Miss Montreal (3 page)

“A new case I might need help with. My first murder.”

“Well, you know it wouldn’t be mine,” he said, his clouded look clearing a little, a tight grin appearing.

“You never had to solve one.”

“No, but I had to anticipate what the person trying to solve it would see. Trust me, you want me on this. Do not doubt my usefulness.”

Who in their right mind would?

“I just need to speak to the client,” I said. “Make sure he’ll authorize expenses for two.”

“I’m not going to charge you, you dick.”

“I’m talking about travel costs.”

“Why? Where is this one?”

“Montreal.”

“For how long?”

“Maybe a week.”

“Cool,” he said. “I like Montreal. Used to do business with the Cotronis back in the day. So who got killed?”

“A guy I went to summer camp with. His grandfather is hiring me.”

“Summer camp? Christ, how old were you?”

“Twelve.”

“I was that age, I was stealing, smoking and running from my stepfather. Summer and winter. So when was he killed, this camper?”

“A few weeks ago. His grandfather said the police are getting nowhere.”

“Forget what they say on TV. A few weeks can still be early days.”

“Not to a dying man.”

Arthur Moscoe lived in a condo on top of a seven-storey building on Bedford, overlooking Varsity Stadium and the exploding crystal wing of the Royal Ontario Museum. A small Filipina let me in and led me to a closed room filled with light, even on a grey morning, and soft classical music playing from hidden speakers.

The man himself must have been big at one time. Even now, wasted by illness, he took up most of the king-size bed on which he lay, propped up by three pillows. The rest was taken up by assorted medical equipment, including a small tank providing oxygen through a tube up his nose. The feet thrust up beneath the bedspread like two sharp hills, the hands at the end of his bony grey wrists wide in their spread. If he played piano, an octave and a half would have been child’s play. His head was also of great size and dominated by a nose that might once have been Roman but now drooped into a hook. His ears were like ferns, the lobes flopping down below the point of his jaw.

He was eighty-three now and dying of cancer. It was the first thing he told me once his attendant had left the room. “I’ve got both leukemia and lymphoma. It’s a race to see which takes me first. That’s one of the reasons you’re dealing with me and not Sammy’s mother,” he said. “I might have months to live, but it could easily be weeks. So I don’t have time to waste. The police have had three weeks to find exactly nothing. And I’m more of a take-charge type than my daughter. You want to talk to her, my advice is call before noon. She’s a
schmecker
, that one.”

“A what?”

“A smoker. Dope, grass, whatever they call it these days. Started back in the sixties and never stopped.”

“What about his father?”

“Gone. Has to be three, four years now. A kind of liver cancer and he didn’t even drink, that’s the kind of luck he had. She’s remarried now, my daughter, living in Florida, and the next time her husband is of any help will be the first.”

“Siblings?”

“One sister, Sherry. Only she got religion and lives in Jerusalem. Calls herself Shira. Also not likely to be of any help to you. She and Sammy weren’t very close. So I’m the man you deal with. I have all the money you’ll need. Better than that,
I have lawyers. Good ones. You need anything at all, you call Henry Geniele. I have his direct number.”

Jesus. Henry Geniele, senior partner at Geniele, Driscoll, Ross. Finding out he was at your disposal was like finding out Tom Brady just joined your pick-up football team.

“Bill whatever you have to but get results,” he said. “It’s terrible what they did to him. Beaten so badly. And—did I tell you already what else they did?

“No.”

“They mutilated him. Carved a Magen David in his chest. The police said they did it after he was already dead, but still. His mother knows. I know. I can’t get it out of my mind, the bastards.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Moscoe—”

“Everyone’s sorry. It doesn’t change what happened.”

“What else have the police told you?”

“He was kicked to death, they think. Probably with steel-toed boots. They broke his head open, that beautiful head of his, full of stories. You ever heard the expression, Jonah, God invented man because he loves stories? If that’s true, he would have invented Sammy over and over. There was nothing he couldn’t turn into a story, even when he was a kid. And his columns—every week something caught his eye, his funny bone, his high horse. My girl prints them out for me from the computer. But then they kicked his head to pieces. Broke his neck too. Put an end to the stories.”

Hearing that he’d died of blunt-force trauma to the head sent a chill over me. I had suffered my own brain injury seven months earlier, and I was still leery of anything remotely close to that. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

“I don’t need your sympathies. I need your professional help.”

“What else did the police tell you?”

“I dictated a letter to my lawyer after I spoke to the detective there, while it was still fresh. I have a copy for you.
Otherwise, it’s probably best you speak to them yourself. Get it first-hand. You speak French?”

“Some.”

“Some may not get you far enough. They’re all French, the Montreal cops, always have been.”

“Who did you speak to?

“A Detective Paquette. Reynald Paquette.”

“In French?”

“Ha. I’m the first to admit, Jonah, my generation didn’t learn much French in Montreal. We were part of the problem, looking back. But Paquette’s English is fine. It’s his judgment I question.”

“Why?”

“They found Sammy in Ville St-Laurent, out by Côte-Vertu. You know Montreal?”

“Parts of it.”

“Not this part, I bet. It’s all Arab now. It wasn’t in my day, but you drive past there now, it’s halal this, Islamic that.”

