Stray Bullets (20 page)

Greene stood up. Being in a jail cell always brought back to him the time he was arrested in the South of France. Trying to speak French. Trying to explain. Those few hours in custody on that horrible day never left him. Never would.

“Did Larkin say anything about Dewey?” Greene asked.

“Yeah. He said Dewey needed a brain transplant.”

“Anything else?”

“No. I thought if I acted too curious it would be suspicious.”

“Good call. Don’t push him. I’m sure he’s been warned to keep his trap shut. But people’s basic personalities don’t change. He won’t be able to stay quiet forever.”

Darvesh stretched.

“How’re you doing?” Greene asked.

“I’m fine.”

“I won’t tell your mother how thin you look.”

Darvesh laughed. He eyed the wrapped package of food by Greene’s elbow. “I need another bite,” he said.

Greene unwrapped it and Darvesh dipped a corner of bread in the curry. He lingered over the food, savoring the smell. “The worst part of this is the prison food. It’s so bland.”

“Dinner’s on me anywhere you want in Little India, as soon as you get out,” Greene said.

Darvesh folded up the aluminum foil. “How do you white people survive eating such boring food?” he asked.

“It’s a challenge.”

“You probably won’t believe this,” Darvesh said.

“Try me.”

“I miss spices almost as much as I miss sex.”

Greene laughed and stood to leave. “I guess,” he said, “you’ve got a double incentive to get Larkin to talk.”

Daniel Kennicott wasn’t a joiner. He didn’t care for team sports, preferring to run marathons, bike ride long distances, swim for miles up at the lake at his parents’ cottage. He’d never been someone with many friends, in part because as a child he’d spent so much time with his family. Even when they were adults, he and his older brother Michael had spoken at least once a day, before he was murdered.

And then there was the question of women. The truth was, he much preferred their company to hanging out with a bunch of guys to play hockey, watch sports, or drink beer. In law school and at his law firm, he’d been popular enough, but leaving that all behind and becoming a police officer had mostly cut him off from his old life. And he didn’t exactly fit on the police force: a cop who’d been a lawyer and lived in a funky neighborhood downtown instead of a cozy commuter suburb, to say nothing of his penchant for wearing quality clothes and handmade shoes.

Jeremy Pulver was the one exception. He and Kennicott had met in a philosophy class at university and gone to law school together. After graduating, Pulver headed straight to the Crown Attorney’s office, where he’d been a very successful prosecutor for almost a decade.

Whenever his shifts allowed him the time, Kennicott would drop into Pulver’s tiny office at the end of the court day. Usually just to say hello, but sometimes, like now, when he needed to think something through. For the last few weeks they’d been talking through the Wilkinson case, or “the Timmy’s shooting” as the nonstop press insisted on calling it.

It was just before five in the afternoon, and Pulver was behind his desk. This was a hilarious sight because the government-issue furniture was small, and Pulver was six foot eight. Skinny, skinny, skinny, with a bleached white complexion and a crop of kinky, unmanageable hair. He was packing his briefcase and had to leave in fifteen minutes to meet his partner, Arthur, at the gym they went to every night.

“We’ve been looking for this Jose guy, the baker at the Tim Hortons who took off after the shooting.” Kennicott leaned against the side wall. “We’re pretty sure he’s here illegally.”

Pulver rolled his eyes. “Good luck. We had a seminar on illegals in Toronto a few weeks ago. The ministry estimates there are seventy-five thousand of them.”

“Guy told his employer he was Portuguese, but we don’t believe it. He speaks all sorts of languages, and it sounds as if he’s real smart. Our hunch is that he’s Romanian.”

Pulver gave him a sardonic smile. “Well, that probably narrows your search from seventy-five thousand to about ten.”

“You’re a great help,” Kennicott said.

“Philosophy 101, play it back from the beginning.”

At university they’d had a demanding professor, Thompson Chamberlain, whose hobby was horses. “You train a horse one step at a time, always going back to the beginning and moving forward. Same thing with philosophy.” He’d written those words on the blackboard the first day of class and had repeated them at the beginning of each lecture. After surviving his class, law school had been easy, mostly because Chamberlain had taught them how to analyze problems. How to think.

“Why did your man Jose take off?” Pulver asked.

