The Ambitious City (33 page)

“Can we believe this guy?” Vertesi asked.

“Aziz told him what would happen if he didn’t cooperate. He’s tough but not stupid—he knows there are as many bikers inside the system as on the street,” MacNeice said. “The fact that Langlois survived the day’s events at the farm will immediately put him under suspicion. If he cooperates with us, we’ll at least give him a new identity and offer to relocate him.”

When asked the whereabouts of the D2D bikers, he told them that, as far as he knew, there were five hiding in Montreal and the rest—another six or seven—had gone underground somewhere in
Ontario or as far away as Vancouver. He had no idea who’d originally hired the Jokers or why, but when Aziz asked him why they came back to the farm, he stalled, said his English wasn’t very good—not true—then asked her to repeat the question.

Finally he told them there was supposed to be a lot of money stored somewhere at the farm, and Frédéric needed it. No one else but Paradis knew where it was hidden. Langlois doubted that the D2D crew knew anything about the cash stashed there—the relationship wasn’t that cosy.

So Frédéric and his crew had been watching the farm and were about to go in when MacNeice’s team had arrived. Given that they had the element of surprise on their side, the bikers decided to risk it. They could see that the cop was falling asleep behind the wheel; Frédéric and Bruni handled him. The others had waited for half an hour in the tunnel; when they emerged, they saw the cop and Wenzel sitting in front of the barn and Frédéric smiling, pointing a gun at Wenzel’s head.

Langlois, of course, claimed he had no intention of shooting anyone but that he had no doubt the other three would—especially Frédéric, whom he described somewhat loftily as a “
sadiste classique
.” Bruni was hopped up on steroids and energy drinks. “He said it was good that the second shot took out Bruni’s neck, because he would have kept coming after the first one,” Aziz said.

“Amen to that,” Williams, said, wiping Cayuga dust off his shoes. As a result of the shooting, he’d spent two hours with Internal Affairs and was only now starting to breathe normally.

“Assuming that was the end of the interview,” MacNeice said, and checked his watch. It was past eight and he was exhausted. “This is the end of me.” He stood up, grabbed his jacket and looked across at Aziz.

“I’ll make sure Aziz gets to the hotel, boss,” Williams said. “I’ve already checked—there’s a cop assigned to sit outside her door.”

—

MacNeice drove out of the parking lot, merging with the late evening traffic gliding along Main Street. He didn’t turn any music on. As he approached the cottage, he saw a red Corvette parked in his driveway. Pulling in behind it, he could see through the tinted rear window that someone was in the driver’s seat. He checked the licence plate—
PATMAN
—before swinging his car back and around so that he ended up sitting three feet from the driver’s window.

He lowered his own window and waited. In a few seconds, the darkened window slid down.

“Pat Mancini,” MacNeice said.

“You know me?” Mancini looked surprised.

“Your plate’s a giveaway. What are you doing here, Patman?”

“I watched Wallace on TV tonight, put one and one together and thought you’d be looking for me.”

“Do I have a reason to?”

“No, no. That’s why I’m here—”

“It’s late, Pat. Let’s meet at the division tomorrow morning.”

“No way, man. Nobody knows I’m up here, but they’d sure as hell know if I showed up at the cop shop.”

“Who’d know?”

“Oh yeah, like I’m going to fall for that shit …”

“Back up your car and get out of here.”

“I just want to talk to you.”

“Thirty seconds.”

“Fuck, man … Okay, look, I know your man Vertesi probably suspects me in this thing out at Cayuga, but I had nothin’ to do with it, okay?”

“Fine, then you have nothing to worry about. Get going.”

“Why are you such a hardass?”

“Because it’s late, you’re at my home, parked on private property—my property. It’s time for you to get out of here.”

“I can give you some shit on this, I can.”

“If you’re serious, I’ll be at your office tomorrow morning before nine.”

“I can’t talk there either, man—no fucking way.”

“Because of your father?”

“No, because of the guys inside, and out. This is a small business—I mean, the whole concrete industry is. People talk.”

“What would they have to talk about?”

“What I say to you can never come back to me, agreed?”

“What have you got to tell me?”

“I need your word, man. Don’t fuck with me—I need it.”

“Pat, I’m not empowered to make deals.”

