A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller)

by Van Rooy, Michael

  Candy’s smile never wavered. “What does that have to do with …”

  I took another step forward. “In each case the cops arrested someone and put him in jail for a few months or years or decades. Then they had to let them go because the person arrested didn’t do the crime. Think about that.”

  Candy didn’t have a response and I kept talking. “Because. Those arrests meant that the murderers got to walk free and clear. And do whatever they wanted. To whomever they wanted.”

  Claire came around and took my arm and I smiled at Candy. “I don’t hate cops. They do a very hard job. Frankly, I don’t think about them at all. But when I do I admire and respect them.”

  It was a lie but a good one to leave on.

  As we walked back to the parking lot Elena just shook her head. “You pour gasoline on fires too? Tease wolverines? Molest sharks? You are a walking disaster area …”

  Alex took her hand. “True. But at least he’s not boring.”

  Claire was pushing Fred, who had fallen fast asleep. She pulled a blanket over him and stuck her tongue out at Alex. “He’s never boring.”

  On the way out the gate Claire looked back at the bright midway and sighed. “And I never even got a prize …”

  #4

  The next morning Claire and I heard the same interview played over and over on three separate radio stations. Each time it was followed by angry callers talking about my behaviour, demeanour, attitude and general lack of respect. We also got nine phone calls from various news agencies trying to get me to comment. Then I got a call from a local right wing radio station that tried to insult me until I got angry but I hung up and finally unplugged the phone.

  I stood there for a second and looked around the kitchen. The whole house didn’t feel safe to me yet. A full year ago an enemy had booby-trapped the place with grenades, cyanide, shotgun shells, spring razors, spikes and so on. Clearing it had taken me eleven days on my hands and knees.

  Eleven days. And I still wasn’t sure I had gotten all the traps out. It gnawed at the place I was supposed to have a conscience—I would hate to have Claire or Fred hurt through my carelessness.

  I had cleared the place to the best of my ability and I was really good.

  But no one’s perfect.

  Idly I wondered about burning the place down … just to be sure. Claire interrupted me before I could think it all the way through. “Coffee? Eggs? Breakfast was promised. You still worried about the radio and the phone calls?”

  I snorted. “Yep. Kept me up last night screaming.”

  Claire accepted the eggs I offered and tried to make the best of it. “Well, at least we don’t have cable television. There’s probably an American Fox news spin on it by now. The right wing demigods probably hate you.”

  “Well, that’s okay. I can handle a little hate. As long as it’s not coming from Stephen Colbert.”

  “He scares you, doesn’t he?”

  “Very much.” I offered a single fried egg to Fred along with strips of toast to dip and he began to devour them. While he did so I spun channels on the radio until I got the civilized tones of the CBC morning show hosts talking about the weather and the chances of forest fires. I looked back at Fred and then at Claire. “Am I supposed to be giving Fred eggs?”

  She looked at me and then at Fred. “Let’s ask him. Fred, should we be giving you eggs?”

  He swallowed and said, “Yes. More—ples.”

  Claire corrected him. “Please.”

  Fred looked at her hard and tried again. “Pleass?”

  “Better.”

  I gave him another egg and finally got around to my own. “And what are you doing today?”

  “Selling houses. Same thing I do every other day. Also probably renting some. Maybe some buying.” Claire had passed her real estate test a few months before and was doing better than fine. She specialized in houses in the North End, the poorer end of town. However, it was the part of the city where bargains could still be found and where the market was still strong. After all, people always needed a roof over their head, no matter what the state of their finances was.

  The North End was where Claire and I lived, only we rented. We weren’t up to buying a house, not yet. I was taking baby steps—when I was a crook I had lived in hotels and motels, so renting a house struck me as a reasonable step in a good direction. Buying a house could wait, would have to wait—hell, I was still getting used to belonging to a neighbourhood!

  I was proud of Claire. Despite a generally tanking global economy she was still selling quite well and with her commissions plus the money I made babysitting we were doing okay, better than most.

  Our neighbours the Kilpatricks, for example, were in much worse shape. When the sub-prime economic mess had started the husband had had to come out of retirement and go back to managing restaurants. His wife, who worked at the Manitoba Telephone Service, had had to take extra shifts. When I talked with them about the situation, they were tight-lipped and furious, so I suggested they rob a bank, and they took a very long time before turning the idea down.

  Meanwhile, Claire and I just kept lurching along. We were making it from hand to mouth and we never had any savings, which meant we had nothing to lose. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  On the other end of the spectrum my assorted criminal acquaintances were doing really well. Marie Blue Duck, who smuggled illegal immigrants and poor people into the States, was having an easy time as the plummeting US dollar scrambled the international money market and dropped plane fares, which made it possible for even more of her clients to come over. And Sandra Robillard, who ran her dead husband’s CCE (continuing criminal enterprise), was selling grass and tranqs like they were going out of style. That was because sins always became more popular when the world was collapsing, a rule I had memorized before I could talk.

