Isabelle was knocking back a hefty brandy in the living room. After a reassuring word to her, he instructed Belowsky to take her statement while he himself headed to the kitchen. The intruder, he wanted to interview personally. As he passed through the archway, the scene before him reminded him of his own kitchen. Dismantled cabinets, mottled walls and the blackened remnants of several layers of linoleum flooring. Two uniformed officers were stationed in the doorways like brick walls, feet planted apart and arms folded. In the middle of the room was a large rectangular oak table surrounded by mismatched wooden chairs.
Slumped in one of them with his elbows on the table and an icepack pressed to his head was a lanky man with strings of sodden grey hair, deep pouches under his eyes, and at least three days’ worth of salt and pepper stubble. As soon as he raised his head, Green knew it was Tom. The cocky confidence of the teenager in the photo was gone, but the defiant blue eyes were the same.
Before Green tipped his hand, however, he decided to see what story Tom had on offer, so without missing a beat he introduced himself and asked for a name and address. Tom apparently chose to play for time. He arched his eyebrows.
“An Inspector? Never met one of yous. Don’t know why you were called all the way out here for this. Like I told these other officers, I got nothing to hide. I ain’t no burglar; I used to live here, and I didn’t know anybody was home. I just came in to look for something I left here years ago.”
“Your name, sir?” Green repeated patiently.
Tom hesitated briefly, and Green could see him weighing his options. Finally, he shrugged. “Tom Pettigrew. I live in Toronto.”
“Street address in Toronto, sir?”
“I’m just moving.”
Green kept his pen poised over his notebook. “So should I put ‘no fixed address’?”
A scowl flitted across Tom’s face. “Put Harmony House.” Another shrug, this time with a hint of defiance. “I got a drinking problem. Hey, it’s not a crime. When you run me through the Toronto police, you’ll know I’m no saint, I been through the system lots of times. But that’s in the past. I’m turning things around now, and this...” He gestured around him vaguely, as if to encompass the house. “This wasn’t like that.”
“So what was this about, Tom?”
“Facing some stuff.”
Tom seemed to perceive the skepticism on the faces around him, for he sat up straighter and thrust out his chin. “Look, I ain’t proud of my life, okay? I know I ain’t done one fucking worthwhile thing in the past twenty-five years. Last month, I woke up one morning in detox with bugs crawling all over me and a great fucking hole in my memory. Doctor said one more binge like that, and I might not wake up. Not that I really gave a shit at the time.” He slumped again and shifted the ice pack gingerly.
Green was tempted to tell him to cut to the chase, but he sensed that the man had a story to tell. Who knows, maybe it was an interesting story. “So what happened?” he prompted.
Tom peered up at him dubiously through wet strings of hair. “What happened is this woman from Harmony House comes to visit me. As tough and crapped over by life as me—raped by her brothers, beaten up by her pimp, carved up by johns, in jail half her life. She told me to stop feeling sorry for myself and get on with it. Either kill myself or clean up my act. I heard that a million times, but something about that broad... She was so ugly—tattoos, scars all over where she’d carved herself—she was like the end of the road. They got God at Harmony House, and I got no use for that shit. My old man whipped God out of me years ago. But just being at Harmony House...”
He paused to grope in his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He caressed one longingly, glanced around as if seeking permission to light up, but met stony, neutral stares. Finally, he jammed it unlit into the corner of his mouth. “I turned forty fucking years old last week. I heard Robbie was selling the place. I thought maybe if I came back and saw the old place. I didn’t mean to scare the lady, I’m sorry about that.”
“So what was it you had to face?”
“What?” Alarm flashed across Tom’s face. Green waited him out, until gradually a sullen scowl replaced the alarm. “We didn’t have a fairy tale upbringing here, officer. A lot goes on out here in the country that nobody sees or hears. I got a memory from every single one of these rooms, from the barn, and from the field out back. That root cellar where I come in, that was the old man’s favourite place to lock me up. Maybe figured I was closer to the devil where I belonged. The room just over our head?” He jerked his thumb up to the ceiling. “Our mother strung herself up in that room. Dad didn’t even cut her down, just went out and got tanked, left poor Robbie to find her. The kid just turned sixteen years old.”
