Fall from Grace

by Wayne Arthurson

  “And you retired from the service when, Detective Gardiner?” I asked, trying to keep things light. “ ’Cause when I checked, there was an announcement fifteen years ago, but from the way you’re talking, it seems like last week. You wanna be the good cop or bad cop in this interview?”

  He chuckled but there was also a flash of grief and something else. Anger? Embarrassment? “The answer to that conundrum is simple: drunk driver.”

  Anger. That was the addition. Anger at a drunk driver for killing his kid.

  “I’m sorry, it must—”

  He waved my concern away. “Don’t give me your pity, ’cause despite our jocular attitude so far, we hardly know each other. Just let me ask you this, before I let you get on with your interview, you have any kids?”

  I first thought about lying but he would see through that. “Yeah. I have a son and daughter. They live with their mother.”

  “Thought so. So you know you better be prepared for the worst because despite the odds, bad things can happen and do happen. And even though cops like me did our darnedest to educate people and kids in school about the evils and stupidity of drunk driving, there are always those few idiots who never learn.” He again pointed to the teenager smiling in his high school graduation gown. “And my son was one of those idiots. And even though I loved my son to pieces, I just thank God that his was a single MVA so that he didn’t kill anybody else.”

  Shame. That’s what that extra look was. Not anger, but shame. Shame toward his son and shame for himself because of his son. Must have been tough for a cop to deal with, his son driving drunk and killing himself. I wondered if his retirement came close after the accident, but then I pushed the thought aside because we already knew who killed his son. We didn’t know who killed Grace Cardinal and that’s why Gardiner had called me here, to possibly help with the story.

  Maybe sensing my desire to move on, Gardiner cleared his throat. “So enough reminiscences from an old ex-cop. As you said, I called you and I’m about to tell you why.”

  I pulled out my notebook and flipped to the page where I had written down the info he had given me over the phone. Gardiner sat up straight at the sight of my notebook. Despite the differences in our professions, there are similarities, such as the use of a notebook. From his reaction, I could tell that he missed the job. “Yeah, you said it was an investigation you undertook about twenty years ago? Pretty vague ’cause you must have undertaken many investigations in your career.”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking a sip of his beer. “I’m sorry I was so vague on the phone but as you’ll discover pretty quick, I have my reasons. First off, I have to tell you that I am no longer a serving member of the Police Service, haven’t been for, as you said, fifteen years, and am not representing that Police Service. Also, some of the information I may give you comes from an official investigation file which should be in the archives of the EPS but, for reasons I won’t tell you, isn’t.

  “And because there are possibly one or two illegal acts here, I am demanding, not requesting but demanding, that my name not be used in your story. You can call me an unidentified retired member of the EPS but you cannot use my name, badge number, or even my rank in your story. Do you understand?”

  “I can see you’ve got the ability to pique one’s interest because that’s a hell of a thing to ask, especially since you called me and I haven’t seen any of this information you are talking about.”

  “I don’t give a fuck. You either agree to what I’m asking or leave my fucking house right now. Empty-handed. Do I make myself clear?”

  It’s not really a good policy for reporters to make deals like this, especially before they have an idea of what the story is about. I could have walked out right then. Could have shaken the old cop’s hand, thanked him for his interest in my story, and moved on with my life. But the way he was talking, I couldn’t resist.

  The potential for a good story was big, but even if there wasn’t a story here, I couldn’t pass up the chance to learn what was in the possibly illegally obtained file and why this old ex-cop was so concerned about having other people not know that he was the one who had given me the information. “We have a deal. If this file is interesting enough for a story, then I won’t tell anyone who or where I got it from.”

  “Not even your boss, your editors. No one knows.”

  “I hate to tell you that if there is a story here and if I write something about one of your old investigations, chances are someone will be able to figure out where it came from.”

  “I don’t give a fuck if somebody figures it out,” he growled at me, in a tone that made me glad I hadn’t been on the receiving end of attention from this guy when he was a cop. “You can’t use anything that can identify me in this story or tell anyone where you got the file from.”

  I waved my notebook at him. “Okay, nobody will know, not even my editor who will be pissed, but I can deal with him,” I was lying because there was no such thing as a Deep Throat source that journalists didn’t share with their editors. The days of backing up a story with a nondisclosed source were long gone. You could write that in a story—the same way I did when I didn’t mention Whitford’s name as the guy who let me into the crime-scene tent—but you’d better make sure that when your editor asks you who that unnamed source is, you tell them.

  “However, if this story results in legal problems for me,” I added, “and I’m faced with the choice of going to jail or giving up my source, I can’t promise I won’t tell. I’ll do my best not to give you up but if they push, I’ll have to give in.”

  Gardiner leaned back in his chair with a short laugh, all the anger and tension gone. “Relax, Mr. Desroches. I don’t think anyone is going to threaten you with jail time. You may take some heat from the fuzz when you run this story, and you will run this story because I know you won’t be able to resist it, and there will be a bunch of cops who would love nothing more than to find a reason to run you in, but you should be fine.

