Ball Park

by John Farrow

  ‘Twenty-nine months I did inside. Never said boo.’

  ‘Under threat of death, not so hard. A medal you want? Do it again. This time, not for twenty-nine months. This time it is forever, and a lot longer time after that.’

  ‘Ezra. Please. How did you know it was me?’

  ‘Who else can be so stupid? Besides, always she was crazy about you. Something that life cannot explain.’

  Ezra felt pleased as Arturo Maletti departed his premises. With luck and a soupçon of ingenuity, he could pin the murder on him. Whether such a gambit would prove necessary remained to be determined. Good to have the option.

  He refreshed his cup.

  Smashing Bones

  (The total absence)

  Dr Eudo Lachapelle had landed in Canada from Belgium in lamentable disgrace. A scandal festered in his wake that in his new land would never be divulged.

  He stepped onto a pier in Montreal seeking to remake his life, although surely not from scratch. To his dismay, he learned that he was not to be a licensed physician in his adopted country without returning to the study of medicine. The difficulty with that proposition, apart from the insult attached to his credentials, was poverty. He’d been permitted to exit Europe with his skin intact only after his properties had been sold and his accounts emptied. To enroll at a university in his new country seemed inconceivable when he had access to neither food nor shelter. His energies were invested in dashing from pillar to post for a snack and temporary lodging, and in railing against the system. With a flair for bluster, he complained to anyone in authority that his adopted land was passing up a singular opportunity for enrichment.

  To many, Eudo came across as a bore; others responded with sympathy to his plight. He managed to endear himself to the men arbitrating his grievance at the Collège des Médecins du Québec. Still, rules were rules, and Dr Lachapelle floundered under the weightiness of the law.

  Prematurely white-haired, with an impressive handlebar mustache, overly large brightly-rimmed eyeglasses, and an angular visage with outsized ears, he augmented the eccentricity of his appearance with a penchant for histrionics. The lack of care afforded him by his new compatriots, he stated without embarrassment, was reminiscent of Napoleon’s banishment to Elba. The assault on his intellectual integrity was depriving the Province of Quebec of its most learned and illustrious physician. He was willing to transform the study of medicine on this side of the Atlantic. A student again? He should be handed a professorship! He was not requesting that a jury of his peers bend rules to favor him: He insisted that the rules be incinerated in a public blaze.

  In the meantime, he found shelter in a storeroom in the rear of a bar where he successfully cadged drinks. Still, no license.

  Eventually, Eudo’s daily agitations elicited an offer of employment. While he would not be permitted to examine patients without taking the prerequisite study, he would be allowed to participate in the police laboratory and assist in their morgue. No living person would be entrusted to his care, but stewards determined that he was unlikely to do significant harm to the dead.

  They were right.

  Dr Lachapelle took to the cadavers with such relief that he never stepped into a classroom in order to be licensed by the Collège.

  His eccentricities caused a few officers on the Night Patrol to pull their hair out – one attacked him with a femur – but Cinq-Mars enjoyed both him and his capable assistant, the skittish Huguette Foss. Hu had mousy hair pulled back along the side of her scalp and drawn forward over the shoulders and around her throat. Under her bangs, her face appeared encircled by an oval picture-frame of hair. On the street, her manner suggested the personality of a timid waif. In the lab, she was a crackerjack: quick, incisive, witty if anyone caught what she murmured under her breath; and with Cinq-Mars and others, flirty. In Émile’s and Huguette’s running repartee, they celebrated the mythic day when they’d be free to run away to Spain – Hu’s choice of country. Cinq-Mars was one of the few people aware that Eudo and Huguette were mutually exclusive, having once interrupted their congress in the lab. Perhaps the age difference of twenty-three years embarrassed them, or perhaps being friends only in public suited them, or it was a professional choice. Cinq-Mars played along with the charade.

  As Émile entered the lab that night, Eudo shouted a joyous greeting. He was often boisterous in the eerie silence of the basement enclave. Oddly, Huguette had nothing to say, no quips, and bore out of the room as if Cinq-Mars had admitted a virus.

