MARTELLO wheeled the Town Car through Chinatown and we ended up parking just off Somerset near Booth. We walked to the restaurant and were politely escorted to the back into a private room where we joined two other men. I wasn’t too surprised to see that one of them was Ottawa PD’s John Phillips, now seconded back to the RCMP.
He just nodded and gestured to a chair at the circular table.
Phillips and a slightly built Asian man were already drinking beer. The Asian man looked up at me and smiled.
Tony made the introductions.
“Conn, this is Lee. His name is a bit more complicated than that, but we know him as Lee. He works out of the Immigration and Passport Office in Toronto. John Phillips you already know.”
Tony was obviously chairing this little meeting and proceeded to order various Chinese food platters, a range of seafood, beef, pork, vegetables, and lots of rice as well as pitchers of beer.
“Bring the beer first, would ya?” he asked the waitress. He then turned to me.
“Personally, Conn, I’d rather be eating on Preston Street, but Lee here, who came special from Toronto to join us, insisted on this Chinese stuff.”
Lee grinned at me. “Well, you round-eyes can’t really tell the difference between spaghetti and noodles anyway, right?”
I smiled back, feeling like the new guy brought in to a regular poker game.
The waitress brought the pitchers, poured the beer into mugs, then left.
Tony cracked his knuckles.
“Okay. Conn? Lee has a little story to tell. You’re here because we think you’ve been connected to this accidentally, plus maybe you can fill in a few gaps for us thanks to your work with CIC and the Minister’s Office there. So walk us through it, Lee.”
Lee rubbed his right hand through his black brush cut.
“Okay. I’m undercover right now in the Toronto Chinese community and I’m picking up something. It looks like there’s a bunch of immigration consultants who are selling Permanent Resident cards. They are selling them to people already here, people who are stuck in the system, here illegally, failed refugee claimants, criminals who could be deported, whatever. These consultants are selling them the magic bullet, the PR card.”
I nodded.
Getting a Permanent Resident card for Canada was winning the lottery. The next step, after three years of having legal status living in the country as a Permanent Resident, was applying for Canadian Citizenship. And with that, you could get a Canadian passport. You were basically home free.
“What I’ve been told,” Lee continued, “is these consultants, scattered around Toronto, are putting out the word that for $5,000, they can get the cards in a matter of days. It has to be cash up front.”
“I thought consultants were regulated now,” Tony said.
“Well they are. At least, self-regulating,” I responded.
For years, Immigration consultants had been a thorn in the side of the Citizenship and Immigration department, in all its past and present structures and linkages with other agencies and departments. In the first place, CIC’s position has always been that foreign nationals applying to immigrate, sponsor relatives, study, work, seek refuge, or visit Canada didn’t need to pay consultants to help them in the process at all.
Trouble is, try telling that to people who have been told their cases could take years to finalize. In many parts of the world, it was common practice to pay someone to go to bat for you at all levels of officialdom. The belief that you always needed someone to grease the wheels is a deeply engrained one around the globe.
CIC recognizes lawyers as legitimate representatives of people in immigration and refugee matters. The department also recognizes consultants who were members in good standing of CSIC, the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants. This body maintains databases of their legitimate membership, plus which consultants have had their memberships revoked or were no longer authorized to represent clients for various reasons, often simply for not having paid their annual dues to the society.
But anyone can hang out a shingle as a consultant. And you could make a killing if you moved quickly enough to fleece desperate people of their cash then disappear and start over elsewhere.
I turned to Lee.
“Have you seen one of these cards?”
Lee grinned and reached into his shirt pocket. He tossed a plastic card on the table. The card was wallet-sized, fully laminated, and incorporated a head-and-shoulders photo of an Asian woman, listing height, weight, and colour of eyes. A hidden Canadian flag was visible when the card was tilted slightly under the ceiling light.
“It looks genuine,” I said.
“Yeah, I ran it through one of our readers, and it’s legit,” Lee said.
Forged documents are a fact of life. There are some very skillful counterfeiters around armed with state-of-the-art technology. I hadn’t heard about any phony PR cards in circulation, but it was only a matter of time before they would appear.
If Lee had gotten his hands on a legitimate card, though, matching a real person, that passed the machine reader test in his Immigration and Passport field office in Toronto, this was a different kettle of fish entirely. It meant the data incorporated in this card was registered in the card-processing centre in Sydney, Nova Scotia. As far as CIC was concerned, the woman was a legitimate permanent resident.
Which meant …
At this point, the waitress and another waiter entered with plates of food. After they left, we went to it, shovelling the food down with forks, all of us, including Lee, forgoing the chopsticks.
