Vigilante Season

by Peter Kirby

  Then it clicked, and Star went into her role.

  “Oh yes. Of course. I’m sorry. I couldn’t place you at first.”

  “Not to worry. It was a short meeting.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Not much, really. But I’ve had some news about Serge and I wanted to discuss it with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, not on the phone. Could you come by? Say about two o’clock tomorrow?” She looked at Desportes, but he couldn’t hear the conversation. He shrugged to say he couldn’t guide her.

  “Of course. Yes. Two o’clock tomorrow.”

  “Great. See you then,” he said and disconnected.

  Desportes wasn’t happy. He shouldn’t have used the number for the fake business card for Clara Furlow. Dufrene’s call could be a coincidence, or it could be connected to the note Star had left under the windshield. They talked it through. How dangerous could it be to meet a lawyer in his offices? What could go wrong? In the end, Star agreed to the meeting. Desportes would wait for her in the Atomic Café.

  The phone rang again at 11:00 p.m. Desportes pushed the connect button and listened.

  “I got your note. What the fuck is this about?”

  “I assume this is Joe Lacroix.”

  “If you know my truck, it’s not hard to figure out who it’s registered to.”

  “I’m glad you got my note. Here’s the deal. I don’t give a shit about you, or what you did. Maybe you had a reason. Who cares? But you have to make amends. Madame Barbeau won’t have Serge to look after her in her old age, and that’s your fault. You need to put $50,000 into her account. Think of it as compensation.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Fifty thousand. Direct deposit into her account. Write down these numbers.”

  Desportes began to recite the numbers for Madame Barbeau’s bank account.

  “I need a pen.”

  Desportes waited, then recited the numbers again while the caller wrote them down. “You have five days to make the deposit, and twenty-four hours to confirm that you’ll do it. If you don’t call back by this time tomorrow, I’ll see who else wants to buy the information.”

  He pushed disconnect on the phone.

  “It was him?” Star asked.

  “He wrote the numbers down. We’ve got the right guy.”

  “So, I should still go to see Dufrene?”

  “I don’t think the calls were connected. I was just stupid to use the same number. So, yes. We’ll see what Dufrene has to say. It’s probably nothing.” Desportes wasn’t entirely convinced.

  “And who is this Joe Lacroix? All we’ve got is a name and an address.”

  “So let’s see what else we can find out about Joseph Lacroix.”

  Desportes sat down at his computer.

  Sixteen

  At 1:45 p.m. Star left the Atomic Café to walk to Dufrene’s office, and Desportes worked the computer. He put on the headphones and picked up noises around Dufrene’s desk. The bug was still working.

  Five minutes later Star reached for the door handle to Dufrene’s office. She didn’t see the two men approaching from behind until they each had a hold of one of her arms. They held her for a few inches off the ground and walked her to the waiting truck before she even had time to think about screaming.

  Desportes waited to hear her walk into Dufrene’s office. He heard nothing. At 2:10 p.m., he left the café and hurried up the street and burst into Dufrene’s office. Dufrene said he knew nothing, that he had been expecting a Ms. Furlow at two o’clock but she hadn’t shown up. When Desportes asked what it was he wanted to tell Furlow, Dufrene said he just wanted to close the file. He had withdrawn as Barbeau’s lawyer, and she should change her records accordingly.

  Outside in the street Desportes looked up and down, as if expecting to see Star.

  The hearing into the riot was being held in the basement of the Saint-Nom-de-Jésus Church. Mayor Chambord knew city politics, where power was more often wielded by graft and manipulation rather than by law. He didn’t have the legal authority to give the committee anything near the trappings of an official inquiry, so he had given it nothing. Nothing but a request, as though the simplicity of the task gave it all the authority it needed. He had, as he told anyone who would listen, asked five respected citizens to look into the causes of the riot and write a report. He was betting that the absence of any of the usual official trappings would give the committee legitimacy. And the first thing the committee members did, seasoned activists that they were, was to come up with an unofficial title: The Root Causes Inquiry. Before the committee had even started, the riot itself had been pushed into the background. It became an inquiry into the conditions in Hochelaga that would make people want to take to the streets and throw rocks and petrol bombs.

  The first days of the public hearings had been taken up with carefully chosen individuals and groups complaining about every aspect of life in the neighbourhood. Hour after hour, witnesses talked of poverty, unemployment, hopelessness, isolation, the absence of government services, crime, drugs, prostitution, and the eagerness of the police to harass law-abiding citizens. It was a platform for the disgruntled, and there was no shortage of them in Hochelaga.

  It made for great television. A home-grown reality show that left journalists who’d covered municipal politics for years reacting with shock and outrage at how the authorities had been sticking it to the people, as though they’d been on a bathroom break for ten years.