  “Even though I’ve been retired for a while, I know how the old boys work. And for the most part, they are a bunch of old dogs who bark but have no teeth. They’ll complain to your bosses, maybe file a grievance with the press council and get the police union to write a nasty letter to the editor, but you’ll be fine.” He stood up and I expected him to pull a file from underneath the cushion of his chair but he just motioned to me to stand up and follow him down to the basement.

  28

  The furniture in the main area of the basement was new, that modern Ikea style of wood and soft fabric. It fit the room. This part seemed newly renovated, white drywall along the walls and the ceiling, with a soft gray Berber carpet along the floor. There was a wood-burning brick fireplace along one wall and a large flat-screen TV along the other.

  We walked past this room through a door into the rest of the basement, which was unfinished and housed the laundry facilities along with furnace and hot water heater. I followed Gardiner through here, stepping around piles of clothes organized by color and material, till we got to a thick wooden door with two heavy-duty dead bolts keeping it locked. Gardiner reached into his shorts pocket and pulled out a couple of keys, opened the doors and, before we stepped in, reached around the corner to flip a light switch.

  The air in the room was stale, as if it hadn’t been used in years. But it was tidy. There was a small desk tucked into a corner, with an old wooden office chair in front of it. The desk was flanked by two three-drawer filing cabinets and the top was clear except for a can full of pens and pencils, a short stack of legal pads, a clock radio with the correct time, and a black rotary phone. It looked like Gardiner had furnished his room with items absconded from the set of that old TV cop show Barney Miller. There was no other chair in the room, no other place for anybody else to sit, so it seemed that no one else in Gardiner’s family ever came down here.

  And while the living room upstairs was filled with family memorabilia, this room looked to be a shrine to his career in the Pol
ice Service. The walls were filled with photos, everything from his academy class shot to grip and grins with various dignitaries, and candid shots from the job and social events, showing a young Gardiner with other people who were probably fellow cops. It was not surprising that all the people in the photos were men; even now female cops are still a minority in the service but in Gardiner’s time they were probably rarer than a passenger pigeon.

  Along with the photos were citations, medals, framed thank-you letters on letterhead from schools and small businesses, everything that a good cop collects in a solid twenty-five-year career. There was even a pressed uniform hanging in dry-cleaner plastic and I bet if I looked in the bottom drawer of the desk, I’d find his old service weapon. The ammunition would be here as well, still in its boxes, but shoved behind a stack of files in the back of one of the locked cabinets. It was obvious that Gardiner was one hell of a pack rat and I didn’t envy this collection the way I envied his collection of family photos upstairs.

  Gardiner grabbed a handful of pens and pencils out of the can and then dumped the rest of the contents on the desk. Along with a few coins and lenses from old sunglasses was a set of keys. He picked them up, sat down in the chair, and unlocked the filing cabinet on the right. He bent over to open the bottom drawer and flipped all the way to the end to get what he was looking for. Without turning, he reached around and held the file out to me.

  “This is what I told you about,” he said as he closed the cabinet, locked the file, and then dropped the keys back into the can with the pens and pencils. The chair squeaked as he turned to face me.

  “Case number 1349–987,” he said as I read the number on the file. I also noticed that the folder wasn’t something that he’d bought at a stationery store; it was the original Police Service file folder. I slowly opened the file and saw that none of the papers inside were copies; these were the original reports, complete with notes and several black-and-white eight-by-ten photos, long-angle surveillance shots, each one showing a typical john-and-hooker shot: a vehicle stopped on the darkened street, the girl bent over to peer through the passenger window. In a couple of shots, the vehicle in question was a police cruiser.

  “Yeah, that is the original file you have there,” he said, answering my unasked question. “You won’t find anything like this in the archives, I can tell you that. This is something that nobody would miss, anyway, so when I took it, I didn’t think I would get in trouble. Showing you is another story, but go ahead, read it and let me know what you think.”

  I slowly flipped through the pages, noting that Gardiner may have been relaxed in his demeanor as a cop but he was ruthless in his paperwork. It was a typical indictment report, a series of statements, records, and notes that a cop files with the Crown Prosecutor office when he believes charges should be filed.

  Everything in the file was organized by time, with the first reports of a minor assault against prostitutes at the beginning followed by roughly scrawled statements and interview notes indicating that some of these assaults may have involved members of the police service, or at the very least, young men in plainclothes carrying badges and holstered weapons, and the further interview notes and statements saying that some of these police officers were using these prostitutes as informants, gathering information on their pimps and drug deals they may have known about.

