Miss Montreal (12 page)

Ryan dropped me at the café where I was meeting Marie-Josée Boily. I gave him Bobby’s cell number and the licence plate I’d memorized.

“How long you think you’ll be?” he asked.

“Fifteen, twenty minutes. I hope. If it’s much less than that, it means she has nothing to say.”

“All right. I’ll wait in that park over there,” he said, pointing up the street at Parc Lafontaine. “Call my cell when you’re done or look for me on a bench if it ain’t raining.”

Café Romarin was a small place that served crêpes, omelettes and sandwiches, and most of the tables were full. I looked for a woman with a copy of
Prochain épisode
by Hubert Aquin, which she told me she’d be reading. I saw women of the right age reading newspapers, checking cellphones and tablets, scanning menus.

No one reading a book.

I took a table for two near the window, looked the menu over while keeping watch on the front door. More people were leaving than coming in as they finished their lunches and headed
back to work. The only language I heard was French, albeit with English words and phrases dropped in here and there.

Ten to one.

A waitress in her twenties, jet-black hair cropped short, a loop through one nostril and small metal bars through both eyebrows, asked me if I was ready to order.
“Juste un café pour le moment
,” I said.

“D’accord.”

The coffee arrived at five to one. It took five minutes to drink. No one came in with Aquin’s book.

At one o’clock, I phoned her office. The woman who answered said something about a
réunion
, which I didn’t quite get.

“A meeting,” she said. “She left for a lunchtime meeting.”

“At Café Romarin?”

“I am not permitted to tell you that.”

“Please,” I said. “I’m the person she was supposed to meet and she hasn’t arrived.”

“But she left twenty minutes ago and we are right across the street.”

I felt a flutter in my sternum, the kind I get when my gut intuits something faster than my brain can process it.

“Does she have a cellphone number I can try?”

“I cannot give that out,” she said. “You must understand, not everyone we work with is satisfied with our efforts. They sometimes get angry with us.”

“Can you call her and tell her I’m waiting here? Or better yet, give her my cell number and ask her to call me?”

“Okay,” she said. “Please wait.”

She put me on hold long enough to listen to half a French rock song; all I could tell was that it was about love, possibly lost forever.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said when she came back on the line. “There is no answer on her cell. I left her a message so maybe she will call you, but that is all I can do.”

I thanked her, paid for my coffee, loitered outside the café for five more minutes, then walked to Parc Lafontaine to find Ryan.

He was on a bench, jacket off, watching kids play on the swings and jungle gym. Maybe thinking of the son he wasn’t seeing very often. I made sure I came around from the front; surprising him from behind was not the secret to longevity.

“You get hold of Bobby?” I asked.

“Yeah. He has someone’s gonna run the plate for us. Probably won’t have it before tomorrow though. What about your meeting? She tell you anything?”

“She didn’t show.”

“She call?”

“No. Her office told me she left to meet someone, which I assume was me.”

“You think she got held up somewhere, or just decided she had nothing to say?”

“She could have told me that yesterday.”

“Maybe someone told her she had nothing to say.”

“I didn’t tell anyone we were meeting.”

“She might have. Or … When you set up the meeting,” he said, “did you call from the hotel room or your cell?”

“The room.”

“That’s it, then. We book the fuck out of there. Now.”

We called around to half a dozen downtown hotels on our cellphones before finding a room at the Delta. We were fortunate, the booking agent told me, that there had been a cancellation. “Otherwise …” he said, leaving unsaid whatever unfortunate circumstances he had in mind.

We packed up in record time and checked out of the Holiday Inn.

“Was something wrong?” the concierge asked.

“No, just a change of plans. But I am expecting a package to arrive at the end of the day. Would you put it aside for me?”

“Normally,
monsieur
, once a guest has checked out, our obligation to him has ended.”

“I understand,” I said. “But you would be doing me a great service.”

“I see.”

And he did, once he took the twenty-dollar bill I palmed him.