“What’s this woman’s story?” I asked Lee.
“She contacted us. She’s a failed refugee claimant and found her way to one of these consultant guys.”
Canada has an enviable record for taking in hundreds of thousands of United Nations sanctioned refugees processed in camps abroad. But the system to process spontaneous claimants, foreign nationals who arrive at the borders and demand hearings, has been another matter. Final dispositions of these cases can take years despite constant tinkering with the process. But people who ultimately are denied refugee status, having built lives here while waiting, are still desperate to stay.
“She got the PR card about two weeks ago, after paying the consultant up front the five grand in cash two weeks earlier. We’ve told her that, in return for her co-operation in nailing this consultant, and I have all his particulars in my briefcase, we will do everything we can to ensure she can stay, can keep her status.”
I was pretty sure this wouldn’t fly at CIC. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t get a hefty jail sentence first before being deported.
“And she believes that?” I asked.
“Look, “Tony interjected, “that’ll be a problem down the road for us, CIC, the removals guys at the Border Agency, Public Safety, the Justice Department, Privy Council Office, Prime Minister’s Office … who knows who else. The main thing is, we’ve got someone we can go to bat with to nail this consultant guy.”
“All right,” I said, “but I guess I have two questions. First, how widespread do you think this little buy-a-card service is? And secondly, why am I here in a Chinese restaurant, or at all, when you need twenty current CIC officials and a cast of thousands from other departments meeting about this in broad daylight at the Blackburn building? Obviously, someone is on the inside at the card-processing centre in Sydney. Someone inputted the woman’s data to spit out the card and Lee’s machine reader confirms it.”
Tony laughed.
“Well, Conn …”
“Hang on,” I said. “Here’s another question, or at least, part two of the second question. What’s this got to do with Rodney Morrison from my old boss’s office on the Hill gassing himself in a government Jaguar which ends up being torched at my shop?”
Tony flapped both his hands in a calming motion.
“Trust me Conn, all will become clear in the fullness of time. Look, let’s take a quick break.”
He turned to Lee.
“Let’s get some tea or coffee and let them get these plates outta here.”
About ten minutes later, Tony gave his knuckles another crack to call us to order. Phillips had been keeping quiet during all the previous talk and now seemed content to continue to sit listening, sipping on his coffee.
“Okay, Lee, why don’t you answer the Morrison question first?” Tony said.
Lee took a small notebook from his jacket pocket, flipped it open, and started scanning his notes.
“These are the notes I took yesterday when the woman handed over her card and told me her story. When she was first steered to the consultant guy, about a month ago, she asked him why she should pay $5,000 up front to get this card. Like, what guarantees did she have that the card would work, that he wouldn’t just take her money and disappear?
“At that time … just a minute … yeah, okay here it is … He told her that her guarantee was that he, the consultant, had a direct contact high up in the Minister’s Office – the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. He was boasting. He showed her a note with a red crest on it. Apparently the note said that the consultant, and his name was spelled out, was authorized to act on behalf ‘of the undersigned.’ There was a scrawled signature with ‘Executive Assistant’ typed under it. It convinced her. The consultant guy said that special people, such as herself, or others waiting in line forever about their cases, could be fasttracked this way, that it was all above board …”
“If Morrison provided this note, he was in deep with this business,” I said. “He must have lost his mind.”
From the silence that followed, I realized I’d blurted out the obvious. Morrison had committed suicide. The Deputy Minister had told me he had been erratic at his office with liquor on his breath and remnants of crack cocaine were found in the burned out Jag.
“Well, there’s a bit more,” Lee continued, still scanning his notes. “According to the woman, the consultant was glassy-eyed, sort of giggling. She thought he was on something. But she handed over an envelope of cash anyway, and sure enough the call came two weeks later for her to pick up her card. The consultant guy told her to send him any friends of hers in the same boat.”
Lee paused, and then looked at Tony, who nodded.
“The thing is, she had second thoughts. And this is the reason. The consultant told her she had to hand over her passport, her Chinese passport, to the consultant when she came to pick up her new card. It was a condition. So she did. Then she realized she couldn’t travel anywhere for three years.”
The woman, having handed over her home country passport to the consultant, wouldn’t be able to board an aircraft flying anywhere outside of Canada. She couldn’t even cross a land border by car into the US.
I remembered the passports I’d seen at Archambault and Morrison’s apartment.
Tony sipped the last of his coffee. He’d been watching me as I thought things through, and was observant enough to identify the little wheels turning over in my brain.
