Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (256 page)

He blamed himself. Replaying their last fight endlessly in his head, he knew he’d screwed up by taking his mother’s side. Years of living with such a forceful, confident personality had taught him to take the easy route, to give in on the little battles. Over time, everything looked small compared to the colossal thrust of his mother’s will.

But at least he understood that now. He only had to find Meredith, take her in his arms, and promise her that no matter how awful the obstacle, she could conquer it with him at her side. Deep down, he had a nagging suspicion that his mother was at the centre of Meredith’s discovery. Disjointed fragments seemed to hint at that: his mother’s secrecy, her cryptic
“He mustn’t
know!”
, the lies about his father’s death, Meredith’s refusal to confide in him...

Anger rolled over him. Enough! What was he? A fool and a child? There were too many secrets, and he was damned if he was going to be shielded any more. Meredith’s search had brought her to Montreal. He was flying blind with no idea whom she’d met or where she’d gone, but he figured he’d start with the family and see how many secrets he could pry loose himself.

In his pocket he also had the newspaper clippings about his father’s death. As the highway curved left onto Montreal’s crumbling expressway, boulevard Métropolitaine, he wondered where to begin. In Westmount, he decided, steering for the Decarie exit ramp and following the sign to Centre Ville.

Sid Green’s face sagged as he watched his grandson light the Hanukkah menorah. It was the first year the five-year-old had been trusted with the honour, and it should have been a celebration. Yet even Tony looked as if he’d lost his best friend.

It was the first night of the eight-day Festival of Lights, and the single candle looked lonely all by itself on the candelabra. Green felt the ache of its symbolism. Hannah hadn’t bought a return ticket, claiming she’d play it by ear depending on the reception she received. She’d said she wanted the freedom to come back after two days if things went badly, but Green feared the opposite. That she would never return.

Judging from the wistful faces around the festive table, the rest of the family harboured the same fear. Sharon had dressed the table in white and sparkling silver to honour both Friday night Shabbat and the first night of Hanukkah. A platter of golden latkes filled the air with the scent of onions and oil, but the beauty only sharpened the sense of loss. Hannah’s place was set, as a symbol of her inclusion, but the empty chair spoke volumes.

“Mike’s going to Montreal tomorrow,” Sharon said to Sid brightly. “I’ve given him a Hanukkah shopping list.”

Sid raised a desultory eyebrow. “Montreal? What’s in Montreal?”

“A couple of witnesses,” Green said. “And I have to talk to the Montreal Police. I won’t be there long. A day, maybe two.”

“You bring back Lester’s smoked meat?”

Green laughed. “It’s at the top of Sharon’s list. How much you want? Ten pounds?”

“Ach.” Sid waved a dismissive hand. Green’s father was nearing ninety and seemed to be shrivelling before their eyes. Now, hunched over and turned in on himself, he looked barely a hundred pounds. Green’s heart constricted as he watched him push his single latke around on his plate, uneaten.

“I’ll miss a couple of Hanukkah nights, but we’ll have a big celebration the last night,” Green said, matching Sharon’s gaiety. “Hannah should be back by then, and we’ll make a big spread of smoked meat and kosher dills.”

Sharon rubbed her hands with glee. “With presents from the Sherbrooke Street boutiques for Hannah and me!”

Green smiled. They both knew that trusting him with the selection of designer accessories, even if they could afford them, was an invitation to catastrophe. His taste ran more to discount department stores than Yves St. Laurent.

Sid glanced at Green. “You’re looking for this missing
madeleh
?”

Green was surprised, for his father rarely paid attention to the news. He left the television blaring all day in his minuscule senior’s apartment, but it was tuned to talk shows and old friends like
Wheel of Fortune
. They provided a background of silly patter that gave no reminder of the darker side of life. Sid Green needed no reminder.

Green weighed his answer carefully. While it was true he would be investigating Meredith Kennedy’s movements in Montreal, his main focus was Lise Gravelle. He had spent the rest of the afternoon getting the necessary travel permissions and making arrangements with the Montreal Police. They had made no progress yet in tracking Lise’s next of kin, but Green suspected up till now they hadn’t tried very hard. To them she was a throwaway, an anonymous citizen of the city with no one to mourn her loss or push the police for answers. She’d had an erratic history of low-paying jobs and welfare, broken relationships and frequent moves, most recently to a small apartment in one of the dozens of cheap low rises in the Van Horne area. The Montreal Police made the obligatory grumbling noises about the upcoming weekend but agreed to get a search warrant for the place.

