From all the descriptions he’d been given, Green pictured Norman Pettigrew as a tyrant with a ramrod back and a ferocious glare. But the man propped in a wheelchair by the window of room 512B was a frail, white-haired figure with a drooping head, a palsied right hand and drool down his chin. Unexpectedly, Tom hung back in the doorway, but Norman lifted his head marginally as Green walked in. His eyes followed Green’s progress across the room, but otherwise he showed no interest. Why should he, Green realized. He’d probably been prodded and poked by thousands of medical personnel in the past three months.
Green placed a folding chair in front of Norman’s wheelchair and sat facing him. He tried to catch the man’s eyes and saw fleeting bewilderment in them before they drifted out of focus. Green reached out to shake the man’s good left hand.
“Mr. Pettigrew, I’m Inspector Michael Green of the Ottawa Police. Can you hear me?”
Norman Pettigrew’s hand jerked away, and Green heard his sharp intake of breath. Oh yes, he can hear me.
“Your son’s name came up in an investigation, and I need to ask you a few questions. Do you mind?”
Norman’s breathing eased and he struggled to lift his head, but Green sensed pride rather than fear or defiance. However, the man had five sons, and at least one was no stranger to police investigations. Green glanced back to see Tom still hovering in the shadows, seemingly robbed of speech himself.
“When was the last time you saw your son Derek?”
The old man recoiled as if slapped. His eyes bulged.
“Was it this year? Last year? Five years ago?”
Norman was shaking his head back and forth with each question, his breath coming in erratic gasps. A large tear pooled in his right eye and spilled down his withered cheek. His lips worked as he struggled to form words, but all that emerged were grunts.
“Gone,” he finally managed, spittle flying.
“Yes, I know he’s gone. Where?”
The man shook his head. “Gom!”
“You mean dead?” More tears gathered and spilled, dripping unheeded onto his hospital robe. Norman twisted his head as if to escape Green’s relentless presence, and his eyes caught Tom in the doorway. His breath spasmed, and his eyes flew wide with fright.
“No!” he gasped.
Tom detached himself from the shadows and walked across the room, his hands shoved in his pockets as if to contain them. “Yeah, Pop. Tell him. Is Derek dead?”
Norman whipped his head back and forth, his lips working frantically. Tom stood over him.
“Derek came to see you, didn’t he?” he demanded.
Norman’s eyes bulged, and his face turned purple.
“Didn’t he! That’s why he threw himself off the fucking tower!”
Norman began to choke, his wheelchair banging the wall. Green leaped to his feet and shoved Tom back towards the door.
“What the hell are you doing!” Green dragged Tom outside into the hall and slammed him against the wall. He pinned him with his arm while he shouted for help and scanned the hall urgently. A nurse with a meds cart hurried towards him.
“Norman Pettigrew in Room 512B—help him!”
Within seconds, a flurry of staff had descended on the room, and Green could hear them banging equipment around and speaking to Norm in soothing tones. Green turned his attention back to Tom, who stood with his head bowed and his anger drained. Green shook him and dragged him down the hall.
“What the hell was that about, eh? You could have given him a goddamn stroke!”
“Lost my cool,” Tom muttered. “Sorry. Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Swearing, Green fished some twoonies from his pocket and slapped them into Tom’s hand. “Take the bus back to Robbie’s and wait for me there! I’ve got to make sure we didn’t do some serious damage back there. Although God knows, I’m beginning to think that’s what you wanted!”
Fourteen
Green was delayed at the hospital almost an hour while he spoke to the medical staff in charge of Norman Pettigrew’s care. By the end, he was satisfied that the old man had suffered no serious harm beyond a moment of fright. The doctor felt he had probably reacted more to his son’s unexpected presence than to anything he said. Norman Pettigrew had very little remaining language function, particularly for more subtle and abstract language, and the doctor implied Green was wasting his time trying to question him about events that had occurred years ago.
The doctor did, however, believe Norman had the right to know of his son’s death and to attend a memorial service at a later date when he was stronger. With stroke victims, he said, we can’t really be certain to what extent recollections are left intact within consciousness, even though the patient can no longer communicate about them. He may remember everything about his son and feel quite strongly about honouring his memory.
Given the picture Green was beginning to form of this family, he questioned the accuracy of the word “honour”, but the doctor’s observations did give him pause. He left the hospital wondering if there was any way to reach into Norman’s brain and tap those recollections that lay imprisoned there.
Green dropped in at home to discover that Bob and his crew, rather than being near completion, had removed the entire plaster wall between the kitchen and the dining room and were busy checking the studs. Electric saws howled and a fine layer of white powder coated everything.
“Dry rot, eh?” Bob announced dolefully. “Have to get it out, or your whole house will come down someday.”
Green peered inside the remains of the wall, noting the chaotic tangle of wires and pipes that ran hidden between the framing. He prayed Bob knew what he was doing.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Green shouted over the saw.
Bob signalled for his crewman to stop, bringing a stunning silence to the house. “You weren’t in, eh? But your daughter said to go ahead.”
“My daughter? When were you speaking to her?”
“She’s upstairs. Came home for lunch.” He grinned. “Likes her music loud, eh?”
Green bounded up the stairs two at a time and knocked on Hannah’s door. Her latest punk rock offering clashed wills with the electric saw that had resumed downstairs, but Green wasn’t sure which was worse.