Kennicott put a finger in the air. “First possibility is that he was somehow involved in the shooting. Doesn’t add up. Dewey Booth is the one with motive to gun down his rival while Jet was picking up Suzanne, his ex-girlfriend.”

“Keep going.” Pulver rifled through a stack of files, jamming a few more into his briefcase.

Kennicott put another finger up. “Jose was threatened by the shooter. Years ago, Booth and St. Clair did a home invasion and scared the witness into not coming to court. There’s a bullet mark in the wall behind where the two clowns were standing. Maybe they took a potshot at him. Scared him off.”

“Then why didn’t they kill him?”

Kennicott shrugged. “Too dark to see him? Too messy? However this went down, they couldn’t have meant to kill that little boy.”

Pulver looked up from his papers. “I buy that.”

This was what made his friend such a good Crown, Kennicott thought. He had perspective. Didn’t see every human foible as proof of some grand conspiracy of evil.

Third finger. “Sometimes the most obvious answer’s the right one. Like I said, guy gave a false name to his employer. He’s illegal, doesn’t want to get deported.”

“That works too.” Pulver looked at his watch. He stood, towering
now over the minuscule-looking desk. “Arthur keeps asking when are you coming over.”

Pulver’s partner Arthur loved trying to set Kennicott up with every woman he knew. He worked as a booker at a talent agency and was on a first-name basis with every actress and model in the city. Loved to brag that he had “access to the top tier.” He was five feet tall, if he was lucky, which made Arthur and Jeremy the most mismatched pair you could imagine. And the happiest couple Kennicott knew.

“It’s tough when I’m on a homicide like this,” he said.

“Tomorrow night, no excuses. It’s the holidays for goodness’ sakes. Dinner at eight.”

“On one condition. No more female friends of Arthur ‘dropping by’ just before it’s time to eat.”

“Then bring a date. Andrea tired of Paris yet?”

Kennicott had been involved in an on-again off-again relationship with a Toronto-born fashion model named Andrea for a very long time. Too long. They were very bad for each other in most ways, except in bed, where they’d been very good. He’d been relieved two years before when she had gone on an assignment to Paris and ended up living with a photographer. Relieved most of the time. Every once in a while, she’d show up on his doorstep, and he wasn’t terribly good at kicking her out.

“Luckily not.” Kennicott put up his fourth finger. “I thought maybe our pal Jose had been arrested before. I had the forensic guys take fingerprints from some pans in the kitchen and the butt of the cigarette he’d shared out back with Suzanne. We got some DNA from his hairnet that Greene found in the bushes. They ran everything through the police computer.”

“Any luck?”

“Nada. Nothing matches.”

Kennicott fanned out his fingers. “Where does that leave us?”

Pulver stuck out his thumb. “Five. Maybe he was arrested for some minor offense and he got released on a Form Ten.”

This was a smart suggestion. A “Form Ten” was the piece of paper accused people signed when they were charged with minor offenses, such as mischief or shoplifting, and released by the arresting officer without having to be brought to court to get bail. They’d be required to sign another document, called a Promise to Appear. The promise was that they’d go the police station to get their photo and fingerprints taken, and then would go to court on the set date. “You’re thinking that
he never showed up for prints or court. There’d be a warrant out for his arrest,” he said.

Pulver laughed. “When I first started at the Crown’s office, I spent half a year processing fail-to-appear charges. Do you have any idea how many we get every month?”

Kennicott shook his head. “A hundred?”

Pulver spread out all the fingers in his massive hand. Wherever he went to school, gym teachers had tried to get him to join the basketball team. He never did. Said he was the least-coordinated person on the planet. “Five hundred on average. Way more in the summer. About six thousand a year. Assume your Jose could have been arrested any time in the last, say, five years—”

“Make it six. That’s more than thirty-five thousand. Quite a haystack.”

Pulver looked at his watch. “Happy hunting, amigo.”

“Maybe now I have to work tomorrow night,” Kennicott said.

“Nice try. The warrant office and everything else around here except a few emergency Crowns on duty is locked up until after the holidays,” he said. “Got to go.”

