Montreal Noir Page 13

“Maybe in Mile End?” I responded, which was risky.

  “All right, maybe in Mile End.” He smiled.

  I returned the smile. “Thank you, but I’m not hungry.”

  “Can I offer you an espresso, perhaps?”

  “Latte, if possible.”

  “Good.” The man turned to an old woman at the counter; she nodded and walked toward the espresso machine. The sound of steam running out of a nozzle filled the small shop. I looked around the well-kept store: there were pastries, vanilla cakes, Lavazza coffee bags, and the obligatory Montreal bagel.

  “Anything for your friend?”

  I looked at Julien. Goddamn, did he look stupid. I turned back to the Italian. “He’s all set.”

  “Sit down, sit down,” he said to me.

  As I settled into the wood-backed chair, the old lady handed me my coffee, smiling as she departed. It was the most honest smile I had ever seen. Something in the way she moved, the way she rested the cup slowly on the table, her old hands still soft from years of care and patience, moved me. If she was this Italian man’s mother, then the apple fell far from the tree.

  “I assume you are aware of the circumstances leading to our meeting today,” he said. “Let’s have it then.”

  I took a sip of the latte. I enjoyed it for a short moment, but then it was time to get down to business. I pulled an envelope out of my jacket. “You will find eight hundred dollars in here as a gesture of good faith, to cover expenses pertaining to your men’s time, as well as yours, of course.”

  He nodded in approval. Eight hundred was a good number. Less than that would have meant we were either broke and expendable or that we didn’t know how things ran properly in the city. Any more than that meant we couldn’t hold our ground and, therefore, why would they even care about us? Right?

  He waved toward his bouncer, who approached and accepted the envelope.

  “Now,” I said, “as you know, it has come to our attention that certain, shall we say, rival organizations, have taken steps to trade illicit products within our neutral establishment.”

  “I am aware, yes.”

  “And I want to assure you that my brother and I have had no involvement whatsoever in these arrangements The person next to me, Julien, had, in fact, single-handedly decided to contact these criminal circles so that they could provide drugs to sell in our establishment.”

  The Italian man listened in silence. He looked pleased. He glanced at Julien and said, “You have the necessary contacts to initiate such a trade?”

  Julien beamed, as if he’d been handed the keys to the fucking city. “Yeah, man! I mean, my man here didn’t even need to ask, yo! I’m holding him down, man. I’m holding him down, you know? I got shit covered. My main man’s a Blood, I mean. And he said he could provide anything we needed. Weed, coke, E—just ask and I’ll call him and shit’s done.”

  “This friend of yours,” the Italian said to Julien, “what’s his name?”

  “Turcotte. Pete Turcotte.”

  The Italian looked at his bouncer.

  “Rings a bell, vaguely,” the bouncer said. “I’m guessing he’s from Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.”

  “That’s it. That’s him. Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Laval.”

  The bouncer continued: “Probably pushing a little weed to his welfare friends, nothing more, but it rings a bell.”

  “I see. This complicates things,” the Italian said, sipping his coffee. We peered at each other. “And you know this man?” He nodded toward Julien.

  “I’m afraid we grew up on the same street. Our relationship is merely due to geographic proximity, and has nothing to do with the actual business or friendship.”

  “Hey!” Julien said. “What the fuck’s up with you all of a sudden?”

  The idea that he was the scapegoat for this whole thing might have just started to sprout in his dumb fucking head. I could have asked for the Italian’s lenience. I could have mentioned how stupid he really was. Hell, I could have gotten the guitar out of my trunk as proof. But Julien had fucked with my livelihood, and that required retribution.

  “For all I care, you can beat him, maim him, kill him. I don’t care.”

  Julien jumped out of his seat. “What the fuck, man!”

  My arm rose to the sky, finger pointing like the Old Testament God. “Trust me,” I said as harshly as I could. “You want to sit yourself back on that chair and shut the hell up. Right now!”

