A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller) (17 page)

“My name is Rumer Illyanovitch. I was a Canadian soldier wounded twice in Somalia and the Balkans and I left the forces with the rank of lieutenant.”

He brought his hands in front of him. “And I was a police officer who retired with the rank of sergeant.”

He brought his feet together. “I have always protected the people of Canada and the people of this city. If you elect me as chief commissioner I will continue to serve and protect.”

He lowered his voice. “That is all that I ask.”

The applause was deafening. Hell, I almost joined in myself.

D
own on the floor Claire gave me a hug and a kiss and then whispered, “That man is going to kick your ass.”

“Wanna bet?”

Her eyebrow went up. “What’s your wager?”

I whispered a complicated obscene act that was patently illegal and required a high degree of organization. She nodded. “’Kay.”

“The bet is that he won’t win.”

Claire narrowed her eyes. “You’re betting that Rumer won’t win?”

“Yep.”

“In exchange for …” She repeated the act with a questioning inflection.

“Yep, that’s the one.”

We shook hands and turned to the small crowd who were pressing forward. Dean and Brenda had appeared as well. Both had notebooks in hand and looked thoughtful, which I assumed meant they were going to chew my ass off.

I ignored them and turned to the rest of the people who wanted to talk to me, three men and two women. Behind them were a television reporter and a camerawoman along with a man with a tape recorder in one hand and a fancy camera around his neck. I ignored the press and talked to the women first and then the men. In each case I shook their hands with both of mine while meeting their eyes directly and smiling broadly.

The smile I had been practising since I’d started the campaign and the handshake as well. Shaking someone’s hand with both of mine gave me control of the person if necessary. It may have looked warm and friendly but it allowed me to move the person along with a little arm pressure if needed. And staring into the person’s eyes allowed me to gauge them.

The first woman was middle-aged and middle-class with a wide mouth and a nice smile. She wanted to know more about my criminal past. “So did you do everything you mentioned?”

“Pretty much. Plus other stuff. But I did all my jail time plus some extra so I feel pretty good about myself.”

She was puzzled. “Extra?”

“Sometimes extra charges and extra time get added. It’s how things get cleared up.”

“You’re not angry?”

“Oh no. Not now. So can I expect your vote?”

She pushed her head forward. “I think so.”

The only other person who wanted to talk to me was a blond man in his early twenties who looked very familiar. As I was placing the face Dean swayed past me and said, “Be gentle. Cameras everywhere.”

I kept my poker face. The blond man came in front of me and jutted his jaw out. “You’re a piece of shit.” He said it loudly and it made heads turn.

My hands were already in front of me and my feet were braced so I kept the smile in place and said, “And you’re an asshole. Will you vote for me anyway?”

The reporters and Claire laughed, but no one else did. The blond man flushed red, balled his left fist and leaned back to swing. I let him and it was the slowest, softest punch ever. I just stared at it. There were maybe six blocks I could use and two counter-blows and two ways to avoid it entirely. As it travelled towards me I saw Dean’s face was painted with a slight smile and so I chose to step forward and let the punch pass under my left arm.

Up close the blond guy smelled like good aftershave and expensive soap. When my face was an inch from his I said, “You wanna stop this?”

He didn’t and I wrapped my left arm around his right, going under and over and then I had him in a shoulder lock a drunk lesbian had used on me once. I braced and forced him backwards towards the ground. Before he could hit I slipped my left knee under his back.

When he hit my knee he grunted and I smelled spearmint mouthwash.

Again I leaned down. “I can break your back or your arm from here. Stop. Please.”

The stupid smile was still on my face and the blond man stopped fighting and held up his other hand, open.

“Hey, it’s cool.”

“It is. You gonna behave?”

“Yeah.”

I let go of his arm and let him fall while I stood back. Two cops had appeared from nowhere and stood over the man. “Is there a problem?”

“No.” I looked at the man on his back. “Are you having a problem?”

“No.” I finally recognized the young man and helped him to his feet. Dean had talked to him for twenty minutes this morning outside the lunchroom where we were having coffee during canvassing. I repeated myself, “No.”

