“Oh, Christ,” I heard Ryan say from the bedroom.
“Found something?”
“Bet your ass I found something.”
“Coming.”
He was squatting in the small closet of the bedroom, a dusty box at his feet. He was holding a long panoramic photograph in a wood-and-glass frame. I knew exactly what it was because I had one just like it, also stuck away in a box in a closet at home. It was the group photo they took every summer at Camp Arrowhead. All the campers lined up in three rows, all in white Arrowhead T-shirts, no hats, squinting as the photographer took long exposures with his special camera.
“Tell me this isn’t you,” Ryan said, his thumb on one camper in the first row.
I took the frame and looked at the boy he meant and, yes, he was me. Twelve years old. Smallish, my hair shorn of its usual curls for the summer, very dark and close to the skull.
“Not much size on you,” Ryan said. “Except maybe the ears.”
“I know. I grew more at fifteen and again at seventeen.”
“Aw, and look at those eyelashes. I bet the girls just curled their toes when you batted them.”
“Bat this.”
I scanned over the rows looking at faces I hadn’t seen for years. Mitchell Stroll. Phil Mittleman. Stevie Garber. Irwin Resnick.
And Sammy Adler. There in the back row with the tall ones. Not up to his full height, slouching an inch or two. Age twelve, like me. Now dead for three weeks. I needed to leave his place with more than we knew going in.
And we did, thanks to Ryan. He found the hair in the bed, the long, dark curly one that couldn’t have been Sammy’s. The cops had probably removed samples for their own analysis and missed this one in the folds of the sheets. Assuming Sammy did his laundry once in a while—and the general tidiness of the place didn’t suggest otherwise—someone else had slept in the bed in the last days or weeks of Sammy’s life. Which gave us something to start with, ask Detective Paquette or the neighbours about.
“We done?” Ryan asked.
“Here, yes. Let’s try the upstairs neighbours. And then the magazine. It’s just a few blocks away.”
We closed up Sammy’s place. I thumbed the seal back over the lock, smoothing the broken halves together. Then I knocked on the door to the main-floor flat. No one answered. I slipped a card with my cell number circled in red through the mail slot and a note saying, “Please call. Appelez-moi s’il vous plaît.”
The rain was coming down harder. I heard a heavy drumming across the street. I looked up and saw the balcony on the top floor of a building there had been covered over by light green corrugated plastic that was magnifying the noise. Someone was sitting under it, protected from the rain, watching the street. Looking right at me. An old woman with wiry grey hair pulled back into a bun, loose strands of it flying out away from her ears.
A watcher.
“Wait a second,” I said to Ryan.
I tilted my head up and made eye contact with the woman. I pointed to myself and then to her porch. “May I come up and speak to you a moment?” I called. Then tried it in French. “Madame? Est-ce que je peux monter une minute vous parler?”
The woman nodded, not giving a hint as to which language she spoke, and got up out of her chair. I crossed the street and went up three concrete steps, then one flight of a wrought-iron staircase. When I reached for the door I heard the click of the lock disengaging.
She had not acknowledged my English or French because she spoke neither to any great extent. She was Greek, about five feet tall and almost as wide, dressed entirely in black. Mrs. Iiamos, no first name offered. We conversed in broken English, with a few hand gestures, first acknowledging how sad it was that Sammy was dead—“Nice boy, very nice. No trouble. Only now.”
Of course, she remembered the police coming that night, almost three o’clock. She had heard the rapping on his door—she didn’t sleep so well anymore. But they didn’t stay long, maybe ten minutes, and then it was quiet.
“That’s it?” I said? “Nothing else?”
She breathed in and frowned lightly. “One more time, somebody knocking again. Maybe three o’clock. I look out the window but nobody there. I go back to sleep.”
I filed that away and asked about visitors.
“He have a little girl,” she said, holding out her hand at shoulder height to indicate her height. “She come every week. Nice girl,” she said, sighing and putting a hand to her cheek, shaking her head to show her concern for the nice little girl whose nice-boy father had been killed.
“What about a woman?” I asked. “Long hair?” I brushed my hands down my jacket, turning them to indicate long and curly.
Mrs. Iiamos smiled. “Since one month, maybe. She come at night only, never day. Come late, one, one-thirty. Go home four o’clock, five o’clock.” She shook her head, acknowledging the scandalousness of the hours, then said, “It’s okay I tell you. If he’s alive, I don’t say one word against no one, but now …”
“Yes, thank you. He was my friend, so it’s good to help me. How many times did you see her?”
She thought about it and said, “Five, six times.”
“What days of the week?”
“Three, four times Saturday night. The other times Thursday. No Friday, No Sunday. No other day, I don’t think.”
“You have a good memory.”
“My husband pass away. My kids move. And I don’t sleep good. Sleep, um, very light. I hear doors open, I hear them close. And when is hot, if I no can sleep, I sit outside. I watch. Watch out for neighbours.”
I mimicked the motion of a steering wheel. “She drive?”
