Badal
Jacques Bissonnette
(Chapter 2: The man with the cut throat in Walkley Street, p. 11-22)
In the feeble light of dawn, the breath coming from the bed was slowly fading. The swollen face, closed eyes, cold skin: everything pointed to an imminent death. Julien Stifer lightly squeezed the hand he was holding, whispering soothing words. Suddenly the breath stopped. The face progressively stiffened until it was a hard mask of flesh. Stifer gently put the unmoving hand on the side of the bed.
For a moment, he looked at the petrified face of the lonely old man whom he'd just helped on his last journey. The anguish of a sad and lonely ending was all he had known of the man. Each dying man experiences his passage in his own way, but all share the same fear. This one was no exception. Stifer had tried to give him some peace, but the few hours he'd spent with him had not been enough.
The busy sounds of the hospital intruded on his thoughts. The nurses were scrambling at the end of their night shift. Stifer put on his jacket, looked one last time at the dead man and left the room. The greenish walls gleamed softly under the first touch of the dismal dawn seeping through the windows. At the reception desk, small drug vials were lined up on the counter like soldiers ready for a last hurrah. So many incurable illnesses were raging on this floor. A plump woman, her grey hair knotted in a bun, welcomed him with a tired smile.
"Long night, Julien?"
"The last one for our friend. He died at 4:47."
The head nurse listened to the news with a glum smile. Stifer marvelled at the nurses' empathy for their patients, even if they stayed only for a short time in their ward.
"I'll do what needs to be done. A little coffee?"
"Why not?"
The nurse poured him some in a cardboard cup). The liquid went down Stifer's throat like a tepid torrent. He hoped the caffeine would dissipate his headache. The shrill beeping of an emergency alarm startled him. He saw two male nurses run towards a room, perhaps for a transitory resuscitation. Death would finally retreat for a few hours from this floor.
He crumpled the cup and threw it in the trash.
"Have a nice day, France."
The nurse looked up for a moment from the death report she was writing. She didn't think it necessary to verify what Stifer had said: he was quite experienced with dead people. She offered a comforting smile to the fiery-haired man whose back seemed to stoop under the weight of that sleepless night.
"You too, Julien."
Stifer called the elevator. The last floor was reserved for terminal patients. The walls reflected a heavy-set man in a tweed jacket, with a plaid tie and tired eyes. He passed nursing assistants in green scrubs going down for their coffee break, came to a corridor full of beds and waiting patients, then plodded towards the big glass doors of the reception booth. The watchman put down his sport pages to give a friendly wave. Stifer replied with a tired smile and went out into the whitish dawn.
Montreal's grey buildings were appearing in a dull light. The cars seemed to be hiding under foggy banks. Stifer crossed Sherbrooke Street to walk a while in the wet grass of Parc Lafontaine, under the august trees, soaking his shoes, seeing a few ducks frolicking in the middle of the large pond with its scattered spirals of mist.
He'd often roamed this park, he knew its every nook and cranny. But dawn made it different. The trees emerged from the wan mist like so many leafy menhirs. The pond gleamed with an eerie watery light. As though ready to carry their passengers on an eternal voyage, the wooden benches seemed to float on the ground. He sat down on one, just as his cell vibrated in the pocket of his overcoat. He rummaged in the big pocket full of gloves, handcuffs and handkerchiefs and finally found the phone.
"Lieutenant?"
"Yes, Lucien."
His assistant's voice crackled bizarrely in his ear, which was wet with the light rain, reminding him of the morning cries of a crow. Sounding embarrassed, Lucien asked, "You still at the hospital?"
"Sitting in the Park."
"Lafontaine?"
"With the ducks."
"Your friend died?"
Stifer recognized the awkward tone his colleagues had when it came to the strange passion that had taken hold of him, accompanying the dying in his spare time.
"Yep, one more for the shadowy band."
There was a silence, then Lucien's husky voice crackled again:
"Here's another one. We have someone with a slit throat on our hands."
"How long ago?"
"Very fresh."
"Clues?
"Forensics is at the scene. They'll tell us soon enough."
"Crime of passion?
"Doesn't look like it."
"OK, wait a sec..."
Stifer rummaged once again in his deep pockets, pulling out a dog-eared notebook this time, and a pencil with a blunt point.
"I'm writing."
It was an apartment on Walkley Street, in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood, in the west end.
"You want me to send a car?"
"I'll take mine."
Stifer ran his fingers through his sodden hair and adjusted his fedora. A new death to solve was something of a relief: he could feel he had a measure of control over that one, at least. He might find a motive, identify a culprit, try to apply some justice. Impose some imaginary limits on eternity.
