The Delicate Storm

by Giles Blunt

  “Fine. So what did you do?”

  “I go out to my shack—the old one that I haven’t used for like seven, eight years. That’s how I met Petrucci years ago, by the way; I took him on a bear hunt, must be ten years ago. Anyways, I find this big sack on the ground outside. Like a duffle bag. Right away I knew what was in it. I didn’t even have to open it. It’s a dead guy, right? This is the first I know for sure it’s a body. So what am I gonna do, call the sanitation department?”

  “You could have called the police department.”

  “Obviously you know Leon Petrucci really well. Besides, I figured the guy’s already dead, I’m not hurting him any.”

  “We know you took the body into your shack. Did Ferand help you?”

  “No.”

  “Was he involved in this in any way? You’re not helping yourself if he was and you don’t mention it.”

  “Thierry had nothing to do with this. I never told him about it till after.” It was true the ident guys hadn’t found any evidence linking Ferand to the crime.

  “Did you cut the body up yourself, or did you have help?”

  “Myself. There was quite a bit of blood. To tell you the truth, the first thing I did when I got in there was throw up. I don’t know, I’ve seen a million dead animals, doesn’t bother me, but there’s something about a dead person, even if you don’t know them. Know what I mean?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Anyway, I didn’t want to get blood all over me. I bundled up the pieces and attached a rope so I could drag it to the bear trail. I knew they were awake and I knew they’d be hungry. I didn’t figure there’d be too much left of the guy.”

  “Was the body stripped when you found it?”

  “No, I did that. Didn’t want to be sawing through clothes. Didn’t figure the bears’d be interested in polyester or whatever, either.”

  “We found some material in the stove. Was there anything else with the body—any kind of ID or personal effects you might have kept?”

  “I didn’t keep nothing. There was nothing to keep. I slung everything into the stove.”

  “Did you recognize the victim?”

  “Never seen him before in my life.”

  “Frankly, I’m still a long way from buying the godfather angle. Do you have any idea why Petrucci would have wanted this guy dead?”

  “No. And I wasn’t about to ask, either.”

  “You have a good business, Paul. A wife. Nice house. Why’d you do this to a guy you didn’t even know?”

  “Why?” Bressard looked away at the far wall of the interview room. After a few moments of reflection he turned back to Cardinal. “Two reasons. One: Leon Petrucci. And two: Leon Petrucci. What do you think he’s going to do if I tell him thanks but I can’t do it? You think he’s just going to let me walk away from this? I don’t think so.”

  “And there was the ten thousand.”

  “Five. I’m still waiting for the other five.”

  Cardinal had Bressard sign a brief statement, then led him back to the cells. He would be formally charged that afternoon and let go on his own recognizance, mostly so he could be watched.

  Cardinal called Musgrave, who was still on the road.

  “You think it’s the mob?” Musgrave said. “You think that note means the order came from Petrucci?”

  “Well, Bressard has worked for Petrucci before. I think the case was before your time—about eight years ago?”

  “Yeah, I was in Montreal back then.”

  “We had a case where Bressard beat a guy pretty bad on orders from Petrucci. We could never nail Petrucci for it because Bressard was too scared to involve him. But when we were making the case, lots of characters did mention him—and one of them had a note, initialled P. We knew Petrucci had his larynx out years ago—it wasn’t unusual for him to write notes. On the other hand, Bressard could be lying through his teeth.”

  “I’m impressed that you got him to talk at all, considering. But you know Leon Petrucci moved down to Toronto.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  “Which leaves it barely in the realm of the possible. Tell you what—why don’t you let me handle the Petrucci angle? I’ll get someone from our Toronto detachment on it. They work organized crime all the time.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Musgrave let out a curse.

  “What’s the matter? You all right?”

  “Goddam truck driver just cut me off. I’m telling you, there’s never any cops around when you need one.”

