City of Ice (5 page)

“I saw him—”

“You saw a Santa Claus,” Cinq-Mars interrupted quietly before his partner embarrassed himself further. “Not this one.”

“Émile,” Wynett said, “I’ll copy you my report to LaPierre, but there’s something you might want to tell him right off.”

“What’s that?”

“The boy’s genitals were hot-wired. High voltage. He got burned up bad before they killed him.”

“Merde.”

“I also have good news. Before somebody snapped his neck, he was choked. The throat’s bruised. There’s tissue and blood under the boy’s fingernails—most likely the perp’s. He scratched him.”

The zipper on the body bag was done up and the corpse swung carefully onto the gurney, avoiding further damage by the hook. The officers took their time strapping him in, making certain that the body
would not slip free when they descended the steep stairs.

Chastened, Mathers followed Cinq-Mars back to the window. “It makes no sense,” he whispered. “This has to be the same Santa. If not, where’s the other one now? Why were we tipped off about a deal with Santa if there was no deal? You’re the one with the contacts, Émile. You should know.”

“We were tipped off because some people wanted to deliver a Christmas present to me. There it is,” he said, nodding toward the gurney. “Now, do you want to take this up with my contact? Do you have a beef with him?” Cinq-Mars asked, suddenly turning angry.

“This is off the subject. Don’t get nasty, Émile.”

“Do you want to meet an errand boy who can take you to my source? He has good information. The prime stuff. My source has even better stuff. Would you like to meet him? Introduce yourself then.” Cinq-Mars turned back to face the room.

“What are you going on about?” Mathers asked.

“Just unzip the bag and say, ‘How do you do, pal? I’ve been looking for somebody like you most of my life. You’ve done wonders for the career of Detective Cinq-Mars, what can you do for me?’ Go ahead. There he is. He can help you along with promotions, at least lead you to someone who can. Say hello, Bill. Go ahead. Unzip the bag and say hello.”

His mouth open, Bill Mathers looked at the bag as though he might actually be tempted. He appeared to regret not having done a more careful study of the tenant. “That’s him? That’s your stoolie?”

“He was never a stoolie, Bill. Respect the dead in their presence. Don’t let me hear you call him that again. He was a conduit. An intermediary. A go-between. Everybody knows I have one great secret source. This kid’s not him. But he was on the pipeline, he was connected to him.”

“Santa Claus?” Mathers’s eyes were as wide now as his mouth. As the new partner to Émile Cinq-Mars, he had hoped to gain his trust and someday make the acquaintance of his contacts. Cops knew that he had to have extraordinary contacts to have accomplished all that he had. Mathers just never expected that an introduction would occur during his first few hours with the man. Nor had he expected the contact to be dead, which did spoil the moment.

“In the flesh,” Cinq-Mars confirmed. “So to speak. At Christmas people give one another presents. I was just delivered mine by Santa himself. Why am I so lucky, do you think?” Cinq-Mars abruptly raised his hand and called to the policeman he had spotted in the outer corridor. “Detective!”

A detective the same age as Mathers came into the room looking from side to side as though expecting someone, his partner perhaps, to jump out at him.

“Déguire, isn’t it?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“Yes, sir. Hi, Bill,” he said to Mathers, who nodded.

“Anything from the tenants?”

The detective checked through his notebook as though his memory was faulty. “Not much,” he concluded in the end. His black hair was thick, curly, and cut short. He kept it trimmed around his ears. A deep, permanent horizontal crease in the man’s brow suggested perpetual concentration, but the way his forehead protruded over his wide-set eyes gave the impression that all the concentration in the world had never helped him to arrive at a conclusion about anything, that he was constantly perturbed. “It’s a rooming house for students mostly. Half went home for the holidays. Some were out shopping during the day, visiting friends at night. One guy’s stoned. Says he saw a moving van. Stuff being hauled out of a room on this floor, could’ve been this one. Must’ve been. Another guy went to mass if you can believe that.
Nobody heard a thing. Like one kid said, everybody plays their music so loud in here nobody can hear nothing. That’s a quote. That’s what he said.” He seemed nervous about addressing Cinq-Mars.

“What name on the moving van?”

“Once he got started he was on a roll. He offered around seven choices. I suggested a few more, and he agreed it could’ve been one of those, too.”

“Great. Who lived here?”

