Street Legal

by William Deverell

  “This sounds like a true botch job.”

  “Yeah, well, we were undermanned, just the two of us . . .”

  “Your underling has doubtless been sworn not to mention the illegal wiretapping. Did anyone else know?”

  “Yes, one other . . . officer.”

  “I want all names.”

  “The other officer is my superintendent, Oliver. This was all done with his blessing.”

  “I am utterly at a loss for words.”

  Mitchell finally lost his temper. “Listen, for God’s sake, this is Billy Sweet we’re talking about. If there’s any hassle about cutting corners, I’ll face it. We’re talking Billy Sweet! Not some two-bit French-Canadian button man. The biggest horse connection north of the Great Lakes. He ordered the execution of those two undercover guys, two good men, family men — we owe! I’m going to nail that cocksucker if it kills me.”

  Mitchell was red-faced from his exertions, and now was standing.

  “And how are you going to nail him?”

  “Watch me. Give me time, Oliver, a couple of days. I mean it, lives are at risk. I haven’t even told Jock Strachan about Normie Shandler. I’m begging you, Oliver.”

  McAnthony didn’t want blood on his hands. A few days, he decided — what would be the harm? Surely Mitchell, left to his own ineffable resources, couldn’t cause further damage to this already wobbly case.

  “Two days,” he said.

  ***

  Leon and Chuck had boosted Carrie’s spirits, but she still felt a void that could be filled only by staying busy. She didn’t want to spend Saturday evening alone, nor in the company of those dubious friends, Anger and Depression. Life had to be gotten on with. Work drowns sorrows.

  Five days had gone by since Carrie had taken on the Cristal defence and she hadn’t yet ventured down to the scene of the crime, so she made a date with Jock Strachan and drove to the Roll-a-Bowl-a-Ball on St. Clair.

  The bowling alley was packed, loud with the buzz of physical exercise, a constant rolling thunder, sporadic clatterings of pins. Carrie wondered: could someone down here actually hear gunshots from above?

  Detective Strachan was waiting for her in the coffee shop. He stood up, straightened his bow tie, and shook her hand. He was really one of the better boys in blue, she believed, unswerving and straight.

  “Jock,” Carrie said, “this is really good of you. Did you bring some blanks?”

  “Aye, as you asked, Carrie.”

  “I’ll wait down here. You go up to the loft. Fire three shots.”

  I t’ink someone tried to set me up. That is what Cristal had said. That off-duty officer, Constable Johnny-on-the-spot . . . Lamont, that was his name . . . claimed to have heard those shots. But did he?

  Carrie could barely make out the sound of the first two muffled cracks of a pistol from above, but the bowling noises obscured the last one. No one seemed to prick up any ears.

  She passed through a side door leading to the stairwell — where André Cristal had been arrested — and climbed to the loft, where Strachan was awaiting her verdict.

  “He would have had to have very good hearing to be able to distinguish those noises as gunshots.”

  “It’s a sound he’s trained to hear, Carrie,” said Strachan. But he seemed to be trying to convince himself.

  He showed her around: the film props were all still here, wardrobes of clothes, crates with veils and fake jewellery, but the heroin paraphernalia was gone, of course. Fingerprint powder all over. There was the sink where Cristal told Carrie he’d seen some washings. Across the way, the rear fire escape, presumably Normie’s route of escape.

  “Last Flight from Istanbul,” Carrie read, studying one of the packing crates. “Did they ever make this movie?”

  “They’re doing the editing now,” said Strachan. “Reputable company, we’ve looked into them.”

  Carrie saw a long curved knife in a bloody scabbard. Some kind of schlock film, she supposed. Heliotrope Studios. Reputable company, its employees smuggling junk.

  “Jock, that off-duty policeman downstairs, did he have a beat or something? What were his regular routines?”

  “RCMP drug squad.”

  “RCMP . . . Drugs? He works under Harold Mitchell?” Suddenly, Carrie was overwhelmed by a flood of suspicions. “Jock, honestly, don’t you think there was something awfully fishy about what happened here last Monday night? I mean, what’s a drug cop doing there standing right under five million dollars’ worth of heroin? Are you saying this was a coincidence?”

