Street Legal

by William Deverell

  Leon was in the lounge making coffee for Jock Strachan. She greeted them with — she realized — too much cheer. Leon looked at her suspiciously. She had yesterday’s clothes on, pretty unusual for her, and she wondered if Leon noticed.

  “Where were you last night?” Leon said. “I kept calling you at home.”

  There was a feeling of censure here, she felt vaguely scolded. “I . . . stayed at a friend’s.”

  Strachan was lounging by the window, his hands in his pockets. “I have something I want to tell you in confidence, Carrie,” he said.

  “Want me to leave?” Leon asked.

  “Leon can stay,” Strachan said. “Your partners should know. You’ve had no contact from Moodie?”

  “None.”

  “Do you still believe he’s innocent?”

  Leon had poured her a coffee, which she sipped as she thought about her answer. “I really don’t know. If he calls, Jock, I’ll try to bring him in. I’ll explain to him that’s best.”

  “No, Carrie, you’ll nae talk to him alone.”

  “You know I have to tell him his rights.”

  “I think it may be dangerous to see him. Carrie, we spoke to another tenant of the Eagle Hotel, who’d visited Moodie in his room. There were pictures of you all over the wall.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m his hero, why is that surprising?” But it was, to her, a little.

  “Stories about his trial. Newspaper photos of the girls who were killed.”

  “That trial was a big event in his life.”

  “Always defending, eh, Carrie?”

  “What do you have on him — other than the fact he hasn’t shown his face recently?”

  “If we find him, we’ll soon know whether he’s guilty. I haven’t made this generally known — and I will trust both of you not to divulge it — but Trixi Trimble bit him.”

  “Where did she bite him?” Carrie asked.

  “Her teeth were clenching a shred of skin. Dense epidermal skin, forensics says. From his palm, we assume. Not enough for a print, sadly. But a wee bit of blood. Not hers. She’s type A. It’s B and Moodie is B.”

  “That’s still half the population,” said Carrie, still defending. But there wasn’t much point in it now, was there? If Moodie were arrested with that bite on his hand, the medical scientists could probably make a skin impression match.

  “You had better be damn careful, Carrie,” Leon said. “He’s seen all the newspaper headlines. If he’s innocent, why hasn’t he turned himself in?”

  “My thinking entirely,” said Strachan. “He’s waiting for the wound to heal. But if you’re as much a hero to him as you think you are, he may contact you before then.”

  “I’ll . . . If he does, I’ll call you, I promise.”

  Strachan finished his coffee and stood to go.

  “I suppose you think I am to blame, Jock, for getting him off.”

  “You defended him fairly. That girl couldn’t identify him in court.” He smiled ruefully. “I dinna know what to think when that young woman pointed to me.”

  Carrie had to laugh. “She was so sure you were the Midnight Strangler.”

  After he left, Leon said, “Maybe it was Jock — you notice how he kept his hands in his pockets?”

  “He always does that . . . Leon, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Sorry, I have an incredible sense of humour. I have a better candidate for the Midnight Strangler anyway. Pour yourself another cup, sit down, relax.”

  Carrie listened raptly to Leon’s account of the injury he’d seen on Orff’s hand: a human bite, it had looked like.

  “When did you first notice this bite?”

  “Thursday afternoon. The day after Trixi was murdered.”

  And he told her about Susie, the female voice within Orff who had come out under hypnosis. He described her odd reaction to bellicose Franz. “‘He likes to do terrible things,’ that’s what Susie said, ‘awful things,’ she said, and then we lost her. Orff hates women, or has some kind of psychotic fear of them. Physically, he fits the bill, a big guy.”

  “Short, though . . . Where is he now? Somebody should check him out.”

  Leon looked at his watch. “He’s supposed to come in to see Hal Kiehlmann in an hour. I’d better go over there tout de suite. And if you’ll pardon my French, comment ça va your client, M. Cristal?”