  9

  THE CROWN ATTORNEY’S OFFICE was on MacIntosh Street in an aggressively ugly building of poured concrete that also housed local offices for the Ministry of Community and Social Services. It was right across the street from the Algonquin Lode, a location that came in handy when Reginald Rose, QC, wanted to make his opinions known to the public, which he often did.

  Everything about Reginald Rose was long. He was tall and thin, with a slight stoop that gave him the look of a scholar. He had long fingers that handled documents and evidence and even the knot of his tie with grace. He was given to red neckties and starched white shirts and red suspenders that—when he wasn’t wearing his habitual blue blazer—gave him the look of a crisp new Canadian flag.

  He was just now addressing himself to a group gathered around a long oak table—an odd-looking group, Cardinal thought. Aside from the elongated Rose himself, there was Robert Henry Hewitt, a.k.a. Wudky, who kept drooping over the table like a dormouse. There was Bob Brackett, his pro bono attorney—deceptively plump and harmless-looking, but a lethal criminal lawyer. And there was Cardinal himself, who was sure he must look as uncomfortable as he felt, because although he was usually perfectly clear about what side he was on, just now he had his doubts.

  “I must tell you right from the start,” Rose said, “that I am not of a mind to make a deal in this case. Why should I? According to all the evidence—and there’s a mountain of evidence—Robert Henry Hewitt is guilty of armed robbery. And not just a little guilty, but absolutely, positively, deadbang guilty. We have his admission of guilt—”

  “Of course you do. Obtained without benefit of counsel.”

  “Mr. Brackett, let me finish. We have your client’s admission of guilt. We have the cash from his knapsack. We have the plaid scarf he wore over his face. We have the holdup note written in his appalling but distinctive penmanship—written on the back of his previous arrest warrant, which coincidentally provides his name and address. Why should we make any deal?”

  Bob Brackett leaned forward against the conference table. He was dressed in impeccable pinstripes; he always was—perhaps because it lent an edge to his portly figure that otherwise had no edges at all. Pinstripes were nothing unusual in the legal trade, of course, but the gold hoop gleaming in Bob Brackett’s left earlobe most definitely was—especially on a half bald, tubby man in his mid-fifties. He had never married, and in a place the size of Algonquin Bay that alone was enough to feed rumours. Toss in one gold earring and the whispers rose a good deal higher in volume. Not that it mattered; as far as his clients were concerned, Bob Brackett could show up in a tutu as long as he was in their corner.

  “Come now, Mr. Rose,” he said. His voice was soft, reasonable, friendly. “Don’t you take any pride in your work? Are you really so desperate for victories that you have to corner a mentally impaired young man and put him away for fifteen years?”

  “Have him plead guilty—I’ll ask for ten.”

  Brackett turned to Cardinal. Cardinal was ready to give his views on the Matlock case and how Wudky had tried to help them out. Unfortunately, Brackett had something else in mind. “Detective Cardinal, I believe you have a nickname for my client down at police headquarters.”

  Cardinal coughed, partly from surprise, partly as a stall. “I don’t think we need to go into that, do we? I thought we were just going to—”

  “Do you or do you not have a nickname for my client down at headquarters?” Brackett’s v
oice never wavered from its note of pleasant inquiry.

  “Detective Cardinal is not in the witness box,” Rose said. “You don’t get to cross-examine him.”

  “I’m not cross-examining him. He’ll know when I’m cross-examining him. I’m asking a simple question.”

  “We have nicknames for a lot of our customers,” Cardinal said. “They’re not intended for public consumption.”

  “I’m not interested in your other customers, as you call them. What is my client’s nickname, please?”

  “Wudky.”

  “Wudky. An unusual cognomen. Could you spell that for us, please?”

  “W, D, C.”

  “W, D, C. An unusual spelling, too. What do the letters stand for?”

  “I’d really rather not say with Robert in the room.”

  Brackett smiled. It was a smile of great benevolence and gave not one inch of ground. “Nevertheless, Detective, we await your answer.”

  “It stands for World’s Dumbest Criminal. Sorry, Robert.”

  “That’s okay.” Hewitt was slumped over the conference table, his chin resting on both folded hands. Speech made his head bob up and down.

