NAME
Tony Green
ADDRESS
17 Mirabeau Street
PHONE
Apmt. 3B
BLOOD TYPE
Hot!!!!!!!!!!
“So the victim’s name was Tony Green,” Guttmann says.
“Probably not.” There is a businesslike, mechanical quality to LaPointe’s voice. “The printing is European. See the barred seven? The abbreviation for ‘apartment’ is wrong. That seems to give us a young alien. And the kid had a Latin look—probably Italian. But not a legal entrant, or his fingerprints would have been on file with Ottawa. He picked the name Tony Green for himself. If he runs true to form for Italian immigrants, his real name would be something like Antonio Verdi—something like that.”
“Does the name mean anything to you? You know him?”
LaPointe shakes his head. “No. But I know the house. It’s a run-down place near Marie-Anne and Clark. We’ll check it out tomorrow morning.”
“What do you expect to turn there?”
“Impossible to say. It’s a start. It’s all we have in hand.”
“That, and the fact that the victim was a little hung up on sex. Oh, God!”
“Why ‘Oh, God’?”
“You know that girl I had to leave tonight? Well, I promised her we’d go out tomorrow morning. Take coffee up on the Mount. Maybe drop in at a gallery or two. Have dinner maybe. Now I’ll have to beg off again.”
“Why do that? There’s no real point in your coming along with me tomorrow, if you don’t want to.”
“Why do you say that, sir?”
“Well… you know. All this business of the apprentice Joans learning the ropes from the old-timers is a lot of crap. Things don’t work that way. There’s no way in the world that you’re going to end up a street cop like me. You have education. You speak both languages well. You have ambition. No. You won’t end up in this kind of work. You’re the type who ends up in public relations, or handling ‘delicate’ cases. You’re the type who gets ahead.”
Guttmann is a little stung. No one likes to be a “type.” “Is there anything wrong with that, sir? Anything wrong with wanting to get ahead?”
“No, I suppose not.” LaPointe rubs his nose. “I’m just saying that what you might learn from me won’t be of much use to you. You could never work the way I work. You wouldn’t even want to. Look at how you got all steamed up about the way I handled that pimp, Scheer.”
“I only mentioned that he has his rights.”
“And the kids he bashes around? Their rights?”
“There are laws to protect them.”
“What if they’re too dumb to know about the laws? Or too scared to use them? A girl hits the city on a bus, coming from some farm or village, stupid and looking for a good time… excitement. And the first thing you know, she’s broke and scared and willing to sell her ass.” LaPointe isn’t thinking of Scheer’s girls at this moment.
“All right,” Guttmann concedes. “So maybe something has to be done about men like Scheer. Stiffer laws, maybe. But not stopping him on the street and making an ass of him in front of people, for God’s sake.”
LaPointe shakes his head. “You’ve got to hit people where they’re tender. Scheer is a strutting wiseass. Embarrass him in public and he’ll keep off the street for a while. It varies with the man. Some you threaten, some you hurt, some you embarrass.”
Guttmann lifts his palms and looks about with round eyes, as though calling upon God to listen to this shit. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing, sir. Some you hurt, some you threaten, some you embarrass—what is that, a Nazi litany? Those are supposed to be tactics for keeping the peace?”
“They didn’t tell you about that in college, I suppose.”
“No, sir. They did not.”
“And, of course, you’d play everything by the book.”
“I’d try. Yes.” This is simply said; it is the truth. “And if the book was wrong, I’d do what I could to change it. That’s how it works in a democracy.”
“I see. Well—by the book—the Vet was guilty of a crime, wasn’t he? He took money from this wallet. Would you put him inside? Let him scream for the rest of his life?”
Guttmann is silent. He isn’t sure. No, probably not.
