‘I’ve had a few but I can still walk a straight line. Won’t wobble much.’
Émile Cinq-Mars silently rehearsed the comment to himself to preempt any colleague’s potential concerns. He had a buzz on, although not a pleasant one. He did not feel well.
The constable from the SQ was driving him.
‘How bad, tell me, how bad do I look?’ he asked the junior cop. ‘Be honest.’
‘You kinda get by, sir. Just don’t talk too loud. Don’t drive. Don’t sing, you know? Try to sit still.’
Excellent advice. He made a note to himself to take down the officer’s name. He might want to know him someday, when sober.
‘Gum in the glove box,’ the younger man let him know.
Cinq-Mars helped himself to a stick of Juicy Fruit.
‘It’s not what you think,’ the SQ cop thought to tack on.
‘I have no opinion on the subject. Lots of reasons to keep gum in your glove box.’
‘Number one, my partner’s bad breath.’
‘Works for me,’ Cinq-Mars quipped.
‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I.’ He could get along with this guy if ever they worked together. Which he supposed they were doing right now. ‘I won’t bother to tell you I’m not usually this far gone. But I’m not. Not usually. This intox—’ he burped ‘—icated. Sorry, what’s your name again?’
‘Dubroc, sir.’
‘Émile,’ Cinq-Mars stated, either a deliberate choice to be familiar or the whisky was working his tongue.
‘Yann,’ the cop responded in kind.
‘Well, Constable Yann Dubroc, what the hell is going on? Why has a prison guard been murdered? What’s up with that? The timing, I got to tell you, is inconvenient. Although I guess someone might argue that it’s not the dead woman’s fault.’
‘I know exactly zippo about it, sir. Will it be up to you to find out?’
‘Can’t say. Don’t know. Jurisdiction – that’ll be a bloody mess.’
‘How so?’
‘Figure it out. The SQ loses one of their own, what happens? Your guys insist on full control. Can’t blame your side for that.’
‘One of our own?’
‘You haven’t heard? The guard, a fly-in. In her regular job she’s SQ. I’m already looking into things, so I have a stake. The Mounties will say she’s a guard in a federal lock-up – the pen will make the same claim – therefore it’s their case. Municipal police in Joliette will want a kick at the can, too, but they’ll get the boot. They don’t have a prayer. Like I said. Messy.’
‘Maybe we can all work together. Cooperate.’
‘Ah, excuse me? Were you born a month ago? You look older to me.’
The officer possessed sufficient whimsy to laugh at himself. He wasn’t that naive.
They turned into a community of small cottages surrounded by manicured lawns and tidy gardens. Out-of-the-way Quebec towns, Cinq-Mars had noticed, occasionally went overboard in their zeal to imitate suburbia. Two more turns down side streets landed them on a crescent inundated with police vehicles, cherries flashing, and a burgeoning horde of neighbors and curiosity seekers. Five-year-olds who ought to have been in bed hours ago, and perhaps were, raced around. So many older folks were out with walkers, canes and wheelchairs that Cinq-Mars presumed the existence of an old age home in the vicinity. The elderly were ducking out at night to absorb a glimmer of excitement. He’d have to be careful making his way through the crowd not to knock anyone off their pins. That would be easily done, given that his own balance was imprecise.
Cinq-Mars tested himself along the edge of the cement walkway up to the house. Not too bad. Not quite a straight line. He passed muster, although he’d still flunk a breathalyzer.
The cottage was both small and sparsely furnished. Isaure Dabrezil had rented, he guessed, given the temporary status of her job description. She had furniture better suited to fit an even smaller apartment, which was probably what she’d left behind in her previous posting.
