by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

François spins his wheelchair down the concrete balcony of his city-subsidized housing unit to the spot where, on May 7, he watched a mad parade of TV trucks and police reverse the eerie silence that had reigned for months next door.

“I hadn’t seen the guy who lived there since just after New Year’s,” he says. “Nobody really knew him except for seeing him ride around on a bike. We figured he was back inside.”

But Jean-Pierre Calce wasn’t inside prison. He had been dead inside his apartment at 550 Préfontaine alongside the body of a woman, possibly since January, the result of what police consider a murder-suicide or a double murder.

The apartment faces a quiet bike path in the Quartier de mélasses, so named for the overripe sugary odour that permeates east of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge at Frontenac and Ste-Catherine E. But another odour betrayed the crime scene. Although François “never smelled anything unusual,” another neighbour complained of an unusual stink, leading authorities to the then-unidentifiable mummified corpses, which a police source describes as looking like “black, dried bananas.” Although the couple were long dead, the police say their bodies were maggot-free when discovered, thanks to the cold weather and lack of flies.

The dead woman, identifed by Allô Police as Sydney Normandin, 37, thought to be a local prostitute, had been reported missing for months. Calce, 36, had troubles with the law in the past and was estranged from his parents, who proved uncurious about his uncommunicative state.

The gruesome find was unprecedented in this city, but the probability of it occuring in a city-subsidized apartment unit is greater than it would have been in a privately-owned building. In the city-run homes for the poor, only one in 20 tenants requires monthly contact with a building manager, according to city media rep Louise Hébert. She says that “85 per cent of tenants allow us to deduct their rent directly from their bank accounts, while another 10 per cent send us post-dated cheques.”

Calce hit the city’s radar after his account was emptied of funds, making it impossible to collect his rent for January. The city then left him phone messages and mailed him letters. They then sent him notice of an upcoming eviction proceeding at the rental board.

The city reluctantly sent an agent to visit the home after a neighbour complained of the smell. “We’re always careful about entering an apartment without a tenant’s authorization. It isn’t something we like to do,” says Hébert, who says the two janitorial staffers were “in shock” by the sight of the decaying corpses, but trooped on without taking time off work.

For at least a week after the corpses were removed, the city left the apartment untouched, citing fear of disrupting a police examination. But unlike some other places in North America, including Arizona, Massachusetts and Georgia, local law does not have any stigmatized-property provisions, which require vendors or lessors to inform new residents of any horrific events that occurred previously at a home. Hébert reports that the city will rent the apartment as usual to the next person on the list of 15,131 applicants waiting for a city-subsidized home. The total is up from around 12,000 last year at this time.