“Our victim. Everybody I spoke to gave me a positive ID off the Polaroid. Nobody knows anything about the Santa Claus routine. His name’s Hagop Artinian.”

“Hagop? That’s a name?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s Armenian,” Mathers put in.

“All right. Déguire, get in touch with the building owner in the morning. He might have plans to double his income this week. I want the apartment sealed until New Year’s.”

“I’m off tomorrow, sir,” Déguire declared. He stuffed his notebook in his pocket and faced Cinq-Mars, challenging him to repudiate his statement.

“You’re what?”

“Off,” Déguire testified. His chin was a pronounced nub, which aggressively extended forward. “It’s Christmas.”

“You won’t do this one little thing?”

His nervousness was apparent, but whether he was being defiant of Cinq-Mars’s authority or was merely intimidated by his reputation was difficult to discern. Perhaps his upset had everything to do with the disruption to his Christmas, as he had stated, and he was mad that once again a superior officer had messed up his plans. “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of that.”

“Good man,” Cinq-Mars told him, although he did not sound impressed.

Déguire lurched out of the apartment as if spooked
by ghosts. Émile Cinq-Mars watched him go, trailed by the dead man, who was finally being wheeled out. Then he left also, with Bill Mathers shuffling along after him.

Behind a wall in that stark room a toilet flushed in the wake of their departure. Moments later, wiping his nose and mouth and sneezing, once, violently, the investigating officer, Sergeant-Detective André LaPierre, emerged from the bathroom. He looked around. He checked the empty closet. Then he yelled for a uniform to get the hell back in there and tell him what had happened to the body. “Where’s my corpse?” he hollered. “Who took my corpse?”

One A.M., Christmas Morning

Detective Émile Cinq-Mars drove west from the mountain and the Christmas lights of downtown Montreal across the broad, flat, and largely English suburbs that would yield to countryside, where he lived, where his American wife slept peaceably, where his problems followed him around as if they were doting pets at his heels, yappy and insistent, affectionate and needy. He drove his own car, a blue Taurus wagon, and set the cruise control fifteen clicks above the legal limit, his usual allowance in winter. Friends thought him foolish to undertake this drive daily. For Cinq-Mars the trip was enjoyable, the quiet time restorative, and crossing the bridge to leave the urban island behind inevitably provided a jolt of relief. He was headed for horse country, an area of woods and open fields and white fences, a leisure community of large homes surrounded by vast yards and farms where, on a crisp, clear winter night like this, the sky was filled with stars.

Christmas morning now, Santa would be aloft, traversing the heavens in his chariot, swinging low to rooftops to scurry down chimneys into the dreams of children.
Good
, Cinq-Mars thought. Good, he meant, that the world periodically returned to its fictions and
fairy tales, good that those whose job it was to separate a department store Santa from a savaging meat hook were shunted aside for a while, their stubborn reality dismissed for a day. Beyond the city, across the bridge, off the island, under the stars, Émile Cinq-Mars drove, and as he drove he brooded. As any man on the downward curve toward retirement might do, he reflected upon those matters in his life that had carried him so gently to this juncture.

No one might have guessed, least of all Émile Cinq-Mars, that he would rise to become the top cop of his time and place. He had prided himself on being particular, a fusspot for detail, pragmatic and diligent by nature, artful by design. “Unremarkable overall” was how he had described the career of his newly attached partner, Bill Mathers. His own career path had made a similar impression through his early years as a police officer. He was known to be thorough, someone who got the job done, a plodder, a man of caution and integrity, unflappable, unexciting, a bore when he wasn’t drinking, an oddity and a practicing Roman Catholic. He was promoted through the ranks on the basis of his reliability and service, all in due course, nothing rushed. That’s how the job was for him, until it suddenly changed.

During his early years on the force Émile Cinq-Mars had specialized in petty crimes. Armed robbery, murders, rapes, headline-grabbing drug deals, and white-collar larceny were not the areas where he had first demonstrated talent. Car thieves, on the other hand, purse snatchers, B & E artists working a neighborhood, pickpockets and muggers—the pests, he called them—were criminals for whom he had a nose, a sense. Their activities suited his methods of investigation. Cinq-Mars did well because of his natural inclination to stick to it. He held an innate belief that the quick-strike petty criminal did not merely fade away
into the welter of humanity, never to be identified, but that he distinguished himself, even shone forth, that he radiated the nature of his being and the manner of his crimes and all that any cop had to do was to keep on looking until the perpetrator showed up to declare himself. Often Cinq-Mars solved crimes he was not investigating. He never let a crime go, never forgot the circumstances, the pattern. Meddling in the affairs of the criminal world invariably unearthed both clues and suspects, and it was more a question, he had found, of matching suspects to a crime than the other way around. Where others might investigate a bank robbery and get nowhere, Émile Cinq-Mars would study the habits of an unsavory individual he had stumbled across and discover the bank robber his colleagues pursued. He liked to say that he didn’t solve crimes. Rather, he figured out what criminals had been up to lately.

