Downfall

by Robert Rotenberg

  “Oh, she had a son?” Alison said, feeling like a total idiot.

  “Two. Mark and Mitchell. Good kids. Both are in high school, and they do their volunteer hours here.”

  “That’s good,” Alison said. Her words sounded so hollow.

  “Good? Good would be if the pharmaceutical companies hadn’t made a small fortune turning their mother into a drug addict. Then maybe she’d be alive today.”

  “Yes, yes.” Alison reached over to the desk and picked up the Post-it note.

  “Thanks for this,” she said.

  But Sylvia was already back at her paperwork and didn’t reply.

  15

  “You want to take the morning recess now?” Tator said to Fernandez. Shaking her head. She looked at the clock on the courtroom wall. “You realize it’s not even ten thirty.”

  “I do, Your Honour,” Fernandez said, still standing.

  Parish sat at her desk watching, not moving a muscle. What was playing out in court was a battle of wills. Court started at ten. The morning session went until one o’clock with the usual coffee break at 11:30. Tator could refuse to allow the morning recess this early and force Fernandez to call his next witness. But Fernandez could choose to not call any more witnesses and the case would collapse.

  “We’ve set aside the whole day for this trial,” Tator said, practically growling. “You know, Mr. Fernandez, that if we don’t finish today, then the next trial date will be months from now.”

  “I’m well aware of that, Your Honour.”

  Parish smiled to herself. The two of them were playing a chess match and everything they were saying was in code.

  Tator wasn’t persuaded by this technical defence about the lawn’s not being the road. Parish could already imagine her ruling. She’d roll her eyes and say, “Really, Counsel, clearly your client understood the intent of her bail conditions and even tried to hide her identity by wearing different clothes three days in a row. This was a clear violation.”

  Classic Judge Tator. She couldn’t wait to get the trial over, convict Melissa, and throw her in jail.

  But Fernandez thought the judge was wrong about the law. He knew that if Melissa was found guilty, Parish would appeal and possibly win. Or at least keep Melissa out on bail and drag this out even further. He wanted to have a recess and use the threat of Tator’s convicting Melissa to try again to make a deal with Parish.

  “I’m well aware of how crowded this courthouse is,” Fernandez said in his most deferential tone.

  This was code for: I know, Your Honour, that you need to make it clear on the record that you are concerned about wasting court time, but I need to get out of here.

  “Now are you proposing we waste more time, Mr. Fernandez?”

  This was code for: I am making it damn sure on the record that I’m concerned about the efficient use of court time.

  “My hope, Your Honour, is that if I have an opportunity to speak to defence counsel, I could, in fact, save time.”

  Code for: No. If you force me to continue, I’m going to close my case. I think you are wrong on the law and besides I don’t want you to throw Melissa in jail.

  Tator shook her head. “I don’t understand why this wasn’t canvassed with defence counsel before trial.”

  Translation: Why didn’t you see this coming?

  “It’s an issue that only arose out of my friend’s cross-examination. Unfortunately, the defence has made no concessions in this matter, leaving many issues that the Crown must be sure to cover. I still have three more civilian witnesses to call and the defence is insisting that I call the officer-in-charge, and then there’s Ms. Lansing, the complainant in this matter.”

  In other words: Give me a break, Parish is being a pain in the ass because of her impossible client, and I can’t think of everything.

  Tator stared down at Fernandez. She tapped her fingers on her desk, fast and hard, making a typewriter-like clicking sound that echoed around the near-vacant courtroom. She looked at the clock again as if to confirm her anger.

  “You hope, Mr. Fernandez, that this recess will save time. But if you are unsuccessful in your efforts, then you’ll agree you would waste more time. To say nothing of the time we are using up right now arguing about this.”

  Meaning: For the record, you’re going to take the blame for this, not me.

  “I’m well aware of how precious our court time is, Your Honour. As you know, our Crown office is one of the busiest in the country.”

