49
Toronto Police Headquarters was a classic 1980s-style, heavy-on-concrete building, featuring a spacious plant-filled atrium soaring up ten stories, three banks of glassed-in elevators, and lots and lots of pink granite covering the walls and the floors. Street cops referred to it as either the Pink Palace or the Pink Whorehouse, depending on their point of view. Already, it looked dated compared to the sleek, glass-fronted condos and office buildings sprouting up all over the city.
Parish had only been here once before, a few years ago when she’d surrendered a client who was on the run and wanted for the murder of a young boy hit by a stray bullet. It was early in the morning. After she brought him in, she’d gone to the basement cafeteria and ordered a chocolate croissant and a large coffee. She’d just taken a bite out of the croissant and the chocolate had oozed out of the end and smeared across her cheek, when she met Detective Greene for the first time.
She couldn’t talk. Nor could she shake his hand because some of the chocolate had also dripped onto her fingers. With someone else it might have been embarrassing, but Greene was quiet and considerate and had a twinkle in his eye. She swallowed hard, drank some of the very hot coffee, and used two napkins to wipe off her fingers and her cheek before she shook his hand.
It was comic, and they laughed about it once they got to know each other, but there was nothing to smile about this morning. One of the elevators opened and Greene walked out and headed toward Parish.
“Saying ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ is trite,” he said. “This is terrible for you.”
She closed her eyes and nodded.
“I’m not going to ask you, ‘How are you doing?’ ”
“Thanks.” She shook her head. “I was shocked when Detective Kennicott told me Melissa was your source.”
“She talked about you all the time,” Greene said. “ ‘If it wasn’t for Nance,’ she used to say, ‘I’d be a goner.’ ”
Parish shook her head. “My friend Zelda said Melissa was my black hole. That she would suck me dry. That I had to stop trying to save her.”
Greene looked straight at her. Unwavering. His eyes were warm. Bluish-green eyes with flecks of yellow in them.
“You had to try,” he said. “There are some people we’ll never be able to reach. Letting go is the hardest part.”
“It’s going to take a long time,” she said. “We need to talk in private. I have something important to show you.”
“Follow me.” They took one of the elevators up to the fifth floor, past the smiling woman at the homicide squad reception desk, to Greene’s office overlooking College Street. He led her to a round table away from his desk.
As Parish reached into her briefcase and pulled out Melissa’s book, she told him how she’d found it in the bag of clothes Melissa had left in her office.
Greene was close with his emotions, but he looked upset when he saw the cover of the diary. He read it slowly, page by page. Parish watched him, not saying a word.
It took him about twenty minutes. When he got to the last page, titled “J’Accuse,” he looked up at Parish. Then he finished the diary and closed it.
“Has anyone else seen this?” he asked.
“No one. What do you think?”
“About her treatise on homelessness, or her accusation that Lydia is the killer?”
“Both.”
“Your friend was an excellent lawyer,” Greene said. “She made a convincing argument about the homelessness situation in the city.”
“And Lydia the murderer? What did you think about her theory about that, Detective?”
“You know the history between them better than I do.”
Parish felt sad. “I can’t believe Lydia would kill anyone,” she said. “Or that she’d ever hurt Melissa. I pray I’m right.”
Greene didn’t react. Parish knew that this was the way homicide detectives worked. They never played their cards until they were ready. “Every homicide investigation is a process of elimination,” he said. “We start from the inside and work out.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, always begin with the family. Sometimes that’s painful.”
He hadn’t answered her question. It was too horrible to even contemplate, Lydia killing Melissa and the other two people.
“I need to keep this for a while,” he said, putting his hand over Melissa’s book. “What else can you tell me?”
“Lydia came to my office this morning. She wanted to talk. She’s totally broken up about this. I’d just read Melissa’s diary, so before she arrived, I clicked on the record function on my cell phone. I put it in my pocket so she wouldn’t see it.”
This got Greene’s attention.
“You recorded your conversation?”
She shook her head. “When I saw her, we both started to cry, and I felt so guilty I turned it off.”
Greene kept his eyes on her. He seemed to understand. “What did you two talk about?”
“We reminisced about the great times the three of us had together. How hard we worked all those crazy years at the law firm. How close we were. I didn’t have the heart to tell her about Melissa’s accusations.”
“How long was she there?”
“About half an hour. There’s this goofy handclapping game called ‘I’m a Little Dutch Girl’ that she used to play with Melissa when they were kids. They taught it to me when I met them. Before she left, we played the game. It was kind of our own way of remembering her.”
Greene sat back. He opened Melissa’s book again to the “J’Accuse” page and started rereading it.
Parish inhaled deeply. Relax, she told herself. Greene is thorough.
“I have something to ask you,” he said.
“Anything.” She had no idea what was coming.
“When is the next time you’re going to see Lydia?”
“This afternoon. We’re going to have a late lunch at three o’clock at an old diner where we used to go for comfort food.”
Greene looked up at her. “Would you wear a wire?”
