Street Legal

by William Deverell

  “Billy Sweet don’t like gettin’ whizzed, fellas,” said the gunman.

  Schlizik, Jerszy Schlizik. The Nose couldn’t see him but he knew the voice. Billy’s main button man. Schlizik who took out those two undercover bulls last winter in the Chelsea Hotel. He felt the panic rising, billowing clouds of fear pushing out through his skin, a helpless loaded total junkie kind of fear.

  “I’m just the tester!” he screamed. “I’m just the tester!”

  The door was still ajar, and the bowling sounds were louder. The Pickens Brothers sang of their pain, “I ain’t gonna be used by you, Betty-Sue, I ain’t gonna be used no more.”

  “Where are you, Nose?”

  The Nose could see Schlizik now, he could see him through the film of silk, dressed in his long black suit jacket, the Undertaker. He was coming around the wardrobe, looking for the shape of him in the veils, in the tangle of imitation-gold chains, hidden and still like a trapped rodent.

  Then the Nose saw someone else, just entering through the doorway, lounging there now, a tall man, six and something, also dressed in black, black hair, black gloves, dressed for Normie’s funeral. His gun was held down, loose.

  Schlizik, too, caught sight of him, wheeled, swiftly levelled his gun at him. Then he relaxed.

  “You almost bought it, André. You’re supposed to stay at the goddamn wheel.”

  André shrugged, looked at the dead bodies.

  “Vouz avez du visou.” A Québécois accent.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You have a dead eye.”

  “Yeah, well, talk my language,” Schlizik said.

  André raised the barrel of his gun without moving his arm, and fired once from the hip, and his bullet went dead centre between Schlizik’s eyes. The explosion rebounded from the walls just as, from below, there came another explosion, and people cheering, a strike.

  The Nose saw Schlizik’s body fold up and drop from view. Normie didn’t move, didn’t take a breath, he begged God that the man wouldn’t spot him, wouldn’t see the figure hidden in the silk.

  André stooped to Schlizik’s body, checked his eyes, then looked around the room as a director might, studying the stage. He picked up Schlizik’s legs by the ankles and moved the body around a little bit. He stood back, frowning, then nodded, and went over to Perez and pressed his gun, a .357 Magnum, into the palm of Perez’s hand, tightening the fingers around the butt and the trigger.

  Preoccupied, he didn’t see Normie the Nose slither from the wardrobe, shoeless now, bent double, making himself small, and now stepping carefully behind some packing crates, along the wall, toward a fire-escape door at the back. He unlatched it, and slipped out.

  André moved back to get a better perspective, then returned to Schlizik, adjusted his position once more. Then he calmly strolled to the sink, wet his face, and walked out.

  ***

  Carrie hardly slept a wink the night that Ted stayed out until three o’clock in the morning. The evening was sultry and she was hot and anxious, haunted by the sounds of their house. It was a comfortable dwelling, a brick semidetached on the west side, in Parkdale, an old Victorian house with gingerbread and plaster mouldings and the original stained glass. A well-built house, yet it creaked as if heavy ghosts were roaming upon the burnished oak floors.

  She played her cello for a while in her studio, solo passages from a Beethoven quartet she was practising for her chamber group. Usually she could lose herself in her music, but not tonight.

  Too many ghosts, too many memories, too much Ted in her head . . .

  Tonight he was out with her, with Melissa. Seeing her. Business, of course. Her trial’s next week, Carrie, she’s under strain, so I have to babysit.

  Chuck was the only person in whom she’d confided her worries about Ted — Chuck, who was like a brother, a confidant since law-school days. He’d airily dismissed her fears. But why hadn’t he been able to look her in the eye?

  If only her mother were still alive to give the comfort mothers give. How cruel God was to have taken her so suddenly and mercilessly after Charlie’s disgrace. Cancer. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to live.

  She poked through the kitchen, the drawers, not sure what she was looking for, then realizing. A cigarette, a pack forgotten beneath the linen or behind the cutlery. She felt the hunger in her throat, her lungs — it was oppressive.

