I’m pretty sure I know where to find out.”
“You do?” said Aikens querulously. “Pray, where?”
Jinnah snapped his notebook shut. God, he needed a cigarette. “The scene of the crime,” he said.
* * *
By the time Jinnah returned to Main and Terminal, the circus was breaking up. Most of the media had gone. So, mercifully, had the Reverend Hobbes. The CSU guys were finishing up. But the people who Jinnah wanted to talk to were there, of course. They lived there.
He looked at the small knots of people still hanging around the lawn. One was composed of emerging alcoholics, led by the bare-chested, well-muscled mule man who had challenged Graham. Another of older street people, chatting and leaning over the handles of their shopping carts the way people in the suburbs leaned over their fences to gossip. The third group was mostly younger people in faded and ripped jeans and T-shirts. Several were holding squeegees. Jinnah strolled up to them with what he thought was just the right mixture of casual coolness and understated authority.
“Gentlemen, ladies,” he said. “Making much money today?”
The half-dozen squeegee kids glared at Jinnah and fell silent.
“Did any of you know Thad?” asked Jinnah, keeping a verbal foot in the door.
A scrawny young man of about twenty, wearing a red bandanna that covered most of his long, greasy brown hair, turned to face Jinnah. A spokesman. Good. The rest watched as Red Bandanna challenged Jinnah.
“You a cop?” he demanded.
Jinnah laughed and fished his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “Do I look like one?” he said, offering his cigarettes.
Red Bandanna looked at the package suspiciously, hesitating. “These regulars or Mother Nature?”
“Sadly, just tobacco,” said Jinnah.
“We live in hope, man.”
Red Bandanna took one. So did a very thin, pale young woman who Jinnah took to be his girlfriend. Jinnah lit both their cigarettes.
“Was Thad a squeegee kid?” he asked.
Red Bandanna scowled. “Why you wanna know? You’re not a cop. You an undertaker?”
“No, I’m Hakeem Jinnah, crime reporter for the Tribune.” Jinnah had waved a red flag in front of Red Bandanna, who had his soap box ready.
“Why don’t you assholes in the corporate media tell the truth about what’s happening down here instead of parroting the fucking fascist cops who are owned and operated by the global money men who are ruining our planet, huh?”
Jinnah kept his face carefully neutral. Just as long as they didn’t identify him as the author of last month’s piece of fascist police propaganda, he might just get something out of this. Simultaneously, he wondered if he could claim expenses for two cigarettes.
“We can’t tell the truth if you don’t talk to us, my friend. For instance, I assume most of my colleagues in the corporate media will refer to Thad as a street person or a junkie. Is he either?”
“Labels!” spat Red Bandanna’s girlfriend through skinny, magenta lips. “Cut-price tags to put on a person so you can write them off as no loss. What does it mean?”
This was a little too esoteric for Jinnah to follow, so he kept roughly to the subject. “So are you saying you didn’t know Thad? That he wasn’t a squeegee kid?”
“He’d blown the scene, man,” said Red Bandanna. “He wasn’t one of us.”
“Ah, but he used to be. And was he a dealer or a user?”
“We don’t deal, asshole of the corporate media!”
“Look, I don’t give a shit if he was either,” said Jinnah sharply. “He was a human being and he didn’t deserve to end up under a tree with his head cut off.”
This took Red Bandanna aback for a second. Girlfriend stepped up to the plate. “He wasn’t around much. So don’t try and label him.”
“I just want to know a little bit about him, as a person,” persisted Jinnah. “Was he part of a gang or something?”
“We don’t have gangs, apologist for the state!” Red Bandanna had recovered. “We’re like a family down here.”
Jinnah found this rich. Well, as long as they pretended to be a nuclear family, he might as well drop the bomb on them. He flipped open his notebook to the sketch of the marks on Thad’s cheeks. “So what’s this then? The family coat of arms?”
Red Bandanna and Girlfriend could not hide the look of surprise and fear that flickered briefly across their faces and was mirrored in the rest of the gang. They recovered their collective cool quickly, however. “What’s that? Your night school art project?”
“It was found on Thad’s cheeks. Know whose sign it is?”
“Look, fuck off, media puppet,” shouted Girlfriend. “You’re scaring away business.”
“Yeah. Beat it,” added Red Bandanna, flicking Jinnah’s cigarette back at him.
Jinnah beat it. He didn’t know what he had, but he knew it was hot. Had to be to scare this group. Lines on paper that scared people. That was Jinnah’s job, often as not. It was time to put the fear of God into city desk.
* * *
“He was marked for death. In an exclusive Tribune report, we reveal how a deadly new gang has staked its turf on Vancouver’s mean streets by decapitating a young man from a good family.”
Jinnah’s editor antennae twitched, twisting ever so slightly to catch the subtle signals issuing from Dick Whiteman’s mouth; anything in his tone or facial expression that suggested approval or disapproval. It had been so much easier under Whiteman’s predecessor, Conway Blacklock, who could not hide the contempt in his voice as he read every story. But at least Connie had given the game away by the degree of derision with which he proofed the promo cards to be dropped into Tribune news boxes in advance of an exclusive. Whiteman wasn’t like that. He was the king of deadpan, a man who made Buster Keaton look like Jim Carrey. If he hadn’t been an editor-in-chief he could have made his fortune as a poker player. At the moment, Jinnah had no idea if the promo he’d filed suited Whiteman or not.
“It’s all ours, chief. Exclusive,” Jinnah ventured.
Whiteman turned his pale, blue grey eyes on Jinnah and stared right through his imitation silk shirt, past his gold, zodiac medallion (Aries), and even his African rug into a region uncomfortably close to his heart, where Hakeem did some of his finest writing.
“A chilling tale of callous murder almost unparalleled in Vancouver history.”
Whiteman’s delivery was as deadpan as his face. Since he’d only lived in Vancouver for three months his grasp of local history was somewhat shaky. Jinnah’s own history with Whiteman was too hit-and-miss to form a definitive analysis of the situation.
“You
