La Rive noire
Jacques Côté
(Excerpt: p. 6-16)
The morgue looked as sinister as a morgue. Death knows no favourites and shows no preferences. Night had come and the black lady had mowed down people on both sides of the referendum debate.
Duval and Francis, for once, would rather wait for the autopsy results outside of the room. But from time to time they couldn't help glancing through the small glass window in the door. The assistant pathologist placed the small body on the X-ray table.
Leaning against a wall opposite Duval and Tremblay, two paramedics talked about the good old times when they drove a Cadillac at a hundred miles per hour and cursed the ugly yellow vans imposed by the government.
A door slammed. An assistant pathologist came out of one of the three autopsy rooms, swearing. His hand was bloody.
"Did Dracula bite you?" Francis called out.
"Don't get on my case this morning. I cut myself on a damned bone fragment. Shit!"
The paramedic who had been describing how he'd once avoided a head-on collision while transporting a multitrauma victim in his Cadillac immediately went to help the man.
Mireille, the young biologist, came through the door of the laboratory. She seemed less affected by the events of the night before. Duval turned to her. Under her unfastened smock, she was wearing a pretty blue suit. The lieutenant's presence always put her on the defensive, as though she felt pressured to look good. She smiled at him, swallowing hard. Duval and Mireille worked more often together since she had replaced the legal pathologists at crime scenes.
"How are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm going to do a spatter analysis with pig's blood."
In her left hand, she held a kitchen knife, one piece of incriminating evidence in a homicide case.
"No need for a pig, go see Murphy who got himself bitten by a corpse!"
Duval, who was not famous for his wit, was proud of the joke. Mireille smiled, forming pretty lines around her eyes.
She did all the crime scene samplings and had developed an expertise on the morphology of blood stains. She was the only one in the province of Quebec with this know-how, which often brought her to Montreal, and even to the States.
The door of the first autopsy room opened. Dressed in his green scrubs, Villemure gestured for them to enter. An intern was examining the X-rays on the viewer. Francis, who felt sick, decided to stay in the corridor. Duval went through the door. The small body, marked with blue bruises, was lying on the stainless steel table. Its skull had been drilled into and its already sparse hair had been shaven. The scene sent cold shivers down your back. Duval's stomach was on the verge of revolting.
The brain was barely bigger than a grapefruit; it sat on an aluminum tray on the stainless steel counter. The physician had cut about half of it into thin slices.
Raising his head, Villemure closely examined the X-ray. He looked at the rib cage, following the bones with his pen, then wrote a series of notes on his notepad. The legal pathologist then turned the baby over in order to check what he'd seen on the X-ray.
He greeted Duval. Villemure had fine white hair and, despite being around sixty years old, he still had a youthful face. His beautiful blue eyes were often bloodshot. Duval had thought once that daily horror had finally impregnated the white of his eyes, like a film.
"You can close," Villemure told his assistant. "Then fetch me the burn victim from Mazenod Street."
Standing at the corner of the table, the assistant threaded a big needle to sew up the opening.
The doctor put down his metal clipboard on the side of the table.
"Typical case of SBS."
"SBS?" the lieutenant asked, lengthening the last S sound.
"Shaken Baby Syndrome."
Villemure showed him the infant's brain. The intern came closer.
"The shaking was so strong it ruptured major blood vessels between the skull and the brain. Look at the blood around and inside the brain. Same thing behind the eyes. There was a lot of bleeding in the retina and behind the eyeballs."
"Could the child have hurt himself falling, or hitting the railing of the crib?"
"Not possible. There's no wound on the skull where he might have hit something hard. But the baby definitely died of encephalic trauma. The lesions in the tissues, and the hematomas leave no doubt."
He turned to his intern, a Laval University student who wanted to become a forensic pathologist and his voice took on a professorial tone.
"As you can understand, physiologically, the volume of the skull in babies and their fragile necks make them very vulnerable to violent shocks. They have delicate bones. Because of the pericerebral spaces, even larger in boys, the brain gets crushed against the cranial wall during a shaking. Imagine an egg that you shake in its shell. The blood vessels very soon rupture. Another element to study, young man: the rib cage, Villemure went on, turning to the X-ray viewer, which was reflected in his glasses. Very often the ribs break under the pressure of the assailant's hands. That's what happened here: the kid has two shattered ribs."
The young man was drinking in Villemure's words like a disciple listening to Jesus's parables.
