The Last Tram on Dorchester Street: A Montréal Murder Mystery

By John Charles Gifford

In the heart of Montreal in 1953, private investigator Eddie Wade witnesses the brutal late-night murder of Saul Blumenthal, a Jewish German immigrant. The police suddenly and mysteriously close the case on this unsolved murder in less than twenty-four hours. Smelling a rat, Eddie decides to investigate and find justice for the victim.
But Eddie soon lands in the center of a miasma of deception and ruthlessness where the edge between justice and revenge is blurred and the threshold leading to redemption is only a faint hope. Deep and brooding secrets lurk in Montreals Mile End neighborhood, and as Eddie discovers more about the victim and his past, he must confront the darkness that lies within his own soul.
With the facts adding up to an unexpected conclusion, Eddie realizes that more than just his investigation is at stake. Someones got it in for him, and Eddie had better tread carefully or he may be the next one put on ice.
Written in the tradition of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, Eddie Wade follows in the footsteps of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Mike Hammer in The Last Tram on Dorchester Street.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475981964

John Charles Gifford

John Charles Gifford earned two degrees from the University of Minnesota, served in the Peace Corps in the Republic of Liberia, and taught high school for twenty-eight years in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He currently lives and writes full-time in Saint-Hubert, Quebec. Lovingate is his ninth novel and the fourth book in the Montreal Murder Mystery series.

Book preview

Prologue

Montreal, 1953

Montreal is a jagged dream of concrete and steel. Turn a corner, any corner, and you’re there.

It’s a city fearful of its past and uncertain about its future. Take a long walk into its center or to its dismal and frayed edges, and it’s a subterranean journey of hacked-out faces and shattered traces of nightmare fears; a long-lost dreamscape of broken hands reaching above them or beyond them but always sinking into garbage-can alleyways and midnight gutters.

Walk slowly or swiftly or linger. It doesn’t matter. Death and violence are there, skulking and prowling its streets. They’re easy commodities to buy and sell in this city of cheap two-bit hotel rooms and glitzy strip clubs where the tentative and the desperate rub shoulders over gin and tonic.

It’s a world of shadows and secret laughter of neon jazz con men with beaten and worn-out women who stare with vacant eyes. Watch its dark streets burst into fragments of electric flames that stretch out in front of you and to the sides of you and behind you like wounds slashed into the night.

The city’s a cruel and psychedelic carousel spinning you around, a house of divided mirrors playing deceitful jokes on you. Across the rooftops and down the roaring avenues, the night sneers and grows impatient and restless.

Chapter 1

At 1:15 on Wednesday morning, I waited for the last tram out of downtown Montreal, heading for my office in the Mile End area of the city. My name is Bonifacio Edmondo Wade, and I’m a private investigator licensed by the province of Quebec. I’m thirty-three years old, never married, and live in the back room of my office. I go by the name of Eddie.

It was cold for an October. The bleakness and frigid weather of Quebec winters came unexpectedly this year. The sky was black, and the air was still and bitter. There were large patches of ice on the sidewalks and streets from a drizzle the previous day, before the temperature tumbled, making the walking slow and treacherous. After the gin mills closed, the hospital emergency rooms would be filled with drunks with broken wrists and noses and concussions. Bad luck on a bad day.

I had walked past the city’s endless frosted storefront windows, taking short careful steps while blowing streams of vapor through my nose, which had begun to sting and become numb. I pulled my snap brim down low on my forehead and pushed my coat collar up to protect my ears from the cold. But it was the dampness that was the real killer.

Earlier, my friend Angel and I had caught the last show at the Folies Bergeres on boulevard Saint-Laurent, better known as the Main, just below rue Sainte-Catherine, and then stopped at the Chic-N-Coop for some spareribs. We were both feeling a bit giddy, so on our way out we stopped and drew a heart with our names in the center on the Coop’s steamy front window just for the hell of it. I looked back as I opened the door for Angel and saw the manager behind the cash register looking at us. He shook his head and gave us a crooked smile. The cigarette between his lips jerked back and forth.

Angel wanted me to stay the night at her place, which was fine with me, but I had to say no. I had just finished a fraud case for the London Life Insurance Company the day before and needed to type up the final report and get it to the company. I wanted to get an early start the next day, and if I stayed with Angel, I knew we’d be up all night. I also wanted to start an investigation that I’d been holding back on. Eight years before, a woman had been killed by a getaway car during a police chase after a liquor-store heist. The police had investigated the case for a time, but after they went through their leads, they hung the case out to dry, relegating it to their open but unsolved file drawer. I don’t especially like being my own client because the pay is lousy, but sometimes I make an exception. I knew the woman. She deserved more than just a file drawer.