  ‘What hauls you down to our murky gloom?’ Eudo called out. ‘You’ve departed our company for the sunny side of the street. Abandoned your witches and ghouls, not to mention our preening prostitutes and midnight muggers, and our sweet drunken derelicts with their kitsch tunes. You have distanced yourself from the company of our manic murderers, Émile. For what? To investigate the theft of car radios? Hurry! A bracelet has gone missing from the tennis court! I had always assumed you were a vampire who sleeps in a coffin by day. Yet now, you stumble among the living wearing suntan oil.’

  ‘A vampire, Eudo? Nice.’

  ‘The nose, Émile. You have considerable Bela Lugosi in your face.’

  ‘Thanks again. What the heck happened to Huguette?’

  ‘She’s on a mission, Émile. What brings you down here, you betrayer of your nocturnal cohorts?’

  ‘Fingerprints,’ Cinq-Mars stated.

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘A murder took place last night. Town of Mount Royal.’

  ‘Night murders no longer concern you, Émile.’

  ‘When the sun came up, I was called to a home robbery.’

  ‘And the murder?’

  ‘Discovered by the light of day. Fingerprints were taken from both crime scenes.’

  ‘By the day squad, Émile, from the Mount Royal poste. Not by me.’

  ‘I know that. Eudo, the two crimes were not compared, one to the other. Could you do that for me? For old time’s sake?’

  ‘They should have been compared,’ Eudo grumbled.

  ‘Two investigations, two sets of detectives. That’s how it goes on the day shift.’

  Eudo removed a hammer from a drawer and took it to a table where a lone bone fragment awaited inspection. He covered it in cloth, then smashed it.

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘The exercise.’

  ‘Eudo?’

  ‘I can do the fingerprint comparison. Are they here, at this station?’

  ‘You’ll have to make a call. I memorized the file numbers.’

  ‘Did you?’ Eudo held up a bone fragment to a light. He nodded. Then looked over at his younger colleague. ‘You memorize file numbers. Which means what?’ He smiled. ‘You don’t have access to the files yourself.’

  ‘All in the pursuit of justice, Eudo.’

  ‘I’m up for that, some days.’ Putting the bone fragment down, he crossed his arms and tucked his fists under his armpits. ‘You didn’t need to make the trip, Émile. Any technician can help you. Tell your Uncle Eudo. What are you up to? Are you lonely for the nightlife? Do you miss us?’

  First, Cinq-Mars asked, ‘Why did you smash that bone?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘I saw you.’

  ‘Oh that. Why are you investigating a homicide and not bicycle theft? What does that get you?’

  ‘I said. The homicide might be related to my burglary.’

  ‘Let the big shots from homicide investigate your robbery. Any other way around is backwards.’

  ‘I’m not stopping them. Why bash the skull? What does that get you?’

  ‘I was testing the hammer.’

  ‘Of course you were.’

  ‘This,’ he motioned with his chin to indicate the hammer, ‘is a ball peen. Over here,’ he returned to his drawer and lifted out different hammers for his show-and-tell, ‘I have a claw, a cross and straight peen, a cross-peen pin and, for the brute within us all, a club hammer. What are their various effects upon a skull, Émile? N
ow that I have met your criteria, tell Uncle Eudo what you’re up to.’

  Cinq-Mars had a vague sense that Eudo Lachapelle was stalling. What was going on with him? Talking gibberish? Smashing skull fragments? Émile brought his own question forward again. ‘Last night, the dead man was sitting behind the wheel of a parked car.’

  ‘How was he killed?’

  ‘Knife to the chest.’

  ‘Knives do kill. They are dangerous that way.’

  ‘The thing is, on the passenger side door – on the interior panel – is a blood smear. Someone deliberately smeared the blood, most likely to obscure the fingerprints. In the opinion of the daytime tech, the smearing obliterated any chance of getting a print.’

  ‘But Mr Oh-So-Smart Guy, you think otherwise?’

  ‘Anyone who took the trouble to smear the prints had a reason. Such as, his prints are on file. I was wondering, even if there’s only a bit of fingertip showing and maybe a different side of the same finger somewhere else, perhaps a whole print can be stitched together? What do you think? If there are bits of several fingers, you could make a match that way, no?’

