A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller) (8 page)

I did another search and got three articles about the commission which confused me even more.

The commission was new. An idea the mayor’s office had arrived at after consultations with experts.

One expert in the paper mentioned how strange this was because the mayor never listened to experts unless they agreed with him.

The board was an elected one and there was one like it in every other city in Canada (except Montreal). It dealt with citizen complaints and budget issues and generally provided oversight to the police force, basically ensuring that the police department was accountable to the public. In theory it helped build trust and respect.

Another article pointed out that the commission concept did two bad things for the police: it removed control of its budget from a purely political process, and it allowed citizens a clear view into the operations of the force. The same article noted that the boards had no real ill effects for citizens.

The commission was going into operation early in the next year and it had a board of six consisting of a president and five voting members. The president was elected from a cross-city election and each police district in the city elected one commission member as well.

The police, through their union, were resisting the commission strongly and were regularly publishing articles about what a bad idea it was and how it would “tie” the hands of the police.

They were unclear on what “tie” actually meant.

The last thing I did was go online and find Reynolds’s article in the University of Manitoba newspaper. It was a brilliantly reasoned piece on the history of execution and the importance of returning to a system of capital punishment.

It was titled, “Arthur Ellis, Where Are You?” Arthur Ellis had been the official name of the hangman in Canada back when we did that kind of thing, a pseudonym chosen to permit a degree of anonymity on behalf of the executioner. Reynolds started by listing the history of executions, going back to Babylonian times and reasoning that executions were part of what made a nation civilized. He talked about the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Italianate states, the French approach, the English and Scottish angle and the humane executions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It was all shit but it was kind of fun to read.

My own feelings on executions were somewhat more pragmatic: I had no desire for the state ever to have more power than it was willing to give the individual members who made up that state.

Even Rome, that notoriously brutally beautiful civilization, had known enough that the carnifex was not allowed to live within city limits.

And Reynolds wanted to bring him back? To give the power of life and death to a faceless and anonymous cypher?

Back home the phone was ringing as I went in. I picked up and the voice on the other end of the line sounded furious as soon as I said hello.

“Who is this?”

The voice was frail, kind of reedy and petulant but I answered anyway. “Monty. I could ask you the same thing.”

“Put Claire on!”

“No. As a matter of fact, I will ask you the same thing you just asked me: who is this?”

The voice sputtered and whined and finally hung up on me and I stared at the phone in bemusement before replacing it in the cradle.

Lots of strange people out there.

A
message showed up with a couriered package the next day. It read, “I’m so very sorry about last night … I just lost my head. I hope this doesn’t change things between us, please consider this a sign of my contrition.”

Claire looked at me and we both said, at the same time, “Weird.”

I looked the paper over. It was strange stuff, coarse and uneven and quite discoloured. And the ink was odd too, a faded green that lay strangely on the page. Claire looked closely at it and then leaned back, stumped. “There are two almost cuts on the sides of each line of each letter with less ink between them.”

She took the box in hand and shook it gently to hear something weighty shift within. She handed it to me and I looked it over but seemed like a normal box. Cardboard and heavy but just a little gift box like you’d buy from a bargain store.

“So,” Claire said, “what’s in it?”

I was paranoid but that was okay, former professional criminals have many good reasons to be paranoid. I opened the package slowly, feeling for resistance that would hint at a trigger wire or a friction fuse. I also listened for any clicks or buzzes that might indicate a firing pin being engaged. And while I did that I used my nose and sniffed for any interesting chemicals like nitrates, acids or petroleum products.

Eventually though the box was opened safely and Claire and I ended up admiring the contents, a massy gold bracelet irregularly studded with a variety of small stones, lying on a bed of white cotton. I looked closely at the stones and saw white ones and reddish ones, grey ones and dark blue ones. They were arranged in no pattern I could recognize and the effect was quite beautiful.

Claire picked it up. “Look at the gold; it’s made into mesh links.”

“Like chain mail armour?”