The cameras had caught the whole thing and I saw Dean out of the corner of my eye and he smiled just a little
more.

That stunt had attracted a crowd and the camerawoman and reporter came in. I recognized her from the fairground and smiled. “Good to see you again.”

“Mr. Haaviko. Can we ask some questions?”

“Certainly. What is your full name, by the way?”

She was tiny and tough and her smile was cold and I quite liked it,.“Candy Sawchuck.”

The camerawoman must have been set up already. She planted her camera on the tripod and started filming. Candy turned to me immediately. “We’re talking with Mr. Montgomery Haaviko, ex-thief, currently running for the position of chief police commissioner. He’s made some dramatic claims about the dysfunctional state of the police.”

She waited but I had nothing to add and she had to ask, “So how would you change the system?”

“I would eliminate the Law Enforcement Review Agency because no one should be tried twice and that’s what
LERA
does to the police. It’s not fair. It’s a provincial organization but we can start there.”

Rumer had wandered over and was listening but he didn’t react. The agency gave a get-out-of-jail-free card to the police but it was a damn hard thing to defend to civilians. So Rumer didn’t do anything but stand there smiling.

Candy nodded and I went on, “I would also propose the establishment of an independent organization to review claims of wrongful imprisonment like they have in the UK.”

Rumer couldn’t stand it and blurted out, “That would never work!”

Candy held her mike to him and made him repeat himself and then I answered, “It’s been around since 1995 in the UK. It’s received more than 10,000 submissions and has referred about 400 to the courts. Sure beats the hell out of all these justice inquiries going one at a time, don’t you think?”

Rumer was quiet so I went on, “I would also arrange to have every single police interrogation on film, and in fact I would do that for every single police/civilian interaction. As a society we seem to be willing to put cameras everywhere so I’d put them on the police as well. Then there would never, ever be a question of who said what, when. Those are the places where I’d start and those we could begin immediately and cheaply. The cost of one public inquiry would pay for all the hardware.”

I turned back to Rumer. “And what would you do?”

He didn’t have an answer.

Candy waited for awhile and then shut down the camera, thanked me and left. Claire and I had to wait though and shake hands and smile.

When everyone had left Dean handed me an envelope. “A present. Take tomorrow off.”

“Can I speak with you?” He nodded and we went into a corner and I went on, “Your idea about the blond guy?”

“Uh-huh. I thought of it this morning and just went with it. What did you think?”

“It worked. Warn me next time.”

“You bet. Now take tomorrow off.”

So I did.

C
laire and I spent most of the next day in bed.

When we weren’t fooling around we babysat, played with Fred, made shepherd’s pie and played cribbage.

When Fred fell asleep we made love until Claire fell asleep.

I
still couldn’t sleep.

Wired on fear, waiting for the Shy Man.

Watching my family.

Waiting.

And, in some strange way, enjoying the sensation of being absolutely and totally alive.

T
he next day I was back on the campaign trail with Brenda and Dean. Claire was at home watching the kids and doing real estate paperwork with the doors locked and alarmed. I had also bought each of us a disposable cell phone so we could keep in touch no matter what, and that helped reduce the stress level. Of course the dozens of cops around helped too.

I had about three hours of messages to deal with the next morning and I listened to them all with a pad of paper handy to take notes and doodle. The calls were mostly from radio stations and reporters asking for sound bites and bits of brilliance along with anything controversial. However, I had very little brilliance in me and so I just listened and made notes. Then at nine I went with the flow, which consisted of heading out with Dean and Brenda. Once I was in the car they told me they had decided it was time to hit another electoral district.

They had chosen the eastern district so that’s where we went, and as Dean drove, Brenda filled me in.

“Okay. We are heading into a nice residential area but, overall, this district is rough for us. It is mostly very conservative, at least that’s how they vote federally, provincially and locally. Most of the residents are blue collar and they have a low crime rate. They also have a low rate of police complaints and a low rate of civic involvement in general. This is Rumer’s stronghold, along with the far south end of the city, but this district might be able to be turned. There is considerable unhappiness having to do with the economy and job loss. That means the residents are starting to distrust the powers that be that got them into this mess in the first place.”

