Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(56)
The prints of my photographs of her and the driver are sharp and clear, despite being blown up. What is interesting (and becomes more interesting as you read on) is that detectives in the Surete’s organized crime unit failed to identify them as known Mafia figures. One officer said they looked “vaguely familiar,” but that was it.
Enter Harvey Plouffe. And here I gratefully pause to blow out a plume of fragrant smoke from my Escepcion. (I confess I became addicted when you sent me to Cuba: the Narvaez case — you remember that? — death by exploding cigar. I must have visited fifty cigar factories.)
M. Plouffe, the steady customer of Svetlana Glinka whom I mentioned in my last report, took me to lunch at an expensive restaurant in the Old City. He insisted on paying. He is of the moneyed class — an inheritance, I gathered. A plump, rose-cheeked fellow of almost unchecked amiability.
I had to confess to him that my interest in bondage-dominance was purely intellectual, but he was quite accepting of that — indeed intrigued that, as a private investigator, I was looking into Ms. Glinka’s disappearance. He took no issue with my being bound by confidentiality as to my employer.
M. Plouffe is gay and he’s well out of the closet. He is out, as well, as an aficionado of BDSM, and openly espouses it as therapy.
He too had enjoyed Ms. Glinka’s strokes — the “delightfully erotic shiver that comes with anticipation of pain,” as he vividly put it. He admitted to no clear understanding of his need for this, though he mentioned strict, religious parenting and “une montagne” of guilt.
He believed he was Ms. Glinka’s favourite. They would chat “like old girlfriends” after sessions, and she shared something of her history. Born in Moscow, entered the sex trade as a teen, arrived in Montreal a decade ago in response to an internet marriage proposal. After getting her papers, she left her husband and went back to the work she knew: call girl, madam, finally graduating to her specialty of the last several years.
M. Plouffe had a regular weekly slot with her, Tuesdays at four in the afternoon, and would usually stroll there from his home in the Gay Village. But on Tuesday, June 4, he slowed his pace on seeing a small white van parked out front, and a man and woman carting heavy cardboard boxes from her home. They had a key to the door, and locked it, then loaded the van and drove off. There was no sign of Ms. Glinka or her car.
M. Plouffe had no idea who these two persons were but recognized them from my photographs of July 7: the moustachioed heavyweight behind the wheel of the Lincoln Navigator, the tall brunette who tried Mr. Sabatino’s door. This is the same couple Ms. Litvak observed at Dorval. Farquist’s lawyers are using the Puhl Detective Agency and I hope to confirm that the couple in question work for it. Sam Puhl himself is likely running the show. I worked with him a few years ago on a corporate fraud matter. He must be doing well to use a pricey Lincoln as his ghost car.
Back to June 4. After the couple drove off, M. Plouffe called Ms. Glinka’s unlisted number and left a message. She never called back. (“I am bereft,” he said.)
Her landlord, the estimable Rocky Rubinstein, has subsequently confirmed that her suite is empty except for furniture and some clothing. The tools of her trade are gone. As is her phone, voice recorder, computer equipment, and files. Clearly, the couple observed by M. Plouffe were tasked to remove all records that might connect the Hon. Emil Farquist to Ms. Glinka.
Doubtless, the terms of the deal to buy Ms. Glinka’s silence required her to spill all the beans, including admitting to sharing the Farquist tape with Lou Sabatino. And so Mr. Farquist’s agents have been prowling the neighbourhood in their big SUV looking for him. To try to buy him off? To question him? to threaten him? or worse?
If they do locate him, and if they learn he copied the video, is it conceivable they would weigh solving their Sabatino problem by tipping off the Mafia? I doubt George Cowper Jr., QC, would go so far, but one of Mr. Farquist’s devoted minions might not be as scrupulous.
It is therefore ever more vital to locate the poor fellow. His wife, Celeste, might know his haunts, but she may be almost as hard to find. His parents are deceased, and he has just one sibling, an older sister, Antonia Colombo.
Her husband’s uncle, Nick Giusti, has recently been done in by the Mafia, so when I talked to her she was nervous, though cooperative, and in much distress over her brother’s disappearance. She was of little help, other than to connect me with Sabatino’s wife’s father, Simon Brault, a mining supervisor living in Rouyn-Noranda.
M. Brault had earlier, by phone, declined my request to visit, but relented when your office called with our scripted white lie — that I was investigating Mr. Sabatino’s disappearance on behalf of his co-workers in the media.
M. Brault is francophone but perfectly bilingual, a brusque fellow and not fond of his son-in-law, who made an impromptu visit to his home on Sunday, June 9, while on a quest to locate his family.
That is the last time that Mr. Sabatino surfaced. M. Brault believes he’s suicidal — at one point he apparently jumped into the lake outside their home. My notes read: “His funeral ain’t going to attract any vast throngs.”
I finally persuaded M. Brault to connect me with Celeste Sabatino who, it turns out, is living in Calgary with her sister, Lucille. He telephoned Celeste and explained to her my mission. I spoke to her briefly and won her permission to visit.
So far, Mr. Sabatino hasn’t shown up there, which seems surprising, and adds to my foreboding about his prospects for survival. Mind you, no bodies have been found, and the Mafia usually does its work openly. But if they do dispatch him, our tasks become very difficult indeed.