  He sat down, shoulders slumped forward like a scorned child.

  I took a deep breath to calm myself. “My wish, Monsieur, is to remain independent. My brother and I happen to be beer enthusiasts, and that is the main reason why we even care about our brewery at all. We like brewing it, we like serving it, the people, the noise, the staff, the waitresses—that’s really all there is to it. While this incident is unfortunate and undesired, you can see that we took swift and immediate steps in order to ensure our neutrality. If you wish for us to handle Julien for you, we would be happy to do so, but the bottom line is that it remains your call to make, not ours. We will be happy to live with any decision that you make at this point.”

  “Richard,” Julien pleaded, “don’t do this, man.”

  The Italian sighed and looked at me, then Julien. Maybe the Bloods did want to start a turf war, and he’d need to beat some information out of Julien. Maybe the Bloods didn’t want a turf war, but two idiots they had allowed in their outer circles could provide an opportunity to reopen certain negotiations. Maybe I didn’t want to think about the real reason why this meeting had been called for in the first place. The silence started to weigh heavily, and I just wanted it to be over.

  “We’ll handle it from here,” said the Italian. “It was a nice gesture: the envelope, him, the way you presented your case. It was well put together and you seem honest enough. We’ll handle the rest.”

  “Richard,” Julien muttered.

  I didn’t look at him.

  “The coffee was flawless,” I said as I got up. I took my last sip and put on my shades.

  “Thank you. It’s appreciated.”

  As I walked toward the door, the bouncer nodded at me politely. I nodded back. I started to feel like I had gotten us out of it. It looked that way for a minute. Maybe the two pieces of driftwood from Hochelaga could rise with the tide and become rich, honest men on their own terms.

  I was inches from the door when the Italian said, “But of course, you have to understand that this business . . .” I stopped and turned around. “This trouble of yours, him,” he added, referring to Julien, “is going to take a certain amount of our time.”

  Fuck! I thought. Goddamn fucking fuck! It hit me like a wrecking ball. I wanted to scream. I wanted to smash a wall or Julien’s face. I couldn’t let it out, though. I couldn’t let it show that I had been fucked. Not now, not ever. Stay classy, I kept thinking. Stay fucking classy.

  I swallowed my pride and said, “Of course,” as calmly as I could.

  “Now exactly how much time this is all going to take will be entirely up to our friend’s collaborative spirit. So do not bother yourself with worrying quite yet.” He got up from his chair and put his jacket on. “We’ll get in touch with you when we know for sure. Go now, enjoy the rest of your day. It’s a beautiful day outside. Go and enjoy it.”

  There was nothing else to say. I had just signed up for a lifetime protection plan, and I couldn’t get myself out of it.

  We were fucked.

  “I’m sorry,” Julien tried saying to me. I didn’t answer. That goddamned idiot had gotten me into so much trouble. So much fucking trouble. I didn’t want to answer. It could get ugly and this wasn’t the time and place for me to lose it.

  The Italian walked up to me. The bouncer approached Julien.

  “Thank you for your time,” the Italian said as he opened the door. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

  I could hear the first punch hit Julien as I walked out. I heard him whine, cry, plead, and shout. I didn’t feel ba
d. Not for a minute.

  I got in my car, lit up a smoke, and started the engine. After I made it to Maurice-Duplessis Boulevard—that’s when I lost it, and I lost it bad. I started punching the steering wheel, punching the dashboard. I punched my own fucking head, shouting, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  It wasn’t gonna do.

  I still had Julien’s guitar in the trunk. I still had his fucking guitar. I still had his shitty guitar that was out of tune with the broken stings and the cheap porn glued to the back of it. I still had his shitty fucking guitar.

  I was going to nail that fucking thing to the wall in my bar. I was going to nail it right over the bar, right over the fucking bar as a reminder of things that are and things to come.

  Shit! I said to myself. The light was green again. There is no such thing as independence in this world.

