Downfall

by Robert Rotenberg

  Never gloat in court, Parish told herself. Words of wisdom Ted DiPaulo had drilled into her when she first joined his practice. “Modesty is a weapon,” he’d told her. “And it’s your natural personality. Use it.”

  Tator turned back to the doctor. “Thank you for coming today, Doctor,” she said.

  “May I go?” Ennis asked.

  Tator held up her hand. “One moment. Mr. Fernandez, any questions in re-examination?” There was a hopeful tone in her voice.

  Fernandez stood. “No, Your Honour. I have no further questions.”

  He looked at Parish. Gave her a hint of a smile.

  “Your Honour,” he said. “I’m going to ask that we take the morning break earlier than usual this morning. There are some matters I’d like to discuss with counsel before I call my next witness.”

  Tator shook her head at Fernandez. Then she turned on Parish.

  Uh-oh, Parish thought. She’d just poked the bear.

  13

  Although Kennicott and Greene had been through many ups and downs, they were still a highly effective team when they worked together. And Kennicott found he learned something new from Greene every time.

  He pulled his car in behind Greene’s vehicle. It was parked on a side street in a working-class neighbourhood in the west end of the city. The street was lined with modest bungalow homes and meagre front lawns. The second victim was from here. Kennicott grabbed a file he’d put together on her background and walked up to Greene’s car.

  This was one of the toughest parts of the job, informing the family of the deceased that their loved one was dead. Murdered. It was impossible to know how people would react to the shocking news.

  As Kennicott opened the passenger door, Greene looked over and nodded. Kennicott knew how quiet his former partner could be. He could see that Greene was preparing in his mind what he was going to say to the dead woman’s husband. This was no time for small talk.

  Kennicott sat down in the car, closed the door, pulled out the file, and began to read aloud: “ ‘Name, Deborah Lemon, forty-one years old, grew up a few blocks from here, studied nursing at University of Toronto and worked at the Humberside General Hospital.’ ”

  “A real west-ender,” Greene said.

  “ ‘When she was twenty-five, she married an orderly, Marvin Lemon. They have two boys, Mark and Mitchell, now fourteen and fifteen. Five years ago she had a bad fall in the hospital stairwell while escorting a psychiatric patient to an appointment and broke her leg in three places. She needed four operations and ended up addicted to opioids. Two years later, she was fired when she was caught stealing oxytocin from the hospital pharmacy. The report says she was up to twenty-four a day.’ ”

  “Twenty-four? Phew. Was she arrested?”

  “Yes. She went to Florida for a three-month rehab stint, wrote a letter of apology, did one hundred hours of community service, and the Crown dropped the charges.”

  “The right thing to do.”

  “Two months later the family filed a missing person’s report. Days later they found her in line at the Law Society Feed the Hungry Program and brought her home. That’s the last thing we have on her.”

  Greene looked over at Kennicott. Shook his head.

  “The house is near the end of the block,” Greene said.

  They got out of the car and walked down the street. Kennicott had called ahead to tell Lemon that they were Toronto police officers—Greene had taught him to never identify himself as a homicide detective on an initial call, to wait until he saw the victim’s family in person—and were coming over to talk to him and his sons. He didn’t give any details.

  Lemon was waiting for them on the small front porch that fronted his two-storey home. He was a short man wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs baseball cap. His face looked grim. Kennicott and Greene went together up the cracked concrete walkway. Lemon came down from the porch to greet them. They shook hands.

  “Mr. Lemon. I’m Detective Ari Greene. This is Detective Daniel Kennicott.”

  “Homicide detectives, right?” he said.

  Greene nodded.

  “It’s Deb, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Lemon flinched. “I saw it on the news. They didn’t say her name, just that it was a homeless woman who was murdered. When you guys called, I put two and two together. I called the medical clinic and talked to Sylvia, the woman who runs the place. She said it was Deb. Still…” His voice trailed off.

  “Where are your sons?” Kennicott asked.

