City of Ice (43 page)

The boy had slumped forward, the ache inside bending him double. Cinq-Mars rested a peaceful hand upon his shoulder and let him weep. After a minute he pulled the boy’s shoulders back so that he was sitting upright again.

“Listen, Jim. You told us about the Russian, and that’s good. But I want you to think back to that night. Clean yourself up inside, you have nothing left to hide. Cast your mind back to the night the Russian was in the garage. This was after you told Kaplonski. You were sweeping up, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“You were trying to hear what was said. You had to be. You’d squealed and now Hagop was going to be punished and you wanted to know exactly what they’d do to him.”

“I couldn’t hear much.”

“You wanted to hear, though. You left the door open a crack. I know that because we can hear your broom on a tape. You were doing your best to listen in. It’s okay if you didn’t hear it all, we’ve got that conversation taped. But we need your eyes, Jimmy, to confirm a few things. Through the glass that separates the drive bays from the office area you could see the Russian, am I right?”

“Yeah.”

“Was he alone?”

“Kaplonski was there.”

“Nobody else?”

“No.”

“Did he drive a car inside?”

Coates shook his head.

“Pay attention. Think back. It was cold weather. The snow was piled up against the curb, parking space was at a premium, especially on a night like that when everybody was staying home. Did the Russian drive a car inside?”

“No. He didn’t.”

“Did you hear a car outside with the motor running?”

The boy thought hard. “He had a car outside. I don’t remember the motor running.”

“Good. Now. How do you know he had a car outside? Maybe he took a cab.”

“Just before he left, he told me to tell his driver to bring the car up. I had to go outside and wave at him.”

“You did that? Did you see the driver, Jim?”

“No.”

“No?”

“It was dark. He didn’t come in. All I did was wave and he started the car.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Nothing. He didn’t get out. The car was ordinary.”

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged again. “An American car. Big. GM or Ford.”

“Come over to the window, Jim.”

Mathers got up and accompanied the other two. More dawn light was showing, and the streetlamps provided adequate illumination in this neighborhood. Just then, Cinq-Mars’s cellular started ringing.

“Yeah?” he asked. He listened a moment. Then he said, “Hold on, will you? Just hold on.”

He held the phone in his hand by his side, and with his other hand he grasped Jim Coates by the elbow. “Look at the cars parked outside, Jim. Tell me which one most closely resembles the car you saw that night.”

The boy surveyed the block. “That one there,” he said, and pointed.

Coates had chosen the unmarked police cruiser in which Cinq-Mars and Mathers had arrived.

“Know your enemy, Jim,” Cinq-Mars said quietly. “Your particular enemy was jealousy and now it’s guilt, and like everyone else your enemy is yourself. Know your enemy and kick its butt. You can do that now, son. You’ve met yourself tonight. You didn’t give up Hagop just because you wanted to be the apple of Kaplonski’s bloodshot eye. You gave him up because you wanted a car to fall on your friend’s head. You knew exactly what you were doing. You’ve seen that now. Now you know yourself. That’s your one chance to set yourself free. Take it.”

The boy turned back away from the window and moved to an armchair, where he collapsed in exhaustion and misery.

“Yeah?” Cinq-Mars said into the phone again. He listened awhile. “What?” he shouted. Then yelled louder, “What?” He listened another moment and hollered the loudest yet, “
What?
All right. Give me that
address.” Cinq-Mars extracted a notebook and pen and wrote a number while cradling the phone between his shoulder and ear. “All right. You stay put. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Déguire?” Mathers asked after his partner had put away the phone.

“Civilian. We’ve got to run, Jimmy. Will you be all right?”

The boy nodded.

“Good lad. Just so you know, I’m betting on you. Let’s go, Bill.”

When they reached the hall they heard the elevator in use. Cinq-Mars had no patience to wait. “The stairs!” he exclaimed, and started off at a run. Jogging behind him, Mathers was already fearing the slippery streets ahead with this gung ho maniac behind the wheel.

