(At odds)
His mentor had secretly bestowed a parting gift upon Émile Cinq-Mars. Neither a plaque nor a wristwatch nor a commendation. Instead, Touton saw to it that his protégé showed up for his first day at his new poste sleepless, ragged, stinky, and drunk. Within minutes of his arrival, Cinq-Mars deduced the wisdom of his old boss’s plan.
‘Heard you were like some kind of priest,’ Sergeant-Detective Yves Giroux challenged. ‘A squeaky-clean saint.’
Giroux did not pose as a gallant figure. He wore his tie slackened. A protuberance of stomach sagged over his belt buckle, a slap of hairy belly often visible between buttons. He shaved at night, so he could arrive each morning with a five o’clock shadow intact. He had a habit of welling out his ears with his pinky, as if drilling into his brain, nor was he above intrusions into each nostril in plain view. He had a reputation for being loud, vulgar, and argumentative without cause.
Giroux had heard that the new man came from different weather, so on first meeting he was confused. The arrival’s sloppy appearance belied his good repute. He’d been forewarned that Émile Cinq-Mars was the moral equivalent of the Pope, that he’d not only think of himself as lead detective, but as judge, jury, and prosecutor rolled into one. He was holier than any thou. Giroux was prepared to receive a new partner who had it in for cops as much as bad guys, someone who might give him a ticket for spitting on a public street. And yet the man before him could barely sit up straight, his tie missing in combat, his shirt partially untucked. Telltale scents of whisky and body odor emitted from his pores. Unshaven, his hair in tangles, bleary-eyed, his general disposition a pathetic wilt, the young detective more closely resembled a derelict dipsomaniac than the keen-bean, tight-assed detective he’d been warned would be a millstone around his neck for the next year. Giroux vastly preferred this revised representation, instead of the Boy Scout he’d anticipated.
A windbreaker, even. Miles outside the bounds of protocol.
As if begging for a reprimand.
Cinq-Mars cottoned onto his advantage. He felt as poorly as he looked, and with the last quart of Glenfiddich merrily swishing through his bloodstream, he remained upright but only marginally functional. Still, Armand Touton had handed him a card to play. ‘The lights in here. Why so bright?’
‘Usually, it’s much brighter,’ Giroux attested. ‘And in case you’re interested, WE LIKE TO SHOUT!’
Both hands went to his temples to subdue the clamor. Looking up, he saw Giroux’s lips moving although no words above a murmur were coming out. ‘Pardon?’ he asked.
‘ARE YOU DEAF? ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF, DETECTIVE?’
Cops around the room stopped everything to look over.
Cinq-Mars held up his palms in a plea for mercy. He deduced that this was probably the preferred head start, better than arriving as a choirboy. If he was making a favorable impression, he owed it to Touton’s treachery.
‘Rough night,’ he murmured.
‘I hope she was good,’ Giroux said. He performed a gyration with his tongue that Cinq-Mars could have done without. ‘Rubber to the road, Detective. We pulled a case. OK to drive?’
Cinq-Mars nodded, but he wasn’t sure.
‘Breakfast first. Bacon, sausage, eggs. Tons of ketchup.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Does someone I know care? We’re loading you with coffee. The captain hates drunks. We don’t arrest drunkards here. We go straight to punishment. Dish out hardcore abuse. Better we get you out of here fast.’
Sergeant-Detective Yves Giroux had not been kidding about breakfast. He ordered a feast. Cinq-Mars endured the visual unpleasantness and stuck to coffee. He was hoping caffeine might pitch him through his day.
‘How’s the old man getting on?’ Giroux inquired.
‘Touton? Fine.’ He’d let news of the captain’s retirement travel the usual channels.
‘He sends you here to screw me? Think you have the dick for that?’
Answer a probing question with one equally intemperate. Basic. ‘Why would he want me to screw you?’
‘He’s one mother of a hard-ass prickster. That could be the main reason.’
Cinq-Mars thought as fast as his throbbing brain cells could manage. He could not agree with Giroux without belittling himself. The cop grapevine confirmed him and Touton as protégé and mentor, a connection he would not betray. But if he defended his old boss, things might quickly derail with his new one.