  “Um, okay, I guess. I saw him yesterday.” All of him. She realized she didn’t dare talk about Captain Lachance for fear she would blurt out something about last night. Leon might not understand — she didn’t understand. “I’ll wait for you here. I have some stuff to tell you.” She would explain later, when more composed.

  ***

  When Leon strolled across the campus to Hal Kiehlmann’s building, he worried about ethics. He was going to ask the psychiatrist to look for a Midnight Strangler hidden within one of Orff’s personae. But Orff was Leon’s client, entitled to his protection. Anyway, the state couldn’t convict Orff for what Franz had done — or could it?

  The Midnight Strangler attacked only every six or seven months, so there was some down time to think about this. Find out who this Dottie is, who Mrs. Pinkerton is, persuade Orff to undergo a little more hypnotherapy, and if they couldn’t get a confession from Franz, one of the others might be prepared to rat on him. No . . . that’s wrong, Strachan had to be informed right away, before that wound to his hand could heal. A conundrum.

  Kiehlmann was waiting for him. Leon had already recited his concerns to him by phone, breaking his promise of silence to Detective Strachan about the bite on the hand.

  “The guy could not possibly be the Midnight Strangler, could he, Hal? In one form or the other?”

  “It’s possible. Orff suffers a deep-seated antipathy toward women. Fear, perhaps, or a form of neurotic misogyny. But I can’t believe he would have the wherewithal to commit all these attacks and not get caught. He is a man of simple mental resources.”

  “Maybe Franz has more.”

  “I wouldn’t want to make any, ah, over-hasty diagnoses.”

  “Maybe there are others we don’t know about. He could be a walking whodunit, full of possible suspects. Maybe Hymie is a collaborator — he takes Franz off to see Dottie and that’s when he goes dotty.”

  “When he comes in, I’ll see if I can’t get Hymie to talk about Franz. He doesn’t seem to be withholding anything.”

  “Let’s find out how he got that injury, Hal. And where he was Wednesday night.”

  Leon told him about Hymie’s recent appearance in court, standing in for Orff. And later, Hymie’s enigmatic reference to Franz and Dottie: I have to share her with Franz . . . It’s embarrassing, not something I wanna discuss.

  “I think he’s using too many of those pills, Hal. What’s in them?”

  “Barbiturates with codeine. Hope he’s not abusing them.”

  Leon looked at his watch. “He’s late.”

  26

  Running hard, feeling his lungs burn, Lachance saw the heavy clouds continue to roll in from the south, a coming clash of fronts. The air was oppressive today, fragile, buzzing with electricity. But above was still the scorching sun.

  His route took him through the winding tree-lined streets of sedate Rosedale, district of the rich. Afterwards it took him north, through parkland on the banks of the Don. He would make one rest stop, a pay phone near a public convenience, the number of which he had already given Cacciati’s pager service. And a time: eleven hours, fifteen minutes.

  He pulled up there to a puffing halt. He was a few minutes early, so he opened his packet of tobacco. In it he found one of the cigarettes Carrington had rolled last night. A very limp one. He smiled as he remembered her, how astonished at her own inexhaustible desire. He could still smell her fragrances.

  From the first time he’d met her, h
e had known they would make love.

  Just as he’d known he’d be betrayed — though he didn’t know by whom.

  He had told Carrington he was psychic. Of course she didn’t believe him. It was impossible to explain. It didn’t please him to have a sense of the future. It was depressing, in fact.

  His first premonition of betrayal had come to him many months ago, when Mitchell had brought him to Toronto for the interviews. But he had volunteered for this work, to live and maybe to die on the edge.

  The pay telephone rang. Lachance simply said, “Yes, it’s me.”

  Cacciati seemed uneasy. “He’ll meet you Tuesday night, late. Has to be a private place, and we got some ideas —”

  “I will tell you when and where. Tonight. Half past nine. In public. At the revolving bar up in the CN Tower.” The safest place he could think of, three hundred metres above the surface of the earth. Not easy to take a shot at someone and get away — he’d been up there, and it was a long elevator ride back to the ground.

