The Poisoned Pawn Read online

  Pike waited for the chief to explain the reason behind his call. He looked out the window. The old man was curled into a fetal position, oblivious to the cold. Soon, he would begin coming down. The shakes would start, the nausea, confusion. Then the overwhelming urge to do it again.

  “Have you read today’s paper? There’s a story about Michael Ellis.”

  “Yeah, I saw it.” Pike had the Ottawa daily folded on his desk. He didn’t believe the allegations for a moment. By the end of the piece, even the reporter seemed to recognize that June Kelly was a troublemaker. The story was full of disclaimers, half-truths. But the newspaper had printed the story anyway. Mike would have a lot of sympathy in the department. That reporter better hope she didn’t run any red lights.

  “Poor man was trapped inside his house all this morning by the bloody media. I’ve sent a patrol car over to keep the reporters a good distance away. This is the last thing he needs while he’s trying to cope with his wife’s death. That lad has been a shit magnet for months.”

  “Do you want me to get him out of there?”

  Tobacco, booze: Charlie Pike had been raised by some of the best smugglers in the world. Except as far as Pike was concerned, they weren’t breaking any laws. When it came to First Nations, the federal and provincial governments were like two fleas fighting over who owned the dog.

  “No, Charlie,” O’Malley laughed. “But I want to keep an eye on things. We have that Cuban policeman arriving in Ottawa tonight. I’d like you to meet him at the airport and make sure he doesn’t get ambushed by the press. They’ll be wanting to ask him about the Callendes charges. We want to make sure the good inspector doesn’t accidentally say something to feed the sharks.”

  O’Malley explained the charges Ellis had faced in Cuba. Of all his detectives, he knew Pike could be counted on to be discreet. “Poor Michael. He’s been to hell and back.”

  “How would the reporters ever know he was in a Cuban jail?”

  The old man outside rolled on his back and spread his arms on the ground like a snow angel. Pike moved away from the window. The old man was entitled to some privacy as he fell back to earth.

  “They won’t. But they’ll be after Ramirez when he arrives, because of that priest, and it might slip out if they ask him why he’s here. I want to be on the safe side. Michael may be on compassionate leave, but he’s still one of my men. If the press finds out he was accused of murdering a Cuban child, this will be the top story in every newspaper and television station across the country. It won’t matter that he was never charged. His life will be destroyed.”

  O’Malley was still politically incorrect enough to refer to his officers as men even though at least thirty percent of them were women. But O’Malley was essentially indifferent to race and gender. He often joked he couldn’t discriminate even if he wanted to, because everything he saw was grey; he was literally colour-blind.

  The media didn’t see things quite the same way. Charlie Pike’s first encounter with them was in 2003, when he was promoted from Patrol to Drug Squad. He was one of the first aboriginal detectives in all of Canada. It was something he occasionally felt proud of, despite his general ambivalence towards most Canadian institutions.

  O’Malley had recommended against giving the interview. “I won’t tell you what to do, lad, but those bloody people rarely have good news on their minds.”

  But Pike believed he could be a role model for First Nations youth, who felt alienated from the police and were all too frequently harassed by them. It was one of the two reasons he’d joined the force. The other was O’Malley.

  He sat in the downtown television studio in his new suit and freshly cut hair, hoping to make a good impression. The host started by welcoming him to the morning show and then asking him how he felt about working on the Drug Squad when so many drug users were aboriginal.

  “It’s so widespread, Detective Pike. Are our aboriginal people predisposed to alcoholism and drug abuse?” the big-haired woman asked, managing to combine racism and paternalism in a single sentence.

  “Are you suggesting I’m an alcoholic?” Pike said quietly.

  He hadn’t touched alcohol in years. He felt his chest tighten, the way it did in the woods when he sighted a moose. I’m not one of your aboriginal people, he thought. You don’t own me.

  “No, of course not you, Detective,” the woman said. She leaned back, folding her arms, a smile plastered on her face. This interview wasn’t going quite as she’d planned. “But don’t your people typically have trouble with drugs and alcohol?”