  “He said he was bowling, he heard shots.”

  “Bowling with whom? Did he have friends or family with him? I’ll bet you a hundred bucks he was alone.”

  Strachan shrugged, and his bow tie bobbled. “What are you saying, Carrie?”

  “Jock, you know very well what I’m saying, and I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t trust you. You know Harold Mitchell. You know the kind of stings he runs. He may not be totally bent but he sure doesn’t play straight.”

  Strachan said nothing but held her eye. “Would he lie to me, Carrie? Be sensible.”

  “I think Mitchell knew something illegal was going on here that night. I think he had eyes and ears on this place. I even suspect he knew some people were going to get killed — he didn’t care, dope pushers, scum, especially Jerszy Schlizik, a cop-killer. And I think after it was all over, he needed a scapegoat. My client was handy.” And she paused, struck by a thought. “Maybe Mitchell even engineered it.”

  “It’s all a wee bit speculative, Carrie.”

  “Any harm in checking it out? Quietly?”

  Strachan thought for a moment. “No harm.”

  “Thanks, Jock. You’re a sweetie.”

  ***

  The Eagle Hotel was block-shaped, three storeys of peeling yellow plaster, a dozen rooms, a large, dank beer parlour on the ground floor decorated with pennants and posters for the Blue Jays, the Maple Leafs, the Argos. The pub was crowded on a late Saturday night, and customers — almost all male — were watching the Jays and the Angels on two raised television sets.

  Their hubbub could be heard on the floor above, in room number seven, a spare, small space with just the essentials: a sink, a bed, a hot plate, a window with a view of an adjoining wall. And a warped wooden table, where Edwin Moodie laboured with a pencil and paper. The night was hot, and rivulets of sweat rolled down his face from his bald scalp.

  The only decorations here were newspaper clippings, tacked to the stained, patterned wallpaper. The headlines, from various Toronto papers, read: “POLICE ARREST RECLUSE,” and “IS IT THE MIDNIGHT STRANGLER?” and “LEGAL AID APPOINTS LAWYER IN STANGLER CASE,” and finally, “IDENTIFICATION FAILS IN STRANGLER TRIAL.” That was accompanied by a photograph of Carrington Barr walking triumphantly out of the courthouse. The photo was smudged, as if fingered many times.

  There was another photo, coloured, clipped from an arts magazine: one man and three women dressed in dark concert attire, a string quartet. Carrie Barr was playing a cello.

  Edwin Moodie put down his pencil and closed his eyes tight. After a while he opened them again and stared down at the gold wedding band that sat beside the pad of lined paper on his table. He tried to put it on his little finger, but could work it only up to the first knuckle.

  The clock beside his bed said eleven-thirty. He made a sound, a low, soft moan, and rose from his chair.

  He left his room, and stepped down the creaky stairs to the dingy lobby. Moodie could hear shouts and cheering from behind the door leading to the licensed premises, an announcer saying, “Ernie Whitt sends it downtown!”

  He walked out onto Jarvis Street, and then down to Dundas, and he kept going, sweaty and hot, clumping his way west, past Yonge, past University, through Chinatown, and further west in the quiet streets of Parkdale. Tonight . . . yes, tonigh
t he would find the strength.

  12

  A ghastly nightmare awoke Carrie on a peaceful Sunday morning. It drove her upright in her bed on the second floor of her house. Through a window open to the street came distant bells, summoning worshippers to church, and sounds came, too, of children playing. “Ring around a rosy, pocket full a posy.”

  “Only a nightmare,” she softly repeated to herself, wanting to hear her own voice. She was trembling and sweating, but alive, undefiled. As she tried to focus, she looked to the other side of the bed, as if for support, for comfort, and, on seeing it empty, for the fleetest foggy moment wondered if Ted had gotten up early to go jogging. Then she remembered.