  “World’s Dumbest Criminal. And you call him that why, exactly?” Brackett’s round face was devoid of guile, just asking for information, please.

  “I thought we were going to discuss this just the three of us.”

  “Oh, no, that was never on the table,” Brackett said. “Please tell us why you call my client the World’s Dumbest Criminal.”

  “Because he’s just not competent. He makes dumb mistakes.”

  “Well, yes. Mr. Rose has the holdup note as Exhibit A.”

  Rose tapped his legal pad with the eraser end of his pencil. “Your client has been found in previous trials to be mentally competent to contribute to his legal defence and to understand the nature of his crimes. Do you expect that to suddenly change?”

  Brackett’s smile was cherubic. “You’re so ferocious in the pursuit of the retarded, Mr. Rose. Perhaps you’d prefer to ship my client to the United States. They execute them down there.”

  “Not for robbery, last I heard.”

  “May I continue?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Detective Cardinal, despite my client’s intellectual limitations, I believe he has recently been extremely helpful to the police. Is that correct?”

  At last, Cardinal thought. “He was a little off on the details. He told us of a conversation he’d had with a known felon named Thierry Ferand. And Ferand told him that a man from down south somewhere had killed Paul Bressard and got rid of the body in the woods.”

  The Crown tossed his pencil onto his pad so hard it bounced onto the floor. “Paul Bressard is alive and kicking. I saw him this morning. You can’t miss him in that raccoon coat, for God’s sake.”

  “Like I say, Robert was wrong on the details.”

  “The details? It’s a completely false statement.”

  Mr. Brackett twiddled pudgy fingers in the air. “Stop. Could we stop, please, and just move on to how much of Mr. Hewitt’s information turned out to be correct?”

  “Well, once we figured out that he had some names mixed up, it turned out he was right. That is to say, Paul Bressard wasn’t murdered and buried in the woods, but Bressard does admit to disposing of a body in the woods. And the body is indeed from down south—an American named Howard Matlock. So you see, Robert just kind of had things reversed.”

  “Thank you, Detective. That’s extraordinarily helpful.” Brackett removed his glasses and polished them with the back of his tie, another gesture that emphasized his pure harmlessness. “Would it also be fair to say you wouldn’t have known about this murder without my client’s help?”

  “Not exactly. It’s true he told us about it before we knew about it for ourselves, but we did hear of it from the person who found the body—part of it, anyway. But Robert also gave us the name of Paul Bressard, which made him a suspect sooner than he might have been otherwise. So all in all, yes, I would say he was very helpful and co-operative.”

  “Thank you, Detective.” Brackett turned to the crown. “So, Mr. Rose, it would appear the Crown attorney’s office has a choice: it can throw the book at a mentally challenged young man, or it can offer a deal to an extraordinarily helpful citizen.”

  Rose turned to Cardinal. “Do you have a suspect in the Matlock case?”

  “Several individuals have our attention, but I couldn’t say any arrests are imminent.”

  Rose raised his arms in a gesture of helplessness to Brackett. “You see? How helpful is that?”

  “Let’s not play games, Mr. Rose. I didn’t come here to waste your time or the detective’s. Does this Crown attorney’s office want to encourage co-operation from defendants or not?”

  “He pleads guilty to bank robbery, he does ten years.”

  “Ten years for a toy gun and an IQ of seventy-eight? I’d rather take my chances at trial.” Brackett tossed his papers into his briefcase and snapped it shut. “He pleads to carrying a concealed weapon—even that’s a gift, since we’re talking about a toy. Two years less a day.”

  Rose shook his head. “Let’s stay in the real world, shall we? Bank robbery, he does six years.”

  Brackett turned to his client and shook his shoulder gently. “Robert?”

  Hewitt sat up, blinking. “Oh, hi. I was just resting.”

  “The Crown is offering six years. With good behaviour you’d be out in four.”

  “Okay. That sounds good. Wow, I was having the most incredible dream, eh?”

