Montreal Noir Read online

  While they talked about men with sticks, I tried to figure out what to do. The SPCA couldn’t help me. The police didn’t take me seriously. I only knew one other officer, Rivera, and he hated my guts. Now what?

  I sat down at my computer to do more research. Surely I couldn’t be the only person disturbed by an animal abuser? What did other animal-saviors do?

  Traditionally, they went to the media and tried to get the newspaper, radio, and TV outlets interested. But nowadays, it looked like they went online. I followed their lead and started a Facebook group. I needed a catchy title.

  “What are you doing?” asked Tucker.

  “Can’t talk. Working,” I said.

  He read over my shoulder. “Help the Hamsters? What?”

  “Have you got a better title?” I snapped.

  “Sure. Headless Hamsters. Help Hammy.”

  Of course, Ryan wanted to get in on the action and was not impressed. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “I’m trying to do some detective work online. That way, I’m not risking my neck. I thought you guys would be thrilled.”

  Ryan stared at me through the camera and repeated, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “I can set up a Facebook group.”

  “But then the killer can find you through your IP address. Haven’t you learned anything?”

  A chill crept down my back. I stared back at him.

  He shook his head and said, “I’ll do it.”

  * * *

  Throughout the next week, my dummy Facebook page received a lot of traffic. I was on my phone all the time, and not just researching articles. People wanted to join the Facebook group—IT folks, teenagers, whatever. I accepted them all, one at a time, before eventually making it an open group.

  Then I got a private Facebook message. The subject was titled yr group, and the sender was Vladamir Kzurstan. The message read: catch me if you can.

  I asked for Ryan’s advice. He called me and said, “This guy’s profile was made two hours ago. It looks like a setup.”

  My Internet research was driving me crazy. I had to do something.

  * * *

  On my second-to-last day of my palliative care residency, I asked Dr. Huot if I could visit the plastic surgery unit one more time.

  The doctor’s eyes twinkled. “Oh, my dear, are you thinking of changing specialities?”

  “I’m just going for a visit.”

  Dr. Huot touched my arm. “Of course, dear Hope.”

  I rushed down Cote-des-Neiges to the Jewish Hospital. I had sins to eat.

  I hurried to Dr. Mendelson’s office. I had no idea if I’d be able to find him, but luckily, I spotted his rumpled lab coat walking into his office.

  I stopped at his secretary and told her I needed a few minutes with Dr. Mendelson.

  “You’re not on the schedule today,” she said, staring at me over the wire rims of her glasses.

  “I know. You’re right. But I need to talk to him about one of his patients.”

  She sniffed. “I’ll check if he’ll see you. He’s a very busy man.”

  Two crucial minutes later, I was sitting in his office. His degrees hung on the walls, and his desk was covered with old-fashioned books and journals, leaving barely enough room for his flat-screen computer monitor, keyboard, and tinfoil-wrapped sandwich. I thought I smelled liverwurst, which always struck me as something one wouldn’t eat willingly.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  Ask not what you can do for me. Ask what you can do for the hamsters, spun through my brain, but I wasn’t crazy enough to say it aloud.

  “I think one of your patients is torturing animals, and maybe humans,” I blurted out.

  He choked and coughed, spraying a few crumbs.

  I explained my accusations to him, using my phone to show him the proof. His eyes shot up, and he only read a few sentences of Heart’s Blood’s posts before he looked at me. “This is a sick man, but what does this have to do with me?”

  “It’s Raymond Pascal Gusarov, the guy with the cheekbones,” I said.

  “That one,” he replied, sagging into his chair.

  “What is it?”

  “His credit card bounced. He never paid me for the surgery. I even had those photos made for him.”

  “Is he coming for the photos?” I asked.

  “I left him a message that he couldn’t have them until he paid for the surgery. He’ll probably never show up again. He has thirty days to pay.”

  “If he doesn’t pay, could you mention it to the police instead of a collection agency?”

  Dr. Mendelson stared at me like I was speaking Kurdish.