  She tried then to recall the dream — it seemed three-dimensional, physical, she could feel the hands upon her. The man who was about to rape her, the Midnight Strangler of this nightmare, was familiar — not Mr. Moodie, certainly, but . . . was it . . . Inspector Harold Mitchell? She decided that’s who he looked like at the end, a face maskless suddenly, angry, red, a wet sheen of bald scalp. But no, earlier he had been someone else, a different monster . . .

  Start the dream over. She’d been in court, and . . . Royce Boggs? Yes, the rich misogynist, he was on the stand, and she was cross-examining him — then it all changed, one of those ungainly dream-jumps, and Boggs was the pursuer. Then what? She had been hiding from him, then running down an endless corridor, and suddenly it was night and he was yelling something about a . . . “voracious bitch.” Royce Boggs, yes, definitely. The Midnight Strangler.

  How ridiculous.

  She saw herself in the bureau mirror staring back with shocked eyes. The dream faded and, though she struggled with it, she lost the details.

  The bedside clock read ten-thirty. It had read two-thirty when sleep had taken her. Again, her house had been haunted by sounds, clanks and groans, a distant, quiet knocking.

  “Husha, husha, we all fall down!”

  Suddenly tears came. From nowhere. No, from deep inside, where she had been storing them. A tidal wave that washed in all the ugly debris of marriage and separation and left her shaking.

  Several minutes passed before strength and composure returned.

  Get it together. Stay busy. Life and career carry on. It’s Sunday. Try to track down the tester, the witness to murder. The Don Jail today. Talk to André Cristal. Maybe hire him to break someone’s kneecap.

  And she simply had to see Mr. Blaine Johnstone with a t and an e. And later this afternoon, a meeting with Leon and Chuck to talk about mundane things such as how they were going to survive.

  As she was making coffee, Lisa Tchobanian phoned, worried, asking after her welfare.

  “Chuck told me about the whole rotten thing, Carrie. I’m crying for you.”

  “Don’t, Lisa. I’m okay. I bent, I didn’t break. The guys stuck with me. Tell Chuck I love him for that. I really didn’t tell him properly how I felt about it.”

  “He would really have been in trouble if he’d chosen Ted’s side.”

  “You two have made up?”

  “A truce. We’re letting the Red Cross come in to care for the sick and injured. Hell, I didn’t mind the idea so much of Chuck acting for Squire, especially if he bleeds the guy to death with fees — but he made me feel like a fool.”

  “It’s not a marriage-breaker, Lisa.”

  “I have your point. Look, you need a friendly ear or shoulder or something, you know where I am. Like me to come over?”

  “I’d love to see you. But I . . . I have some things to do, I’m just going to keep busy.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  Later, Carrie sipped her coffee and stared at the empty chair at the other side of the kitchen table, where Ted was usually buried in the sports section. She fought tears, but they came.

  ***

  A short distance east of downtown and just west of the Don Valley, where Toronto’s embarrassingly minor river, the Don, distorts into a canal before emptying into Lake Ontario, stands the Toronto Jail, known simply as the Don. An older prison had been built on the site in 1865, an ugly relic whose closing brought no tears to those who’d inhabited it. The Don was a short-term holding facility, and in 1980 boasted a population of four hundred and fifty mostly unhappy persons.

  On the fourth floor of the Don were kept prisoners likely to come to harm from their mates, an area called p.c. — protective custody — and that was where Carrie was told she could find Blaine Johnstone. But the man brought out to talk with her was not her client — either that or he had cut off his rooster-tail and done some serious plastic surgery.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “I didn’t ask for no lawyer.”

  “What are you charged with?”

  “Rape. The crazy bitch is lyin’.”

  Carrie went back to the control booth and learned he was the only Johnstone they had, with or without t or e. This was becoming a little abnormal. Can people just disappear through a hole in the earth while going through the court system? Right out of Kafka, the poor man had said: maybe he’d turned into a cockroach.

  Where does one look for him? She wasn’t sure.

  “Where can I find André Cristal?”

  This time she was sent into a visiting room on range 3A, a large stark room dominated by a long table.