  “Inside. I told them they had to stay home from school. I prepared them for this.”

  “Do you want us to talk to them?”

  He shook his head. “Deb’s been dead to them for a long time.”

  Dead to them, Kennicott thought, but not to him.

  Kennicott could see the shock and sadness turn to anger on Lemon’s face. “That bloody hospital. She worked there her whole damn life. Did you know she was born there?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Greene said.

  “So was I. A week later. We used to laugh about that.” He gave out a bitter chuckle. “Her fall was all their fault. One hundred thousand per cent. The cleaners didn’t dry the floor, and the patient was known to be violent. She should never have been escorting him by herself.”

  Kennicott glanced at Greene. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Lemon since the moment they’d met. Every bit of his attention and compassion was with the man.

  “What did the hospital do?” Lemon said, his voice rising. “Pump her up with those drugs and kick her out the door.”

  Greene nodded.

  “I hate what they did to her,” Lemon said.

  “The drugs,” Greene said.

  Lemon looked down and tied his hands in knots. “The drugs, the hospital, and the drug rehab places that sucked up all our money. And the Nursing Association, oh, they were a big help. Star Chamber is what I call them.”

  He was spitting out the words.

  “Any time Deb started to recover, they’d drag her in for an interview. Their overpriced lawyers in their fancy suits all making tons of money off our backs. Assholes. They’d cross-examine her as if she was a criminal. Urine tests, blood tests. They poked her like she was a pincushion. Then we’d get those long cover-your-ass letters on their embossed letterhead.”

  He made a fist with one hand and hit it into the other. He stared at Greene. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize,” Greene said.

  Lemon pounded his fist into his hand again. His voice softened. “She’d come home from one of those hearings, and I knew in a few days she’d be gone. Did you know I had to re-mortgage this house to pay for that clinic in Florida?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Greene said in an equally soft voice.

  “She wasn’t home a month, and she started stealing from us. Living back on the street. One afternoon she took the boys’ hockey equipment and sold all of it at the Hockey Exchange for a hundred and twenty dollars. Right before the playoffs. I told the owner what happened, and he gave me the stuff back. Her own sons. A hundred and twenty bucks.”

  Big pain and little pain, Kennicott thought. When people were faced with overwhelming tragedy, it was often the small things that hurt them the most.

  Lemon looked back up at Kennicott, then Greene.

  Greene put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “I have to ask you. When was the last time you saw Deb or heard from her?”

  Deb, Kennicott thought. Greene picked up on the nickname Lemon called his wife. Greene spoke about her as a real person, instead of using impersonal words such as “your wife” or “the deceased” or even “Deborah.” It was good to be working with Greene again.

  “Seven weeks ago. On a Tuesday night after I’d come home from baseball. Our last game of the season. It was midnight, and she started pounding on the front door. I came right out here on the porch and locked the door behind me. I wouldn’t let her in. We had a horrible fight.”

  Midnight. A
fter his baseball game. Last one of the season. When a witness was this detailed about something, it was seared in their memory. Kennicott could see that Lemon knew exactly how long he’d endured the agony and uncertainty of wondering if he’d done the right thing: Seven weeks ago last Tuesday night.

  “It was the first time I’d locked her out,” he said. “I had to.”

  “The boys,” Greene said.

  He nodded. “They couldn’t take it anymore. For years everyone—my sister, the kids’ therapist, even my friends at work—they all told me I had to draw the line. So there. I drew the line. And see. This is what happened.”

  Kennicott looked at Greene. He still had his hand on Lemon’s shoulder and was still entirely focussed on the grieving man.

  “Thanks, Detective,” Lemon said. “I’ve got to go inside.”

  “Go be with your boys.”

  He nodded. Saddened and defeated. “Cremate the body when you’re done with it. Sylvia is going to arrange for a memorial service this afternoon. I want this over with.”

  He shook hands with both of them, turned, and walked up the steps.