  She tried to read in bed for a while, then sought oblivion in sleep. With the lights off, the house noises seemed louder, almost like feet shuffling about. She thought of that strange letter, the man who’d seen her “pickture” on the TV. She thought of the Midnight Strangler — he’d broken into houses in safe residential areas . . .

  A scuttling noise, a mouse, or maybe the raccoons were back.

  A creak. A moan, wind in the branches outside, but somehow human.

  She crept from the bed, and padded barefoot to the open window overlooking the elm-lined street, the flat black lawns, the slumbering houses. A distant streetlamp, moths attacking it, the boom of a nighthawk somewhere above, circling, hunting, the anonymous buzz of the city, a siren from afar, the sound rising and falling, another siren, more distant. There, in the shadows, something . . . A man?

  The figure moved again, and stopped, a dark blur beneath a tree. She strained, tried to make it out. Nothing. She was seeing things.

  She went downstairs, checked the doors.

  Nervous Nellie. She hated it when Ted stayed out late. She hated it when he didn’t come home.

  At two o’clock she subsided into sleep. Some time later — she wasn’t sure what time — Ted climbed into bed with her reeking of wine and something else. Carrie squeezed her eyes shut and gripped her pillow.

  ***

  Over coffee in the morning — just a few hours later — Carrie erupted.

  “Where the hell were you?”

  “Looking after business. Melissa’s a goddamn client, Carrie.”

  “You were taking a brief of evidence from her all night?”

  “She insisted on after-drinks. She got maudlin. Christ, Carrie, I’m suing her husband for a vast gob of money, and I’m not going to walk out on her in the middle of Barberian’s Restaurant when she’s crying and has had too much to drink. I took her back in a taxi and came straight home.”

  “By way of Winnipeg?”

  “I swear to you, damn it, nothing’s going on!”

  Then he called her paranoid.

  She threw her wedding band out the window of their kitchen nook. It fell among the wilting rosebushes outside.

  Ted seemed shocked. She was suddenly uncertain, wanted to believe in that hurt expression.

  She hated being in love with him.

  3

  Outside Toronto’s Old City Hall, now the Provincial Court Building, a dozen people had gathered, and more were arriving. Two women unfurled a banner: PORNOGRAPHY IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH. Another woman passed out signs: PORNOGRAPHY IS A DIRTY WORD, END PORNO’S YELLOW REIGN.

  Harry Squire could see them from the back of the unmarked cruiser where he sat handcuffed and in a state of dismay. The police car wheeled by the demonstrators to the back of the building, to the prisoners’ gate.

  Squire, a man of forty with quick, restless eyes beneath beetle brows, swivelled his head and saw — with not much relief — that his lawyer seemed to be on the job. B.J. Festerton, Q.C., was pulling up behind the police car in his Cadillac.

  The raid had occurred last evening, just after the last customer of the day left Squire Books International, Yonge Street branch. Squire estimated that something like fourteen thousand books, half the stock of his main Toronto store, had been carted away. Those women out front, those picketers against free speech, had laid the charges.

  While the police were packing out the books, Harry Squire had made a hurried call to Festerton. The lawyer
had finally arrived, imperious and insulting, demanding to see warrants, threatening to call the chief, the mayor, the premier. Fur was going to fly.

  It had been the wrong tack, Squire now realized, for the morality squad, who had merely intended to serve a summons upon him, arrested him instead, and coolly advised him he would have to apply for bail after spending the night in jail. It was a night of sleepless horror. He’d also been subjected to the ignominy of prints and mug shots at the police station, and now was on his way to court.

  Festerton had said the arrest was a technicality; he had promised Squire he would be back with his family in an hour. Festerton was connected. He golfed with the mayor.

  A barred gate opened and the cruiser entered a narrow passage leading to the building’s lockup, and Squire was helped from the car. As B.J. Festerton, with his articled student in tow, strode to the gate, Squire complained loudly to him: “This town is overpopulated with drug dealers, pimps, and armed assassins, and the police have little better to do but harass an honest businessman.”

  A woman poked her head around the side of the courthouse. She was waving a sign: JAIL HARRY SQUIRE.

  “It’s him!” she shouted.

