(The deal)
Sergeant-Detective Yves Giroux fiddled with a shirt button that, undone, exposed a disagreeable montage of protuberant belly. Cinq-Mars bumped his way past him and selected a booth in the restaurant’s far corner. Giroux slid in next to him, leaving the opposite banquette free, only to have the button disassemble again.
‘They won’t show,’ Cinq-Mars stated flatly. He felt pinned in place. ‘Sit across.’
‘Smart money took the bet, kid. I dropped a silver bullet in Frigault’s tray.’
‘I’m not that gullible.’
‘Did I mention my note? Show up or red ants will hike across your arse.’
‘Right. That’ll make them jump to it.’
‘Suit yourself, if you don’t believe. Your funeral.’
Sergeant-Detective Paul Frigault and Detective Marcel Caron did arrive. Not far off schedule, either.
‘Heard you’re buying,’ Caron remarked in his gravelly voice. Perhaps the morning hour exaggerated its tone.
‘Worth it to see your faces,’ Giroux implied.
Cinq-Mars got over his initial surprise that they showed up. He was no longer impressed. To ensure that their fellow detectives arrived for a meeting, his partner had bribed them with a free breakfast.
‘What about our faces?’ Frigault demanded. Itching for a scrap. The waitress came by and took their orders. She remarked that she was glad the new guy ate solid food.
Coffee was a foregone conclusion. She put mugs down and a second server poured.
‘Like I said,’ Giroux advised them, ‘my new partner will open your eyes.’
Cinq-Mars knew the comments impeded his proposal.
‘Anytime you’re ready, kid,’ Frigault invited.
If he asked these men to never call him ‘kid’, they’d never call him anything else. Cinq-Mars was at the table to make a deal, which meant devising a trade. On the spot, he adjusted his list of what he required in return for his offer.
First, he posed a question. ‘You heard about the homicide last night?’
‘Confessing?’ Frigault put to him. ‘Why’d you do it? Was it the wife?’
Caron picked up the thread, his voice as gnarly as tree bark. ‘I get it. She said no. You were down on your knees. Full beg. Weeping, gnashing your teeth. The husband comes home and curses you out for not being a man. At that point, I don’t blame you, you shoot him in cold blood. Tell me I’m wrong.’
‘Twenty to life,’ Frigault summed up. ‘All because the gal said no.’
‘Why do homicide cops fantasize about murder so much?’ Cinq-Mars asked.
‘Oh goodie. A riddle.’
‘Give the kid a break,’ Giroux butted in, bailing him out for once. ‘What’s coming, I’m telling you, is the look on your faces. The first time a woman says yes to you, if it ever happens, that’s the look. I can’t put a dollar sign on it. Why I’m paying for breakfast.’
The pair of homicide detectives couldn’t fathom this – for some incomprehensible reason, Giroux was buying breakfast. Wary, they kept their guards up.
‘Armand Touton and the Night Patrol,’ Cinq-Mars started up again, ‘caught the case last night. Touton himself, in person. He’s not doling it out. Next step, he’ll tie that murder to our robbery. Not hard. The same house. After that, he’ll tie our robbery to your murder. Fingerprints the link. Also, the loot from the robbery was left in the dead guy’s car. Bottom line: Touton and the Night Patrol walk away with the whole shebang for themselves. Our poste gets nothing. They take their murder, your murder, and the burglary. Yves and me go back to bicycle theft, where you think we belong, but you go back to praying that a wife will slice-and-dice her husband so you can root around for body parts. Except it’s a fantasy. Instead, you read the headline news. You’re not in the story. Guys, you know this dance. You know the tune.’
‘Touton has you by the short hairs,’ Giroux piled on. ‘You don’t have the weight to stop him.’
‘Nobody does,’ Cinq-Mars confirmed.
Frigault and Caron glanced at one another, then stared back at Cinq-Mars.
‘Grim news, hey boys?’ Giroux egged them on in their misery. ‘Wait for what’s coming. That’s not the half. Your faces. I wish I had a camera to take the picture.’
‘I’m going to eat the eggs you’re paying for,’ Frigault told him, his tone mildly threatening. ‘The bacon. But enough about our faces.’
Giroux held his hands up in an attitude of mock surrender.
Food was arriving, and they broke off their talk as the plates were put down. Cinq-Mars bit into his bagel and cream cheese while chewing on an afterthought. He had noticed Caron – the tall one with the fifth-rate Einstein hairdo and gravelly voice – taking a moment prior to commencing his meal. The tough talker, of all people, secretly said grace!
Religious in his own unique way, saying grace was something Cinq-Mars had let drop. The real surprise to him was his reaction to Caron. He had something on him now that one day, in some bizarre fashion, he could use against him. In the meantime, he chewed on the city’s great claim to fame, the Montreal bagel.
‘Go on,’ Frigault encouraged him. ‘What do you want to say?’
‘We brought the girl in for the robbery,’ Cinq-Mars reminded them, ‘but we can’t hold her, she’s underage. I’ve started a dialogue. She’s my responsibility until she’s turned over to youth protection.’
‘Turn her over,’ Caron stipulated. ‘Why not?’
The one who said grace before eating was the one who delivered the tough-guy remarks. Cinq-Mars found he was already using the man’s religious bent against him. He was taking Caron’s antagonism less seriously now.
‘More useful to keep a line of communication ajar.’
‘Are you a bleeding heart, Cinq-Mars? Are you sensitive? Out to save the world, one bad girl at a time?’
‘Given the two murders, the robbery, the attack on the girl’s house, keeping her under our jurisdiction is the better option. More to learn that way.’