The large woman lay on the living room floor. Her final minutes had not all taken place there. To Cinq-Mars’s eye, she’d been engaged in a battle which had gone from the kitchen by an open back door, through the dining area and into the living room. A table was bumped aside. A couple of chairs upended and plates smashed. Knick-knacks were scattered across the floors. A sofa chair, on its side, spilled cushions. Gripped in the victim’s hand, a fireplace poker had been seized as a desperate measure, a valiant failed attempt at self-defense. Blood across all three rooms. Most of it on the carpet where she died. She’d bled out from several wounds, any one of which may have been fatal. Knife wounds, obviously, or from another sharp object. She’d fought, the mess caused by the fury of her response. A loud, raucous fight. Knowing how robust and muscular a woman she had been, she’d been met by an overpowering counterforce. Cinq-Mars computed a minimum of two attackers against her. Men, he presumed, but no matter the gender they were probably huge themselves and strong to have taken her on and survived.
He suspected her attackers had absorbed a few blows from her. Injuries that might show.
He paused a moment over the body, not as a policeman on duty, but as a fellow traveler, wishing this one a bon voyage to her next destination.
An abbreviated silence. ‘Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars.’ His name spoken kindly. He turned to face the warden for the Joliette Institution for Women, Agatha Paquet. The severity of her dress and grooming – hair pulled tight to her head and snapped into a bun – and her authoritative demeanor were contradicted by an inherent gentleness to her gaze. Her grey eyes, if not her comportment, were naturally expressive. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘I’ve had a few—’ he started to say, then stopped himself.
‘Are you all right, Sergeant-Detective?’
‘I’m fine. Bear with me if it seems otherwise. This is one helluva thing, Warden. Sorry for your loss.’
‘It’s barbaric. I thought you should be here – in case it reflects on your current investigation.’
‘To be determined, of course.’
‘Of course.’
An SQ detective, not knowing him, probably mistaking him for a forensics technician or a morgue attendant, physically bumped him aside on his way back to the body. A solid shoulder thump. Cinq-Mars considered breaking his arm but now did not seem the right time and he considered that it might be the whisky egging him on. Instead, he exercised his position there by introducing his SQ driver, Constable Yann Dubroc, standing beside him in uniform, to the warden. That got the SQ detective’s attention; the man gathered that he’d been obtuse. He still didn’t know who Cinq-Mars could be, but he was not whom he assumed. He’d be careful next time, perhaps ask permission to play through. Cinq-Mars let him stew about that as he had more pressing concerns.
‘Warden, does this connect directly to Flo’s murder, do you think? Any reason to believe they’re related?’
‘It’s your investigation, Sergeant-Detective. You tell me. A guard spent five days a week among eight inmates. Nine women in total, now two are dead.’ She made a slight gesture to lead him away from the SQ detectives and forensic technicians. Alongside a window blocked off by ceiling-to-floor curtains, she resorted to a husky confidential whisper. ‘Émile, I want us to understand each other. It’s time for that.’
‘Let’s.’
‘One inmate, now one guard, dead. This is on my watch.’
‘It is.’
‘I don’t have an investigative arm to figure out what the hell’s going on.’
‘You’d like me to be your arm?’
‘I’m left in the dark, otherwise. I don’t want that. You’ve been working on the inside. A head-start over anyone else who’s here now. My sense is, until we find out differently, this runs from the inside out. SQ officers will work it from the outside in. They’ll consult with me not at all, and if I’m right, that will get them absolutely nowhere. Then what? No resolution. Worst case, another death?’
‘On your watch.’
‘Yes, on my watch. I won’t apologize for caring about the institution on my watch.’
‘Sorry. I will apologize. I’ve had a few.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I can still walk a line. Don’t worry about that.’
‘Cinq-Mars, what are you talking about?’
He put a hand up, more to stop himself than her question.
‘Pull yourself together,’ she advised him, whispering still. ‘Nobody says you have to be sober off the job. But if you’re a drunk, keep it to your fucking self, all right? Shape up. You’re my only option.’
‘Not a drunk,’ he protested quietly. ‘Just, you know, at the moment, a little. Tipsy. Listen, if you can use your influence—’
‘I have virtually none with respect to these assholes.’