  “Billy don’t wanna —”

  “Sacré, I don’t give a damn! I have a quarter and I am at a pay telephone. It is easy, I just tell the police their paid informant is in danger.”

  A pause. “The CN Tower, I don’t know, Billy’s ascared of heights.”

  “Give him a sedative. Just Billy and me, eh? Nine-t’irty tonight will be a deadline.”

  He hung up. The scabrous Speeder Cacciati with his fat floating pupils. A garbage-head. Drugged and dangerous.

  But Lachance would be armed. He would be wired. The inspector would hear everything. Again he wondered — why hadn’t there been backup last night? Mitchell’s expert, Lamont, in one of his many disguises. But maybe he’d been disguised too well.

  He continued running, north again, up a little strip of park in a creek valley, to Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

  The thunderheads billowed closer, yet the sun still shone upon the gravestones. Lachance checked his watch. Eleven forty-five hours, no Mitchell. Just Lachance and the silent remains of many dead.

  Now he saw a hearse turn in through a distant gate, cars following in slow procession. How languorous the rites of death. He smoked and watched the people in black, sad men and women following a coffin up a pathway among the trees.

  Around a bend in the path came Harold Mitchell, purposeful, wearing a floppy hat to cover his bald scalp. He waved but did not look Lachance in the eye.

  “It’s over, Michel,” he said.

  Lachance wasn’t sure what he meant. “Where was my backup last night? It could have been very dangerous there.”

  “I pulled them. And I’m pulling you.”

  Lachance was incredulous. “You’re serious?”

  “Dead serious.”

  “I’m there! It’s almost zero hour. Billy Sweet’s hungry for the bait. Maudit!”

  “You blew it. And now my feet are in the fire.”

  “Blew it . . .”

  “It’s all on video, Michel. We have you murdering Schlizik.”

  There was silence as the realization hit Lachance. Then he said, “You had video . . . you showed it?”

  “Someone unauthorized saw it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means you’re charged with Schlizik’s murder for real. They want to proceed.”

  “Schlizik? Does someone care? Schlizik? He shot your two undercover men, you told me to —”

  Mitchell cut him off quickly. “I didn’t tell you anything. I told you to use your judgment.”

  “And if I had the chance, to take the bastard down! I had licence. I had carte blanche!”

  Lachance felt his control go — he felt unhinged, he was almost shouting.

  Mitchell looked about apprehensively. “Easy, Michel, there are people over there.”

  Lachance lowered his voice to a hiss. “I was asked to go inside and root the maggots out. I’ve risked my life to do so, and you’re saying they want to prosecute me for murdering Schlizik? I will go to jail for my life?”

  “It was blown wide open, Michel. I don’t have options. Look, I can make a hell of a pitch —”

  “I’m there! How can you . . .” So this was the betrayal that had been divined. And the thought that it had to come calmed him a little.

  He flipped his cigarette away, looked around for Lamont, for the others. “Am I under arrest?”

  Mitchell shifted uncomfortably. “Well, Michel, right now I’m alone.”

  Lachance smiled his coldest smile. “So this is my chance to disappear? I’m to be saddle with everyt’ing. I am to be sacrifice to the altar because I eliminated some stinking pustule. Ah, Mitchell, you’re a Judas.”

  “Take your time. Pack your bags. We won’t hit your apartment for six hours.” Mitchell started backing away, again glancing ner-vously at the mourners near their burial plot. “I’ll say you must have been tipped. You never showed up.”

  “You corrupt shit. I am not running.”

  “Suit yourself.” Mitchell strode away.

  ***

  Alone in the deserted office, Carrie anxiously awaited Leon’s return from Dr. Kiehlmann’s office. Outside her window she saw a distant ribbon of lightning over the lake, and she thought of Lachance’s electric touch.

  How convincing he had been in his role of mobster, this glib commando. In just six months he had parlayed a friendship with Big Leonard Woznick into a role as enforcer for the underworld — sucking in crooks and lawyers. Brilliant. Yet there seemed something just slightly off-centre about the man, something askew she couldn’t identify.