  And, of course, Elena was doing fine with lots of overtime as she fought crime in all its assorted forms. Bank robberies by desperate honest men, fraud by desperate dishonest men and familial violence by mothers and fathers under job pressure.

  The economy made for interesting times all around.

  Our dog, Renfield, came into the room and sat down by his water dish and wagged. When his tail got wet from the water dish he had forgotten he was shocked and confused, so I gave him a little egg on a toast point and he cheered up again. While he was cheering up the radio announcer changed subjects. “And we have with us next a representative of the city who is answering questions about some claims made public yesterday about the police.”

  Claire winced visibly and I apologized one more time.

  The man who came on was angry and energetic. “Thanks for having me on. The claims made last night are completely without foundation and show a profound disrespect for the hard-working men and women of the police service.”

  “So there’s no shred of truth to the statements that were made?”

  “None.”

  I looked at Claire and held my hands together as if in prayer and pointed at the phone. She sighed, plugged it in and handed it over. A minute later I was on the air.

  “Hi. My name is Monty Haaviko. I assume your guest is talking about me?”

  The host managed to say, “Good morning, Mr. Haaviko …” and then the other man cut in with, “You have a lot of nerve!”

  “Not really.” Claire came around and rubbed my neck. “Actually I called to correct something your guest said. It’s Mr. Harrow, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said I have profound disrespect for the police. That is not true. I simply do not have blinders on. But I do respect them.”

  “What do you mean?

  “Should I respect them for that time when a cop shot an unarmed man and the investigation was questionable, to say the least? Or the recent enquiry when a cop killed a woman and the investigation was botched? Or what about the occasion when a hundred cops faked illnesses after another cop beat up a handcuffed man on camera and w
as temporarily suspended?”

  “This is preposterous …”

  The host cut him off. “Mr. Haaviko, what are you trying to say?”

  “I’m clearing up a point. Words that I never used are being put in my mouth. Attitudes are being attributed to me that I do not have. I did not say I dislike cops, I said they make mistakes sometimes. Even when I was stealing I didn’t hate cops. They were simply part of the business expense. But, they do make mistakes.”

  Mr. Harrow came back on, “Well, of course they do, they’re only human.”

  “Exactly. All I’m saying is that cops have made mistakes. That’s it. Am I wrong? Not in specifics, but in general?”

  There was dead silence and then Mr. Harrow said, “Well, sometimes mistakes are made.”

  “Okay then, let’s leave it at that.”

  I thanked the host and the guest and hung up and unplugged the phone and turned the radio off. Ten minutes later Claire was gone out the door and Rachel, the Kilpatricks’ granddaughter, and Elena’s Jake were in my home, trying to tear the place apart.

  The life of a professional babysitter. There’s no life like it. As I cleaned up spilled apple juice I thought, somewhat longingly, of going back to thieving.

  At the park that afternoon Fred, Rachel and Jake played on the swings while I warmed a bench. One of the nicest things about the North End is its vast number of parks. The whole area was laid out in a time with a different civic attitude and the parks survived most types of improvement and development. Another nice thing is that most of the parks have areas where children can still play on swings and teeter-totters and the occasional jungle gym.

  After about twenty minutes a young man with badly pitted skin and protruding eyes sat down on the other end of the bench and pulled out a radio/flashlight combo he had to crank to get working. The man was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, jeans and runners, and the radio, when he got it working, was set to the same right wing talk station that had tried to ambush me that morning.

  It must have been a slow news day because they were still talking about me.

  “Next caller …”

  “Hi, I just wanted to say that I agree with everything the other guy said. This Mr. Haaviko doesn’t understand anything about the situations our city’s finest find themselves in day after day down on the front lines …”

  Uh-huh. It was an interesting statement but it didn’t really make sense. I did understand. I was an ex-con, I’d seen up close the world cops complained about. And I’d seen it for years, better and more clearly than any cop I’d ever seen.

  “Good point. And that caller is absolutely right. Mr. Haaviko, a convicted criminal, has no right to comment on the behaviour of the fine men and women …”

  Right.

  I got up, gathered the kids together and started for home. When I got there I found a bundle of dark red, long-stemmed roses wrapped in a recent UK London Times newspaper leaning against the screen door. There was a note with the flowers that I opened, written in block letters: “To Claire, In Admiration! So wonderful seeing you at the Fair!”

  Nothing else.

  I took the flowers inside and put them in a pitcher with water. There were seven flowers and nothing else, none of the greenery or preservative powders that normally come with them. There hadn’t been any tissue paper around the flowers either. I got ready to tease Claire when she got home and started to make dinner after plugging the kids into a documentary about particle physics.

  Some parents for whom I babysat did not like that I showed their kids documentaries. They wanted me to show them Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer and other stuff like that. I told them that such programs were against my personal life philosophy and that if the kids wanted to learn about co-operation, a good documentary on lions eating an elephant was as good as anything Hollywood, Tokyo or Seoul could come up with.

  One mother told me I was depraved but she kept bringing her daughter back, so I figured I must be doing something right. Either that or she meant depraved in a good way. Or maybe she just couldn’t find another babysitter.

