City of Ice (10 page)

Mathers nodded. “You told the IO all this?” “I told LaPierre squat and I’ll thank you to do the same. We’re on this case, Bill. It’s not official, but we’re on this case.” Cinq-Mars stared at him to gauge his reaction.

“I’m square, as long as you can skate us around the department.”

“You let me worry about the department.” “What about Sergeant LaPierre? I don’t know much about the guy, but he catches us messing with his case—” He’d not had to deal with these issues working in the suburbs. They had internal political problems there, too, but nothing that skirted so far around the rules. Bill Mathers was a man who stayed within the lines, but he was not so much inclined that way as fearful of doing otherwise. He was coming up against his own trepidation, rather than a moral dilemma.

“Relax. He’s doing his duty. Today’s the boy’s funeral. LaPierre’s attending.”

Mathers offered a little smirk. “You think of everything.”

“Let’s go.”

They clambered out of the car and walked up to Garage Sampson. The door to the side office was locked. Lights were on inside, and they could hear a radio.

Mathers rang the bell.

The radio was switched off.

Mathers rang again, and this time they detected a motion down a lengthy corridor. A figure advanced toward them. When he was near he shouted in English for them to hang on a second. Momentarily they identified the figure as a young man approaching with a ring of keys. He had to open several locks.

“Is this Fort Knox?” Mathers inquired in French when the door swung open.

“What?” the young man asked in English. He was dressed in a mechanic’s greasy coveralls. Steel-toed boots protected him from mishaps.

“Never mind.” Mathers pushed his coat back and showed his hip badge. “Police. We’d like to come in, ask you a few questions.”

The youth promptly stepped aside. Cinq-Mars gave him a nod as he followed Mathers through the door and did a broad scan of the premises.

“You alone here?” Mathers asked the mechanic. He offered a wide smile, to suggest that he was the one person he’d want to trust in all the world.

“Yeah.”

“What’s your name?” He was good-looking, dark-haired, thin, and Mathers guessed that Cinq-Mars would describe him as not having a criminal appearance. He looked the part of a grease monkey. He wore what girls were calling hockey hair, long at the back and on top, shorn on the sides.

“Jim Coates. This about Hagop?”

“You know Hagop Artinian?”

“Yeah, he works here. Or—I mean. You know. He did. I can’t believe he was killed, man. Whew. He’s a good guy. Nobody deserves something like that. What was he doing in that Santa suit anyway?”

“Were you friends?”

“Sort of. Not really, but, you know, we worked together.”

“Here?”

“In the garage, yeah.”

“What did he do?”

“Mechanic. I do bodywork, he did engines.”

Cinq-Mars listened to the boy as Mathers questioned him, catching his tone. An underlying excitement was apparent, as though the investigation was enough of a novelty, despite the grim circumstances, to give him something to talk about later. He seemed nervous but not frightened. Without bothering to ask permission, Cinq-Mars wandered into the garage bays to do a general snoop.

“How long did you know him, Jim?” Mathers asked. His pen and notepad were poised to record the answer, and the boy leaned slightly forward on the balls of his feet to make sure that he did so.

“I been here about three months maybe. Something like that. I knew Hagop since then. We didn’t hang out or nothing, but we talked to each other at lunch and stuff.”

“You didn’t work together?”

“I’m body, he’s mechanics. When I’m working it’s not so easy to carry on a conversation.”

“Where’s everybody? Why are you here alone?”

“Christmas holidays.”

“Cars crack up around Christmas, don’t they?”

“The boss gave us the week off.”

“Except you.”

“Tough luck. I got the least seniority. I got a couple of cars to do, but mostly he wants somebody down here telling customers to come back next week.”

“Isn’t it a strange time of year to be closed down, Jim? With this weather, don’t you have a lot of fender benders?”

“I guess so. Yeah. Maybe.”

Mathers moved around the office, in between desks, casting his eyes on the paperwork waiting in abeyance, order sheets, invoices, much of it left as if the staff had suddenly been spirited away. He wanted to see if the young man would try to stop him, but he didn’t seem concerned.

“Christmas holidays, is this something that goes on every year? Did you know about it in advance? Or did the boss just spring it on you?”