  By the time the committee got to the riot itself, it was Thursday morning. Vanier and Saint-Jacques had been invited to come and tell their stories. Neither would have shown up if the Chief hadn’t ordered them to, and the Chief was delivering the message from the Mayor. The Police Service had nothing to lose. If Vanier and Saint-Jacques screwed up, the Service would cut them loose and claim it was cleaning house. If they did okay, they might survive. There was no question of them doing well. They were scheduled to follow a slate of carefully chosen witnesses who would tell things from the people’s side.

  Simple citizen after citizen told the committee how they had heard about Barbeau’s arrest and decided to vent their anger peacefully by walking to the police station. They had no idea how things got out of hand. Nobody had seen anyone throwing rocks or bottles, and each one of them had gone home as soon as Colonel Montpetit addressed the crowd and asked them to.

  Then it was Vanier’s turn. He could feel the hostility as he took his seat at a table in front of the committee. He wasn’t sworn in. It wasn’t that kind of hearing.

  Vanier waited for someone to give him the go-ahead. The Colonel was looking at his fingernails, and the other members of the committee were scribbling notes. The silence eventually forced them to look up.

  “I have a prepared statement to read and then I will answer any questions the committee might have.”

  “Fine. Carry on,” said the Colonel.

  Vanier started reading from a handwritten statement he had put together. He started with his visit to the Patriotes’ office in the course of a murder investigation and seeing his tires slashed. He explained about the video camera above the entrance, and how it had captured an image of Barbeau sticking a knife into his tires.

  After reading the first couple of paragraphs, he looked up and realized that nobody was paying much attention, they seemed to be waiting it out until he finished. He looked down and continued reading, explaining how his partner had identified Serge Barbeau as the person who slashed the tires and how they went to his apartment and arrested him. They brought him to Station 23 and questioned him for a time. Then he was allowed to leave. Vanier ended by reminding everyone of the television news stories that confirmed that Barbeau had been in perfectly good health when he was released.

  “Thank you, Inspector Vanier,” said Colonel Montpetit. “I hav
e a few questions. Before I get to them, I want to make it clear that this committee is not looking at the issue of whether Mr. Barbeau was beaten while in police custody.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “So you said. Our job is to look at why the riot happened. The question of whether Mr. Barbeau was beaten while in custody is for someone else to decide.”

  “He wasn’t. There is no question to decide.”

  “Perhaps. Now, I do have some questions.”

  Vanier clasped his hands in front of him. “I’m sure you do.”

  “Remind me again, Inspector. Why did you choose to arrest Serge Barbeau?”

  “As I said, I had reasonable grounds to believe that he had slashed the tires of a police vehicle.”

  “A police vehicle? Was it marked as a police vehicle?”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “Did the vehicle belong to the Service de Police?

  “No.”

  “Whose car was it, then?”

  “Mine.”

  “So you suspected he had slashed the tires of your car, not a police vehicle?”

  “It was my own car, but it was police business.”

  “I just wanted to clarify. It was not a police vehicle.” Montpetit smiled and looked at the other committee members.

  “What unit are you attached to, Inspector?”

  “Serious crimes.”

  “Do you usually investigate offences that involve property damage?”

  Vanier felt like he was on a downward spiral. “That depends.”

  “On how serious the property damage is, I suppose?”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  “Tire slashing. Do you often investigate tire slashing complaints?”

  “No.”

  “But this was personal. Is that it? It was because it was your car?”

  Vanier tried to head him off. “If I see something illegal, I can’t ignore it. Are you suggesting I should have ignored it?”

  “I’m asking the questions, Mr. Vanier.” The Colonel had already demoted him to civilian.

  “What I’m getting at is that tire slashing is not part of your normal duties. Isn’t that true?”

  “I don’t normally investigate tire slashing. That’s true.”

  “Tell me. For these kinds of property offenses, what are the normal options available to a police officer?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I’m sure that the police don’t arrest everyone suspected of property offences. Don’t put them in detention and subject them to interrogation.”

  “It depends ….”

  “Because if they did, I’m sure you wouldn’t have time to deal with serious crime. And that’s your real job, isn’t it?”

  “Not every suspect is arrested. You’re right.” Vanier’s hands had curled into fists.

  “So my question is, what were the options?”

  “I could have ignored it. I could have just let him go. That happens a lot with property crimes, you know. Just ignore it and wait until the person does something more serious. People are always complaining that the police don’t do enough to stop property crimes.”

  “I suppose you could have just checked his identity and issued him a summons, couldn’t you?”

  “That would have been an option, yes.”

  “What I’m trying to understand, Inspector, is why Mr. Barbeau was arrested and detained. I’m sure you had better things to do with your time.”

  “I wanted to ask him some questions.”

  “And you couldn’t ask them when you met him at his apartment?”

  “No. He was in the course of fleeing out the back door.” There was a round of subdued guffaws from the audience.

  “Perhaps the police intimidated him. We’ve heard enough here this week to see that the police in Hochelaga are very intimidating.”