Parish hadn’t expected this. She didn’t know what to say.
“Melissa’s still your client,” Greene said. “If Lydia really is the killer…”
“I know,” Parish said.
“If you decide to do this, Detective Kennicott can wire you up,” Greene said. “Take your time. I’m fine with any decision you make.”
“Thanks for that,” she said, standing to leave. He stood and opened his office door for her before walking her to the elevator. There was something rather old-world about Greene that in someone else might be annoying. But she’d seen he was equally polite with men and women. In a strange way it was reassuring. And persuasive.
He insisted on riding down in the elevator with her and walking her to the front door. He gave her his business card and wrote out his personal cell number on back and told her to call him any time, night or day. By the time she shook his hand to say goodbye, it was unspoken, but they both knew what she was going to do.
50
“Good afternoon, Ms. Dennison,” Alison said, as she sat across from her at the drop-in centre. The homeless woman was sitting in the same chair at the same table, writing away in her diary in her tiny script. She peered up toward Alison, looking past her, avoiding eye contact.
Alison had learned much about this mysterious woman. Her full name was Rachel Dennison. Until two years earlier, she’d been the executive assistant to the CEO of a large company. Her husband worked as an installer for Bell, and they had a daughter named Gina who worked at a bank. Life seemed perfectly normal until one weekend when Dennison went missing. Then it was for ten days, then two months, and now she was homeless.
“Did you talk to my husband?” Dennison asked.
“I tried. He didn’t return my call.”
Dennison’s lips curled up in anger. “He’s too busy fucking that whore of a girlfriend of his.”
She started writing again. The movement of he
r hand was swift, precise.
Alison waited until she stopped before she spoke again: “I talked to your daughter.”
Dennison gave out a loud harrumph. She turned a page. She still had not made eye contact. “What did Gina say about her crazy mother?”
“She said that she wished you’d get better and come and see your granddaughter.”
Dennison put her pen down, whipped her head up, and stared straight at Alison. “She’s furious at me, isn’t she?”
Alison met her eyes. After the interview with Gina she’d talked to her Grandpa Y. Ever since she’d become a full-time journalist, Alison would chat with him about the stories she was working on. It amazed her how much he understood about people and how they think. She’d told him about the now-homeless woman and her daughter, Gina.
“What did she tell you about her mother?” he’d asked.
“That her mum had worked for years as an assistant to a top executive. She was super organized and efficient. They don’t even know why she started to disappear.”
“What did her father do?”
“She said at first he would cover up for her. Tell friends she was away at a conference. When she’d come back home, Gina would hear them at night having horrible fights in their bedroom. Her dad would plead with her mom to see a therapist. She’d threaten to leave and never come back if he made her go.”
“What happened next?”
“Gina’s dad spent more money than he could afford on treatment.”
“Did it work?”
“For a while, Gina said, things were almost normal, then a week before her wedding, her mother disappeared again, and since then she’s dropped in and out of her daughter’s life, never showing up for more than a few days. Her dad has a new girlfriend and wants nothing to do with her. Gina just had a baby, and her mum hasn’t seen her. Gina’s so angry at her.”
“Understand, my dear,” Grandpa Y had said, “in life we save our greatest anger for the people we love the most.”
Dennison stopped writing. Her dark eyes bore in on Alison. If she was going to gain this woman’s confidence, Alison knew she had to be honest.
“Yes. Gina is very angry with you. She had the baby without her mother to help her. And you’ve never even seen Hunter, her daughter. Your only grandchild.”
Dennison kept staring. Then ever so slowly, she began to nod.
“She truly cares about you and wants to see you,” Alison said. She felt as if she were pleading. “Your daughter misses you so very much.”
“It’s terrible,” Dennison whispered.
“What’s terrible?” Alison asked.
“That she has me as her mother.”
“No, no. Don’t you understand? Gina’s only angry because she cares so much about you.”
Dennison picked up her pen. She covered her notebook so Alison couldn’t see. She wrote for a few minutes without pausing, and then stopped.
“You’re young, and you sound British,” she said to Alison without looking up. “Where does your mother live?”
“My mother is dead. I live here with my father.”
Dennison started writing again before she looked up.
“Is that why you want to do a story about us?” Dennison swept her hand out across the room. Her face red. Her voice nasty. “We lost and abandoned women? Do you think you can save any of us? So you can have a feel-good story on TV of you reuniting us with our families?”
This must have been what it was like for Gina and her father, Alison thought. These sudden mood swings. This flash of fury from out of the blue. Her attack on their character.
But maybe Dennison was right. Why was Alison so determined to do a story about women and poverty in this city? About women who abandoned their families to live on the street, and the families they left behind? What was she really doing? Rebelling against her father? Filling the void left by her mother’s death? Working out her anger at her mother for leaving her? Trying to find answers to questions that couldn’t be answered?
She pushed back her chair and stood. “Thank you for your time,” she said. “I won’t bother you anymore.”