  Eudo raised an eyebrow and prolonged the gesture.

  ‘What?’ Cinq-Mars questioned him. ‘A longshot, but doesn’t it make sense?’

  ‘Hate to tell you this, Émile.’ He picked up the cross-peen pin hammer and returned to his smashing table. Another skull fragment cracked under a blow. ‘The Mounties had a case where fingerprints were deliberately smudged. Their lab lifted a corner from this finger, a snippet from the hand, a tiny bit of the tip off the pinkie. Nothing definitive, but enough for the Mounties to make an arrest.’

  ‘That’s what I’m looking for.’

  ‘Is it? The match did not stand up in court. The technicians explained how the whorl off the side of the thumb, the tented arch off the tip of the forefinger, and the partial double swirl on the ring finger all pointed to the killer. How did the judge rule? Too great a chance for error. Threw it out.’

  ‘Eudo, that’s down the road. I want to know who to arrest.’

  ‘True. Fine. I’ll requisition the prints. Is the car, or the door panel, in our possession? Or only photographs?’

  ‘Both, I presume.’

  He brushed his flowing mustache with the fingertips of both hands while deciding. ‘I’ll look. Render an opinion. Fair warning, I can only check fragments against local felons. Burglars. Murderers. A short list. With fragments, an extended check takes eons. Literally. Someday, I’m told, a machine to do the search will exist. Hard to imagine. The size of a bank. A computer, it will be called. By then I’ll be gone to my just reward.’

  Suddenly, the lights went out.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Cinq-Mars asked.

  ‘Power outage. Happens often.’

  He’d been downstairs in a power failure before. Why weren’t the emergency lights on? He heard a door opening. He turned. Lights were on in the hall. Shadows moved. A figure, then several, scooted through the door, bent over. Marauders in the morgue.

  Lights snapped back on again and the roar that ensued practically lifted Émile Cinq-Mars out of his skin. There stood Huguette, an impish, devilish grin on her face, surrounded by about twenty elite detectives from the Night Patrol. They were roaring at him. No other word for it. Roaring. Cinq-Mars saw the beer, wine and whisky hauled in and ready to be poured.

  Touton had given him a private send-off. These guys had missed out. Cinq-Mars could only pray he’d survive their turn.

  One small mercy. The total absence of showgirls.

  Confetti Money

  (Red wine)

  When Quinn arrived home, her dad was sitting up past his usual bedtime.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ He tried to moderate his dread.

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘I’m your father, for crying out loud.’

  ‘Not what I meant.’

  ‘What did you mean?’

  ‘You never ask me where I’ve been. I mean like you’re somebody different. It’s a joke.’

  ‘Used to be I could count on you being at a game.’

  ‘Used to be,’ Quinn said. She went to the pantry, hauled out a box of cereal.

  That seemed to awaken her dad from his coma. ‘I made spaghetti and meatballs. You want, I can warm them up.’

  ‘No thanks. I’m kind of hungry, but not. Maybe later.’

  ‘Sure. Like in the middle of the night. Quinn, the police were here today.’

  She stood frozen a moment. Then continued to shake out her Cheerios. ‘I know why,’ she said.

  ‘You have a boyfriend?’

  She sat down opposite him. ‘We went out a few times. His name was Dietmar. Somebody killed him, Dad.’

  ‘Quinn.’ Jim Tanner scratched a side of his forehead. They didn’t have formal father-daughter talks. Instead, they communicated in brief asides, snippets of news, sudden bursts of chatter unrelated to anything pertinent in their lives. They got along but had found a way to communicate without saying much. ‘Were you there?’

  She shrugged a shoulder. ‘If I was, I’d be dead, too, I guess. Or maybe Deets would be alive.’ She poked around in her Cheerios with a spoon. Quinn recognized that flip didn’t strike the right tone. If she was to stay on top of this exchange, she needed to ease off her usual sass. ‘I wasn’t there. OK? He was a really sweet boy. He didn’t deserve that.’

