Ogrodnik Interior 2.0c (6 page)

Elliot made it a point to follow the activities of the local street gangs and, in particular, any violent crimes attributed to them. The police had little luck in solving these types of crimes because the victims would rarely talk, and witnesses were non-existent. In this case, an innocent teenager was shot and killed; there were no witnesses, only vagaries about hearing shots and seeing a non-descript car speeding away.

Over the years, he had invested and cultivated a small core of informants. These were people on the periphery of the street gang world, people who didn't like what was happening but were afraid to speak out; people who were victims and had seen firsthand the suffering caused by the gangs; people who had learned to trust Elliot and, for a price, would send him information. The intel he received was often material that the police were not able to collect, information that could be used to identify guilty parties.

There was no set process for what Elliot would do with his intel. He was, by nature, an analyzer, a gatherer and distiller of data. Sometimes he would send information anonymously to the Gangs & Guns unit for them to pursue; sometimes he just kept it for his own purposes.

He unlocked the credenza and pulled out a thick, accordion file folder with four partitions, each labeled neatly in blue marker. He slipped the Danielle Estoban printout into the last partition, the one labeled "Open," and put the accordion folder back into the credenza. 

Elliot was anxious to see what Riv had discovered this morning on the mountain but couldn’t wait around with his thumb sphinctered, so he headed out to see Dr. Baldwin.

Ray Baldwin practiced out of a low-rise clinic in a district west of downtown called NDG. His father had been a mentor to Dr. Baldwin and had taken him under his wing as he was coming up through the system, so when his father retired, Ray Baldwin took his father on as a patient. The only time he’d met Ray Baldwin was at his father’s funeral. It was a quick, “Sorry for your loss/Thank you for coming” exchange, so Elliot could not say that he knew him. The calendar on his father’s wall indicated that he had an appointment with Baldwin on February 17
^th
. He checked in at reception and was ushered in without delay.

“How do you do, Dr. Baldwin?”

“I’m fine, Elliot, and please, call me Ray. Your father did.”

“Okay, Ray. You’re probably wondering why I wanted to meet today.”

“Let’s not dally then,” he replied. “What’s on your mind?”

“I know the police consider Dad’s death a robbery gone bad, but I’m not satisfied with that theory, so I’m conducting an investigation on my own. I thought I’d start with the people with whom he’d met in the weeks before his death, and your name was on his calendar. So here I am looking for any help you can give me.”

“By all means, I’ll answer any questions you have.”

“My interests are on any casual conversations you may have had with him. Did he mention something he was working on or someone he was working with? “

Dr. Baldwin raised his eyes to the ceiling trying to remember the nature of their conversation that day. “I don’t recall him mentioning that he was involved in anything. To be honest, that appointment was two months ago, so I can’t remember specifically what we talked about that day. We usually chit chatted about hockey and the weather, and he was always interested to hear any gossip about our mutual comrades in the medical field, but I can’t think of anything that would have been of interest to you. “

“Ray, did Dad mention anything regarding drugs or pharmaceutical research he might have been working on?”

“Not that I remember.”

He could tell the doctor was busy processing something, thus, he kept quiet until the doctor was ready.

“Your father’s visit to me was not routine,” he said cautiously and waited for me to look at him. “Were you aware that he was dying?”

“What?”

“I wasn’t sure if you knew,” the doctor continued. “Yes, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor six months ago and was given a year to live at that time.”

Elliot was stunned into silence. His mind raced through the previous months trying to remember instances where his father may have exhibited symptoms or inadvertently let it slip in conversation.

“He never told me,” Elliot said quietly as he looked at the floor.

“The disease was just starting to manifest itself when I last talked to him. He was experiencing periodic headaches and blurred vision,” Baldwin said softly.

The doctor could see that Elliot was taken aback by the news. “Elliot, it’s common for someone in your father’s position to withhold information from those closest to them. They don’t want to be a burden and are not comfortable with the attention they will attract. Since there was nothing anybody could do about his condition, he chose to live his final months as normally as possible.”

Elliot needed to process what he just heard; he dismissed himself without further questions. “Thanks for your time, Ray. I should be going now.”

He sat in the car to absorb what he’d just heard.

I can accept Baldwin’s explanation about why Dad would not have confided in me,
he thought to himself
. It sounded exactly like the way Dad would handle the situation. It’s still a shock to hear that he was dying, but it put new perspective on his murder. Perhaps Dad’s death was something he orchestrated or at least set in motion. If Dad knew that a crime had been committed but did not have evidence to support his theory, it’s conceivable he would confront the supposed perpetrators, to poke the bear as the saying goes, to see if he could elicit a response. He’d also know that the response might be extreme, but with his death already imminent he might have been willing to take that risk. It also meant that he was expecting, or at least hoping, that someone would take notice and investigate the murder. That someone would be me, his son.

Elliot checked in his rearview and noticed a black SUV a few hundred yards back, and it triggered a memory of a similar vehicle in his rearview earlier this morning. He turned onto Queen Mary and watched to see if the SUV would take the same turn. It did. He tried to convince himself that he was being paranoid but needed to put it through the litmus test. From Queen Mary, he took the Decarie southbound and kicked his Mazda into cruising speed moving into the far lane. He saw that the SUV had followed him onto the southbound Decarie but lost sight of it when he had gunned his car. Taking no chances, he exited at St Jacques and continued along through Little Burgundy and then into St Henri, his childhood stomping grounds. Eventually, he found himself on Selby Street, a one-way street that ran in the shadow of the elevated Ville Marie Expressway. He pulled over and watched his mirror to see if the black SUV pulled onto the street behind him. Five minutes without seeing the black truck told him he was not being followed. He chalked it up to paranoia.