“We had the day off before Christmas, and Christmas and Boxing Day. Then on Boxing Day, after we heard about Hagop and that, we got called and told to take the week off. Me, I was told to come in. The boss came down here and we took care of a few customers and the rest we told to come back.”

“So it came as a surprise. A last-minute sort of thing.”

“I guess so. Not much of a surprise for me. But it’s been a quiet week for me too.”

Cinq-Mars returned to the office area. “I see only one car out there,” he said.

“Yeah. We’re closed.”

“Did Hagop have friends here?” Mathers asked.

“He kept to himself a lot. The boss liked him. He hung out with the boss a bit. That made the rest of us, you know, a little careful around him.”

Cinq-Mars had wandered through to the executive office and plucked a business card from a tray. “This your boss’s name—Kaplonski?”

“Yes, sir,” the youth said. He was showing more
nerves now. The line of questioning had not been what he might have expected. He had hoped to get details he could share with others.

“What’s that,” Cinq-Mars called through, “Armenian?”

“Polish,” Mathers answered.

Cinq-Mars joined them again. “They left you in charge,” he said to Coates.

“Yes, sir.”

“You must be a big shot to be left in charge.”

“I’m at the bottom of the heap. Everybody else gets a holiday.”

“Maybe everybody else deserves one. Did you think of that?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.” The boy was flustered now.

Cinq-Mars loomed a head taller than the young man, and he stepped closer to him and stared down the ski slope of his nose. “Where do you work in this place usually? When you’re not listening to the radio and reading
Penthouse
in the back like you were when we rang the bell, where would you be working?”

“In the back.”

“In the body shop? Where that Buick is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What kinds of cars do you work on back there?”

The young man shrugged. “All kinds. Damaged cars.”

“What makes?”

“All makes.”

“Mostly new or mostly old?”

“I don’t know. Mostly old, I guess. New ones, too.”

“Up front, where you don’t work, what kinds of cars get worked on up there?”

The boy shrugged again. “Different cars.”

“Mostly what kind would you say?”

He seemed to not like where this was headed. “Mostly German, I guess. I don’t know.”

“Mercedes-Benz?”

“Yes, sir.”

“BMW?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about Japanese cars? Lexus?”

“I seen some of those, yeah.”

“Those were mostly new cars, I suppose.”

“I guess so.”

“Do me a favor,” Cinq-Mars demanded. “Don’t guess.”

“It’s just an expression.”

“Don’t express yourself, son. Just answer the questions.”

Coates remained quiet. He was beginning to rebel, Mathers noticed, against this inquiry. He kept looking over to Mathers as though the younger officer might help him out.

“What kinds of problems do they work on up front here?”

“Mechanical. I don’t know. It’s not my department. Tune-ups, I guess.”

“Tune-ups,” Cinq-Mars spat out. “Son, if you owned a new Mercedes-Benz would you bring it down to this shit-box garage in this rat-box neighborhood for a tune-up? Would you?”

The mechanic looked from Cinq-Mars to Mathers and back again. Then he looked down. “Probably not,” he said.

“Son, you’ve got stolen cars coming in and out of this place every day, don’t you?”

The boy kept his head bent down.

“Well? Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I work on older cars. I talk to the customers. I know those cars aren’t stolen.”

“We’re not talking about the body shop. We already know that’s a front. We’re talking about the cars at this end of the garage. The ones that get priority treatment.
Those cars. Does it come as a surprise to you to hear they’re stolen?”

The boy shrugged in his compulsive manner. “I don’t know,” he said.

“What
do
you know?”

He squared his shoulders this time. “I don’t know nothing about stolen cars. Honest. I just do bodywork in the back.”

“A boy can get into serious trouble working for a stolen car ring.”

This time the young man raised his hands in his own defense. His glance was shifting around, but he wouldn’t look at anyone’s eyes. “I got nothing to do with that. I was out of work a long time, then I got this job. I mind my own business, that’s all.”

“Hold your hand out,” Cinq-Mars ordered.

“What?”

“Are you deaf? Hold your hand out!”

The boy did so, his left. He held it out as though expecting to be strapped by the school principal.

Cinq-Mars removed his own hand from the pocket of his topcoat and dropped small rectangular pieces of metal into the boy’s palm.