“We’re hopeful Meredith Kennedy is alive,” was all he said now. “She has some friends and family in Montreal.”

Tony had been listening with rapt attention. “She’s going to be in big trouble when you find her, right, Daddy?”

Green chuckled. “I think everyone will just be happy to have her home again, buddy.”

Sid had retreated into one of his faraway places. Back in the Warsaw ghetto with his little children, perhaps. Children who had been lost to him forever. An all too familiar sight to Green.

“So!” he announced, reaching down and putting a shiny silver gift bag on the table. “Tonight’s presents are from Hannah, who wanted to make sure we wouldn’t forget her.” He distributed the small wrapped parcels around the table. Tony pounced on his and gleefully unwrapped
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Green was afraid he’d be disappointed it wasn’t a Nintendo Wii game he’d been angling for, but he brandished it with delight.

“Cool! We’re almost finished
Tom Sawyer
.”

Green opened his own present, a CD from some indie rock band he’d never heard of. Bit by bit, his daughter was dragging his musical taste out of the eighties into the modern age.

Sid was looking at his own present, his chin quivering. It was a framed photo of Hannah with her soft orange curls and her sparkling hazel eyes. She’d come a long way from the blue Mohawk and corpse-white make-up of three years ago. She had taken the studs out of her eyebrow and lower lip, and she looked angelic. Across the bottom she had written in a beautiful, elegant script, “To my all-time favourite zaydie, Love Hannah.”

She sure knows how to tug the heartstrings, Green thought. She better be coming back to us.

THIRTEEN

It was just past eight o’clock Saturday morning when Green headed east on the highway towards Montreal. Luckily, a crisp northwest wind had blown away all danger of snow, and the morning sky was already a rich blue. The rising sun seared his eyes.

The four-lane highway was nearly deserted. Setting cruise control, he slipped his new CD into the player and settled in to enjoy his morning coffee and bagel. He had intended to use the two-hour drive to sort out his thoughts on the case and to plan his day, but the indie band was so good that he found himself listening to it over and over, fascinated by the guitar riffs and flourishes hidden in the harmony. Fascinated too by how similar Hannah’s and his tastes were. Before he knew it, the warehouses and big box stores of the West Island were whizzing by and up ahead rose the majestic twin humps of Mount Royal, topped by the rounded dome of St. Joseph’s Oratory on the right and by the white tower of the Université de Montréal on the left.

Compared to Ottawa, which was confounded by three rivers, a canal, two lakes and a severe shortage of bridges, Montreal did not pose much of a directional challenge. It did, however, present other hazards. The expressways were old, impossibly crowded, and made even narrower by three-foot snowbanks on either side. The road surface was riddled with patches and potholes. In response, Montreal drivers drove as if rules such as speed limits, lane markings and signal lights were just further inconveniences to be ignored. Boulevard Métropolitaine was transformed into a Grand Prix racing circuit, and Green needed every trick he’d ever learned in his defensive driving and emergency manoeuvres courses in order to navigate the trip across the city to the east end.

Unlike Ottawa, which until a hundred and fifty years ago had been nothing but a rough timber town, Montreal was the birthplace of Canadian commerce. Ornate brick and limestone heritage buildings stood alongside sleek glass towers in the colourful and lively downtown core. Green was disappointed to learn, however, that instead of being housed in the new Montreal Police headquarters on legendary St. Urbain Street, Major Crimes was located in what looked like a glorified shopping mall way out on Sherbrooke Street East. At the height of Saturday morning, cars fought for space as Christmas shoppers tried to get at the shops along the commercial strip, and Green nearly missed the unprepossessing building amid the crush of chain stores and discount hotels. The only advantage to its location, he admitted grudgingly, was quick access to the expressways that crisscrossed the city.