“Yes. Like the gloves my dad used.” Her dad had been a butcher and I remembered the gauntlets he’d worn, but I was thinking more of knights and dragons. Claire looked closely. “I think that,” she touched the dark blue stone, “is lapis lazuli.”

“Really?”

She shrugged and her breasts moved under her shirt. I never got tired of that. “I think. I never dealt with that stone much. The best comes from Afghanistan and Siberia.”

Claire was running a curio and relic shop when I met her. I’d been shooting an ex-partner at the time and it had been love at first sight for me. As for Claire, she’d hated me but had gotten over it. After a few years.

Okay. After many years.

Anyhow, she’d had lots of experience with semi-precious stones, fossils and other strange items. So I believed her when she named a stone I had only heard about yet never seen.

I touched the grey stone and felt a slightly greasy surface.

“That’s an uncut diamond … I think.”

“You’re not sure?” she said dryly.

“It’s been a while,” I admitted. “I stole a half tray of them in Vancouver ten, maybe eleven years ago.”

My mind drifted. I remembered the chaos of that day in the Chinatown shop. I remembered the smell of cordite as I dumped two rounds of #6 shot into the ceiling to get everyone’s attention. I remembered the howls of the customers and staff and the shrilling of the alarms.

It had been a messy robbery but we’d gotten away with two trays of unset stones—diamonds, rubies and some emeralds. Also sixty grams of gold in tiny bars and a double handful of Bulova watches. I remembered the whole experience in snapshots. There was Jimmy Brunswick standing tall and walking the manager into the back room, he moving fast because of the long-barrelled .22 in his ear. And in the corner there was Jarrod Black cracking display cases with a roofing hammer and picking through the debris with inhuman precision.

Two minutes later we were all in the car with Sally Leiter driving the speed limit. Behind us four army surplus smoke bombs spewed orange and filled the road with even more chaos and then we were gone. As we travelled Sally passed me a Steyr Mannlicher Classic carbine in .222 and I worked the bolt to put the first of four rounds into the breech and flicked the safety off. Sally laughed like a bell and I hoped and prayed that no cop would show and that no citizen would decide to play hero.

Because if anyone did, I’d have to kill them, because I was the only decent shot in the car.

And we’d gotten away clean with two million and change, which a Seattle fence had bought for a quarter mil. Which was $55,300 and change each after the expenses were covered.

And I couldn’t remember where the money had gone.

I vaguely remembered cocaine and whores in Quebec City and I remembered a meth-fuelled brawl in a strip club in Hull. I remembered a long poker game in a Kansas City steak house with a waitress bringing drinks and wearing only high heels and a smile. I remembered coming down from a heroin-fuelled lost weekend in Saskatoon on a farm rooftop with a teenage girl telling me she really, really loved me. I remembered believing her.

Sally and Jimmy and Jarrod.

All of them gone.

Sally beaten to death when the love of her life turned septic in a suburb outside Quebec City.

Jarrod pulled from a wrecked semi after a cigarette hijack near Victoria. The cop had been over-eager and had twisted while pulling and Jarrod had ended up a bag of dead meat from the neck down. That had lasted until he’d managed to chew through his tongue late one night in the hospital while the guard was pissing in the bathroom sink.

And Jimmy, spiking on PCP and meth, had his face punched in by eleven rounds from a cop’s forty calibre in a Saskatoon back alley.

I touched the stone again and shivered. “Yeah. It’s a diamond, and I think the white stone’s a pearl. I’ve never seen an irregular one like that though.”

Claire touched it. “Well, it’s gorgeous.”

“It is that. Let’s go to bed.”

That night we fucked until I’d said goodbye again to all my ghosts. Claire seemed to understand.

F
irst thing the next morning Reynolds’s Lexus sedan pulled up out front and a red-headed woman got out. For a second I didn’t recognize her and then I realized she was Gwen, Devanter’s secretary/receptionist. She was wearing a brown leather coat and green slacks, and she carried a thin metal briefcase under one arm as she got out of the car. Then she took a deep breath and walked up the sidewalk to my house with a determined stride.

