Miss Montreal

by Howard Shrier

  Paquette sat up and leaned his elbows on the desk. “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Getting a bag over someone’s head and holding it there while he’s struggling and someone else is taking a swing with something? Not that easy, Detective. If it was me, the second the bag is over his head, boom, I’d break his nose, get him down on the ground and go to work with the boots and bats.”

  “Really? That is how you would do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose you were in Toronto May twenty-ninth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad. All right, Mr. Geller, you earned this one. There were fractures to the nose and left orbital bone. Someone hit him very hard indeed, almost certainly right-handed. Probably knocked him out, but there were so many different brain injuries, it’s hard to tell.”

  “Any idea how many assailants?”

  “Only that there was more than one. There were two different types of shoe or boot involved.”

  “Ask him about the police call,” Bobby said.

  “Right. Do you know why the police were called to his apartment that night?”

  Paquette thumbed through his binder until he found what looked—at least upside down—like an incident report.

  “Apparently a misunderstanding. Perhaps a joke of some sort played on him.”

  “You don’t think there’s any connection to what happened later?”

  His lower lip moved out past the upper and his eyebrows went up and down: “What sort of connection would you suggest?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems like an unlikely coincidence.”

  “Most coincidences are unlikely,” he said. “That’s why a word for them had to be invented.”

  Just my luck: I had a cop who was probably trained in rhetoric by Jesuits.

  “All right. Have you talked to the people he was interviewing for his stories?”

  Paquette looked at his watch, held up three fingers, then leafed through the black binder again. After spending at least one of my remaining minutes, he looked up and said, “We have to date interviewed twenty-three individuals in person, including family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and, yes, people he was interviewing for his work. We also checked through his email archives to see if his writing had prompted anything our profilers would consider a death threat. We found nothing. I am told he was a humorist, although for me it would be hard to tell in English. Most of the email he got was funny or trying to be. Sometimes sarcastic. Occasionally angry. Nothing that set off alarm bells.”

  “What about the current stories?”

  “In your final minute, Mr. Geller, what about them?”

  “You said you questioned the people involved.”

  “Some of the principals, yes.”

  “On the story about the Afghan community, who did you interview?”

  “Whom, Mr. Geller. I’m surprised I have to correct you in English too.”

  “Whom?”

  “The story focused on a family that is very much the opposite of the one involved in that so-called honour killing of ours. I’m sorry, I saw no honour of any type in that crime and I resist calling it that. It was what it was. I spoke to the brother and sister Mr. Adler was profiling. They struck me as well-educated people. Not at all closed or limiting to their women.”

  “No extremist connections?”

  “Ask them yourself.”

  “I will. What about the other family?”

  “Which other one?”

  “The Lorties. Did you interview them?”

  “Of course. Quite an interesting family. Well, father and daughter, anyway. They’re sure to spice up the election quite nicely this fall.”

  “Was there anything to indicate animosity toward the victim?”

  “From what we read of his notes and his previous work, his profiles tended to be pretty balanced. They weren’t—what do you say, hatchet work? Hatchet jobs, that’s it. He didn’t do those. We saw some emails back and forth between him and both the Lorties, and there was nothing heated in them.”

  “What’s your feeling about the Lorties?”

  “About their political fortunes?”

  “As people.”

  Paquette laughed, genuinely so, I thought. “Why on earth would I share my feelings with you, Mr. Geller? You’re not a friend, relative, colleague, therapist or priest. You’ll have to meet with them yourself and see what you feel.”

  “You don’t think Sammy could have been a threat to them somehow?”

  He looked at his watch. “That will have to remain unanswered, Mr. Geller. Your ten minutes are up. Do you want to wait for the phone records or come back for them when they’re ready?”

  “How long will it take?”

  He shrugged. “I agreed to do it, not to give it the highest priority. If you like bad coffee, you can wait. Otherwise, I will try to send it by the end of the day. You are at the Holiday Inn on Sherbrooke, non?”

  “Yes,” I said. And wondered how he knew.

  We saw Chênevert on our way out of the building, having a cigarette with two other men in suits. I waved to him. He gave us the finger, then ground his cigarette out on the concrete, even though he was standing next to an ashtray.

  CHAPTER 08

  Not everyone walks into their hotel room to see a man sitting at the small desk they provide, cleaning a field-stripped Glock. But when you are rooming with Dante Ryan, anything’s possible.

  It was the pistol he’d bought from a dealer in Boston, enough to stop any human who wasn’t full of crank or angel dust. It was broken down into four pieces: the frame, barrel, recoil spring and slide. The magazine and the round from the chamber—and he always had one in the chamber—were set off far to the side, out of reach. He had a can of CLP solvent, a bore brush, a soft rag, a few Q-tips and a toothbrush, which I hoped wasn’t mine, and the kind of compressed-air cleaner people use on keyboards.

  “You’ve only had that three months,” I said. “I’m surprised it needs cleaning.”

  “It doesn’t,” he said, pushing a nylon bore brush through the barrel. “But I told you last night this relaxes me when I’m bored. No pun intended,” he added, waving the brush at me.

