Grand Trunk and Shearer, page 1
GRAND TRUNK
AND SHEARER
A D’Arcy Kennedy Crime Novel
Ian Truman
PRAISE FOR GRAND TRUNK AND SHEARER
“D’Arcy Kennedy’s search for his brother’s killer is a gut-wrenching trip into a world of people left behind by gentrification, forgotten by changing politics and trying to hang onto what little family they have left. It’s authentic, it’s raw, and it’s got heart. It’s a trip worth taking.”—John McFetridge, author of A Little More Free
PRAISE FOR IAN TRUMAN
“The Factory Line captures an entertaining voice in a highly readable manner which relays the exploits of some blue collar factory workers over the course of a day.” —Brian Lindenmuth, Spinetingler Magazine
“Truman has an incredible ear for dialogue…There aren’t two pens like [his] in the writing business.”—Benoit Lelièvre, Dead End Follies
“Truman’s A Teenage Suicide follows a group of friends working through late adulthood issues of identity, depression, and lots of tough choices. Set in and around Montreal and in particular its punk, art, activist and student scenes, its down-to-earth raconteur style provides an enduring snapshot of young-adult life in the big city today.” —Expozine Awards
Copyright 2016 by Ian Truman
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Down & Out Books
3959 Van Dyke Road, Suite 265
Lutz, FL 33558
DownAndOutBooks.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover design by Collective Narcolepsy—Mtl.
Photo by Rocky33
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Grand Trunk and Shearer
Also by Ian Truman
About the Author
Other Titles from Down & Out Books
Preview of Jen Conley’s Cannibals: Stories from the Edge of the Pine Barrens
Preview of Jerry Kennealy’s Screen Test
Preview of Frank De Blase’s A Cougar’s Kiss
With exceptional thanks to Benoit Lelièvre.
Chapter 1
“Hey, yo,” the voice said on the phone. It was Phil calling me at five o’clock in the morning. “Cillian’s in the canal.”
What the fuck was going on? I didn’t know. “You mean he’s swimming in the canal?” I replied, wondering if my brother was acting fourteen again. I sat on the edge of my bed, ran a hand through my hair, scratched my beard. I hadn’t slept all that much and Phil had better have a good reason for calling me.
“No, I don’t mean swimming. I mean, he’s dead in the canal.”
I didn’t believe that my brother was floating in the canal, partly because no one had dumped a body in the canal in the last ten, maybe fifteen years. You just didn’t see that anymore. Another part of me didn’t believe Phil because he had once called me in the middle of the night saying he had fucked Lady Gaga.
“It’s no shit,” he had told me. You could almost smell the whiskey over the phone. Agreed, Phil did work a shift here and there for the big touring shows coming through the city, so it was not entirely impossible. But, the thing was, Lady Gaga made terrible music but she was way too hot for a guy like Phil. Plus, she was on tour in Scandinavia that day. We actually checked online.
It turned out he had fucked a five-three hipster chick, good for him, but that didn’t make it Lady Gaga. You had to check the details with Phil.
“What the hell are you saying? What are you talking about he’s dead? He’s probably at Annie’s house, or Isabel or whoever he’s been fucking these days.”
“I’m telling you, the police are here and everything. They got boats and shit in the water. There’s a crowd now, D’Arcy. They pushed us back, but I saw him, man. I saw him before they pushed around the corner. Cillian got stuck in the pillars under the bridge by Des Seigneurs Street.”
“The police are there?”
“Trying to fish him out as we speak.”
“You home from the graveyard shift?”
“Yeah.”
“Drank much?”
“Fuck you! Get over here ASAP.”
“This better not be a joke, Phil, because if it is I will break your teeth with a hammer.”
“Why would I joke on something like this?”
I didn’t have anything to reply to that. Phil was a fucking idiot, but he was also a decent fucking idiot. What the hell was this all about, I was still too groggy to know.
“Alright, give me five minutes.”
“You gonna tell your ma?” he asked.
“Not until I see it for myself. Where are you now?”
“Saint-Patrick and Shearer,” he replied. That was four blocks away from my house.
“I’m on my way,” I said as I got up. “You better not be shitting me,” I added.
“It ain’t.”
“Alright.”
I didn’t know what to think. I would have been surprised if anybody had been found in the canal. You heard your uncles talk about shit like that. It didn’t happen anymore. Regardless, the prospect of my brother being dead, however improbable it might be, was something worth getting up for, even at five in the morning.
So I put on my camo shorts, then the same black T-shirt I had taken off a few hours earlier. It still reeked of beer and cigarettes.
“Shit,” I said, but I was too lazy to pick up a clean one from my drawer. I put on my poor boy hat and walked out the bedroom.
The kitchen was a mess with dirty dishes, pots and pans filling up the sink well beyond its capacity. The curtains were drawn, I forgot to take out the trash again and the August heat had been working the leftovers.
