Mulengro, page 2
“I didn’t do nothing,” Cleary mumbled.
“No one said you did,” Briggs explained gently. “We just want to ask you what you saw tonight, that’s all. Think you can do that, Ralph?”
The wino nodded. “They call me Red-eye on the street,” he offered, “on account of the way my eyes get, you know?”
“Would you prefer to be called that?”
“No. I like being called Ralph better.” He shot a quick glance at Will, then returned his watery gaze to Briggs. “I used to be a midshipman, you know—out of Halifax. I wasn’t always . . . you know. Like this.”
Briggs nodded sympathetically. “Times are getting tough again,” he said. “All we can do is just hang in there the best we can.”
“Yeah. We just gotta hang in there. . . .” His voice trailed off. Briggs let the silence hang for a few moments before he spoke again.
“So what did you see, Ralph?”
Cleary shrugged. “I was just minding my own business, you know, sitting on the stoop over there, resting my feet.” He nodded to the front of the indoor parking lot across the street from the mouth of the alleyway. “I was just sitting there, when this guy comes by. I thought I might hit him up for some change, but when he got into the light and I could see him better, I saw he didn’t look a whole lot better off than me. I thought maybe I’d call him over, offer him a swig, you know, just to be sociable. I had about a third of a bottle left and I was feeling pretty good, but then . . .”
He’d been looking at what he could see of his feet between his legs while he spoke. As his voice trailed off for a second time, his gaze flicked to Briggs’ face, then back to his shoes.
“What happened then, Ralph?” Briggs prompted him. For a long moment Cleary didn’t say anything. When he finally spoke, his voice was strained. Scared.
“Did you ever stand in a harbor and . . . and watch the way the fog comes rolling in?” he asked. “The way it licks up the streets at first, you know, hanging real low?”
“Yeah, sure.” Briggs wasn’t sure what Cleary was on about, but he wanted to keep him talking.
“Well, that’s what it was like . . . like a little patch of fog that came rolling up the street, only there was this guy in the middle of it and the fog just sort of hung around his feet like it was . . . I don’t know . . . following him. The first guy, he stopped in front of the alley when the guy with the fog called out to him, and then he just sort of faded back into the alley, like he was scared of him, maybe. The other guy followed and the fog . . . it . . .” He looked up at Briggs. “You’re going to say I was drunk, and maybe I was, but there was something in that fog, mister. It was up to the guy’s knees now, maybe, and there was . . . things moving in it. It didn’t look like no fog I ever saw and I’ve seen a lot. I used to be a midshipman, you know—out of Halifax. I worked hard, real hard, but old Red-eye likes his bottle, you know, and I guess they just had to let me go. . . .”
“Then what happened, Ralph?”
Cleary looked back at his shoes. “Then the other guy—the first guy—screamed. . . . But it wasn’t loud or anything, you know? It was this long whispering . . . wet sound. Well, I just took off, mister. I dropped my bottle and I ran, but I just didn’t get too far. I made it to the park and I just sort of couldn’t go no more. I sat down on a bench and I been there ever since.
“I saw you boys all pulling up with your lights flashing and I knew I should tell you what I saw, but I couldn’t get up. And I thought . . . maybe . . . you’d think I done it, you know? Whatever happened to that guy in the alley . . . I thought you’d think it was me that done it. But I never hurt no one, mister.” His gaze fastened onto Briggs, searching for confirmation, needing to know that the detective believed him.
“No one thinks you did,” Briggs assured him.
“That first guy . . . he’s dead, isn’t he?”
Briggs nodded.
“Jesus. . . .”
“Did you see the second man come out of the alley?” Will asked.
Cleary shook his head. “I just took off.”
“Was he ever in the light?” Briggs asked. “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”
Cleary shivered. “I . . . I think so. He had these scars under his eyes. . . .” He lifted a trembling hand and touched his upper cheeks. “. . . right around here, but maybe . . . maybe it was just the way the light fell on his face. He was dark-skinned—not as dark as you,” he added, looking at Will, “but dark. His clothes looked all black and so did his hair. And his eyes . . . his eyes were like the fog . . . all sort of pale and smoky. . . .”