“But that would be playing it by the book. And do you remember that fou who sharpens knives and worries about the snow? He’d make a great suspect for a knife murder. You almost sniffed him yourself. And do you know what would happen if you brought him in for questioning? He’d get confused and frightened, and in the end he would confess. Oh, yes. He’d confess to anything you wanted. And the Commissioner would be happy, and the newspapers would be happy, and you’d get promoted.”
“Well… I didn’t know about him. I didn’t know he was…”
“That’s the point, son! You don’t know. The book doesn’t know!”
Guttmann’s ears are reddening. “But you know?”
“That’s right! I know. After thirty years, I know! I know the difference between a harmless nut and a murderer. I know the difference between shit tracks on a man’s arm and the marks left by selling blood to stay alive!” With a guttural sound and a wave of his hand LaPointe dismisses the use of explaining anything to Guttmann’s type.
Guttmann sits, silently pushing his spoon back and forth between his fingers. He isn’t cowed. He speaks quietly, without looking up. “It’s fascism, sir.”
“What?”
“It’s fascism. The rule of a man, rather than the rule of law, is fascism. Even when the man has been around and thinks he knows what’s best… even if the man is trying to do good things… to be fair. It’s still fascism.”
For a moment, LaPointe’s melancholy eyes rest on the young man, then he looks over his head to the gaudy Chinese hanging and the Coke advertisement.
Guttmann expects a denial. Anger. An explanation.
That’s not what comes. After a silence, LaPointe says, “Fascism, eh?” The tone indicates that he never thought of it that way. It indicates nothing more.
Once again, Guttmann feels undercut, bypassed.
LaPointe presses his eye sockets with his thumb and forefinger and sighs deeply. “Well, I think we’d better get some sleep. You can get the sits in your brain, as well as in your ass.” He sniffs and rubs his cheek with his knuckles.
Guttmann delays their leaving. “Sir? May I ask you something?”
“About fascism?”
“No, sir. Back there in the freight yard. That bomme didn’t want me to come with you and see his kip. And later you said something to him about not telling the others. What was that all about?”
LaPointe examines the young man’s face. Could you explain something like this to a kid who learned about people in a sociology class? Where would it fit in with his ideas about society and democracy? There is something punitive in LaPointe’s decision to tell him about it.
“You remember Dirtyshirt Red last night? You remember how he had nothing good to say about the Vet? All the bommes on the Main sleep where they can: in doorways, in alleys, behind the tombstones in the monument-maker’s yard. And they all envy the nice snug private kip the Vet’s always bragging about. They hate him for having it. And that’s just the way the Vet wants it. He wants to be despised, hated, bad-mouthed. Because as long as the other tramps despise and reject him, he isn’t one of them; he’s something special. That make sense to you?”
Guttmann nods.
“Well—” LaPointe’s voice is husky with fatigue, and he speaks quietly. “After we left you back there on the path, I followed him along a trail I could barely see. But there wasn’t anything around. No shack, no hut, nothing. Then the Vet went behind a patch of bush and bent over. I could hear a scrape of metal. He was sliding back a sheet of corrugated roofing that covered a pit in the ground. I went over to the edge of it as he jumped down, sort of skidding on the muddy sides of the hole. It was about eight feet deep, and the bottom was covered with wads of rag and burlap sacking that squished with seep water when he walked around. He had a few boxes down there, to sit on, to use as a table, to stash stuff in. He fumbled around in one of these boxes and found the wallet. It was all he could do to get out of the pit again. The sides were slimy, and he slipped back twice and swore a lot. He finally got out and handed over the wallet. Then he slid the sheet of metal back over the hole. When he stood up and looked at me… I don’t know how to explain it… there was sort of two things in his eyes at the same time. Shame and anger. He was ashamed to live in a slimy hole. And he was angry that somebody knew about it. We talked about it for a while. He was proud of himself. I know that sounds nuts, but it’s how it was. He was ashamed of his hole, but proud of having figured it all out. I guess you could say he was proud of having made his hole, but ashamed of needing it. Something like that, anyway.