“Didn’t the live-in tenderize that Kildonan Park asshole better than Tenderloin Meats does a prime rib?” said Sangster.
Sawatski leaned back into the vinyl bench. “She’s harmless, Bangster. It’s not motorcycle weather, and I highly doubt that she’s going to show up to the surrender with a full-auto under her arm. We’re just playing whack-a-mole on this one.”
“What about the barbeque at the porn shop? Did anything show up at the autopsy?”
Sawatski shook his head. “It looks like a pro offed the laundry guy. He was dead before that Jasmine something-or-other flicked her Bic for the kaboom.”
Sangster had reached the final remnants of the pie crust. “Yeah, this whole thing is getting weird. Can’t believe we haven’t got a tip or a body by now. I mean, we’ve got bodies, just not the one we’re looking for. The white shirts are trying to deflect it, but you know the shit’s going to dirty us before it dirties them.” The “white shirts” were reserved for the administration-level staff of the police service. They usually weren’t seen for the day-to-day media reports unless a comment was required to keep the populace calm or to deflate a growing scandal. Three bodies within twenty-four hours related to the case, major property damage, and no arrests would mean that the white shirts would be getting plenty of starch.
Sangster gobbled up what was left of the meringue, pushing the plate towards Sawatski. “I gotta jet.”
Sawatski nodded at the exit. “Hot date?”
“Hot enough,” said Sangster as he buttoned up his coat. “Catch you on the flip side.” Sangster was about five steps from the table when Sawatski called to him.
“Hey, Bangster, forget something?”
Sangster turned around to see Sawatski holding his takeout cup. “Shit,” said Sangster. “I’d forget my head if my toque wasn’t holding it on.”
“Sweet nectar of life, right?” Sawatski held the cup aloft for an easier grab.
“You got that right, brother. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Sawatski nodded as he watched Sangster exit the way that he had entered, to the rear parking lot. He waited for the door chime to ring before he moved quickly to the front counter. Near the cash register he saw a monitor that was displaying the four camera feeds for the restaurant’s security system, most likely a deterrent to would-be thieves. He watched as Sangster walked past the camera to an idling silver Chrysler 300. Sangster got in on the passenger side, handing the coffee to the driver. Bangster wouldn’t drink Sal’s coffee if you put a gun to his head, thought Sawatski.
Sangster was freelancing just like him, but for whom? He grabbed a nearby Sal’s order pad and pencil to record the plate number: 729 DWN. The city-owned police cars had used plates starting with an A prefix since the mid-nineties, recently switching to F, G, and H-prefix plates. There was only one full-sized Chrysler product in the fleet, a marked Dodge Charger Enforcer that was purchased for evaluation against the newest Ford Police Interceptors. The Charger’s brakes couldn’t hold up to the pursuit requirement, and the car had been demoted to a marked community affairs unit. Whomever it was, it wasn’t a cop. It also meant that someone was looking at the movements of Sawatski’s Crown Vic, thanks to the now-standard GPS tracking system on the police fleet. Sangster was part of the union committee that had recommended the GPS system to speed up response times for officers needing assistance. Every member of the service had access to the live GPS movements of the fleet, 24/7, through car-mounted laptops or a secure smartphone app. Sawatski continued to watch the screen, hoping that the driver would get out for some reason, any reason, for a basic ID. As Sawatski watched, one of the night staffers ambled up to the counter. “You want to order more chili?” said the counter clerk.
“No thanks,” said Sawatski as he watched the screen. “I think I just lost my appetite.”
Chapter Forty-One
Nathaniel sipped on his Sal’s coffee while Sangster gave him the lowdown on his conversation with Sawatski. “He’s not saying a lot that helps, and I don’t think he’s got it in him to whack the hooker and her Dynamic Duo. The guy’s a total fucking liability at this point.”
“We don’t need a dead cop right now,” said Nathaniel, checking the camera feed on his laptop between sips. “If it can somehow happen during the takedown, and it’s clean, then you have my full authorization. But let me be clear: we can’t have any witnesses. We need the ledger, and we need to ensure the silence of the Hebert extraction team, which may have just unwittingly added the good sergeant to its ranks.”