  “You know Al Capone?” I asked.

  He blinked in surprise.

  “He was a gangster who’s probably most famous for ordering the Valentine’s Day Massacre. But they never caught him for that, anything else either, like bootlegging or prostitution. What they got him for, eventually, was tax evasion. I wonder if we could catch Raymond Pascal Gusarov the same way.”

  Dr. Mendelson looked as if he’d rather stick leeches all over my face.

  I licked my lips, but kept going: “You could report him to a collection agency too, of course, so that you could get your money back. But look, he just posted another photo now, see?” I held up my iPhone, but the doctor hardly glanced at the picture, which showed a hamster with an ice pick through its heart, pinned to the table, its little paws hanging in the air.

  Dr. Mendelson looked at me coldly. “I’m not doing this for you.”

  My heart dropped in my stomach.

  “I’m doing it for someone else.” He picked up his phone and started making calls.

  * * *

  A month later, the police dropped by Raymond Pascal Gusarov’s apartment.

  Through the door Gusarov yelled, “Fuck you, pigs.”

  This did not endear him to the cops, especially when he started shouting, “You can’t come in here without a warrant. Go away!” Then the officers heard someone in the apartment scream.

  The police obtained a warrant, lickety-split. Dr. Mendelson told me that the person in the apartment was a minor held against his will.

  “It’s bad blood,” Dr. Mendelson muttered. He crossed his arms and stared out the window overlooking Cote-des-Neiges. We watched the cars stopped at the light and the people zigzagging on the sidewalk, carrying their briefcases and gift bags.

  I thanked Dr. Mendelson and tiptoed out of his office, barely catching something he said in Yiddish. His secretary had come to usher me out, and just before I left their shining office, I asked her, “What did he say?”

  She pressed her lips together, but after a moment she told me: “A shlekhter sholem iz beser vi a guter krig.”

  “What does it mean?”

  She glanced at the patient coming in behind me and said, “A bad peace is better than a good war. Good day, Dr. Sze.”

  I turned to face the patient, a man whose gray hair and spotted hands belonged to someone in his sixties, but whose tight face seemed eerily younger. He smiled at me with gleaming white teeth.

  Milk Teeth

  by Howard Shrier

  Rue Rachel

  Max understood animals. His mother had always kept at least one cat in their East End flat, to keep the mice and rats to a minimum. He knew the cats could be cruel at times, batting around a trapped mouse or spider with one paw while pinning a tail or leg with the other. But they’d also rub against the back of his leg when he fed them. One gray tabby, Faigie—named for a maiden aunt with a sad bristle of whiskers—would curl in his armpit when he was falling asleep and rest her head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat.

  Before he was old enough to find a real paying job but was strong enough to bale hay, Max spent three summers at his uncle Willie’s farm near Shawbridge. Willie always had dogs roaming the property. One of them, Stella, took an immediate liking to Max. She was a blond Labrador mix, with huge swollen nipples up and d
own her chest. Max thought her eyes looked sad even when her tail wagged. Sometimes she would bare her fangs at the other dogs, snapping at their muzzles, asserting her place in the pack. Sometimes she’d let Max lay his head against her side in the tall grass behind the barn where he went to smoke cigarettes he filched from Willie’s pack.

  After he joined the police, he befriended a cop in the mounted unit, Marcel Aubin. They sometimes met at the stables on Mount Royal before heading off to drink. Max would watch Marcel groom his horse, Cassius, and marvel at the muscles rippling under its gleaming chestnut coat. The horse’s eyes were darker than Stella’s, coal black. They gave nothing away, though Max thought he knew something about the horse, watching it snort and shake its head back and forth as Marcel worked the curry brush over his sides.

  Cats, dogs, horses. These he understood. It was people that baffled him.

