Deadly Descisions

Chapter 19

Les appartments Du Soleil were anything but aunny, contrary to their name. But naming the place after its actual attributes would have been bad marketing. The building was dark and cheerless, its windows clouded by grime and painted shut by decades of careless maintenance. The tiny balconies jutting from each of its three floors were wrapped in turquoise siding and packed with rusted grills and cheap lawn chairs, plastic garbage cans, and assorted types of athletic equipment. One or two had flowerpots, the contents brown and withered from seasons past.

But no one could fault the heating system. In the day I'd been gone in North Carolina spring had finally made it to Quebec, and I touched down to a report of sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. It was above that now, but the Soleil's radiators soldiered on, raising the temperature inside to well over eighty. The heat and the odor of putrefaction combined to make one queasy and inclined toward shallow breathing.

From where I stood I could see into each of the rooms that made up the squalid little flat. The kitchen lay to my left, the living room to my right, the bedroom and bath straight ahead. The place looked as if its occupant had been holding a garage sale, though the filth and stench would have discouraged even the most ardent bargain hunter.

Every elevated surface was heaped with tools, magazines, paperback books, bottles and broken appliances, and the floor was crammed with camping equipment, automobile and motorcycle parts, tires, cardboard boxes, hockey sticks, and plastic bags tied with metal twisters. A pyramid of beer cans rose almost to the ceiling at the far end of the living room, with torn and curling posters tacked to the wall on either side. The poster on the right advertised a Grateful Dead concert. July 17,1 983. Below it a White Power fist advocated Aryan purity.

On the top left a poster entitled Le Hot Rod showed a penis in Ray-Bans, a smoking cigarette tucked between it and its companion genitalia. The image below featured an upright phallus, the words A st re-Cock in bold letters across the top. The organ was circled by the symbols of the Zodiac, a message of wisdom under each. I took a pass on consulting my sign.

As far as I could see, the only furniture available for practical use consisted of a Formica table and single chair in the kitchen, a twin bed in thc bedroom, and an armchair in the living room. A body now occupied the armchair, its head a distorted red mass above a blackened torso and limbs. Embedded in the flesh I could see a shattered skull and facial bones, a partial nostril with mustache skirt, and one complete eye. The lower jaw hung slack but intact, showing a purpled tongue and rotten teeth stained brown.

Someone had collected shards of bone and brain pudding and sealed them in a Ziploc bag. The plastic sack lay in the man's lap, as though he'd been put in charge of watching over his own brain. A large flap of skin clung to the edge of the chair, smooth and shiny as the belly of a perch.

The deceased sat opposite a small TV on which a coat hanger had been rigged to replace the broken antenna. One twisted end projected toward his head, like the finger of an eyewitness pointing to its find. No one had bothered to turn the set off and I could hear Montel talking with women whose mothers had stolen their lovers. I wondered what the discussants would think of their grisly viewer.

A member of the Ident section dusted the bedroom for latent prints, while another did the same in the kitchen. A third worked a camcorder, slowly sweeping each room, then zooming in for closeups of the jumbles of junk. Before I'd gotten there, she'd shot dozens of stills of the victim and his gloomy surroundings.

LaManche had been and gone. Since the body wasn't badly burned and decomposition was only moderate I wasn't really needed, but that hadn't been clear in the early stages. Initial reports described a body and a fire, so I'd been called and transport arrangements had been made. By the time the scene was assessed, I was in transit from Raleigh and the simplest thing was to follow through with the original plan. Quickwater had picked me up at the airport and brought me here.

Les Appartements du Soleil were located southwest of Centreville, on a small street running east from rue Charlevoix. The neighborhood, known as Pointe-St-Charles, was on the island of Montreal, so the murder fell to the CUM.

Michel Charbonneau stood across the room, his face the color of Pepto-Bismol, his hair projecting in clammy spikes. He was jacketless, his collar soaked with sweat, his tie hanging below the open top button of his shirt. Even loosened it was much too short. I watched him pull a hankie from his pocket and wipe it across his forehead.

