As if they were darkened ships off-loading contraband at sea, detectives Émile Cinq-Mars and Henri Casgrain transferred cases now and then. The lack of overlap on shift changes made it difficult to grab a case when ready for bed – often the situation for Casgrain – or hungry for a meal at a long dayshift’s end – a typical circumstance for Cinq-Mars. Crooks rarely timed their operations to suit their pursuers.
Casgrain was a bald-headed man with a full brush mustache and an elongated visage. His cheeks were concave. He matched Cinq-Mars in height – north of six feet – except that a severe slope to his shoulders and a stooped posture left the impression that he was shorter. Cinq-Mars wondered if he’d fractured a vertebra or sustained a neck injury, but the stoop was congenital. While the posture made him appear dopey, Cinq-Mars knew his colleague to be both wickedly smart and convivial. As importantly, he was a man of character. He coached hockey teams in winter, baseball in summer. In contrast to their dad’s impairment, his three boys were enthusiastic athletes. Cinq-Mars was inclined to trust cops who were community guys and family-oriented that way, and he trusted Casgrain.
Lately, the attitude struck him as ironic, as he himself was not community-oriented, had no progeny, and was bereft of feminine companionship.
Cinq-Mars never shook hands with cops on the job, it wasn’t done, but Detective Henri Casgrain was the exception. Their handshake conveyed mutual respect. Both men messed with the bad guys yet stayed clean. As well, neither admired the day-to-day drudgery contributed by their peers, even when diligent. They preferred to stab routine with inspiration.
‘Another rung up the ladder, Émile. Hope your feet are on the ground.’
‘My head sleeps on one cloud. I put my feet up on another.’
‘I bet. Congratulations, bud.’
Casgrain was one man he could expect to be sincere.
‘Thanks, Henri. You’re next.’
‘In a pig’s eye. Anyway, happy where I am.’
‘What do we have here?’
‘I was hoping to keep this one. Boss says no. Time and money, Émile, the two things we’re lacking on the midnight shift. Why is our budget constantly imploding?’
‘Somebody has sticky fingers, maybe.’
‘Hate to think.’
‘A break-in? More than one, I was told.’
‘We can walk through the janitor’s apartment. I want you to see this from the back lane.’
They faced a building five stories high, tall for the area. No route existed to get to the rear that did not require walking to either end of the block, as no gap existed between apartment buildings, duplexes and triplexes lining the street. They were stuck in the middle. Casgrain had more or less claimed the janitor’s basement quarters for his operations and guided Cinq-Mars through to the rear. The late arrival took an interest in what he observed, in what was out of whack. Back outside again, he moved onto the lane to gain a broader vantage.
Casgrain tested him. ‘What do you see?’
Exterior back stairs connected each floor. They served as fire escapes and gave access to the lane. Children played there, and folks washed their cars or changed the oil on their sedans. Men leaned over carburetors, contemplating the universe. Smaller buildings sported gardens and kiddies’ sandboxes, and often a few vines for making dreadful wine in the fall. Stairs that served the upper floors of duplexes were wooden and straight: kids loved sliding down the bannisters. Steel stairs spiraled between floors of the apartment buildings. On each metal-grate balcony, wooden storage huts, notorious as firetraps, cluttered the panorama.
‘From a distance, not much,’ Cinq-Mars concluded. ‘Except …’
‘You noticed.’
‘Hard to see in this light. Circles of glass, cut out from the windows in each door.’
‘Mode of entry. Seventeen times.’
‘Seventeen! Whoa. Somebody was busy.’
‘The storage sheds? Eleven broken into. The locks snipped.’
The newly-minted Sergeant-Detective crossed his arms over his chest and grunted. In the grand scheme of things, this was not a major heist – these were impoverished people – but the ambition behind the caper impressed him. A good one to catch first thing. ‘What else you got?’
‘A truckload of crazies. They’re all yours, Émile. I’m jumping off here.’
Easy to interpret his going-away smile as a warning.
He was learning what Casgrain meant by ‘crazies.’ As if the circus pitched a tent. He tried not to deploy obvious mnemonics, but as he went along, he needed to keep the many victims straight. Serge the Spitter, who sent gobs over the back railing like artillery fire. Florence the Hen, who literally kept her eggs in a basket and offered Cinq-Mars a pair. ‘Hard-boiled.’ She added, ‘Are you hard-boiled, Mr Policeman?’ Chloë the Carrot Stick. Skinny as a sapling and equally shy. She wasn’t a redhead, but her dress was orange. Youssef the Bombardier. Shirt off, big-bellied and wearing shorts, he’d caterwaul to anyone on the lane in a voice capable of drowning out the Blitz. He’d awakened the block to the robberies that morning. Constantly bellowing, he had nothing meaningful to impart.
Many had been robbed. In each instance, the thief removed a circle of glass from the back-door window, put it to one side to not be tromped upon, and reached through the hole to twist open a pathetic lock. On first impression, the busy crook went no further than the kitchens of each apartment. Pressed for time, he had little interest in waking the residents.