  * * *

  No animal could ever have done what was done to Irene Czerniak in the summer of 1951. However cruel a cat might be, whatever strength a horse possessed, however vicious a dog might become, none would have hurt Irene that way. A cat might have clawed her. A horse could have kicked her. A dog—gripped in a foaming rabid craze—might have ripped out her throat. But only a human could have beaten her so savagely. Once Irene’s body was finally found, after four agonizing days of searching, the pathologist, old Vaillancourt, had to append a second sheet to his report to list all the injuries inflicted upon her.

  “It would have been easier to write what hadn’t been broken,” he told Max.

  Hardly a bone had been left intact, he said. Her head had been pulped until it lacked structural integrity. Nearly every tooth had been cracked or knocked out.

  Most of them were still her milk teeth.

  Irene had just turned nine years old when she went missing from Avenue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville; she was a petite, dark-haired girl with two younger siblings. Her parents didn’t really start to worry until nightfall. Being the oldest, Irene was independent and often went to visit friends on surrounding streets, allowed to go as far east as La Fontaine Park, where she’d watch the swans and boaters in the man-made lake. She knew when she ought to be home and always returned on time. Until August 3.

  On the morning of August 4, a missing persons report was filed at the Boulevard Saint-Laurent police station. Two detectives took statements from Irene’s parents while a dozen constables began canvassing the three-story buildings in her neighborhood: Laval, Rivard, and Drolet to the east; Rue de Bullion, Coloniale, and Saint-Dominique to the west. Under detective supervision, neighbors searched the laneways behind the houses. A police dog was given Irene’s scent from a pair of her pink socks, and moved through the lanes, sniffing the ground, straining against her leash.

  Nothing. No one had seen the girl since five o’clock on Tuesday night, when she left the flat of her best friend, Sybil Grauman, a block east on Laval, saying she was going home to help her mother prepare supper.

  * * *

  It was eventually the smell that led them to her. After nearly four humid days with temperatures in the high eighties, Irene’s small body was found wedged into the crawl space under a shed at the rear of a three-story row house on Mentana, well outside the grid of streets they had been searching. The ground-floor tenant had not checked the rear, though a foul smell had been in the air the past two days. There were plenty of reasons why it might smell under a shed in a Montreal laneway—trash cans from three flats sat against the shed wall, and raccoons, squirrels, and skunks sometimes crawled under there to die. Once the tenant realized what he was looking at, a patrolman was on the scene in minutes. After the officer finished retching, he used the tenant’s telephone to call downtown.

  A few minutes later, the commander of the homicide bureau, Honoré Bellechasse, called Max Handler into his office on the second floor of the municipal courthouse.

  “They found her,” said Bellechasse.

  Max had hoped someone else would get this call. Someone who hadn’t lost his own kid, his only son, along with his wife, in a fire. “You know Rene is still out,” he said. His partner, Rene Jamieson, was on medical leave, his left shin fractured by a bullet three weeks earlier. Wasn’t that reason enough to give the case to one of the other old couples on the squad?

  “Take Marois.”

  Max sighed. “No. I’ll work it myself.”

  “Take Marois,” repeated Bellechasse. “The newsmen are going to be all over this and I don’t want anyone thinking I gave it the short stick.”

  Max sighed again. Bellechasse peered down at some papers on his scarred wooden desk and didn’t look up again.

  * * *

  Marois was small, even by French Canadian standards, maybe five-six and 135 pounds. He had dark hair slicked back with Brylcreem and a pencil-thin mustache, his mouth a little sunken around his dentures.

  “Boss says the parents are Hungarian,” Marois said.

  “Yes.”

  “You speak any of that? Boss says you speak a little of everything.”

  “Maybe ten words,” Max said. “Hello. How are you. Goodbye. Like that.”

  “Is that a Jew thing?”

  “What?”

  “To speak so many languages.”

  “It’s a Saint Lawrence thing. I walked the beat there for six years.”

  “It’s okay I ask you that? I don’t know any other Jews is why. You’re the only one on the force, right?”

  “I’m the only detective, not the only cop.”

  They rode in silence until Marois asked, “Do you know how to say I’m sorry? It’d be good to tell them that.”

