A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller) (22 page)

“Hey, did Sergeant Osserman call either of you to find out where we were today?”

They both looked at me blankly and shook their heads, which meant that Osserman was having me followed and whoever was doing it was really good. This worried me because I was operating at maximum paranoia, which meant I should have noticed something. Although perhaps that was professional ego.

Dean gave me a lift home and Brenda rotated in her seat and handed me a small black leather case.

“Here. A present from us.” Inside was a Nokia cell phone and charger. “It already has our numbers programmed in.”

“Thanks.” I hated cell phones, they removed privacy, cops could trace them through broadcast towers to find out exactly where the user was and any idiot with forty dollars worth of electronics could overhear your conversations. I also knew a guy whose phone had rung while he was burglarizing an apartment, which sent him to the can for two years plus a day.

Brenda just looked at me and smiled. “You hate it, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Learn to deal with it.” She grinned. “Like my friend says, it’s time to put your big girl panties on.”

She turned around back to her laptop and left me alone with my cell phone. Which promptly rang so I answered and found Reese on the other end.

“Hello sir, this is your lawyer speaking.”

“A lawyer. One of my lawyers.”

Reese was smart. By announcing he was my lawyer he was serving notice to anyone listening in that this was a privileged phone call.

“Same thing. Just wanted to tell you that the dummy is in place. It’ll be announced tomorrow at noon.”

“Why noon?”

“To max out on publicity. And we’re doing it on Tuesday because you only announce things on Friday if you want them to be ignored.”

“Makes sense. Anything I should do?”

“Just relax. It’ll be fun.” There was a long pause. “We should talk.”

“We should? Why?”

“Certain things happened to a friend of ours.” I wondered if he was talking about Reynolds. “And I want to discuss them with you.”

“Sure. Soon.”

“Now might be a good time.”

“Later, like you said. Just relax. It’ll be fun.”

He growled and hung up on me but he was right, it was fun.

T
he announcement went out at noon but at 9:00 that morning I was in a used computer place way down in Saint James paying $350 cash for a battered laptop already loaded with basic software. It was two years old and slow as molasses but it had a wireless hook-up and the battery would last for an hour or so before needing a recharge. I had chosen the shop because they didn’t have surveillance cameras, despite the fact that I was wearing a basic disguise of non-corrective glasses and a baseball hat.

I had left my work cell phone at home and at 9:15 I phoned Reynolds and Lake and got hold of Reynolds via his secretary. When he answered and told me he was in his office I told him I was a potential client and on my way over. Then I hung up before he could accept or refuse.

At 9:45 I was in the office building and by 9:50 I was back in my favourite bathroom stall and connected to the Internet through “Beelzebub.” I had wiped the computer down with toilet paper moistened with rubbing alcohol and was wearing surgical gloves.

At 9:56 I had found the North American Man/Boy Love Association website and from there I just drifted into two questionable sites that linked to it. Then I went to four other sites newspaper research had recommended to me, sites I didn’t like to think about.

Without looking and without remembering what I saw I clicked on images and short movies and advertisements.

I looked for youth and innocence and I found horrors.

What I was doing was laying a careful track on the Internet. One that would lead anyone examining it straight back to Reynolds’s server.

But it was still unpleasant and disgusting and I wondered if I was, in fact, looking into something similar to the Shy Man’s brain.

At 10:42 the computer battery said it was about to give out so I backed out of “Beelzebub” and shut down. Then I slid the computer into its plastic bag and left.

At 10:58 I dropped the laptop into the second-floor garbage disposal crusher in a downtown mall.

And at 11:45 I was back canvassing old Saint Boniface with Dean and Brenda.

C
laire and I met for dinner that night at home and stared at each other while Fred stared at us both.

“I can’t keep doing this.”

“Me either.”

We were talking in circles and eating take-out Italian food that reminded me of being a thief and Claire of failure. I missed making our own meals, the peaceful chaos of babysitting and all the rest.

