CHAPTER 5
1955
CAPTAIN ARMAND TOUTON DROVE EAST, AWAY FROM the ongoing riot. Delivering bad news had to be done promptly. Procrastination did no one any good, the cop least of all, and usually indicated that the detective was worrying more about his own discomfort than the pending time of sorrow for the family. “The loved ones,” he had lectured his squad of irascible detectives, “got a right to be told. It’s your job to tell them. Nobody says you have to put on a happy face—we got assholes in this room who wouldn’t know how to say a kind word if a dog licked their balls, and if they ever cracked a smile they’d look like shit warmed over.” The remarks earned a muffled round of chuckling, for in these late-night sessions Touton was expected to be profane, and the men laughed at anything irreverent. “But give them that much. Deliver the fucking news. Go in. Get it over with. Quietly leave.”
The policy was not an easy one to implement, as Touton was discovering for himself. The death of Roger Clément affected him more deeply than he might have expected. He was experiencing an acute regret, and while he would not delay his mission, he was not driving swiftly to his destination, either.
He had delegated the task of informing the coroner’s family to Detective Sloan, while Clément’s would be his own obligation. A few cops found it odd that he chose to speak to the wife of the dead thief rather than the dead coroner, but he refused to explain himself.
He did not know the thief’s family, although anytime they were together, Roger Clément wanted to talk about little else. From the outset, the man’s love for his wife and daughter informed the nature of their interactions, setting them both on a course to become better acquainted and appreciative of one another’s lives. Just as Touton lived an exceptional life for a cop, so had Clément lived an atypical life for a small-time hood. In the choices they made and the experiences they encountered, the two unearthed a rare friendship.
Now Clément had been killed, a priceless dagger thrust into his chest. He had died amid chaos and intrigue, true to the violent world in which he’d lived.
Shocked. Perhaps for the first time in his career, Touton could apply the word to a perpetrator’s story. He was shocked, years ago, to learn that while he bullied himself to survive a German concentration camp, Roger Clément was also interned. Not as a POW, which might have been merely surprising. Nor had he been incarcerated in a domestic prison for petty crime, which might have been expected. Roger Clément, the family man, the enforcer and a former battling left winger in the National Hockey League, had served time in a Canadian internment camp, one set aside specifically for political malcontents. To attach political motives to a petty thief and a back-alley bruiser had altered Touton’s perceptions of him, especially as Clément’s political views contradicted his understanding of the man. What the alley ruffian stood for took time for Touton to unravel. Eventually he deduced that, as in the beginning of their acquaintanceship, the man really believed in nothing in particular except his love of family.
Now Touton had to tell his wife and daughter that their beloved husband and father was dead.
To become a cop had been no snap accomplishment after the war, despite a hiring boom. Armand Touton did not resemble the barrel-chested tough nut he was repudiated to be. The man had worked on railway extra gangs in western Canada as a teenager, in a hardscrabble environment, and defended himself against all comers. His fists had kept him alive. After joining the army as a volunteer, never a popular choice in Quebec, he had given an impressive account of himself both in battle and while imprisoned. Yet the man standing in line at a police recruitment centre failed to live up to his press clippings. Half-starved in the POW camp, further wracked by hunger, dysentery and cold in the dead of winter on the long march out of Poland back to Germany, he’d passed close to the brink of death. Before being demobilized, he remained wan and undernourished. Neither his body nor his mind had fully recuperated.
Then, suddenly, he was returned to Montreal.
A large number of soldiers found work in the construction industry, which was starting to move with the spurt of immigration from a war-ravaged Europe, while others chased opportunities in the gaming business. The city was expanding, and with it the police department, so soldiers were also being given a nod to become cops. Touton desperately wanted to be one of them.
Once his war record had been reviewed, he’d been a shoo-in, but first he had to pass a medical. Although depleted, he seemed to be breezing through the exam until the last moment, when the physician informed him he had varicose veins.
“Excuse me?”
He knew that the war had damaged him physically, but he associated that particular condition with robust old ladies in support stockings. He may have aged prematurely, but he was quite certain that his gender had not been altered.
“Varicose veins,” the doctor stated flatly, offering no note of sympathy. “The condition makes it impossible for you to enter the police academy.”
“Men get that?”
“All the time.”
“Where? Show me one of those veins!” he implored the doctor.
“Your legs are hairy, sir. Trust me. Under all that cover … varicose veins.”
