The quick hop from the church to the poste crossed from an impoverished neighborhood into the lap of affluence. A fence partitioned the adjacent communities, which helped declare the disparity as jarring. An immigrant ghetto next door to the nouveau riche. Inner-city congestion slapped alongside suburban entitlement. Back alleys vanished, backyard lawns appeared. This time, driving through, Cinq-Mars paid little heed to his surroundings.
He felt vexed. In failing to persuade the minister to relinquish her crusade, he had let his friend Armand Touton down. Compounding that regret, he could not reach the old man, who’d gone fishing. He considered an impromptu appearance before the parole board himself, where he’d either beg or polish up a lie. One choice was pathetic, the other illegal. Grumbling to himself, he parked his Volkswagen Bug in his poste’s backlot, entered the yellow brick building, and sat at his desk. He didn’t notice his new partner approaching until the last second.
Geoffrion hovered, perplexed.
‘Nord?’ Cinq-Mars inquired.
‘I’m in shit.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I was getting along with Captain Delacroix, thought so, then wham-o.’
Ah. Sometimes the captain came across as schizophrenic. ‘Wham-o how?’
‘Beats me.’
‘You were having your toast and jam, then what?’ He expected the sarcasm to slip by unnoticed, and it did.
‘That was over an hour ago,’ Geoffrion pointed out. ‘I was looking into robberies – can’t find any similar to ours. I went out for a break, and when I came back, he marched right up to me and told me to eff off.’
‘He told you … Nothing else?’
‘Yeah, something else. In front of everybody. He told me to screw my grandmother.’
Even for Delacroix, that was beyond the norm.
‘I’ll talk to him,’ Cinq-Mars said.
‘What did I do?’ Geoffrion bellyached. He was quick, as Cinq-Mars noted earlier, to turn on himself.
‘What’s bugging him, Nord? That’s the question to ask.’
Delacroix could be illogical and prickly; this occasion appeared to be more than that.
‘Hey, boss.’ He slumped down in one of the two visitors’ chairs in the captain’s office.
‘Welcome back to the Montreal Police Service, Sergeant-Detective. I presume you’ve been on leave of absence without pay?’
Cinq-Mars declined to engage, and asked, ‘Cap, what do you have against my new partner’s grandmother?’
They stared at one another while Delacroix’s adrenalin burned off. The captain shuffled papers from one side of his desk to the other without examining them.
‘Maybe that was out of line,’ he admitted.
‘His first day on the job. Plus, you softened him up with toast and jam. One minute, he thinks he’s landed in breakfast heaven, the next, he’s stepping off the roof.’
‘What roof?’
‘Any roof. Maybe one that’s not too high.’
‘He’s suicidal?’
‘Fragile. I was exaggerating, boss.’
‘He’s fragile? Fuck that noise. I’d prefer him to be suicidal.’
‘I’m still exaggerating.’
‘How am I supposed to know?’
From the get-go, Delacroix had always felt maligned by his officers. A stickler for the rules in an era when rules were being crushed, a teetotaler in a Quebec culture of drinkers, a puritan in a time of license and exuberance, he felt disconnected from the world around him. He tried to remedy his righteous inclinations by being aggressively gruff and profane among subordinates – he felt more like a captain when he behaved that way – although he never carried it off in a convincing fashion. Had he stopped to think, he might have noticed that he was closer in outlook to the spiritual bent of his Sergeant-Detective than he realized, but Delacroix never arrived close to that conclusion. Cinq-Mars poured whiskey down his gullet. He was single and smart. Delacroix never imbibed and resented the younger man’s freedom and brain power. His rampant insecurities commonly manipulated his better angels.
‘Maybe not fragile, either. Let’s say he doubts himself. Lacks confidence. We can leave grandma out of it.’
‘I don’t know his grandmother.’
‘That might be the point.’
Cinq-Mars was figuring this out. Delacroix had taken Geoffrion’s reputation at face value, something he was prone to do with anyone. He’d figured that Geoffrion could be a true subordinate. Not more clever than him, not braver or more successful, and that allowed him to extend the warm hand of friendship. Since then, something had undermined that initiative.
‘Sticking up for your new partner, Cinq-Mars, that’s so sweet. What’ve you been doing all day besides handing over our case to homicide?’
‘Sorry. The dead guy got in the way.’
‘He’s sorrier than you, I bet.’
‘Right now, he couldn’t care less. Has anything come in on that case? Are you privy? Has the victim been ID’d?’
‘I better be privy. Homicide should respect our turf.’
After a previous partner to Cinq-Mars had been shot – then taken early retirement – downtown consolidated the homicide unit. The brass upheld that the two events were not connected, a line not widely believed. Segregating the homicide squad had the unintended effect of granting detectives in the elite group a keener sense of privilege and superiority. No longer sharing office space with riff-raff detectives, they quit thinking of them as peers. The treatment Cinq-Mars received earlier in the day still rankled because it enforced that culture.