Charbonneau once told me that as a teen he'd worked in the Texas oil fields. Though he loved the cowboy life, the heat won out and he'd returned to his home in Chicoutimi, eventually drifting to Montreal, where he joined the city police force.

At that moment Quickwater emerged from the kitchen. The victim was known to have gang connections, so Carcajou would also be involved.

The constable joined Charbonneau and the two stood watching a team examine bloodstains in a corner behind the victim. Ronald Gilbert held a gray-and-white L-shaped ruler against the wall while a younger man shot videos and prints. They repeated the shots with a plumb line, then Gilbert switched to sliding calipers and took a series of measurements. He entered the data into a laptop computer, then went back to the ABFO ruler and plumb line. More video footage. More photos. More measurements. Blood was everywhere, speckling the ceiling and walls and mottling oblects stacked against the baseboards. The two looked like they'd be at their task a long time.

I took a deep breath and approached the detectives.

"Bonjour. Comment ça Va?"

"Eh, Doc. How's tricks?" Charbonneau's English was an odd blend of quebecois and Texas slang, most of the latter out-of-date.

"B onjour, Monsieur Quickwater."

Quickwater rotated slightly, looking annoyed at having to acknowledge my presence, then returned his attention to the bloodspatter team. They were filming an acoustic guitar propped upright on a rusted birdcage. Behind the cage I could see an athletic cap jammed against the wall, the letters "-cock-" visible in the center of a wine-colored blotch. I thought of the posters and wondered what lewd macho message we'd been spared by the gore.

"Where's Claudel?" I asked Charbonneau.

"Checking out a suspect, but he'll be here soon. These guys are really something, aren't they?" Charbonneau's voice filled with disgust. "Got the moral qualities of dung beetles."

"This is definitely gang-related?"

"Yeah. The guy that's not looking too good over there is Yves Desjardins, street name 'Cherokee.' He was a Predator"

"Where do they fit in?"

"The Predators are another Hells Angels puppet club."

"Like the Vipers."

"You got it."

"So this was a Rock Machine hit?"

"Probably. Though I understand Cherokee hadn't been active in years. He had a bad liven No. Colon cancer That was it. Not surprising given the shit these guys usually have on board."

"What had he done to anger the opposition?"

"Cherokee ran some kind of spare-parts business." When Charbonneau made a sweeping gesture I could see a dark crescent under his armpit. "But apparently sprockets and carburetors weren't profitable enough. We found about two kilos of coke hidden in the big brave's underwear drawer. No doubt a safe spot since the guy looks like he never changed his shorts. Anyway, that's probably what inspired the surprise visit. But who knows? Maybe it was retaliation for the Marcotte hit."

"Spider"

Charbonneau nodded.

"Were there signs of forced entry?"

"There's a broken window in the bedroom, but that's not how they got in."

"It's not?"

"Most of the fragments are in the alley. Looks like the window was popped from inside."

"By whom?"

He gave a palms-up gesture.

"So how did the killer get in?"

"He must have let them in."

"Why would he do that?"

"Cherokee was wily as a pit bull and just a little less friendly But he'd outlived the stats and was probably starting to feet immortal."

"Except for the cancer

"Right. Let me show you something."

Charbonneau crossed to the body and I followed. Close up the smell was stronger, a nauseating blend of charred wool, gasoline, excrement, and putrefying flesh. He pulled out his hankie and held it across his nose.

"Check out the tattoos." Muffled.

Cherokee's right hand was in his lap, his left flung at an odd angle across the arm of the chair, fingers hanging toward the carpet. Despite a thick layer of soot, a cluster of skulls was clearly visible on his right wrist. There were fifteen in all, arranged in a pyramid like the mysterious offerings found in European caves. But these trophies showed a distinction our Neanderthal ancestors had failed to make. Thirteen of the skulls had black eyes, two had red.

