River City (27 page)

Fleury stood up. “I’ll see to it personally,” he said.

“Now you’re catching on.”

Five weeks later, he was back again, looking grim.

“What’s the matter?” Touton inquired. The guy looked as though both his parents had died, and perhaps his dog.

“I made a mistake.”

“That happens.” He didn’t tell him that he expected as much. Fleury was not, after all, a properly trained policeman. “What did you do wrong?”

“I made arrangements with this guy who washes cars.”

“That’s what you were supposed to do,” Touton recalled.

“I got a list of twenty-nine vehicles with possible rear-end repair jobs.”

“Twenty-nine? Do limo drivers brake too quickly around here?”

“Not exactly.” Fleury sighed, then straightened up, flexing his shoulders back, as though to face the music. “I was paying the guy per car. For every suspect limo, he got another fifteen bucks.”

“Oh, Gaston.” Putting a hand to his forehead he closed his eyes.

“Yeah. Yeah. I finally started to get suspicious, but, I know, I was slow to catch on. Anyhow, I went down there yesterday and looked at the cars for myself, to see if they really did have damage.”

“And?”

“The guy I hired? I saw him take a baseball bat to a tail light, then he drove the car into the garage for a wash.”

“So they’re all tainted. They’re all spoiled.” Apologies weren’t useful at that point. Fleury merely rose and was leaving the office. Touton called him back. “You were looking at city cars, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay. So if you come up with an idea on how to look at provincial and federal cars—if you find some better method—then we can try that, too.”

“All right. I will.”

“And Gaston,” Armand Touton said as the man tried to leave again.

“Yes, sir?”

“You realize that this incident places you under suspicion.”

“Sir?”

“If the killer’s car had been a city car, you just found the way to scuttle that evidence. That places you under suspicion. It’s not personal. I’m just letting you know. You might be the director’s man in Policy, but if you’re going to do street work for me you have to prove yourself, day in, day out. I’m putting a black mark beside your name. It’s only a question mark. But I want you to know it’s there.”

He was enjoying a little sport with the fellow, but Fleury didn’t seem to catch on. Touton figured if this man was going to work with him, he’d have to develop his internal toughness.

“I’ll make it up to you, sir.”

“Government cars. Provincial. Federal. Find a way.”

“Yes, sir.”

Touton figured there’d be no way he could do that, but at least the guy was out of his hair for another week or two.

He didn’t know how the homicide squad was doing with the deaths of Roger Clément and the coroner, but he did know that his own side investigation had stalled terribly. Throughout the country, and internationally, he’d posted a description of the missing knife—which, not surprisingly, had not turned up. That the knife had been stolen for its symbolic power rather than for its retail value remained a credible theory and an angle he wanted to explore. How could he make inroads into an upper strata of society where members of the Order of Jacques Cartier might dwell? He had no experience in that realm. He came from the poor districts, had been a beat cop among the poor, and most of his working hours were spent among cops and criminals, all of whom had emerged from the same tough streets. Even the people he could trust, the mayor and the police director, did not come from money, for they were hard-nosed lawyers from the middle classes, perceived as being such fanatical reformers by the rich that they were deeply distrusted. How could he find a way into that mysterious upper echelon?

At a meeting with the mayor and the police director in the director’s office, he asked that very question. From time to time, the three of them would do
this—conduct a meeting in Pax Plante’s office to remind other cops just who held sway in the new era of reform. Being invited in for a few minutes tabbed an officer as someone who enjoyed the support of the new administration, while any senior cop who was never invited into a meeting with the mayor was considered to be under suspicion. The method kept crooked officers nervous, and good cops trying harder to demonstrate their worthiness. The meetings also proved to the department that a power in the city greater than the police now existed, that the good old days when cops ruled were finished.