Touton didn’t trust him. When he’d been examined before being demobilized, no one had mentioned it. He submitted to a physical by an army surgeon. “Do I have varicose veins?”
The army physician laughed heartily, as if he’d heard a good joke. “Ask the doctor,” he advised, “how much it costs to be cured. Then come back and see me.”
He walked into the office of the civilian practitioner a second time, asked his question and received a firm price. “Fifty dollars a year. It’s not expensive. A buck a week. Not even.”
A lot of money for a working man in those days. “Every year?”
The doctor shrugged. “If you’re promoted, the treatments might become more costly for you. I’m just trying to give you a break. If I report that you have varicose veins, your days as an officer of the law are over.”
“I look at my legs every night. I still don’t see them.”
The man shrugged. “I do,” he said. “I’m the doctor.”
Touton returned to the military, where he was greeted by a phalanx of seventeen physicians. Each examined the war hero, and each signed a document proclaiming that not only did he not have varicose veins, he was exceptionally fit for a man who had endured ordeals fatal to most mortals. They allowed that his body had been compromised in the service of his country, but affirmed that he was returning to full health at a rapid pace. Furthermore, the seventeen physicians declared, they would join forces with the military bureaucracy to assure that any civilian doctor who declared otherwise would be both sued and brought before the College of Surgeons to have his licence revoked for both incompetence and graft.
That day, Touton became a cop for free. Every other policeman who joined the force that year was apparently suffering from varicose veins and would annually pay a physician a fee to adjust the medical record. The recruit had been initiated into a corrupt regime, borne into the culture as its enemy.
As a young cop in an openly dishonest department, Armand Touton took a risk, hitching his wagon to the political reformers of his day. In war and in captivity, he had learned to be true to himself—as a policeman he could do no less. In that period, Roger Clément, who was about seven years older than him, had been hiring out his fists at election time to anyone who needed a polling booth wrecked, or voters and scrutineers pummelled. One of the reformers, Jean Drapeau, had received police protection during his run for mayor, but the cop assigned to him was conveniently down the block buying a coffee when goons arrived to rough up the campaign workers and vandalize the offices. Touton surveyed the damage, then took the absentee cop into a nearby alley and rather vigorously used his cap to thrash him until the officer told him who the visitors had been.
He then drove off to pick up Clément.
He tracked him to a tavern and sat down at a small circular table before a cluster of glasses, both full and empty. In the style of the day, drafts were rarely dropped one at a time, but in batches according to the patron’s level of thirst, often by the dozen. “We’re going for a ride.”
Clément checked his watch. “Naw. It’s my kid’s bedtime. I was heading home to tuck her in.”
“Too bad you didn’t think of that before trashing that campaign office.”
“What campaign office? You got proof?”
“I don’t need proof.”
“How come?”
“I told you,” Touton advised him, his voice flat and uncompromising, “I’m not arresting you. I’m not putting you on trial. We’re just going for a ride, me and you.”
“Yeah? Me, you and what army?” Clément’s friends were hanging close by.
Touton lowered his voice so that his warning remained between them. “If my pistol accidentally discharges at this moment, the bullet blows off your left little toe. I been in the war. Believe me, it hurts. I seen tough guys bawl because they lost their littlest toe.”
“Are you threatening me?” Clément carried weight, including in his neck and jowls, but his head seemed carved from granite. His jaw and chin might have been forged in a smelter. He had heard about Touton’s threat to shoot off people’s toes, but he also knew that the man hadn’t done it yet. On the other hand, no one had called his bluff yet, either.
“I’m just apologizing in advance in case there’s an accidental discharge. I’m sorry, I want to say, for the pain and the suffering that might cause you.”
Clément nodded. “You’re a big man behind that pistol and badge.”
“We should go a few rounds, but your friends here might interfere. I don’t have enough room in my squad car for everyone.”
Touton sat back in the small wooden armchair. The chairs were comfortable, built to keep a patron happily sedentary through an evening. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you, but sure, I’d go with you.”
“So I’m curious. You took who? Bremen, Talbot … those guys I heard about.”
“Yeah, they wanted to try their luck. Both those guys I knocked out cold.”
“Me, too. I took them out.”
“Yeah?” Touton asked him, interested now. “Who else?”
“Lafarge … Gabriel Blais. Okay, those weren’t knockouts, but I took them. Bloodied them up.”
