The sun was starting to go down. Victor hesitated. Part of him wanted to return to the hotel near the airport and get some rest, but another part wanted to do a bit of sightseeing downtown. His flight home was scheduled to leave early the next morning. There was a pool at the hotel. With a little luck, he’d find trunks for sale at one of the shops in the lobby and be able to swim a few lengths.
On the other hand, he’d never been to Dallas before. He might never come again. His laziness made him feel guilty.
Not wanting to have any regrets later, the detective sergeant decided, despite his fatigue, to walk for a bit. He might find a nice little restaurant and have a bite before turning in.
He wasn’t sure what conclusions to draw from his meeting with Willis. A stroll would help clarify his thoughts. The old man had spoken of so many matters that Victor had the vertiginous impression, recalling them, of plunging into a black hole. He needed to sort things out in his head, to categorize the new information.
And he needed a hit of nicotine.
Taking a cigarette from his pack, he went back to the newsstand. The clerk was in the process of putting away magazines. His workday was done, but, for a dollar, he sold the detective sergeant a map of downtown Dallas.
Smoking calmly, Victor went back up Elm Street, along which relatively modest brick buildings alternated with tall, glass structures. The city core was emptying out, little by little. People were going home after work.
Victor nodded a greeting to a man smoking a cigarillo in front of a 7-Eleven. To his left, at one end of a long parking lot, a telecommunications tower rose into the blue sky.
The detective sergeant walked on and soon found himself in a grove of skyscrapers. Eyes lifted, neck bent back, he gazed up at the steel and glass giants.
Hoping for a little variety, he looked more closely at a silver dome pictured on his map: the Dallas Convention Center.
Victor turned right onto a street that didn’t appear on his map, but which seemed to be heading in the direction of the Convention Center. Arriving at an intersection that he couldn’t locate on the grid, he decided nevertheless to keep going.
If he was reading the map correctly, he would eventually come to Akard Street. From there, he could reach the Convention Center. As he advanced, pedestrians became more and more scarce. He had clearly entered an area that was not only less busy, but also, judging from the shuttered storefronts, less prosperous.
After walking for another few minutes, Victor had to face facts: he was lost. Lighting another cigarette, he decided to go as far as the next intersection. It would be easy to figure out where he was once he saw the street signs. But when he reached the intersection, he was once again unable to find it on his map. That was the trouble with these tourist guides: they only showed the main thoroughfares.
At the corner, a wiry little guy with a toothpick between his lips called out to him. Wearing a Pac-Man T-shirt and leaning against a chain-link fence, the guy had noticed that Victor was trying to find his way.
“Where do you want to go, man?”
“The Convention Center.”
The diminutive guy bounced over in his sandals. “Easy. Let me show you, man.” The guy bent over Victor’s map and, with a grimy finger, indicated the route. Victor realized that he was only a few blocks from his destination.
“Can you spare a smoke, man?”
The detective sergeant was groping for his pack of cigarettes when, with a hard, economical motion, the guy threw a punch that caught Victor just under the left eye. At the same moment, something struck him violently on the back of the neck.
Victor felt himself pitch forward. Everything went black. In the distance, he heard a loud noise blasting through the silence.
82
BABY FACE
Victor opened his eyes and tried to get up. Framed in the yellow glare of a streetlight, a man was bending over him, dreadlocks swaying around his face.
“Easy, brother. You just got flattened.”
Victor panicked for a moment, putting a hand to his left eye — he couldn’t see out of it. His fingers touched distended flesh. The swelling had shut his eye. It took him a moment to remember where he was, what had happened, and why this stranger was looking down at him.
The stranger’s hands slipped under Victor’s armpits. “Let’s get you back on your feet.” The man hoisted Victor into a standing position and led him toward a taxi.
The pavement and the surrounding buildings were wobbling in the cop’s field of vision, melting into a blur. He spat, trying to get rid of the mercury taste that filled his mouth. His eye began to throb. Then the pain arrived in the back of his neck. He’d been hit from behind as well.
Staggering forward, Victor patted his pockets. No more wallet, no more phone, and, worst of all, no more cigarettes.
“You were lucky, brother. The man upstairs set Samuel Baby Face Johnson down on your path. Indeed he did.”
It was true. Victor had been fortunate.
From the driver’s seat of his taxi, Baby Face had seen Victor being attacked. He had put the assailants to flight with several long blasts of his horn. Then, armed with a baseball bat, he had stepped out of the car to lend assistance.
“Where to from here, brother?” Baby Face asked as he eased Victor into the back seat of the taxi. “I can take you home, or to the hospital, or I can call the police for you. But if I call the police, I won’t be sticking around to say hello. The truth is, I have a history with the police. And I’m sorry to say it’s not a happy one.”
Baby Face laughed, revealing flawless white teeth. When Victor explained that he was from Montreal, staying in Dallas for one night, and that he had a room at the airport Hyatt Regency, Baby Face insisted on driving him there.
“I don’t want you getting wrong ideas about how we treat strangers around here, brother. I’m not going to let you down. The man upstairs would be displeased if I did.”
“I have no money to pay you.”