Elliot looked over toward the expressway and the unused area beneath. He thought about how he had spent many days in his youth playing in similar ad-hoc playgrounds that can be found in the nooks and crannies of a city. To Elliot, the expressway marked the border between two vastly different classes of Montrealers. North of the border was the upscale Westmount neighborhood, and south of the border, across the train tracks and underneath the expressway, were the much less affluent boroughs of St Henri, Little Burgundy, and Griffintown. In recent years, these less prosperous boroughs were taking long strides toward respectability and had become a preferred living destination for young families, but Elliot knew that the separation was not only physical but cultural. The peoples on the two sides were oil and water; they would never mix.

The stanchions supporting the overhead expressway were embellished with graffiti from generations of teenagers, each generation over-writing the previous generations' graffiti with artwork of their own. Between the stanchions lay unused areas that served as gathering spots for teenagers. The unused areas that were paved served well as basketball courts or skateboard parks. Elliot was never much of a boarder, but his height made him a valuable commodity when teams were being drawn for pickup basketball games
.

He shook himself from his childhood recollections and drove off, still unconvinced that the SUV had not been following him.

When Elliot arrived at the office, Rivka was already back from her morning expedition. Based on her still flushed face, she had probably run up and down the mountain and must have only recently arrived.

Rivka was the picture of wholesomeness. She was tall and athletic, and when they walked together, Elliot often felt as if he were a member of a celebrity’s entourage, not because she was famous or well known; she wasn’t. It was because of the attention she attracted, particularly from the opposite sex. Her looks couldn't be classified by routine descriptions like cute or gorgeous since they all implied a degree of feminism and delicacy that would be unfitting. She was a fascinating woman with a strikingly unusual and different look to her, and there was a swagger in the way she talked and walked that bordered on entitlement. He concluded this must be the confluence of a lifetime of growing up with her God-given attributes coupled with the years she spent on the force walking the beat backed with a badge and an attitude.

“Morning, Chief.”

“Morning, Riv.” He settled down into his chair and watched her fiddle around with a zipper on her backpack without saying anything. Experience told him that she’d tell her story when she was good and ready and not before.

“I had an interesting morning,” she finally said.

Elliot looked at her with arched eyebrows. “And...”

She pulled out her notepad. “I interviewed thirty-three people.”

“Nineteen walkers, eleven runners, and three bikers. Of the thirty-three, twenty-one were not up on the mountain that day or don’t remember.”

“Of the twelve who were on the mountain, seven don’t remember any vehicles parked, two said they saw a tour bus in the lot, and three said they saw the bus and also a white panel van. One of the people who remembered the van also recalled two men getting into the van at about 8:40. She remembers the two men because one of them was freakishly large. She thought at least six and a half feet tall and more than 300 pounds. She also gave me a general description of the clothing on both men.”

“Great work, Riv.”

“One more thing. The person who saw the two men was also interviewed the day after the murder by the police investigators and she gave the same account to them.”

“Interesting,” Elliot replied. “Were you able to get that copy of Dad’s case file? I’m curious to see what else they may have uncovered in their investigation that they haven’t told us about.”

“Stella has it ready and will drop it off at my place tonight after work,“ she replied.

“Let me summarize where I think we are with the case,” he started. “There are no parking meters nor are there any security cameras on the mountain. That means we’re not going to get a plate number for the white van that way, agreed?”

“Go on,” she replied.

“The two men knew when Dad was leaving on his morning walk, so he must have been under surveillance. It makes sense that the white van parked near his house, watched for him to start his walk and then drove up to the parking lot on the mountain to meet him at the top of the trail where it is most secluded.”

“Agreed.”

“What do all stakeouts survive on?”

Riv didn’t even have to think about it. “Duh. Coffee.”

“Bingo. If I was getting up that early to sit in a van for hours, I’d need coffee. Okay, Riv. Can you start canvassing drive-thru coffee shops in and around the Westmount area and see if you can get footage for early that morning and also the four previous mornings? Focus on the main routes in and out of Westmount. These guys are almost certainly not Westmount residents, so they’d be coming in along a major route like Sherbrooke or Atwater. If they didn’t stop along a major route, they either stopped close to where they came from, which could be anywhere on the island, or they don’t drink coffee.”

“On it, Chief.”

Elliot had
some time to kill. He headed back to his father’s to talk to Anne Simmons. Before knocking on the door to the in-law suite, he went upstairs to get something to drink. He put his pack on the table, took a bottle of water out of the fridge and when he glanced out the patio door he saw Anne relaxing on the deck. Anne was a good looking woman, some would say exotic, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason why she sometimes looked strikingly beautiful and other times rather ordinary. She had dark, shoulder length hair, and when she moved her head, the ends of her hair teased the nape of her neck in a way that made Elliot wish he knew her better. From a profile view, she had too much face and not enough chin, but it somehow worked for her. She wore the thick framed, rectangular
glasses that were in fashion, and they gave her an air of sophistication that added to her allure. From his oblique angle, Elliot noticed a ray of sunlight reflect off her right eye, and it was the first time he noticed their color, like the deep blue of a clear, sunward sky thirty minutes after sunset. He wondered why she hid them behind glasses.

He opened the patio door. “Morning, Anne.”

Anne flinched. “Elliot. You startled me!”

“Sorry. I was wondering if we could chat for a few minutes.”

“Yes, certainly. Have a seat,” she said putting her book down on the table.

“It’s about Dad.” Elliot sipped his water and waited until he had Anne’s full attention. “I’m not convinced his murder was as random as the police have led us to believe, so I’ve started my own investigation. I’m quite convinced that there was someone waiting at the top of the trail for him. Consequently, I’m
trying to reconstruct what Dad was doing in the days and weeks leading up to his murder.“