Homicide detectives were designated la crème de la crème. The toughest, the smartest, the best-dressed. Émile Cinq-Mars found many to be sharp and rarely disputed their acumen. Toughness was difficult to gauge, but he agreed that they wore expensive ties. Yet, lately, a few members of this elite band were coming across as smug dickheads. As if the burden of being la crème churned their contingent into stinky cheese.
Case in point: the pair that showed up to the crime scene. He’d had run-ins with them. Back when Cinq-Mars thrived under the wing of Captain Armand Touton of the Night Patrol; when he was an untouchable. Other cops resented that. Now that he was a suburban outcast, these two in particular were eager to sully his existence.
‘Cinq-Mars, how long does it take to find a stiff in a closet? Were you out sunning yourself? Humping an air mattress?’
‘You guys are called in after a body’s discovered. After a corpse is leaking maggots. The rest of us, we investigate the crime first. We open the closet door to see what’s inside.’
He was talking to Alfred Morin, a gold shield detective who, as of today, held less rank than him. Which made not a nick of difference. Morin was in homicide, so for him, everybody else could go fish or enjoy a colossal fart. His red hair indicated Irish descent, his ancestors among the thousands absorbed into the Québécois people during the hard times of potato famine and cholera in an earlier century. Irish kids who survived epidemics when their parents did not were generously adopted into rural French homes. Through time, the physical features of the French and the Irish blended, and on occasion, generations on, redheads returned.
Cinq-Mars had met Morin ten years earlier. He had not liked him then; less so now. Joining homicide, the man had not only graduated as an A-1 jerk, he’d proudly stuck his diploma on the wall. Had Morin been first on the scene, Cinq-Mars believed, the cadaver would never have been detected until the stench ripened.
‘Are you interested in what I put together?’
‘How many days off my life will it cost me?’ Morin asked.
‘Start over at point zero, then.’
‘I don’t need your permission, Cinq-Mars. Oh, excuse me, I meant to say: Sergeant-fucking-Detective Cinq-Mars. It’s time to run along. Look into bicycle theft. Somebody’s probably shoplifting socks. That should keep you busy.’
‘What about the toasters?’ Cinq-Mars asked him.
‘What toasters?’
‘You’ll find out, Detective.’
Let him hunt them down. He wasn’t going to warn him off Moira Ellibee, either. Let him work through the whole crew. With any luck, Morin might be spat upon by Serge the Spitter or have his eardrums pierced by Youssef the Bombardier.
‘Show me the stiff,’ Morin directed him. ‘Then get back to speedbump patrol. Make sure those old ladies slow down, hey. Don’t let them whack you with their canes.’
Morin did not have rank, but he had jurisdiction. He was working it to the limit. If Cinq-Mars pulled rank, some other clodhopper up the scale would arrive to verbally pepper-spray him. Not worth the trouble. He did as he was told: showed him the dead guy and departed.
Geoffrion had fared no better. He’d dealt with the senior detective of the pair who’d hosed him down for not wearing gloves. He pleaded that he’d been checking on stolen radios and coffeemakers; nobody had shown up dead when he first went through the building. Sergeant-Detective Jerôme LaFôret let him know that if he contaminated his murder case, he’d bust him down to clerical. A curious pathology. Cinq-Mars found it aggravating that both homicide detectives were inclined to piss on the shoes of every cop in the vicinity. Prone to anxiety, Geoffrion responded to them as they wished: he became unglued.
‘How did I contaminate? I didn’t touch nothing!’ he whinged.
‘Nord, don’t worry about it.’
‘My hands were in my pockets. Most of the time. You saw me.’
‘You might’ve touched a few clothes in the closet.’
‘Oh shit!’
‘And the phone.’
‘I’m dead.’
‘Nord. Nobody’s dusting a jacket for prints. You were careful with the phone.’
‘Right. Right. Why is he busting my balls?’
‘Good question. Focus on that. What’s his problem?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The point is, his problem is his problem. Not yours.’
‘He could make it mine. Seems like he wants to.’
Cinq-Mars gathered why some people called his new partner Poof-Poof.
‘I got your back, buddy. Relax.’