‘Like you said,’ Frigault reminded him, ‘Touton’s in the driver’s seat. Winner takes all. The murder in the house puts him out front. Who he is – his weight – that does, too. Grapevine says the old boy’s retiring. I say we kill time until he leaves and get the case back then.’
‘That’s your plan?’
‘What else you got?’
Cinq-Mars and Giroux exchanged a glance. Time for their critical move.
‘Touton’s not giving up the case anytime soon. Let me tell you why.’ Cinq-Mars extracted a scrap of paper from a jacket pocket and read it aloud. ‘Savina Vaccaro Shapiro,’ he said. ‘I can’t keep track of names that aren’t French. The grieving widow. Her father is Giuseppe “Joe” Ciampini.’
The detectives on the opposite side of the table stopped masticating. They stared back at him with their mouths ajar. Not a civilized sight. Moments passed before they recovered sufficiently to chew and swallow.
‘Not the look I was waiting for, but I’ll take it,’ Giroux pronounced. He waved his fork. ‘The case is out of your league, guys. You don’t do Mafia. The kid here, that’s different. He does Mafia when he’s in the mood.’
Once again, Giroux’s interference was neither warranted nor welcome. Cinq-Mars’s body language demonstrated as much. Giroux shrugged and shut up.
‘What Touton does not know,’ the younger detective revealed, ‘is that I ran the fingerprints from the passenger-side door in your murder case.’
The breakfast guests looked puzzled.
Frigault spoke up. ‘We ran those prints. That gave us a connection to the house break-in.’
‘He’s talking about the smeared prints,’ Giroux interjected.
‘Those prints,’ Cinq-Mars confirmed. ‘Your lab said they were useless because they were smeared. My lab worked the edges of the smear and scored a positive ID.’
The two detectives opposite him had their mouths open again.
Finally, with a sliver of sarcasm, and perhaps one of admiration, Frigault said, ‘Your lab?’
‘Private access – let’s put it that way.’
‘And?’ Caron asked. In his mind, results outweighed method.
‘An ID. Local thug. If we look at the house again – dust for prints, this time in the bedroom – and if the guy’s thumbs and his little pinkie show up, that will make him first on the payroll for the house murder and the car murder. If you arrest, what does that do for your position on the case?’
‘You will request the comparison,’ Frigault told him. ‘Your lab and whoever’s. You’re a cop. It’s something called your duty.’ He could be a stickler for the rules when it suited him.
‘Duty, duty, but is it my case? Do I want to interfere with another cop’s case? Especially when that cop is Armand Touton?’
Frigault and Caron were beginning to grasp the train they were riding on.
‘He just joined us,’ Giroux put in. He flexed only one cheek while grinning. ‘He doesn’t want to step on anybody’s toes. Or on your knees. Or on your fingers while you’re clinging off a cliff.’
‘He has his own lab,’ Frigault reiterated. Then posed the obvious question, ‘What do you want, kid? What are you looking to get out of this?’
Cinq-Mars was direct. ‘We processed the dead driver’s girlfriend. She’s our thief.’
‘We talked to her first. Before you. You were horning in where you don’t belong. Maybe it got her house firebombed. How about we give that one a dry-run through the rumor mill?’
‘We talked to her in person,’ Giroux reminded them. ‘Face to face. Not on a bloody telephone.’
‘Hey! Nobody said it was our last conversation. Only our first. You went there off-duty – off-the-case. I see nothing here we need give up to you.’
Frigault and Giroux went at it. Cinq-Mars made eye contact with Caron, directly across from him. The man was waiting for the other shoe, or a fork, to clatter onto the floor. Cinq-Mars could tell that he knew it would.
As the two bickering detectives went silent, Cinq-Mars declared, ‘I want to keep the robbery case for Yves and me. Full charge. I also don’t want the thief turned over to youth protection. I’ll run her myself. The DPJ will wreck any chance she can help us. I will be the only officer responsible for her case. I’ll turn her over to DPJ if things go south, but that’s my call and mine alone.’
‘Sounds like you’re in love, Cinq-Mars,’ Caron said. Contrary to his words, his inflection indicated that he wasn’t being combative. ‘A horn-dog on? Woof, woof.’
Cinq-Mars restrained himself from telling Caron to say a Hail Mary for that.
‘In exchange?’ Frigault asked. He already knew what response was coming.
‘You get the hood’s name and a clear shot. If you make the collar, the car murder is yours. Play it right, you’ll be the daytime slugs on the house murder as well. A win-win. To top it off, like the cherry on a sundae, Giroux buys breakfast.’
The cops opposite him shared a nod and arrived at the right conclusion. They accepted the deal. But Cinq-Mars hadn’t finished enumerating his terms.
‘Another thing.’
‘Don’t push it,’ Frigault warned him.
How he approached the matter was critical. He had to accomplish an end-around before they knew what direction he was coming from. ‘The captain of the Night Patrol and me, we trace back in time. That’s also what makes this work. My helping him keeps you on the case. Out of our long history, Touton gets to call me “kid”. There’s stuff behind that. Life stuff. Death stuff. Cop stuff. I’m fine with it, and that’s all I’ll say.’
‘What’s he going on about?’ Caron was legitimately confused.
Frigault knew. ‘I’ll explain later,’ he told his partner. ‘We have a deal, Cinq-Mars. Not bad work, even if you do have a private lab.’
Giroux was the only one at the table beaming. ‘Your faces,’ he burst out. ‘Worth buying breakfast for.’
‘The name,’ Frigault demanded. The last detail to seal their deal.
‘Arturo Maletti,’ Cinq-Mars told him.
Highly credible. The two homicide cops knew him.