“Conn, we’ll get back to Morrison and Archambault in a minute, but I think that particular question of yours has been answered. And with the consultant taking this woman’s passport, that puts it squarely in my directorate. We’ll be laying the charges against the consultant. Sure, there will be a lot of big meetings with all the players about this one, especially the PR card production angle with CIC, but I wanted to get some ducks in a row tonight.
“As to how extensive this PR-cards-for-sale thing is, Lee’s informants are picking up similar rumours all around Toronto. We also had a note from one of our people in Vancouver, same kind of story, same price, $5,000 cash and carry, same demand to hand over the foreign passports. It’s the requirement to hand over the foreign passports that is looking like a mistake by these guys. The card buyers are unhappy about it, and they’re starting to talk.”
I nodded.
“Okay, let’s move on,” Martello said.
It was by now just after 8 p.m.
“John, why don’t you take a turn?”
Phillips had finished up his black coffee and started talking.
“We went through Morrison and Archambault’s flat pretty thoroughly. The SOCOs haven’t found any evidence of the killer. We’re assuming it’s one person for now. Whoever it was, was very careful. No sign of forced entry, so we assume Archambault knew him and let him in. Archambault was garrotted from behind with some kind of cord, which wasn’t left at the scene. No fresh prints other than Mr. Anderson’s here, and also from five other guys he had over for a party the Saturday night …”
Tony sniggered.
“Yeah, guess they all took their snorts of coke, and did whatever. But for Sunday, estimated time of death, and in and around it, every one of them has a solid alibi.”
Phillips turned to me.
“There was paper and stuff all over the place, but we didn’t find any passports on that desk or anywhere else.”
Tony spoke again.
“From the colours of the docs Conn saw, they could have been from several countries – China, Pakistan, India – anyways, we’ll get back to the foreign passports in a minute. Carry on, John.”
“We’ve also been talking to Quebec Sûreté about Morrison’s suicide. Tox showed a lot of coke and alcohol in his system, high levels of carbon monoxide, of course, but nothing else untoward. The car … well there’s not much left of it now, but it appeared to the Sûreté from fingerprints they took off it at their garage that Morrison did all the suicide preparation with the tape and hose.
“And there’s the note found in the Jaguar. Archambault told us at the time it was Morrison’s writing for sure, and we’ve confirmed that with other samples. Archambault said that Morrison and he had had an argument, Morrison was upset, had been moody, snorting a lot, drinking a lot, depressed, etcetera, etcetera. It’s a simple note, here …”
He tossed a plastic baggie my way. I could see and read the note through the plastic clearly.
It was on buff paper, good stock, notebook sized with the red Minister’s Office crest on it. I recognized it as exactly the headed notepaper that we all used in the MO to write brief scribbled notes or instructions on to clip to files or dockets we’d been sent for decisions. From what Lee’s source had said, the consultant had shown her an “authorization” note from Morrison written on the same stock.
This one, the suicide note, which appeared to be in Morrison’s writing as far as I could recollect, had no date, just a scrawl in black ink, which read:
I can’t take this. Sorry. Rodney.
I passed the bagged note over to Lee, who scanned it and passed it on to Tony.
“That could simply mean that he didn’t want the file,” I said.
“Come again?” Tony asked.
“I can see Morrison attaching this note, with just this message, on a file, and handing it back to his secretary, for redirection. In other words, Morrison is saying: ‘I can’t take responsibility for this. Sorry.’ He’s saying, in effect, rework the file or give it to somebody else in the office. I’ve seen this kind of wording in his notes before.”
“You mean, someone got this note from one of the files in his office, kept it for a rainy day, and then used it as a suicide note? How?” Tony asked.
“That’s easy,” I said. “He used to take work home in a briefcase. We all did. We weren’t supposed to, but we did it.”
No one spoke for a moment; none of us needed to say “Archambault.”
Phillips looked over at Tony.
“I told you it seemed a bit too pat. The Sûreté just wanted to close things out. They had a note, an argument, a drunken crackhead, a lover confirming everything, fingerprints in the right places …”
Lee spoke up.
“But what about the fingerprints? You said Quebec Sûreté was convinced Morrison had rigged the hose to the exhaust and everything.”
Phillips looked around in turn at each of us.
“Supposing Morrison was given so much booze and coke that he passed out, then he’s taken and gassed in a garage somewhere else, somewhere not far from where he was found in the car? It’s pretty easy to press the prints from a dead hand onto a hose or duct tape. Then the killer wears gloves to set everything up, carefully puts everything in place on the car without smudging Morrison’s prints, leaves the motor running, and bingo – you’ve got your suicide.”