He was relieved to find state-of-the-art security inside the building with full-body turnstiles controlled by a coded keypad, and a front desk enclosed behind glass that Green assumed was bullet-proof. The ongoing war with Montreal’s biker gangs had been ugly.

Green stopped at the desk to introduce himself. The head of Specialized Investigations had promised to obtain the necessary search warrants and to assign one of the weekend investigators to assist Green in the Lise Gravelle case. The man had sounded brusque and impatient on the phone, however, even when Green had dusted off his best French, so he was not holding out much hope. He was pleasantly surprised when a huge black man came off the elevator and bulldozed through the turnstile. He would have looked more at home on a football field than he did in his polyester suit, but his broad smile was dazzling against his ebony skin.

“Inspector Green! Detective Sergeant Magloire. Jean Pierre to my friends.” He engulfed Green’s hand in a crushing handshake. Magloire had a deep gravelly voice and a slight accent that sounded like African tinged with French Canadian. Green guessed it was Haitian.

“Mike,” he managed through rattling teeth.

“You must be tired. Hungry. The warrant’s not quite ready. You want to see our offices? No, I bet you want to eat.”

Since Green’s bagel was now a distant memory, he nodded. “Food would be nice, if there’s some place close by.”

“I know exactly the place. It’s a bit of a drive, but on our way out to the victim’s home.”

“But the warrants—”

“Don’t worry about them.” Magloire tossed on his coat as he strode down the front stairs, leaving Green hustling to keep up. He realized he’d been managed. With fluent ease, Magloire had steered him out of the police station and away from the tardy paperwork. Magloire selected an unmarked Impala from the lot and squealed its tires as he accelerated into the line of traffic headed west along Sherbrooke. He drove the staff car one-handed, weaving in and out of the traffic at a speed that left Green clinging to the shoulder strap.

Magloire grinned. “Montreal is a living thing, full of fight,” he said. “She does her best to turn you upside down. You have to push back.”

They zipped past thickly treed parks and the shiny silver dome of the Olympic stadium before heading deeper into the older French parts of Montreal. The cityscape changed gradually from modest residential duplexes to an ad hoc mix of hospitals, agencies and older tenements, their weathered brick and limestone façades pressing close to the street. At boulevard St-Laurent, he turned right into the bumper to bumper traffic inching up the historic street. Magloire began a running patter about the gentrification of the Main, pointing out the strip clubs and drug dealers side by side with fashionable boutiques. All the while he was smiling as if hugely pleased with himself.

When he slipped the car into a no-parking spot in front of a nondescript storefront, Green looked up at the sign,
Chez Schwartz,
Charcuterie Hebraïque de Montréal,
and realized how thoroughly he had been managed. Schwartz’s Main Hebrew Deli was known around the world for its exquisite smoked meat and its dubious ambiance. Briskets and gallon jars of peppers were piled high in the front window. Green eyed Magloire with a new respect.

Even in the winter, the line-up of customers straggled down the block. Ignoring the glares of those in line, Magloire pushed inside, where the harried waiter immediately caught his eye. The tiny place was packed with customers crammed into banquette-style tables along the wall. Miraculously two vacant chairs opened up in a spacious corner and the waiter gestured to them to sit down. This gives community policing a whole new meaning, Green thought, reminded that in Montreal, alliances and understanding were everything. From the lowliest sex trade worker on the street corner to the CEO of the largest construction firm, everyone knew someone to watch their back.

The menu was printed on the placemat, but Magloire ordered for both of them before Green could even decipher it. Smoked meat sandwiches with fries.

“And a side of peppers,” Green shouted at the waiter’s disappearing back.

The waiter turned, his grease-stained apron flapping. “Hot?”

“As hot as you got.”

The waiter scurried off, and Magloire gave Green his trademark huge grin. “You been here before.”

“Not here, but it’s a legend.” He leaned forward to reassert control. “Jean Pierre, I’m on a tight timeline here. When will the warrant be ready?”

“By the time we finish lunch. I told them to bring it here.”

“Good. Meanwhile, what have you guys uncovered about Lise Gravelle?”

“Apart from getting the warrant, not much. We’re trying to find next of kin but she appears to be alone. Parents dead, one sibling—a sister—estranged. No children or husbands. There may be nobody to claim her or bury her.”