  Right back at you: I’m not going to be bullied.

  Tator pursed her lips. Frustrated with Fernandez, she turned to Parish.

  “Counsel,” she barked.

  “Yes, Your Honour,” Parish said, springing to her feet.

  “What do you say?”

  Parish had to be careful. Fernandez was trying to do her a favour, and she wasn’t going to throw him under the bus. But she didn’t want to get Tator any angrier.

  “Your Honour, my client has been on bail for months and is anxious to have this matter dealt with today—”

  “Good. You agree with me. There’s no need to recess now and we should get on with the trial.”

  Parish waited until Tator finished. A judge could interrupt a lawyer at any time, but it was never a good idea for a lawyer to interrupt a judge.

  What Tator had meant was: Come on, Parish, don’t play cute. You’re dying for this early recess to make a deal for your loser client. All you’re doing is pretending you’re concerned about court time for the record if there’s an appeal.

  “But on the other hand,” Parish said, once it was clearly her turn to speak, “Mr. Fernandez is an experienced counsel and if he thinks that recessing at this point would be productive and save the court time, I believe it’s in the best interest of all parties to see if we can enter into a fruitful discussion.”

  Parish’s code: Best interest of all parties, including you, Judge. How will it look on appeal if you deny this request? Parish knew that if there was one thing that judges hated even more than lawyers who wasted their time, it was being overturned on appeal. No one saw what happened in ninety-nine per cent of the trials they presided over, but appeals were reported for all of the judge’s colleagues to see.

  Tator gave a long, loud exhale. She remained seated.

  Both lawyers were still standing, looking down at their feet like a pair of troublemaking teenagers hauled up before an angry school principal.

  “Mr. Fernandez, just how long do you need for this extremely early recess?”

  Code: You win, but I’m going to limit the damage.

  “I think half an hour will suffice.”

  The usual morning break was fifteen minutes. Fernandez was saying he needed some time to hammer out a deal.

  “Half an hour?” Judge said in mock horror. “Ms. Parish?”

  “I agree with my friend. I think it might be best to have a longer-than-usual recess if there’s a hope of resolving everything. That would save the rest of the day, allowing Your Honour to assist other courts with their matters.”

  Her code for: Thanks, Fernandez. I have your back.

  Tator slammed her hands on her desk and stood up abruptly. “Fifteen minutes. That’s it. I’ll be back here and counsel had better be ready to go.” She grabbed her court book, looked straight at Parish, smiled, and flew off the bench, out the door, her court clerk trailing behind her like a nervous courtier following her queen.

  What did Tator’s smile mean? Parish wondered. Maybe she’d read this all wrong. Maybe the judge was trying to force Fernandez on with his case because she was going to acquit. Maybe she was trying to tell Parish: Don’t make a deal.

  Or was there more to it than that? Tator had read all the court documents. Maybe she was saying to Parish, Hurry up and make a deal. I’m trying to scare your client for her own sake. If I find her not guilty now, she’ll just get herself into more trouble.

  That was one thing about being a trial lawyer. Unless you got to the end of a c
ase, you never knew what a judge was thinking. Ever.

  16

  After having to notify the loved ones of a murder victim that their family member had been killed, attending the autopsy was the second-toughest thing for a homicide detective to do.

  Kennicott always felt as if he were an intruder. Seeing the dead person, their naked body laid out on a stainless-steel operating table. Silent, motionless, all their past secrets an open book, the way their bodies were sliced apart, their insides pulled out, weighed, bottled, and sent off to a nameless lab.

  Over the years he’d grown accustomed to the gruesome medical parts of the procedure: the slick swishing sound of the sharp knife slicing through skin, the high-pitched whir of the circular saw cutting off the top of the head, and the horrid stench of an opened body, which was inescapable in the sterile room. But the thing he never got used to was going through the personal effects of the deceased.