“Bullshit,” said Sangster. “Sawatski won’t help anybody but himself. What’s in it for him?”
Nathaniel took a stiff swig of the Sal’s coffee to punctuate his thought. “Every man has a moral compass, Sangster, even you. Every man has the ability to chart a course away from his true moral north, and a precious few have found the justification needed to do just that. The world needs men like that, Sangster, men like us who can see the bigger map.”
Sangster was impressed by the statement. “Wow, when you say it like that, I feel like one of the good guys.”
“We are the good guys, Sangster. Did Sawatski say anything else?”
“Yeah, he actually gave me a compliment.”
Nathaniel smirked. “Please tell me it wasn’t for that ridiculous toque of yours.”
“Nope, it was for the laundry guy. He said I did him like a pro.”
~
Galecki’s station wagon had an exhaust leak somewhere. Tommy felt the headache begin about two minutes into the drive. It was anyone’s guess where the leak was coming from: a rusted muffler, a cracked gasket, or one of the holes in the floor that had been hastily fixed with sheet metal and pop rivets. He rolled down his window a crack to help diminish the toxic gases. The dashboard lights flickered constantly. A play-by-play of the out-of-town Jets game vibrated the front speaker.
As Tommy opened the window, Galecki stepped the defroster fan up one speed to compensate for the frigid air. “I think it’s the Y-pipe,” said Galecki, fully aware of the safety concern within. “And the weatherstripping needs to be replaced on the back window.”
So, that’s where that rattling is coming from, thought Tommy as he looked at the rear pane covered with yellowing frost shields. He remembered hearing that driving with the rear window down on a station wagon could cause exhaust to roll in, probably affecting the cognitive development of the kids who sat in the rear-facing third-row seat. Tommy figured he had dodged that bullet: he would always call shotgun with Ernie Friday.
Galecki lived on Alfred Avenue, a block east of McPhillips Street. The neighbourhood had gentrified over the past decade, with many of the post-war boom houses wearing new siding and windows. Casa Galecki was the exception; the house was built in 1909 and still wore many of the original exterior decorative wood trimmings. Much of the paint had flaked away from the original craftsmanship, along with the shingles, eavestrough, and many of the front porch floorboards. Tommy was surprised at the level of dilapidation and how it failed to take away the significance of the original architecture. They drove around to the back lane, where a large gate on an equally large fence had been opened, rolled to one side on a metal wheel-and-track system. Galecki hit a button on a garage door–style opener, and the gate started to roll back to its closed position as they came to a stop.
“Just like the rich folks do,” said Galecki, punctuating his dig at class and society with a signature snort.
The pair ambled past the garage up to a rear porch that wasn’t doing much better than the front. “It’s a little spongy in spots,” said Galecki, so Tommy placed his steps exactly where Galecki’s landed. He tapped the door with “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits,” which didn’t seem like much of a secret knock to Tommy. From within, a series of six latches unbolted. The door opened to reveal a petite blonde in her mid-fifties.
So Gwen IS real, thought Tommy as they shuffl
ed into the rear mudroom. She wore simple clothes, including an oversized cardigan that must have been from Galecki’s closet. She adjusted her reading glasses as she looked up at the guest.
“Gwen, this is the infamous Tommy Bosco,” said Galecki.
“Good evening, Mr. Bosco,” said Gwen, with a voice that sounded like it could have been culled from a society page of a bygone era. “Welcome to the library. Would you care for Earl Grey or chamomile?”
Tommy remembered that one, or possibly both, of those things were tea. “Uh, sure, thanks, Gwen. I guess the grey one, please.”
Gwen smiled graciously as she took both of their coats and hung them on a vintage mirrored stand that had started life in a much grander house. The interior of the home was best described as organized chaos. There were stacks of books everywhere, situated in some of the neatest stacks imaginable. It appeared that the stacks were concerned with lining up the dimensions of the books first, mingling a variety of subjects together. Even with the multiple stacks, the house was spotless, filled with an eclectic array of bric-a-brac. Add a few price tags, and Galecki’s home could be easily transformed into an antique shop.
