City of Ice (18 page)

Cinq-Mars reluctantly accepted his hand.

“One more thing,” Captain Beaubien announced. The four other men in the room settled back into their chairs, expecting something less than pertinent. “Detective Mathers.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You’re junior to Cinq-Mars, and you will report any discrepancies or you will be demoted to foot patrol quicker than you can say Jackie Robinson.”

Cinq-Mars wanted to ask him what he knew about Jackie Robinson, who had begun his professional base-ball career, as a black man in the white man’s leagues, in Montreal, but he checked himself in time.

Mathers said only “Understood.”

“Another thing,” Beaubien continued. “As op leader, I’m removing both of you from any further involvement with the operation. Your contribution so far is appreciated. But both of you need to be reminded what it means to have a chain of command. Cinq-Mars, you’re gone.”

The two men glared at each other.

Tremblay clicked off the tape recorder. “We’re done. Remember, within these walls.”

Satisfied, LaPierre scooped up the logbook.

“You’ll want to check who else was onboard that day.”

“It’s my case, Émile.” He led the brigade out. Cinq-Mars remained seated, and Mathers dutifully stayed behind as well. They listened to the silence.

Finally, Mathers stated the obvious, because he wasn’t sure if it was true or not. “I guess we’re off this case.”

“Are we?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“Émile.” He wanted to protest further but didn’t dare.

On his feet, Cinq-Mars came around behind him. He bent low to whisper in his partner’s ear. “Within these walls.”

He straightened sharply, reverted to restless pacing, then leaned close to Mathers a second time. Rage made him pant.

“We had weight in this room, Bill, but don’t be intimidated. I have a line open to weight heavier than
what you saw here. That’s why they consented to make this informal. That’s why they insisted on doing it within these walls. Because an official tribunal would expose them to the real power in this department. They know it, and I know it. It’s only fair that you know it also.”

He paced again. Mathers could feel his partner’s ire.

“I get information, Bill. The good stuff. Prime stuff. I get arrests. Flesh traders shipping young girls to foreign countries. Asian connections importing girls. Hot car rings, drug pushers, jewelry thieves, I get the busts. Why? Because my phone rings. I pick up the phone, and I act on the information I receive. I don’t pay for it, in cash or in favors. All I do is receive it, and arrest the bad guys. I never had to pay until Christmas Eve.”

Again he broke off. Mathers waited.

“My information cost the life of that boy. Hagop paid with his life for doing our job. That’s a higher price than I ever agreed to. That’s a bargain with the devil I want to rescind. Nobody can tell me that I’m not on this case. I am on this case because I am implicated in this case.”

Cinq-Mars pulled away again, and Mathers did his best to console him. He spoke quietly as well. “It’s not your fault, Émile. Who wouldn’t accept that information? It’s prime. What choice did you have? You can’t ignore solid leads.”

“I took the information and that boy died. Okay, I’ve made my peace with that. But somebody ran that boy. Somebody guided him. Who that was, I don’t know. I call him my source. His code name, between us, is Steeplechase Arch. He’s not the one who killed him, but he is responsible for involving him, and therefore he’s responsible for that boy losing his life. He’s the one I’m after, Bill. I am involved in this case, and nobody, nobody, can tell me otherwise. If you don’t want to be my partner, say so now.”

“I’m your partner,” Mathers stated simply. “I bust my gut to get the chance to line up with you. I’m not bailing out now, Émile. This is my chance to prove myself. I hate being treated like some English kid who’s lucky he’s not been assigned to traffic patrol. I’m a good cop. But I’m English, and I’m young, and I look like I should be coaching the swim team. I’m in. I’m in because this is my one chance to make something of my career. People think I’m the dogooder, that I won’t bend the rules. Well, give me a reason, give me a good reason, then see what happens.”

Cinq-Mars sat down beside him and exhaled down to his toes. “I don’t know where to start,” he confessed. “I don’t know who he is, I have no links to him.”

“Sure you do,” Mathers chirped.

“Excuse me?”

“
You’re
the link to him. Do you think he chose you out of the phone book? Hardly. Your source knows you. He must’ve known who he was choosing to be his conduit. Either he knows you or he knows people close to you.”

Cinq-Mars looked sternly down his impressive nose at his colleague. “You’ve given this some thought,” he noted.