  He’d examine the usual things: money, credit cards, cell phones, makeup kits, sunscreen, lip balm, pens, Post-it notes, Tylenol bottles, mints, gum. Then there would be the clues to a normal day in a normal life cut short: a pair of tickets for a show, a receipt for an item they’d bought and intended to return, a shopping list, a letter not yet put in the mail. The hardest part was the clothing, rummaging through their pockets, their shoes, their socks, even their underwear.

  No one gets up in the morning expecting to be murdered. They left behind all the minutiae of their day-to-day existence. It all seemed innocent, typical of another day in the life. Not death. As if their lives were a clock, ticking along, and in an instant, smashed, never to start again. Kennicott’s job as a homicide detective was to try to trace their life from that moment backwards, live the life the dead person had lived before it was snatched from them.

  That’s what made this autopsy and the one he’d attended last night unusual. Both were homeless people who had lived in the Humber Valley, and neither of them had any of the accoutrements most people took for granted. No wallets, no driver’s licences, no cell phones, no identification, no money. They literally had nothing but the shirts on their backs. Shirts plural, not just one shirt, because they wore layers and layers of clothes. Their only real possessions.

  “Back so soon,” Dr. Ramos, the pathologist, said greeting Kennicott. She was a stylish, agile woman with long thin fingers. She had the look of someone who, in another life, could have been a concert pianist.

  “Thank you for coming in on such short notice,” he said.

  “I appreciate that this is urgent. Another homeless person from the same location is what I understand,” she said in her lovely accent.

  “A woman this time,” Kennicott said.

  “We’ve had Adam, now we have Eve.”

  “Both from the Humber Valley. Hardly the Garden of Eden.”

  “Let’s have a look, shall we,” she said, as casually as a dentist about to examine a sore tooth.

  Kennicott watched as she opened up the body efficiently, cut away and scooped out the key organs, all the while narrating her actions into a small mic clipped to the top of her white coat. An assistant followed her every move, anticipating the tools she would need and preparing the appropriate jar or steel plate with which to take and store the various body parts.

  In less than an hour she was done, pulling off her surgical gloves, using her elbows to turn on the long-stemmed taps over the deep sink in the corner of the room and washing her hands. “Cause of death is easy,” she said to Kennicott as she scrubbed away. “Smack on the top of the head with a glass bottle—lots of fragments in her hair and scalp—and the head bashed hard in the back.”

  “Which killed her?”

  “The bash to the back of the head. The glass bottle would have stunned her but wouldn’t have been fatal.”

  “Can you tell which came first?”

  “Wouldn’t want to speculate. The back of the head was bashed in with one blow from a blunt-force object.”

  “Any idea what it could have been?”

  She kept cleaning her hands. “Can’t say. I think that’s your job, Detective.”

  “Similar to the male victim we had last night.”

  “Appears to be.”

  She used her elbows again to turn off taps and then pulled down a roll of fresh paper towels to dry off her pristine hands. She scanned the operating room. Her assistant was at the other end, labelling the samples.

  “This woman had cervical cancer. I suspect it was totally untreated. It had spread throughout her body.”

  “Life on the street for her must have been rough.”

  “Horrible.” She lowered her voice. “There’s one thing about both of these cases that I find unusual.”

  This could be useful, Kennicott thought. But he didn’t say anything.

  She took off her white coat and hospital scrubs and neatly folded them up as if she were packing for a trip, before putting them squarely in the laundry bin.

  Be patient, Kennicott told himself. The way Greene would be.

  “If one does this job long enough, one does get a feel for things.” She headed for the door. Kennicott walked beside her.

  “You mentioned that both times a vodka bottle seems to have been used on the back of their heads.”

  “Yes.”

  She opened the door and politely stood aside, insisting that Kennicott go first.

  Kennicott understood what was going on. She wanted to tell him something completely off the record and was being careful. Pathologists were meant to be scrupulously objective and to never speculate about the crime itself.