He liked this woman. She understood the lay of the land. ‘I might not say this if I was sober.’
‘Go ahead. Say.’ She was growing impatient with him.
‘Finagle. Deceive. Generate a few white lies. Impress upon the SQ that you need to be appraised of every aspect of their investigation—’
‘They won’t go in for that.’
‘Doesn’t matter. If you trick them into believing that you will insist on the Mounties taking over the case, and convince them that the Mounties will do so, they will cooperate. With you. A little.’
‘After that, you want what they say to me turned over to you.’
‘Aren’t we working together? I know the SQ. They’ll hold stuff back. They might pass along material they assume is irrelevant when it’s not. They’ll miss things. Screw stuff up. I’ve learned to count on it.’
‘You won’t miss things?’
‘Let’s be fair, being on the inside gives me an advantage.’ He seemed to drift for a moment, then come back. ‘Trouble is, I need to know about developments on the outside, too.’
Warden Paquet’s eyes slid across at that moment to Officer Dubroc, who drove him there, then back again.
‘Yes. He represents access,’ Cinq-Mars admitted. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
‘And I’ll take care of my part,’ she promised.
‘Who’re you?’
The question was inevitable. At least the right man was asking: the Investigating Officer for the SQ on this case.
‘Montreal Police Service. Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars. How do you do?’
‘Montreal?’
‘Also, your liaison with the penitentiary, authorized by the warden. I’m conducting a related investigation on the inside.’
‘Related how?’ The SQ detective was a swarthy, hirsute man, on the plump side although that may have been an effect of his genetic code. He looked fit despite the weight. A big boned, brawny man. Scruff beard. Neck hair poking from his shirt collar where he’d loosened his tie. His bushy eyebrows had been granted permission to grow wild.
‘Your victim was a murder suspect. One of many. But one of.’
‘Hate to break it to you, Montreal. That’s absurd.’
‘Why? Because she’s one of yours? I know that,’ Cinq-Mars told him, which caught the other man off-guard, forcing him to reappraise the outsider who stood before him. ‘Here’s the deal.’
‘We have no deal.’
‘Give it a minute. We will. If you copy me your dailies—’
‘In your dreams, Montreal.’
‘—in exchange, I’ll give back whatever I learn on the inside. Tit-for-tat.’
‘How about you keep me informed. Every scrap. Our dailies, I keep to myself.’
Cinq-Mars anticipated he’d offer along those lines. ‘The horsebacks will want to take this over,’ Cinq-Mars mentioned.
‘You’re too late. We’ve cleared it with the Mounties. They agreed to stand down.’ Having an SQ officer as a victim was different than having one as a suspect. The Mounties were willing to let the provincial police hold sway.
‘No, sir. Due respect. You cleared it with a staff sergeant somewhere, or a sleepy lieutenant who couldn’t be bothered. I’ll be informing the Deputy Commissioner of the situation here, as it stands. He will talk to your Head. Who will then have your balls pressed in a vise while you take a flying fuck off a trapeze. Which has got to be thrilling. At least, I imagine so.’ Sometimes he needed to talk in the lingo of other cops to get a point across. He could play that card. ‘The staff sergeant or the sleepy lieu will deny ever taking your call. His ass on the same trapeze otherwise. Check me out, Detective. Find the weight on my hip.’
The cop who had bumped hard into him earlier was listening to the talk intently, leaning in as though trying to grasp the intricacies of a chess match. The IO had not made his next move.
‘One more thing,’ Cinq-Mars added. ‘Your sidekick owes me one hell of a motherfucking apology.’ He immediately regretted saying that last remark. The whisky kept his tongue too loose.
‘Fuck that shit,’ the more junior detective declared. Also built solidly, he was the lightest and shortest of the three.
‘That doesn’t sound like an apology to me,’ Cinq-Mars said, not looking at him but at his superior. ‘Sound like it to you?’
‘What’s he apologizing for?’ the senior SQ officer asked.
