River City (37 page)

“A fight on the Main got out of hand—what’s the big deal?” the dispatcher asked him.

Probably it was no big deal, he replied, but he had a hunch. He wanted a more experienced coroner. Sloan got his wish. He then asked to have a message delivered to Touton’s desk, a question: “Interested in a dead chauffeur?”

“That’s all it says?” the dispatcher asked, his curiosity piqued.

“Just say that. I’m going to see the body gets into the morgue truck, then beat it home. I’m bushed. Put the stiff’s rap sheet on my desk.”

Sometimes it took awhile to sweep a body off a street. The morgue guys were never too swift in the middle of the night. They usually stopped for a drink along the way. A coroner had to be fetched out of bed, and that could require more than one call to make sure he’d stayed awake. Then he might drop himself off at a strip club first, to acquire a taste for the evening air and to make the outing more worth his while. Dawn had arisen before Sloan finally departed the scene, and the soft light of morning had not improved the alley’s disposition. If anything, the space seemed to stink more once the detritus of city waste had become fully visible.

Light of day sprinkled gasoline on the fire of Armand Touton’s rage. By the time the Night Patrol convened the following evening, his emotions were in an uproar. His commentary to his fellow officers lacked his usual insouciance.

“If these motherfucks think they can … Mother of God, they better shit in their own soup …
maudit câlice …
we’re going to vomit down their throats and tape their mouths shut … make them blow puke out their nostrils, these fucks!”

He’d had a few drinks, which didn’t help, but a day of dwelling on the audacity of punks slathering paint on his stoop and awakening his wife from her slumber, not to mention blowing up Fleury’s Chevy, had him in a lather.

“Dynamite, that’s the word. Three sticks—three too many! I want to know where those sticks came from. Lean on every shit-eating dung hole in this town. I want to know where those sticks came from, who bought them off who for how much, and I want to know
exactly
how much change the motherfuck got back! I want to know every fucking detail about that transaction. This city is not going to rest until it comes across with that information. You got that? Does everybody in this room understand what we’re doing tonight?”

No one did. None of them had shaken down a city looking for information about dynamite, but no one would confess to their ignorance either, not with their leader in that mood.

“They made a mistake, the shit-eating skunks,” Touton confided in a quieter, intense voice.
“Two
mistakes, if you want to know the truth. They painted a swastika on my door, and that tells me they think they can hold my military career in disrepute. Do you understand what I’m saying? If they think they can fuck with me, they’ll shit their pants before I’m done with them! Second, they blew up Gaston Fleury’s Chevrolet. His fucking Bel Air. Know why that’s a mistake? Because it pins the two events together. It lets me know that they believe they can shit on my porch. They can’t shit on my porch! They can’t mess with my officers! Not with any one of you! They want to scare our
wives
? I’ll scare the dicks right off their balls! They want to mess with a policeman’s property? They’ll wish they were sleeping on a cot in Siberia before we’re done. You got me?” He scanned the roomful of still, scarcely breathing officers, daring any one of them to twitch. Then he spoke in a deep, growly voice. “Who sells dynamite in this town? Find that out for me. Who steals it? Who offers it up for sale? Who buys it? Pull out fingernails if you have to, but find that out.” After scowling over his crew, he finished by asking, “Any questions?”

Everyone had questions, but no one dared voice them, the exception being Detective Andrew Sloan, who raised his hand slowly.

“What?” Touton snarled at him.

The others in the room held their breath. They hadn’t wanted any questions. They wanted to get on the job, not because they were particularly enthusiastic about getting started, but because they wanted out from under the furious eyes of their leader. They immediately wished that Sloan had not raised his hand, and when he spoke off topic, the room, as one, wanted to shoot him.

“I had a murder last night,” he stated.

Touton glowered at him. “Deal with it. We got more important shit to scoop right now.”

“You didn’t get my message? This could be important in other ways.”

“Deal with it, I said! Don’t bother me with your little problems off the street!”

Sloan was surprisingly petulant. “Nobody got hurt,” he murmured.

“What?” Touton fired back at him. “What did you say?”

