The Last Witness (5 page)

  Michel stood studying the photos from two yards back, then threw a quick eye over the others and back again, as if measuring how they slotted into the whole picture.

  ‘So, still very much in love,’ he said.

  ‘Looks that way.’

  Michel leant in closer, studying finer detail in the photos. What had he been hoping for? Some small sign of cracks in their relationship, so it might be easier to get Donatiens to testify against the Lacailles. After all, she was only in her early twenties, impetuous, strong-willed, and probably wasn’t yet settled emotionally. Before Donatiens she’d had a chain of different boyfriends, seemed to change them every other month.

Michel shook his head as he studied the look on Simone’s face kissing Donatiens goodbye. Wishful thinking. Their relationship had held solid for sixteen months, and looked stronger now than ever.

But the photo he was finally drawn to most was of Donatiens just as Simone headed away. Perhaps business hadn’t gone smoothly in Mexico, but Michel doubted that was it: the expression of concern suddenly gripping Donatiens looked too heavy, severe. Donatiens knew about Savard.

‘When’s the wedding planned?’ Michel asked.

‘Early July – the eighth.’

Michel nodded thoughtfully, still scanning the photos. He already knew the date off by heart, but a changed date might hint of some cooling off. He was getting desperate.

They’d all be there, Michel reflected: slim, dapper Jean-Paul, his mid-brown hair greying heavily in sweeps at each side, but still looking younger than his fifty-one years. His mother Lillian, 74, who now spent more time at the family’s holiday residence in Martinique than in Montreal. Deeply religious, her permanent tan, designer clothes and henna-tinted grey hair at times seemed vain, superficial affectations at odds with her firm-rooted nature, with all revolving around the church and family; but she looked well, and her age showed only with her slightly matronly bulk and resultantly slowed gait. Simone’s younger brother Raphaël, 15, now in 6
^th
Grade at Montreal’s top Catholic school, St Francis, where he shone at art and literature; but to his father’s concern he was poor at math, showed little future promise for business, and spent his every spare moment rollerblading or, in the winter, snow-boarding. They looked like any other new-moneyed Montreal family, probably more upper-middle than top drawer – until you got to the photos of Roman and the Lacaille family’s key enforcer, Frank Massenat, so often in Roman’s shadow. Then the underlying menace of the Lacaille family became evident.

Roman was four years younger than Jean-Paul and, while only two inches smaller at five-eight, looked shorter still due to his broadness and bulk. While Jean-Paul had been on the tennis court or jogging, Roman had been in the gym pumping iron or pummelling a punch-bag until he was ready to drop. He was known as ‘The Bull’, not just through his build, but because of his habit of keeping his head low and looking up at people, swaying it slightly as he weighed their words; a motion that would become more pronounced if he started to doubt or didn’t like what they were saying. He reminded people of a bull measuring a matador for attack – and there had been many horror stories of Roman striking out swiftly and unpredictably, head first, ending any potential argument or fight by caving in his opponent’s face.

Head and shoulders above Roman, Frank Massenat was a giant. Seven years ago, when he first joined the Lacailles, he was at the peak of physical condition, but a diet of salami and pastrami rolls, beer and rich cream-sauce meals had steadily mounted on the pounds, so that now he looked like a big lumbering bear with a beer pot. With his eyes heavily-bagged and jowls, he looked almost ten years older than his thirty-four years.

In contrast, Jon Larsen, the family’s Consiglieri and adviser for almost twenty years, would fit in well in a family wedding snap. Close to sixty, slim, now mostly bald with only a ring of grey hair, he could easily have passed for a family uncle or perhaps Jean-Paul’s older brother.

Michel’s gaze swung back to the photos of Jean-Paul. In the end, Jean-Paul always absorbed him most – not only because as the head of the organization that’s where his main focus should be – but because he never could quite work him out. At least with Roman and Frank, what you saw, you got.