“Anton LeBrun?”
“I fought him,” Clément boasted. Immediately, he raised his beer glass to his lips.
“You take him?”
Clément shrugged. “We had a battle. It’s hard to say who won.”
A couple of friends chuckled. For them, the victor had been more apparent.
“I took LeBrun,” Touton told him.
“You did?”
“One punch.”
“Sucker punch, I bet,” Clément rallied.
“He gave me two good shots to the ribs, I fell to one knee, then I dropped him with a right uppercut. I hit him in a sweet spot, I’ll concede that much.”
Clément clucked his tongue. “He gave me two shots to the ribs. I couldn’t breathe after that. That’s how come he took me.”
“You’re brittle—that’s good to know. Now, what are we going to do here?”
The thug took another sip, and considered his options. “I’m serious,” he decided. “It’s my daughter’s bedtime. Let me give her a call at least.”
In the interest of making this easy, Touton let him do that. After the call, they went for a ride.
Touton drove out of the East End towards downtown along Notre Dame Street, past the shipyards, the locomotive maintenance facility and Molson’s brewery. After the war, the neighbourhood had swelled with working men who toiled in the tough places, where strength and fortitude were prerequisites to survival. The workers went home to small houses populated with streams of children, and on the weekends the streets and lanes were shrill with their bawling and brawling, so that the men usually looked forward to the end of their leisure period and another week of hard labour.
“Where we going?” Clément asked the policeman.
“You’ll find out,” Touton told him.
“Who do you work for anyways?” the thug asked further along. He had a few scars from his travails. A thick one cut through his left eyebrow, matched by another just under the same eye. He must have looked a royal mess after that adventure. Those marks could have been caused by pucks or sticks, but the line beneath his right jaw suggested he’d been sliced by a stiletto, although again, it could have been the blade of a skate.
“I’m a cop,” Touton answered. “I work for the police department.”
“Yeah, right, tell me another one.”
The cop looked over at him. He had his reasons to let him sit up front. “I’ll ask the questions, if you don’t mind.”
The man shrugged. “Why not? You’re an officer of the law.”
“Who do you work for?”
“That I can’t say.”
“We’d be in trouble then, wouldn’t we?”
“Let’s find out.”
“I work for my bosses and I don’t rat them out. That’s how I support my family. Hey. Where are we going?”
“You’re a tough nut,” Touton determined.
“Yeah. So?”
“There’s only one thing to do with a tough nut.”
“Yeah? What? Take him for a swim?” Clément asked.
“You’ve heard?”
“Yeah, I heard, all right? I ain’t going to talk just because … I’m not like those other guys. I ain’t going to talk. Forget about it. I don’t sing to cops. I just don’t.”
Touton turned and headed for the docks. Roger Clément had heard this story, that the policeman would park high above the river where the rapids were fast, open the passenger-side door, and invite the poor sap in the car to either talk freely or step off the pier.
“You don’t understand,” Clément said, and for the first time, his voice sounded uneasy.
“What’s that?”
“I can’t swim.”
The cop quickly sucked in his breath and shook his head with mock compassion. “That kind of limits your options, doesn’t it? I don’t have a life jacket with me.”
“You don’t understand!” the thug shot back.
“What’s that?”
“I won’t talk. I can’t! It’s not in my nature!”
“Try me.”
“You’d piss your pants if I told you.”
“Tell me anyway. It’s my car. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“It’s not in my nature. That’s what everybody knows. That’s how I support my family. I’m no squealer. I don’t squeal. It’s how I earn my living.”
“You don’t squeal and you don’t swim. Jesus. We’re at a crossroads here. Have you ever been at a crossroads before? It could be interesting.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m not laughing. Are you?”
The man didn’t say. He was holding onto the dash and the door as the car sped up and swooped over and around bumps and onto the timber pier, where it shook like a freight train on rough track. The cop was driving like a madman, and the passenger was already more afraid than he had been for a while, believing the car was nearly out of the crazy cop’s control, and with the river so near.
Worried the man might leap from the vehicle, Touton kept his speed up and drove with reckless intent. They reached the pier over the fast-moving water and he drove hard along the lip. A timber protected the edge, but he knew a place where a big ship had crashed hard and the bulwark had broken away. He scooted into the spot so that the first step out the passenger side of his car was into open air, then water, and he jammed on the brakes.