I walked Angel to her place at the Marlborough Apartments in Milton Park, a classy area of town not far from McGill University. I gave her a little peck on the lips by the front door and waited until I saw her apartment on the second floor light up and her waving at me at the window, and then I doubled back to catch the number 65 tram on rue Dorchester, hoping to be in bed by 2:30.

In case you think I don’t own a car, I do. I have a black 1950 Ford coupe with a chrome grille that frowns at me on occasion, depending on its mood. In the center of the grille is a red eight, meaning that the engine is a V8. It’s in good shape with low mileage, and I want to keep it that way. Car theft is a big business in the city, so I don’t usually leave it parked downtown by itself at night if I can help it. Besides, the tram is reliable and gets you where you want to go. Thinking back on that morning and what came after it, maybe I should have used my car after all.

I waited alone at the corner of Bleury and Dorchester for the tram, hoping I hadn’t missed it. My hands were deep in the pockets of my overcoat, and I was stomping my feet in place to encourage a little circulation. I didn’t have to wait long. The tram squealed to a stop as air entered the brake lines. At that time of the morning—or night, depending on how you want to look at it—it wasn’t crowded. There were only three passengers on the tram, two men and a woman. One of the men sat directly behind the motorman in a long seat that could have accommodated three other passengers with elbow room, facing the aisle under a No Spitting sign. I walked by him. He looked to be in his fifties with graying hair combed back and not parted. He had a look on his face as if he had just lost the family savings at the roulette wheel and had to go home to tell his wife about it. He was staring at his knees, his hat pushed up on his lap.

The woman had a deadpan look on her face and didn’t pay any attention to me either. I pegged her for a cleaning lady by the way she was dressed. The gray coat looked too thin for this weather, and the brown dress, which looked like a uniform, stuck out below the coat and had dark stains around its frayed hem. But her shoes were a dead giveaway—black, boxy, and dirty. She was probably going home to her husband and children who were all tucked in nicely in their warm beds. Her eyes were slits.

A guy who was parked a couple of seats away from her had the washed-out look of someone who had had too much to drink. I wondered whom he was going home to. He teetered sideways with his eyes shut as I passed by. I stopped to catch him, but he caught himself with a sudden jerk. His eyes never opened. I went to the back of the tram and sat in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped seat by myself. I took off my hat and filled my pipe and began puffing away, trying to keep my hands warm with the bowl.

The motorman shifted a steel lever in front of him, allowing air to escape the brake lines as the tram made its way up Dorchester and then turned left on rue Saint-Urbain. When you enter a tram that’s filled to the brim with standing room only, it seems claustrophobically small. It’s all hats and shoulders, stale breath, and weary faces devoid of expression. When the tram’s nearly empty, as it was then, it’s like being the third or fourth person to step into the Montreal Forum before a Canadiens’ game. You feel hollow and displaced at first but at the same time full of anticipation about whom you might see there and what crazy things can happen.

The tram crossed Sainte-Catherine, Maisonneuve, and Sherbrooke. The motion of the tram can easily put you to sleep if you’re already tired. It’s massaging and lulls you into your own little isolated world. The steel wheels grating on the rails, the rhythmic sounds of clump-clump-clump, the jerking of the car, the occasional bell. It’s a recurring symphony. It’s calming and soothing and reassuring. It gives you the false impression that you’re safe in the world. From the rear of the car, I watched the heads of the passengers jerking from side to side. Then there was a piercing squeal as the motorman moved the lever again, allowing air to reenter the brake lines, and the tram came to a smooth stop on rue Milton for another passenger.

I was dead tired because it had been a long day, so I leaned back in the seat and stretched my legs out with one shoe resting on the other. I relaxed and continued to smoke my pipe. I changed hands every so often so the bowl could keep them both warm. I noticed a gleam of light on my shoulder that shot ahead and reflected off the chrome on the backs of the seats and the hand railings in front of me. I turned around. Through the condensation on the window, I could see the headlights of a car just behind us. I wiped a circle in the window with my fist and saw a Metro Taxi sign on the roof with wide metal stripes down the hood and the amber Indian head of a Pontiac in the diffused light. I turned around again and tried to clear my head of the previous day’s business, but I kept coming back to the woman who was hit by the getaway car. You know how that goes. The more you open the door and try to empty your mind, the more things pile in. Eight years is a long time to decide whether to investigate a case, especially when I wasn’t going to be paid for it. But I had my reasons. I couldn’t get her out of my mind, and I recently decided that I wasn’t going to put the case to rest until I found out who had killed her.