Michel was a keen modern jazz fan, and he remembered once being surprised at seeing Jean-Paul Lacaille at the city’s main jazz club, ‘Biddle’s’ on Rue Aylmer. He later learnt that, indeed, Jean-Paul was a strong jazz aficionado, particularly of the new Latin jazz. Michel found it hard to separate in his mind this urbane, charming persona, now also presumably with good music tastes, from what he knew to be the cold-hearted, brutal reality. That here was a man who as easily as he smiled and nodded along with his guests in the jazz club, could with the same curt nod signal that a man be brutalised or his life taken. The two just didn’t sit comfortably together – though charming, smiling, socialite Jean-Paul was the image being pushed more and more these past few years, trying to convince everyone that he’d turned his back on crime and had become ‘legit’. Michel didn’t believe it for a minute.

Three photos Michel had purposely pinned to one side of the main spread. The three main losses of the Lacaille family: Pascal, Jean-Paul and Roman’s younger brother, shot dead five years ago at the age of thirty-eight, the tragic end result of a battle with the rival Cacchione family. Their father, Jean-Pierre, dead fourteen months later, many said of a broken rather than failed heart – Pascal had been his favourite. Then just three years ago, Jean-Paul’s second wife Stephanie after a long battle with breast cancer. The Lacailles had seen their fair share of tragedy these past years, reflected Michel; but even that Jean-Paul had sought to turn to advantage. He’d held up Pascal’s death like a banner as the main reason behind his decision to move the family away from crime. Jean-Paul was a consummate audience player, would have made a good politician. 

Michel rubbed his eyes. ‘When do you hope to hear from Arnaiz?’

‘Within a few hours. Certainly before lunch.’ Chac forced a tight smile. ‘Hopefully he might have something interesting this time.’

Michel nodded, but he doubted it. Chac was just trying to lift his spirits after the calamity with Savard. On the last five trips by Donatiens to Mexico – the trips to Cuba they hadn’t monitored – Enrique Arnaiz had turned up nothing. Arnaiz was a private investigator Chac had dug up from his old card file. The Federalis wouldn’t get involved unless or until Donatiens was seen with known drug associates or other criminals – so each time Arnaiz would have Donatiens followed and those he met with photographed for comparison with Federali files. Michel wasn’t hopeful of anything turning up this time either.

That was the other conundrum. Was Donatiens a clean-cut money-man only dealing with the Lacaille’s legitimate enterprises, or one of the sharpest and most efficient money-launderers they’d ever encountered?

‘What do you think, Chac? Is Donatiens what Jean-Paul keeps selling him as, the golden boy making good on his shiny new leaf as a legitimate businessman – or are his hands dirty along with the rest of them?’

Though the question had been posed before, with Savard gone Chac knew that it was now far more significant. He weighed his answer carefully. ‘On the surface at least he looks clean, however much that goes against the grain with the Lacaille’s past form. But from our point of view, I suppose it’s best if he is clean. If he’s in with the rest of them all the way, we’ll never get him to testify.’

‘That’s true.’ Michel voice was flat, nonchalant. He took a fresh breath. ‘Now all we’ve got to do is get him to turn his back on the love of his life and betray her entire family.’

‘Yeah, that’s all,’ Chac agreed drolly. Then, after a few seconds uneasy silence: ‘One thing we never did work out was what Donatiens was doing in the car the night Leduc was shot. The only time it looked like he might be getting his hands dirty.’

‘No, that we never did.’ Michel stayed staring contemplatively at the spread of photos ahead, as if they might magically provide the answer, and after a moment Chac left him alone with the Lacaille family and his thoughts.

He worked quickly and efficiently through the penthouse.

  He found a ventilation grill in the main en-suite bathroom to take one bug, the hollow base of a table lamp in the dining room, another. Then he paused, hard pushed for good places for the others: a lot of flat, smooth surfaces, minimalist furniture and décor.

  In the end he cut a tiny hole in the fabric beneath the main sofa and tucked a bug far to one side with one finger, did the same under the beds in all three bedrooms, then removed and clipped back a kitchen cabinet plinth to conceal the final room bug. The phone bugs, one in the drawing room and one in the bedroom, he put in place last.

  Carlo Funicelli stood for a moment in the middle of the apartment, looking from one extremity to the other, contemplating whether he’d left any dead sound areas. The guest bathroom and maybe the first yard of entrance corridor. Hopefully not too many vital, meaningful conversations would take place there.