“You gotta, or I’m outta here—and I mean gone.”

“I promise you, I’ll do all I can to keep you out of it.”

“Not good enough. I need your word.”

MacNeice sighed. “You have my word.”

Mancini looked around, peering into the night. “Can we talk inside?”

“No one followed you here.”

“Yeah, no shit, but they may have followed you.”

“Get into my car and slouch down. We’ll go for a drive over the bridge.”

As quickly as he could, Mancini slipped out of his car and into the passenger seat of the Chevy.

As they headed north on Mountain Road, MacNeice asked him, “How did you know where I live?”

“It wasn’t hard to find out. You have a gravel driveway—that gravel came from somewhere …”

“All right, so I’m listening.”

Mancini spoke in a slow monotone as if he’d rehearsed what he was going to say. He started from the beginning for him—which was hockey. When he was playing in the NHL, he had been sent
down to Junior A for a while to help him focus on his game, out of the limelight. On game day at the local arena, he’d buy marijuana from one of the guys on security. That was in Montreal, and the Jokers controlled security at the rink. “When I heard the Deputy Chief announce the death of Frédéric Paridis, I knew I had to talk to someone,” Mancini said.

As the Chevy climbed the Sky-High Bridge, Mancini told MacNeice that he and another player had begun scoring more than bud from the Jokers: the bikers owned a string of Ukrainian dancers who weren’t exactly dancers in the strictest sense.

“Prostitutes, you mean, Pat?”

“Yeah …”

Those women would have been expensive, but when MacNeice asked him how much they cost, Mancini said, “That was the thing—Freddy didn’t want money. He said, ‘We’ll pick it up somewhere down the line, when you’re back on Broadway.’ So, you know, that was good, but Broadway didn’t last all that long and then I was out of hockey altogether.”

“But you still owed Frédéric.”

“Big time. And he had this motherfucker of a guy—like Lou Ferrigno without the weird speech thing, though this guy sounded like a girl. He bought it today too, I heard.”

“He did. What did they want from you?”

Frédéric wanted security jobs. He’d done a deal with D2D and had hookers and dope lines from Windsor to Quebec City, but they were always on the fringes of the large gangs. Frédéric was certain Pat Mancini could get them better connections.

“Why would he think that?”

“I dunno. Maybe ’cause I’m Italian and I went back to work in my pa’s concrete company.”

“You mean you were bragging to him about being Italian?”

At first Mancini denied it, but then he admitted Paradis had told
him that once, when he was stoned, Mancini had been going on about his family’s mob connections. Mancini had no recollection of ever having done so. “I swear on my grandfather’s grave, I don’t think I would have—”

“Even if you didn’t, Pat, he had you because you were too out of it to remember what you said.” Mancini was staring out the window over the dark horizon of the lake; the bridge lights caught the thin stream of a tear coursing down his face. “He was still supplying girls and grass?”

“Yeah, quite a bit.”

“What did you provide in return?”

“Information. I thought I was giving him a line on solid security jobs, but I guess I told him about the concrete deal going down between ABC and my dad for the harbour project.”

“You guess you told him?”

“I told him.”

He’d also told him about DeLillo and how they’d got beaten out of the deal and might be looking for a fight with ABC. MacNeice was waiting for it, but Mancini did not mention McNamara. When MacNeice asked him what else he was getting besides women and dope, Mancini said he had no interest in harder drugs and had even cut back on the grass. Women, however, were a serious addiction.

“So you may not have told him anything about mobs in the beginning, but to maintain a steady supply of ‘dancers,’ you fed him full of Mafia stories, right? And the Italian concrete business on both sides of the border, all with the idea that he could supply security?”

“More or less.”

“Who’d he work for?”

“I swear we never got into that. We both agreed that the less I knew about what happened after I handed over the information, the better.”

So Mancini had told stories about competing Italian families and left Paradis to draw his own conclusions—and he had. Mancini had no idea who Paradis was offering muscle to, including his own father, and he didn’t want to know.

“So why come forward now, Pat, now that Frédéric’s dead?”

“You think that fucking frog was working alone? No way. He’s got a brother for one—Joe. For all I know, his brother is nuttier than he was.”