‘Slamming into me.’
‘It’s a small room. Crowded,’ the offending cop maintained.
‘Next time, go around. This time, apologize.’
The three stood still in stalemate.
‘Clock ticking,’ Cinq-Mars told them.
‘You’ve been drinking,’ the IO noted.
‘On my own time. Punched out six hours ago.’
The IO chewed his lower lip a moment, then asked, ‘How does this work?’
‘We find a way. Let’s say that the driver you sent over—’
‘Dubroc?’
‘Is that his name? Let’s say he gives me an hour every couple of days to meet up. Sometimes downtown Joliette. Other times, the prison. I meet him at the gate. We exchange relevant news. What I get, I give back the same. You hold back, I follow your example. You know how it goes.’
The IO was nodding, as if they were coming to an agreement, but still delaying. ‘Tell you what. I’ll call your bluff, Cinq-Mars.’
‘Who’s bluffing?’
Turning to his associate, the IO directed him to ‘Call Borde. He knows Montreal cops. Ask about this guy. Let me know what he says. You don’t mind hanging on for a bit, Cinq-Mars?’
‘No problem.’ Before the junior detective dashed away, he added, ‘Say hi to Gabriel for me.’
The man stopped in his tracks. ‘What?’
Cinq-Mars addressed both men. ‘You’re calling Gabriel Borde? Say hello. One of my closest pals.’
He wanted to qualify his last remark, to tack on in the SQ, but didn’t. He figured that that quick self-correction indicated he was sobering up in a hurry.
The IO surrendered then, raising a hand to keep his junior in place. ‘All right, Montreal. We’ll see how this goes.’
‘Plus my apology.’
Both men looked at the guilty younger officer. ‘Fuck sake, I bumped into the guy. Fine. Sorry. What the hell. A little bump.’
‘Good enough?’ the IO inquired.
‘Adequate,’ Cinq-Mars confirmed.
Outside, he arrived at a different conclusion regarding his state of inebriation. No question that he’d been drinking too much, but he had also been eating poorly. The combination had disrupted his inner gyroscope, not strictly instigated by the Laphroaig. He reached that conclusion while stumbling on the walkway from the house when he tried, and failed, to tightrope along its edge. As he righted himself before hitting the ground, his stomach lurched. That wave train of hot dogs, poutine and whisky sashayed through him and was identified as the real culprit in pulling him off-kilter.
‘You OK?’ Officer Yann Dubroc inquired as he sorted himself out.
‘Never better.’ A feather might not knock him over, but an old-timer with a walker probably could. Those guys were around, too. He had to watch himself.
The crowds had not diminished, augmented now by broadcast news trucks and the general citizenry. A morgue van precipitated a few parents to gather up their teenagers and beat it home, but they were quickly replaced as word traveled around town even at this late night hour and over the airwaves. Cinq-Mars led Dubroc to a quiet patch. The younger man had no clue he was being led anywhere until the older one stopped short.
Dubroc noticed then their abrupt isolation. He figured out quickly that they were about to converse in private.
‘We could talk in the car,’ Dubroc pointed out.
‘Not ready to leave. I might want to replace you before I go.’
‘Replace?’
Cinq-Mars shrugged. ‘Depends. Say what’s on your mind, Yann. Get it off your chest.’
Cinq-Mars laughed a little at his own fumbled directions. The idea of what was on someone’s mind also being on his chest amused him in his current state. Still mildly tipsy.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ the officer inquired.
‘Good question. What you do is entirely up to you.’
‘Oh yeah? I don’t follow.’
‘You and me will talk. Regular basis. Your bosses will not cooperate. That’s a given. It’s in their DNA. The SQ will pass along as little as they can, pretend to make an effort. I will pass along to your bosses what I think might help them. Still, if I think the SQ will screw up my information, I won’t.’
‘So really, there’s no difference between you. No cooperation.’