“You’ve been a big help, Ralph,” Briggs said as the man’s voice trailed off once more. “I want you to know that.” He nodded to Will and the two detectives got out of the car. “What do you think?” Briggs asked Will as his partner came around the car to stand by him.
“A defense lawyer would tear his story apart in about ten seconds.”
“Yeah. But what do you think?”
Will sighed. “I don’t know, Paddy. All this weird stuff about a fog doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
Briggs nodded. “But he saw something and it scared the shit out of him. And I don’t think it was just the booze.”
“No. It wasn’t just the booze. . . .”
“What I can’t figure,” Briggs said, “is why the murderer would take the time to make it look like it was the work of an animal, but then leave that symbol scratched in the dirt like some kind of calling card. Anyone with half a brain—”
“Psychos only have about half a brain.”
“Yeah.”
The two men stood silently by the car. At length, Briggs headed over to where the patrolman was still waiting.
“I want you to run Cleary downtown,” he said. He pulled out his wallet and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “But get some food into him first.”
“Sure. What’s the charge?”
“No charge. Let’s call it protective custody. He’s all we’ve got right now and I don’t want to lose him. And I don’t want the press to get wind of the fact that we’ve got him and I don’t want anybody— and I mean anybody—asking him questions. Now before you go, this is your beat, right? Where were you when it happened?”
“I had a disturbance up on Dalhousie—a couple of hookers got into a tussle over this John and . . .”
The coroner’s initial report, combined with the story Ralph Cleary had given them, brought Will’s offhand remark about juju a little too close to home. Juju was Will’s catchall word for anything inexplicable or spooky. And this alley murder, Briggs thought, was shaping up to fit both categories perfectly.
“Look, Briggs,” Cooper had said when the two detectives stopped off in his office, “at this point I can’t rule out the possibility that some kind of animal didn’t do it.”
“What about the symbol scratched in the dirt?” Briggs asked.
“And there were no tracks,” MacDonald said from his desk across the room.
The two men shared the office, Alec MacDonald a hulking figure behind his desk, while Peter Cooper was almost lost behind the clutter on his own. Cooper was a waspish, balding man who moved his hands in broad gestures as he talked. He pointed a finger towards MacDonald, but Alec spoke first.
“No tracks, no traces of fur, claws or saliva in or around the wounds.” He ticked off the items on his fingers as he listed them. “And most importantly, we’ve got nothing in this city capable of inflicting that kind of damage. If we’re talking animals, we’re talking panthers, maybe. Or tigers. With,” he added, grinning at Briggs, “some artistic ability.”
“Then what kind of weapon could it have been?” Will asked.
“There was no trace of metal in the wounds,” Cooper said firmly. “Nor were there the usual sort of lacerations one could expect if a weapon had been used.”
“Do you think we could come to some kind of a consensus?” Briggs asked. “Was there a weapon involved or not?”
“The wounds weren’t caused by a knife or any other sharp implement that I can think of,” Cooper replied. “Something tore into the victim, that’s all I can say. I’m still waiting for a few final tissue samples to come back from the lab. Meanwhile, what you’ve got there,” he indicated the report that Briggs was holding, “is all I can give you.”
“You want a weapon that could have done it?” MacDonald asked. He was rummaging around in the bottom drawer of his desk and finally came up with an object that he deposited on his blotter. It looked like a metal bracelet, with a narrow oval opening rather than a round one and four wicked-looking metal spikes protruding from one side like the lumps on a set of brass knuckles. “Here you go,” he said.
Briggs laid the report down and picked up the object, turning it over in his hands.
“What the hell is it?” Will asked as Briggs passed it over to him. He fit his hand inside and brandished it, the spikes jutting up from his knuckles.
“You’ve got it on backwards,” MacDonald told him. “The spikes should protrude from the palm of your hand. It’s called a shuko—a Japanese climbing spike. We picked it up from some guy who thought he was going to be the next Bruce Lee and I’ve been hanging on to it ever since. Mean-looking little sucker, isn’t it? Can you imagine getting swiped by that?”