  “My people used to have trouble getting alcohol,” Pike answered. “It was against your laws, for a long time, for my people to have a drink in their own homes without being arrested. Just thinking about having a beer was enough to put an Indian in jail.”

  O’Malley said that at first he roared with laughter as he watched the woman squirm. But he’d laughed only briefly. And after that, when Pike continued speaking, he cried.

  “But, yes, there are quite a few aboriginal people who struggle with addictions. Not surprising, when you know how many of them were little children when they were dragged away from their families and put in residential schools hundreds of miles away from everything they knew.

  “I’ve heard the elders’ stories, the few times they’ll talk about it. How they were beaten with pitchforks and fan belts and coat hangers if they tried to speak their own language, or visit with their brothers and sisters, or because they wanted to play. The religious people in charge of those schools thought it was okay to rape and beat little children, so long as no one found out. So, yes, I guess some of us do have problems with drugs and alcohol. I think of that every time I see an Anishnabe woman selling herself on a corner for a few dollars so she can get enough drugs to forget what happened to her. Someone came up with the idea of residential schools as a way to ‘civilize’ us. They wanted to take the Indian right out of us. But it wasn’t one of my people.”

  The woman blanched.

  Pike had nothing more to say. That was a long speech for him, despite his mother’s Mohawk heritage. He wiped the television makeup off his face with the back of his jacket sleeve and walked out of the studio.

  After that, Pike had nothing to do with reporters. Except to make sure they stayed out of his way.

  “Sure, Chief. Does he speak English?”

  “Fluently. You’ll have to identify yourself to him, though. He won’t be expecting you.”

  Or anyone remotely like me, thought Charlie Pike as he hung up. But then, neither would the reporters.

  Pike pulled his mouth into something close to a smile. If they bothered him this time, he had his gun.

  He looked out the window at the old man again and walked downstairs to buy some soup.

  EIGHTEEN

  A morning spent on paperwork; the afternoon lost to meetings. Inspector Ramirez looked at his watch. He had only a few hours before his flight. He hoped to find a warm coat in the airport lost-and-found, or, more accurately, the stolen-and-expropriated. His bag was packed with his few belongings, but he still needed supplies.

  He walked down the hallway and nodded to the pretty clerk who sat at a desk outside the exhibit room. Rita Martinez was a young woman who favoured short skirts and low necklines.

  He let himself into the exhibit room and pulled the heavy door tightly closed. The storage room was lined with rows of battered metal shelves, each piled high with numbered boxes. Since so many ordinary activities had been criminalized, the dusty containers held all manner of exhibits, from stuffed toys to machine guns. But like the garbage dump at the city’s edge, the room’s contents had been well picked over. Members of the Cuban National Revolutionary Police Force were highly skilled at recycling.

  He kept digging until he found the box he wanted, one with the exhibits from the Michael Ellis investigation. He removed a plastic envelope full of Polaroid photographs and put it in his jacket pocket. He also retrieved a digital camera that belonged to
a foreigner who had snapped a picture of Señor Ellis with Arturo Montenegro before the little boy was murdered.

  Candice Olefson lived in Ottawa; Ramirez planned to return it. Given the dire shortage of cameras, he had briefly considered keeping it, but there was no point. He had no memory cards and they weren’t easy to find. Besides, Celia Jones had promised Olefson the camera would be given back to her.

  He returned the box to the shelf and signed the appropriate forms to indicate these items were in his possession.

  He could not fail to notice, as he rifled through adjacent exhibit boxes, how many held empty plastic envelopes that should have contained money. Euros, German marks, Chinese yen, British pounds, Canadian dollars, all gone.

  He was looking for one box in particular. It contained exhibits from an illegal rum smuggling operation that he and Sanchez had put a stop to. An investigation that continued to provide Ramirez, not to mention the Minister of the Interior, with a reliable source of well-aged rum. Of the twenty-four crates initially seized, only six remained.

