Parish put her hands up in frustration. “What else can we do? I’ll bail her out again.”
“I don’t want Melissa to ever be in jail.”
“What did you think would happen when the police were called?”
Lydia’s eyes widened. “I didn’t call the police. It was the neighbours. We met in kindergarten. Kindergarten. She’s my oldest friend. I don’t want any of this. People blame Karl, but they have no idea what he put up with all those years. The time she cut him with the knife and he finally called the police—”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. It wasn’t the first time. You should see all the cut marks he has on his chest, his arms, and his legs from her attacks. He had to report her that time, to protect Britt.”
Parish looked at Lydia. She could see she was telling the truth. Parish wasn’t surprised. Part of being a good defence lawyer was trying to limit the damage for your client. Keep the issues as narrow as possible.
They stood looking at each other. The other people in the hallway had moved on, the hum of their many conversations criss-crossing and floating through the air.
“It’s not my fault I fell in love with Karl,” Lydia said.
“No one’s blaming you.”
“Ha,” she said. “Tell that to Melissa. She will never believe me, but I want her to see Britt, I want her to be there as her mother. I want her to be healthy again.”
“We all do.”
“Before court starts, please come with me up to the Crown office,” Lydia said. “I’m going to tell Fernandez to drop the case.”
“Sure.”
Lydia put her head on Parish’s shoulder. It landed like a dead weight. She reached out, and they held hands.
“What happened to the Mel we knew? The Mel we loved?” she whispered. “Nance, what happened to her?”
19
Alison was beyond exhausted. Not only from the lack of sleep, but from the emotional turmoil of the last twelve hours. She was walking up the steep hill to her dad’s house, perched high at the end of a cul-de-sac.
The house was elevated from the street, and there was a long staircase up to the front. Last year her Grandpa Y had turned the bottom floor into a separate apartment for Alison, with her own side-door entrance off the driveway on the south side.
Alison was thrilled. She’d adored her grandfather from the moment they met at the airport the day she arrived in Canada with her father. They’d just got through passport control and customs and walked out into the hall packed with anxious friends and relatives waiting for passengers from all over the world when, without warning, a short, surprisingly muscular man with a magical glint in his green-blue eyes rushed up and wrapped his arms around her.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” he said in his warm, laughing voice. The way he held her somehow made Alison feel for the first time since her mother died that she was at home. She soon nicknamed him Grandpa Y.
His wife had died a few years earlier, and Ari was their only child. Ari’s surprise discovery of Alison, his unknown daughter in England, meant that for the first time in his life Grandpa Y had a grandchild.
She couldn’t even begin to imagine the horrors he’d been through in his long life. He’d grown up in a small town in central Poland. Half of the four thousand people who lived there were Catholic, the other half were Jewish. The two groups got along without incident for centuries, until the night in September 1942 when the Nazis arrived. Grandpa Y’s first wife and two children were murdered, along with all the other two thousand Jews. He and one other man were the only ones who survived. In 1945, when the American 82nd Airborne liberated the concentration camp he was in, he weighed eighty-five pounds. After three years in a displaced persons camp in Austria, where he met Ari’s mother, they arrived in Canada virtually penniless. Despite all this, Grandpa Y was the most positive and wisest person she’d ever met.
Alison climbed the three flights of stairs to the front door. She’d called ahead to tell Grandpa Y that she was on her way home, and he was sitting at the kitchen table. He’d made her lunch: a tuna-fish sandwich, which he’d cut in half on a diagonal, a pickle, and fresh pot of tea.
She hadn’t realized how hungry she was, but just the smell of the food made her stomach churn. She was starving. She picked up half of the sandwich.
“Eat, eat,” he said. “I saw you on TV. Congratulations. You were the first reporter on the scene.”
“I was lucky,” she said, polishing off the first half of the sandwich in a few bites and reaching for the second half.
He shook his head. “I don’t believe in luck.” This from a man who’d survived three years in the camps. “Drink some tea,” he said. “I made it the British way.”
That was a running joke between them. He liked instant coffee because it was the first thing the paratroopers who freed him had given him to drink. Alison’s mother was a tea fanatic. When she lived for a year in Toronto with Ari, she’d taught him the “correct method” to make a pot of tea. Alison had shown Grandpa Y how to do it the same way.
He poured the tea, and she watched the steam rise. When he was done, she cradled the cup with both hands, the warmth comforting.
“I saw you reporting from the protest,” he said.
“They were angry at the police.”
“I could see that on the TV.”
“Do you think Dad will be upset at me for covering this?”
“Why? It’s your job. That young doctor you interviewed is quite dynamic, isn’t he?”
Yes, dynamic. That’s the word. That’s what had attracted her to him. She’d spent two hours with Burns at his clinic and watched how he treated his sad and broken patients with remarkable kindness. How could Grandpa Y be so smart to see she liked him?
“He took me to his medical clinic for the homeless today. He’s very committed,” she said, polishing off the second half of the sandwich. “You won’t say anything to Dad if I see him again?”
“Never,” he said.
“That’s why I love you,” she said, after crunching into the pickle. “I never knew there was this much poverty in Toronto. It all seems so very hidden.”