“No. She walk away. That way. To Carré St-Louis.”
“How old is she?”
“Maybe thirty,” which Mrs. Iiamos pronounced as tooty. I didn’t care how she pronounced it, everything she told me was something I didn’t know before. A thirty-year-old woman, with long dark hair, coming to Sammy’s late, leaving early. A married woman?
“He’s a Jew?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I think maybe she’s a Jew.” She rolled her hands down her shoulders as I had to indicate the long curly hair.
Thursdays and Saturdays, she had said: A Jewish woman, I wondered, unable to come on Friday?
“So you think he was banging someone else’s woman?” Ryan said.
“A possibility.”
“An Orthodox Jew.”
“A theory.”
“That narrow it down enough to reward ourselves with a smoked meat?”
“The magazine first.”
“All right. I was just saying we’re getting traction.”
“Then let’s keep going.”
CHAPTER 05
The Montreal Moment office was in a three-storey stone house on Milton, which runs east of the McGill campus toward St-Laurent. The sales and marketing staff took up the ground floor, editorial was on the second, design was at the very top. As in Sammy’s place, the ceilings were high, the rooms generously sized.
A woman at a ground-floor reception desk told us Holly Napier’s office was one flight up, rear corner. Up we went, past bulletin boards jammed with notices of upcoming city council meetings, union meetings, protests, cultural openings and some events that no doubt combined elements of all. The newsroom itself was open concept along the right side, with three white pillars spaced evenly from front to back. Along the left side were closed offices with glass fronts.
The closest person to the front was a man in the visible quarter of a cubicle. He looked to be in his late twenties and was staring intently at a stand-alone widescreen monitor, a white Mac at his fingertips. His face was bony and hollow looking, as if he were drawing in his cheeks, and he had two weeks’ growth of dark hair and beard. He looked up as I got close to his desk and said, “Bonjour.”
I said, “Bonjour.”
He said, “What can I do for you?” My French obviously had not fooled him into thinking I was a native.
/> “Is Holly Napier in?” I asked.
He pointed behind him at two women, one sitting at a desk, the other leaning in over her shoulder, pointing at a monitor. The seated woman was young, Asian, early twenties with long dark hair—but not a match to the hair we’d found at Sammy’s flat: perfectly straight, not a curl in it. The woman standing over her had glorious curls, red ones tumbling past her shoulders, the right length but the wrong colour for Sammy’s mystery woman. But very right on her. It was the woman from the photo on Sammy’s fridge, the one who’d been with him when he collected his award, holding his arm so loosely.
She sensed our presence, looked up, smiled a little. “Can I help you?”
“Are you Holly?”
“Yes.”
“Can we talk a minute?”
“If you’re looking for freelance work, the short answer is we can’t use any right now.”
I said, “I want to talk about Sammy Adler.”
The smile went away. She said something to the younger woman and walked up to me. She appeared to be about my age, trim in jeans and a sleeveless blue top. Her eyes were pale green and brilliantly clear.
She asked what my interest in Sammy was.
“Can we talk privately?”
She looked at the seated young woman and said, “Can you keep going on your own?”
“I think so,” the woman said.
“Go back to your notes and find another quote or two,” Holly Napier said. “I’m still not getting who this person is and why she’s running for office.”
“Okay.”
“Keep it to a thousand words. I don’t want her picture to be a thumbnail.” She said to me, “We’re on deadline so I’m gonna need to make it quick.”
“That’s fine.”
“Come on. My office is the one at the back.”
Only when I moved did she see Ryan behind me and start a little.
There were a lot of plants in Holly Napier’s office. Spider plants hanging in baskets hooked into the ceiling near the window, something large and rubbery in a plastic pot meant to look like clay, a tall, leafy ficus with a lot of new growth, glossy leaves free of dust. They all looked well taken care of.
Ryan and I were sitting in matching chairs with inoffensive beige padding. He was closest to the wall and angled so he could see the door. Holly sat behind a light beech desk with a Mac notebook networked wirelessly to a mouse, keyboard and flat-screen monitor. She had a much better chair than we did, with levers that angled it this way and that. Editions of at least three or four newspapers in English and French covered whatever surface didn’t have files, mail and the remains of a salad.
“So you’re private detectives,” she said.
“I am,” I said.
“And you?” she asked Ryan.
“I’m his …” He trailed off.
I tried: “He’s my …”
“Don’t say apprentice,” Ryan cut in. “Don’t say trainee. And do not say assistant.”
“He’s my friend,” I said.
“He seems to be more than that,” she said.
“He’s my shadow. He’s learning the PI trade. In his own way.”
“I get the feeling that’s how he does everything,” Holly said. “So how can I help you?”
“We’re investigating what happened to Sammy,” I said. “How long did you know him?”
“I knew of him before I ever met him. I first noticed his byline in the Concordia student paper. I always skim it looking for budding young writers who might work cheap. Sammy was covering the faculty meetings and already skewering people with their own words. When he got out of school, he interned at the Gazette and stayed on maybe three years, then left to go on his own. He freelanced pretty much everywhere in English Montreal, including here. Then our urban affairs writer quit—what is it now, five years ago—and I offered Sammy the gig. Did you know his work?”