Cinq-Mars publicly maintained that shoddy police work was the chief reason petty crime flourished. “Crooks,” he had declared while imbibing at an officers’ party, “are like horses. They look smart going over the jumps, but they’re still dumb animals.” That remark had won the approval of his colleagues and a satisfying round of laughter. Cinq-Mars, however, had had quite a few whiskeys that night, and he continued on with a final aphorism, “The main thing dumb-ass crooks got going for them is dumber-assed cops,” an opinion that failed to garner a laugh, or even a smile.

Still, the career of Émile Cinq-Mars had been predictable enough, and while he was respected and over the fullness of time would earn appropriate honor, the principal credits that had made him worthy of promotion were duty and years of service. He was not on an accelerated path, nor did he do anything of a dramatic nature to help himself. Cinq-Mars had nothing to contribute to the operations and teamwork
put into play against the New York-Montreal Mafia connection or the Toronto-Montreal alliances or the Hell’s Angels. His prey were the miscreants, the street toughs, the rough boys out to hot-wire a buck. Some he pursued because they were salvageable, others because they weren’t. Most he tracked down because that happened to be his job. He was considered too genteel, too small-town, too hick country, to be a real street cop, but that’s what he had become, in his own way, a street cop with a degree in animal husbandry, and his counterpoint, his reason for being, like the cow to the farmer, was the street punk.

But that would change. Everything would change. By the age of fifty-two, when most men were taking a sobering look at the limits of their careers, at the finite and shrinking choices of their lives, at the victory of boredom over ambition, of regret over aspiration, at a time when most men were choosing to settle for less and those who labored within large bureaucracies were settling for less than they had deemed imaginable, Émile Cinq-Mars would see his world turn, his wheels slip, his life and circumstances take a harrowing swerve. His career bounced once, twice on the tarmac, and then took off.

Cinq-Mars drove on.

Provided that those who were judging his appearance had an eye for extremes, character, and a blurred racial mix, the detective was a handsome man. His prominent forehead and amazingly large, aquiline nose, with the dominant crown and the steep ski slope down to a hefty nub, spoke of both his French-Norman roots and the Iroquois bloodlines a few generations past. A further French mix—paradoxically, Huguenot—irked him. At times he felt that that Protestant ingredient, in a grandmother, impinged upon his Roman Catholic soul, deformed him internally. Fifty-six now, he looked his years. Not younger,
not older. His severe, erect bearing moved him through the world with an attitude of eminence. He could readily be mistaken for a judge or a bishop rather than be identified as a policeman, and politics might be guessed as his hobby before horse trading. Yet a measure of his authoritative stance was his inclination to be recalcitrant, to disavow power, to choose his own judgment over the rules, his own path above the accepted method. In the way that he pursed his lips, how he bobbed his head from side to side in a kind of ritual incantation, in the manner that he arched his rather extravagant and eccentric eyebrows, Émile Cinq-Mars displayed a thorny, rebellious temperament that caused those who knew him personally to fear him as much as those who knew him by reputation alone.

In answering a call on a wintry night such as this, he had agreed to visit a familiar motel on rue St. Jacques, in the city’s west end before the onslaught of the suburbs, a predominately English-speaking neighborhood. Told nothing of what he might find there, in Room 23, he was, in effect, being dared to go and to go alone. Cinq-Mars did not call for backup, although he recognized the motel as the night headquarters for an Irish gang that controlled the nearby turf, a place where members monitored police radio frequencies and doled out small jobs to underlings and wanna-bes. He went alone as instructed and knocked at Room 23. A woman’s voice spoke from the opposite side of the door. Cinq-Mars identified himself as a police officer. He stated that he had received a complaint. Opening the door, the woman threw herself into his arms.