“It all seems so very hidden?” he said, echoing her British accent. He was a great mimic. Said he learned it in the war. “The poverty is not hidden from your father. A police officer sees all sides.”
She sipped her tea and put the cup down. She had to screw up her courage to ask him a question she’d been afraid to ask since they’d met.
“The tea is lovely,” she said.
“You’re a good teacher.”
Maybe she wasn’t ready yet to ask him about something that meant so much to her.
Before she could say a word, he reached across the table and took her hand. “Your mother was a good teacher too.”
She exhaled. Tears clouded her eyes.
“You knew her? I was afraid to ask.”
“I was waiting until you did. Did I know your mother? Of course!”
“But—”
“Ari didn’t know she was pregnant.”
“I know but—”
“My wife had early onset of Alzheimer’s. Some days Ari would come to visit us and she’d scream at him, thinking he was a Nazi guard.”
“He couldn’t leave you alone with her.”
Grandpa Y shrugged, a shrug that said: This is life, what are you going to do about it? You have to get on with things.
“Dad never told me any of this.”
“Why would he burden you with it?”
She had one more question. The toughest one. Grandpa Y was still holding her hand.
“The answer is yes,” he said, before she could speak. “Your father loved your mother. I know she loved him. You never have to worry about that.”
She hadn’t cried since her mother died. Now she couldn’t stop. Grandpa Y waited patiently.
“Grandpa Y?” she asked him at last. “Did you like my mum?”
“Me?” he said, laug
hing. That warm laugh of his that she had come to treasure so very much. “Like her? Did I like her? I loved her. I told Ari to go with her to England, but he wouldn’t leave. It was the biggest mistake in his life.”
Her parents loved each other. She was conceived in love. She wasn’t sure why it meant so much to her, but it did.
She got up and bent over to kiss his cheek.
He pulled her close for another one of his hugs. This one was tighter than ever. “The Nazis took them all away from me,” he whispered, his lips close to her ear, “then God gave me you.”
20
Greene had known Julian Keswick, the supervisor of the parking lot below City Hall, for decades. Keswick was in charge of the secured section where judges who sat at the nearby Old City Hall courthouse parked, as well as a second secured lot reserved for city politicians.
Greene tapped on the perpetually dirty glass door of Keswick’s little office, located deep in the bowels of the parking lot, and walked in. The place hadn’t changed from the day Greene had first come here decades ago. Same steel desk. Same classic old Farrah Fawcett poster behind Keswick on the otherwise bare wall. Same seemingly endless stacks of paperwork on the desk. Same plaque on the desk: “Honk If You Need Service… Then Wait Until I’m Damn Good And Ready.”
Keswick looked up from behind a fat old computer monitor that must have been there for at least fifteen years.
“Ari.” He leaned back in his old wooden chair, then, like a boy on a swing, he used the momentum of his chair to propel his enormous body back toward the desk so he could stand up. He gave Greene an exaggerated mock bow.
“Hail to the Chief,” he said. “I heard about your new gig. Couldn’t keep away, could you? Once a copper always a copper.”
“It’s a job,” Greene said, reaching out to grasp Keswick’s extended, meaty paw.
Keswick shook his hand. “A job? Excuse me, you’re the head of homicide. And to think, I remember when you were a little pisher division detective doing purse snatchings and house break-ins. To what do I owe the honour, sir?”
He sat back down, relieved to be off his feet.
Greene took a seat across from him in the old stack chair that also had been there forever. He pointed to the poster. “I see Farrah’s still keeping you company.”
“It’s an ideal marriage. We’ve been together for forty-five years, and to me she’s as beautiful as the day we met.”
Greene laughed, even though he’d heard the joke many times over the years. “I need to take a look at a vehicle,” he said.
Keswick turned his head back toward the restricted judges’ parking lot. “One where our ‘vulnerable’ judges park?”
Greene shook his head.
Keswick turned his head in the other direction.
“Oh. You want to look where our ‘hard-working’ politicians leave their cars.”
Greene nodded.
“And I assume, Chief, that we don’t want anyone to know about this, do we?”
Greene shrugged.
Keswick leaned back again. His chair groaned. “Ari, I haven’t laid eyes on you since you beat that murder rap. I hated seeing you charged.”
“I wasn’t too fond of it, either.”
“I knew you were innocent all along. When I heard you went to England after, I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”
“Neither did I.”
“Maybe you should have stayed away. Look at what’s happening to this town. All these murders. Kids. One of them looks at another the wrong way and out come the guns. It’s ridiculous.”
“Standards have slipped,” Greene said.
“Now what? We have a serial killer murdering homeless people?”
This was the way Keswick worked. First, he wanted some conversation, some gossip, before he’d agree to let Greene do whatever he wanted to do.
“We’re working it,” Greene said. Which he knew Keswick would understand to mean, I can’t tell you anything more right now.
“It’s not right. This isn’t the Toronto the Good that it used to be.”
“Big-city progress, big-city problems.”