They walked together down the narrow hallway passing the office of a law school colleague of theirs, Jo Summers. Her door was closed. Kennicott had recently worked on a case in which her half brother was killed. They both had brothers who were murdered. It gave them something in common. That and a one-night stand they’d had years before at law school. The attraction hadn’t gone away, but their timing was always off.

Kennicott had never mentioned any of this to Pulver, but Pulver didn’t miss anything. “Jo took a bereavement leave,” he said.

“Good idea.” Kennicott worked hard to sound bored.

“Went back to South America, where she traveled a few years ago.”

Actually, he knew she’d gone to Central America, but Kennicott wasn’t about to correct him. And he hadn’t heard from her in months. “Oh,” he said, thinking he sounded foolish. He was tempted to ask, “When’s she returning?” but he managed to hold himself back.

Pulver stopped walking. “She got back about a month ago.”

“Oh,” Kennicott said again. This time he really sounded stupid.

“Tomorrow night at eight,” Pulver said. “With Arthur, anyone could drop in. And you know she’ll be beautiful.”

Kennicott thought to object, but the words didn’t come.

This was turning into a really bad day. It was a Thursday, and right now Ralph Armitage was supposed to be on his way to tasting the fine foods of three of the city’s best caterers with his beautiful wife, Penny. Instead, for the second time in the last two months, he’d had to cancel their weekly date. She was upset, but he’d assured her this was a one-time emergency and promised it wouldn’t happen again. Now he was sitting once again at the Plaza Flamingo, in the exact same table where he’d met with Phil Cutter six weeks before and made their deal.

He’d decided this was a good place to meet the fellow who’d called him a few hours ago. The guy had insisted they meet privately and it had to be tonight. The restaurant was loud and crowded, and no one would notice them.

He had brought a copy of the
Toronto Star
with him to read while he was waiting. There wasn’t any news. Not surprising three days after Christmas. Even the Maple Leafs weren’t playing, so the sports page was a bore. The weather map showed another snowstorm was on the way. And the city was still shoveling out from the big one yesterday. He checked the temperature in Barbados. Sunny and warm. He could just picture his whole family spending the day at the beach, playing volleyball at sunset.

“Excuse me, sir.”

He looked up. A small-boned man with short dark hair and a beard, but no mustache, was standing behind the chair at the other end of the table. Before coming here, Armitage had carefully inspected the composite drawing that had been done of Jose Sanchez, the baker who’d worked at the Tim Hortons. He could tell this guy had tried hard to change his appearance, but even in the bar’s dim light the birthmark by his left eye was easy to spot.

“Have a seat.”

“Thank you for meeting with me.” The man’s eyes flitted about the room before he sat across the table from Armitage. He had a slight accent, kind of Eastern European, but wasn’t hard to understand.

“Most people call the cops, not the Crown,” Armitage said.

“I don’t want to talk to the cops.” He put his hands on the sides of his head, as if he were trying to hide his face.

“At the Tim Hortons you gave your name as Sanchez,” Armitage said. “Jose Sanchez. We’ve checked everyone in the city with that name. None of them is you. I’m assuming it’s not your real name.”

Sanchez, or whoever he was, nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Call me ‘Jose,’” he said.

“Okay, Jose. What do you want to talk about?”

The man put his hands in front of him and meshed his fingers together. Armitage noticed his fingertips were brown. Looked like nicotine stains. He still didn’t speak.

“You called me. I suggested we meet here because no one can overhear us,” Armitage said. “I’m not taking any notes. Not taping this. Whatever you say will just be between you and me.”

Jose stared straight ahead. “I was there,” he said at last.

“We assumed that.”

“No, no, I was right there. I heard them talking.”

The restaurant was hot, but Armitage felt his skin go cold. Under the table, he balled his big hands into two fists. Don’t talk, just listen, he told himself

“Sir,” Jose said, shaking his head. “You’ve made a very big mistake.”

Armitage felt as if he’d been punched in the head. Stay calm, he thought. “The police have investigated this very thoroughly. The lighting wasn’t very good outside.”

“I was right behind those two guys. They didn’t know I was there. But I saw it all.”

“We have a number of witnesses,” Armitage said.

Jose, or whoever the hell he was, put his hands up. “I read the article in the
Star
. You’re the one who made a deal with the short guy Dewey Booth’s lawyer, aren’t you?”