Green felt the bile of pity rise in his throat. He was no stranger to the tales of cruelty that scarred the souls of those he met on the street, so he welcomed the emotion as a sign he was still human. To judge from the expressions of the patrol officers around him, so were they.
Yet even before the pity had receded, the seasoned police officer in him raised a flag of skepticism. Alcoholics were masters of melodrama, skilled at finding excuses for their failures and at mining the sympathy of others. Tom had spun a far longer, sadder tale than was needed to answer Green’s question, and in the process had deflected attention from the one crucial fact he had let slip. Belatedly, Green retrieved it.
“What was it you came back to find?”
Tom had just removed the cigarette from his lips and held it longingly. It quivered slightly in his tobacco-stained fingers. Abruptly, he stopped to look at Green in bafflement.
Nice try, Green thought, not believing his confusion for a minute. “You mentioned you came to get something you’d left here years ago.”
“My brother Derek’s address,” Tom replied. “He left home after university, and I ain’t seen him since. But he used to drop my mother a postcard now and then, so I was hoping she packed them somewhere. Robbie said there were still some boxes of old junk in the house.” He shrugged and placed the cigarette back in his mouth. “Like I said, I been trying to get my life back together, and he’s almost all that’s left of us. Except Robbie—who was just a kid when I left, and anyway he’s written me off. Not that Derek and me got along all that great, but blood’s blood, right?”
Green stifled the edge of excitement in his voice. Tom could be telling the truth, because Isabelle had said he seemed to be searching for something. “What was the last address you had for Derek?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Tom winced and pressed his hand to his head. “I’m getting a fucking headache. Can we at least take this outside, where I can have a smoke?”
The paramedic intervened to perform a brief exam before allowing Green to continue. Green could see nothing to be lost by granting Tom’s request and a lot to be gained from letting him relax and open up. Gesturing to a patrol officer to accompany them, he led the way outside onto the small front stoop. Dusk had deepened. To the west an eerie purple wash still cloaked the horizon but overhead the stars were emerging into the brittle black sky. Beside him, Tom cupped his hands against the chill night breeze as he lit his cigarette. Green waited in silence as he pulled the smoke greedily into his lungs.
“Derek’s address?” Green prompted after several lungfulls.
“If I remembered that, why would I come all the way here to look for it?”
“The city? The state? You must remember that.”
“Used to be Berkeley, I remember that part. Then I think it was one of them in-the-middle states. Mi-something? Never been good at geography.”
“What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know!” Tom flicked the ash onto the ground angrily. “Like I said, we weren’t close. He just dropped Mom the occasional line, you know, so she wouldn’t worry.”
“But he was settled somewhere? Making a good living?”
“Oh, yeah. Derek was the smart one, always knew what he was going to get out of life.” Tom jutted out his
chin and cast Green a cunning look. “What the fuck’s it to you anyway? That’s what I was looking for, and I should’ve called on the lady properly, but I never was one for manners. So if you’ll call off the goons—”
“Tom, there’s no record of Derek being at Berkeley. No record of him ever living in the States.”
Tom sat stock still, his cigarette halfway to his lips. He said nothing for a long moment, as if trying to assess the direction of the threat. Finally, he shifted his gaze from Green to the patrol officer, then to the circus of squad cars on the front lawn. His eyes grew hooded. “What the fuck’s going on?”
He might be a career drunk, but he still had a decent share of brain cells, Green thought as he weighed his next move. He had no evidence to suggest foul play in Derek’s disappearance, merely an uneasiness in his gut. He had even less evidence that Sophia had met a similar fate. A good investigator never played from a position of weakness. He needed leverage. Tom was almost certainly lying about Derek, but he was far too wily and experienced to roll over and confess just because Green accused him of lying. He’d simply clam up, claim memory loss, or say Derek must have lied to the whole family then.