“You think Muslims attacked him?”

“They’re Jew haters, aren’t they? Who else would kick a Jew to death and do what they did after? I told this to Paquette. Connect the dots, I told him. You don’t have to be a genius. He said they had to consider all leads. I don’t know if he was really clueless or being politically correct. Since then, I haven’t heard much that’s new. No suspects they’ve identified, certainly no arrests.”

“When was he found?”

“May 29th. Early, just after seven. Guy opening his restaurant found him in the laneway behind. Also some kind of Arab. The address is in that envelope on the side table.”

“Any idea what Sammy was doing there?”

“What did I know of his day-to-day life? He was my grandson, living in another city. There was some kind of call to the police that night, I know that much. They went to his
place, but Paquette says it was a mistake. Maybe a prank call.”

“I’ll check into it. Anything else?”

He opened his mouth, about to speak, then closed it and looked out the window.

“Mr. Moscoe?”

He looked back at me: “We spoke maybe once a month, saw each other a few times a year. If it wasn’t the Arabs, then maybe it had to do with his work.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he wasn’t a wild man, Sammy. Didn’t run around. He was very devoted to his little girl, my first great-granddaughter. He got along with his ex-wife. He loved what he did. And he worked hard at it.” He sighed deeply and said, “The little girl. Sophie. She’ll be raised completely in French now. Not that it matters to me, I’ll be gone soon. But she’ll be lost to the family. Maybe there’s one or two cousins she’ll stay in touch with, but that’s it.”

“Do you have Paquette’s email or phone line?” I asked.

“In that envelope. It has his direct line and cell, your retainer, Sammy’s address, his ex-wife’s number, the key to his flat …” He looked away and I could see teardrops pooling in the deep sockets of his sunken eyes.

I didn’t force eye contact. I gave him the time he needed.

“There’s a picture too,” he finally said. “Take it out and look at it.”

I picked up the envelope and slid out a five-by-seven print of a young man with light brown hair, thinning above the temples into an inadvertent pompadour, warm brown eyes behind glasses, a thin nose and a slightly weak chin.

Sammy? Is that you?
Remembering the gawky kid I had tried to turn into a hitter.

Could someone look at a picture of me when I was twelve and see the man I was today? Were there hints, even then, of any of the darkness to come?

“You know,” Mr. Moscoe said, breathing as deeply as his weak old lungs would allow, “I wish I’d never opened my mouth to him. About Montreal, I mean. He went there for school, I know, to the writing program at Concordia, but if it wasn’t for me, maybe he would have come back here to live.”

“Why do you say that?”

The old man’s lips spread into a smile that moved from his dry lips to his eyes, still some brightness in them. “He’s the one I told all my stories to. My Montreal stories. He ate them up. Of all my grandchildren, he was the one who took an interest. Always asking about the streets we came from, the characters, the fights, me and my exploits. You see me here now, running out of gas, but Montreal was my town for a long time. From the early fifties until the separatists came in, that’s twenty-five years. And in those twenty-five years I went from nothing, less than nothing, to the owner of a company that set this family up pretty good. You’ve read Mordecai Richler? His books about St. Urbain Street?”

“Sure.”

“Well, they were rich compared with us, that’s all I can say. More than one step above. They were west of the Main, for one thing. You know St. Lawrence Boulevard?”

“Yes.”

“We were east of there on De Bullion, probably the worst street in the whole area. And I had stories too. Who didn’t? Montreal was a special town in those years. It had everything Toronto didn’t have. The clubs, the nightlife, the colour. It was Havana North. All the great entertainers, strippers, boxers and wrestlers, hockey players, gangsters. Sammy loved those stories. He even moved to my old neighbourhood. He was paying thirteen hundred a month for a flat on Laval. I’d kid him—I’d say, ‘Sammy, when we lived in that neighbourhood, we paid thirty-five dollars a month, and the first bucket of coal was free.’ I’d tell him, ‘Write a book about those old days when Sammy
Davis was dancing across the street from where Lili St. Cyr was stripping—and there was no question, Lili was the bigger star.’ Ah, the poor kid,” he sighed. “Poor, poor Sammy. No one should die like that, set upon by animals.”

“No.”

“You knew him, my daughter tells me.”

“From summer camp,” I said. “For a few years.”

“You liked him?”

“I did.”

“Because he was a quiet kid, you know. Loved to read, that one. Always with his nose in a book. You really remember him or you just saying you do?”

“I really do.” I told him the story about the softball game, giving Sammy the nickname he used to the day he died. He was in tears when it ended, wiping them away with the backs of his hands.

“I am so glad to hear that,” he heaved. “So glad. The better you knew him, the more connected you feel, the harder you’ll work to catch the bastards who killed him. It won’t just be a job for you.”

“It never is,” I said.

From
Montreal Moment
magazine, Montreal, March 31

A
warm summer rain was falling at seven the next morning. Not on me, though. I was smart enough to wait under the overhang outside 10 Hogarth. It was June 21st, the longest day of the year, but the whole landscape was dark, wet and grey, as it had been for days. Summer was starting somewhere but not here. At that hour it was quiet except for a crow boasting about something on a high wire and a streetcar grinding up Broadview.