Slow Recoil (30 page)

Leyden had called first. “Some new developments,” he'd said. “We'll need some of your time tomorrow.”

“You know where to find me,” McKelvey had said.

“Don't be leaving town,” Leyden said.

“Only the guilty skip town,” McKelvey said.

Leyden said, “Right.”

Then the call he had been waiting for. He held the receiver, spoke his name, and waited. There was silence. Then the faintest sound of breathing.

“McKelvey,” a man said. He had a strong accent that McKelvey could not immediately place. Eastern European. He pronounced the name “
McKeelvy”.

“Yes,” McKelvey said. And again he waited. It was torture. He couldn't wait for the opportunity to meet face to face with the caller. No sucker punches this time. This time he would finish the job.

“Tomorrow at ten a.m.,” the man said, “I will call the middle pay phone against the far wall of the arrivals level at Union Station. You will answer. I will give you instructions on where to meet so you can see your friend Tim Fielding.”

“I want to talk to him first,” McKelvey said, and he suddenly felt like a character in some B-movie. He was at the end of his patience with this game.

“Not part of the plan,” the man said.

“Listen to me,” McKelvey said, and he felt the familiar ring of heat on the back of his neck, spreading across nerve endings like a spider's web. “I'm not bringing the cops into this. Like you instructed in your letter that you so neatly printed and left on my fucking fridge. I'm keeping my end of the bargain. I need to hear his voice.”

There was a long pause, and McKelvey thought for a moment there was a chance he had blown the phone call. The one and only chance to make contact with Fielding.

“We are out of time,” the man said. “No tracing of the calls. I will call the pay phone at ten a.m., and you can hear your friend's voice.”

The caller had hung up.

Now McKelvey finished the last swallow of the third pint of beer, and he looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. The lighting was dim, a soft amber, and it was normally quite complimentary.

But tonight there was no amount of makeup or lighting or smoke and mirrors that could hide the fact that McKelvey looked like a piece of hammered shit. He wasn't sleeping, he wasn't eating properly, and the bruising on his face had turned that yellow- brown hue that bruises take on as they wane.

“You're in rare form tonight, Charlie,” Huff said. He put his big hands on the bar and leaned in. McKelvey could almost count the scars, the nicks and cuts across the canvas of the man's face. “You celebrating or contemplating?”

“You ever get yourself into a jam that you weren't sure you could get out of?” McKelvey said, turning the pint glass in his hand.

“Every time I put on a pair of skates,” Huff said, and he smiled. “Yeah, I got myself into a few corners over the years. I figure the only thing to do is fight your way out. Keep swinging, and eventually you'll land a good one.”

McKelvey digested the advice. It was true. He had to keep swinging here, try to get one step ahead, gain some leverage. His call to Peter Dawson had perhaps provided a means to do so. In the process he had also likely shortened the window of time before Leyden and Kennedy and the whole fury of the Homicide Squad came crashing down on his head. Once they found out this unknown man was quite possibly somehow involved in the death of the building superintendant, Christ, once they found out he was taking calls from this stranger, well, it wasn't a stretch to make a case for obstruction of justice. If a prosecutor was in a particularly bad mood, it could even look more like accessory after the fact. Either way, he had no choice now but to get to Fielding. And he had to get there first.

Dawson had not appreciated the call to his home number. “I think you'll agree this is a rather odd situation. If the police want to speak with me, they can contact me at the office,” he had said. “I've already provided you with more information that I should have.”

“I appreciate that,” McKelvey said, “but let me help you out here, Peter. You didn't do anything wrong. Why should the centre come under the microscope, maybe even get shut down, just because of Davis? The sooner I can sit down with Davis and clear some things up, the better off you'll be.”

McKelvey had asked the man two questions. Two questions and the promise that he would provide the full back story before any officers approached Dawson for an interview.

“Does the name Bojan Kordic mean anything to you?” McKelvey asked.

“I don't think so,” Dawson said. “Doesn't ring any bells.”

“Do you have a home address or phone number for Davis?”

“That's part of the problem, I can't reach him,” Dawson said. “He always used a cellphone, and his number was constantly changing. I mean, like every couple of months. The last number I had is disconnected. Like I said, he travelled a lot for work. In the last year I probably only saw him three or four times in at the centre. I think his interest had waned.”

“What about an address?” McKelvey said. “He must have had to provide some basic information when he applied
to volunteer.”

“He sure did,” Dawson said. And here the man laughed a little, a mixture of nerves and stress and frustration. “One Bathurst Quay.”

McKelvey tried to picture the address. Bathurst Street. At the Quay. There were high-rise condos sprouting up along the waterfront like wild flowers.

“One of those new condo buildings?” McKelvey said.

“How about Lake Ontario,” Dawson said. “Davis was fucking with me. You don't really think much of these details when you have bodies willing to roll up their sleeves and volunteer. I suppose I thought it was strange, I mean you don't often see ‘one' in a street address, but it didn't concern me. Davis volunteered off and on for almost three and a half years. He was getting us funding. I never had reason to go over to his house. We weren't buddies.”

Now McKelvey sat on the stool at the bar, trying to line up the bits and pieces. It was now obvious that Davis Chapman—or whatever his real name was—had used the immigrant resource centre to get Donia Kruzik set up. Davis Chapman worked in some capacity for the “government”. Donia had been found murdered in Tim Fielding's apartment. Donia's boss, Bojan Kordic, had been murdered. Tim Fielding had stepped into the middle of something that was beyond the experience of McKelvey's time on the force. What was the objective here, the motive?