Thursday, January 20, after dawn

The city’s mechanical wizardry combated successive blizzards of snow and prevailed every time. Ice proved to be a more competitive adversary. As traffic increased, the streets jammed with immobile cars, expressways resembled parking lots, and the hilly streets downtown became impassable. Salt trucks sat motionless in the gridlock as the temperature sank and sirens wailed across the graying dawn. The system had broken down. The only responsible weapons were prudence and patience, and on this morning Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars possessed neither in adequate measure, pushing his unmarked car hard while the headlights flashed in alternate sequence and a blue beacon pulsed from the rooftop. He leaned on the horn, resorted to the siren once, and fought his way downtown.

They drove on, and he climbed Guy Street, where cars had failed to manage the steep slope in either direction and city buses ascended or descended by increments. Pedestrians emerging from their high-rises hung on to lampposts or fell. At the top of the hill, where the massive Montreal General Hospital stood like a castle overlooking the city, ambulances wove through stalled traffic. Lights flashing, Cinq-Mars wheeled across both
sides of the road to pick his way through the checker-board of vehicles and made a hard right on Wilder Penfield. Here the high-rises took advantage of being on a mountainside and were especially tall, overlooking downtown. Access was via steep streets only, and few cars had made it through, giving Cinq-Mars clear passage. He sped quickly. At Mountain Street he stopped abruptly and told Mathers to jump out, join Detective Déguire halfway down the hill.

“Excuse me?”

“What part of that didn’t you understand?”

“Where’re you going?”

“Tick, tock, Bill. No time for chitchat. Relieve Déguire. Let him take a whiz. Keep a close watch. I don’t want this guy slipping through our fingers.”

“Émile, come on, nobody drives a Q Forty-five on a day like today. It’s asking to get pranged. If he has someplace to go he’ll either walk or cab it.”

“Watch anyway. We’re not dealing with just anybody. If he leaves, tail him.”

“Émile—”

“In case you’re wondering, that’s an order.”

Reluctantly, Mathers stepped out of the car and promptly fell on his derriere. He shimmied into a snowbank.

“You all right?” Cinq-Mars called to him. The side door remained open.

Mathers thought about it. He had been awakened prematurely, commanded to be downtown. He’d witnessed an interrogation which demonstrated that his own had not been sufficiently vigorous. He was now being delegated to wait in a car with an officer he didn’t much like on a mission that looked like a huge waste of time, and in the meantime he was sitting with his ass on ice. Both wrists ached, his tail-bone felt bruised, but he was not about to seek his partner’s sympathy. “I’m fine,” Mathers grumbled.
Struggling to his feet, he slammed the door shut.

“Same to you,” Cinq-Mars said to no one in particular as he bolted back onto Penfield. Where the one-way avenue curved upward around McGill University, a bus had slid sideways into an old Beetle. Uniforms were on the scene, and Cinq-Mars employed his siren to clear spectators out of his way. Once through, he had to contend only with ice, as his was the lone car on the road all the way up to Pine and down to Park.

He drove with reckless intent.

East of downtown, he was working against the main flow of traffic, which provided him with roads less traveled and, consequently, better salted. He drove fast and turned off his emergency lights only as he neared his destination. Working people had left, leaving a selection of parking spots, and Cinq-Mars checked the address he’d gotten over the phone while in Jim Coates’s apartment. He exercised more caution getting out of the car than he had driving it and skated on ice to the door. He rang the bell.

Okinder Boyle came down the inside stairs to let him in.

The place was run-down, smelly. The stench of old meals hung in the stairwell. Plaster had been gouged from the walls as if tenants periodically pulled tantrums, and a quick glimpse confirmed that the spray paint of graffiti offered nothing of interest—the usual sexual and racial slurs and inept rage.

“She’s here?”

“Upstairs,” Boyle told him.

“She understands? She’s willing?”

“LaPierre’s not her favorite guy. Which helps a lot. She seems willing, Émile, but she doesn’t want to make trouble for herself.”

“She’s already got trouble.”

“I gave her my word. I’m trusting you. Don’t let her down.”

“Let’s head up.”

Boyle opened the door for Cinq-Mars on the second landing as though he’d been living there a fortnight, guiding him into an unkempt, filthy, dark apartment. They stepped around clumps of unwashed clothes. Alone on a lumpy sofa in the living room, the girl wore jeans and a green shirt now, unlike at their first meeting.

“I’m Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars.” He flashed his hip badge. “Do you remember me?”

“You were at André’s last night. You had a peek, I remember that. Then you went snooping in his closet.”