“You’ll pay it forward, brother. The man upstairs is watching. He’ll know if you’ve honoured your debt down the line. Amen to that.” Baby Face crossed himself.
And while Baby Face continued to talk about the man upstairs, Victor sank into the passenger seat. He watched the highway flow past his window. A Texas Rangers pennant fluttered from the rear-view mirror.
From the hotel desk clerk’s expression when he asked for a new key card to his room, Victor could imagine how bad he looked. In the elevator, a couple studiously avoided his gaze.
As soon as he entered his room, the detective sergeant went to the desk, picked up a pen, and scribbled a number on the hotel notepad. Before Baby Face drove away, Victor had asked for a business card so he could send him reimbursement for the unpaid cab fare. But Baby Face wouldn’t hear of it. So Victor had memorized the permit number posted inside the car.
Turning his face away from the room’s mirrors, Victor swallowed several acetaminophen tablets. Then he went for ice at the end of the corridor while the bathtub was filling.
Immersed to his neck in piping-hot water, he held a bag of ice wrapped in a wet washcloth against his eye. The cold began to numb the pain.
As he considered the trouble he’d have to go through to replace his various cards, one thought provided some consolation: the attack on him had been a simple mugging, unrelated to his investigation. And he could count himself lucky that he’d stored his passport and return airline ticket in the room safe.
Sitting naked on a towel at the head of the bed, Victor hung up with a sigh. His bank cards had been cancelled. The rest could wait until tomorrow.
After several attempts, his call finally got through.
“… lo? Is any … ere? Less …? Hel …?”
“Jacinthe, it’s me. I want you to … Can you hear me?”
“… ard? … lo? Hello?”
Static. Background noise. A poor connection. Jacinthe was someplace with bad cell reception. The detective sergeant could hear distant, mu
ted sounds: crackling, and a woman’s voice speaking a language that was neither English nor French.
“My flight gets in at 11:30 tomorrow morning. Come pick me up.”
“Wha …?”
“Come pick me up tomorrow! At the airport!”
“… port? … ime?”
Fed up, Victor slammed the handset onto its cradle. Then he pressed the redial button. The line was busy. After several failed attempts, he gave up. At that moment, he realized that he was now sitting beside the towel, with his bare buttocks on the bedspread. He jumped up, disgusted.
He’d always lived by an absolute, inflexible rule, applying it equally to fleabag motels and five-star resorts: never, under any circumstances, touch a hotel bedspread.
The acetaminophen was starting to kick in. Standing up with difficulty, Victor decided to risk a glance in the mirror. Bad idea. Instantly, he turned off the light. A lump of purple flesh enveloped his eye. Luckily, the cut that Nadja’s brother had inflicted on the eyebrow hadn’t reopened.
Victor looked like Rocky in the aftermath of his bout with Apollo Creed. Feeling desperately alone, he momentarily considered calling Nadja. Then he decided against it. He might as well go all the way with the Rocky impersonation and start yelling Adrian! at the top of his lungs, for all the good it would do.
Putting on clean underwear, he reflected on the absurdity of the situation. This had all started with the two wallets Lortie had left on the ledge before stepping into eternity.
And now Victor’s own wallet had been taken.
For a fraction of a second, he entertained the notion that the mugging hadn’t been a coincidence. Then, in the dark hotel room, he began to laugh quietly.
His wallet was gone. So was his money. His cellphone. His son. His girlfriend. His cigarettes. His face was a battered pulp. And his bare ass had touched the bedspread. Could things get any worse?
The laughter died in his throat. He opened the minibar and closed it. Walked around the room. Opened the minibar again. Closed it again. Those little bottles … No. He wouldn’t go there.
He took a pill to calm the anxiety that held him by the throat.
Then he took another.
83
SOMETHING DOESN’T QUITE FIT
Trudeau International Airport, Montreal
Friday, December 30th
With his travel bag slung over one shoulder, Victor navigated around the herd of travellers and exited through the glass doors.
Taillon froze for an instant at the sight of his black eye, which his sunglasses didn’t entirely succeed in hiding. “What the hell, Lessard?” she said, laughing. “Did you say the wrong thing to a Cowboys cheerleader?”
“Go fuck yourself, Taillon,” he said, trying to smile.
Jacinthe touched his shoulder with one finger and pulled it away sharply, making a hissing noise. “I missed you too, honeybunch.”
In the Crown Victoria on the way to Versailles, Victor asked Jacinthe what had happened in his absence. She told him there had been essentially no progress. Then she couldn’t resist adding, “A banged head in Summit Woods, a split eyebrow courtesy of your ex-girlfriend’s brother, and now a souvenir shiner from Dallas … I’m guessing you’ll be glad when this case is over, my friend.”
Victor chose not to respond.
His account of the conversation with Cleveland Willis had an effect on his colleagues, especially when he described the retired agent’s revelations about Evergreen and the possible involvement of Tousignant, Lawson, and Lortie in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Delaney undertook to contact authorities in the U.S. to pass along the information.