The thug had to fend himself off the dash. Before he had time to recover, Touton pressed his pistol against the man’s knee. “Out!” he commanded.
“You’ve got to understand this,” the man insisted, but he didn’t sound fearful or intimidated. He sounded resigned to the worst that this day might bring.
“No, you do. Open the door.” When the man did not respond, Touton jabbed him with his pistol and demanded again, fiercely this time, “Open the fucking door!”
“This is against the fucking law!” Clément shot back.
“What fucking law? What fucking town do you think you’re living in? It’s thanks to people like you there is no fucking law. Now open the fucking door!”
Clément opened it.
“Now step outside, Roger. You’ve got sixty miles to stay afloat before the current runs you into shore. Can you stay afloat that long?”
“I’m reaching into my pocket for my wallet,” Clément told him.
“I’ll shoot! Step outside or sing to me! Those are your two choices.”
“Go ahead and shoot. But I’m going to show you pictures of my daughter, Anik. Do you have children?”
“I don’t want to see a picture of your daughter!”
Clément shrugged again. “I don’t want you to shoot me in the leg. So there, we’re even. Here, look. Look at her. Isn’t she sweet?”
The girl in the photograph was indeed sweet, a bright smile with black hair in a pageboy bob. She had smiling dark eyes.
“I don’t care,” Touton declared. “Talk to me or step out of the car.”
“If I step out, I’ll die. Who cares? You won’t. All right, I understand that. You’re the tough guy. You convinced me already. But my daughter will care.” He kept the snapshot before Touton’s eyes. “Did you think of that? What will she do without me? I want to know. Tell me, what will she do without her papa? How will she live? My wife. Let me show you a picture of my wife.”
“I don’t want to see. Will you put the pictures away?”
“Just look at her.”
The two men looked at the woman together.
Touton toughened up. “If you want to see your wife and daughter again, talk to me. That’s all you have to do.” A cooler breeze was flowing in through the open window next to him and through the open passenger door, but it was still a warm night.
Clément answered him with silence.
“Before you go for a swim, tell me something,” Touton asked, for he needed to be convincing in his menace. A cop could never back down in this situation, because the word would get around and he’d never have the upper hand again. “I looked at your rap sheet. How come you did time in that internment camp? What are you, a fascist? Communist? Spy? What?”
“I love my wife,” Clément told him.
“You’ve made that point already.”
“That’s why I did time.”
“They don’t put you in jail for that.”
“Yeah, they do,” Clément said. “In my case, they did. My wife, she’s a unionist. An agitator, they call her. A commie, they call her, but she’s only looking out for the working people, in particular for the seamstresses. I took the blame for something that came out of my house. Pamphlets. That’s all. Had to do with a strike at a munitions factory. It was considered unpatriotic, borderline treasonous, but you don’t know what they made those poor girls do. I’m talking to you about sexual favours. And worse—rape. So they went on strike, those girls did, and my wife, she supported them, because that’s what she does. She knows about strikes. So I did the time for her. I told them I printed the pamphlets. I was happy to do it. To me, it didn’t matter much. I don’t know what your camp was like—in my camp, I got to play hockey in the wintertime. All summer I played ball. The mayor—you know, Camillien Houde, the ex-mayor—he was in my camp, too, doing his time. At night, we talked politics, him and me.”
The mayor of Montreal had declared that the French should fight on the side of Mussolini. He’d also driven the city into bankruptcy by supporting the poor with work projects during the Great Depression, and fought against conscription, as did most Quebec politicians. What had finally done him in was his statement that he would disobey the law and not register for the draft, and he urged everyone else to defy the law as well, and for that he was rounded up and, without trial, dispatched to an internment camp, serving four years.
“I didn’t get to play hockey in my camp,” Touton admitted. “Are you telling me that you work for Houde?”
“I’m telling you no such thing. If I told you that, I’d be lying most days—maybe not every day. If I told you who I was working for today, you’d piss your pants. Trust me on this one thing.”
“Pull that door closed,” Touton instructed him, “but not all the way.”
Clément did as he was told, not comprehending what might be in store for him. “Now what?” he asked.
“Put your hands through either side of the window and hang on to the door.”
He looked at the door, at the open window, then back at the detective. “Wait a minute, my wife, my daughter—”
“I’m thinking about them—now hang on to that door!”
Clément hung on.