“Not well. I read his last few columns online last night.”
“Read more,” she said. “Everyone should. They should be required reading at journalism schools. The way he combined humour with a social conscience, moral fury with wit and compassion. We didn’t call him Slammin’ Sammy for nothing.” Her eyes glazed over with a film of tears. I thought of telling her the nickname story, make her smile, but that’s not in my job description. It’s when people are in tears that most truth is told.
“Who did he slam?” Ryan asked.
“Who didn’t he? He took a lot of things personally. Hated bullies. Couldn’t stand hypocrites. People who dip into public money while voting to cut breakfast programs. People who preach family values and get caught with their foot under the bathroom stall. The small-minded bureaucrats who nickel-and-dime people out of benefits, then expense Château Petrus at lunch. City councillors and the provincial government were his favourites, I guess. The more local, the better. But he went after anyone who in his opinion was lowering the quality of life in Montreal.”
“No one person stands out?” I asked
“No. The police said he … he was beaten to death. Really viciously. I can’t imagine anything he ever wrote, not in all the years I knew him, that would provoke that kind of reaction. He got his share of crank mail, and he shared the weirdest of the weird with me. People wrote to complain, to challenge him, God forbid correct him—because he never had his facts wrong. They tried to break him down with logic, but not threats. He was never hateful and people weren’t with him.”
“He never raked anyone’s muck? Exposed their dirty secrets?”
“To be honest, he left that to others. He wasn’t the one poring through files to uncover wrongdoing. There’s an old newspaper saying about columnists,” she said with a sad smile. “They come out on the field when the battle is over and shoot the survivors. Sammy waited for the reporters to dig the dirt, do battle, then he commented. Put it into his perspective. He did call people out. Held them to account. Dared them to justify their actions. Sometimes showed them the high road, what they could have done instead, what could have been. But he did it with such humour—you could get mad at him, but how could you stay mad?”
Now her eyes really watered and she first brushed them with one sleeve, then reached for a box of tissues. “Shit. I keep these there for the people I interview, not me.”
We waited while she blew her way through two tissues, wiped her eyes and cleared her throat.
“Anyway,” she said, “his columns weren’t all negative. People would have tuned him out the first year if they were. He also liked to find diamonds in the rough, people doing things to brighten the town in some way and celebrate them. He wrote about the good things he saw that make Montreal unique. How more Anglos than ever are bilingual, for example. How more Montrealers are intermarrying and raising kids who are fluent in both languages from birth. This one series he wrote about Franglais—the mix of English and French some people speak when they intermarry—it was so popular, it became the basis of a cabaret, which was quite the little hit.”
“I saw he also wrote feature stories,” I said. “I haven’t had time to read any yet.”
“Make time. Writing his column was very demanding. He had to work himself up to a very high pitch, his state of high dudgeon, I used to call it. And every week he did it: topical, on time, precise word count, beginning-middle-end, a personal connection, an opinion, a conviction. The features gave him time to come down, work at a different pace. They were long but still tightly written, very well thought out.”
“What kind of subjects?”
“Profiles, mostly. Or inevitably, I should say. For Sammy, it was always the person at the heart of the story. Whether it was a political leader or an ordinary person who was making a difference, it was personal with him, like I said. Christ, when he lost his dog to cancer a couple years ago, he had half the town in tears. Or at least half the Anglos.”
“Not one piece of hate mail?”
“No. The police spoke to me after it happened and I told them the same
thing. Gave them access to his inbox.”
“Any chance he owed anyone money?” Ryan asked. “Beating up deadbeats is their specialty.”
“Who could he have owed? He owned his flat outright and he didn’t have a car. He biked or walked here every day. And if he spent money on anything like clothes, he kept it a big secret.”
“He ever talk about gambling?”
“He played poker once a month with some guys for twenty bucks. Same guys he’s known since college.”
“How did he get along with people here?” I asked.
“Great. He was not only good at what he did, he pitched in on other things if he was around—copy-editing, fact checking, proofing, layout even. When he didn’t have his daughter, he was basically here. And he was funny. Oh, God, he was funny. I mean we have totally different senses of humour. Mine is dry as dust—all those generations of English—and his was more … generous? Compassionate? Something like that.”
“No one was jealous?”
“Of his talent, sure. He was an award winner, and plenty of people in the English media wish they could write like him. But would that inspire enough envy in anyone to kill him that way? He wasn’t living the big life, like I said. He was a divorced single dad who got lucky he bought his flat in a down market. Which was the extent of his holdings.”
“Any women in his life that you know of?” I asked.
“No one recent. Sammy was better on paper than he was with the ladies. He used to say he was going to try a computer dating service, but he was kidding. I think.”
“You ever see him with a woman with long dark hair? Not as curly as yours but not straight either.”
Miss Montreal Page 5