“It’s still metal,” Cooper said, “and there was no trace of metal in the wounds.”
“So maybe he used a plastic one.”
Cooper nodded grudgingly. “It would be less likely to leave any traces,” he admitted.
“So there you go,” MacDonald said. “Or maybe he had one of those clubs the leopard cults in Africa use.” He glanced at Will.
“Hey, don’t look at me. The closest I’ve been to Africa was a National Geographic Special that I watched from my sofa, thanks all the same.”
“What kind of clubs are these?” Briggs asked.
“What they’d do,” MacDonald explained, “is mount a stuffed leopard’s paw on the end of a club and use it to mimic the blows of a leopard in ritual killings.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure.”
“You saw the body,” Briggs said. “Could something like that have been used on it?”
MacDonald shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it was a leopard or a panther. Maybe you should check around to see if a circus is in town. You know, Zabu van Gogh—the Amazing Drawing Panther.”
“Everybody’s a comedian,” Briggs muttered.
Cooper cleared his throat and began to straighten the papers on his desk. “I’ll be in touch with you as soon as I get those final samples back from the lab. It might have been one of those fancy knuckle-dusters, it might have been an animal. We’ll see.”
“No fur, no saliva, no claws. . . .” MacDonald was ticking the items off on his fingers again. He looked up at Briggs. “But maybe you’ll get lucky and someone’ll step forward like a good citizen to tell you that he’s got a panther sleeping under his porch and would you please come to remove it.”
“Maybe I’ll get even luckier and you’ll get transferred out to the West End.” Briggs smiled sweetly and MacDonald laughed.
“Better watch it, Paddy,” he warned. “Next thing you know, you might start developing a sense of humor.”
“I hate waiting to get lucky,” Briggs complained to Will later that morning.
They were sitting at Will’s desk in the new police station on Elgin Street, one floor above the Morgue and the office where they’d left Cooper and MacDonald. The final construction on the new station had been completed this past spring and everybody had been happy to move out of the crowded confines of the old building on Waller. The new five-story structure was the pride of the city’s police department. It was five times the size of the old station and cost fifteen times the price tag of the Waller Street station that had been built in the late fifties for a modest $1.4 million. Everything in it was still shiny, with a smell of new paint about it. Briggs figured the glow would last another month, tops. The Morgue already had its own peculiar odor, as though it had never been moved.
“I know what you mean,” Will said. “If we go by Cooper’s report and what the rubbie told us, we should be out looking for a guy with a panther that can sometimes change itself into fog. Unless, of course, our boy in black is like one of those people in Cat People. You ever see that?”
Briggs nodded wearily. “It was bullshit. And so’s what we’ve got so far. But they’re not the same kind.”
He glanced at his partner’s lanky frame. Will’s feet were draped across the top of his desk, head tilted back against the headrest of his chair as he went through Miller’s photographs. One by one, Will tossed the B&W glossies over to Briggs. The detective frowned down at them. They were Stan’s usual excellent work and didn’t look any prettier this morning than the real thing had looked last night. But at least they had a name to go with them now. Cooper had managed to pull the victim’s prints—from the hand that hadn’t been chewed up or whatever had happened to it—and, once they’d run them through Ceepik, they’d come up with a prior’s sheet as long as the desk. Ceepik was an abbreviation for the Canadian Police Information Computer—a teletype information-sharing computer serving all police departments in Canada and, in some cases, the United States.
The victim had been one Romano Wood, aka John Yera, aka Kalia Winter. . . . In fact, he had as many names as he had arrests. Thirty-seven of them, ranging from vagrancy to fraud, with fourteen convictions. All told, Wood or whatever his real name was, had served a total of six years, ten months and three days in various county, provincial and federal jails. But the most interesting snippet of information, to Briggs’ way of thinking, was the fact that Wood was a Gypsy. No fixed address. No occupation. They weren’t even sure what nationality he was. He’d been picked up with everything from Canadian ID to a Brazilian passport.