“Hold tight. Now step out.”
“I can’t swim! You bastard! You’re killing me here!”
“I’m not asking you to swim. I’m asking you to hang on to that door and don’t let go! Don’t let go, Roger!”
Prodded by the gun, Clément gripped the doorframe through the open window, and, stepping out of the car, swung out above the water as the door yawned open. His feet dangled forty feet above the river darkly fomenting below him, thrashing the air as if trying to find something solid on which to land his shoes. “You bastard!” he shouted out.
“Let’s not get personal here, Roger.” Touton slid down the bench seat and sat on the passenger side, holding the door open with his right foot. “I’m not asking you to jump or fall. I’m just asking you not to let go while you think about your daughter. That’s all. Just think about your family, Roger.”
“I can’t swim, I told you. I wasn’t lying!”
“Then don’t swim. Whatever you do, don’t let go of that door. Just think about your daughter.”
The two men fell silent awhile, the one dangling above the river, the other propped in the front seat of his sedan, keeping the door open.
After a long ten minutes, the thug deduced, “I can’t stay out here forever.”
“I can’t either,” Touton admitted. “But I’ve got ten, maybe twelve hours in me. How many you got in you?”
Clément waited about five minutes to answer. “Not that many,” he said.
“Who do you work for, Roger?”
“You’re one mean motherfuck, you know that?”
“Who do you work for?”
“Duplessis,” Clément told him. What was the point in haggling forever?
Touton released his leg and foot and the door crashed closed. Clément hollered as he took the blow on the shoulder and upper thigh. Getting him back into the vehicle was awkward, and risky, but in the end both men were strong enough and managed it. Then Clément was sitting in the front seat again.
“Stay here,” Touton told him.
“Where you going?”
“I gotta piss.”
Armand Touton stepped behind his car and pissed into the river. What kind of a world did he live in, he wondered, when the premier of the province used low-level hoods to smash the offices of mayoral candidates? Smashing the offices of his political rivals was bad enough, but now he was sending goons out to disrupt municipal elections—which, on the surface of things, were none of his business. What kind of a world was this?
“I told you you’d piss yourself,” Clément said as the cop got back into the car. “Can we go now?”
“There’s something you should understand,” Touton advised him.
“What’s that?”
“You work for me now. Do what you have to do for the people you work for—Houde, Duplessis, the mob guys … exactly who doesn’t really matter. But you work for me now. We can’t clean this town up unless people like you help out people like me.”
Clément sat quietly in the car awhile. He didn’t want to be a stool pigeon, and couldn’t think of himself in those terms, but the cop’s words had made it sound different than that. As though this was a special mission and a worthy cause. In any case, they wouldn’t be driving away soon unless he agreed to do it, and, given the alternatives—jail, the river—he had no reason not to agree.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll clean this place up. Maybe my wife and daughter, someday, they’ll be proud of me for that.”
“Now you’re thinking with your brain,” Touton said.
They drove off the docks, back to Clément’s neighbourhood.
“Did you really take out LeBrun?” the thug asked.
“One punch,” Touton confirmed, but conceded, “I got lucky. Right up under the chin, and he dropped. Took him more than twelve minutes to wake up, and when he did, his pride was gone. He wept. Something to see, LeBrun wiping tears off his cheeks. You never know how somebody will react. You think you’re invincible, and poof! You’re not. LeBrun never thought he’d be looking up from the floor at another man while his body felt like yellow mush. It’s tough to be a legend in your own time, I guess, when your time as a legend is over.”
Touton arrived at the address he’d lifted from Roger Clément’s wallet. The single-level dwelling hunkered down between a duplex on one side, a triplex on the other. The brown clapboard home had seen better days, and in another time had overseen a backyard of hogs and chickens, perhaps a corn crop and rows of beans and lettuce. Now it would be a patch of weeds, worn to dirt where children played, fenced in, sunless by day, leading onto a lane. The roof sagged. The stoop sloped dramatically forward and crumpled to the left. Visitors quickly assessed that the stairs were booby traps for the unwary. A low, black wrought-iron fence segregated the rather sparse front patch of yard from the sidewalk, and Touton bent at the waist to find the latch and unfasten it. He stepped over the rickety stairs onto the porch, then rang the buzzer by the door.
The house remained unlit, soundless.
He could hear his own breathing.