What happened next would not only change the direction of my own life, but would irrevocably change the lives of countless other people as well.

I looked up and caught sight of the motorman as he opened the two doors that folded back from each other. He was looking at something to his front and left, away from the door. My eyes then moved to the older man who sat behind the motorman. He was looking toward the door. His face was a mixture of surprise and confusion, the kind of look that a person has when he suddenly sees someone he knows well but doesn’t much like and was not expecting to see at that moment. I turned my head slightly, trying to see out the window to his right, but it was foggy, so I couldn’t see much. As I did that, I heard a gunshot ring out. And then three more. There was a pause after each shot, and I heard a voice in between them, but I was too far from the front to hear the words.

I went down on my knees and took cover behind the seat in front of me while looking over the top for the gunman. As I did so, I knocked my pipe against the seat, and it went flying, spreading hot ashes onto the floor. There was no one to see. I stood up and leaned toward a side window, and wiped it with the palm of my hand. My vision was blurred by the condensation, but I saw a man with a long overcoat and fedora running down rue Milton. My eyes followed him until his silhouette disappeared behind the side of a brick building.

My .45 semiautomatic was holstered under my left arm, and I thought about running after him, but my attention quickly focused on the old guy behind the motorman. He was slumped over on his right side. I ran down the aisle toward him, passing the other two passengers. I lifted one of his wrists with one hand and checked his pulse with the other, placing my fingers just below his palm. Then I placed two fingers on the side of his neck just below the jawline on the carotid artery. There was no pulse. I opened his overcoat. He was wearing a gray pinstriped suit and a white shirt with an ugly purple tie, the end of which was hanging over the seat. There were four bullet holes in his chest. His face had the same expression as when he was alive a few minutes before. His eyes were fixed across the aisle on a sign that advertised Nehi Beverages—Your Favorite Drink In Your Favorite Flavor.

I looked down at my hands and saw his blood on them. The acrid, smoky smell that the gun left behind lingered in the tram and made my nose twitch. My ears had a slight ringing sensation in them. I looked at the old guy again. I wasn’t about to complain.

The first impulse that most people have who witness a violent death is to turn away from it to safeguard their souls from its sight. I’ve seen too much violent death in my life for it to matter much anymore. I imagine my soul’s in pretty tough shape.

The other two passengers were wide awake and standing halfway in the aisle looking bewildered, trying to figure out what just happened. Their faces looked as if they had just awakened to a nightmare, which I supposed they had. The woman started to scream when she saw the stiff, holding her head and shaking it back and forth. I went to her to calm her down because my tolerance for screaming women is pretty low. I looked over at the other passenger; he seemed frozen in time, his wide eyes fixed on the dead man with his jaw hanging open. I wasn’t going to get any help from him.

The motorman was up and heading toward us, so I left him to calm the woman down. That’s what he gets paid for. He was a large man and by his looks, close to retirement. The ringing in my ears and the screams of the woman were beginning to annoy me, but I kept my composure. That’s what I get paid for.

I ran up rue Saint-Urbain one block to a corner phone booth and called the police.

Chapter 2

In my line of work, I’m rarely at a crime scene just after a crime has been committed. I usually pick up the debris long afterward, working my way back into ancient history to see how the pieces of the wreckage of someone’s life fit together. Those normal people you pass by on the street, the ones with passive expressions, good looks, and nice bank accounts—they’re all my prospective clients. Their passions are restrained just above the façade, dripping like water, creating hairline fissures that take years or decades to deepen, and then drip by drip, the veneer splits, and they end up in front of my desk, spilling their guts with their alcohol breath, nervous twitches, and check books.

This crime scene, however, was different. I witnessed a cold-blooded murder. Although I didn’t have much to tell the police besides the vague description of the gunman and the direction in which he ran, I decided to stick around as a cooperative witness. I’m not sure I had a choice. Besides, I wanted to see how this would all play out. Crime scenes are interesting creatures in their own right. They all have a story to tell, but the chapters are sometimes scattered and illusive.

Two police cars blocked the middle of the intersection of Saint-Urbain and Milton, cutting off traffic. With the cherry top lights rotating on their roofs, red streams of light swept across everything within their range—people, brick buildings, shop windows, and other vehicles—shrouding everything with the eerie pall of death.

A uniformed officer had told me to stand by one of the police cars along with the other three witnesses. The screamer had stopped screaming but was nervous and digging in her purse for something. The motorman and the other male passenger stood with their hands in their pockets, taking in the activity. The same officer had taken down our names and addresses and left to do crowd control. Only a few people had gathered. They were probably from nearby apartments and heard the shots or the noise of the crime-scene activity and saw the lights and came down, curious to find out what had happened.