“Perfect. Joe and Fred Paradise, like names out of a Raymond Chandler novel.”

“I don’t know who Raymond Chandler is, but I wouldn’t joke about that shit with him.”

After Mancini had gone to work for his dad, Paradis would send the Ukrainian girls from Montreal on the train. They’d spend a day or two in Dundurn and then be back on the train again. In return, Mancini had provided enough truth along with his fantasy mob world that Paradis felt he was always on the edge of a major breakthrough—getting the nod to provide expensive muscle to the Mafia.

“I was away when that OK Corral gunfight happened,” Mancini said. “I didn’t hear about that—not from Paradis, not in the news—until today. I’m shit-scared. I love the dancers … okay, I’m guilty of beautiful women, but not the rest of this shit. No way.” Mancini was watching the vehicles passing by, studying the occupants for any possible threat.

“How much does your father know?”

“Nothing. My dad would be sick if he knew what his favourite son was up to.” He insisted that Mancini Concrete was as straight as they come and that his father had worked hard to be the most stand-up guy in Dundurn.

“Are you going to continue in the business?”

“I don’t have any talent for concrete. I mean, I’m a hockey player—sorry, I
was
a hockey player. What do I know about
concrete? The guys there see me for what I am: an ex-jock, and now Daddy’s boy.”

“That’s a very raw assessment, Pat. Do you mean it?”

“Oh yeah. I got the game-shits when I watched that press conference. My pa saw you on TV earlier when that other cop, the Muslim one, spoke about the mangia-cake slasher. He said, ‘There’s a good man.’ That’s why I came looking for you.”

As they passed Princess Point, MacNeice asked him what he was going to do now. Mancini said he had a duffle bag full of gear in the back of his car and he planned on leaving right away for L.A., where a friend of his played for the Kings. He figured he’d lie low but he didn’t have any idea how long it would take for the Paradis family or D2D to forget about him.

“I can stop you from doing that.”

“I know you can, but will you? I’ve been straight with you.”

“So far, I believe you have. You’re sure there’s nothing you’re not telling me?”

But for the hum of the engine, there was no sound in the car for several seconds.

“McNamara,” Mancini finally said.

Finally
, MacNeice thought. “What about them?”

Another long silence as the nighttime landscape drifted by in horizontal streaks on either side of the Chevy.

“I told Freddy that I thought the Irish were trying a power move on the project.”

He insisted there was no evidence for it, other than a phone call McNamara had made to his father when Pat was in his office enjoying an espresso. He was on the sofa ten feet away but said he could hear Sean McNamara yelling at his father over the phone. When he asked him about the call after he hung up, Alberto handed him a chocolate wafer as if he were a kid. “Just business with our Irish friends …”

“When you and your dad met with Vertesi, you said something about your family knowing how to take care of yourselves. What were you referring to?”

“Shit, man, I was just crankin’ him up. He’s such a sincere guy, and Pa likes him. I think it was a line out of a gangster movie.”

“So what if Joe Paradis comes looking for you and finds your father instead?” MacNeice asked.

Mancini had been staring out the passenger window again, and now he turned to look at MacNeice. “Good shot.” He paused, then said, “Am I more of a risk to him here or in L.A.?”

MacNeice explained patiently that if Pat skipped town, his family would be the only logical target for revenge or demands for financial compensation. The motorcycle club from New York wouldn’t go away, and neither would the locals. Going to California might take him out of it, but not his parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. “Even though you were the one getting the girls, your family could end up paying the bill.”

They passed by Division in silence. Mancini began tapping the armrest with the tip of his middle finger. It wasn’t a rhythm, just erratic tapping as the buildings slid by. They went straight across town like that, moving with the lights and the traffic and the finger-tapping. They crossed Parkdale and the vacant lot that long ago had been an outdoor dancehall where a young woman in a party dress spent her last night dancing for dollars. They passed the Dairy Queen and McDonald’s, the car dealerships and all-night coffee-and-doughnut gas stations.

MacNeice turned right on Mountain Road South and, a few hundred yards later, right again into the lane leading up to the stone cottage. He pulled in beside the Corvette, turned off the ignition and took out the key. He looked over at Mancini, who was still looking out at nothing in particular and tapping the side window with the knuckles of his right hand.