A streetlamp allowed him to read the sign in the door’s glass: PADLOCK YOUR ASS. Meant for cops, it carried more than a single connotation. The first reference was to the Padlock Law, which had permitted the homes of communists and union sympathizers—and, by extension, Jews—to be barricaded by the police while the inhabitants were briefly away. The second referred to the police procedure of padlocking brothels and gambling dens after a raid. Everyone knew the scam. A brothel might have its broom closet bolted shut. One famous whorehouse had a door specially built on the street for the purpose. The door went nowhere—it opened onto a wall. After first alerting the madam, so that she could depart the premises and install her janitor to remain behind specifically to endure the arrest and pay the trivial fine, the police would ceremoniously snap a lock on the door to nowhere. In doing so, they discharged the letter of the law, while the spirit of the whorehouse remained cocky and the daily cash receipts continued unabated. The greatest inconvenience to most brothels might be to discover that their mops and buckets had been locked up, temporarily placed under house arrest.
He rang the buzzer again. This time, a light inside snapped on. Then the porch light came on, and the curtain in the door’s glass was pulled aside an inch.
He displayed his badge.
A petite, attractive woman, although not at her best in nightdress and housecoat, applied a sliding chain lock and, once secured, opened the door a crack.
“Mrs. Clément?”
“Who wants to know at this fucking hour?”
“May I come in?” Touton asked gently. “I’m Captain Armand Touton of the Montreal Police Department. I have news about Roger.”
Clearly, the woman had been geared for a more confrontational tone from a police officer. She closed the door only to unlock the chain, then let it fall wide open. Turning her back, she led Touton into the living room, where she glared at him, arms crossed. Despite the severe posture, she appeared to be shivering. “So, you’re Touton,” she stated.
A little voice piped up behind the policeman. “Mommy?”
“Anik. Come here, honey.”
Rubbing sleep from her eyes, a girl, about eight years old in pink Bambi pyjamas, moved towards her mother. She rested her head on the woman’s hip and wrapped her little arms around her, snuggling in as her mom held a hand around her shoulder. The child looked up at Touton with dark eyes.
“Perhaps Anik should wait in her room,” Touton suggested, suddenly unsure of himself.
“She stays.” She eyed him up and down. “What do you want?”
“I have bad news.”
“No,” she said. Her face, that quickly, went pale, and the woman stepped back and found the chair behind her. She managed to pull her olive-green housecoat more tightly around herself, then gathered the child closely to her side. “Did you kill him? Were you the one?”
The cop was momentarily stunned. “No.” Then he realized that the question had probably been justified. “It had nothing to do with the police. But I’m sorry to report, Madame—”
“No—”
“That your husband is deceased.”
She said “No” twice more, yet something in her manner indicated to Touton that she was not a woman to deny the truth for long. Her body began to quake. She had to heave to catch a breath. Her chin and lips quivered a moment before she tightly clamped her jaw. The child held on to her, and he could tell by the way the woman’s head slumped forward and the pain rose up in her eyes that this day had not been entirely unexpected. She had anticipated the moment. Knowing what her husband did for a living, that he took large risks, she had lain awake through many long nights, awaiting the sound of his footsteps and a key in the lock, her heart clamped tight with dread. Only after he had fumbled with his clothing in the dark and his weight had eased down beside her would her thorax begin to unclench. This time, his footsteps would not arrive on their ramshackle stoop. This time, her fears had been confirmed.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the detective murmured.
Madame Clément pushed her child away from herself gently to dab her eyes on the sleeve of her housecoat. She gazed upon her daughter, her eyes filling with tears again, her anguish apparent. At the sight of her mom in such distress, the girl also wept, although she did not know why. For her, “deceased” held no meaning.
“Your papa …,” the woman said, then could go no further.
Confused and distressed now, the daughter, Anik, placed her small head against her mom’s and held her tightly, as if to squeeze the tears and the obvious pain right out of her.
Touton sat down opposite the mother and child. He had felt uncomfortable looming above them, unable to approach.
“What happened?” the woman managed to ask. Her voice was barely audible.
The captain of the Night Patrol explained what he could, letting her know that her husband had been stabbed and that the case would be given the full attention of the police. He described the murder weapon, but refrained from suggesting that Roger himself might have been the thief who took the knife from the Sun Life Building. He had no evidence of that, and this was not the time to be accusing her dead husband of criminal activity.