"They're like notches on a gun." Charbonneau took the cloth from his mouth lust long enough to speak. "Black means he killed a male, red a female."

"Pretty stupid to advertise."

"Yeah, but our boy here was old school. Today they're listening more to their lawyers."

From the amount of bloating and skin slippage I guessed the victim had been dead a couple of days.

"How was he found?"

"The usual. A neighbor complained about a foul odor Amazing anyone would notice in this shithole."

I looked at the body again. Other than the bad teeth and mustache it was impossible to tell what the man had looked like. What was left of his head rested against the back of the chair, a dark blossom staining the upholstery around it. I could see shotgun pellets in the flesh that had been his face.

"Like the special effects?"

Charbonneau pointed at the small braided carpet below the victim's feet. It was badly charred, as was the underside of the chair Cherokee himself was smoke-blackened, and his dangling left hand, jean cuffs, and boots were singed. But beyond that there was little damage due to burning.

A fire had been set in front of the chair, and the lingering smell of gasoline suggested the use of an accelerant. Flames had probably engulfed the body, but then, lacking fuel, petered out. By then the killers were long gone.

Charbonneau lifted the hankie again.

"Typical biker shit. Blast the target then torch the body Only this team must have failed Arson 101."

"Why would this guy open the door if he was dealing coke in someone else's backyard?"

"Maybe his colon backed up into his brain. Maybe he was smacked on drugs. Maybe he suffered from delusions of normalcy Hell, who knows how they think? Or if they think."

"Could it have been his own club?"

"Ain't without precedent."

Claudel arrived at that moment and Charbonneau excused himself to join his colleagues. While I was curious about the suspect he'd been interrogating, I didn't want to take on a ClaudelQuickwater tag team, so I moved to the far side of the room and resumed observation of the blood-spatter analysts. By now they'd finished the xvest wall and were rounding the corner onto the north.

Though I'd positioned myself as far from the body as I could get, the smell in the room was becoming unbearable. And Charbonneau was right. The corpse was only one element in the sickening cocktail of mildew motor oil, stale beer, perspiration, and years of bad cooking. It was hard to imagine how anyone could have lived in such a putrid atmosphere.

I looked at my watch. Two-fifteen. Starting to think about a taxi, I turned to the window at my back.

Cherokee lived on the first floor, his balcony not six feet above the sidewalk. Through the filthy glass I could see the usual armada of cruisers, vans, and unmarked cars. Neighbors stood in clumps or observed from the stoops of neighboring buildings. Press cars and minivans added to the confusion on the small street.

The morgue vehicle pulled up as I was surveying the assemblage, and two attendants hopped out, released the rear doors, and withdrew a gurney They snapped the wheels into place and pushed the cart up the short front walk to the building's entrance, passing between rutted patches of mud, each furrow filled with standing water. An iridescent slick shone atop the surface of each. Nice. The front yard du Soleil.

In seconds the transport team knocked on the door. Claudel admitted them, then rejoined the group. Steeling myself, I crossed to the detectives. Claudel did not interrupt his account of the interview with the prime suspect.

"You think that wall is a mess?" Claudel gestured toward the northwest corner where the recovery team was still measuring and filming bloodstains. "This guy's Iacket looks like he wore it in the slaughtering house at a stockyard. Of course the little roach hasn't the brains to pull the wings off a moth."

"Why did he hang on to it?" Charbonneau.

"He was probably too cheap to part with the leather. And he figured we'd never link him. But he'd taken the time to wipe it off and stash it under the bed, just in case.

"He was spotted here Monday night?"

"Just after midnight."

"That squares with LaManche's estimated time of death. What's his story?"

"He's having a little trouble remembering. It seems George drinks a bit."

"Any ties to the vic?"

"George has been a Heathens hang-around for years. They let him drive and deal a little grass, so he thinks he's hot stuff. But he's so low in the hierarchy he needs a snorkel lust to breathe."