‘You’re the difference. You come between the SQ and me. You will make decisions. If you hear something that you think I should know but your bosses don’t want me to hear, you decide to tell me or not. Works the other way, as well. Everything is up to you, Yann. If you have information that serves the cause of justice, but maybe not your superior’s territorial gravity, it’s your decision to pass it on or not. Good luck with that. Not saying it’s easy.’
Dubroc mulled everything over, which required a prolonged scratch to the back of his neck. ‘You don’t know me,’ he said.
‘I make snap judgments about people all the time. Most work out. Some don’t. For instance, I have recently decided on the woman I want to marry and I scarcely know her any more than I know you. Let’s hope it works out. That’s a bigger concern for me right now than you are.’
Dubroc was confounded again, until he realized that Cinq-Mars was either sharing a confidence or still drunk. He decided it was the former. ‘Good luck with that.’
‘Thanks.’
Their solitude next to a brambly bush attracted the attention of onlookers wondering who they might be and what they might be discussing. Warden Agatha Paquet also noticed them and strolled over. Blue and red flashing lights from patrol cars on the street rhythmically illuminated and alternated the color on their faces.
‘Warden,’ Cinq-Mars greeted her. Dubroc took a step back, a movement that the Montreal detective forestalled by raising a hand. The SQ officer hung on the periphery of the talk after that, listening in. The warden noticed that Cinq-Mars was admitting him to their chat.
‘Something you should know,’ Paquet said. ‘When you came here, you knew that Isaure Dabrezil was SQ, did you not? That’s why Montreal police were asked to be involved.’
‘Right. I knew that.’
‘You were told a bogus tale.’
He returned his imperious gaze. People usually hated it and he could tell that the warden did, too. He said, ‘She was marked up for insubordination, that’s what she told me. She alluded to the SQ being embarrassed if the reason for her suspension got out.’
‘Straight out-of-the-box bullshit.’
Cinq-Mars and Dubroc exchanged a quick glance and waited. Cinq-Mars dropped his contrary attitude.
The warden said, ‘Those are the official stories, that’s true, disguised as secrets. If folks get wind of what they consider to be a secret, they’ll believe it. What you thought was secret was a ruse. Isaure was a plant. She was never on my payroll. Only on the SQ’s. You can guess why.’
‘Abigail,’ Cinq-Mars concluded in a trice. No other option came to mind.
‘Specifically, Abigail’s money.’
‘You allowed this?’
‘Cinq-Mars, we’ve put cops next to prisoners since the cows came home. The difference this time—’
‘Isaure came in as a guard. Not as a fellow prisoner.’
‘In place long before Abigail got transferred here. Abigail’s smart. She would suspect all fellow prisoners as being potential informants. She would never suspect a guard who arrived months before she did. That was the idea, anyway.’
‘It’s elaborate, give you that.’
Paquet nodded agreement. ‘Not my plan. Given current events, I thought you should know. Powerful people, Cinq-Mars. Every side of the spectrum has an interest in Abigail’s money.’
He was beginning to fathom the possible dimensions.
‘A word,’ the warden said. She meant to speak to him beyond Dubroc’s ears.
Cinq-Mars nodded, and the junior policeman walked off a distance. Grateful to have been included for so long, he didn’t resent being dismissed at this stage.
‘The plan you spoke to me about?’ the warden whispered.
Cinq-Mars nodded, knowing her reference. ‘We’ll abort, I guess?’
‘Too late,’ the warden stipulated.
‘Why say that?’
‘She arrived today. After you left. She’s in place.’
‘Fuck.’ The reaction escaped him. His whisky tongue. ‘What happened tonight changes everything.’
‘She’s in danger. I hope you chose well.’
‘We can still pull her out.’
‘You convinced me the first time. We need her. Now more than ever. Dangerous or not.’
‘Fuck,’ Cinq-Mars muttered under his breath again, this time deliberately.
‘Language,’ the warden admonished him. Then warned, ‘Proceed with caution, Cinq-Mars, and goodnight.’