Instead, he asked the most routine of investigative questions. “Do you know anyone, Madame, who might want to do such a thing to your husband?”
She had further difficulty breathing a moment, but commenced to pull herself together. As she spoke, she absently combed her child’s hair with her fingers, an unconscious habit, and the girl faced Touton while sitting in the chair alongside her mom.
“You, or any cop, that’s my first choice. Second choice, goons from this or that mob … take your pick. Politicians—municipal, provincial, federal—they’d be next on my list. You should investigate any businessman who has it in for unionists, even if he’s hired Roger to bust up strikes in the past. So, yeah, cops, goons, politicians, businessmen. More or less in that order. I don’t think the Church had anything against him, so I’ll rule out priests, but you never know, and working people were on his side. Every friend he’s ever had would die for him, so it was none of them. Does that narrow it down, Captain?”
Touton knew a few things about Carole Clément. Roger had talked about her often, his love for her clearly impassioned and devoted. As well, the cop had culled information from her police record. She had been in jail for organizing strikes among seamstresses. The trade offered the lowest-paying jobs for women, in the most difficult conditions, and usually only immigrants took the work. The sweatshops were primitive, the labour physically debilitating, the threat of dismissal for the slightest fault ever-present. After she had become a mom, Carole had taken on piecework at home, partly to be close to her daughter, Roger had said, but also because no one in the industry would knowingly hire her. Friends had seen to it that she found work without the bosses being aware of who actually performed the labour.
“Piecework’s no better,” Roger had told him. “You get paid for what you do dead perfect, not for your time. The bosses? They know a woman’s got to be home to look after her kids, that they don’t got options in life. The good part is, no boss is looking over her shoulder now, checking a stitch, or feeling up her tits—if anybody does that now, it’s me—but at the same time, she’s got to work fast and accurate or she won’t earn a dime. Rights? Hunh? What rights? Carole’s organizing pieceworkers now, but in secret. Everything’s secret or the work gets cut off. It’ll be one mean, long fight.”
“As you know, Madame,” Touton spoke in a low, gentle voice, “your husband had a tough job. He made enemies. That’s what I’m asking about. Who carried a grudge? Anyone? Also, his business partners, shall we say, they might have gone against him. Was he worried about anything like that?”
“You mean, was he worried that his business partners—what you call them—maybe found out he was a stool pigeon working for you? Yeah, he worried about that. Did anybody find out? How would I know? The first clue for something like that would be Roger gets a knife stuck in his chest.” The words had come out defiantly, but once they were spoken she collapsed into tears. This time, the daughter was alert to a dire possibility. “Is Daddy coming?” she asked.
Carole responded with tears and hugs, and Armand Touton steeled himself so that a surprising tremor wouldn’t trouble him as well. The daughter’s presence—prompting him to remember all that Roger had said about her—broke his heart.
Eventually, he offered, “I admired your husband, Madame.”
“You admired him,” she repeated back sarcastically.
“I thought he was a fine man.”
“A fine punk! A goon! A thug!” Carole shot back. “Are we talking about the same guy?”
“He had a way of going about his job—”
“He only beat up the assholes. You don’t have to tell me. I’ve heard that story before. It’s a crock of shit. He’s a liar, my husband. He makes up stories. He breaks some poor bastard’s nose and says the shit deserved it. But … he tried to get proper work. Who would let him? Would you let him? You didn’t want him off the streets. You didn’t want him going straight. You wanted him to stay with the bastards. He tried to work in factories—by noon, somebody would find out that he was Roger Clément, who once played a year with the Rangers, a few games over three years with the fucking Blackhawks.”
“Mommy, don’t say that word,” Anik censored.
“I know, sweetie. Mommy’s sorry.” She turned back to the detective. “Roger Clément, who spent most of his career in the penalty box. Roger Clément, who got beat up by the really tough guys on the other teams, but at least he kept swinging. Okay, so he was never a great fighter on skates. Off skates, in shoes, nobody could outpunch him.”
“Except me, maybe,” Touton said. “We had that between us, him and me. We wondered who could take the other guy if it came down to it. Maybe I could outpunch him, but we never found that out. It’s one reason we were friends. We could both punch.”
