On the Rothmann break-in, nothing was stolen and the only damage was to the doorframe and lock. Probably some street tramp or shelterless American draft avoider trying to get out of the damp cold of night. Once again, LaPointe advises Mr. Rothmann to install special police locks, and once again Mr. Rothmann argues that the police ought to pay for them. After all, he’s a taxpayer, isn’t he?
The holdup of the newspaper vendor is a different matter. LaPointe presses it to a quick finish because he realizes that someone might have been killed. Not the victim; the holdup man.
The paper seller could only give a description of the thief’s shoes and legs, and of the gun. Tennis shoes, bell-bottom jeans. A kid. And a black gun with a tiny hole in the barrel. The tiny hole meant the weapon was one of those exact-replica waterguns the Montreal police have made repeated complaints about, to no avail. After all, the people who sell them to kids are taxpayers, aren’t they? It’s a free country, isn’t it?
LaPointe makes two telephone calls and talks with four people on the street. The word is out: the Lieutenant wants this kid, and he wants him right now. If he doesn’t have him by noon, the street is going to become a hard place to live on.
Two and a half hours later, LaPointe is sitting in the cramped kitchen of a basement flat with the thief and his parents. The father admits he doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with these goddamned kids these days. The mother says she works her fingers to the bone, never sees anything but these four walls, and what thanks does it get you? You carry them under your heart for nine months, you feed them, you send them to Mass, and what does it get you?
The kid sits at the kitchen table, picking at the oilcloth. His eyes lowered, he answers LaPointe’s questions in a reluctant monotone. Once he makes the mistake of sassing.
In two steps, LaPointe crosses the room and snatches the kid up by the collar of his imitation-leather jacket. “What do you think happens if a cop chases you and you flash that goddamned water pistol? Hein? You could be killed for eight lousy bucks!”
There is fear in the kid’s eyes; defiance too.
LaPointe drops him back into his chair. What’s the use?
It’s a first offense. The Lieutenant can make arrangements, can find a job for the kid swabbing out some restaurant on the Main. The boy will pay the newspaper vendor back. He will have no record. But next time…
As he leaves, he hears the mother whining about carrying a child under her heart for nine months, and what thanks does she get? Heartache! Nothing but heartache!
There will be a next time.
About the vandalism at the building site, LaPointe does nothing, although this is not the first time it has happened. He goes through the motions, but he does nothing. His sympathy is with the people who are losing their homes and being shipped out to glass-and-cement suburban slums high-rising from muddy “green zones” dotted with emaciated twigs of one-year-old trees tied by rags to supporting sticks.
Corners, whole blocks of row houses are being torn down to make room for commercial buildings. Narrow streets of three-story Victorian brick with lead-sheeted mansard roofs are falling prey to the need to centralize small industry and commerce without threatening land values and the quality of life in the better neighborhoods. The residents of the Main are too poor, too ignorant, too weak politically to protect themselves from the paternal tyranny of city planning committees. The Main is a slum, anyway. Bad plumbing; rats and roaches; inadequate playgrounds. Relocating the immigrants is really for their own good; it helps to break up the language and culture nodes that delay their assimilation into New Montreal: Chicago on the St. Lawrence.
Although LaPointe knows that this blind striking out at the construction sites will change nothing, that the little people of the Main must lose their battle and ultimately their identity, he understands their need to protest, to break something.
More subtle than these dramatic attacks on the Main are the constant erosions from all points on its perimeter. Individuals and organizations have discovered that protecting what is left of old Montreal can be a profitable activity. Under the pretext of preservation, rows of homes are bought up and gutted, leaving only “quaint” shells. Good plumbing and central heating are installed, rooms enlarged, and residences are created for affluent and swinging young lawyers, pairs of career girls, braces of interior decorators. It is fashionable to surprise friends by saying you live on the Main. But these people don’t live on the Main; they play house on the Main.
LaPointe sees it all happening. In his bitterest moods he feels that this bubble in his chest is consonant with the rest of it; there wouldn’t be much point in surviving the Main.
When he arrives at the office Thursday morning, his temper is ragged. He has picked up word that Scheer is bragging about being back on the street before long. Obviously, the Commissioner has reported to his political acquaintance.
After scanning the Morning Report, he paws about in the three days’ worth of back paper work that has accumulated since Guttmann’s departure. Then he comes across a memo from Dr. Bouvier asking him to drop down to Forensic Medicine when he has a free moment.
As always, the smells of wax, chemicals, heat, and dust in the basement hall trigger memories of St. Joseph’s:
When LaPointe enters his office, Bouvier is just drawing a cup of coffee from his urn, his finger crooked into the cup to tell when it is nearly full.
“That you, Claude? Come in and be impressed by one of my flashes of insight, this particular one focused on the case of one Antonio Verdini—alias Green—discovered one night in an alley, his body having acquired a biologically superfluous, and even detrimental, orifice.”
LaPointe grunts, in no mood for Bouvier’s florid style.
“My ingenious filing system”—Bouvier waves toward his high-heaped desk—”has produced the interesting fact that our Mr. Green’s uncommon appetite for ventilation was shared by”—he cocks his head in LaPointe’s direction and pauses for effect—”the victims of two other unsolved murder cases.”
“Oh?”
“Somehow I had expected more than ‘oh?’.”
“Which cases, then?”
“Men known to the department, and therefore to God, as H-49854 and H-50567, but to their intimates as MacHenry, John Albert, and Pearson, Michael X. This X indicates that his parents gave him no middle name, doubtless in a spirit of orthographic economy.” Bouvier holds the two files out to LaPointe and stares proudly at him with one huge eye and one nicotine-colored blank. The Lieutenant scans rapidly, then reads more closely. These are Bouvier’s personal files, fuller than the official records because they include clippings from newspapers, relevant additional information, and certain scribbled notes in his large, tangled hand.
One file is six years old, the other two and a half. Both stabbings; both males; both without signs of robbery; both at night on deserted streets.
“Well?” Bouvier gloats.
“Could be coincidences.”
“There’s a limit to antichance. Notice that both happened on the edges of what you call your patch— although I hear there is some difference of opinion between you and the Risen Cream as to the extent of that realm, and of its monarch’s authority.”
“What’s all this business here?” LaPointe puts one report on Bouvier’s desk, keeping his finger on a passage scribbled in the doctor’s hand.
Pressing the bridge of his broken glasses to hold them in place, Bouvier leans over, his face close to the page. “Ah! Technical description of the wound. Angle of entry of the weapon.”
“Identical in all three cases?”
“No. Not quite.”
“Well, then?”
“That’s where you discern the touch of genius in me! The angles of entry are not identical. They vary. They vary in direct proportion to the heights of the three men. If you insist on playing the game of coincidence, you have to accept that there were three killers of identical height, and who held a knife in the identical way, and all three of whom were most gifted in the use of a knife. And if you want to stack up coincidences with the abandon of a