‘I agree with you there,’ he said, keeping Giroux in the dark. ‘He is who he is.’
‘I was on the Night Patrol myself,’ Giroux revealed. ‘Years back.’
‘He fired you?’ Ask a probing question.
‘Why think that?’ The man posed an equally intemperate question back. Giroux was also familiar with the basics, as though they’d both attended the school of Armand Touton. Both had.
‘Before my time. I don’t know.’
Giroux pulled the gooey routine with his toast again, dropping a concoction of toast and yolk and ketchup into his maw. Cinq-Mars looked away.
‘I quit on him,’ Giroux said.
‘Heard that. Can’t remember where. Something about wanting to extend yourself in the department. Now I remember. Touton told me. Same time I told him almost the same thing.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Is that what?’
‘Why he stuck me with you?’
‘Did he do that?’ Cinq-Mars knew his old boss had done so. Still, he preferred the bliss of ignorance. He swigged his coffee.
‘Maybe he wants to pull you back. Sent you to me to change your mind about being a real cop.’
‘You think being in the Night Patrol isn’t being a real cop?’
‘Heard it’ll be disbanded, soon as Touton goes. Ever hear that?’
‘That would be unconscionable.’
‘Un-what? Un-conscionable? Where are you from, Cinq-Mars, the Ivory Fucking Tower?’
He tried to suppress his elevated vocabulary around cops, without much luck. Like an accent, his language trailed alongside him wherever he went, sometimes to his advantage, often not. Within police culture, which was changing too slowly for his liking, he was frequently caught out.
‘You might as well hear it from me,’ he told his new boss. ‘I attended university. I graduated. Not veterinarian school, although I specialized in the care of farm animals. You don’t like it, I don’t care. You want to joke about it? Be my guest. All I ask is that you be original because I’ve heard every bad joke going.’
‘I thought it was seminary school you went to.’
So he’d done some research. ‘Do I look like a priest to you?’
‘Dog shit in hell’s kennel is what you look like to me, kid. I can barely stand the sight of you, not to mention the stink. Anybody ever tell you that you have one helluva huge honker? My God. How do you keep your head from tilting forward and getting your nose wedged in the ground? You want to watch it going through a door sideways. Always, straight on. Don’t turn your head in a gunfight, either. You’ll get that schnoz blown right off. Don’t present a target like that. In a gunfight, gently insert your nose up the crack of your ass and then shoot. Never show your silhouette. Now, pay up. We’ve got a case.’
‘Pay up? You had breakfast. I had coffee.’
‘Do the honors. Incidentally, if you blow that thing, use a towel, not Kleenex.’
Catching up to him outside, Cinq-Mars said, ‘Silhouette’s a big word.’
‘Go fuck a wombat.’
In his thirty years, Cinq-Mars had never registered exactly what a wombat might be. Some sort of Australian animal or bird or something? Intuition told him that Giroux probably didn’t know, either.
In the car, the senior cop recited an address in the Town of Mount Royal and sketched the scant details known to him.
‘Burglary. Overnight. Discovered this morning. You know what that means.’
‘Fill me in.’
‘A scam.’
‘People don’t get robbed?’
‘They do. Then the victims, the rich ones, take advantage. In an upscale neighborhood, count on it. Maybe there’s a robbery, maybe not. If not, jewels and cash went missing. Jewelry is easy to tuck away until insurance pays, then the bracelets and diamond rings magically reappear. It’s a fucking miracle. Not that anybody’s checking by then. Extra cash was on hand to pay a contractor under the table, that’s what they say, even though there’s no evidence that work got done. Of course, the television wasn’t taken, because the victim wants to watch his favorite shows.’
‘What if there was an actual robbery?’
‘Shit happens. That case, electronics probably left the house, plus the jewelry and cash. Again, the cash was at least four grand, in a drawer in the kitchen. They keep that much lying around in case a door-to-door salesman comes by selling encyclopedias. The jewelry, maybe it was worth three grand – suddenly it’s eighteen, nineteen, never a round number. Like that’s supposed to fool us. They feel they deserve something for their double trouble.’