A transporter called to Claudel, and the detective gave a go ahead gesture. One of the men unfolded a body bag and laid it on the gurney, while the other placed a brown paper bag on Cherokee's left hand.

Watching Claudel, I was struck by how out of place he appeared. His brow was sweat free, his hair perfect, the creases on his trousers sharp as razor blades. A spot of Armani in the midst of a nightmare.

"Maybe he saw the hit as his big chance for upward mobility" said Charbonneau.

"Undoubtedly But George Dorsey isn't going to be mobile for a long time." Claudel.

"Is there enough to hold him?" Quickwaterv

"I'll hold him on suspicion of spitting if I have to. My sources tell me Dorsey recently sent out word he was looking for work, and that no job was off-limits. We've got him pegged for another hit, so I showed his picture around. A witness put Dorsey right here when the shoot went down, and when I dropped in to discuss this fact, I found Dorsey's outerwear covered with blood. Does that sound dirty to you?"

At that moment Claudel's radio erupted in static. He stepped toward the door, listened, spoke into the mouthpiece, then gestured to Quickwater The two men exchanged words, then Quickwater turned to Charbonneau, pointed at me then at the door When Charbonneau gave a thumbs-up Quickwater waved and exited into the hall, and Claudel rejoined us.

Great. I'd been passed off like someone's kid sister.

There are two emotions that cause me agitation: feeling trapped and feeling useless. I was experiencing both, and it was making me restless.

And something about the scene bothered me. I knew I was out of my element, but I kept remembering the slides I'd seen at Carcajou headquarters. What I was seeing didn't ring true.

What the hell. I hadn't asked to come here.

"Isn't this a little different from their normal method of dispatch?"

Claudel turned in my direction, his face pinched into its usual chilly expression.

"Excuse me?"

"Isn't the shotgun off from the MO for a biker hit? And the botched fire?"

Charbonneau cocked an eyebrow and shrugged both shoulders. Claudel said nothing.

"This seems so messy," I pressed on, determined to make a contribution. "In the cases I've reviewed the hits were pretty efficient."

"Things happen," said Charbonneau. "Maybe the perp was interrupted."

"I guess that's my point. Don't bikers research their victims and pick settings where they know they won't be interrupted?"

"With a dead biker who was freelancing in the drug trade, we do not need to search the membership roster at the Unitarian church to find our hit man." Claudel's voice was cool.

"Nor should we slam our brains shut after the first theory drifts into them," I said caustically

Claudel gave me a look implying infinitely strained patience.

"You may be very good at digging up bodies and measuring bones, Ms. Brennan. But those skills are not at the heart of this homicide investigation."

"It's hard to find a hit man if you don't know who's been hit, Monsieur Claudel. Are you going to put his face back together?" Anger made my face burn.

"That will not be a problem here. Fingerprints should suffice."

I knew that, but Claudel's arrogance was bringing out the worst in me.

Charbonneau crossed his arms and blew out a deep breath.

Claudel checked his watch and I saw the flash of a gold cuff link. Then the arm dropped to his side.

"Sergent-detective Charbonneau and I will drop you off." His voice indicated he would not be discussing the case further on this occasion.

"Thank you."

We crossed the room and I took one last look at the chair where Yves "Cherokee" Deslardins had died. It was empty now, but a port-colored cloud marked the place where his head had rested. Dark rivulets curved from each lobe, like the talons on a raptor greedy for a kill.

Claudel held the door and I exited to the corridor, gripping my bags so tightly my nails bit into the heels of my hands. Still annoyed with Claudel's superior attitude, as I swept past him I couldn't resist one last gibe.

'As you know, Monsieur Claudel, I am the lab's liaison to Carcajou. You have a professional obligation to share ideas and information with me, like it or not, and I expect nothing less."

With that I strode down the hall and descended into sunlight.