I asked Claire to open the door and she did, saying warmly, “Yes?”

Gwen’s voice was soft and calm. “I’m looking for Montgomery Haaviko.”

“You’ve found him. Come in then.”

She entered cautiously and I came towards her wiping my hands on a dish towel to imply I had been in the kitchen. I was in my robe, and Claire and I still smelled of sex. Gwen noticed and her nose wrinkled and she smiled.

“Mr. Haaviko!”

She offered her hand and I shook it and introduced her to Claire and she said, “Pleased” with far more warmth. Then she turned back to me, opened the briefcase and handed me a sheaf of stapled papers.

“Let me guess. Alastair is suing me? And you got stuck serving the papers?”

Gwen smiled. “No, it’s a contract. Space for you to sign. Mr. Devanter has already signed.”

I took it and read it. It was simple. I was contracting to provide unnamed services for an unnamed period of time. It was very open and very vague and very full of legal crap. I read it and looked at Gwen. “There is mention of an initial payment of $5,000. Do you have it?”

“I do.”

She gave it to me from out of the wallet, a thin sheaf of fifty new hundreds so crisp I cut a thumb. I counted it and checked the serial numbers for repeats but the bills were either real or such good queer I could pass them painlessly. Reynolds and Devanter were definitely paying their way.

So I signed the contracts and the receipts and kept one copy of each and then showed Gwen out. As I closed the door Claire said, “Nice girl.”

I fanned the money and said, “Not really.”

Claire looked thoughtful. “A natural redhead? I wonder.”

I shuffled the money and handed her five bills. “I got another five if you can find out.”

“It’s a deal.”

After Claire left I thought for about ten seconds. If you pull a gun on me I will distrust you. So I distrusted Devanter and Reynolds. I thought for another ten seconds and then I called Dean Pritchard. “Mr. Pritchard? This is Monty Haaviko. I’ve thought about your offer and I’d like to accept. Could I meet whoever hired you? Who would be the person who wants to hire me?”

He was speaking on a cell phone and his voice came in scratchy. “Certainly. Let me give him a call and we’ll set something up. Can Brenda and I meet with you today though? There’s not much time to get all this organized.”

We made a date for six at a restaurant and bakery I know and then I wrangled children for the rest of the day. Since it was hot, my wrangling consisted of turning on a sprinkler in the backyard and letting the kids rampage. As the grass also needed watering I felt this was an effective strategy. For supper I made spaghetti and sauce with a recipe from an Italian lady whose three sons played with my kids occasionally. She had given me not only the recipe but also eight tomatoes from the greenhouse she had built on top of her garage.

When she told me that I was amazed. “You built a greenhouse on top of your garage?”

She was slim and prim and looked maybe nineteen. She always sat in the corner of the parks, in the shade, knitting and watching her kids with her dark eyes and a slight downturn of her mouth as though she disapproved. The sound of her clashing needles had first drawn me when we’d originally met that spring. Later she decided she could trust me a little and when I asked about the greenhouse she looked at me with round eyes. “Of course! Store tomatoes taste just awful.”

The next day she brought the recipe on an index card along with the tomatoes in an old, creased paper bag and so I made spaghetti. And it was a tremendous success, which had nothing to do with my skills as a chef.

By quarter to six I was at the commercial bakery on Main that I liked; the one run by the Greek family. It had five round tables under an awning around the side, which made it a good place to meet.

When I’d first come to town I’d visited the place and fallen in love with the coffee and the pastries. Me and the owners had gotten along fine until a psycho cop named Walsh had tried to run me out of town. But that had been more than a year ago.

There were two other patrons at the place, an old man sitting by himself and drinking a small cup of coffee beside an aboriginal child, maybe eleven, wearing designer jeans, eating a cream horn and reading Carl Jung’s
Psychology and Alchemy.

I sat down and a fattish young man with dark, curly hair, blue eyes and a silver stud in his eyebrow came out holding a menu. He was wearing white overalls and an apron and tucked into his apron was the worn wooden handle of a hammer.