Keswick chuckled. “When I started this job, what were my lunchtime options? Burgers and fries. Fish and chips. Fried chicken. Now? Within two blocks of here there’s Japanese, Thai, Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern. Back then who’d ever even heard of pad thai or sushi or jerk chicken? Now I can eat delicious food from anywhere in the world, so long as I don’t get hit by a stray bullet.”
The two men had a long history. Keswick and his wife, Beulah, had a daughter named Daphne who was a bad crack addict. When she had a daughter, Francine, Children’s Aid swept in and scooped up the baby. The upshot was that Keswick and his wife had raised their granddaughter since a month after she was born.
“How old is Francine now? Three?” Greene asked.
“You never forget, do you?”
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s a handful for old folks like us. Never stops moving. She calls me Papa. You know, Ari, we’re blessed.”
Keswick pulled out the top drawer of his steel desk, extracted a fob key on a thin metal ring, and pointed it toward the politicians’ parking lot.
“The vehicle you’re looking for is the black Ford SUV. Spot fourteen, on the left wall.”
Keswick had already figured out that Greene wanted to check out Hodgson’s vehicle on the QT. He slipped the key ring onto one of his fat fingers and twirled it around.
“Bastard killed that homeless guy with a golf club,” Keswick said. “Now he struts around here as if he owns the city.”
Greene had an idea. “When’s the last time you heard from Daphne?” he asked.
Keswick twirled the fob faster. “You won’t tell Beulah?”
“Of course not.”
“She thinks I go out for a beer with my pals after my Monday Night Bowling League, but I see my daughter at the Coffee Time at Sherbourne and Jarvis. The twenty-four-hour one.”
“How’s Daphne doing?”
He shook his head. “She won’t go to a shelter and I won’t give her money. Instead I buy her coffee cards.”
“Still won’t go back into treatment?”
“You mean follow-up treatment after Beulah and me drained our savings to get her into rehab? You know, Ari, she had one relapse.”
He stuck his forefinger in the air.
“One damn relapse. Oh no, no, no. The government can’t afford to pay for follow-up treatment for an addict who relapses. Ask the fucking bureaucrats. And the politicians, why should they care? The homeless don’t vote. All they want to do is balance their budget. That’s a joke. Did you know they spent three quarters of a million dollars retrofitting this garage to make our precious judges ‘feel safe’ when they park their Lexuses and Teslas here? No one gives a damn about the poor anymore.”
Greene sat still and waited for Keswick to catch his breath.
“Where’s Daphne living?” he asked.
“She won’t tell me. I’m worried sick she’s in the Humber Valley where all the homeless are getting killed. Sometimes she stays under the Danforth Bridge. She’s told me there’s all sorts of hidden encampments down there that nobody even knows about.”
He puckered his lips, stopped twirling the fob, and pulled it off his finger.
“Last winter almost killed her. And now it’s getting cold again. Thank goodness for the lost and found here. I got her scarves and gloves and toques. Someone even left a Canada Goose coat. Worth about a thousand bucks. Amazing what some of these rich people buy and don’t even care about.”
He looked Greene square in the eye and handed the fob over to him.
“Is there really a serial killer on the loose murdering the homeless?”
Greene met his eyes. “It’s Monday. You seeing Daphne tonight?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
“Really, Ari, you don’t have to—”
&n
bsp; Greene put up his hand to stop him from talking.
“Thanks,” Keswick said. “Daphne was such a beautiful child. Now she looks older than her mom.”
21
Parish opened her car door, threw her briefcase onto the passenger seat, plopped into the driver seat, and slammed the door shut.
“Damn it!” she yelled. She lifted her hands and smashed them down on the steering wheel hard enough that it hurt. Then she did it again. She was tired. She was hungry. She was frustrated as hell, even though she had somehow “won” another case for Melissa.
After Melissa ran out of the courthouse, Parish and Lydia went up to the Crown’s office to see Fernandez. Lydia told him she didn’t want him to go ahead with the charges. He then walked with the two of them back into court, precisely at the end of the fifteen-minute recess.
Judge Tator marched in, took one look around the courtroom, and demanded of Parish: “Counsel, where is your client?”
Fernandez explained that he’d spoken with the complainant, Ms. Lydia Lansing, who was standing beside him in court. And that he had decided at Ms. Lansing’s urging to withdraw the charge.
Parish eyed Tator carefully. Was she angry or pleased to hear this? Tator gave no indication. She spoke to Lydia in a matter-of-fact voice, like a customs officer going through a checklist on a form, making it clear for the court record that she was doing her due diligence.
“Ma’am, I understand from the materials I’ve read about this matter that you are a lawyer.”
“That’s correct,” Lydia said.
“You understand the nature of these proceedings.”
“I do, Your Honour.” Lydia was staring straight up at the judge. Parish could see she looked determined to maintain her composure.
“No one has tried to influence you to make this decision.”
“No, Your Honour.”
“No threats or promises.”
“None.”
That should do it. Parish expected Tator would end it now, but she didn’t. Instead she dug back into the court documents in front of her. Reading.
It is rare to have total silence at any time a group of people are gathered together. But it is particularly awkward, and intimidating, when a courtroom falls silent. The judge had the floor and no one else could speak in a place designed for talk.
Downfall Page 10