He picked his massive body up off the wet bench and took the path to the northern end of the park, along Rachel Street where he'd parked his car. The sun appeared through the trees, scattering the swirling fog; grey squirrels were prancing around, a cyclist's bell rang very close. Life and death all mixed together. Stifer was ready to face them again.
Small flags marked off the bloodstains on the floor. In order to avoid these restricted zones, Stifer did the usual morbid slalom to the place where a man was lying face down in a twisted position in the middle of a mattress lying directly on the floor. The half-severed head looked like a wilted flower with a bloody corolla. The eyes, reduced to slits, were staring at the void, while the pale lips were stiffened in a dazed grin.
"No one thought of closing his eyes?" Stifer grumbled.
"We usually leave that to the pathologist," retorted, Miron, the head of the forensics team, who was bent over the floor near the door.
Detective sergeant Lucien Bernard was leaning in a precarious position, one shoulder against a wall, crushing a smouldering cigarette butt against the sole of his worn shoe, while carefully cupping the shower of ashes in his left hand. He straightened up, stuffed the butt and ashes into a bulging pocket, put on his latex gloves and went to the deceased to close his eyes.
Stifer sighed. Lucien was showing as much respect if he had been closing circuit breakers. Since Stifer accompanied the dying at the hospital, he was becoming keenly aware of the respect due to corpses. More and more often he had to refrain from berating his subordinates at crime scenes.
"OK, details?" he asked.
The weasel-faced sergeant grimaced as he began reading his notes. Stifer knew why: Lucien wrote in shorthand, in a spidery scrawl, which was a big problem for him when he had to read his own writing. Stifer had never found out if his assistant really read his notes or just quoted them from memory.
"Here it is... at two forty this morning, call to the operator; anonymous. A woman's voice, from a public phone booth on Fielding."
"What did the message say?"
"You'll find a dead body on Walkley Street. Then she gave the address."
"Nothing else?"
"She sounded like she was crying. Then she hung up."
Stifer walked carefully around the room, following the bloody trail circumscribed by the small flags to the corpse on its pallet. The body was oriented towards the back of the room while the head pointed to a side wall. Half severed from the torso, it lay at an odd angle with it, reminding Stifer of a character from some Asian language. He put on the gloves and gently moved the head to see the face. The victim looked middle-aged, in his forties or fifties, of Middle-Eastern origin. Short hair, angular features, a white shirt and duck pants.
Looking for a dry place on the mattress where he could kneel, Stifer bent down to study the wound. Through the darkened flesh of the gaping trachea the bumps of the spine were visible. The cut must have been made with a lot of strength, with a tool as sharp as a razor. He looked at the hands: they were slender, with no obvious wounds.
"The pictures have been taken?"
"Of course," Miron answered. "We've been on the job for hours."
He stood up stiffly, wiping his forehead with a sleeve. He rotated his head a few times to relax his neck muscles, which made his long blond braid whip around. He was wearing a black sweater with the word POLICE in fluorescent white letters. On his cap, which he wore back to front, the insignia was a painted masked penguin.
"Why didn't you call me earlier?" Stifer asked.
"We knew you were at the hospital," Lucien replied in his gravelly voice.
Surprised by his assistant's tact, Stifer looked at the sergeant, who was examining his bitten nails.
"OK, let's turn him over."
Lucien took the feet and Stifer held the head while Miron slowly turned the body on its back. Stifer then replaced the head in a decent position, aligned with the torso. Satisfied with the renewed dignity thus afforded to the deceased, he checked the torso: very lean, it seemed veiled by black striations, like pleats of a toga made of dried blood. Stifer passed his fingers over the crusty surface: no injuries. He got up and stepped back a little to study the scene.
The victim was now lying on his back, feet apart, head in its rightful place, on his bloody bed. The wound could be seen in all its gaping horror. The man's throat had not been slit, he'd been almost decapitated. Stifer turned again to the forensics chief who was entering the crime scene data in his electronic pad.
"Do we have an ID?"
Miron typed something on his keyboard and raised his head, answering: "Ismaël Gunaratna, an Algerian immigrant. We found an Immigration Canada card with his name, as well as the lease for the apartment, and various bank details.
He pointed at the worn chest of drawers in a corner:
"He kept his clothes in there, not many. He apparently lived alone."
"Drugs?"
"No, just a nargileh in the next room, Miron said. With half-burnt herbs."
"Weapons?"
"None. Not even the murder weapon."
Stifer came back to the victim and stared at the awful wound.
"What was used to do this?"
"Looks like a giant can-opener to me," Lucien said.
"Yep, with a very well-sharpened blade," Miron concluded.