  #5

  Over dinner Claire asked Fred what he learned today. He thought about it and said, “’Article physics are cool!”

  She looked at me, “Particle physics? You’re teaching our son about particle physics?”

  “He’s going to have to learn sometime …”

  She forked a piece of lettuce into her mouth. “You don’t know anything about particle physics.”

  “I got the kids a DVD from that rental place across the Assiniboine River; the one about an hour’s walk away. The monsters seemed to enjoy it. I’m trying very hard to enhance my mind, I’ll have you know. Nice flowers, by the way.”

  “Thank you. They’re not from you?”

  “Sorry, no. They had that note. Strange delivery, if you ask me. I just figured it was from one of your many lovers.”

  Claire looked at the note and put it down. “None of mine. But it’s nice to get offers, you know? Weird, the note’s cut from a piece of strange paper; it’s not a real card at all.”

  “So who did you meet?”

  Claire shrugged. “No one. I talked to lots of people but actually met? No one. Maybe it’s a joke.”

  While we were still eating our doorbell rang and Renfield went nuts, barking ferociously until Claire put him in the guest bedroom. I went to the door and made sure the chains were in place. When I was sure, I pulled the crowbar from the umbrella stand and held it behind my back. Only then did I open the door to the limit of the chain. The door itself was solid core oak, an antique that had cost a mint and a half and which I’d ruined by painting it white and setting into a steel frame. A battering ram might get through it. Normal cop door-breaking shotgun ammunition would be useless.

  Claire used to tell people, “It’s not that Monty doesn’t trust people.” She’d pause for a measured two or three heartbeats and then go on, “ … it’s just that Monty doesn’t trust people.”

  Standing on our steps were a man and a woman, both wearing dark grey suits and carrying thin leather briefcases. The woman was white and the man was an olive-skinned Aboriginal. They were both fairly forgettable, wearing nondescript, expensive clothes and good quality watches and smelling very slightly of expensive colognes and perfumes. At a guess I put them in their late twenties or early thirties. They didn’t look like cops and they were too well dressed to be reporters, so I didn’t slam the door but instead asked, “May I help you?”

  The man reached into his shirt pocket and produced a business card with a practiced flourish and handed it to me. I took it and read, “Dean Pritchard—Consultant” followed by a cell number, land line, fax number, email address and website. The card was of heavy bond paper with raised lettering, tastefully done with black ink on an old ivory-coloured stock. Reflexively I glanced at their shoes, which were well-shined with heavy stitching, made of a creamy-looking leather that had never been stretched, dyed or sewn. Shoes are an easy way to tell the wealth of a person. Rich people do not buy cheap shoes. I’m not sure they know how to buy them.

  When I offered the card back the man refused and I complained, “Your card doesn’t actually tell me very much. What do you need?”

  “May we come in?”

  His voice was smooth and I unlocked the two chains and removed the floor plate lock to let them in. “My wife and I are just finishing dinner. Please come in though. Have a seat in the living room.”

  I wanted to find out what they wanted and why and quickly. Inviting them in was the fastest way to get answers. Frankly neither of them scared me or I’d insist on meeting them somewhere else. Here, in my home, I had an advantage. And a few assorted tricks that I could always use.

  They came in and shook my hand and then Claire came over and they shook her hand as well. When the amenities were over Dean spoke. “We won’t take long. We’re here to find out if you’re interested in a proposal, Mr. Haaviko.”

  I motioned for everyone to sit
down and then I asked, “A proposal?”

  “Yes. We saw you on the news and we think you’re exactly the kind of person the city needs.”

  Claire didn’t even crack a smile as she said, “The city needs a goat?”

  I love my wife but I chose that moment to ignore her. I walked back to the door, spun the crowbar back into the umbrella stand and said, “What are you talking about?”

  “You are exactly the person the city’s new police advisory commission needs.”

  “Police advisory commission? I don’t think so … I’m a convicted ex-felon. We, as a group, generally have very little to do with the police, if we can avoid it. They don’t like us. We don’t like them. It’s kind of a system we have.”

  The woman, Mrs. Brenda Geraghty, according to her card, nodded. “We know all about you. Convictions for armed robberies, possession of narcotics, possession of prohibited weapons, burglaries, assaults, attempted murders, frauds—it’s an extensive list. And arrests for multiple-murder last year, although those charges were dropped.”

  Dean took over. “Anyhow, that was all in the past. We’re interested in having you run for the job right now. It’s an elected position and the election takes place in September, so we have to declare soon. Then we can put a support team in place and get your campaign happening.”

  My head was spinning and Claire was looking profoundly amused. Fred finished his supper, climbed down from his booster chair and came over. I picked him up and put him on my knee before answering, “Uh. Thank you. But I don’t think so.“

  Dean went on, “The position pays quite well. More than babysitting. And it will be very simple to do: not a lot of work at all.”

  “That’s nice.” Alarms went off in my head. They knew my criminal record, although the news could have given them that. The babysitting job was less well known. Reporters were loath to mention anything to do with kids, so these two in front of me had done some research.