  So far, that was nothing unusual; prostitutes are regularly used as informants. But the next few pages showed the relationships went deeper. And darker. Two statements stated that the informant relationship was only the beginning and these so-called cops were threatening communication for the intent of prostitution (the typical charge because officially prostitution isn’t illegal in Canada. It’s a typically Canadian quirk. You are allowed to pay or charge someone to have sex with you, however, if you actually verbalize the offering of and asking for sexual services in exchange for money, then you have broken the law) and other criminal charges in exchange for sexual favors, for themselves, for friends, and also for extortion purposes. If any of the prostitutes refused these offers, then charges were filed against them or, sometimes, they were assaulted, sexually and/or otherwise.

  Those statements painted a bleak picture of police corruption and brutality, but the cynic in me believed that the statements from the prostitutes were false and designed to be a means of getting back against the cops who were only doing their duty to make the city streets safe and free of things like prostitution. It all came down to who are you going to believe, the woman who sells her body on the street, usually to get money for her drug habit, or the guy who rides in the cruiser risking his life for making our city a better and safer place? Most everyone would believe the cop.

  But one of the statements was highly detailed, listing incidents, threats of charges, assaults, parties, blackmail attempts, along with dates, times, locations, and the badge numbers and cruiser numbers of the members involved. This statement was further backed up by Gardiner’s work.

  His investigative skills seemed to be pretty solid and he had a plethora of information to back up the prostitute’s statement; duty schedules matching the dates of some of the incidents with the badge numbers, motor pool request matching the cruiser numbers listed, arrest reports connected to threats, a sidebar report about a member of the Police Commission, who was critical of the police service, being caught in the backseat of the car with one of the prostitutes in question, plus a couple of invitations to stag parties, offering special entertainment, that coincided with some of the parties the prostitute had listed. Gardiner even had what he had termed “an undercover report” in which he attended one of these parties and cataloged events and possible charges.

  The guy sitting in the chair in his basement was one of two things: a hell of a cop, or a rat, depending on which side one landed on, who believed the prostitutes and then backed up their allegations with a solid case, including photos.

  When I turned to the page that listed the recommended charges and the names of the cops he recommended should be charged, my heart stopped. I read it a second time, this time much slower, making note of each name on the list. A couple of them almost knocked me on the floor. I looked up at Gardiner, shocked at what was either incredible bravery or stupidity. “Were you serious with this?”

  He nodded, giving me a long, slow blink. “Very serious. I never recommended charges without a solid case and this was one of the most solid cases I ever made. As you may or may not know, some cops in the service are idiots, they think they are immune to the real world and can play by their own rules.”

  “I don’t know many of these names, but these two, I think everybody knows who these guys are. They aren’t your basic cop.”

  “Not anymore, yeah, but back then, these guys were a bunch of gung ho constables, fresh out of the academy and being trained by old school cops who had learned from even more old school cops that this is the way things are and how one does the job. Whoever they are now is immaterial. Back then they were just stupid constables, and from the look on your face, I know you know the type.”

  I knew the type and had come across cops like the ones named in the file, but they were a minority. I also knew there were police like Gardiner or Whitford or the thousands of others who did their jobs with honor and respect. Police officers who took seriously their oaths about protecting the public and the city they lived. But the other truth of the matter was that there were countless times when good cops let the behavior of the bad ones slide because to call them to task or complain about them was to be labeled a rat. So in the end they were all tarred with the same brush when the bad or stupid ones transgressed.

  But Gardiner’s list was something else: something worse. Gardiner’s list of “gung ho constables” fresh out of the academy included not only the recently resigned chief of police but the now-serving chief. This was a hell of a story that would blow through the city like a nasty winter blizzard, grinding it to a halt and creating a backlash that would reverberate for months, maybe years.


  But I was not at all sure I wanted to be the one to write it. The reputation of every cop, even the good ones, would be tarnished by this. And every cop, even the good ones, would hate me for writing it. I wanted to take this file to Gardiner’s fireplace, toss it in, and roast a couple of marshmallows in its flame.

  “You can keep that if you want. Nobody wanted it when I wrote it up,” Gardiner said, which was probably the understatement of the year. “Not even the Crown Prosecutor. I thought that fucker would have a heart attack when I showed him my report. Actually, the look on your face matches his, although he stopped breathing for so long I thought I would have to give a bit of mouth-to-mouth.”

  “You actually filed this with the Crown?”

  Gardiner gave a dismissive grunt. “This was one of the best cases I ever made in my career, so of course I filed it with the Crown. Nine months of work, poking into every cranny, buddying up with guys who made me puke, who made me feel ashamed to call myself a fellow member, and backing up all statements with a solid case and then recommending charges to the Crown. That’s what cops are supposed to do, isn’t it?”

  No wonder he missed several rounds of promotions; this was the biggest fuck-off you could give a superior. But Gardiner’s words told me he was the bravest and the dumbest cop I had ever met. He had found fellow members involved in criminal activity, and instead of turning his back on it, filing it under “boys will be boys” or redrawing the thin blue line, he came forward with it. He didn’t care if the people being abused by the system were criminals themselves or living an unsavory lifestyle. He didn’t care if they would call him a rat, didn’t care about his chances for advancement or about being ostracized by every single cop in the country, he just did his job.