  Her voice broke then. Tears surprised her by springing up so quickly and forcefully. She came out of her seat. Jim Tanner adjusted his own chair and she fell onto his lap like she used to as a child. He held her. Only after a minute had passed did she grasp that she was way too big for him now, and for the kitchen chair, and she struggled back up. She wiped her eyes and sat back down in her seat.

  Jim Tanner was too stunned to speak.

  Quinn could tell that her dad was fighting to find a way back into the conversation. Questions, worries, doubts swarmed through him.

  ‘The police want to speak to you,’ he managed to say finally. ‘I promised you’d call in the morning. I got a card. Name and number.’

  Throughout the day, she had feared a tap on the shoulder. A badge in her face. Handcuffs. A squad car. Making bail. Who knew how to do that? She imagined calling her dad from jail. That the cops were willing to wait for her to call lightened her burden. She might pull this off, get away scot-free. Fingers crossed and hope to die.

  ‘You have to call them, Quinn.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You were the last to see him alive, they said.’

  ‘The killer had to be the last person, Dad. The last time I saw him, Deets was fine.’

  ‘Yeah. Were you going out a long time?’

  ‘Not long. He was in …’ She stopped herself, partially overcome, partially aware of a sleight of hand inside her head. ‘He was in Social Studies.’

  ‘College kid.’

  She wanted to tell her dad that she had a boyfriend who was a university student, that she’d come up in the world. He’d be proud of her that way, perhaps be more receptive to her guy. Yet the notion was seriously out of whack – Dietmar was dead. He lost his life working for her. Not something she could talk about to her father.

  ‘Yeah,’ Quinn acknowledged.

  Jim Tanner decided to warm up the spaghetti and meatballs for his daughter whether she wanted the meal or not. He knew something about a young person’s appetite. If he put good food in front of her, she’d devour it. She thought she wasn’t hungry because she was sad and upset, but she might find out differently.

  ‘You used to watch baseball a lot,’ her father said.

  ‘The Expos, yeah.’

  ‘The local boys, too. The juniors.’

  ‘Not so much anymore.’

  ‘We used to play catch a lot, you and me.’

  ‘Fun. Good times.’

  ‘I played baseball in the old days.’

  ‘You played third. Catcher, a bit.’

  ‘Second-string. First string at thi
rd. I enjoyed watching the old Royals.’

  ‘We have the Expos now, Dad. The majors. Not Triple-A anymore.’

  ‘You think I don’t know? That Rusty Staub, he’s a good one. Like the man said, “What’s a staub? And why do we need a rusty one?” I like that joke. Mack Jones, he’s gone. I liked him. I like this new kid, Parrish.’

  ‘He’s a hunk. He’s so gorgeous. My god.’

  ‘That I don’t know. And Barry Foote. He’ll be good.’

  ‘You like third basemen and catchers.’

  She didn’t know why he was going on about this. Probably he just needed to talk. Or, he was working his way around to something, which might have to do with her and her dead boyfriend and the police.

  ‘The Royals had Drysdale one year. Dick Williams, he’s a manager in the bigs. I remember when they brought him in to play short for the Royals. He joined the team in Havana. Had a good first game. Two hits. One a double. A spark plug, Sparky Anderson, he played second. He’s a manager now, too. That guy with the TV show, Chuck Connors, he played first.’

  She was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t having a breakdown.

  ‘Are you all right, Dad?’

  ‘Jim Dandy. You?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Quinn said. ‘Maybe a few guys on the Expos today will be managers tomorrow.’

  ‘You never know. Tommy Lasorda. He’s a manager now. He pitched for the Royals. A lefty. He took Drysdale under his wing when he was here. I could coach third base for the juniors, Quinn. I got asked.’

  ‘What?’ So that was it. ‘How did this come up?’

  ‘I been asked before. I said no. I got asked again.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘The field manager called me. Gus Jornet. You know him?’

  ‘I know him. He’s a …’ She stopped herself. He looked at her. ‘Dad, I’m not allowed to swear in the house, right?’

  ‘I promised your mother.’

  ‘So I don’t. Neither do you. Maybe on the shop floor you swear. I bet you do. Maybe in the lane a word comes out of my mouth. It’ll happen. But I’m going to swear this one time in the house—’