If she was expecting Dennison to object or to try to stop her from leaving or to magically say, “Yes, yes, I want to see Gina and my granddaughter,” Alison was sorely mistaken. Instead, Dennison curled back into her notebook, her head even farther down than before, writing furiously.
Alison walked carefully through the tables of silent, homeless women, making herself not rush. None of these women wanted anything to do with her. What was she thinking?
She pushed her way through the heavy front door. There was the stench of urine on the sidewalk. The wind whipped down Adelaide Street, sending a chill right through her as she buttoned up the top two buttons of her overcoat. The low November sky was dark and foreboding.
51
This was the last thing Parish wanted to do. The very, very last thing. But she was doing this for Melissa. Wasn’t she? Following Melissa’s paranoid fantasy that Lydia was a killer. Parish was sure she would prove Melissa wrong. But what if? What if?
She was talking to herself as she walked over to the George Street Diner, a classic diner that the Three Amigas used to go to once a month when they needed some good home cooking. They hadn’t been here for a long time. Whenever she and Lydia had met in the last few years—and it happened less and less often—Lydia always wanted to go to the newest, trendiest, most expensive restaurants.
Parish’s coat wasn’t warm enough. This happened every November, when the temperatures dropped and she was still in denial that winter was coming. The tape that held the recorder to her chest felt itchy as she walked. Be sure not to scratch yourself, Kennicott had warned her. He was in a van around the corner with a technician and would be listening in. She checked her watch. It was a few minutes after three. Lydia was always late, so she wasn’t worried.
At the door of the diner she saw there was still a lineup inside. Cold weather, people wanted comfort food. Damn, she should have got here earlier to get one of the booths by the window.
“Well, would you take a good long look at whom the cat dragged in,” she heard a familiar voice say before she saw Ash, the spirited Irishwoman who owned and ran the diner. She grabbed Parish’s sleeve. “Your amiga is already here. She got here half an hour ago to get a booth,” Ash said.
Lydia never got anywhere early.
Ash tugged Parish through the crowd. The diner was long and narrow, with the kitchen counter on the left and red-cushioned booths on the right along the sunny south-side wall. Lydia was in the last booth, not on her cell phone, not looking at her laptop, not checking her watch. Waiting quietly. That was another first.
“I’m so sorry about your Melissa,” Ash said in her warm Irish accent. “She’d come by here when times were rough, and we’d feed her.”
“You did?” Parish said. All these things she was learning about Melissa’s life. Now that it was too late.
“Family. You never give up on family.”
Lydia stood and Ash looped her arms around both of them for a group hug. “Now the Three Amigas will be the Dynamic Duo, right?” Ash said.
“Nance, thanks so much,” Lydia said, when they sat back down alone.
“We’ve been friends for…”
“Sixteen years,” Lydia said. “And you know what all this has made me realize?”
Lydia teared up and brought her hands across the table. Parish held them.
“All those rich people who wanted to chummy up to us once Karl won the trial and got elected. They all think he’s going to be the next mayor. Guess how many of them have called?”
She formed her forefinger and thumb into a circle. “Great big zero. But you, even though I’ve been such a lousy friend for the last few years—”
“You haven’t been, Lydia. Our lives have changed—”
“Not true. I have been terrible. And who is the only person I can talk to? You.”
Yes, me, Parish thought.
Trying to trap you and get you arrested for murder. Some friend she was being. She could feel herself start to sweat. The stupid tape was itchier and itchier.
“It shouldn’t have taken Melissa being killed to wake me up,” Lydia said, still holding Parish’s hand. “I’m not asking you to forgive me or believe me. Please give me a chance to show you how important you are as my friend.”
She let go of Parish’s hand.
What was she doing here? Parish asked herself. She picked up a menu from the metal holder by the window. “Why don’t we start,” she said, “by having some food?”
52
Just as the Humber River ran through the west side of the city down to the lake, the Don River did the same thing on the east side. Although over the years politicians had tried to make hay with campaigns to “Clean Up the Don,” it remained a vast, wild, and overgrown river valley right in the middle of the city. And an ideal place for the homeless to camp out or hide. Greene had gone down into the valley many times.
From the west end of the Danforth Bridge, he took the narrow path that led to the river far below. The footing was slippery. There were still remnants of the snow and ice from the recent storm. He picked his way down until he was about halfway and arrived at a long, flat plateau. Someone had built a bench out of wooden branches in the middle of it, and for years Greene and Dent had met at this spot. Dent must have come up from wherever he was staying in the valley, because he was sitting there waiting. He stood when he saw Greene.
Not a man for greetings or introductions—a holdover, Greene thought, from his years as an overseas bond trader handling calls and people and money for fourteen-hour days—Dent never bothered to say hello. Or goodbye.
They shook hands. Greene had a fifty-dollar bill in his palm, and Dent pocketed it. The preliminaries over, it was time to get down to business. Greene reached into his pocket and gave him a handful of Tim Horton cards.
“Give her these too,” he said. “Tell Daphne that they’re from her dad.”
Downfall Page 22