  He walked through the doorway and Ramos followed behind him. She waited patiently for it to close before she spoke.

  “One also develops this extraordinary sense of smell,” she said quietly. “You see, Detective, when I opened up both of these people’s stomachs, I didn’t smell any alcohol. Anywhere.”

  “No?” Kennicott said, surprised. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, it will take a few days to get the laboratory results of the blood tests to confirm this,” she said. “Perhaps this was not a fight between two drunkards or a battle concerning a bottle of alcohol, as it first appeared to be. Perhaps someone wished to create that impression. No?”

  17

  Greene drove slowly through the stone gates of the Humber River Golf Club. He’d been here many times a few years earlier during his investigation of Hodgson’s murder case, and he remembered how everything about the place had the feel of old money. The sculpted gardens, the granite steps leading to large clubhouse double doors, the high-ceilinged foyer with its elaborate moulding, wainscotted walls, and dark oak floors.

  Established in the 1920s when the area was a wealthy Toronto enclave, the club had expanded over the years and now owned a swath of beautiful property that backed onto the Humber River. As with all the golf, tennis, and social clubs in the city back in the early twentieth century, originally membership was restricted to keep out Jews, Asians, Blacks, Italians, Greeks, and Irish Catholics. That had changed slowly over the years, but these days the club faced another type of foreign invasion from the homeless people who’d taken up residence across the river.

  Repelling them wasn’t an easy task. The club built a fence around the property, only to find it cut through, climbed over, or dug under. Members reported finding liquor bottles and needles on the putting greens, and tents made from plastic sheets in the nearby woods. In the parking lot, members’ luxury cars regularly had their windows smashed in and their contents stolen. As the tent city across the river grew, things got worse. Despite the club’s hiring security guards to patrol the grounds 24/7, there was a string of robberies out on the course’s more remote holes: members forced to surrender their watches, jewellery, and cell phones at knifepoint. It all culminated with Hodgson’s killing the man who tried to rob him.

  Greene pulled into the parking lot. Since it was mid-November, there weren’t many cars, but a bunch of colourful trucks were lined up by the f
ar fence: Disco Dan’s Dancing Show; Peter’s Party Photo Booth; Barbara’s Big Balloons; Greg’s Golf Games.

  These would be the suppliers for the party that Hodgson was throwing tonight for his daughter, Britt, the young golf protégé. Like everything Hodgson did, it was going to be a big event.

  Greene took his time going over to the main clubhouse. It was a point of pride amongst homicide detectives that they walked and didn’t run—unless, of course, the situation was urgent. There was also a good reason for this: they always wanted to project calm. Confidence.

  Gerald Waterbridge, the club’s general manager, was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. Greene had met Waterbridge when he worked on Hodgson’s case, and Waterbridge had been unfailingly cordial and cooperative. His prime concern back then was the reputation of his club. He must be doubly concerned now.

  “Detective Greene, welcome back to Humber River,” Waterbridge said, holding out his hand.

  Dressed as always in blue blazer, white oxford-cloth shirt, old school tie, grey flannel pants, shining black loafers, and conservative eyeglasses, Waterbridge projected what Greene thought was the perfect buttoned-down image for the perfect citizens at their perfect golf club.

  “Nice to see you again too,” Greene said.

  “I can’t honestly say it is good to see you again here,” Waterbridge said with a nervous laugh. He looked worried, but ever the gentleman, gave Greene a warm handshake.

  “Perils of the job,” Greene said. “No one likes to see a homicide detective show up at their door. Especially for a second time.”

  “You are right about that,” Waterbridge said, trying not to sound nervous but not succeeding.

  A large van pulled up beside them. The signage on this one read Barry’s Big Blow Ups and featured poster-sized photos of people in various poses. The driver and a workman jumped out and opened the van’s sliding side door.

  “Excuse us, gents,” the driver said. “Major delivery.”