While Gwen readied the tea, Tommy followed Galecki into the living room. A tubular chrome table of 1950s vintage was taking up most of the centre space. On top of it was a Bell & Howell microfiche reader, humming the way that vintage technology tends to do. Next to the machine was a selection of microfilm reels and microfiche slides.
“It’s like the internet,” said Galecki. “But without all those annoying cat videos.” The Galecki house cats didn’t seem to mind the dig; they were too busy occupying the comfortable chairs.
Galecki started off with a well-worn box of slides, scanning through them at a frantic speed that only his librarian superpowers could understand. The same was true when he switched over to the spinning microfilm, forwarding and reversing in a fashion that Tommy found reminiscent of the procedure used to dislodge an old car from the snow. “Eureka!” said Galecki, as he landed on a black-and-white image of a white-haired man in thick black spectacles. “Say hello to Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron.”
Tommy looked at the picture for a moment, not entirely sure what the grainy image signalled to Galecki, or anyone else. He figured it was his job to break the silence. “Uh, okay. And who is Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron?”
Galecki looked at him, puzzled. “You don’t know about Dr. Cameron?”
Tommy shrugged. “What is he? A chiropractor or something?”
Galecki went to answer, and then paused to think about what Tommy had just said. “Well, not exactly, but I guess in a way he was, except that he wasn’t adjusting your spine, he was doing the Snap-Crackle-Pop to your brain.”
Tommy didn’t understand a word of it. “Steve, explain it to me like I’m five.”
“Very well,” said Galecki. “You’d better pull up a chair.” Galecki started to flip through more of the microfilm panes, stopping on a postcard of a brick institutional building, dated 1950. “Back in the fifties, they called this the Brandon Hospital for Mental Diseases, and after that the Brandon Mental Health Centre. In the beginning, it was just a good old-fashioned nuthouse, the Brandon Asylum for the Insane.”
Tommy looked at the building, noticing its tightly manicured grounds and its regal stone staircase. There was something off about the place: it was as though the asylum’s worst patients had been locked up in the cellar while the promotional picture was being taken. The image literally gave him the creeps.
“Cameron was the new whiz kid on the block for psychiatry in those days, when the whole idea of psychiatry was still wearing short pants.” said Galecki. “He landed in Brandon around 1929, and they put him in charge of assessing every loon that came through the door. It wasn’t like today; there were no ‘c’mon get happy’ pills to dole out. There was frontal lobotomies and electroshock therapy, and they did an awful lot of that.” Galecki flipped forward a few more slides to an image of nurses in crisp uniforms, standing next to what looked like a cage attached to the top of a hospital bed. “Apparently, they loved to experiment on the schizophrenics. They’d strap them down in those cage beds and aim 200-watt heat lamps at them for hours, just to see how they’d react. Scary shit. Cameron left Brandon in ’36, and he went on to do a whole pile of big-time head-shrink stuff, even went on to psych-evaluate some Nazis at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two. The biggest big-time of all was at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. You ever hear of the Sleep Room?”
“The what room?” said Tommy.
“The Sleep Room,” said Galecki. “It was all part of this CIA mind-control study called MKULTRA, and Cameron was the resident Dr. Frankenstein. They’d knock you out with drugs for a couple of months, and then they’d spic-and-span your brain to the point that you had to relearn how to talk, piss, and shit. They were messing with LSD, trying to build a real live Manchurian candidate. People went into the Allan to be treated for depression and walked out not even knowing their own kids.”
Tommy finally nodded that he understood. He remembered seeing the remake of The Manchurian Candidate with Denzel Washington, at the time unaware that there was a black-and-white version before it with Frank Sinatra in the same role. Mind control, assassins, and government black-ops — what did any of this have to do with a cheap-ass ledger?