  She ran forward. Others joined her.

  “It’s Harry Squire!”

  “Dirty Harry!”

  He heard boos, catcalls. Press photographers rushed forward, bent, kneeled, stood on tiptoe, getting all the angles.

  “Send him to jail!”

  “With the other perverts,” said the woman with the JAIL HARRY SQUIRE sign. She was pert and plump, pleasant-looking enough, but obviously — beneath the skin — just another mindless censor.

  “How am I going to get a fair trial?” A rhetorical question, unheard above the shouted insults.

  Festerton tried to walk in past the gate, but an officer blocked his way.

  “Sorry, sir, you’ll have to go in by the front. We have to process him before court.”

  “You will not continue to treat my client like a common criminal.”

  “Looks like another hot one today,” one of the officers said to the other. “Be great to be at the lake.”

  They led Squire past the prisoners’ door. Inside, he could hear the clanking of metal doors, raspy barks, commands, the obscene shouts of imprisoned thugs.

  ***

  The courthouse, facing south on Queen Street and looking down the narrow tunnel of Bay Street, had served as Toronto’s City Hall back in the days when Toronto was Anglo-Saxon and staid and upright and closed on Sundays. The courthouse was dwarfed now by the financial towers which had sprung up around it, high spires of tinted glass, and by the two tall, arc-shaped structures across the street that comprised the new City Hall.

  The nineteenth-century building in which the city’s main criminal courts were housed lacked the proper ponderous look of a courthouse — too ornate, the sandstone exterior grey and pink and pigeon-shit white, the interior metallic and lacy with its bronze facings and wrought-iron railings, its mosaic tiles, its stained glass and oak panelling. But the lawyers who worked in it endured it; some even loved it: the familiar creaks, the dark corners where they gathered to hatch their plots, the awkwardly shaped courtrooms with the lions and the unicorns of the Canadian crest.

  Outside One-Eleven, the first-appearance court, waiting for it to open, pacing up and down the lobby, Chuck Tchobanian felt strangely oppressed by all the hum and bustle: clerks scuttling back and forth, yelling greetings; coffee-gulping cops memorizing their notes; other witnesses, civilians, wandering lost or gathering in small knots to debate their causes. And the lawyers: tense men and women, racehorses before the bell, making hasty notes, brushing up their witnesses, doing deals on sentence, gossiping, telling jokes.

  But most of the talk today was about the triple murder last night above the Roll-a-Bowl-a-Ball. A French Canadian was in custody, Chuck had heard, one André Cristal, presumably a button man for Billy Sweet; a cop had mentioned something to Chuck about stolen dope.

  He knew there wasn’t a lawyer here who wouldn’t give his or her bicuspids to be retained for Cristal’s defence. Big fee if Billy Sweet were indeed the paymaster. Lots of ink and the chance to notch a major win.

  Chuck Tchobanian was ready for his first murder after four years of defending bums and drunk drivers. When was something big going to come his way? He needed a nice, fat, rich crook with lots of troubles, a milch cow. Not much milk in criminal work, though: look at Carrie, a measly fifteen grand in legal aid for six months doing a serial killer. Maybe Ted’s got the right idea: divorces, corporations.

  All Chuck had today was young Timmy Klein, an armed robber of convenience stores, a picayune five hundred clams for a bail application, although there’d be more if he could get the kid out. Also, he was supposed to babysit a hooker, Carrington’s client, Trixi Trimble, who probably wouldn’t show up — she had a heavy habit.

  “Hold Trixi down,” Carrie had said on the phone. “I’m just getting dressed, I may be late.”

  “What do you mean, hold her down? I’m a married man.”

  But Carrie hadn’t found this funny. She was grumpy, only a couple hours’ sleep.

  “Why no sleep?”

  She hadn’t wanted to discuss it.

  Then she had added, before hanging up: “That son of a bitch.”

  Carrie didn’t often swear: a genteel woman, civil, a cultivator of the arts. So Chuck feared Carrie had caught Ted — figuratively — with his pants down. What had Ted been up to last night? But of course Chuck knew, Ted had mentioned something about “eating out” with a client. He hadn’t been so crass as to wink, but he had smiled too confidingly.