“I’ve got a chauffeur shot dead in an alley. You’ve got paint on your doorknob. I say my case is more important.”

Both men could feel the entire room silently groaning. Historically, Sloan was the one man willing to stand up to Armand Touton anytime the captain got wild. Touton had noticed the trait himself, and for that reason alone he valued his colleague, even though he made life difficult for him from time to time.

“Investigate,” Touton hammered back at him. “Report. Don’t bother me. You got that? Is that too much to ask? If it’s too much to ask, I can have you transferred to bicycle theft. I’m sure they could use your expertise.”

Warily, a few detectives chuckled. When Touton wanted to ridicule a member of his squad, he always used the same threat, which apparently he found amusing. They felt the need to laugh along.

“Some detective pissed somebody off,” Sloan objected, “so they blew up his car when he wasn’t in it. They knew he wasn’t in it. The car was empty, sitting by the curb in the middle of the night. It’s a big deal—I agree with you on that, it is a really big deal, but I’m just saying—”

“I don’t really care what you’re just saying—”

“No kidding. I think that’s my point.”

“Sloan.”

“What?” the detective asked.

“My office,” the captain replied. “Now.”

“Fine.”

That’s what he wanted anyway. A chance to have it out with Touton, and if that meant going toe to toe in private, so be it. Sloan followed about ten strides behind his boss as the captain departed the room and headed down the hall. The others in the room, finally free to broach their duties, were relieved, and a few were delighted that Touton had caught a sacrificial minnow to munch upon.

Back in his office, Touton was surprisingly conciliatory.

“What’s your problem?” he asked Sloan, having moderated his voice.

“You’re not seeing the forest for the trees,” Sloan said. Then he toned himself down also, adding, “As I see it.”

“So you like this chauffeur to be the limo driver the night the coroner was killed? The night Roger Clément went down?”

“He’s a punk limo driver. He’s dead. That’s all I know. But that’s enough to check him out, don’t you think? That’s all I’m saying.”

Touton sat down. “You are aware that we’re not officially investigating that case? Speaking about it out loud before the entire squad doesn’t help us at all. You’re aware of that, right?”

If he’d heard that, he’d forgotten. “Sorry,” Sloan said.

“So what’s the bee in your bonnet?”

Sloan had thought that this was going to be a tougher point to get across to his superior officer, and he wanted now to deliver his opinion with the appropriate emphasis. He realized that he might actually have preferred the opportunity to sting the captain in a verbal fight, something that might have given his point a heightened credibility. Unfortunately, he would have to stake out his position without the lustre of passionate engagement.

“Everybody’s going on about the car-bombing and the paint job on your door last night. Okay, I’ll concede that those are nasty things. But why would anyone do that? That’s what I keep asking myself. If the goal was intimidation, that’s one thing, but if we don’t actually know who did it, how is anyone being intimidated? Just because your door—”

“This is not about my door,” Touton said tersely. “This is about my wife being terrified.”

Sloan backtracked a little. He would have to compromise his attitude. “I understand. That’s bad, that people would target a man’s wife like that.” He breathed in deeply. “Armand. I have a theory, all right? Let me just spit it out.”

Touton nodded to give him at least slight encouragement.

“Everybody’s going on about those events, but maybe that’s the idea. Those things were distractions, maybe. If so, the bad guys sure as hell succeeded in what they’re doing—”

“Distractions?”

Sloan could feel Touton’s anger rising again. “Let’s say somebody wanted to kill another man, that that killing was involved in a case you were working on. The killers knew you’d take an interest and they wouldn’t want that. Absolutely, they would not want that. So they give you something else to think about instead, and that way they get to walk away from a murder without you ever taking notice.”

Touton leaned back in his chair. He was tired, fuelled by caffeine and alcohol, but what his detective was saying made sense. He leaned forward, checked information off a sheet, and wrote down an address for Sloan like a physician jotting a prescription. He tore the sheet off his pad.

Sloan accepted the paper and read it. “Who’s Carole Clément?”

“Roger’s wife,” Touton explained. “She called today. She was listening to the radio.”

“And …?”