I pulled out the bag from the can, opened the back door and threw the garbage in the corner of my balcony. Garbage day wasn’t for another two days. I opened the kitchen window, put on my shoes and walked out.
The plastic chairs were full of rainwater from last night. The ashtray next to it was full of mud that was made out of ash and rain and beer. My mother had left one of her books on a small table next to her chair and the pages had swollen. I couldn’t help but think she’d be sad about that, tried to open it so the pages would dry. And then I stopped myself. Hey, Cillian’s in the canal, let me dry up the pages to this book here. Why would Ma care about the book if the news turned out to be true?
I felt like I should hurry up but the time of the day warranted a quick stop on Centre Street for coffee and something to eat before I could handle any bad news.
I walked across our small yard, up my dark alley, up front to the wooden gate. It was old and all crooked. You had to push it hard in order to get the lock off of it. I struggled with it, more than usual. An old chip of red paint came off it and tumbled to the ground next to the dozen that were already there.
It’s got me thinking, like it did every time, that Dad had said he’d fix this shit before he left over a decade ago. For some reason, I could have mustered the will power to get it done that morning. I saw myself walking into a hardware store, get some thinner and some paint, or a whole new set of planks. Why not get everything done before Ma would get up? That would have been fucking nice. But then I sighed and pushed the door open.
I exited on Shearer and walked north to Centre Street. I didn’t know if I actually expected anything to be open at this hour. Even Tim Horton’s wasn’t 24/7 but luckily for me, the local café had just opened minutes before I got there.
“Bonjour. Hi,” the waitress said as she was still preparing her day.
“Hi.”
“What can I get you?”
“Got anything to go in a minute,” I asked.
She looked back at her kitchen. “Not really. Nothing’s ready yet.”
“Coffee ready?”
She looked at the machine, then said, “Enough for a cup, yeah.”
“Just coffee then.”
“To go?”
“To go.”
She turned around, poured my cup of joe in a white Styrofoam cup.
“Milk and sugar?” she asked without turning around.
“Two milk, two sugars.”
“So double, double,” she said.
“I refuse to use the term double-double,” I replied. She smiled.
“I wonder what’s the commotion about over at Saint-Patrick.”
“I don’t know. Some people eager to relive the good old days in the Pointe,” I replied.
“You going over there aren’t you?” she dared.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Funny,” she said as she handed me my cup. “Didn’t pin you for the nosey type.”
“We all have our days,” I said. I tipped her a buck. I walked out of there, took a sip on the sidewalk. It was too hot to drink yet.
Centre Street was nearly deserted. Only a few unlucky Saturday drivers were starting their shifts here and there. Most of them were to deliver food or restaurant supplies. The occasional UPS or Purolator truck headed for Wellington, and then downtown, that was it.
The city of Montreal was still asleep, or at
I got this bad feeling in the back of my head that Cillian Kennedy, my brother, could actually have gotten himself in enough trouble to end up dead in the canal. After all, I hadn’t seen him all that much these last few weeks. Who was I to know what he had been up to?
Cillian had indeed been a troublemaker. I had met way, way worst troublemakers in my life. Hell, Cillian would be considered a saint in this neighbourhood. I would never believe he’d do something bad enough that someone would kill him off like that, not Cillian. Fucking a guy’s girlfriend, that was his style, nothing else. And you might hit a jealous husband every once in a while, but most of the time, you end up in a brawl, nothing more.
My breath got short, I felt deaf all of a sudden. I had this heat flash running through my spine and I started thinking: jealousy, fights, drugs, random gang violence, wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time kind of thing. And here I was, having coffee like I was simply going to work, like it was just another weekday.
Fuck!
I headed north on Shearer and it took no time for me to notice the yellow tape and a few cop cars with their lights turned on. A dozen people or so had walked out in their pyjamas, wondering what was happening.
There were welfare moms in their night robes, barely concealing their fat bellies and ample breasts. One guy was standing shirtless on his balcony, looking over to the canal to see if he could spot anything.
No doubt, the event would fuel the gossip around the neighbourhood for the weeks, months or maybe even years to come.
Among the flock of poor folks that had been born, bred and lived their entire lives in the Pointe were the few odd urban professionals that had bought a condo in one of the factories that used to provide work for the rest of us. They looked out of place. They felt out of place. But they bought the motherfucker, now they had to live with it.
“D’Arcy,” someone shouted. I spotted Phil in the crowd, waving his hands from a distance. “D’Arcy. Over here.”
I caught up to him next to the police line. I shook his hand and said, “Hey, man.”
“I saw him, man. Right over there.” He pointed towards the canal. You never saw Phil panic. He just didn’t do that. But that morning, he almost did. That much made me worry.
“Where’s the body?” I asked a nearby cop.