Armand Touton explained his dilemma, and Mayor Jean Drapeau and his good friend Pacifique Plante tossed a few names back and forth. Problems surfaced around each person they mentioned, and on rare occasion, when they did not have a specific difficulty with someone, they were also not enthusiastic. Then the mayor came up with a suggestion. Stacked in a corner of his office, the police director kept old copies of
Le Devoir.
These contained yellowing articles from a few years back, when he and the future mayor had changed the city forever. Booted from the police department by a corrupt chief, Plante had absconded with his files. He then conscripted a journalist, Gérard Pelletier, to ghostwrite articles for him based on this trove of information. At the time, the newspaper and Plante were expecting hundreds of lawsuits, for Plante named names and provided addresses of the bawdy houses and gambling dens, citizens with honest reputations were being brought low and those who were known to be shady saw their stature in the criminal world clarified. The articles were so blistering in their attacks on crime and criminals, and on the failure of the justice system as a whole, that a public inquiry became necessary, which led to the dismissal of the police chief, while the mayor at the time decided to retire gracefully. Two audacious young men had led the public inquiry, Drapeau and Plante, and they followed up their success by being whooshed into power.

Drapeau pulled an old article off the stack, plunked it down on the desk and rapped his knuckles across the page. “There’s our man,” he said. “The one who wrote these pieces for Pax.”

“Pelletier?” Plante wondered skeptically. “He’s not that high up in life, is he?”

“High enough. His friends go higher. Him and that other fellow … what’s his name, the one publishing
Cité Libre
? They’re upper crust.”

“What’s his name?” Touton asked.

“Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” Plante said. “But these guys are communists,” he told the mayor.

Drapeau shrugged. “Are we asking them to run the country? Who better to provide information about fascists than communists?”

“He’s rich?”

“Trudeau’s from money. Pelletier’s not exactly off a pig farm,” Plante said.

“Harvard graduates,” Drapeau put in. “London School of Economics. Silver spoons. They move in those circles, yet they’re unionists. Maybe communists. They’re young. Foolish. Smart, though. They have integrity, I have to give them that. I read
Cité Libre.
They want to change the city, so we have that in common even though we disagree on a lot. Talk to Trudeau, he’s at the centre of that clique. Call your friend Pelletier. Clear the way for Armand.”

As it turned out, the meeting would be with both Trudeau and Pelletier. Trudeau insisted that his friend accompany him, thwarting Touton’s desire to wheedle him out. Trudeau seemed to understand the premise that it’s infinitely easier to recruit someone as a police informant when he’s in isolation. Involve another person and the second-guessing commences. Since two were coming, Touton brought along Gaston Fleury to even the odds as well as to tap his expertise on the Order. Should something with the two men actually develop, he planned to set him up as a liaison.

Touton couldn’t imagine meeting these sons of the wealthy in a tavern, so he invited them for lunch instead, at Ben’s Deli, for smoked meat.

Both seemed amused to be talking to police officers, as though this was a lark they’d be recounting over cocktails that evening, but just as Touton was beginning to feel irritated, Trudeau calmed the waters. He seemed gracious for a rich man’s son.

“Captain Touton, you’re quite famous,” Trudeau began. “Courageous, it’s said. Moral, I’ve heard. Gérard and me, we’ve been battling Duplessis’s shock troops, so it’s unusual for us to be breaking bread with a cop. This is odd for us.”

Touton appreciated the candour. He knew what Trudeau meant. Provincial police had a rough reputation, as they were routinely deployed by Duplessis to break up strikes. The premier of the province would announce that the
cops were being dispatched to help workers cross picket lines. When no worker chose to cross, they’d beat their truncheons over strikers’ heads until at least a few of them changed their minds. At the instigation of the premier, in another example of power run amok, the provincial cops had arrested more than a thousand Jehovah’s Witnesses for handing out pamphlets to French Catholics. While making the arrests, they smashed the furniture in the homes of the accused. Are they cops, the young men were asking in their little magazine, or political goon squads? The more they lent support to the aspirations of Quebec workers and to the powerless, the more experience Trudeau and Pelletier were gaining with police tactics.

Touton shrugged. “I work closely with Pacifique Plante. Mr. Pelletier knows him well. He understands his work. We’re not that kind of cop.”

“I think we both understand that,” Trudeau said. “But the police, the intellectuals, even when both entities have goodwill, we’re not likely to be on the same side of too many issues.”

“This is why I’ve brought along my good friend here, Detective Fleury. Gaston is one of Plante’s handpicked men. He knows more about the politics of this situation than me.”

