Chapter 13 - Visiting Hours on Barton Street
The Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre—known across the province simply as the Barton Jail—rises like an iron-grey fortress of brutalist concrete out of the working-class streets of East Hamilton.
Built in the 1970s, it has no charm, no architectural grace, and no mercy. Its small, slit-like windows are covered with heavy steel mesh, and the high security walls are topped with rolls of razor wire that catch the blowing snow like tattered grey spiderwebs.
At ten o'clock on Wednesday morning, forty-eight hours after Bradley Vance’s arrest, the wind was howling down Barton Street with sub-zero ferocity.
I sat in Interview Room 3 of the professional visitation wing.
The room was nine feet square. The walls were painted that universal, sickening shade of municipal institutional green that seems designed to drain hope from a man’s eyes. A laminate table was bolted to the concrete floor, flanked by three plastic chairs. In the corner of the ceiling, a heavy dome camera hummed with a low, continuous electrical pulse.
The heavy steel door groaned on its hinges, and a correctional officer with a ring of heavy brass keys stepped aside.
“You’ve got twenty minutes, Mr. Wallace,” the guard said. “Keep your hands on the table.”
Richard Daniels shuffled into the room.
If I had passed him on King Street that morning, I would not have recognized the man who had stood at the front of the pavilion ten days ago, adjusting the silk lapels of his midnight-blue tuxedo while an imported string quartet played Bach behind him.
He was wearing the standard-issue orange polyester jumpsuit, three sizes too large, the sleeves bunched up around his wrists like dirty accordions. His white hair, which had been styled with expensive pomade on his daughter’s wedding day, hung in thin, greasy tufts over his ears. His face was mottled, grey-stubbled, and sunken around the cheekbones, and his hands—trembling with the violent, uncontrollable tremors of acute alcohol withdrawal and absolute terror—were clamped tightly against his stomach.
He didn't look at me as he sat down. He kept his eyes fixed on the metal rivets holding the laminate table together.
“You came,” Richard rasped. His voice sounded like dry gravel sliding down a chute. “Arthur said you wouldn't come.”
“Arthur was right,” I said. “I shouldn't have. But I wanted to look at you one last time, Richard, before the Crown transfers your file to the Regional Special Prosecutions office.”
Richard flinched. He looked up, his bloodshot, yellowed eyes darting toward the security camera in the corner before dropping back to the table. “Jerry... Jerry, you have to talk to the Crown attorney. You have to get me transferred to Maplehurst or the St. Lawrence facility. You have connections with the provincial cabinet—I know you do. You funded the Premier’s rural infrastructure task force!”
“I don't use my connections to help criminals evade the consequences of their theft, Richard,” I said coldly.
“They’re going to kill me, Jerry!” Richard suddenly lunged forward against the table, his handcuffs clattering against the metal edge with a sharp, violent ring. “You don't understand who Luc Desjardins represents! That two-point-eight million wasn't just a mezzanine debt. It was dry-cleaning money from the port operations in Montreal! They used Daniels Haulage because we had fifty-two bonded cross-border permits! If that paper trail hits the public registry during the bankruptcy hearing, they’ll put a contract on my life before I ever see the inside of a courtroom!”
I sat back in my chair, folding my arms across my wool chest.
“You should have thought about the port operations, Richard, before you bought your wife a three-hundred-thousand-dollar Bentley with money you borrowed from the mob.”
A pathetic, whimpering sob broke from Richard’s chest. He buried his face in his cuffed hands, his shoulders shaking. “It was Shelby... God help me, Jerry, it was Shelby and Marilyn. You don't know what it’s like living with them. Every month it was another club membership, another trip to St. Barts, another renovation on the house. If I didn't produce the money, Marilyn looked at me like I was a dead dog. When Caleb came along... when she found out his father was Jerry Wallace of Morris Supply... she thought we’d hit the jackpot. She told Shelby that once the wedding was done, you’d never let your daughter-in-law’s family go under. She said you were an old-school peasant who’d pay anything to keep the family name out of the papers!”
“She was wrong,” I said.
“I know!” Richard wept, tears running freely through the white bristles on his chin. “I know she was wrong! Jerry, they took the house yesterday. The bailiffs threw Marilyn out onto the sidewalk with three suitcases. She’s staying in a roadside motel on Highway 20. She doesn't even have a credit card that works. And Shelby... Shelby won't even take her calls from the hospital.”
I didn't answer. The air in the room was stale, heavy with the smell of cheap bleach and human misery.
“What do you want from me, Jerry?” Richard asked, looking up through his tears, his breath coming in shallow, wheezing gasps. “I gave Vance the passwords. I gave him the corporate ledger for Frontenac. I signed over every share of Daniels Haulage to StoneBridge for one dollar. What else is there?”
I leaned forward until my knuckles touched the cold laminate.
“I want the names of the five dispatchers at the Brampton cross-dock who were taking kickbacks to switch the trailer identification seals on the Montreal night runs,” I said.
Richard’s mouth opened slightly. “Jerry... if I give you those names, Desjardins will know the leak came from my desk.”
“Desjardins already knows the leak came from your desk, Richard,” I said. “The only difference is that if you give me those names right now, Arthur will file an emergency affidavit with the Ministry of the Attorney General requesting an immediate transfer to the Special Handling Unit at Millhaven under witness protection. If you don't give me those names, you stay right here in General Population at the Barton Jail. And you know better than I do who works the kitchen detail on Range Four.”
Richard’s face went the color of curdled milk.
He looked at the corner of the room, where the hum of the camera seemed to grow louder, filling the small box of green concrete with the sound of a closing trap. He reached out with his trembling right hand, his fingers clawing at the empty air as if he were trying to grasp a lifeline that wasn't there.
“There’s a notebook,” Richard whispered, his voice trembling so violently I had to lean close to catch the words. “It’s inside the false bottom of the tool chest in the maintenance bay at the Brampton yard. The red Snap-on box by Bay Twelve. The key is taped to the back of the air compressor tank.”
“Who wrote the entries?”
“Desjardins’ brother-in-law,” Richard whispered. “Every container number, every seal change, every cash payout to the customs brokers at Fort Erie. It’s all there, Jerry. Every dirty dollar since 2021.”
I stood up.
I pulled my wool cap from my pocket and pulled it down over my forehead.
“Arthur will be here with the transfer application at two o'clock,” I said, turning toward the heavy steel door.
“Jerry!”
I stopped, my hand resting on the iron latch.
Richard was looking at me, his eyes hollowed out by grief, fear, and forty years of hollow vanity that had finally collapsed into dust.
“How is Caleb?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Is the boy... is he all right?”
I looked back at the ruined man sitting in the orange jumpsuit beneath the cold fluorescent glare of the Barton Jail.
“Caleb has two raw hands and an aching back, Richard,” I said quietly. “He sleeps on a narrow cot in a five-hundred-dollar room, and he eats cold sandwiches out of a tin lunchbox on the loading dock. But when he lays his head down at night, he doesn't have to worry about who’s waiting for him in the shadows. He’s more of a man today than you ever were in your entire life.”
I knocked twice on the steel plate.
May you like
The lock clicked back, the door swung open with a heavy scrape of metal, and I walked out into the cold, clean air of the Hamilton morning, leaving Richard Daniels alone with the ghosts of the empire he had built upon sand.
***