"Very few children get away with no after-effects, be they neurological, behavioural or physical. Some will have blindness or poor vision, epilepsy, cerebral paralysis, learning problems, mental retardation or they will even be reduced to a permanent vegetative state. And all of that because an immature, frustrated parent lost his or her head for an instant. Unfortunately, too often they get away this it, since doctors miss a lot of these cases."
During this forensics lesson, Duval thought again of the crisis the miscarriage was provoking in his marriage: his wife accused him of not being upset about it, of reducing the foetus's death to an inconsequential event.
"Hey, hello, Daniel, you still there?" Villemure asked.
Duval came to again:
"Excuse me, I went to bed late last night."
"Here is a copy of the autopsy report. The pictures will be sent to you in about an hour."
Villemure went out into the corridor to meet with Francis, who looked like a zombie.
He examined him, looking over his bifocal glasses.
"You don't look too good."
"What about you? Did you manage to convince your wife to vote 'yes'?"
"She voted 'no,' like her father. She's always voted like her daddy, he's been very active in the Liberal Party since Taschereau. At least, in Duplessis's time, women voted like their husbands. Even better, before 44 they didn't vote at all..."
This made Duval grin.
"I thought the vote would be closer," Francis muttered.
"To console yourself, think of Levesque's speech: "if I understand you correctly, you're telling me 'until next time.'"
Tremblay almost really smiled, for the first time that day.
"We'll meet again, gentlemen, for the exhumation of the lady from Île d'Orléans," Villemure reminded them, before saying goodbye.
In the car taking them back to headquarters, the image of the dead baby kept haunting Duval. Despite all the cadavers he'd seen in his career, that one was seared on his memory.
For Laurence, everything had begun with some bleeding. Nerve-racking hours. She'd explained to him that it sometimes happened and that medicine was unable to explain it. But the hemorrhaging and cramps had become more frequent. Then the body had gotten rid of this small life on the very bed on which it had been conceived. Laurence cherished this unborn child more than Daniel, and her sensitivity was heightened. The events of the night before and of the morning were reawakening the wound.
On the radio, the first chords of George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" were accompanying the real sun in its ascension to the zenith. Duval suddenly clicked on the worlds "Little Darling, it's been a long, long cold winter... Here comes the sun." He was obsessed by the infant's face. He would have to write an article for the Sûreté Magazine on shaken babies.
Francis touched his arm:
"Stop the car, I feel awful, I'm gonna puke."
Duval immediately stopped the Chevy in front of Dominion Corset, at the corner of Dorchester and Charest Boulevard. Francis ran behind a bus stop and abundantly vomited his bitterness into a trash can. The people waiting in line stared at him in disbelief. The aikido master, in his Yves Saint-Laurent suit, looked like a nouveau riche bum. He stayed stooped like that for a moment, then slowly straightened up. He came back to the car and sat down with difficulty, his eyes bleary, his breath appalling. It felt like the periodical table of chemical elements was pouring out of it.
"Fuck, I drank too much..."
"Go back home and get some rest. You won't be good for anything today."
The detective nodded. In the sky a plane was pulling a streamer: Canada Thanks You! Duval hoped his colleague would not raise his eyes to the firmament. Everything was sickening in this dismal morning. Defeats, like victories, always make you feel dizzy.***
Duval saw his colleague, Harel, in front of the bulletin board, on the ground floor of the station. Louis was holding a poster in his right hand and a box of tacks in his left hand. His cane was leaning against the wall. His big hairy hand, all thumbs, dropped the poster, which glided to the floor a yard from the lieutenant. Duval picked it up and read: "Tonight I'm dancing with my police."
The police artist, Badeau, had drawn police officers dancing with citizens, in a comic-book style.
"What you wouldn't do to get some fresh meat!"
"Don't get me wrong, now!"
Big Louis organized all kinds of activities. It was thanks to him that they had this popular disco evening once a month.
A mocking bird passed them by, whistling a disco tune. It was Malo, a big slacker with zits and dirty hair. He called out one of the stupid jokes he was so good at:
"Will they be singing 'police full of piss number thirty-six' again?"
"No, but in some occasion, police full of shit would be justified," Louis muttered, loud enough to be heard by Malo.
Louis hated him, and it was mutual. Malo had often laughed at him when Harel used cocaine, was shacked up with a dancer and lived on credit, leading two lives that he had both lost in the end.
Louis looked proudly at his poster and turned to Duval.
"Frankie's not with you?"