“Have you heard from him lately, since the murder?” Mathers asked.

“Early this morning,” Cinq-Mars conceded.

“And?”

“A cryptic message.
The Russian freighter is the key.”

Mathers nodded. “That’s why we raided.”

“Raided!” Cinq-Mars ridiculed. “It was a promenade.”

“Whatever. You were lured there, in any case.”

“Bill,” Cinq-Mars said, leaning forward and placing his index finger gently upon the other man’s wrist, “listen to me. This is my fear. Steeplechase Arch,
whoever he is, whatever he’s up to, was trying to run an agent inside the Hell’s Angels. That agent was Hagop Artinian. That agent is dead. Whoever he is, whomever he represents, I have no reason to believe that he will quit now. I believe he will try to run somebody else. And if that doesn’t work, somebody else. The life expectancy of an informant inside the Angels is brief, the method of death, brutal. Hagop Artinian was tortured and murdered. Whoever his replacement is, that’s whom I want to protect. I don’t want another young life on my conscience. Whoever is next must not die. This is our job. Now you understand why we’re involved in this case? This isn’t some personal thing. This is urgent. This is necessary.”

Mathers met his gaze. He granted his consent with an imperceptible bob of his head. “Understood. But let me ask you something. I have a wife and kid to support. What about Beaubien and LaPierre?”

“Leave them to me. I’ll deal with those two. Their days are numbered.” Cinq-Mars smiled slightly. “Within these walls, Bill. Remember that.”

“Yes, sir,” Mathers answered quietly.

Julia Murdick skipped through the snow to La Magique, a nightclub, hurrying to escape the cold. Inside, down a long entry corridor, she was met by a bouncer, a graduate of the weight room, who gave her a long look but admitted her without charge. “What is this,” she asked, “Ladies’ Night?”

“Every night,” the thug told her, “is free for you.”

Julia smirked, to let him know that she felt less than flattered.

She was the only woman in the place wearing clothes.

She sat in the dark club and ordered a beer from a bare-breasted teenager who looked at her a little coyly. Julia was either a customer or a job applicant, and
either way the waitress was curious. Two women danced seminude onstage, slowly removing each other’s clothes, while others stood on plastic milk crates and displayed themselves inches from the eyes of patrons. Close enough to be licked. When the waitress returned Julia asked if Max Gitteridge was around and the girl pointed him out.

Gaining liquid courage, she walked across to the lawyer’s table. Selwyn had told her not to delay. She had to arrive early so the place wouldn’t be busy, and she had to act quickly before a patron got up the nerve to hit on her. Gitteridge had a phone pressed to one ear, and in the other he’d inserted a finger to block out the music. He was a small man with black, slicked hair and a narrow, pinched face. The features were generally weak, the nose narrow, the chin pointy. He was wearing a double-breasted suit over a black turtleneck, and Julia thought the shoulders had been bulked up. She put him in his late forties. She sat down opposite him in the booth. She didn’t know what to make of a man who still greased his hair. Hard to believe. He regarded her without courtesy, and that made her squirm. His pupils were large and dark. When he hung up, he took the finger out of his ear, and said, “Say what, sugar?” as if he was trying hard to be a cool dude.

She had to lean in, on account of the music. With her jacket open, the tops of her full breasts were revealed at the neckline to her sweater. He was noticing.

First she slid a newspaper article written about Max Gitteridge across the table. He took a quick glance, enough to recognize the headline in a revolving light from the stage. “Lies,” he told her, raising his voice to be heard. “I intend to sue.”

“So you don’t represent the Hell’s Angels and the Mafia?” she asked him.

He signaled for her to lean forward again, and he moved toward her. He stared at her breasts while speaking near her ear. “I don’t ask clients to list their memberships in social clubs. Who are you and what do you want?” He leaned back to wait for her answer, forcing Julia to shout.

“My name is Heather Bantry. I want to propose a business deal.”

“You don’t want to dance?”

She thought she’d love to take a tube of his hair grease and smear it across that leering smile. Instead, she slid a newspaper column on the Banker across to him. “Have you read this?”

“What is it?”

“It’s about my father. He’s looking for a job.”

Gitteridge gave the clipping a glance, holding it up to catch a bit of light. “This is about some guy who lives in a tunnel.”

