Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(2)
He’d got a lot of quiet help from his sister’s husband’s uncle, Nick Giusti, a former lawyer for the mob. Despite Nick’s cunning, two of his Mafioso clients had been sent up for gunning down an informant, prompting the compagnia to withdraw their fat retainer, and he was pretty disgruntled.
Nick had an unsavoury reputation as a fixer, a washer of ill-gotten gains, but you take your sources where you find them. Jules “the Monk” Moncrief and his pals would fit him with cement shoes if they ever figured out he was Lou’s Deep Throat.
Nick had been the source of voluminous court records, bank statements, notes, ledgers, hard copies of paper exhibits from a dozen trials. He would not be suspected as the source because most of the material was on public record, but without his help the research would have taken a year. As it was, Lou had to painstakingly assemble the jigsaw puzzle of waterfront connections. He’d got no cooperation from the cops — they’d gruffly refused to talk to him.
After the third instalment went nationwide, someone fired a fusillade of bullets at Lou from a passing car, outside his home in C?te-des-Neiges.
§
Lou’s near-death experience, on a frigid ten-below evening in the midst of an unrelenting snowfall, had happened in mid-February. He was wheeling the big green recycle bin to the curb in front of his semi-detached. He’d had a few whiskys, celebrating his national scoop — heads were ducking, the Prime Minister was “concerned,” the Montreal Port Authority was scrambling, refusing comment. The series was perfectly timed, with Parliament in session and the Opposition pelting a Conservative government that had squeaked to a minority victory on an anti-graft platform.
Fortunately for the slightly tiddly ace reporter, he slipped on the icy walkway, and the bin went down and so did Lou, just as a black sedan cruised by, just before a burst of automatic fire went over his head and took out the snowman behind him.
When the police came, he was still holed up in the bathroom, throwing up. He gave a garbled, frantic account, Celeste a more coherent one — she had seen everything from an upstairs window. Amazingly cool, this unyielding, practical woman. The police posted a guard that night, adding to the posse of media outside.
The next day, Superintendent Malraux came by and stayed for a few hours, talking about motive, about the famously ruthless Montreal Mafia. He was pissed off that Lou declined to reveal his sources, and on parting handed him a subpoena: he could either tell all to Malraux now, or tell it to the judge under threat of contempt of court and jail time. Lou apologized; he was bound by ethics, by the promises made to his informants.
What Lou hadn’t realized was that his headline coup had almost blown a police task force’s long and arduous investigation into corruption on the docks. Charges were filed hurriedly, and over the next few days thirteen men, francophone, anglophone, several of Italian extraction, were apprehended. Among them was the capo, Monk Moncrief. Many prime suspects eluded arrest.
Lou was put under a vague and unappealing form of witness protection: the supposedly safe house in an ungentrified quarter of Centre-Sud, south of Sherbrooke. They’d offered a hideaway in a quiet village but Celeste had refused to move from Montreal, away from her customers — a decision she not only regretted now, but somehow blamed on Lou. So, for Lou, it was a life of hiding, lurking, and enduring her hostile emanations. For the kids, it meant a new school, which they claimed to hate. Meanwhile the whole family had to endure grunts and slaps until three in the morning from the apartment below.
Why had the authorities settled them above a dominatrix’s so-called therapy clinic? Was it some hideous kind of joke? The only perk was that Witness Protection paid the rent for this dump. But it was hard to explain to little Lisa and littler Logan what those muffled screams were all about. They couldn’t be persuaded the building wasn’t haunted.
§
And now the last gruelling three months had culminated in this one exponentially shitty spring day, the mid-morning of which found Lou sitting in the back of a subway car, fearfully listening to two men talking animatedly in Italian.
He peeked over his copy of Le Journal. Surely they were too modish for the Mafia, too sharply dressed. Almost everyone else was staring at phones and tablets — except for the big oaf in the ski jacket. He was reaching into a pocket! His hand emerged with an iPhone.
Lou got off at Place-d’Armes and, wet from the rain, glasses fogged, scarf over his nose, worked his way down to the ponderous old landmark that housed the national wire service to which he’d devoted the last twenty years of his life. Hired on at twenty-one, right out of Carleton with a journalism degree, he’d spent fifteen years in Ottawa then transferred to Montreal. He was the head rewrite guy now, doing political roundups and the occasional piece of real reporting.
Looking behind to make sure he wasn’t being followed, Lou stepped inside the offices and almost onto the toes of Louise, the shy copy girl. She blinked at him nervously until he slipped off the scarf. He tried to come up with something flip or jolly — nice to bump into you — but could only grin lamely. She hurried by, as if frightened.
Eight staffers were in the newsroom, at their monitors and keyboards, all pretending to be too busy to notice him and thereby giving off ominous vibes.
Those premonitions were validated when Hugh Dexter, bureau chief and living proof of the Peter Principle, beckoned Lou into his office. After the usual commonplaces about the crappy weather and their respective states of crappy health, Dexter let him know how deeply CP valued his two decades of service, whereupon Lou sagged.