  Back in the car, Greene said to Kennicott, before starting the engine, “Come back tomorrow and ask Mr. Lemon what his wife said to him when they had the fight on the porch.”

  Mr. Lemon. Kennicott realized Greene was showing the man respect even when he wasn’t there. Another lesson learned.

  14

  “It’s called a cortado,” Burns said to Alison, referring to the two coffees he brought over along with a pair of little white napkins. She was perched on a high stool looking out the south-facing window at Fahrenheit Café, the trendy spot where he’d asked her to meet him. The coffees came in small clear glasses, the image of a swan neatly drawn in white foam on top.

  “I know all about cortados,” Alison said. “I was a barista when I lived in London.” She was going to add she worked at a café when she was a university student two years ago but didn’t. It would have made her sound too young.

  He gave her a sly look. “You’ve never tasted one as good as this. They’re real coffee snobs here.”

  “Good. I need the caffeine after a sleepless night. You a regular?”

  “I come here every morning.”

  Alison felt someone come up behind her. She turned and saw a man with short-cropped hair and an impish grin on his handsome face. He slapped Burns on the shoulder and spoke to her.

  “Arnold took my five-hour barista course. Star student. I keep trying to convince him to quit this medicine stuff he does and get a real job pulling shots.”

  Burns grinned. “Alison, meet Sameer, world-champion barista and teacher extraordinaire.”

  “Do you like my coffee?” Sameer asked her.

  “I’ve yet to try it.”

  “Two sips. The first one only sets your palette,” Sameer said.

  “See,” Burns said.

  She took a sip. The coffee was not too hot but deliciously warm, the way a cortado was supposed to be. The flavour was bold. Naturally sweet. She took a second sip. He was right. Now she could really taste the richness of the coffee.

  “Pretty good,” she said.

  “That’s British for ‘very good,’ ” Burns said.

  “Pretty damn good,” she said, in as North American an accent as she could muster.

  Both men laughed. Sameer slapped Burns on the back again and went back behind the counter.

  She lifted her glass and clinked. “To fighting the good fight.”

  “To the fight,” he said, a serious look replacing his smile.

  She tossed back the rest of her cortado in one gulp and used one of the napkins to dab her lips. Carefully. She’d put on some lipstick before walking into the café and didn’t want to rub it off.

  He sipped his cortado without talking. This was the other side of his loud public persona, she thought. The quiet, committed side. She felt at ease to be with someone who wasn’t afraid of silence, like her father.

  “How long have you been in Canada?” he asked her after he’d finished his drink.

  “About a year and a half. It’s a long story.”

  She’d grown up in England with her mum, who’d told her that her father had left when she was a baby, moved to New Zealand, and started a new family. That wasn’t true. Alison was twenty years old when her mother was stricken with a brain tumour. Unbeknownst to Alison, her mum reached out to Ari, whom she’d lived with two decades earlier when she was finishing her graduate degree in Toronto.

  A week after her mum died, Alison went to a solicitor’s office and was introduced to this stranger: Toronto homicide detective Ari Greene. Her father. He stayed in London for months, and eventually she decided to try living in Toronto with him. It turned out she had an unknown grandfather as well.

  “Do you like the city?” Burns asked.

  She looked back into the café. It was filled with well-dressed, energetic young people brimming with confidence and enthusiasm.

  “It certainly is modern with the high-rises going up, the building cranes everywhere, and all the glass. People always on the go. It seems there are a lot of rich people here.”

  “Seems,” he said with a note of bitterness. “That’s the point. If you want to see the real heart of the city, come with me.”

  Outside, he had a smart fixed-speed bicycle that he’d locked up with a thick chain and a heavy-duty square-shaped lock.

  “A socially conscious doctor with a super trendy bike,” she said, chiding him as he bent down to unlock it. “You’re such a hipster.”

  He laughed a self-deprecating laugh. She liked that.

  “I love my fixie. I put on special tires in the fall and ride every day of the year.”

  “Rain, snow, sleet, or hail?”