  Ramirez finally found the file he was looking for. He retrieved a plastic envelope that contained American dollars. The currency was worthless in Cuba: illegal to use, possess, or exchange. That was the only reason the money was still in the exhibit room and not in some policía’s pocket. But in Canada, the bills could be of value. If Ramirez didn’t help himself to them, someone else would, as soon as Castro legalized the currency again. He opened the envelope and rubbed the crisp, green bills between his fingers.

  “Give me a ten dollars bill green american,” Castro wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was fourteen years old. “I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them. Thank you very much. Your friend, Fidel Castro.”

  When the currency had been legal in Cuba, ten American dollars was the difference between children who had milk to strengthen their bones and those who didn’t. In Ramirez’s family, only Estella was entitled to milk rations. When she turned seven, she’d be too old.

  Ramirez’s monthly salary of twenty-five pesos, generous by Cuban standards, was barely enough to cover his family’s basic needs. And Francesca was right, his parents were getting older.

  His mother was Cuban by marriage only. Once his father died, she might not receive any government support. It worried Ramirez. He needed a raise but knew that getting one was as unlikely as Castro calling a democratic election.

  Ramirez looked at the American bills, imagining what he could buy with them in Canada. He ran his fingers over the face of the dead president. The dead cigar lady watched him intently from the shadows.

  “What do you think?” he whispered. “Did you ever want something for someone else so badly that you were willing to risk your own future?”

  She pointed to her throat and shrugged.

  “Look,” said Ramirez, frustrated at their inability to communicate. “We take other things from the exhibit room already. Like rum. And money buys rum. What’s the difference?”

  Flawed reasoning, Apiro would say. Faulty logic. Like the child who kills his parents and claims to be an orphan. Or the murderer who argues that he didn’t kill, it was his gun.

  He waited for the old woman to wag a finger at him, to silently scold him for even considering it. Instead, she looked at him the way his mother used to when he was a small boy weighing the risks of misbehaviour.

  “Yes, I know there may be consequences,” he acknowledged. “But surely moderation can be taken to extremes.”

  Ramirez pocketed the money. He slipped the clear plastic envelope back in the file and returned the box to its original location. It wasn’t a large amount, but he felt like Judas; he’d sold his principles for a few pieces of silver.

  He let himself and the dead woman back into the corridor and re-entered the usual late-afternoon bustle of the police station. He walked by the luscious Rita Martinez again without even noticing her new breasts.

  No one had seen him slide down the ethical cliff except a ghost who might not be real. But Ramirez had crossed a moral line, and he knew it. The inspector and his apparition walked sadly into the light.

  NINETEEN

  Officer Fernando Espinoza—no, wait, that was Detective Espinoza now—was on his first week in the Major Crimes Unit. Espinoza was hardly able to believe his good fortune. Just by doing his job on foot patrol and helping to identify a murdered child, he had received a big promotion. And here he was, barely twenty-one years old, already a detective. Working at a much better-paying position—almost fifteen pesos a month.

  As he walked to the front door of police headquarters, he saw Apiro deep in conversation with a woman on the sidewalk. And not just any woman. She was almost six feet in her high heels. Thick, streaked-blonde hair, a low-cut blue top, tight skirt. Her voice was husky, as deep and rich as molasses.

  Was she Cuban or foreign? Espinoza wasn’t sure.

  “Hola, Dr. Apiro,” he called. “Excuse me for bothering you, but I wondered if I might have a minute of your time.”

  “Of course, Detective. Maria, this is Detective Fernando Espinoza. He was recently promoted to Major Crimes. Detective Espinoza, this is Maria Vasquez.”

  Maria, Espinoza guessed, despite her name, was no virgin. Besides, the surname Vasquez came from the Basque country, and everyone knew that Basque women were feminists.

  Espinoza stood on the balls of his feet, trying to look a little taller. He liked strong women.