“What situation is that?” Trudeau asked.

He let Fleury explain about the Order, and he could tell by the way that the men shot glances at one another that the discussion interested them. Probably they already possessed information they could impart. Never had they expected anyone representing authority to broach the rumour of a powerful fascist club in Quebec.

At the end of Fleury’s summary, Trudeau asked, “Why are you telling us?”

Touton explained that he needed access to the affluent classes. He needed to know who might be a member of the Order, which others might offer information.

Trudeau chuckled and glanced discreetly at his friend. “You want me to be a spy. I can’t do that. I won’t do that. I’m not a spy.”

Anticipating exactly that response, the policeman had prepared an alternative way to look at this. “You run a little magazine.”

“I do.”

“You could print an article on the Order. I could read it, and that way acquire my information, the same as anyone else.”

Pelletier stepped in. “I’d advise Pierre against any plot that results in the magazine being sued. With all due respect, sir, to you and Pax Plante, this could be a huge set-up to bring us down.”

“I tend to listen to his counsel,” Trudeau remarked.

“That’s the trouble,” Touton pointed out. “The suing. So try this. You prepare the article, but you don’t publish it, and since you’re interested in having your facts confirmed, you pass your notes around to others, for their comments. For instance, you pass your notes along to me. That’s not spying. That’s preparing an article for publication that happens to not get published.”

“You’d make a good recruiter of spies, Captain.”

“Thank you. I guess.”

The pair of intellectuals again shared a glance. Trudeau shrugged. “Fascists, right?”

“Possibly they’ve committed a double murder. Possibly they’ve stolen a relic that rightfully belongs to the people of Quebec. You’re unionists. You’re not on the same page with them. I’m sure they want to break up every strike going. It’ll surprise no one that they support Duplessis.”

“We don’t exactly have access into that crowd.”

“You have a social access I don’t. If you heard some things, you could guide me through the maze, advise me who can be trusted or who might be involved in such a group.”

Trudeau shook his head. “That could quickly turn into a witch hunt, Captain, the power you’re giving me. A man gives me a hard time for dating his daughter, do I denounce him as a member of the Order?”

“You might get more dates,” Pelletier pointed out. “What father would dare stand up to you?”

“You see, Captain, the power you’re placing in my hands?”

“I’m relying on your integrity,” Touton pressed on, “that’s true. But who says that you won’t date a fascist’s daughter? Not by design, but it could happen, no? The daughter, in her unhappiness, she tells you something about sweet Papa—something not so flattering to him, you understand, about his
habits, his friends, his beliefs. She’ll never tell any of that to me, but to you, Mr. Trudeau, when you are holding her in your arms, she might tell you everything she knows.”

Trudeau again showed that cocky little smile of his. “So now you want me to spy on my girlfriends.”

“Spy! Must we use this word? Eat your smoked meat. Think about it, that’s all. You move in certain circles. You will make certain arguments, shall we say, in those circles. People will disagree with you. Sometimes, in a great rage, pissed off with you, they might say something they shouldn’t.”

“Like what?” He was wolfing down his sandwich, trying not to let the mustard dribble.

“Like, someday,” Touton began, and he deliberately slowed his pace so that his words might mean more than what he was saying, “when things change, when Quebec finally has a great man to lead them—a great man, you understand what I mean by that?—and, you know, the Jews are gone, and the English are expelled—”

“Many people want the English out. That doesn’t make them fascists.”

“But one or two might be. The ones who want the Jews out first, for example. In your circles. Among the rich. I cannot move in that world. Where would I begin? Surely, you two aren’t opposed to fighting fascists. In your magazine, you talk plenty tough about it.”

The four men ate quietly awhile. The restaurant provided a large, bright space, with spartan decor. A popular late-night haunt among the entertainment crowd, in the daytime it served working people and businessmen, bankers in need of a quick bite and students on a budget. Looking around as he ate, Trudeau realized that this was the one place in town where a couple of hip intellectuals could sit down with a couple of cops and nobody would bat an eye. So even the meal’s location had been carefully choreographed. That impressed him.