  “The detectives at Station 4 speak English and French,” Max said. Sajnálom, he thought to himself. Sajnálom.

  * * *

  They beat old Vaillancourt to the scene by a good quarter-hour. They were driving a 1946 Chevrolet sedan, while the pathologist had to lumber all the way north from Old Montreal in a ’42 Cadillac hearse that served as his mobile forensic lab, the back half weighed down with chemicals, tools, and portable lights.

  Max showed his badge to the pale constable guarding Irene’s body, instructing him to bring out the tenant who had found her. “Get his story,” he said to Marois. “See if you catch anything wrong.”

  While he waited for Vaillancourt, Max stood just inside the entry into the yard, as far from the body as he could. He smoked and scanned the yard slowly, from the property line to the shed. He looked side to side, up and down. Looked at the wrought-iron latch on the wooden gate, the semicircular line in the stone where the gate had been dragging of late.

  He walked up and down the lane, looking at nothing, taking in everything. Once Vaillancourt arrived, Max would have to share the crime scene with him, his technicians, a photographer. He needed to be in it by himself as long as he could, just forming impressions, breathing in details. He was aware that people were watching him from their yards and balconies. They were going to have to canvass this area too, find out if anyone in these flats had a record of offenses against children. Somebody had to have seen something wrong. All it took was one. Maybe they wouldn’t have the whole story, but a detail, a snatch of it. Someone might remember who walked through the dark. The make of a car, the smell of tobacco, an unwashed body, the breath of an ogre.

  * * *

  After half an hour on the scene, old Vaillancourt gave Max a grim preliminary report. He made it clear how much violence had rained down on Irene.

  Max couldn’t say offhand the number of dead bodies he had seen. Most of them stayed in his memory, which was considerable by both nature and training. He certainly remembered the first—a fifteen-year-old girl who drowned in the Lachine Canal back when he was a rookie patrolman. She got tangled in long weeds and only bobbed up when her body was bloated with gas.

  Max had seen exactly nine dead children in his life, and could recall every detail about their crime scenes, autopsies, and investigations. Once he had caught the person responsible—and he had caught them al
l, six men and three women—he could tell you what they looked and smelled like; what they wore when they were caught and what they wore to court; the look in their eyes when they contradicted their own lie.

  Irene Czerny had been in the hot, damp dirt long enough for significant decomposition, but not quite long enough to mask her youthful beauty. As Max gently felt Irene’s head and bones, noting to himself the fractures, Vaillancourt smoked a steady line of Player’s Plain, careful to flick his butts into the dirt and away from the body. Everybody was smoking to keep the smell out of their noses and give themselves something to look at besides the girl.

  “I’m glad you’re leading this case,” Vaillancourt said, once the small body had been bagged and loaded into a morgue wagon. “You had to work harder than most to make homicide.”

  “I guess,” Max said.

  “When you find who did this, give him some of the pain he gave her.”

  “Whatever I can.”

  * * *

  “Tell me about the guy who found her.”

  Marois pulled a notebook from his breast pocket and thumbed it open to a page in the middle. “Roméo Leblanc, thirty-six, married, four kids ages two to eight. Works as a baker on Rue Saint-Hubert. Leaves his house at five in the morning. Works twelve-hour shifts.”

  “So he’d get off at five o’clock at night, around the time she went missing. And he might have passed her street, depending on his route home.”

  “I think he’s clean,” Marois said.

  “Based on what?”

  “He looked me in the eye. He shook my hand. He spoke in a steady voice. Besides, he has kids of his own.”

  How did this man make homicide? Max wondered. Marois read crime scene details out of a notebook—Max had never carried a notebook in his entire career. If you couldn’t commit a scene to memory, couldn’t recall the details of an interrogation, what good were you?

  Dead children. They could make a man fucking crazy.

  Max left Marois at the scene to oversee the canvass and drove to Station 4, where Irene’s disappearance had first been reported. He talked to a detective named Dagenais, and went through the statements he and his team had taken from the parents and neighbors.