  Joke’s On You

  by Catherine McKenzie

  Saint-Henri

  I.

  A Murder Is Announced

  The sky above my grandfather’s funeral was low and cloud-covered. Hovering around the gravesite in a far wing of the Mount Royal Cemetery, I felt oddly claustrophobic, like we were tucked into the back room of my father’s favorite bar. Only it was raining, our breath marking each of us.

  There weren’t many people in attendance, just our immediate family and a few of my grandfather’s golfing buddies. The sad fact is that when you die at ninety-three, there aren’t many people left to pay their respects.

  No funeral, my grandfather had always said. But despite the bleak weather and the sadness that weighed me down like a wet cloak, I was glad we’d ignored him. He never wanted to be a bother, but he was a man worth making a bother for.

  We held black umbrellas handed out by the funeral home. Rain dripped off my umbrella’s edges, creating a wet circle around me in the freshly turned dirt. I shivered inside my grandfather’s old trench coat, which I wore because he’d once told me, in that prairie-plains accent of his, that it belonged to me after he died.

  “You use this after I die,” he said, pinning a slip of paper with my name on it into the label. I would’ve preferred the paintings from Spain that brightened the hall, but a trench coat wasn’t the sort of bequest you denied. The coat was too big for me, and it smelled of aftershave, mothballs, and cheap gin. He and my grandmother would drink gin and tonics nightly; none of the rest of us would drink them unless absolutely necessary.

  I had trouble concentrating on what the nondenominational pastor was saying. I hadn’t being sleeping well lately. My brain whirred awake at night and most of the time I lay in a racing panic before the sun was up. My sleep symptoms, combined with a constant, nagging catch in my throat, were telltale signs of depression, so WebMD told me.

  Oh joy, I thought when that result turned up, but of course there wasn’t any joy, only a long flat line representing the time I had to get through every day until I could retreat into my bed and hide under the covers.

  After the pastor said his final words—Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—and my father lifted a spade, placing a dash of earth on the cheapest coffin he could get away with purchasing, we trudged down the hill to the waiting cars. My brother and I climbed into the first one, shutting the door firmly behind us. No parents welcome here was written as firmly in our actions as it was on one of the signs we’d affixed to our bedroom doors as teenagers.

  Two days of togetherness had been two days too many.

  As the car wound through the cemetery, my brother began complaining about something our mother had said that morning. I murmured a one-word response. That was another thing about me now, how I seemed to speak with the volume off, my words only loud in my own head. Everything that mattered seemed to take place between my ears, and even the reality of death was just a bump in the feedback loop.

  We reached my grandparents’ house. It was low-slung and pink, hugging the corner of Vendôme and de Maisonneuve. Anyone who’s seen Jacob Two-two Meets the Hooded Fang would recognize it; it’s where Jacob lived. Filmed in 1978, my grandfather still talked about the thousand dollars he’d made renting out the house for the shoot.

  When we got inside, the house smelled like a gas fire and economy catering. Covered in plastic wrap on the dining room table were egg salad sandwiches, interspersed with a few smoked salmon rounds and some sad-looking crudités.

  “Your grandfather wouldn’t want us to spend any money on a reception,” my father had said before my grandfather’s body went cold, trying, but not succeeding, at hiding his naked desire to start perusing the bank statements.

  It was a good thing there weren’t very many people coming.

  In the elastic band of time, it seemed only a minute before the doorbell rang. My brother’s wife’s parents entered along with the next-door neighbors. The living room was small, and soon the noise felt unbearable.

  I needed to flee. So I did.

  I stole up the stairs and crept along the dark hall to my grandfather’s bedroom. It smelled like his coat, which had hung in the closet until earlier that day, when I’d stopped by to retrieve it.

  He and my grandmother enjoyed sleeping in separate rooms, he had told me without embarrassment years before. Her room was down the hall—this was his private domain.