"Signs of a struggle?"
"Nothing suggests it. He must have been executed."
"No traces of blood from the executioner?"
Miron made a face, pointing around the blood-spattered room.
"Hard to tell. So much blood. If there was any, it would be impossible to find a viable DNA signature. It's all mixed together."
Stifer could hear his shoes squeaking on the bloody floor.
"Nothing else? A cigarette butt? A stale cup of coffee?"
"Everything is stale here. The guy must have found his furniture at the Salvation Army. Burglary certainly wasn't the motive... Oh, yes, he had a weird necklace in his hand."
Miron called to a technician who was collecting blood samples in various places.
"Paul, show the lieutenant the necklace!"
A bearded man in oversized pants held out a plastic bag to Stifer, who pulled out the piece of jewellery: a blue pacifier, covered with blood, hanging from a fine silver chain.
"You say he had this in his hand?"
Miron repositioned his cap with the threatening penguin on top of his thick hair.
"Exactly, Lieutenant."
"Maybe a medal from the nanny Olympics," Lucien grumbled, examining the necklace."
The chain seemed old and the colour of the pacifier looked faded. Stifer sighed, thinking of the memories this odd jewel must have carried. They were now dissolved into the abyss of death. He gave the object back to the technician, and turned again to the corpse now painted in livid colors by the photographer's flashes. He examined at length the soaked mattress and the walls sprayed with blood, concluding sullenly:
"The execution was extremely quick. He was forcibly turned to the wall, then his throat was cut. The mattress absorbed a lot of the blood. The guy knew what he was doing."
"It must not have been his first time," Lucien added sourly. "In twenty-four years in this job I've never seen anything like this. I'll bet the guy got out of here without one speck of blood on his tie."
Stiffer took off his gloves and handed them to Morin, who put them in a bag. He left the room, avoiding the small flags cordoning off the bloodstains on the floor. He followed the hallway to a small living room where there was a computer sitting on a worn desk. An enormous pipe stood in the middle of the wobbly table; it had three tubes ending in narrow mouthpieces, lined near the base like so many quiescent tentacles.
Coming up behind Stifer, Lucien took one in his gloved hand.
"We let it as it was so that you could see the whole scene, Lieutenant. I asked the techs to take some samples, for possible traces of DNA. Maybe the killer took a few tokes with his victim?"
"Good thinking," Stifer said.
He doubted such an assassin could be so careless. He lifted the cover of the smoke compartment on the top of the nargileh. An acrid smell rose from the ashy black powder. Stiffer took some of it, which he examined closely. Unburnt tobacco leaves were mixed with the ashes.
Lucien drummed his fingers on the back of a chair with a small rolled rug sitting on it.
"There was only one chair at the table. The guy must have been smoking when the murderer came in."
"Where did he come in?"
Lucien shrugged his thin shoulders.
"He must have rung the bell."
"Have you started questioning the neighbours?"
"We arrived in the middle of the night. Nobody was in a hurry to give us any information."
Stifer went into the tiny kitchen where an antique fridge was rattling. A back door opened on a modest balcony. The back of dilapidated buildings was the only view. Spiral staircases were hanging from neighbouring buildings like rusted ivy.
Stifer tried the stairs, on the lookout for any clue. They squeaked under his weight as he checked the surroundings. A solitary tree was growing very close, its roots burrowing into the cracked asphalt between the buildings. The fraying ropes of a swing were tied to a branch. Junk food bags were strewn around it like soiled flower bouquets.
Stifer turned his attention to the plantain shoots growing amidst the rubble. One of them gave him what he was looking for: a dark spot on one of the leaves. He noticed a similar spot on another plant, then another. The trail led to the sidewalk between two buildings.
"You've got a bag, Lucien?"
The detective took a bag out of his pocket and gave it to him. The lieutenant opened a switchblade and, squatting down, he began to cut off the bloodied plants, careful not to damage the stems. He put the samples in the bag, sealed it and gave it to Lucien.
"Blood spots?" the detective asked.
"The victim's, or the assailant's. Maybe he was wounded during the attack. Maybe he had his victim's blood on the bottom of his shoes. In any case, he went out the back door. Maybe he came in by the same door. I hope we'll get some identifiable DNA".
Lucien looked at the bag then at the surrounding buildings, running his bony fingers through his thin hair.
"It must have been dark. Not very likely someone could have seen the murderer leaving the scene."
"We'll question them anyway," Stifer said.
Lucien threw his still burning cigarette butt on the ground and went back up the stairs, trampling the plants. Stifer saw them spring back at once, their thin stems boldly pointing to the greyish sky. Life went on...
© 2007 Éditions Alire
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