He was startled at first but then replied coldly, “I’m not at liberty to discuss any details of the operation, sir.”
“Hey, look at my face. Look here,” I insisted. He was pissed, but fuck him. “Where’s the fucking body?”
“C’est son frère,” Phil added. “Je l’ai vu en bas, criss. J’te jure je l’ai vu en bas.”
The cop wasn’t convinced.
“Sir, please,” I said.
“Alright.” He took his CB. “Sergeant à 1429.”
“Oui,” the CB screamed.
“J’ai quelqu’un ici qui prétend connaître la victime.”
“J’arrive.”
The sergeant showed up three minutes later. Looked at me and Phil, but mostly me.
“C’est toi qui a vu la victime dans l’eau?” he asked Phil.
“Exact.”
“And you, sir, what’s your last name.” He was looking at his notes.
“Kennedy,” I said. He looked up from his pad. That meant bad news.
He almost replied, but then no words came out of his mouth. He decided it was best not to speak. Not here. He looked at me with as much fake compassion as he could muster and said, “If you would come with me, sir.”
I was fucked. No need to see the body. I fucking knew it. He lifted the yellow tape, I slid under. He took me twenty yards inside or so, by the corner of Des Seigneurs and the bridge. It was fucking weird, the yellow tape and the crowd out at five in the morning.
They were just around the corner but the wind blew through the leaves of the trees in the small park and the building sheltered us from the crowd. It was like the entire city was there around the corner but you could only head them as an echo. Even the cops were quiet, felt quiet. Hell, you could hear the water splash against the cement walls of the canal.
There was an ambulance near the entrance on the other side, forty cops or so and a bunch of camera crews on the north end. Half a dozen reporters lined up in front of them.
The cop next to me waved at someone down by the pillars. A young officer in a suit and tie was coming out of a small harbour unit in the canal while swimmers were packing up their gear behind him. He climbed a ladder up to the bridge. He traded a few words with another inspector. There was a second boat on the other side of the drawback. They started the engine, headed out for the old port.
“Who is this now?” the inspector asked as he was walking over. No one replied. “Oh,” he added when he was close enough.
Shit!
He took a good look at me. Five-eleven, strong build, freckles, heavily tattooed. “Can I please see some ID, sir.” I took out my driver’s licence.
“My brother’s back there, isn’t he?” I asked.
He took a quick glance at my licence, one glance at my face and said, “Mr. Kennedy. I think we better find some place quiet.”
Chapter 2
I spent a couple hours at Headquarters downtown. They had taken me there, offered me coffee, said they’d be back as soon as possible. I waited there a long time if you ask me. Long enough for two people on two different shifts to offer me coffee. I found that funny even though it wasn’t. There I was, sitting in an office with two fucking coffees and no brother. There must have been some irony to that.
I didn’t cry when I saw my brother dead on a stretcher. Something inside me turned cold, I can’t explain it. They had pronounced him dead the moment they fished him out. The ambulance was not going to carry him to any hospital. There was no need for a hospital. Everyone was just waiting for an unmarked, blue coroner van to get here and take him to the morgue. I was there the whole time and I watched it happen the same way you watch an episode of CSI.
I thought it should hit me anytime now. I was going to just collapse, cry, shake…anything. Nothing. The worst is that it didn’t fuck me up. It wasn’t like I was worried by my lack of reaction. I was just tense and nothing else.
“Has your brother been involved in any criminal activities,” the investigator asked me after he finally walked back in. It was the same young officer who was at the canal. I expected an older cop, I don’t know why, but I got stuck with the newbie.
He and some blue had taken me to headquarters in a civilian car, asked me if I’d like to stop by my house first. They asked me if I had anything I needed to pick up or something I had to do before going on with the proceedings.
“I’m good,” I replied coldly. So they started the car.
They U-turned on Canal Street. The cops opened the bridge for us. We headed north, passed Basin onto Williams, took a left, then picked Ottawa at the Y intersection. Constructions sites and empty lots filled the view on my left. Soon the whole place would be filled with condos. On the other side, rows and rows of warehouses were there to remind everyone that this was still a working class part of town.
Passed the firehouse, the first few high-risers appeared. By the time we reached the underpass, we were downtown. The cop took a left on Duke and we sank into the Ville-Marie tunnel. The bright, early, sunlight made way for the narrow walls and yellow floods of the tunnel. Then the one lane we were in opened instantaneously to five for as far as the eye could see.
Traffic was light. The ride was short. A few hundred metres later, the Saint-Laurent exit appeared. We circled over the highway, headed for the main. The homeless still owned the whole of Viger Square and the Peace Park. It was too early for most commuters. The city was quiet.
Five minutes later we had reached the headquarters’ parking lot. They drove up to the back door. The inspector got out with me while the blue went to park the car.