Meanwhile, as Jacinthe reminded the team, they were still investigating a series of murders in Montreal, and they needed to focus their energies on one thing: finding Senator Tousignant. Her own take on the subject was, as usual, categorical. “If you ask me, we’re gonna end up in the same place. Okay, so we were wrong about Duca. He clearly didn’t commit the murders to avenge his martyred father. But you said Lortie had lots of girlfriends, right?”
“That’s what Willis claims,” Victor said.
“I’ll bet if we do some digging, we’ll learn that Lortie’s relationship with Duca’s mother wasn’t all sweetness and light. We may even find out he was beating her. We know Lortie had this nutty habit of hiding papers in bathroom walls. So one day, in the house he inherited from his mother, Duca stumbles across one of Lortie’s stashes. He finds documents proving that Lortie and the other people connected with Evergreen were complicit in the torture and murder of the accountant and his co-workers. Imagine Duca’s reaction. It’s like finding out your father was a war criminal. He’s so sickened that he comes up with a plan. He decides to kill those responsible and make it look like Lortie is the killer. Trouble is, when he slips the wallets into Lortie’s possession to set him up, things take an unexpected turn. Lortie kills himself. Duca decides to go ahead with the other killings anyway.”
A long silence followed Jacinthe’s explanation. Victor had to concede that it held water.
“What about Rivard?” the Gnome objected. “He’s too young to have had anything to do with the accountants’ deaths.”
“I’ll admit, that part doesn’t make sense,” Jacinthe conceded. There was a brief silence. “But we’ve already speculated that Rivard might have been pulled into the affair simply because he tried to recover the Northern file. Or Evergreen — call it what you like …” Jacinthe was strutting, preening, proud as a peacock of her analysis. “What do you think, kid? Are we on a roll here, or what?” Jacinthe lifted her hand for a high-five, which Loïc, caught by surprise, had no choice but to return.
A deep voice cut through the back and forth. “I agree with just about everything you’ve said, Jacinthe. I believe we’re close to the truth. But still, something doesn’t quite fit.”
The smile died on Jacinthe’s lips. She was about to express her displeasure with Victor when he raised two fingers. “Hang on. Give me two minutes before you start yelling. I have something to show you.” Victor got up and went to the metal shelf where the audiovisual materials were stored.
Dozing on the plane during the flight home, he’d had a succession of dreams. In one of them, he’d been at Le Confessionnal, about to take a drink, when Nadja burst into the bar. Unholstering her pistol, she had fired a shot that shattered Victor’s glass before he could drink from it.
Waking up with a start, he’d been unable to think of anything except the man in the baseball cap. He saw the man in his memory, staring at him as he leaned against the bar.
Victor played the surveillance footage taken at Senator Tousignant’s house, repeatedly showing his colleagues the sequence in which the man with the baseball cap lifted up the garbage bags to be sure the camera caught them.
The detective sergeant couldn’t remember the exact measurements that Jacinthe had listed when, on the evening of Duca’s death, she’d mentioned his height, but Victor’s mind had lingered over that detail.
“Does anyone notice anything?”
The cops on the team looked at each other. Jacinthe was wearing a little smile. Victor knew she was about to invoke the blow to the head he’d received the day before, intending to cast doubt on his credibility. Before she could open her mouth, he addressed her. “Jacinthe, when we were at Duca’s house, you gave me his height and weight. They should be in your notes somewhere.”
“I can’t remember,” Jacinthe answered, yawning. She glanced at her watch. “Okay, partner, we’ve all had fun watching TV and shooting the breeze. But I don’t see how we’re any closer to finding Tousignant.”
“Where are you going with this, Victor?” Delaney asked.
“Lucian Duca was huge, Paul. The man in the ball cap was just average height.” Silence. “Doesn’t anyone else find it strange that we found no sign of Duca being in possession of a heretic’s fork? Everyone’s been assuming he was the killer, but we’re not looking at a single modus operandi here. We
’re looking at two.”
“You know people who commit several murders often change their methods. And I’m not just talking about serial killers, here.”
“Yes, I know that, Paul. But maybe there’s another possibility we should be considering.”
“That Duca wasn’t the only killer? Is that it?”
A heavy silence fell over the investigation team. By raising doubts about the solution of the case, Victor had called everything into question. What if they needed to do more than find Tousignant? What if there was a second killer out there?
“I’m just asking, Chief. But my own view is that Duca had an accomplice. He was much bigger than the man we just saw in the video — the same man I came up against at Le Confessionnal. And last I heard, we still hadn’t found Tousignant.”
“Height is relative, Victor. It’s not easy to judge on video, and you said yourself it was dark in the bar. Also, you weren’t in a normal state of mind …”
The detective sergeant was on his feet in an instant. “I won’t deny that I could be wrong, Paul, but if you’re suggesting that I was drinking …”
Waving both hands in front of him, Delaney tried to calm things down. “Not at all, Victor. That’s not what I meant and you know it. I was talking about your fight with Nadja’s brother. In any case, the artist’s drawing based on the video has already been distributed all over the city.”
Jacinthe opened her mouth. Victor knew she was about to make an unpleasant comment. “Taillon, if you say one word about concussions, I swear, I’ll wring your neck.”
Never Forget Page 41