Delacroix pressed a magic button. Immediately, his secretary lounged in the doorway. Fern was perpetually caught in mid-pose, jutting a rather substantial hip. Cinq-Mars liked her. She was interested in important things and cordial. And yet, based only on a supposition, he didn’t want to know what she did during her off-hours. Fifty and heavyset, that jutting hip signaled an adventuresome spirit. A wild-side personality. She departed, off to fulfill the captain’s request for information on the morning’s events.
‘What happened,’ Cinq-Mars pressed him, ‘with Geoffrion?’
‘First day at his new desk, he’s sneaking around.’ The adrenalin burn was returning. ‘I was coming back from a piss, happened to glance out to the parking lot. Who’s there but our new guy. I get it. He smokes in private. But that wasn’t it.’
‘What was he doing?’
‘Drinking.’
‘Drinking?’
‘He met a guy. Not a cop. A young guy, rough around the edges, that type, who gets out of his car and passes a flask to Poof-Poof. They share a couple of pops. First day at his new desk, Cinq-Mars. Boozing it up in the parking lot. A secret meeting with a mister nobody.’
‘You didn’t ask who it was?’
‘I told him to bugger his grandmother instead. Why not?’
‘Yeah, that was helpful. I’ll ask him.’
‘He’ll lie. They all do, these pricks. You know the type. These boozers.’
‘Unless he’s not a prick.’
‘Spare me the bullshit tale! I saw him with my own two eyes.’
Fern struck a hip against the doorjamb again and recited news off a fax. ‘No identity on the dead man, Captain. Homicide found nothing on his person, no wallet, nothing in the apartment to identify him. Neighbors said he goes by Willy. No last name. Weird, huh? Homicide is waiting on fingerprints. That’ll take longer than forever, and like always give us nothing.’
Fingerprints held great promise for the future; for now, a process in its infancy.
The secretary left the room, her heels clicking on the linoleum floor.
Cinq-Mars and Delacroix absorbed the news.
‘The corpse was a ghost before it became a corpse,’ Delacroix mused.
‘No surprise on the wallet,’ Cinq-Mars pointed out. ‘Stolen in the robbery.’
‘Nothing else lying around? No phone bill? What name is on the apartment lease? I hope the boys in homicide know their asses from their elbows on a Tuesday.’
‘Doubt it. Thanks, Cap. I’ll get back to you on Geoffrion.’
‘Don’t bother.’
Geoffrion ventured over as soon as Cinq-Mars reclaimed his desk.
‘Nord, the Cap gets nervy about stuff going on behind his back. I can’t blame him, but he overreacts. Also, he really hates drunks. Pathological with him. I have a whiskey now and then, or a beer. I’m not a drunk, not by a longshot. According to the Cap, I should sleep in the drunk tank if I even think about having a nip. You? You were drinking with a stranger in the parking lot. On the job. He no longer wants to see your face unless it’s immersed in a toilet bowl – or you have a damn good explanation. Which I doubt, by the way.’
‘I have an explanation. Why do you doubt it?’
‘Sharing a bottle in the middle of the day? Looks bad, Nord.’
‘The guy? In the lot? Son-in-law. He dropped by to celebrate. Him, on the birth of his second child yesterday. Me, on being a grandad for the second time. My first granddaughter.’
He was beaming now. Cinq-Mars stood to shake his hand. He then announced the news to the dozen or so cops and half-dozen civilians in the room. His timing impeccable, as Delacroix happened to emerge from his office. ‘Everybody! Our new man, Nord Geoffrion – he’s not related, by the way – became a granddad last night for the second time.’
The man was swiftly engulfed with well-wishers. Cinq-Mars was stepping aside to let it happen when a thought clicked. He recorded the moment by tapping two fingers against his right temple, then crossed the room and intercepted Delacroix. They retreated to his office.
‘The guy in the car lot?’ Delacroix asked, sheepish now. ‘His son?’
‘In-law. We misinterpreted this one, Cap. But it gave me a jolt. Look, I need to go back to the crime scene. I’ll wait a day, not to push it. I need you to provide cover, in case homicide finds out I’m playing in their sandbox. Thanks to you, I had an idea.’
‘Thanks to me?’ Words he’d not heard before.
‘Mistaken identity. You missed on Nord’s son-in-law. I whiffed on the scene this morning. I accepted what my eyes showed me, what my ears told me, yet totally missed the obvious. Also, you called the corpse a ghost. Maybe you weren’t the first to do that.’
‘Can you try, Cinq-Mars, to make sense?’
‘Too complicated, Cap. I need to go back there. Bear with me. Give me cover?’
Captain Delacroix shrugged, sighed, and thought about it. ‘If it comes up, you lost your keys. If that doesn’t wash, I’ll say it was your senses. Nobody will have trouble believing that.’
Was the man trying to tell a joke again? Hard to say. If so, it was for the first time within earshot of his newly minted Sergeant-Detective.
Cinq-Mars thanked him. Captain Delacroix had no clue what for.