Which was, of course, entirely possible. Derek and Sophia might have run off together, as the note suggested, and rather than risking the wrath of their strict, traditional families, they had opted to drop out of sight. If Derek had decided to sever all ties with his brothers and father but had retained a small soft spot for his long-suffering mother, he might well have sent home the occasional postcard containing a carefully constructed lie to reassure her. Green needed concrete evidence to the contrary before he confronted Tom. Evidence he hoped Sophia would be able to provide, assuming she was ever found.
In the meantime, Green did have concrete evidence of another tragedy that he could certainly challenge Tom on. Evidence that might rattle Tom sufficiently to shake loose some of the secrets he was storing inside. Green reached into his pocket, unfolded a paper and held it out to Tom in the porch light.
“Do you recognize this man?”
Tom didn’t touch the photo, merely stared at it for a long time. In the silence, Green could hear the murmur of voices from the house. Out on the highway, a lone pair of headlights shot by.
Tom broke the silence, his voice like gravel. “You’re thinking this is Derek?”
“Is it?”
Tom exhaled smoke in a rush and flicked his cigarette butt into the darkness. Before it had even hit the ground, he was reaching for another. He had to make three tries before he could light it. “Can’t tell,” he said finally. “Picture’s all fucked up. Plus people always look different when they’re dead, eh? Like something’s missing.” He spoke matter-of-factly, but his cigarette trembled, and a twitch had begun at the corner of his left eye. “What happened to him?”
Green explained briefly about the discovery of the body and asked if he’d mind coming downtown to look at the body.
“Rather not.”
“If it is your brother, wouldn’t you want to know?”
Tom rested his forehead in his hands. “Fuck, life always finds a way to kick you in the ass, eh?”
Green said nothing. Tom smoked. Shook his head. Then said “Fuck” and hauled himself to his feet. “Can I at least smoke in your car?”
Twelve
Viewing dead bodies had never been Green’s favourite part of a case, albeit a necessary part when he’d been in the field. But months behind a desk had weakened his defences, and at the first hint of that peculiar morgue smell, composed of equal parts disinfectant, guts and putrefying flesh, he felt his stomach quail. He’d reached Sullivan en route from Brockville and arranged to meet him at the morgue, where he could have simply delivered Tom into Sullivan’s capable hands without even passing through the lime green doors. But to judge from Sullivan’s monosyllabic response, he was no more enthusiastic about an impromptu, after-hours visit with a three-day-old corpse than Green was. Besides, queasy stomach aside, Green was very curious to see how Tom would react.
Green made a second call from his cell phone as he, Tom and the unlucky constable from rural west district who’d drawn escort duty barrelled through the dark towards the city. It was to Dr. Alexander MacPhail. He reached the pathologist in the middle of a dinner party at which, from the sound of it, Scotch whiskey had been flowing freely for some time. Raucous laughter punctuated the background as MacPhail cursed into the phone.
“Goddamn it, lad! Check the man into the Y and go home to your wife and kiddies. The poor stiff will still be there in the morning, and so will I.”
Green glanced over at Tom, who was staring stonily out the window in the back. He was on his third cigarette, and his hands were shaking, probably from need of booze. The stiff might still be there, Green thought, but my next-of-kin won’t be. He’ll be on the first bus out of town, as far from Ottawa as he can get. With profuse apologies and assurances that MacPhail would be back with his guests in no time, Green stuck to his guns.
When he and Tom arrived at the morgue, neither MacPhail nor Sullivan were anywhere in sight, but they’d only been waiting a minute before the elevator pinged. Green could hear MacPhail’s angry stride all the way down the hall, and when the tall, rangy pathologist burst around the corner, his white mane defied gravity and vivid purple blotched his pockmarked face. He barely acknowledged Green’s greeting as he unlocked the morgue door and pulled on his lab coat. But even in the throes of one of his famous whiskey-fuelled tempers, his professionalism took over when he turned to Tom.