  “Three sixty-five. Saving the environment,” he said, stringing the chain around his neck as if it were some kind of warrior’s necklace.

  “Cliché millennial,” she quipped.

  They walked up Jarvis, a north-south street filled with sleek new condos and office buildings. But after only a few blocks everything changed to empty parking lots, car rental places, and graffiti-filled walls. Instead of well-dressed young people, the sidewalks and alleyways were now filled with hunched-over men and women wearing dirty clothes, huddled together, smoking cigarettes, drinking cheap coffee outside shelters and free-injection sites.

  The People on the Street Health Care Clinic was in an old storefront, with chipped-paint-covered bricks and a thick metal door. Inside, the reception room was filled with ragged-looking women sprawled out on low-slung couches, each with a crinkled shopping bag at her feet. To one side an older woman sat behind a linoleum-topped desk that looked to be twenty years old, shuffling through a mound of paperwork.

  “Sylvia, meet Alison Greene,” Burns said to the woman. “The TV reporter who covered the protest and actually gave me ninety seconds of air time.”

  “Looked more like a minute to me,” Sylvia said. Her voice was gruff and monotone. She rolled her eyes over to Alison. “Welcome to Women’s Day in Paradise.”

  “Women come Mondays and Wednesdays,” Burns explained. “Men Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  “Fridays we do Pilates, take vegan cooking classes, and tend our organic garden,” Sylvia said, her deep voice flatter than a pancake.

  “Translation,” Burns said. “Paperwork for the government so we can get paid. It’s massive.”

  “And emergency appointments,” Sylvia said.

  “Well, I’m jolly pleased to be here,” Alison said.

  Sylvia raised an eyebrow and rolled her eyes back to Burns.

  “Forgive Sylvia’s skepticism,” he said. “We’ve had a boatload of reporters come through here all enthusiastic about doing a story on our clinic and nothing ever happens.”

  “Perhaps I’ll be different.”

  “Why don’t you start by covering the memorial service,” Sylvia said.

  “Memorial service?” Alison asked.
/>   “For Nurse Deb,” one of the women on the couches behind Alison said.

  “Nurse Deb?” Alison asked.

  “The woman who was killed in the valley today,” Burns added. “Word travels fast in our little world. That’s how we got the demonstration together so quickly this morning. Deb was a registered nurse until her life fell apart.”

  “Oh,” Alison murmured, feeling foolish.

  “Don’t look so shocked, Miss Reporter,” Sylvia said. “Just because these women are down on their luck doesn’t mean that they’re not smarter than half those assholes in the office towers a few blocks from here. Everybody loved Deb. She got lots of people off of the needle.”

  Sylvia picked up a clipboard and handed it to Burns. “Fatima’s in Room A. The CAS grabbed her kids again, and she overdosed on the weekend.”

  Sylvia returned to her paperwork without another glance at Alison.

  Burns took the clipboard and motioned to Alison. “The women here live in constant fear that a social worker from Children’s Aid Society will show up at any time and they’ll lose their children. For years kids were taken away because of false drug tests.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “That’s reality. Let’s go see Fatima.”

  Alison started to follow him, then turned back. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Sylvia.”

  The woman looked up from her desk. Annoyed.

  Alison crept back toward the reception desk. “Can I ask you about the memorial service?” she asked.

  Sylvia stared at her.

  Alison stepped closer. “The details perhaps?” She was trying not to sound as if she was pleading. “Ah, when? Where the memorial is being held?”

  Sylvia frowned. She rummaged through the piles of papers, moved a pack of cigarettes out of the way, and somehow found a pad of Post-it notes and a pen. She wrote something on a note and stuck it on the end of her desk.

  “Marvin told the cops to do what they want with her body.”

  “Marvin?”

  Sylvia frowned again. “Deb’s husband.”

  “She was married?”

  “Yes, lady reporter, Deb was married. For twenty-four years. Marvin wants this over and done so we’re doing it this afternoon. Better for his boys’ sake.”