Claire picked at her salad and sneered at the lettuce. “How much longer?”

We both had pads and pens at our elbows. I started to write while I answered, “The election is in two months. Hopefully it’ll start to slow down soon.”

I wrote:
“No idea where S.M. is. No idea how long it will take. Thinking about taking you away from here. Maybe back to Banff, putting you up with your folks and hiring some folks to provide security.”

She read it and slid it back. “No.” She waited. “Well, it might slow down. I hope it does. Maybe we can send Fred to my parents for a visit?”

Fred looked up, pleased someone had used his name.

I ate some spicy sausage and tomato sauce on whole wheat spaghetti and thought about it. I wanted to protect my family but I wasn’t sure if I could. Getting Fred out of harm’s way would help, if I was sure the Shy Man didn’t know where he was. If he got Fred he could make Claire and me do anything.

Absolutely anything.

“That might be an idea.”

And I wrote:
“Do your parents still have the mobile home? If they took Fred with them on a tour of the States for a few weeks that would be safe.”

Claire smiled. “I think that’s a great idea.”

After supper we burned our notes in the kitchen sink and then made love in the back bedroom while Fred watched an episode of a Samurai Jack cartoon thirty feet away. Every few minutes we would check on him through a crack at the edge of the door.

At eight Reese showed up and he and I took a ride.

Downtown we took a walk around the Forks, an upscale shopping mall and market at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. People had been meeting there for 10,000 years and now it hummed with commerce and yuppies and drunks and trains. Reese and I moved down to the riverfront walkways and moved two abreast along the well-lighted path.

“Brenda tells me that Devanter hit the roof after our dummy came onstage today.”

“I know. He called me on my cell and set up a meeting for tomorrow morning early, at like seven.”

“That is early. He lives in the apartment above his office, did you know that?”

“No. So those early meetings are a way of showing how important and hard-working he is?”

“Pretty much.”

We stepped around two young women kissing.

“And how did our dummy sound?”

“Good. Here’s a quote: ‘Bring back the death penalty for killers and rapists and child molesters. That is the way to achieve justice, not this coddling. Mr. Illyanovitch is a good man but he does not have the will to go to the end. And Mr. Haaviko is a lying, cheating and manipulative son of a bitch who cannot begin to understand the world around him.’ And more like that.”

“And the crowd?”

“Loved him. Oh, he’s also pressing charges on you about that fight you two had at the speech.”

“Ah? Interesting. Give me a second.”

I took my cell phone, called Lester’s office and told an assistant to press charges against the dummy as well and to talk to the cops the next morning when he got a chance.

The young woman took down every word and I asked, “Are you recording this?”

“Of course.” She sounded offended.

“Okay. And tell Lester I will of course not speak to the cops without him being present.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Good night.”

And she hung up.

Further down the walkway along the Assiniboine River, Reese and I came upon three young men fishing with spinning rods in the fast current.

Reese stared into the brown water. “So what does the dummy do here? Goodson is not impressed about laying out more cash for this.”

“How much is the dummy costing?”

“Five thousand. He’s a university student, an actor. A good one.”

I absorbed it. “It’ll pay off in the long run.”

“All right. Now, what does the dummy do?”

“He bleeds off votes from Illyanovitch by hitting him at the root of his constituency; we want the dummy to appeal to the law and order crowd. To protect himself from that Illyanovitch will have to start being more right wing and the distance between him and me will grow. We want to give the voters a clear choice.”

“And the point of all this?”

I shrugged. “Simple strategy. Divide and conquer. We are aiming for the ballot question; the last question asked by the voters before they cast their vote.”

“You seem to know a lot about this. How is that?”

“Is it important?”

“Yes.”

“In prison I had lots of time to read. I read a lot of political biographies—Huey Long, Stephen Harper, Vladimir Putin, Sarkozy, Nixon, Elizabeth the First of England, Kissinger, Reagan, Bush one and two, Philip the Second of Spain, Ivan of Russia and so on.”