“The body is in the cold room at the moment, sir. We have a few paperwork formalities, and then I’ll have my assistant bring him into the viewing room next door. He’ll be draped in a sheet, so you tell me when you’re ready to take a look. His face has been badly damaged, so you’d best be prepared.”
Tom acknowledged the doctor’s tact with a curt nod. He was vibrating from head to toe, and his gaze flitted around the room, lighting restlessly on the stainless steel tubs and bowls, the rows of jars, and the three long, stainless steel slabs. Mercifully, there were no gurneys parked in the corners with telltale toes protruding. Green risked his first full breath of air.
The viewing room was small, airless and furnished in standard waiting room plastic. Tom barely glanced at the papers before scribbling a large, unpractised signature by the Xs that MacPhail had marked. Afterwards, Green settled into one of the chairs, but Tom leaned against the wall with his hands shoved in his pockets, affecting a casual pose.
“I been through this before, you know,” Tom said into the silence that had settled on the room. “AIDS, booze, freezing to death. It’s all part of street life. I don’t suppose Derek would ever look as bad as that. Always took fucking good care of himself, even the cowshit didn’t smell on him.”
Green had decided in the car that he would not mention Lawrence, for he wanted Tom off balance enough to shake loose a secret or two about his past. So far, the man wasn’t giving away a thing. They’d been waiting five minutes when the door swung open and Sullivan came in, followed closely by Peters. Her eyes danced, and she looked as alert and animated as Sullivan did drained. Green barely had time for introductions before MacPhail cracked open the door again.
“Ready?” His assistant wheeled in a gurney that was discreetly draped in white, but even through the sheet, the contours of a tall, bulky man could be seen.
Tom thrust himself off the wall and strode to the centre of the room, his hands still in his pockets. MacPhail glanced over the paperwork, then nodded to Tom questioningly. Tom had begun to shake again.
“Take your time, sir.”
“No,” said Tom through gritted teeth. “Do it.”
MacPhail reached up, and with a gentle, practised hand, he folded the sheet back from the face. Peters and Sullivan looked at the body, but Green watched Tom. Saw a faint twitch at the edge of his left eye, a flicker of raw horror that he fought to control. For a moment, he didn’t even breathe.
“
That’s Derek,” he managed finally. “Holy fuck, that’s my brother Derek.”
* * *
“Well, that throws your cockamamie theory out the window,” Sullivan pronounced flatly as he jackknifed his bulk into the booth opposite Green at Nate’s Deli. Nate’s was a legend in Ottawa, having maintained its original menu and building on downtown Rideau Street since Green’s boyhood. Until two years ago, Green had lived only blocks away and had become such a fixture in the corner booth that the waitress never bothered to bring him a menu. Montreal smoked meat platter with fries and a side of hot cherry peppers, all washed down by a pint of draught in a frosted mug. Green was nursing this pensively when Sullivan returned from dropping Tom off at the downtown Y. Sullivan was tired and cranky, but neither detective had thought it wise to abandon the poor man at a bus stop.
Green had been mulling over the same thought before Sullivan arrived. Tom’s pronouncement that the body was Derek and not Lawrence threw his whole understanding of the case into disarray. He’d been so sure that Lawrence had murdered Derek, and that the family had locked him away to cover up the fact. He’d been so sure it was Lawrence who’d met his death in the churchyard, that he found himself at a loss. If Tom was telling the truth, they were looking at quite a different sequence of crimes.
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” he asked.
Sullivan picked up Green’s mug and tossed back half of it in one grateful swig that left a foam mustache on his upper lip. He shrugged. “The guy was pretty much a basket case on the drive to the Y.” He held up two fingers an inch apart. “This close to hitting the bottle again, I’d say. Besides, I don’t see what he’d gain by lying.”
“Well, for starters, it stops us asking questions about what happened to Derek twenty years ago.”
“Maybe nothing happened! Did that ever occur to you, Mike? Maybe Derek went off to the States like everyone says, and maybe Lawrence just flipped out and got committed. End of story.”
Fifth Son Page 14