“Yeah,” Julia agreed, shouting to be heard. “Some guy. Who just happens to be a former vice president for international commerce at a major bank.”

Gitteridge read a little further. “Says here he’s nuts.”

“That’s where I come in. I know how to take care of him. I can keep him level. I have that effect.” Julia caught sight of a woman removing her bikini bottoms inches from the glare of a customer. She was momentarily shocked that the woman was shaved, and when she glanced up at her face, the woman was smiling right at her. She jerked her eyes away, facing Gitteridge.

The man separated his hands and brought them together again. “Do I look like an employment office to you?”

“Read the piece. That’s all. My phone number is at the bottom of the page if you want to get in touch.”

She stood up, but Gitteridge quickly waved her
back. He motioned her to sit down beside him. “What did you say your name was, sweetheart?”

“Heather.”

“Why’d you come to see me, doll?” He ran his fingers up the inside of her thigh.

She resisted clamping her legs together and instead leaned closer to Gitteridge. Julia tucked her hands in her leather jacket. “My father’s had a mental breakdown. He’s been on welfare, he’s living in a tunnel. He’s broke. Ruined. He’s destitute. He can act funny sometimes. The goddamn Royal Bank isn’t going to hire him, now is it?”

With that, she wriggled free of his grip, jumped up, and walked through the gloom of the nightclub, doing her best to keep her eyes off the tempest of dancers and the avid, entranced faces of their admirers. Selwyn Norris would not be waiting outside to give her a lift home this evening. She’d have to make her own way back. He had warned her that she might be followed.

Buried in his cubicle through the dinner hour, Émile Cinq-Mars was disturbed by a call from downstairs. A reporter was asking to speak to him. “What about?”

He waited while the officer addressed the visitor again. Then she said, “Santa Claus.”

Minutes later, arriving at his desk under escort, the reporter introduced himself as Okinder Boyle. After nodding thanks to the uniform, Cinq-Mars stood to shake the young man’s hand and assumed that he would be blowing this off quickly enough.

“I have nothing to say about the Santa Claus case,” he advised him. “The investigation is ongoing, the responsibility of Homicide. Perhaps you’d like to speak to Sergeant-Detective André LaPierre?”

Boyle sat down, folding his coat across his lap. “I’d rather talk to you.”

“It’s not my case,” Cinq-Mars said in a switch to English. “I appreciate your interest, sir, but I have nothing to say. The investigation is ongoing, the responsibility of another department.”

“I spoke with Vassil Artinian today.”

Cinq-Mars gave him a closer look. “Did you now?”

“He told me his brother was working for you.”

Émile Cinq-Mars finally sat down. The beginning of the night shift had brought boisterous officers into their vicinity, but even in the rising bedlam he feared prying ears. “Would you like some coffee, Mr. Boyle?” he asked quietly.

“Thanks. I would.”

“The coffee here tastes like sewer water. Let’s go out.”

Cinq-Mars led him outside Police Headquarters and up the hill on rue Bonsecours into Old Montreal. At this time of year the sun set a little after four, and at six-thirty darkness had settled in as deeply as the cold. They faced a bitter wind along rue St. Jacques past City Hall, where late rush-hour traffic still managed to work itself into a snarl, and at Place Cartier they walked downhill a short stretch past the old stone buildings that now housed restaurants and bars to cobbled rue St. Paul. From here, the early settlers of the city had believed, they’d convert the savages. Cinq-Mars guided the younger man into a coffee shop. They were both mute, conversation stifled by their cold lips and stiff cheeks. “Are you a Montrealer, Mr. Boyle?”

“I’m from Grand Manan,” the journalist told him, and explained that he’d been raised on an island off the coast of northern Maine that belonged to New Brunswick. “I’m descended from a long line of fishermen.”

“Now you catch different fish in different nets.”

“No, sir. That’s what you do. I just write about those fish.”

“Ah.” Cinq-Mars took a table in the rear, sitting with his back to the wall. He ordered coffee and Danishes for them both and was contemplating a way into the conversation when Boyle seized the initiative.

“So far you haven’t denied Vassil’s claim. Hagop worked for you.”

“He did not.”

“Vassil lied?”

“He misconstrued the facts.”

“How so?”

“Mr. Boyle, I’m not about to surrender confidential information. You must have known that coming in.”