“She heard your dead man’s name. She wants to talk about him. We’ll go see her together, all right? Keep it quiet. Meet me there, ten-thirty. I might be late.”

Sloan stood up. For a while that evening, he thought his boss was off his rocker. Now he realized that he was a step ahead of him, again. If the affairs of the previous evening were indeed a ploy, whether by accident or design, Touton had made it look as though he’d swallowed the bait whole. The performance in the squad room had been for show. Sloan understood that he had nearly screwed it up.

“Sloanie, take a meandering route to get there.”

“I will,” the detective promised. “I’ll be—what’s the word?—circumspect.” He paused on his way out. “So getting everybody to hunt down dynamite, that’s about the Sun Life as well, right? Or Fleury’s car
and
the Sun Life.”

Touton grunted, stood also, and the men went their separate ways.

Touton headed off on a quest for different quarry. He’d arranged an evening rendezvous with a Montreal psychiatrist, one who had inscribed his name on
the infamous petition requesting sanctuary for a French war criminal. The man’s name was Camille Laurin. Carole Clément had labelled him as a man who hated strikes, and given that her husband had disrupted a few picket lines in his day, the possibility lingered that the two of them might have had recent contact.

The meeting was set up for the working-class north end of the city, close to where the physician conducted a private practice. Touton had argued for the odd hour as he was a late-night detective, and the doctor had grudgingly agreed. At the restaurant door, the captain slipped off his hat and checked his watch: 8:46
P.M.
Civilized.

Surprisingly, the doctor had ordered a meal, so the hour could not have been disorienting for him, either. His pasta arrived at the same time Touton did, and the policeman asked the waitress for a coffee. Cops on the night shift congenially joked with one another that they bled caffeine, to pour them a cup of joe if they ever got shot—that way, they’d never bleed out. Close in age, the two men sat across from one another in a high-backed, red vinyl booth.

“The famous captain,” Dr. Laurin said, his voice annoyingly quiet, restrained. His handshake felt like holding a fillet of halibut. “I salute your achievements, sir.”

“Thanks, Doc. I’m afraid I don’t know about your work. I can’t—what’s the word?—reciprocate.”

“I maintain a modest practice—nothing fancy. How may I help you?”

Touton didn’t say so, but the question was a particularly good one. In truth, he had no idea.

The doctor had a way of lifting his chin that made him appear to be gazing down his nose. His hair was wavy and black, which emphasized the full height of a broad, impressive forehead. His eyes were unusually small.

“I guess my question is … psychological? Is that the word?”

“Psychological, yes.” Laurin seemed pleased, and reached for his cigarettes. Judging by the ashtray off to the side, already filling up, he was a chain-smoker. Nicotine stains were noticeable on the fingers of his right hand, so this smoke was neither a sudden nor nervous reaction. “Depending on the question, of course. Which is?” His smile was thin, and once the cigarette was lit his face remained implacable behind a veil of smoke.

Shifting around in his seat, as though the discussion had already ascended above his head, Touton suggested, “It’s the psychology I’m wondering about, Doctor—the way the mind works. Why are some people, do you think, left wingers, while others are right wingers? Psychologically speaking, I mean.”

In taverns across the city, drinkers with draft glasses barricaded in front of them might assume he was talking hockey. But Laurin knew what he meant.

“Why do some people live in the real world, while others dwell in a land of fantasy, dreaming utopian dreams? Is that what you really mean by your question? … A big issue, Captain. I’d be interested to learn how it pertains to police work.” He chose to stare high to his right, rather than upon his visitor. “Offhand, the answer is likely to be different in every case. But we can acknowledge that some minds have a predisposition to grasp the potential of the individual, the potential for the race, while other minds, regrettably, prefer to whine about insignificant matters.” His eyes met Touton’s again. “The universe of the left is based upon materialism. It’s a Marxist tenet. The chaos of the imagination, the divine promise of human experience, exquisite achievements of art, man’s cherished divinity … all these matters are lost on the left, which is primarily concerned with wages and with what can be acquired without being earned. The left wants to know what can be picked from the pockets of the enterprising and the visionary—then wasted.”