  As he was leaving, Cardinal had to endure a mini-lecture from Rose about the responsibility the police shared with the Crown to make sure criminals are adequately punished. “The police department,” he said, “is not a place for bleeding hearts. If you want to empathize, I suggest you become a social worker.”

  Bob Brackett twiddled his fat fingers at Cardinal in the parking lot. Raindrops glistened on his scalp. Two uniformed cops were putting Robert Henry Hewitt into the back seat of a squad car. “Did Rose give you a lecture?”

  “Sort of.”

  “It hurts the poor fellow to give up such an easy case. Some people’s self-esteem depends on how many years they put people away for. It’s sad, in a way.”

  The squad car pulled to a stop beside them and the rookie at the wheel said, “Customer wants to talk to you.”

  “What’s up, Robert?”

  “I just wanted to like thank you, eh? Thank you, thank you, thank you, Officer Cardinal. Mr. Brackett says you saved me like ten years off my life, and I won’t never forget it. Like never, never, never, eh? I don’t forget my buddies. No way.”

  “Robert, the best way you can thank me is to stay out of trouble.”

  “Oh, I will, eh? I’m gonna be so good they’ll have to send me back before I get there. Really, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  The last Cardinal saw of Robert Henry Hewitt, he was turned around in the back seat of the squad car, still mouthing multiple thank yous as the car turned right on MacIntosh and headed north for the trip back to the Algonquin Bay jail.

  10

  LISE DELORME WAS ANNOYED to be shunted aside on the Matlock case. What Cardinal had said was quite true: she had worked with Musgrave before and they got along fine, even though he was a chauvinist nightmare. But no, D.S. Chouinard had wanted Cardinal on Matlock, and Cardinal it would be—which meant that while Cardinal was deep in the juiciest case to come along in a year, Delorme was left to handle whatever run-of-the-mill stuff might happen to be phoned in.

  She had been eating at her desk when the call came in from St. Francis Hospital about a missing person. Delorme had taken down a few particulars and promised to be there in twenty minutes.

  Missing persons. The trouble with missing persons is, they’re usually not missing at all. Not the adults. In most cases they’re simply fed up—with their mate, their job, their life—and they’ve decided to take a powder.
A spontaneous sabbatical. But there were elements in this particular “misper” that warranted immediate investigation, even though the subject—a single female in her thirties—had not yet been gone for even twenty-four hours.

  “I’m here to see Dr. Nita Perry,” Delorme said to the duty nurse. “Could you page her for me?”

  Delorme went to wait in the sunroom. On the television in the corner, Geoffrey Mantis, premier of Ontario, was explaining why teachers would have to work longer hours.

  “Oh yeah,” Delorme said to the screen. “As if you’re going to work longer hours.” All Mantis seemed to do was vote himself pay raises and go on vacations. Delorme had never thought of golf as a year-round sport before. But she had learned to keep her political opinions to herself around the station. Definitely Tory turf, except for Cardinal. As far as she could tell, they were the only two cops on the force who didn’t consider Mantis a hometown hero.

  A young woman in surgical scrubs came into the sun-room. She was small—a good two inches shorter than Delorme—and her red hair was held back from her face with two severe-looking clips. “I only have a few moments,” Dr. Perry said. “I’m just on my way into surgery.”

  “You’re a surgeon?” Delorme asked.

  “Anaesthetist. They can’t start till I get there.”

  “You called in a missing person report on Dr. Winter Cates?”

  “That’s right. I have the picture you asked for. I managed to scrounge it up from our security people.”

  The photograph showed a pretty woman in her early thirties, with curly black hair and a crooked smile that gave her a faintly sardonic expression.

  “It doesn’t do her justice, believe me.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to Dr. Cates?”

  “Last night, about eleven-thirty. I called her to tell her Road Warrior was on the late show. She’s a real Mel Gibson fan—well, we both are. But she had rented a movie to watch. She certainly sounded fine, then. Not a care in the world.”

  “Eleven-thirty seems late to be calling someone. Even a good friend.”