler entered the apartment and Cinq-Mars closed the door gently behind her. “Has no one told you what’s happened to Andrew, Mrs. Stettler?”

  The woman moved away from him and took a gander around the rooms, looking through each door from a distance. Her great cape swirled with her turns, and in the end she faced the stranger again. Her eyes were reddened, as though she’d been weeping. “I know that Andrew has passed on. I was told about that.”

  Now Cinq-Mars was confused. “I thought you asked me if Andrew was here?”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “No,” Cinq-Mars answered cautiously.

  “I’ve been trying to contact him,” the woman explained. “His soul is still restless. He hasn’t settled down on the other side. His soul is straining to make contact with me. Death has been a shock. He’ll be in touch soon, I’m sure.”

  Was she using a telephone, or, Heaven forbid, e-mail? “How are you trying to contact him, Mrs. Stettler?”

  “I’m in touch with the dead on a regular basis. Seance. For me, it’s no different than picking up a phone to call someone in Manitoba.”

  “I see,” the detective replied. At least now he had a grasp of what was going on here. He smiled to assure her that he meant no harm. “Before moving on, did Andrew live here a long time?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars, Mrs. Stettler. I’m a police officer.”

  She nodded. “Are you interested in his death?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am too. I’d like to know what happened. I’m going to ask him who did that terrible thing to him. If you give me your number, I’ll let you know what he says.”

  “Thank you. I’d appreciate that. I’ll leave questions of his death to you and Andrew. But I was wondering, would it be possible for you to tell me about his life? I’d like to know more about him.”

  She said that she did not know much, and would have little to tell him—a statement that proved untrue. Mrs. Stettler rattled on for more than an hour about her son, about his problems with the law on one occasion, when he had been “wrongfully accused” and “picked up by the police” and “hustled off to prison like some no-account hooligan.” Her boy was a good boy, she explained to him, and she backed up that accreditation by telling Cinq-Mars how good her son had been to her. “He had a goofy mom, he was not advantaged in life,” she explained plainly and honestly. “He could have turned his back on me and no one would have said boo about that, including me.” Instead, Andrew had looked after her necessities, given her an allowance each month, made sure that she had everything that she needed in her apartment, and lived right above her so that she would not be afraid “when bad spirits ring the buzzer at night.”

  Her voice was excitable, as if she was on the verge of being frantic, and her head wagged along with her vocal rhythms. How her son had earned his living she did not know, but it was clear to her that he had friends, or at least a lengthy list of acquaintances. In summer they would sometimes come by on their motorbikes, “And if you think I look silly, let me tell you about those men! With their tattoos! And their badges and crests! Hell’s Angels! Glory be! I have spent my life in communication with Heaven’s angels! I’ve barred the door to the Devil’s agents! You would think—wouldn’t you think?—that nobody in their right mind would want to attract an angel from Hell? If there are such things. I told Andrew often, devils are from Hell, angels from Heaven, but he’d only just laugh at me.”

  So Andrew Stettler was connected. To the bad guys. This was news. Even if his mother failed to deliver the name of her son’s murderer straight from the lips of the deceased man himself, at least he had gleaned this tidbit. Cinq-Mars knew that the case had taken a deeper, menacing turn.

  “Did Andrew ever mention the name Lucy to you, or Lucy Gabriel?”

  She shook her head. “Who’s she?”

  “She’s missing. I’m trying to find her.”

  “W
hen he checks in, I’ll ask him if he knows her. If he’s not too busy, maybe he can look around for her from up in Heaven. He probably has a view.”

  Cinq-Mars gave her his card, patted her shoulder, and led her back to the front door. “I’ll look forward to hearing what he has to say on that subject, Mrs. Stet-der. Thanks.”

  He wandered through the house some more after she’d gone downstairs. He found a writing pad inside a side table by Stettler’s bed. Three pages were covered with notations concerning bill payments and dates for credit cards and utilities. The amounts had been added up and ticked off as if they’d been double-checked. On the top page, the name Jacques was inscribed in the upper-left corner. On the next, again in the upper left, the author had written Paramus, New Jersey, in full. On the third sheet of domestic financial notes, Andy, presumably, had written, lips lips lips, and underlined the words three times.

  Cinq-Mars stared at the writing for a while, then flipped the page. There were no more financial notes, but again there was writing in the top-left corner: C-M. Beside the letters was a tick mark.

  The detective felt his hands go cold, as if the woman downstairs had summoned one of her ghosts. He put the notepad back in the drawer. Locking up, he left the building to its mysteries and ghosts, and to its last, sad inhabitant.

  The signal was the most common of covert codes, generic to television and movies. A car drove into the parking lot and backed into a spot as far from the building as possible. The engine was shut down, the lights turned off. The occupants waited awhile in the dark, then flashed their headlights at the building once, twice, a third time. Another pause. On the second floor in a darkened office window, a desk lamp was switched on and off twice in response.

  The occupants of the car continued to wait. They remained silent. Watching. Suddenly, both front doors sprang open and a man, from the passenger side, and a woman, scrambled out. They moved with alacrity. The man wore a brown robe, each of his hands tucked in the sleeve of the opposite arm. The woman pulled her collar up as she walked, either to deflect the night’s cold air or to conceal her identity.