Looking down from the back balcony where Serge the Spitter was launching air-to-ground missiles, and from where the Bombardier lamented the collapse of civilization to a gathering of the curious, Cinq-Mars noticed a man with his hands on his hips gazing skyward. The gent was overdressed. He wore a long topcoat despite spring yielding to summer. His fedora, tilted back, ill-suited the times. After the cultural upheaval of the sixties, men stopped wearing hats, with the exception of hippies and artistes who discovered various unique forms of hat-wear. In Montreal, the fedora had become an endangered species.
One rested upon the head of the man now staring up at him.
A uniform stepped out from an apartment. ‘Man, do I have a looney tune for you.’
Cinq-Mars felt the need to break from this clutter of humans. Either that or he was reacting to being addressed as ‘man’ by a uniform. Time and place for familiarity. This was neither. ‘Later. I need to check something out.’
He’d grow into his rank. For the moment, he did not need to explain himself to a uniform. He headed down, getting into a rhythm. Upon his descent, he felt a bit dizzy. The whole way down, the man on the ground never took his eyes off him. He was older than Cinq-Mars, in his late fifties, with an expansive smile and watery eyes. He kept his hands on his hips as though in a perpetual state of inquisitiveness. Or befuddlement. He introduced himself as Geoffrion, and added, ‘Not related.’
Oh. Him. That guy.
Cinq-Mars knew of him: nothing complimentary, but nothing drastic. His full name was Detective Norville Geoffrion. His surname was famous in Quebec thanks to the local hockey legend, Bernard ‘Boom-Boom’ Geoffrion, now retired as a player. The detective was infamous for adding a rider when he was introduced – ‘Not related’ – to the point where colleagues might remark, ‘Don’t ask me. Go ask Not Related.’
An irony persisted, given that the two Geoffrions probably were related. The original family name, Joffrion, went back to the founding of Montreal, many decades before the Mayflower. A different nickname had been applied to him, a cruel disparagement of Boom-Boom. Behind his back, cops referred to him as Poof-Poof.
Cinq-Mars presumed the moniker had no merit. Nor did he care. What names were dismissive of him behind his back – ‘Damn Priest’, the least offensive – were water off a duck’s back. The same held true for any cop. What he drew from the general scuttlebutt regarding Norville Geoffrion was that he was not the crystal to give a chandelier its sparkle. No one knew how he made detective grade. Rumor held that he flunked out as a beat cop and some dope upstairs decided that he was best hidden from public view as a bumbling detective. Cruelties, Cinq-Mars assumed, borne from the usual run-of-the-mill grist mixed in with an occasional grain of truth.
Either way, his partner now, and junior in rank.
‘What tale here?’ Geoffrion asked.
‘Seventeen kitchens robbed. Along with eleven storage sheds.’
‘Kitchens? That’s rich. What were they after? Knives and forks?’
‘Purses. Not merely the contents, the entire purse. Six in all. A bunch of toasters.’
‘Toasters!’
‘Quite a haul, huh? Toasters, coffee-makers and radios. In every case, only kitchens. We’re sorting out what’s missing from the sheds. Assorted junk. A few tools.’
‘A busy man,’ Geoffrion deduced, which is what Cinq-Mars initially assumed.
‘Nope,’ he made known.
Geoffrion’s hands finally came off his hips.
‘Seventeen windows carefully cut out,’ Cinq-Mars explained. ‘Eleven locks clipped on the sheds. A boatload of small appliances and a few purses taken. A couple of wallets. Nobody did it on their own.’ Both men gazed up at the rear of the apartment block. ‘A coordinated gang. If I’m not mistaken, it was intended to be an exercise in precision, speed and cooperation among a high number of participants.’
‘An exercise?’ Geoffrion repeated. Cinq-Mars didn’t mind that he sounded skeptical.
‘Think about it. Park Ex is the juvenile delinquency capital of Canada. That’s statistically true. Also statistically true, couples here are the poorest of any neighborhood in the country. I heard it on the radio. Now, I can imagine delinquents getting together to rob a bunch of apartments, but their precision is hard to get my head around. And why choose such a poor neighborhood? Are they local themselves? Could be. But I’m saying, this was a dry run. These boys won’t be satisfied with toasters and purses going forward. The enterprise was too clever and too quick. A practice run, Norville. What they’re practicing for, I have no clue. They pulled it off like clockwork, and what comes next, whatever that is, will require clockwork, and, apparently, practice.’
‘Practice,’ Geoffrion repeated. He seemed to be admiring the building. Then he said, ‘I heard you were smart.’
‘Anything you hear inside the department, take it with a grain of salt,’ Cinq-Mars advised.
Whatever had been said about him should be deposited on the junk pile. He meant to suggest that he was willing to do the same with the tables turned.
The uniform who had wanted to speak to him about a ‘looney tune’ hadn’t relinquished the thought; he’d come down the stairs and was walking over.
‘What’s up?’ Cinq-Mars asked.
‘This woman, sad case, hard to make sense of her. Man, if what she says is true …’ The cop was in his early twenties. Little experience. Walking up to the investigating detective like this and interrupting his conversation with another superior indicated as much. Still, Cinq-Mars admired his persistence if not his choice of appellation.
First, he corrected him. ‘My rank is Sergeant-Detective.’ Then he encouraged him. ‘Go on.’
‘I think she was raped.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Because she says so. I think. Kinda hard to tell with her.’
That changed everything.