We drove the short distance to our new lodgings without maiming any jaywalkers. This time Ryan checked us in, using a credit card in the name of Alessandro Spezza.

“I don’t suppose I want to know where you got that,” I said.

“I don’t suppose you do.”

The room was a little larger than the Holiday Inn, with a TV a foot or so larger, and mini-bar prices that would have embarrassed most black marketers. But at least we could do our business privately.

I used my cell to call Marie-Josée’s office again. She had not returned from lunch, or wherever she had gone at noon. The only thing we knew for sure was that she had not gone to Café Romarin as scheduled.

I called Arthur Moscoe in Toronto. It went straight to voice mail again. I left another message asking him to call as soon as he could.

Nurses and waitresses. Every man I know has fallen in love with one or the other at least once in his life.

In Sammy Adler’s case, it was a nurse.

“He was riding his bike home from work,” his ex-wife, Camille, told me. She was in her early thirties, with short dark hair and milk white skin: a Goth effect without makeup. We were on the south side of the park, away from the dog run and playing fields. Her daughter, Sophie, was climbing a plastic
structure that had tubular slides curving gently down to the ground, discharging one child after another into the sand.

“He was not paying attention,” she said, “which I found later was him in a nutshell, and someone opened a car door and knocked him over. He wasn’t hurt too badly, mostly scrapes and bruises, but I was walking past, also on my way home, and I stopped to check on him, make sure he was okay. He said he was in a lot of pain and could I help him around the corner to his flat. Later on, he admitted he was faking it a bit because he wanted to get my phone number and ask me out.”

“And you said yes.”

“Of course not. I told him nurses cannot go out with patients. He said he was not my patient. He told me his name and asked me mine. Again, I said no. What did I know about this man? So then he said this was all frustrating to him because he had actually paid a friend to open the car door at that exact moment so he could get knocked down and meet me, which made me laugh so hard. Which I needed very bad at the time, because I had split up with my guy of a long time, and finally I was charmed enough, or flattered, and I gave him my number.”

“How long until you got married?”

“Two years. I was already pregnant with Sophie. I had not planned on getting married ever—most Québécois don’t bother with that anymore. But he said he was old-fashioned and wanted a wedding—plus we would get nice gifts from his family and their friends. So we went ahead. Had the big wedding, my God, almost two hundred persons. For all the good it did.”

“What happened?”

She didn’t answer right away. Kept an eye on her daughter as she came laughing down one of the chutes—a small girl with light brown hair held back with a bright yellow clip—picking herself up and running back to the ladder that would take her up again.

“When you first meet someone who is different from you, different from all the guys you have been with, you think how
fresh it is. Here is someone who is not full of anger, resentments, who isn’t wasting his life being a student forever, or plotting the next revolution on Rue St-Denis. Here is someone who is funny and real and free of all the history we carry in Québec.”

“But …”

“At the same time, he was a little too different. Sam didn’t have family here or many friends when we met. They were all back in Toronto. So he was absorbed into my circles and didn’t always fit. My parents, my sister, my brothers, most of my friends, they support sovereignty. They voted yes in both referendums. They want Québec to be its own country. It is already its own nation, the distinct society, I think it’s called in English. Sam was sympathetic to that, as much as any English-Canadian could be, but in the end he could not support it. His attitude was—
Christ, c’est quoi le mot en anglais?
Condescending? Patronizing?”

“Either one.”

“Okay. In his view, Québec should stay in Canada because of what separation would do to the rest of the country. He didn’t see what it would do for us, make us
maîtres chez nous
—masters of our own fate, you would say. So there were arguments. Not between me and him, I am not so political. But between him and everyone else. And it wasn’t really his fault. He would ask honest questions and expect to get honest answers but instead he got emotion. Grievances. Two hundred years’ worth. As if he were the occupying power and we were still so downtrodden.”

“Did anyone ever get really angry?”

“To kill him over, you mean? Christ, no. Arguing about federalism, sovereignty, is a bit like hockey here. People are passionate about it, but no one would murder him for his opinion. Besides, we were separated more than a year before he died.”