  Not many guys I know can make gun jokes like that.

  He sprayed some CLP on the spring and guide rod assembly and used the toothbrush to work it in. Without looking up, he asked how the meeting with the detectives had gone.

  “Unproductive,” I said. “If they know anything, they’re not telling.”

  “Typical.”

  “They are going to send copies of Sammy’s phone records, so that’ll give us something to look at.”

  “How was his partner? He come as advertised?”

  “Completely. If there was a Hall of Fame for assholes, he’d have his own wing.”

  “Now I’m really sorry I wasn’t there.”

  “One interesting thing they did know.”

  “What?”

  “Where we’re staying.”

  “Already? Who knows we’re here?”

  “Besides the client? I told Holly Napier, the adoption worker, Sammy’s ex, the Afghans he was interviewing, the Lorties …”

  “When’d you do all that?”

  “I sent out emails last night. Left some voice mails.”

  “My money’s on the Lorties.”

  “Why?”

  “What we heard about them, they sound the most connected. The Afghans, if they’re like most immigrants, want fuck all to do with the cops. The editor, the ex-wife, the adoption lady—they don’t seem likely.”

  He put the barrel and recoil spring back in place, used the air spray to blow out any remaining dust, fit the slide back in and dry-fired once to make sure the reassembly was complete. Then he put the magazine back in place and thumbed the single round into the chamber. Glocks have no safety, so I’d have left out that last part, but I’ve learned not to question Ryan when it comes to guns. I’ve already been shot once and don’t w
ant to repeat the experience.

  He was reaching for the Baby Eagle in his case when the phone rang. It was Marie-Josée Boily, the caseworker Sammy had spoken to about adoption.

  “Thanks for calling back,” I said.

  “You are welcome,” she said, in heavily accented English. “But I am not likely to be of ’elp to you. We try to be open in Québec about the adoption, to ’elp families come together and, um, see themselves as normal, yes? But there is also very strict rules regarding confidentialité.”

  “You know Mr. Adler was murdered.”

  “Yes. It’s the only reason I call you back. Are you family? You did not say on your message.”

  “I’m working for his family,” I said. “Trying to find out what happened to him.”

  “But that has nothing to do with me.”

  “Maybe not. Did you ever meet with him or just speak on the phone?”

  “We met,” she said. “Twice.”

  “About his own family?”

  A few moments of silence passed. I said, “Hello?”

  “Yes, I am still here. I am thinking what I can disclose to you.”

  “Let me put it this way: if it wasn’t about his own family, if it was for a story he was working on, would you have spoken to him?”

  “Only in generalities. About the process, the regulations of the adoption act, that sort of thing.”

  Then they probably would not have met twice, I thought. He’d have done one interview and then followed up by phone or email if he needed more information.

  I said, “Why don’t we meet for a coffee? Talk about this in person?” Man, I wished Jenn were here. I might have boatloads of personal charm and dazzling interrogative techniques, but she can get information out of people like a farmer milking a bloated teat.

  “I don’t know if that will be possible.”

  “Please,” I said. “His family is desperate.” Thinking that a social worker would give in to help a family in trouble.

  I heard a deep sigh on the other end of the line. “Do you know where is the Centre Jeunesse? The youth centre of Québec?”

  “No.”

  “It’s on de Maisonneuve, at the corner of St-Timothée. Just a few streets east of St-Hubert, maybe six past St-Denis if you know that better. Our bureau is across the street from there. Next to that is a café called Romarin where I will be taking my lunch. Is a quarter to one okay for you?”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “We won’t need a lot of time,” she said.

  I wondered if it would be more than the ten minutes Detective Paquette had offered.

  “What now?” Ryan asked when I’d hung up.

  “Ville St-Laurent,” I said.

  “The rug store?”

  “And the place where his body was found.”

  I’ve been on some bad roads in my life. In Israel, for example, where you are more likely to die in a road accident than in any war or act of terrorism. In France where passing on blind curves is a sudden-death national sport. Even in Ontario, where winter whiteouts make the tamest straightaways deadly.

  Give me any of those anytime, day or night, over Montreal’s elevated highway: the Metropolitan. Narrow lanes, potholes the size of bomb craters, tailgaters, cars crossing double solid lines as if they weren’t there. Ryan was snarling like a Rottweiler by the time we exited onto Boulevard Marcel-Laurin and headed north into Ville St-Laurent. “If the GPS tells me to take this road again,” he said, “I’m going to empty a fucking clip into it.”

  “Save the last bullet for me,” I said.

  The traffic got lighter as we headed north and the rain had all but stopped. We made it to Côte-Vertu without further mayhem and headed west until we came to the strip mall that housed Les Tapis Kabul, along with a market called Medina that advertised halal products, both next to a travel agency with posters of sun-kissed beauties in bikinis, framed by palm trees and white sand. Walking past were two women in full black niqabs, nothing visible but their eyes. Whatever they thought about the women in bikinis would remain a mystery.