“Ah?”

I sat in the back seat and thought, then borrowed a pen from Dean and made some notes on the back of one of my pamphlets and came to a total of $9.1 million, which I doubled and then divided by $38,002.28, the starting salary of a fourth-class police constable. The final number I got was 479. I circled that and we started in on a street of well-maintained single-level bungalows.

The first thing I noticed was the large number of garage sale signs everywhere. The second thing I noticed was how few people actually wanted to talk to me. For the first fifteen houses either no one was there or else no one answered the knock. Dean marked streets off on his map as Brenda went up to try another door, moving carefully up the sidewalk because no home owner wants to see their lawn despoiled by an unwanted visitor.

Dean looked up. “So few people. Kind of sad, really; these are the working poor. Both man and woman have to work full time to support a house they never visit and kids they never see and then they wonder why their life is shit when they finally stop working and retire.”

It was more philosophical than I’d expected from the man and I glanced at him sideways as I pulled off my jacket and tie. He noticed my look and shrugged. “Sorry, Monty, it just gets to me sometimes. Everyone hustles and no one gets anywhere. The sad-ass lie in the centre of the system.”

“Yeah.” I stared at the rows of houses. “Let me tell you a story. Guy I knew was from a little village in Jamaica, a couple of miles from Kingston. He used to haul garbage away from the excavation of Port Royal, the pirate city that got drowned for its wickedness, and worked other part-time jobs like that, but he also fished and sold shit to tourists. He had it pretty good. He wanted to make his million, so he came to Canada and did bank robberies and insurance scams. He always talked about home, how peaceful it was, how cheap the rum was, how pretty the girls were. Someone asked him, so why are you here? And he said, to make my million and retire.”

Brenda found someone and waved me up but I bent to tie an already tied shoelace. “Anyhow, someone asked, retire where? And he said, Jamaica, back to where it’s peaceful and the rum is cheap and the girls are pretty. And we said, you’re nuts, you leave paradise to make money so you can go back to paradise which doesn’t cost to live in.”

I stood. “And it was like a thunderbolt. He just stood up and walked out of the safe house and got on the next flight home and that was it.”

Dean nodded. “Yeah. That’s the lie. Work to get what you want. Not enjoy what you’ve got. Oh well, give ’em hell.”

At the door was a thick-bodied white man with his left arm in a sling.

“Good morning, sir.”

He ignored my hand when I offered it and I pulled it back.

“Morning. Wanted to see you in person but I got no intention to vote for you.”

“Well, thanks for seeing me anyway.” I turned to walk away and he called me back.

“Aren’t you going to try to convince me of why you’re the right person?”

I shook my head. “No way. You’re a busy man. You’ve made up your mind to vote for Rumer, right?”

“Yes. He’s a cop, you’re a thief. He’s honest, you’re a liar. No offence.”

“None taken. Hmmm. Can I ask you one question and tell you two things?”

The man was solid, with layers of fat on top of muscles, there were bags under his eyes and his fingers were thick with yellow calluses He nodded reluctantly. “Sure. But my mind’s made up.”

“All right. First, are you safe here?”

“Safe? What do you mean?”

“From crime.”

He laughed loud and hard. “Fuck no! Little punk shits spray crap on my garage, my van got stolen last year and my daughter got groped by some perv downtown last month. Crime is a fucking problem and Rumer can deal with it.”

“Sure. Rumer is a cop, through and through, and always will be. In the past twenty years there have been three public inquiries because of cop and prosecution mistakes. That’s cost the city and province $18 million.”

The man nodded. “Shit happens, so?”

“That $18 million would have paid the annual salary of 479 policemen. But we had to have the inquiries because shit happened. That’s what this commission is about, stopping shit before it happens and stopping it cheaply and fast. Now why should we have a cop in charge of cops? We already know they can’t govern themselves.”