  Chuck had seen this coming. He had warned Ted. Melissa was not worth a tenth of Carrie. Melissa was a rich, beautiful mistake. Lust was blind. You’re letting your dick do your thinking.

  Chuck was conscience-smitten about his role as Ted’s cover man, his personal Alibi Ike: the fishing weekend that Ted had not really shown up for, the afternoons they’d supposedly taken off to play squash and tennis.

  He prayed Carrie hadn’t figured out he’d lied and weaseled for Ted and betrayed his old pal Carrie Connors with whom he used to study torts in law school, used to play Scrabble and chess, who used to drag him out to ballets and concerts — never anything physical between them; they were like brother and sister, the sister who used to tell Chuck her secrets, who’d once confided she was falling head over heels in love with a certain senior partner of the firm they’d both joined.

  Was it as bad as it sounded? Should he try to phone Ted, to get the whole gruesome? Or should he just back away, stay the hell out of it? No, talk to Leon, that’s what he must do, the wiser, older head, together he and Leon would work Ted over, get him to see reason . . .

  Al Costello, a grifter who had somehow managed to scam a law degree, pulled up in front of him, a clean suit today, sharp.

  “How’s it hanging, Chuck?”

  “Loose and easy.”

  “I see this Cristal guy’s got two counts of murder so far, maybe there’ll be three. The bulls haven’t figured out what was going on up there, a fucking Chinese fire drill. He got a lawyer, you heard?”

  Chuck shrugged. “He’s just a small-time hit man. Billy’s got plenty of ’em.”

  “Billy, that’s who they really want. The Bullet creams his shorts thinking about it. But they’ll never nail him. Too careful.”

  Not once in his mottled career had Billy Sweet been tagged for anything, not even speeding. It seemed they’d always been after him, looking for him to stumble, to make a mistake, even before he became Toronto’s kingpin, before he cornered the city’s drug market.

  “I’ll bet this Cristal was in on the job Billy did on those two narcs, too,” Costello said.

  The Bullet — Inspector Harold Mitchell, head honcho of the RCMP’s narcotics division — had
developed an almost neurotic obsession about Sweet, it was said, especially after his two undercover officers were murdered in January, men borrowed from E Division headquarters in Vancouver. They’d been running a reverse sting that backfired.

  “Billy will go deep-pockets on this one.”

  “He usually hires the best and the swiftest for court, Al. Don’t get your hopes up.”

  Costello looked at him sourly, adjusted his tie, a conservative stripe; he looked like a corporation guy from Bay Street.

  “Who’s prosecuting?” Chuck asked.

  “The man himself.” McAnthony, the A.G.’s top gun. “I just saw him talking to some feet from homicide.”

  Costello was looking around now, on the hunt for game, defendants without lawyers whom he could hustle and make a buck off. “This joint is a zoo today. You see all those pickets out front? Burn the books, and throw the bras into the fire, too, while you’re at it.”

  Chuck watched him amble off. Books and bras, he had no idea what the guy was talking about. Chuck had come in a side door, hadn’t seen any pickets.

  Oh-oh. Here was Carrie striding toward him, purposeful yet looking — to someone who didn’t know her — wide-eyed and innocent: those big green startled eyes. But the mouth was firm and set.

  “Has she shown up yet? Trixi?”

  “No.”

  “Damn her. She’s using again.”

  Carrie looked pretty bagged, white.

  “Okay, what’s up?”

  “Chuck, I want you to be frank.”

  “Okay, and you can be Geraldine.”

  “Please, Chuck. Is he involved with someone?”

  Chuck looked for means of escape. The doors of the remand court were opening, people starting to flow in.

  “In particular, is he seeing Melissa Cartwright?”

  Chuck gritted his teeth, and lied for all he was worth. “Come on, Carrie, she’s a client. Ted would never do that. Get him disbarred.”

  “He was out ‘til almost three o’clock with her.”

  “Well, that’s . . . you know, that’s business. Man, Carrie, he’s got a big contingency on this, 15 per cent, and Dr. Cartwright is worth about five million bucks.”