“You’re not going to mention that again, are you?” he asked sternly.

She reached across to the arm of the sofa and retrieved a pack of smokes and her lighter, selected one, and lit up, studying him through the smoke. “That you was in his closet or gave my muff an eyeball?”

“That I was there at all.”

The girl had hard eyes and a determined slant to her chin. She’d known a measure of depravity through her teenage years, although her youth showed through the crust. Part of her persona was an act, the larger portion was composed of a bitterness that could not be faked and was impossible to conceal. She shrugged. “I got no need.”

“What’s your name?”

“Lise,” she said.

“Lise Sauvé,” Boyle added quietly.

“Are you using, Lise?”

“He said it didn’t matter.” She indicated the journalist with her chin.

“I’m just asking the question. I need to determine what sort of witness you’ll make.”

“I won’t be no witness.”

“No?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“I’ll whore for me, I ain’t gonna whore for no law.”

She sounded as though she was quoting someone. “Trouble is, that’s what we’re asking you to do, isn’t it?” he suggested gently.

The girl thought about that a moment. “You want me to spread my cheeks for medical science, I’ll spread my cheeks. But I ain’t gonna open my yap on no witness stand. For sure, not for the law.”

That didn’t sound like a quote, but like her own truth, her own definition of limits.

Cinq-Mars was weary enough that he would not have minded a seat. Disinclined to touch anything on the premises, he remained standing. “This young man has told me that you’re willing to make a donation to our cause. That you have something I can use. You’re willing to give it up voluntarily, and write down that you did so voluntarily. Is that right, Lise?”

“A donation?” She almost cracked a smile. “Now that’s a word for it. Yeah, I’m willing to donate. Ain’t good for nothing else, is it? Not where it’s hanging out. A donation. I like that. I don’t want no trouble out of this, that’s all.”

“You won’t get any from me, Lise. How long’s it been?”

She shrugged. Boyle answered, “Less than two hours now.”

“I wasn’t asking you,” Cinq-Mars told him.

The girl shrugged again and asked, “What’s it matter?”

“I want to ascertain that it’s one hundred percent pure. I don’t want a mixture, if you know what I mean.”

“I got a fresh batch,” she told him, smiling now, trying not to, poking her tongue into the side of her mouth.

“All right. You want to get your stuff on, we’ll go. When’s your next fix?”

“I can make it to eleven, twelve if I got to.”

“You holding?”

“André took care of that.”

“André’s your pal.”

“Oh yeah. He’s my guardian angel. He’s a charmer.”

Downstairs they helped one another across the ice on the sidewalk and made it over to the police issue. “Want me to drive your car back?” Boyle asked him.

“On ice? I don’t think so. You can come with us.”

The girl slid in the back alone, and Boyle clambered into the front. She noticed the absence of window and door handles. “Crack-up, I’m stuck here.”

“I got skates on my tires, Lise. I was born driving on ice.”

Cinq-Mars alone spoke on the journey downtown, talking into a cell phone to Dr. Marc Wynett, a pathologist at the Royal Victoria. He told him what he wanted, and Boyle shook his head as though he could not believe the indignities that some people suffered to stay alive. He shook his head again when Cinq-Mars typed up a document at the hospital and passed it across for Lise to sign. Boyle read it first. He leaned over her shoulder and had a little trouble with the French but deduced both the gist and the implications.

“You’ve got it wrong,” Cinq-Mars whispered to him. “This keeps her alive.”

“But if she dies, you’ve got that contingency covered.”

“That’s my job,” the detective reminded him.

“It’s not mine,” Boyle said, and he walked away while Cinq-Mars read his copy aloud to Lise Sauvé. She signed without protest and a minute later was called in to see the pathologist.

“It’s a grim world,” Cinq-Mars told the journalist.

“Is that some kind of justification?”

“The girl wants to do it.”

“Just because that’s true doesn’t make it right.”

“It has to be done.”

The journalist went over to the water fountain for a drink. He came back and sat on the bench beside the policeman, whose arms were folded on his chest.

“There are times,” Boyle said, “when you want to be on the side of those who get kicked around in life. Sometimes you kick them around a little yourself, and you think you’re doing them a favor, that you got to kick them around to keep them in line, that the line is good for them. In my book, Émile, just because something is necessary doesn’t make it right.”