  How was she going to deal with him when they next met? Awkwardly, no doubt. Hands-off relationship from now on. Pretend it never happened.

  She found that didn’t work. Her memory insisted on embarrassing her with instant replays of her long night of dissolution.

  Impatient because of Leon’s lateness — it was mid-afternoon — Carrie was readying to leave when he finally came back. He looked a little exasperated.

  “Well, is your Herbert Orff the Midnight Strangler?”

  “He didn’t show at Kiehlmann’s. I drove all the way out to his house, but he wasn’t there either. All locked up and windows closed.”

  “We have to tell Jock Strachan about that bite mark, Leon.”

  “Let me try to track Herbert down first. Maybe he’s working weekend sewer backups. I’ll try to reach that Mr. Blumberg. I could try calling all the Pinkertons in the phone book and ask if Dottie is home.”

  “Leon, I have to talk to you.

  “Sure.” But he seemed distracted. She followed him into his office, where he started leafing through the phone book.

  “Leon, André Cristal isn’t really André Cristal. He’s a cop. Sort of. A rent-a-cop.”

  Leon reacted as if she had told him it was going to rain tonight. “Scarborough, Waste Management, probably closed today.” He looked up from the phone book. “What did you say?”

  His eyes kept widening as she repeated it for him in detail, the shenanigans of Inspector Mitchell, Lachance’s role as a government mole.

  “That’s incredible!”

  “I don’t know whether to sue or scream or what.”

  “Do you want me to call Oliver McAnthony for you?”

  “No, I . . . I promised Michel I wouldn’t rock his boat for twenty-four hours.”

  Leon shook his head stubbornly. “I’ll call McAnthony.”

  “There’s something else, Leon. Something worse.” Leon would understand — he would be her confessor. “I went a little nuts last night. I slept with him.”

  Carrie could scarcely believe the amount of pain that registered on Leon’s face. He seemed slowly to withdraw into himself.

  “You’re shocked. So am I.”

  Leon had no response. He broke eye contact, went back to his
phone book. With a mechanical slowness, he dialled a number. His voice seemed to break as he talked to someone about an emergency, asked how to reach Mr. Blumberg. He wrote down a number.

  Still not looking at her, he said, “Let me deal with this first. We’ll talk later.”

  “Well, we do have a date this evening.”

  “Yes. Dinner.” His words were faint. “Is that still on?”

  “Of course. Can I bring anything?”

  “I have everything. Thanks.”

  Carrie felt enormously guilty now about her night of sin, her lapse. It had been a scandalous thing to do — she could see that now from Leon’s reaction.

  He was looking past her, at his door. She turned and saw Captain Michel Lachance standing there.

  “I took a chance of finding you here.”

  She was suddenly flustered, and felt a burn rise to her cheeks.

  “Oh, hello. Have you met Leon, my partner?”

  Lachance walked in and held out his hand. “André Cristal. A pleasure.”

  “Mon plaisir,” said Leon, expressionless, half-rising to meet him.

  Carrie, weak of knee, led Lachance out into the corridor.

  “I need a drink,” he said. “Do you have a whisky?”

  “We have some Ballantine’s.”

  She led him into the lounge, and sat him down. “Ice or anything?”

  “No. Neat.”

  She poured just a little for herself — for her nervousness.

  “Did something go wrong, Michel?”

  “Now I really need a lawyer,” Lachance said. “And it is time for the whole truth. What I tell you now is utter secret.”

  He looked at her with eyes that were spear points, black and sharp — something manic in them, she thought.

  “Okay, you’re my client. There is absolute privilege.”

  “I did shoot Schlizik. I murdered him in cold blood. They ’ave everyt’ing on film.”

  “Murdered . . . What film . . . ? The police had a camera? My God, Michel —”

  He took a big swallow of whisky and made a face. “They didn’t tell me about the camera. So I t’ought I could get away with it. I really t’ought I could.”