Monday Mourning

“Getting back to the building,” I said, after a few crepe moments. “Nick the Knife bought the place in 1970, and held on to it for ten years.”

“How is all this relevant to your skeletons?”

“I’m talking wiseguys, not choirboys, Anne. Anyone could have been buried in that basement.”

“Aren’t we being a bit melodramatic?”

“People were whacked left and right in those days.”

“Teenaged girls?”

“Strip clubs? Prostitution? Life’s pretty cheap to these thugs.”

Especially female life, I thought, flashing on the gutted hooker now at the Nôtre-Dame Hospital.

Anne focused on her crepes until their completion. Then, “What was on the ground floor when this Knife guy owned the building?”

“That information wasn’t available.”

“Who bought the property?”

I checked my printout.

“In 1980 the building was purchased by Richard Cyr. According to records, Cyr still owns it.”

“What does Cyr have on the ground floor?”

“There are four separate businesses.”

“Including a pizza parlor.”

“Yes.”

“Where does Monsieur Cyr live?”

Back to the printout.

“Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.”

“How far is that from Montreal?”

“It’s a neighborhood just west of Centre-ville.”

Anne’s wineglass froze in midair. As in my kitchen that morning, the other hand came up, palm skyward.

“There you go.”

“That’s three, Annie.”

Exasperated look.

“Your next step. Give Cyr a call. Better yet. If he’s that close, how ’bout a surprise drop-in? The Cagney and Lacey thing’s been kind of a bust for me so far. Let’s solve this case.”

My eyes swung to the phone by my plate. The little screen offered nothing but my name and the time.

It was obvious neither Claudel nor Charbonneau was answering my page.

I raised my Coke. Anne raised her wine.

“Archaeological research,” I said, clinking my glass to hers.

“With one slight modification.” Anne drained her chardonnay. “We’re digging for dirt instead of in it.”

Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, or NDG, is a quiet residential neighborhood two circles out from Centre-ville. Not the Westmount of the well-heeled English, or the Outremont of their hotsy-totsy French counterparts, but nice. Middle-class. A good place to raise kids and collies.

Richard Cyr lived in a redbrick duplex on Coronation, within spitting distance of the Loyola Campus of Concordia University. It took twenty minutes to get there, another five to size the place up.

Faded metal awning over a small front porch. Postage-stamp yards in front and back. Driveway leading nowhere. Blue Ford Falcon.

“Monsieur Cyr doesn’t step and fetch to the call of the shovel,” Anne noted.

In winter, Montreal homeowners either clear their own walks or hire a company or neighborhood kid for the task. Cyr did neither. The afternoon’s snowfall was blanketing a sidewalk already two inches deep in packed snow and ice from earlier accumulations.

Anne and I had to watch our footing as we made our way to the steps and up onto the porch. When I pressed the bell, an elaborate chime sounded somewhere deep in the house.

A full minute later, no one had answered.

I rang again.

Nothing but chimes.

“Cyr must be physically impaired and the tightest miser on the planet,” Anne observed, almost losing her footing.

“Maybe he spends his money on other things.”

“There’s a happy thought. This peckerhead’s on his yacht in Barbados while we’re trying not to kill ourselves navigating his front steps.”

“Car’s here,” I observed.

Anne turned to look. “Guess he doesn’t drop the bucks on glitzy wheels.”

I was raising my hand for another go at the chimes, when the inner door opened. A man peered out through the aluminum and glass storm door.

The man did not look happy, but his expression was not what alarmed us.

Anne and I started easing back off the porch.

14

THE MAN WATCHING US WAS SHORT AND WIRY, WITH YELLOWED white hair and an elaborate gray mustache. He wore grease-smeared glasses and gold chains around his neck.

Nothing else. Just glasses and chains.

The man’s scowl turned to self-satisfaction at the sight of Anne and me backpedaling unsteadily across his porch. Then the expression went fierce again.

“Je suis Catholique!”

My boots slithered and angled on the uneven ice.

Cyr grabbed his penis and waggled it at us.

Beside me, Anne grabbed the railing and made a one-eighty toward the steps.

“Catholique!” the man shouted.

Catholic?

I stopped. I’d seen Harry use the same ploy. Dressed.

“We’re not missionaries, Monsieur Cyr.”

The scowl wavered, then reaffixed itself.

“And I’m not Pee-wee Herman.” The name sounded strange in joual French.

I reached into my purse.

Cyr made a feint at the door. “Get lost!”

I pulled out one of my cards.

“And don’t leave none of your damn pamphlets, tabernouche!!”

“We’re not with any church.”

Realizing what was happening, Anne used the handrail to turn herself back toward the house.

Cyr repeated his penile threat, this time in Anne’s direction.

“Oh, horror,” Anne said, sotto voce. “Assault with a dead weapon.”

The grimy lenses froze on my companion. A smile did a slow crawl across the wrinkled lips.

Cyr waggled again.