“Your hands are dirty now, son. Tell me what you’re holding there.”

The boy examined the contents of his hand. “Oh shit,” he said.

“Tell me what you got there.”

“You know what they are.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“VI numbers.”

“The VINs of hot cars, to be precise. Am I right?”

“Look, when I got here, the boss, he said, ‘Can you work?’ I said yes. He asked me if I knew how to mind my own business. I said sure. That’s it. That’s all I know.”

“Go on. Touch them. Rub your fingers on them. I
want a good set of prints on those tags. Go on. Do what you’re told.”

“I don’t want to,” the boy said meekly.

“You do what a crook tells you to do you can damn well do what a cop tells you to do! Now put your fingerprints on those tags.” The boy did what he was told. Cinq-Mars lifted the flap and pulled his coat pocket open. “Now I want you to slip that evidence into my pocket here.” The boy did so. “Good. I guess your goose is cooked now. But I’m only guessing and that’s only an expression.”

The mechanic stood grimly silent.

“What’re you going to do?” he asked in a whisper.

“That’s not the question,” Mathers interjected, and he stepped toward the boy as Cinq-Mars backed off. “The question is, what are you going to do? Do you think you know too much, Jim?”

“I told you, I don’t know nothing about what’s going on.”

“Do you think Hagop Artinian knew too much?”

The mechanic thought about that. “Maybe,” he allowed.

“Look what happened to him. They dressed him up in a Santa Claus suit and broke his neck and stuck him through the back with a meat hook. I’m the one who opened the cupboard where they had him stashed. Not a pretty sight. You know something now, don’t you, Jim? You know you’re working as part of a stolen car ring. You know how dangerous that can be. If I were you I’d start looking for another job. One with improved benefits. Someplace where they don’t kill you for what you know. Get that job, Jim. Then give Mr. Kaplonski two weeks’ notice. That’s what I would do if I were you.”

“Here,” Cinq-Mars butted in, “I took Kaplonski’s card, so you take mine. If you ever get the feeling there’s a meat hook in your future, give me a call. In
the meantime I want you to go back to your
Penthouse
magazine and turn on your radio. We’re going to have a look around. You’ll forget about the whole thing, right?”

“Yeah,” the mechanic agreed.

“Good,” Cinq-Mars confirmed. “Get his address and phone number,” he told Mathers.

“Start looking for that new job,” Mathers warned him as he wrote down the particulars. “Work is hard to find but you have an incentive now. You should have an easier time than before. Working here you’ve added some experience to your résumé.”

The two policemen opened drawers and scanned papers. Cinq-Mars moved slowly through files labeled with the letters
P
and
C.
He examined telephones and lamps, and Mathers checked under desks and the bottoms of drawers until he found a bug.

Cinq-Mars put a finger to his lips. They’d discuss this elsewhere.

Satisfied, the two men shouted a good-bye to Jim Coates and departed.

Outside, Mathers asked, “One of ours?”

“What are the choices?”

“One, it’s ours. Two, it’s theirs, and they keep surveillance on their own people. Three—unlikely—it’s some other gang.”

“Four,” Cinq-Mars cut in, “it belonged to Hagop Artinian. Or whoever he was working for. My contact. The person who calls me with good information. Hagop was on the premises. So that’s a point for that theory. It could be us. It’s primitive, so whoever planted it was on a budget. Which could be us, which could be anybody, I suppose. Outside gang? Like you said, not likely. We found it in the outer office, right? Who’d want to know what the secretaries talk about? The boss, maybe. My contact, I’m sure, would plant a bug in the boss’s office, if he
had a choice. So would we. That’s a point for the boss spying on his staff, and less likely it was my contact or cops.”

Mathers opened the driver’s side door and got in. He reached across and flipped the latch for Cinq-Mars, then started up. He spun the tires on the hard snow pulling out, and they headed off down the street. They saw Jim Coates watching from the office window.

“Anything out of the files?” Mathers asked.

“Enough to know I’m coming back with a warrant.”

“Good show. What’s next, Émile?”

“Run his prints. I think he’s clean, but let’s check. Later on we’ll visit the Artinian family. Pay our respects. Share their grief. We were the ones who found their son.”