  The selection inside Les Tapis Kabul was dazzling. Dozens of carpets hung from the ceiling, many in vibrant shades of red. Some were clearly handmade, their surfaces rough and nappy, their edges not quite straight. Others must have been machined, with a smooth, almost glossy surface and perfectly straight edges. Behind the hanging rugs were deep pigeonholes where more rugs were rolled up, some inside brown paper.

  A man around thirty was behind the counter at the back, guiding a woman through a catalogue, nodding enthusiastically when she stopped him and placed her finger on one image, apparently complimenting her on her taste. He wore a crisp white shirt and dark slacks, and had coarse black hair and a five-o’clock shadow hours ahead of schedule. Ryan and I walked around, looking at carpets like we were just two other customers, waiting for the man to finish serving the woman.

  “Nice stuff,” he said, running his hand over a nine-by-twelve tribal rug from Pakistan. Then he looked at the price tag and whistled. “A grand for this? Are they serious?”

  “Don’t you have gym bags full of cash?”

  “Not after buying the Charger.”

  “Can I help you gentlemen?” a woman said.

  We turned to face a beautiful young woman in her mid to late twenties. She wore a bright green long-sleeved silk blouse and black slacks that flared widely enough at the bottom to cover her shoes. Her eyes were a shade of green that very nearly matched her blouse. Her headscarf was a shade in between. “I see you were looking at the tribal rugs. We have quite a few excellent samples here and many more in our storeroom.”

  “We’re actually here on other business,” I said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Are you Mehri Aziz?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re here about Sammy Adler,” I said.

  She looked away quickly, craning her neck around to the counter where the young man was still leafing through the catalogue, head down, unaware of the ripple we’d just caused.

  She looked back at me, swallowing hard like something was going down the wrong pipe. “What about him?”

  I handed her a business card. “My name is Jonah Geller. This is my associate, Mr. Ryan. We’ve been hired by Sammy’s family to help find his killer.”

  She looked the card over, carefully examining both sides. Buying a little time. “I—I don’t see how I can be of any help.”

  “He interviewed you for a story he was writing.”

  “Yes. Very briefly,” she added quickly. “But he was finding out about me, not me about him.”

  She turned to look at the man behind the counter and I saw, clinging to the silk of her blouse, a long dark hair that had escaped her hijab.

  I said, “Can we speak privately somewhere? There is a personal question I’d like to ask.”

  Her shallow breaths reminded me of old Mr. Moscoe trying to fill his lungs in his deathbed. “That would not be possible,” she said. “We are very busy here.”

  “One whole customer,” Ryan said.

  She glared at him and said, “I manage the inventory. I only came out because I thought you were shopping.”

  “Don’t you want justice for him?”

  “I value justice like anyone else,” she said. “I answered the questions the police asked me, and I am sure they will find out what happened. Now please excuse me.”

  She turned to walk away. Now or never, I thought. “Was he your lover?”

  She spun on her heel, a panicked look on her face. “That is outrageous,” she hissed, her voice much lower than before. “A terrible, reckless thing to say. Not just in my place of business but in public at all.”

  “A witness told us about a woman who visited Sammy late at night. She matched your description.”

  “Then your witness was wrong.”

  “Don’t tell me the police didn’t ask the same thing.”

  “What they asked is private. As were my answers.”
<
br />   As she said it, the woman at the counter shouldered her purse and walked toward the door. Now the man behind it looked over at us. “Mehri?” he called, followed by words that were neither English or French. Pashto, I guessed. Or Dari.

  She responded and he came around the counter fast, striding toward us in a way that probably wasn’t in the customer service manual.

  He stopped just short of us, hands on his hips, and said, “What do you want? Why are you bothering her?”

  “No one is bothering anyone,” I said.

  “She says you are.”

  “Are you Mehrdad?”

  “If you are not buying a carpet, it does not matter who I am. Leave our store. Now.”

  “Sammy Adler interviewed both of you for a story he was writing, didn’t he?”

  “What if he did?”

  “We’re trying to find out who killed him.”

  “We have spoken to the police already. Are you more police?”

  “No. Private investigators.”

  “Then we don’t have to speak to you.”

  “Maybe you want to,” Ryan said.

  “Look,” I said. “Sammy was trying to help you, wasn’t he? He wanted to show the Afghan community was about more than honour killings.”

  “Good for him. Now that he is dead, the story is finished and our part is over. Are you going to leave or must I throw you out?”

  He reached out with his right hand and grabbed my shoulder, trying to turn me toward the door. From the corner of my eye I saw Ryan step forward and reach into his coat. I didn’t want him to pull a gun; maybe I also wanted to prove to him what I could do with a pressure point. I took hold of Mehrdad’s wrist, put my thumb against the vein in the soft underpart and squeezed the top muscles hard with three fingers. He gasped and his hand opened and I moved back, free of his grip.

  See? I wanted to say.

  “Stop it,” Mehri said. “Both of you. This is a place of business, not an alley.”

  Mehrdad ignored her. He turned and shouted something short and gruff. A few seconds later, a door behind the counter opened. Two men came out of a storage area, both about his age, one a good deal bigger than the other. Or me, for that matter. The big man held a flat blade about ten inches long, thick layers of masking tape forming a makeshift handle. The other was brandishing a long pole with a hook on the end.