Funicelli headed out and down the five floors in the elevator. The doorman gave him the same curt, disinterested nod as when he’d walked in; as he did with anyone who had a key and seemed to know where they were going. 

From his pre-break-in briefing, the keys had come courtesy of Simone Lacaille. Donatiens was too careful with his set. But she had a spare set to let herself in for when he was working late of a night she was due to come over; she might start preparing dinner for them or, if he’d been away for a few days, often she’d re-stock the fridge. Love. But she was careless with her set, often left them laying around. She regularly spent weekends at the Lacaille family home, particularly when her father arranged get-togethers, and it had been easy for Roman to grab the keys for a few hours to have them copied.

An hour and a half till the pre-designated time for him to call, Funicelli headed downtown and killed it having coffee and window-browsing in the underground Place Ville-Marie complex. It was too cold in the city to spend any length of time above ground. He called from a phone booth there rather than on his mobile, as instructed.

‘Yeah. City Desk.’ Roman Lacaille’s voice answering had a slight echo to it. He was leaning on the bar in their Sherbrooke club, a cavernous basement thirty metres square spread before him. The bar staff had all left long before the first twilight, the bar manager, Azy, after helping him go through the night’s till receipts, and the cleaners had just twenty minutes ago shut the door behind them. He was on his own.

‘It’s done. The place is live and kicking,’ Funicelli said.

‘When? When can we listen in?’ Roman’s tone was pushy, impatient.

‘Now. It’s already rolling. The receiving monitor’s set up only a few blocks away. Anything more than ten decibels sound and it’ll kick in, the tape will start rolling.

‘Great work. Give the Indian a cigar.’ Roman smiled. His pet names for Chenouda: Sitting Bull or Last of the Mohicans. He knew the last thing Chenouda would be getting right now was a cigar, unless he was bending over to receive it. With the Savard fiasco, maybe he should rename him Sitting Duck. ‘I’d like to go see the set-up some time, listen in. Probably best one evening. More action.’ Roman chuckled.

‘Yeah, sure. When?’

They arranged it for two evening’s time when Simone was next due to stay over, and signed off.

Roman looked thoughtfully at the club ahead after hanging up. At night it would be a sea of lithe, writhing naked bodies under wildly rotating crimson and blue penlight spots, heavy male hands eagerly reaching out to slip ten and twenty dollar bills into tangas or garters.

Up-market lap-dancing club, the last bastion of the Lacaille family’s past criminal empire. Five year’s back, they’d had associations with a chain of downtown and Lavalle clip joints and massage parlours rolling in big bucks. This now was the furthest Jean-Paul had decreed they should go with the flesh trade. But it was less drastic at least than his moves away from every other area – drugs, racketeering, loan-sharking, fencing; in those, he hadn’t even kept a foot in the door.

So after a decade and a half of making sure all of that ran and ran smoothly, this is what he was left with: counting the takings in a pussy club. Oh sure, they were opening another in six months and then there were the two night clubs and the restaurant. But it hardly compensated.

This squeaky-clean crusade might suit Jean-Paul, but little thought had been given to anyone else, especially him. But then Jean-Paul never had given him much thought; a tradition no doubt passed down from their father, Jean-Pierre. Pascal and Jean-Paul had always been his favourites. Now with Jean-Paul it was always Raphaël, Simone, John Larsen, roughly in that order, or, more recently, Donatiens. The new golden boy.

They all no doubt looked upon him as just a dumb ox, a muscle-headed old-school moustache Pete, and becoming more of a dinosaur by the day with Jean-Paul’s new business direction. Redundant.

Most of his life he’d spent in Jean-Paul’s shadow, but no more. He had more street-smarts than the lot of them put together, and the time to make his play couldn’t be riper. Though everything with Savard had gone well, half of it had been laid in his lap by the RCMP. The next stage with Donatiens wouldn’t be so easy.

The pressure mounted steadily through the day.

  Just before lunch, Maury Legault put his head round Michel’s door with the news that they’d found the van used with Savard, left abandoned in a Saint Hubert side-street.