“Is that what ended your marriage? Political differences?”

Camille smiled. “No, of course not. That’s just where the cracks first showed. What it really came down to? Sam was an observer of life. And a good one. He could be at the most
fantastic party in the world, the greatest concert, the biggest gathering—like a Woodstock—and he’d be off to the side making notes, taking down the details, planning how he would write it in his magazine. Me, I’m a doer. I go right to the centre of things. Like I did the day I met him. I saw someone fall, I went over to help. That’s me. If I’m at a party, I’m dancing. At a concert, I’m singing along. Painting my face blue and white for the Fête Nationale, lighting a lighter, hugging strangers. I am nowhere else but where I am. Sam was always somewhere else. Always in his head. His perfect night would be to eat dinner at home and watch a movie, or hockey. Even before we had Sophie. After she was born, to get him out for something besides work, forget it. To be honest, I got very bored in our marriage. I started going out with my sister, sometimes dancing, sometimes to a show. I have to experience life by doing, not watching.”

She looked at her watch, then her eyes trailed Sophie as she moved around the playground.

“The first summer we were together,” she said, “I took him camping in the Gaspésie. Me, I love camping. I went every summer with my family because we had no money to stay in hotels or resorts. I took him to a park where I’d been a dozen times, and I couldn’t wait to show him everything. The river where my dad taught me fishing, the trails you could walk and see the tracks of wolves. And all he did was complain. Too many bugs. Too much he’s allergic to. Too much work cooking and cleaning. No electricity for his computer. Too hard to understand the local accent. We were supposed to stay a week but he was so miserable, I broke down after three days and we drove to Quebec City and stayed in a bed and breakfast. I should have seen then how different we were, but his complaining was funny in a way. Like his big hero, Woody Allen. He wrote a great column about it. One of his best, I think. But life isn’t a column. Or the movies. After two hours, you’re still there and the complaining isn’t funny anymore. Sophie!” she called.
“Fais attention!”

The girl had come down the slide and landed on the feet of a boy her age who was still picking himself up out of the dirt. She looked at her mother, took me in and called out,
“C’est qui, lui?”

“Un ami de Maman, Sophie. Ça va.”

That satisfied her and off she went to continue the ups and downs of her four-year-old life.

“How is she doing?” I asked.

Camille shrugged. “She’s four. She doesn’t quite understand what has happened. She knows her father is gone but … whether she understands he is not coming back, who knows? She asked last week if she could still sleep at his apartment and she cried when I said no. But I don’t know honestly what she was crying about. The change in the routine, or the things of hers I haven’t yet collected from there.”

“What about you?”

“It’s a loss for me too. I’m not grieving as if he was still my husband but we had good years together. We parted as friends, I think. I will have to raise Sophie alone and when she is old enough to know how he died, that will be hard, I think.”

“At least she’ll know why he died, and who killed him.”

“It’s you who will find this out?”

“It’s me.”

It had to be. You don’t take someone like Sammy out of the world, take him away from a four-year-old girl, rob his city of a unique voice, without having to answer for it. And if Paquette were making progress, he was keeping it well hidden.

“Do you know if he was seeing anyone?” I asked.

She cocked her head slightly and smiled for the first time. “Sam?”

“Why did you say it like that?”

“He wasn’t exactly a, um,
un homme à femmes?”

“A ladies’ man.”

“Yes.”

“But he got you.”

The smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Yes, he did. He did. So I suppose it’s possible. But he said nothing to me about that. We always told each other that if we met someone serious—if someone was going to be part of Sophie’s life—then we would talk about it. And we didn’t, so that is as much as I know.”

“Did he ever talk about enemies?” I asked. “People threatening him?”

“Not to me, never.”

“Money problems?”

“Everyone in Montreal has money problems. Or at least everyone I know. But his grandfather has so much and he won’t live to spend it. I’m sure if Sam had troubles that way, Arthur would have helped.”