“Write it on his grave: ‘Here lies Roger Clément. He could punch.’” The woman wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Every time Roger got a factory job, every fucking time—oh sorry, sweetie, Mommy won’t say that bad word again. His first day on the job, no matter how hard he tried to get out of it, at lunch somebody wanted to take him on, try his luck. So what’s he going to do, lose? He’d fight the guy, then get fired, or fight the guy and get arrested, or fight the guy and six other guys would line up to try their luck. Every time, it ended up with him realizing that if he had to fight anyway, he might as well get paid for it without doing all the shit labour and being pushed around by bosses and foremen.”
Repeatedly, the policeman turned his hat over in his hand. What she said was valid. When he’d worked on the railroad, and later in the army, his reputation as a man who could use his fists was frequently challenged. There was always somebody who wanted to prove his status false. He didn’t know if he could have taken Roger in a brawl. He had taken LeBrun, but he had always believed that that had been a lucky punch. And Roger had a soft middle. Between the two of them, the question was held in suspension—who could take the other guy out?—yet for both of them, the issue would only remain a curiosity. Neither man had an interest in that ultimate test.
Only the rest of the world cared.
“So he’s not been particularly worried lately? No new problems with his job?”
“You’re so holier-than-thou, aren’t you?” Carole fired out.
Touton was now glad that Anik was there. Her presence obliged her mother to mind her tongue. “Did Roger think that way? I don’t think he did.”
“Roger was confused by a lot of people. Look who he’s working for.”
“Roger,” Touton stated, “taught me that I had no right to look down on him. He worked for the mob, guys in the rackets, I worked for the police department.”
“Who are also in the rackets,” Carole taunted him.
“That was your husband’s point. As he used to tell me, with the gamblers and the pimps you knew what you were buying. With a cop, if you expect one thing, you could get something else.”
“We don’t have a police department in this town,” the woman complained. “The strong arm of the law is nothing more than the strong arm of the mob.”
“Some of us are trying to change all that. Roger was helping.”
“Yeah, well, some of us dedicate our lives to changing the system.”
“We’re making progress.”
“Speak for yourself,” she told him. “My husband is dead.”
Her little girl looked up at her. “Is Daddy dead, Mommy?”
For a long time, the woman wept in the arms of her child, while the policeman stared at the floor.
He did not leave before receiving assurances that she would contact a neighbour, to have someone be with her. And he vowed to pursue the case, to bring her husband’s killers to justice.
“You don’t know where that might lead you,” she cautioned him.
“I will take it where it leads me. That’s the promise I’m making here tonight. To you and your daughter. That’s a promise I’ll keep.”
She pressed her lips tightly to stop them from quivering.
At the door, with her child against her, she called the detective’s name before he stepped off the porch.
Touton turned. He felt captured by the wide, dark eyes of the child.
“Roger and me, we had an understanding. I wouldn’t ask him about his work and he wouldn’t tell me anything. But we always talked about finding a way out.”
“I see.” The detective returned his hat to his head and pulled in his coat against the chill. The woman was shivering now in her grief.
“Lately, he’s been talking. I don’t know how far things got. But he’s had some idea about a big score on his mind. I didn’t stop him. I didn’t discourage him. We needed to change our lives.”
“Did he mention anything about this big score? Who he’s been seeing lately?”
She shook her head, and Touton knew that he could believe her, that she was not withholding information. Perhaps she didn’t know that her husband had also been working for him in recent days.
“Has he ever mentioned something called the Cartier Dagger to you?”
Again, she shook her head.
“Thank you, Madame. Please accept my condolences on your loss. I liked Roger a lot. Him and me, with twists of fate, we could have traded places.”
“Detective.” Her new reality was taking hold, and through her heartache, practical matters had presented themselves. “I hope I won’t be reading in the papers that my husband was a police informant.”
Touton gazed at her, then at Anik, and back at the mother.
“No, Madame, you won’t be reading that. But I can’t control how the papers will describe him. He has a past.”
“You understand, don’t you? It’s not possible. You can’t attend the funeral.”
She desired to hold her head up over the next little while, and that would include holding her head high among the families of friends who had worked with Roger in nefarious activity. Touton nodded, sadly expressing his understanding. He felt a pang, for he realized that he had both wanted and expected to be paying his respects in a proper manner.
His last image of the evening would remain the most haunting: the dark, doleful eyes of the child gazing at him. Questioning him. He drove home, knowing that he’d be awake early in the morning to confront a city in the midst of its devastation. Yet he was going to feel more troubled, he knew, by these two forlorn hearts.