Gypsies weren’t the same problem now as they had been when Briggs had had to deal with them on a continual basis back in his days as a patrolman in the late sixties. They had a much higher profile then. He could even recall a fortune-telling joint on Wellington Street—right across from Parliament Hill. These days you hardly heard a peep out of them, though he knew his counterparts in Hull, just across the river, still had to deal with them. Harassment charges. Vagrancy. Welfare, check and insurance frauds. Squabbles between the extended families that seemed to operate on the same principles that the Mob did. He’d have to check with Castleman in the Fraud and Commercial Crimes Unit to see if there were still any in Ottawa.
They were a weird people, no doubt about that. It wasn’t so much that they were lawless, as that they didn’t believe that non-Gypsy laws applied to them. They were asocial—except within their own communities. Briggs wasn’t sure that he cared all that much for them. They were always causing trouble of one kind or another. A headache, more than a serious problem—though he’d heard some ugly stories about the families in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
Briggs shrugged. His own feelings were irrelevant. What he had to deal with was the fact that someone had killed a Gypsy on his turf and he had the uncomfortable feeling that it had been a premeditated ritual killing. There was the symbol scratched in the dirt beside the victim’s head, and the way he’d been killed. . . . Bad juju.
“You think Wood being a Gypsy had something to do with the way he died?” Will asked suddenly, surprising Briggs at how close his partner’s thoughts paralleled his own. Maybe some of Will’s intuition was rubbing off on him. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense otherwise,” Will continued, answering himself. “Shit. If we’re going to have a repeat of what went down in Van last year . . .”
Briggs nodded. He remembered now. Gypsies were rarely involved with serious crimes of a violent nature, but last year something had set off a rampage of infighting between two Vancouver families that had ended in a minor riot in Gastown, leaving three men dead and another half-dozen or so in the hospital. If he remembered correctly, by the time it all blew over, the Vancouver police never did piece any of it together. The Gypsies issued dozens of conflicting statements and none of the parties involved were willing to lay charges against each other. Without one piece of hard evidence, even concerning the deaths, the police had been helpless to bring anything more serious to court than creating a nuisance and disorderly public conduct. He could just imagine how the detective in charge of that case must have felt.
“There’s another possibility,” Will said.
“What’s that?”
“Could be these Gypsies are horning in on some of the Syndicate’s rackets. Or maybe the Mob’s pushing them out of Montreal or Toronto and they’re looking for a new base. We should check into that.”
Briggs regarded his partner with interest. “Are you just whatifing still,” he asked, “or’ve you heard some noises in that direction?”
“Whatifing. I’m going to phone Gaston over in Hull. Maybe try a few contacts in T.O.”
“You might try Montreal, too,” Briggs added. “Dan Sullivan’s still working the Main and he owes us one for the connection we made with Coletti’s people last winter. He built himself a nice little case out of what we gave him.”
“Will do. You going to give me a hand?”
Briggs indicated the thick stack of unsolved cases that they were still working on. “I’m going to take a stab at a few of these,” he said. “But call me if you need me.”
He carried the files over to his own desk and sat down. Filling his pipe, he drew out the photograph of the symbol scratched into the dirt beside Wood’s head and stared at it, troubled. Ritual. Murder. Just what kind of rituals did Gypsies have? He thought about fog and panthers and a man in black and frowned. Sighing, he shoved the photo back into its file and tried to concentrate on one of the other cases.
three
The Ottawa River neatly separates the Nation’s Capital from Hull, its Quebec neighbor, with an average width of about a third of a mile. By 1820, when Ottawa was still dense bushland, Hull was already a thriving village. At the time Hull was first settled by the Boston farmer Philemon Wright in 1800, there was not even a landing on the Ontario side of the river. Parliament Hill was merely an impressive limestone cliff, and the remainder of the future Capital was composed of marshland and beaver ponds. The first structure on the Ottawa side wasn’t raised until 1809 when a Vermont Loyalist named Jehiel Collins built a shanty tavern and store at the canoe landing below Chaudière Falls and the shoreline now called Nepean Point came to be known as Collins’ Landing.