As McKelvey sat thinking, his eyes glanced to a man sitting at a small table beneath a black and white portrait of James Joyce. This was the same bearded rounder he'd seen in the bar a couple of times over the past week. The man was not doing a very good job of hiding the fact that he was looking at McKelvey.

TWENTY-SEVEN

M
axime had fallen asleep on his bed at the Royal York after making contact with his office in Lyon. The time difference, about five hours, meant that his support staff had to be available at all hours of the day and night. Such was the life of a young officer looking to make the grade. Maxime had certainly paid enough dues to earn his tenure. When he lifted his head from the floral bedspread, the digital clock read quarter past nine. At first he wasn't sure if it was morning or night. The curtains were sufficiently multi-layered to block out all natural light. He blinked and reached for his wristwatch on the night table. As he slipped it on his wrist, he was happy to note that it was still evening.

He had dozed off in his jeans and his dress shirt. He paused in the bathroom long enough to wet his hair and splash some water on his face. He smiled as he recalled the brief conversation he'd had with someone at the Toronto airport upon his arrival. He had been looking for the toilet. The young woman had smiled and said, “The washrooms?” Yes, he supposed he would need to wash as well, but what he was really interested in was a toilet.
La
toilette.
It was all just a matter of nuance, he thought. Much like police work or being in love. Or, he hoped, being a father.

He put his coat on and headed down the hallway to the bank of brass-fronted elevators.

McKelvey sat there at Garrity's for a long time thinking, looking but not looking at the bearded man sitting alone. He had a last swallow of his fourth beer and got up. He was halfway to being full-fledged intoxicated. Everything on him, pressing down, these traps of his own setting. On his way past the bar, he leaned in and asked Huff if he still kept that umbrella under the bar.

“Sure,” Huff said, and smiled. “Are you expecting rain on the long trip home?”

McKelvey took the umbrella and tucked it along the inside of his left arm. He gave Huff a wink and headed out of the bar. On the street, he walked briskly past his building then ducked down the alleyway between the condo and the sushi restaurant beside it. He waited a beat. Then he heard it, as he'd somehow expected, his cop's instinct still firing on a few cylinders. The door to Garrity's opening, letting the soft Irish music bleed into the street. Footsteps. He waited, the umbrella in his hand like a night stick. He hugged the side of the building and listened. It sounded as though someone had paused at the door to his condo. Then they continued on, closer now, steps from the mouth of the alley. McKelvey let the dark figure pass by just a few steps before he turned to look down the alley, and he was there, right there, the same rounder from Garrity's with his shaggy black goatee and his oilskin crop coat.

“Looking for me?” McKelvey said, and he stepped from the bricks of the building, the umbrella still hugging his forearm.

“Your name McKelvey?” the big man said.

McKelvey didn't hesitate—not when someone on a dark street was asking your name. He stepped in, swinging the umbrella out and upwards the way they'd been trained to do with their police batons, a tool he'd used on the streets and in the housing projects, an extension of his will. The curved wood handle caught the stranger hard on the side of his jaw, and he went down, sloping sideways like a buffalo felled by an arrow. As he hit the sidewalk and teetered there, McKelvey became aware of the man's sheer bulk, the heavy upper body and thick shoulders, and it summoned images of prison weight pits. McKelvey understood he had no chance against the man if he allowed him to get to his feet again, so he came in quickly from behind and put the umbrella under the man's neck, then pulled back hard with a knee to the back for leverage, choking him.

“You looking for me?” McKelvey said. “What, did I arrest you ten years ago and you want to square things away, is that it? Who the fuck are you anyway?”

The man was on his knees, and he used one hand to fight the pressure of the umbrella at his neck, and with the other he reached back and fought for purchase against McKelvey's leg. The man's grip was strong. McKelvey felt his foe's energy surging with the adrenalin, knew he would pull up from the sidewalk within seconds. And then, toe to toe, it would be McKelvey who would find himself on the losing end of the equation. He pulled back with all of his weight, and the man's arms flailed, then he was pulling up, this great wildebeest rising from the concrete.

McKelvey was shucked off like a kid wrestling with his father, and he fell backwards, the umbrella gone from his grasp. He looked up at the city sky, dark and glowing with halos of street lamps. It was happening so fast, this action, and it occurred to him briefly that he was about to die here on the street in front of his building. From the corner of his eye he saw a third figure coming in, running across Front to the alley. The man was of small stature, but he bent low at the waist and came in with his hands held by his jawline as though he'd had some boxing lessons. He walked into the rounder's heavy swings like a log being pushed into a wood chipper, and the punches from the bigger man either failed to land or had no effect. The new stranger came in with his chin tucked into his neck, and he delivered two or three hard jabs, pistons of bone, and the rounder was dropped for the second time, flat on his ass on the sidewalk.

The smaller man went to jump in with his foot, but McKelvey called him off. The man stepped to the side, and his face, for the first time, was washed with the yellow light of the lamps. McKelvey's mind clicked. He'd seen this man before. Yes. That was it. It was the man who had knocked on his door looking for Giuseppe just that afternoon. He was sure of it.

He turned his attention to the rounder. “Who are you?” McKelvey asked.

The big man sat up, rubbed his jaw, and turned and spat a little blood on the sidewalk. He brought fingers to his mouth, fiddled inside, and pulled out a tooth.

“I used to run with the Blades,” the man said, catching his breath. “Pierre Duguay sent me on a mission…he wants you to know… ”

“Wants me to know what?” McKelvey said. He had picked up the umbrella and was tapping it against his palm like a nightstick. Old habits.