  Cristal marched in briskly, like an officer in the military, gave her a kind of inspection, and frowned. Carrie had done her face — maybe too much — but hadn’t got rid of the shadows.

  She didn’t offer her hand. “How are you today?” she said with a wan smile.

  “Not too bad. And you, Mrs. Barr?”

  She was stuck for an answer. “A little . . . under the weather, I guess. Not in the best shape. Have too many things whirling around me.” She was babbling. “I’m okay.”

  He waited, as if expecting her to carry on, to explain. She became busy with her bag, bringing out pen and pad and a sealed pack of Player’s. “If you get tired of rolling them . . .”

  “Thank you.” He pulled out two, extended one. “But I should not offer, should I?”

  Carrie felt a hand struggling to move up there, to grasp that little sweet tube of addicting drug. Miraculously, her hands remained near the table, fingers fiddling with her ballpoint pen, clicking the button in and out.

  “No, you shouldn’t.”

  “Je m’excuse. I ’ave deep admiration for you, madame, I ’ave tried to quit.” He started to put both cigarettes back in the pack.

  “No, you —”

  “I can wait —”

  “— can smoke if you —”

  “— not important.”

  As their words collided, Carrie made a grab for the cigarettes, snatching one of them, lighting it, just one teensy draw on it, then handing it over to Cristal.

  God, did that feel good. Why was she so nervous with this man?

  Cristal was smiling broadly. Carrie felt foolish. She cleared her throat, and told him of her visit to the Roll-a-Bowl-a-Ball and the prop loft, and the blank-bullet test.

  “This Inspector Mitchell,” he said, “do you t’ink he ’as tried to set me up?”

  “He has a sort of Machiavellian mentality. I wouldn’t put anything past him. If he has information he isn’t disclosing, we can get the case thrown right out. Okay, I also saw your Mr. Big Leonard Woznick. I had to scare him a little bit. He says he will try to get some wheels turning.”

  “Don’t be surprise if they will make contact. If Big Leonard is scared, Billy will be very scared.”

  “Sweet — he’s a real worry wart?”

  “Big Leonard says Billy has — I can’t pronounce . . . anxiety neurosis. It is his weakness, but maybe for his business it is his strength also.”

  Carrie recited to him her con
versation with Woznick. He listened quietly.

  “I liked Big Leonard. Walked into the middle of his bridge game.”

  “I ’ave learn bridge from him. And you play, too?”

  “A little.”

  “Maybe one day, you and I, we can play. We can be partners, eh?”

  She met his eyes, saw something in them that made her feel strange and prickly.

  Abruptly, she said, “His daughter wants to be a lawyer. Lenore.”

  Cristal drew deeply on the cigarette, blew out slowly. “Lenore, I am very fond of her.”

  “So it would seem. Frankly, M. Cristal, it would have helped my bail submission had I known you were seeing his daughter. Makes it a little easier to explain your association with a . . . well, a gangster.”

  “I do not want to involve Lenore.”

  “Okay, I guess I respect that.” Why was this gentleman — for that’s what he seemed to be — involved in something as sleazy as the heroin trade? It didn’t quite come together for her. In truth, did he not follow a more noble criminal profession — was he not a runner but a gunner? Sadly, that seemed more likely. She wanted to believe he had nothing to do with those bodies in that loft — but the mental effort was taxing. He knew too much, for instance, about the witness in the loft. Psychic, he had said. Pretty unlikely.

  “Well, your speculations — whatever they were — about a tester turned out to be correct. His name is Normie. He looks like a weasel.”

  She described her encounter on the street near her office.

  “Normie — the name means not’ing to me,” said Cristal. “And was he there when . . . does he say he see me in the loft?”

  “He wants to be paid for his information.”

  “And do the police know about him?”

  “No, they would have disclosed that. He hasn’t talked to the law, not yet. He won’t until he tries to work me for some money. I assume he’ll phone me when he runs out of heroin.”

  Cristal studied his cigarette butt, slowly mashed it into the ashtray, damped the embers.