  I sat on the edge of my grandfather’s bed. His bedside table was littered with his last haul from the library: a new Robert B. Parker novel, an old Dorothy L. Sayers book, and Agatha Christie’s Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. He was the one who introduced me to mysteries as a child, and was largely why I worked as a private investigator now.

  The September rain spat at the window. I pulled an envelope from my pocket—it was a birthday card from my grandfather I hadn’t opened yet. He’d written the address poorly, one of the 0s looking like a 6. My neighbor received the card, and handed it to me two weeks after my thirty-eighth birthday. I’d put off reading it, as if he wouldn’t really be gone if I didn’t consume his last words to me.

  But the earth had already covered him over and that wasn’t going to change.

  I kicked off my high-heeled shoes, which I thought were a good idea to wear for the occasion. They went with the coat, you see, along with the black sheath dress I felt poured into. Bright red lips completed the look.

  Fake it till you make it.

  My feet felt like they’d been dipped in ice after an hour by the graveside. I wrapped them in my grandfather’s afghan, which sat folded at the end of the bed. I peeled open the envelope and pulled out a card with a faded bouquet of flowers across the front—not a birthday card, just one of those generic ones you get on sale once the holidays are over. I smiled through the lump in my throat as I turned the cover to read what was inside.

  I did not die of natural causes.

  II.

  Last Rites

  I spent another compressed night turning those words over in my mind. Was my grandfather trying to tell me that he’d been murdered? If so, who murders someone in their nineties? How would he know it was coming? And if he knew it was coming, why wouldn’t he tell me more directly, or go to the police, do something to stop it? What was I supposed to do with this information? Why had he sent me this card?

  For a few dark minutes I thought about ending my own life unnaturally.

  If you’re thinking about suicide, you’re supposed to go to the hospital immediately. That’s what the Internet told me when I googled thoughts of suicide. Google didn’t say how many other people had searched this, but I felt some small comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the first.

  My problem was this: how do you know if you’re really thinking about killing yourself? Is it the first moment it enters your mind, even if only for a minute? Does it have to take root, live there for a while? Does the method have to be worked out in detail?

  I didn’t know the answers to these questions. I only knew that I thought about it for four minutes and thirty-seven seconds after I read the bit online about the hospital, then put that thought away.

&nbs
p; In the clear light of day, I was certain I didn’t want to go through with it. But my grandfather’s card lingered in my mind, so going to see a doctor seemed like a good idea.

  My grandfather didn’t have an autopsy. There were no suspicious signs surrounding his passing, just an incredibly old man dying in his sleep. Our family doctor had confirmed the death when my grandmother called him to the house. The house call was unusual, but he’d been my grandfather’s doctor for the last thirty years, and so he came.

  Dr. Wheelbarrow’s practice was in a suite of offices in Westmount Square. I showed up without an appointment, but I knew from experience that if you were willing to sit there long enough, he’d generally fit you in. After two hours of playing SimCity on my iPhone, I was called into his office.

  The doctor greeted me and told me to disrobe.

  “Oh, I’m not here for me,” I said, clutching the edges of my sweater. “I wanted to know if there was anything suspicious about my grandfather’s death.”

  “He died from natural causes.”

  “I know, but I thought maybe . . . Are you sure there wasn’t anything unusual?”

  He sat back in his chair, tapping his finger against his lip. “What are you getting at?”

  “Can I confide something in you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have reason to believe my grandfather didn’t die naturally.”

  “And what reason is that?”

  I realized how silly it might sound, but forged ahead: “He told me.”

  “He told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “He wrote me a letter. A card. For my birthday.” I described what the card said. How I’d gotten it after he’d died.

  “So he knew he was going to be murdered before it happened?”

  “Well, he was suspicious, obviously.”

  “My dear girl.”

  “Okay, I know. It sounds ridiculous. But why else would he have written that to me?”

  “I can’t answer that for you, my dear.” He glanced at his watch. “I have patients to see.”

  “I’ll go, but if something occurs to you, will you please let me know?”