The look on Geoffrion’s face. As though no one had uttered a similar kindness to him in his lifetime. The glow – as if voted Most Popular in a high school yearbook.
‘Talk to a neighbor, Nord. Find out the victim’s name. Then we’ll beat it out of here.’
‘OK,’ Geoffrion agreed, his spirit returning. ‘Hey. You’re assuming something.’
Good that he noticed. ‘The victim, the tenant: probably the same person.’
‘We can’t be sure.’
‘His shoes. His suit. Perfect fit. They match other clothes in the closet. Find out his name. We’ll go from there.’
‘Where do we go? Not our case. Homicide will have a bird.’
‘Nord, think. The dead man had his toaster moved to a different room. Perhaps against his will. That’s outrageous. Where’s his radio? His wallet? Will we abandon him in his time of need, just because somebody speared him through the throat?’
‘Ah. Right. Gotcha.’
Geoffrion had arrived on the scene in a squad car, Cinq-Mars in his personal vehicle, a Volkswagen Beetle. When ready, they traveled back to the station separately. Cinq-Mars said he’d find the new man a desk and introduce him around. He also wanted to check reports from other postes. If similar robberies had occurred around town, it would be useful to know that. If not, he’d be on the lookout for the next escalation in the new gang’s progress. He now nursed an alternative theory, of course, that the robberies were an elaborate ploy to mask a murder. Had murder been the intention of the gambit all along? He had to consider the premise, although it made limited sense. Due to the robberies, the body was located sooner than otherwise, which undercut the theory.
Yet, somehow, did burglary facilitate murder?
Did a killer believe that a murder obscured by the heist degraded an investigation?
None of it made sense. More likely, the robberies and the murder, and for that matter the mystical rape, were unrelated. A scenario that shoved him back to investigating the rampant theft of toasters. Quite a thrill.
Strange, though, the killing. The victim, dressed in the middle of the night with his feet in his slippers, without socks, wearing a suit but no tie, slaughtered with a long, sturdy knife – machete-like – offering no resistance. No upraised protective palm, for it displayed no wound. The victim may not have seen the blade coming, despite being propped against the closet wall. Had he been hiding there, only to suddenly be revealed when the killer shoved aside the suits as Cinq-Mars had done? Perhaps someone had also noticed the slippers first, out of place given the rack of shoes nearby. Or had the man been threatened into standing in the closet, believing that that would be the end of it, that his attacker would leave, only to have the blood supply to his brain abruptly severed.
The power of the blow was impressive. Through the throat, then deeply enough into the wallboard that the blade held the victim upright. Not a short jab with a knife, but a mighty thrust, perhaps two-handed with the full weight of the attacker behind it. The victim waiting passively to be struck. But how did that make sense?
The knife wreaked destruction more typical of a spear.
What of blood from the wound? Rather, its lack? Why wasn’t it all over his spiffy suit? Why had no blood splashed onto the suits nearest the victim?
Getting into possible scenarios, Cinq-Mars regretted losing out on the investigation. He wouldn’t be watching speedbumps as Morin had intimated. Bicycle theft never rose above the level of cops in uniform who jotted a few notes, submitted a brief report, then forgot about it. Yet a truth was included in the mean-spirited jibes, for he had no other case as interesting to occupy his time.
Or so he believed. At the station, he was handed a message from his old boss, now retired, asking to see him, pronto. Cinq-Mars called first.
‘On the double, kid.’ Always, he was kid to the old man.
‘Ah, you do know that I work days now. I can come over after dinner. Or for dinner if you want to fire up the barbecue.’
‘Your ass,’ retired Captain Armand Touton demanded, ‘my doorstep, right the fuck now.’
‘Anybody wants to know my whereabouts,’ Cinq-Mars whispered to Nord Geoffrion as he was going out the door, ‘tell him I got a lead on a bunch of toasters.’
‘Do you?’ his new partner inquired. ‘Already?’
Overall, the new guy did not seem to lack intelligence as his reputation foretold. Then again, there were moments …
‘I’ll be back, Nord. Can’t say when. Make yourself look busy. Check for similar thefts around town. Also, write up an obit on the corpse. Who is he? I want to know. Thanks.’
Hopefully, the man knew how to do that, both make himself busy and handle fundamental research. Good to find out.