“What happened to Cameron?” said Tommy.
“Died in ’67,” said Galecki. “And even that’s a little trippy. He left the Allan in ’64, and right after he left, the Institute did everything they could to distance themselves from anything associated with Cameron’s methods. So, in ’67, he goes for a hike with his kid and keels over, dead as a doornail. Heart attack, maybe a poison CIA dart in the neck for all we know. They didn’t even get around to investigating the CIA mind-control stuff until ’75, which worked out really well for them, since they started incinerating the really bad stuff back in ’73. A little thing called Watergate probably had something to do with that.”
He was losing Tommy again, and Tommy was glad when Galecki decided on fast-forwarding to his summation. “The thing is this: weird government-funded stuff has been going on here for a long time. Cameron might have been at the Allan in the fifties and sixties, but the guy had a lot of influence and a lot of friends. Maybe, just maybe, they were still doing stuff in Brandon. Maybe they were injecting prisoners with LSD at Stony Mountain Penitentiary. Maybe the whole polio epidemic in the fifties was an experiment in germ warfare. It’s all a big fat maybe, but THIS —” Galecki felt the need to stand and hold the ledger aloft to drive home his point, “this could be the smoking gun that everyone has been looking for.”
“Everyone?” said Tommy.
“A lot of people have been messed up by governments over the last hundred-ish years,” said Galecki. “Mustard gas in World War One, radium water at the corner drugstore, lead paint, red dye, cyclamates in your diet soda, and whatever else they’re sticking in the food, the smartphones, and most of all, the water. That’s how you can get to everybody, through the water. You’ve gotta drink it sometimes, you’ve gotta cook in it, you’ve gotta clean in it. Hell, we’re all about sixty percent water. There’s no better bullet than water.”
Tommy thought about what he had seen at the federal lab, the city water department trucks, and the entries in the ledger, especially what appeared to be the water meter number of The Guiding Light. What did the meter number actually prove? There was nothing red and shiny attached to the water main, no flashing blue light with a skull-and-crossbones symbol to tip him off. Maybe the water meter number was just another way to put down an address instead of actually writing it down. It still didn’t explain the pent-up interest in a working girl who murdered a low-life who probably had it coming. There was more to this ledger — a lot more than he ever could have imagined.
Chapter Forty-Two
Miles Sawatski let the new pieces of recently acquired informat
ion settle into place as he poured his takeout coffee at the 7-Eleven near Kildonan Park. With the exception of a few Crown Victoria catnaps, Sawatski was approaching thirty hours without a proper dream. Sangster was definitely dirty, but who exactly was he working for? Whoever it was didn’t drink Timmy’s. Is the Sal’s coffee man also the president of the Toilet Tank Bank at The Line Up? thought Sawatski. Sangster had obviously tracked Sawatski to the Salisbury House, and, thanks to the hard-wired GPS system, he would continue to track him in any police unit. If he drove back to the Public Safety Building, Sangster would follow and easily assume that Sawatski had switched out the current Crown Vic for his personal car, which probably had a hidden GPS tracker on it by now. He couldn’t grab another detective unit, since his badge number would appear on any police vehicle that he signed out, also appearing on the live GPS feed. He didn’t know if there was a tap on his phone. He had to get to Spence to tell her the tale that no cop wants to tell their partner. Sawatski didn’t care about the consequences anymore. For the first time in a long time, Sawatski felt like he was a cop again.
“Mileage, is that you?” Sawatski popped out of his trance and looked up at Jim Fletcher, better known as the Repo Man. He was pouring his coffee into an oversized mug on the opposite side of the self-serve coffee station. Fletcher was the go-to guy for vehicle repossessions in Winnipeg, having run a successful bailiff service since the early nineties. He was pushing a fit fifty, with a well-manicured salt-and-pepper moustache and goatee combination. He must have been on the job from a recent seizure as he was still wearing his high-visibility orange parka. “They still got you driving the Crown Vic? I thought they were all retired by now.”
Clean Sweep Page 19