“Okay,” Lee said, “if Morrison was murdered, are we saying Archambault did that, faked the suicide, and then a third person killed Archambault?”
I sat back and said, “The unknown Public Works guy.”
Phillips nodded.
“He could be the guy we’re looking for, a third member along with Morrison and Archambault running the cards-forcash scam from Ottawa.”
“So are we saying that Archambault is clean on Morrison?” Tony asked.
“Yep,” Phillips said. “At least for killing Morrison and staging the fake suicide. Sûreté confirmed Archambault’s whereabouts for the whole Monday night until Morrison was found in the car around 1 a.m. the Tuesday morning. Big dinner, lots of people. Yeah, he made sure he was in view all the time for hours.”
“But he’s implicated all right,” I said. “In the first place, he had access to the suicide note from piles of files Rodney took home to write notes for.”
“He bent over backwards to make sure he was in the clear for Morrison’s death,” Philips said. “And he backed up the notion of Morrison’s being in a frame of mind to do himself in.”
Tony took charge.
“Okay, what have we got?”
He moved his bulk away from the table, stood up, and started pacing the room, counting points off on the sausages he had for fingers.
“One. A Permanent-Resident-card-for-cash scam, run from Ottawa by Morrison, Archambault, and the third guy, operating through unregulated immigration consultants in Toronto, Vancouver, and who knows where else. At five grand a pop, could be big money. Morrison’s key. Or at least his authorization note is. The big man in the Minister’s Office who consultants use to convince the clients to part with their money. And they have a person on the inside at Sydney to produce the cards for them to special order.
“Two. I’m betting a nice sideline in selling foreign passports they collect from the clients as a condition of giving them their new PR cards. They can sell those on the black market to all kinds of people who are too stupid to realize that, even with a photo substitute, doctored passports won’t pass muster now even at an airport check-in counter on a busy day. But these guys selling them don’t care if their customers get caught at the check-in counter. They have their money and aren’t going to offer a money back guarantee anyways.
“Three. Looks like there’s some kind of crack and cocaine dealing going on here, too. We’ve got Morrison and Archambault using for sure from the tox results and what was found at the flat. The consultants involved are probably using as well from what we’re picking up.”
I spoke up.
“There was crack residue found in a nice blue Jaguar.”
Tony looked at me and grinned.
“Yeah, that works. This missing third guy, let’s call him the Public Works guy, organizes a nice blue Jaguar for Morrison off the books, so to speak, to keep him sweet.”
“And now we’re at four,” I managed to count off.
Tony turned to me.
“Yep, and things get screwed up. Me? I’d say Morrison was the weak link here. He can’t take the stress, too much boozing and crack smoking, loses his nerve. At some point, Archambault gets nervous, tells Public Works guy. They agree they’d better shut things, including Morrison, down.
“Five? Morrison is killed by Public Works guy with a nice fake suicide. Public Works guy makes sure of things by burning the evidence, the blue Jag, once Quebec Sûreté has ticked off their little boxes, convinced by the ‘I can’t take this’ note in Morrison’s handwriting, with Archambault backing up Morrison’s state of mind.
“And six?” Tony said, looking at me again.
I thought it through.
“Public Works guy visits Archambault for a little followup talk, sees my name on Archambault’s notepad by his entry phone, hears from Archambault that I’ve been around looking for answers about the arson at my shop involving Morrison’s S-Type, and decides to take Archambault out of the running.”
We all sat quietly for a while. It was nearly 9:30 p.m.
Phillips turned to me.
“You got a weapon you keep on hand, Mr. Anderson?”
This thought had occurred to me already, and I voiced a related one.
“Public Works guy must be losing it. To start with, why would he burn the car when Quebec Sûreté had closed the file on Morrison’s supposed suicide as just that? All torching the car did was bring more attention to the whole thing, one way or another.”
Tony nodded.
“Maybe Public Works guy figured torching the Jag would ensure any evidence, coke residue, second thoughts about fingerprints, whatever, would go up in smoke. If he’s sampling some of the crack merchandise himself, he’s probably paranoid about everything. He didn’t really need to kill Archambault, who, as you said already, implicated himself in Morrison’s murder by stealing the ‘suicide’ note from Morrison’s homework. You leaned on Archambault and couldn’t get him to talk, could you?”
I shook my head.
“Well, John’s right, Conn,” Tony said. “Public Works guy is likely looking at you as another loose end.”
Great. And there was something else just at the edge of my mind, connecting the unknown Public Works guy and my shop.
“Okay,” Tony said. “We’ve gotta possible or probable scenario. We need to connect some dots. Here’s what we’re gonna do.”