"He finished his morning by puking in a trash can on Charest Boulevard. Sick as a dog."
"Damned politics... You mustn't forget, tomorrow we're invited to a Lower Town school.
"Oh, yes, it's true," Duval remembered with annoyance. "Who was it who invited us?"
"The religious studies teacher is one of my friends. He's in the Lions Club."
Duval hated these promotional events. To begin with, unlike Louis, he hated speaking in public. But even worse, he was leery of his colleague's jokes: Louis often tried to embarrass him to entertain the audience.
Louis picked up his cane and limped to the offices of the Major Crimes Squad. Lots of progress in four years, Duval thought. Harel was a force of nature. He'd survived the shooting that had left him in a coma. Waking up, he'd thought he'd seen a cross shining in front of him. Despite the sceptics, he wouldn't budge, especially after the doctors considered his case a miracle. When he left the hospital, he only had the use of one leg. After long months in rehabilitation, he'd gone from a wheelchair to crutches. Four years later, he was walking with a cane, which demanded a lot of gymnastics on his part. Louis wanted to bear witness to his meeting with God - his resurrection, as he said. Loulou was also on air each week on the community radio station, a four hour show, from 10 pm to 2 am, in order to reach out to isolated people. Duval had thought the Big Man would fall on his face, but as muddle-headed as he was, his friend knew how to speak plainly and to get spectacularly and delightfully angry on the air. All kinds of people participated in his phone-in program: prostitutes, nuns, police officers, invalids, convicts who called from the pen to berate him and say they hope somebody would off. Louis replied with psalms or swore back at them.
They went through the door of the Major Crimes Squad. Each space was separated by a glass partition. Through the windows you could see Lockwell Street below, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste quarter and its splendid bell tower, the Lower Town and, far off on the horizon, the Laurentian Mountains, greener by the day.
Prince, who was whistling cheerfully, was typing a report for the deputy public prosecutor. You never heard him whistle like that. On his right, the Journal de Québec, with its historical front page, was proudly displayed. Tomorrow, it would be the martyred baby, Duval thought. History force-feeds tabloids with a whole variety of foods.
Prince looked up.
"Can I confess something to you?"
"You're retiring?" Louis asked.
"My Canada wouldn't be the same without you, guys."
"Thanks, but don't go saying this to Francis or Canada will have one less citizen tonight."
Duval smiled. Bernard Prince felt like a real dynamo today. The fourth wheel of their team, who rarely spoke, he'd taken a lot of hard lumps. He very rarely opened up to his colleagues like he'd just done now. In their quartet, he played the viola, a reserved individual, tormented by remorse and anguish. His life had been going well in every aspect until the day his daughter had begun drifting into schizophrenia. He'd had to put her in the Beauport Asylum; she thought she was an angel.
The phone rang in Louis's office and the big man strode to his glass cubicle, limping briskly.
"Have the Savards changed their version of the events?" Duval asked.
"No. The wife and husband have kept to their first deposition," Prince answered. "What about you, anything new?"
"Yes, the M.E.'s report and pictures. By the way, do you have details, for this afternoon?"
Prince raised his large head, which made him look like a defensive back. He had a wide forehead, creased by three deep lines, black eyes under thick brows and spiky crew-cut hair that made him look like a heavy.
"The time and location of Mrs. Marquis's exhumation are on your desk."
"Thanks."
Duval went into his office. He plumped down in his chair, wrote the time of the exhumation in his organizer and put the pen back in his piggy-shaped pencil holder; next to it were two pictures: Mimi, his daughter, with her graduate's mortarboard on her head, and Laurence on the beach.
He reread some details of the Marquis case: it was going to be closed as fast as it had been opened. Florence Marquis was the wife of a rich Quebec businessman, Charles Marquis. Another ugly fight over an inheritance that ends up badly, Duval thought. He put the document back on the table and rubbed his tired eyes. He was not in the mood for details. He hated inheritance cases. They were a proof of how the human species was morally unhealthy, a proof of its greed. Instead, he looked over Villemure's forensic report and the Savards' deposition, before he interrogated them. He went through Gaston Savard's police file: some arrests for DUI, some aggravated assault charges after a bar fight in Vanier, then, in 1976, charges of battery against his wife. The latter held his interest. The history of the police intervention, which had taken place in Giffard, suggested that his then companion had been severely beaten. One detail sent chills down his spine: "The woman was seven months pregnant..."
© 2005 Éditions Alire & Jacques Côté
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