  “Mr. Barbeau did not seem to be intimidated by policemen.”

  “Isn’t it true that there was no good reason to arrest him? Isn’t it true that everything you wanted to do could have been done without arresting him? Everything, that is, besides intimidating him, threatening him, or worse.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “No. An observation.”

  “I didn’t beat him. The film of him leaving the police station proves that. I was in the middle of a murder investigation, and my tires were slashed while I was visiting you, Mr. Montpetit. I wanted to know why he did it. Did he pick my car specifically? Why not some other car? Did someone ask them to do it? Pay him, maybe? I was investigating a brutal murder and wondered why my car, alone, was targeted.”

  “Are you suggesting he was connected to the murder?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. But now that you mention it, Mr. Barbeau’s arrest led to a riot. Then he was beaten, and now he’s disappeared. Why don’t you tell me if there’s a connection?”

  Colonel Montpetit was irritated. He turned to the crowd, “I think we’ve heard enough from this witness.” And then back to Vanier. “You’re excused, Inspector.”

  “Because when I’m reinstated, that’s a lead that I will be following.”

  “Thank you, Inspector.” Montpetit stood up to show that the committee was finished with him. “We’ll take a break for fifteen minutes.” The other members followed his lead, and they all left the room.

  Vanier sat at the table and watched them walk out.

  Desportes was desperate. He thought he would never call the police for anything, but he called the police. They all but laughed at him for trying to report the possible kidnapping of a street kid he barely knew. Then he called Barbeau’s mother to see if anyone else was trying to track him down. She said no, but she’d heard that the cop that arrested him was still looking for him.

  “Do you have his name?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “It’s important, try.”

  “Just a second. I remember he left his business card here when they took Serge. Maybe it’s still there.”

  “I’ll wait. Can you go look?”

  It took about five minutes, and she was back on the phone.

  “Imagine that. It was stuck on the railing where he left it. All that time.”

  Desportes had her read out the name and telephone numbers. One was a cell phone. He dialled the number and left a message. He asked Vanier to call him. He left the phone number and the address and said it was important.

  Star was sitting in a folding metal chair facing a huge man with a shaven head. He was leaning towards her over the back of another chair, so close that she could feel the warmth of his breath. She wasn’t tied down, but every time she moved, another man standing over her would move, as though he was ready to grab her again. The bald man was smiling like an undertaker, no humour, a show of teeth without humour.

  “Star, tell me again, one more time. Why were you looking for Serge Barbeau?”

  “I told you, fuck. I told you already.”

  She didn’t have time to flinch before the back-hand slap caught her full in the face. Getting hit wasn’t new, and she wasn’t going to cry.

  “Language. Please. No swearing, understand?”

  “I told you already.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “I did, I said … ” Another slap to the face. She tasted blood in her mouth.

  “I asked if you understood?”

  “Oh … yes. I understand.”

  “Say it, then.”

  “I understand … no more swearing.”

  “Good. Now, tell me why you were looking for Serge Barbeau.”

  “I said. He stole my money. $200. I wanted to get it back.”

  “But your story keeps changing, Star. Every time it’s different. What’s the truth?”

&nbs
p; “It’s not different. It’s the same. It’s the truth?”

  “For example, first you said that somebody told you his lawyer’s name. Then you said you got it from the newspaper.”

  “That was a mistake, I was scared. I got his name from the newspaper.”

  “But you see my point? Your story keeps changing. How can I believe anything you say?”

  “I was confused, that’s all. I wasn’t lying. Please, I just want to leave.”

  “Don’t you mean you want to go home?”

  “Yes. I want to go home.”

  “And where is home?”

  “I told you. I’m living on the street.”

  “So when you said you wanted to go home, you were lying, right?”

  “No. I said I want to leave. You talked about home.”

  “And where is that?”

  “What?”

  “Home.”

  “I said I don’t have a home. I’m living on the street. Sometimes I stay with friends, on a couch or something.”

  Again a lightning backhander across her face. The blows were getting harder.

  “Liar! You’re lying to me every time you open your mouth. First you want to go home. Then you don’t have a home, you’re sleeping on the streets. Then you’re sleeping on a couch with friends. Why don’t you tell the truth?”

  The bald man was acting enraged. He stood up, his bulk dwarfing Star.

  “I just want to leave. Please”

  He reached for the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it up over her head, lifting it half off. Then he anchored it behind her neck, exposing her sports bra.

  She jumped from the chair, making a dash for the door, half crawling, half running across the floor. The other man grabbed her before she was three feet away and dumped her back on the chair. As soon as he let go of her she was off again, running for the door.

  “Let her go,” the bald man shouted, and Star’s heart lifted. She reached out for the handle and pulled. The door was locked.

  “You can’t escape, Star. So let’s finish our conversation, and then you can go home. Come.” He gestured with both hands for her to come back and sit down and she obeyed. Only then did she notice her T-shirt. She reached up to put it back in place.