“Ivan the Terrible?”

“He wasn’t that terrible. Anyhow, all the data’s there. You just have to see it.” Politics and crime, crime and politics, lines blurred. Both were about manipulation, and the borders blurred all the time. In Japan members of the Yakuza sat in the Diet, in Russia the Senate held its fair share of Mafiya, in England a convicted perjurer and a white-collar thief sat in the House of Lords, in the United States a senator had to be pried out of power like a limpet after accepting bribes.

Reese absorbed this information and then took my arm and leaned in close. “Did you hear about what happened to Reynolds?”

“No. What?” I thought about being curious and hoped it showed on my face.

“He snapped and sent out cease and desist orders to about a hundred people to stop talking about Devanter and Illyanovitch. In my business it’s followed with an injunction or restraining order.”

“So?”

Reese shook my arm. “He sent it to people who had nothing to do with Devanter or Illyanovitch. He sent it to lawyers and judges and cops and millionaires and businessmen. He snapped.”

I was curious. “So what’s happening?”

“He’s in serious damage control mode now and practically paralyzed. He’s had to delay two cases I know of from going to court and reschedule at least ten meetings. Devanter is furious with the dumb shit. And, to top it all off, there have been dozens of complaints with the Law Society of Manitoba and even a couple to the police for harassment.”

I pulled my arm free and kept walking. Reese followed and went on, “And that’s just what I know about.”

A duck flew over our heads and Reese paused and then asked, very casually, “You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”

“Me?” I thought innocent thoughts and hoped they showed.

He held up his hand. “Before you answer, you should know, anything you tell me is privileged.”

My criminal mind was very doubtful about the necessity of telling him the truth and I really could think of no reason to risk it. “Sure. But me? Never.”

He looked doubtful. “Okay.”

“Now, would it be all right if I went and visited Mr. Goodson?”

“Sure. You should call him first. Do you want me to come?”

I stooped for a stone and flipped it out to pop a plastic bag floating in the river. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I want to ask him a question you don’t want to hear. And you really don’t want to hear the answer.”

“Ah. I’ll call and get you permission. Tomorrow?”

“Or the day after.”

When I got home Claire was drinking straight from a bottle of Benedictine liqueur. In front of her was a fancy sheet of thick paper with tiny words written in beautiful script. Holding it flat to the table was the Beretta pistol and the unsheathed Mauser bayonet.

I wanted to reach for the bottle but took the paper instead. It said,

Dearest Clarice!

I’m so sorry you couldn’t make it for coffee but I hope you enjoyed the chocolate and flowers.

Shall we have dinner? We have so much to discuss and so much to plan.

I hope your husband will have the dignity to step aside in respect of our love.

I long for your embrace and look forward to the continuation of our beautiful relationship.

Signed,

A Wretched Englishman! (You will forgive the pun, my one true love!)

I sheathed the bayonet and carried it with me to check the doors and windows and set the alarms. I wondered how the Shy Man had found out Claire’s full name was Clarice, which she never used and which she hated. I wondered where he was.

When I got back Claire had corked the bottle and had pulled the magazine from the gun and the bullets from the magazine and was reloading. She stared into the distance while pressing firmly down on each brass cartridge against the resistance of the spring. I had taught her to do that every night to double check that the magazine was still working.

She saw me and smiled brightly. “I think it’s time for a change.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

I
called Devanter the next morning at 6:00 from a pay phone up on Main to cancel our appointment. I got his answering machine but I told the machine that there was a family emergency and it seemed to understand—or at least it didn’t argue with me. Then I took a brisk jog to Salter Street where I caught a bus downtown. From there I hit the hamster trails that connected most of the city buildings until I found the parking garage under the Millennium Library. I used the rear entrance to the park and then crossed two more streets to a big hotel.

If anyone was following me they were really good.