Cinq-Mars bit. ‘What double trouble?’
‘The aggravation of being robbed, then cops taking up their precious time. I hate them. They make us their accomplices in crime.’
‘I see.’
‘You will see if you don’t.’
Cinq-Mars slowed down to take a corner. They wended through an upper middle-class neighborhood – ‘wealthy’ to some, although old money would sneer, call the people here nouveau riche. Big houses, modest properties. Fat mortgages.
‘What do we investigate in a case like that? The robbery or the fraud?’
‘A robbery’s a reported case. It’s on the books. The fraud is make-believe, it doesn’t exist in our crime stats at the end of the year. Are you here to break my balls, Cinq-Mars? Did you bring your own hammer or expect me to provide one?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘Touton sent you. That’s a known fact.’
‘Touton’s retiring.’ He might as well reveal it. Pick up a little mileage from the news.
‘Get out.’
‘He’s packing it in. I’m not here on his behalf. He has no interest in you, me, or anybody else. He’s handing in his badge.’
Giroux reflected on the news. His eyes shifted rapidly from the road to Cinq-Mars and back again.
‘Then why the hell did he ship you to me? That leaves only one option.’
‘I’m not seeing it.’
‘He expects me to educate you.’
‘That I don’t see at all.’
‘You don’t have to. It’s not going to happen. Not in any way he might expect.’
Cinq-Mars pulled up against a curb and switched off the ignition. The house where the burglary took place was a two-story brick colonial with a small manicured front yard. Two-car garage. Buick out front.
Giroux stalled Cinq-Mars, tapping his wrist. ‘This is how an insurance scam works. Victim files for extra. That gets shared three ways. Adjustor, victim, cop. Foolproof. Tamper-proof. Cop-proof.’
‘I’m not taking a share.’
‘Did someone offer? Live on Poor Street, no skin off my dick. And I’m not circumcised. I ask one favor. If you wind up in the morgue someday soon, don’t think you’re the first cop to die under strange circumstances. Don’t be that naive.’
Cinq-Mars looked at him. His new partner was gazing down the street and over the fence into the neighboring community known as Park Extension. He had to ask, ‘Did you just threaten me, Detective?’
‘A killer will kill, that’s what I say about that. A serious killer never threatens. Threats are for fools.’
‘Then you know where I stand,’ Cinq-Mars tells him.
‘Where’s that?’
‘At no time did I threaten you.’
‘So we’re even. I’m pulling your leg. You know that, right?’
Cinq-Mars had no idea.
‘Admit it. You think I’m a dirty cop with his fingers in the pie. The apple, the cherry, the lemon meringue.’
Cinq-Mars offered back a faint shrug.
‘The strawberry rhubarb tempts me, that’s about it,’ Giroux said, leaving Cinq-Mars mystified, his prior suspicions put on hold.
They trundled out of the car. Direct sunlight caused Cinq-Mars to squint. On the crossing street before them, where a fence and a hedge separated the street from traffic on Boulevard l’Acadie, a patrol car whipped by. Then evidently pulled up out of sight, judging by the windy roar of its tires followed by silence. Giroux shrugged, and nodded, granting permission for Cinq-Mars to walk down fifty feet to look around the home that blocked their view. A second patrol car was on the scene. Between them an unidentified vehicle sat parked. When Cinq-Mars hung on for a longer look, Giroux joined him.
‘Big fuss for a speeding ticket,’ Giroux noted. ‘What’s your take?’
‘They ran the plates, found a prior,’ Cinq-Mars said.
‘Or the car reeks,’ Giroux suggested. ‘They checked the trunk. Our officers will be divvying up a kilo. Go. Help yourself to a baggie, Cinq-Mars. I’ll wait.’
He had no way to determine what was bluster with this man and what, if anything, was felonious. ‘I’ll take a pass on that.’
‘Good. I’d arrest you otherwise. Come on. Let’s check out our scam artists.’
‘They might be victims.’
‘In whose world?’
They turned their backs on the scene and crossed over to visit the house where a woman had reported being burglarized.