  “I’ll leave you two men alone to talk business,” said Maria.

  Espinoza was quite surprised when she leaned down and kissed the pathologist on the cheek before she walked languidly away. He wondered if she was the doctor’s cousin, or maybe a neighbour.

  “Forgive me for interrupting your conversation, Dr. Apiro,” Espinoza said. “I wondered—do you have any idea yet what killed that old woman in the alley? I will be handling the investigation in Inspector Ramirez’s absence.”

  “No, not yet,” said Apiro, as he pulled his thoughts from one woman to another. “It looks as if she died of a heart attack, but the damage from the knife wound and the degree of decomposition are making it difficult to know what might have caused it. I’m still running tests.”

  “I know how busy you are,” said Espinoza. Both men watched Maria’s hips swivel as she moved fluidly away from them through the crowds of tourists. “Forgive me for asking, but is Maria married? She’s very beautiful.”

  “That she is.” Apiro shook his head, smiling wistfully. “And no, she’s not.”

  Apiro didn’t volunteer any other information about his mysterious friend, and Espinoza didn’t ask. But as he opened the heavy front door to the police station, allowing the pathologist to enter before him, Espinoza wondered why the little doctor sounded so sad.

  Detective Espinoza sat on a wooden swivel chair in his new office. Well, not quite an office, but the desk Inspector Ramirez had assigned to him for his first murder investigation.

  It was better than the corner of the Malecón for which he had previously been responsible. There, he had been required to stand in his cheap black shoes on the hard, cracked concrete throughout his entire shift. At least in Major Crimes he could sit down.

  “Stabbed through the heart after she was dead? Do you think she was a zombie?” Espinoza had asked Ramirez.

  Espinoza believed in zombies. In fact, many Cubans believed that Fidel Castro, hovering between life and death for almost a year since his botched surgery, had become one.

  “I don’t know what she was,” Ramirez laughed. “I only know that someone killed her. But try to find out if she had any family, Fernando, will you? That may help us track down her killer.”

  It was late at night, but Espinoza sat at his desk, idly flipping through the stack of papers. He was working his way through hundreds of missing persons reports. He hoped to impress Ramirez when the inspector returned from Canada by telling him he had found the victim’s relatives. And maybe her killer as well.
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  The manager of the building where Señora Aranas had lived had been of little assistance. She had a son, he said. But he hadn’t seen the man in years.

  As he thumbed through the pages, Espinoza held back a yawn. So many people had gone missing from such a small island. But then, with all the people trying to escape on rafts made of rubber tires, it was hard to keep track of the Cuban population. It would be almost more productive to have missing tire reports.

  A young woman walked past his desk. He watched her turn the corner towards the exhibit room, admiring her legs. She was very pretty, and around Espinoza’s age. Civilian clothes, her dress cut just low enough to catch his interest. She must be a clerk, he thought. A mangito, that one. Those breasts, carumba. He let out a low whistle and hissed in appreciation. The detectives sitting at their desks beside him grinned.

  When she came back towards his desk, Espinoza called out, “Hey, linda,” using the slang for “beautiful.” “I’m off at midnight. You want to have a drink somewhere?”

  “With you?”

  “You see someone else here?” He held his arms out, palms up, and looked around as if he were the only officer working late.

  She shrugged, but a smile tugged the corner of her mouth. “I’m working night shift, consorte. And when I get off work, I have other plans. You think I don’t have a boyfriend waiting?”

  I have plans for you too, thought Espinoza, eyeing her appreciatively. A cuarto somewhere, if he was lucky enough to find an empty room in one of the few hotels that Cubans could rent. A little hoja later on, if she felt like fooling around. If not tonight, well, maybe soon. But no sex at his apartment: he still lived with his parents. And probably would for years, despite the big pay increase.

  “Maybe so, sweetheart,” he smiled. “But you won’t have any more boyfriends after you go out with me, I promise. Come on, one drink. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life wondering what you missed, do you?”