I watched the police as they did what I assumed police usually do at crime scenes. Perfectly choreographed, the officers looked steady and controlled like stage actors who had rehearsed a play for months and were now performing on opening night. They worked the crime scene briskly but carefully, blowing plumes of vapor into the crisp air. I was impressed.

Two reporters, one thin and tall under his topcoat, the other thin and short in a black leather bomber jacket, had press cards sticking out of the bands of their fedoras and stood off to the side, watching the activities and making hushed comments to each other. I rubbed my hands together and did a little dance, trying to stay warm. The other witnesses saw me and did the same thing. This was January weather in October. Last week it had been Indian summer, and I was wearing short sleeves. But the weather had dropped more than a couple of notches in the last few days and surprised us all, not giving our bodies time enough to acclimate, so we were colder than what we should have been.

I noticed Max Drummond standing at the tram with one shoe on the step and one hand on the door as if he were about to board. He was talking to one of the uniforms, blowing clouds of smoke from the cigarette between his lips that bobbed up and down as he spoke. Drummond was the chief muckety-muck of homicide, and it was well known by his colleagues in the department that he was ambitious for the job of chief of police. He was of average size but looked bigger and more authoritative in his oversized topcoat against his uniforms. His face was average looking, as was his intellect, and he could easily disappear into a crowd of people if it weren’t for his position on the force. If Mayor Houde ever wanted an average police chief, he would find one in Max Drummond.

His brown fedora was pulled down on his head, and a dark maroon scarf was tucked in at the collar. He turned in my direction and eyeballed me while he talked away. His look could have sent me reeling into the ropes. I smiled and gave him a short, polite half wave. He continued to throw combination punches at me with his eyes as he cupped his cigarette with his hand and puffed away. He didn’t acknowledge the smile or the wave.

A third police car drove up and parked. Four uniforms got out and walked over to him. They talked for a few minutes, and then Drummond led them down rue Milton where I saw the gunman flee not more than forty-five minutes ago.

You’ve probably guessed by now that Max Drummond doesn’t hold me in high regard. It’s nothing personal though. He hates all private investigators. He once told me to my face that I was sneaky and had a big nose that I insisted putting where it didn’t belong. He’s probably right on that account. He also believes I failed the police exam, and I’m now playing at being a detective because that’s as close to the department as I’ll ever get in this lifetime. He’s dead wrong on that account. He had delivered a low blow with that, but I never cried foul. I take his jabs gracefully, knowing that one day he’ll leave himself open, and I’ll land a knockout punch. He used to watch me fight at the Forum before the war when he was a patrol officer on rue Sainte-Catherine, so he knows that I have a pretty decent right cross.

I was standing about ten feet away from the tram and could see flashes of light through the windows as the police photographer took a variety of shots of the body. I saw half of him from the waist up as he held the camera close to his face and leaned in. Then he squatted down and disappeared, and I could see the flash go off. Then he was up again for another angle. He worked the body that way for another ten minutes. By that time, the small crowd that had formed at the scene before the police had gotten there had grown larger. The funny thing about crowds is how they appear so fast out of nowhere like dozens of jack-in-the-boxes popping up erratically.

The sound of a car caught my attention, so I looked behind me and saw a late-model green Chevy pull over a little ways outside the barrier the police had set up. A short, fat man got out and trotted in my direction, a trail of cigar smoke drifting over his right shoulder. It was Jake Asher. Jake had the night watch at the Gazette monitoring the police radio. I was surprised he hadn’t already been there. He caught sight of me and slowed down to a walk, but an officer told him to stay back. When the officer left, I managed to maneuver myself over to him.

Jesus, Eddie, what happened? he asked, chewing on his stogy and looking around.

You’re a little late, Jake, I said, nodding in the direction of the reporters from the other papers.

I had to take a piss. The goddamn pisser’s a mile away from my desk. That’s when the first call must have come in. I didn’t catch on until there was more chatter about a shooting. Next time, I’ll put a coffee can under my desk. How come you’re here?

I gave him the short version of what had happened, looking over my shoulder now and again. Jake listened, nodding his head, squinting his eyes, and puffing on his stogy, taking it all in. As a witness who hadn’t yet given an official statement to the police, I shouldn’t have been talking to the press. The other reporters had been isolated and would have to wait until a police official gave them a statement, probably from Drummond himself. I like to follow the rules when I can, but no one told me not to.

So you didn’t see the guy who greased him? Jake asked,