She opened her door, her pixie smile quickly tossed under wraps when she saw who it was. Not the tanned, musclebound carpenter downstairs but her father, sporting a dubious look.
“What are you doing home?”
She shrugged. “No co-op today.”
“Why not?”
“How should I know? It’s no big deal, Mike. I’m home, aren’t I, instead of out selling my body down on Dalhousie Street?
He wavered. She held the door open only a crack, preventing him from looking inside, and the police officer in him imagined all sorts of ills. But it was her room, and her time, and if he was ever going to strengthen the fragile bond between them, he had to respect that. He cast about for neutral ground.
“You hungry?”
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” she countered.
“Yeah, but I’m worried about Bob taking down the entire house while my back is turned.” Sensing this conversation had lasted as long as it could, he moved to go. “Keep an eye on that for me, will you?”
As he climbed back into his car and fled the scene, Green’s head filled with visions of dollar bills swirling down the drain. Like it or not, he’d have to ask Sullivan’s advice about dry rot. Sullivan’s aging split level in Alta Vista had been a do-ityourself renovation project for him as long as Green could remember. While the mere idea drove Green mad, he suspected it had kept Sullivan sane through the more horrific crimes of their tenure.
Driving back past the Civic Hospital on his way to the station downtown, Green’s thoughts drifted back to Norman Pettigrew. He couldn’t get the man’s face out of his mind. Before Tom’s appearance, Norman had seemed confused and distressed, as if at the bewildering demands of the world around him. But at the sight of Tom
, he’d become apoplectic. Not from confusion, but from what looked for all the world like sheer, raw panic.
Why would the sight of Tom have panicked him so much? And why had Tom confronted him? Did Tom really believe that his father was somehow responsible for Derek’s death? Why would he think that, given that Norman had been confined to a hospital since well before Derek’s death? Did Tom think Derek was still haunted by some past horror his father had committed, or did he think Derek had visited his father just before he died and that something in the exchange between the two had driven Derek to his death?
On the other hand, perhaps Tom had an entirely different reason for staging the confrontation. He had claimed to be accompanying Green in the interests of protecting his father, an excuse that rang hollow considering the antipathy he’d expressed for the man. What if his real reason for tagging along was to control the information Green obtained, to steer the interview along certain lines and to prevent Green from getting answers to crucial questions about the past? Such as what had happened twenty years ago between Derek and his family?
Green thought back to the interview. Tom had stepped into view at exactly the moment Green was asking about Derek’s death. And also at exactly the moment when Norman was trying to say something. “Gone.” He’d been adamant about that word, frustrated that Green couldn’t understand it. Gone? Gom? Or...
Tom.
Was that what he was trying to say? And if so, why bring up Tom when Green was asking about Derek? One thing was clear, Tom had made sure he never got the chance to find out. But in that action, he had unwittingly tipped his hand. Something more was going on than just the death of a longlost son, something that had its roots in an ancient feud. Something that implicated Tom.
Lying to Green was like waving a red flag before a bull; nothing made him more determined to uncover the truth. When he reached his office, he put in quick calls to all the troops in hopes that someone had made a useful discovery about the past. But Peters had been unable to find anyone who knew about Derek’s old girlfriends, and Gibbs had hit dead ends all over Italy in his search for Sophia Vincelli. If she had gone to stay with relatives over there, no one was admitting it to the cops. Green couldn’t believe that an entire Italian family had no knowledge of Sophia’s fate. It was more likely they were keeping that knowledge to themselves for some reason. Perhaps out of shame or loyalty to the family, perhaps out of simple mistrust of the police, or perhaps out of some deeper, more sinister motive. Gibbs had promised not to give up, but Green wasn’t sure he had the necessary social cunning to take on a Mediterranean oath of silence.
Green was just radioing Sullivan when the squad room door opened and in strode the man himself, looking more energized than he had all week. He walked right into Green’s office and tossed Robbie’s photo album on his desk.
“We got an interesting new development, buddy,” he announced, sprawling into Green’s guest chair and stretching his long legs out.
“What’s up?”
“Mrs. Hogencamp came up from Brockville to have a look at our dead man.”
“And?”
“It’s Lawrence.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. Green felt a rush of mixed feelings. Triumph that his earlier instincts about the dead man’s identity were correct. Dismay at the sinister implications it resurrected about Derek’s disappearance, about Sophia, and about the twenty-year-old tragedy that had destroyed the family.
And most of all, bewilderment. What the hell was going on? “Did she recognize anybody in the photo album?”
“Well, that’s the other interesting development.” Sullivan’s eyes had the old familiar gleam in them. Like a good storyteller, he liked to tease. “The photos are gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” “I mean the photos of the brothers have been taken out of the album. Not all of them, just the close-ups of them when they’re older.”
“You mean the ones we saw just two days ago?” Green pulled the album across the desk and flipped through it. There were no empty spaces; other photos had been moved around to make the disappearance look less obvious. But Derek’s grad photo and at least half a dozen other pictures were missing.
Green looked across at Sullivan, who was clearly waiting to see if Green’s theory matched his own. “Robbie or Tom? They both had access to the album.”
“No contest. Once a con, always a con.”
“So he lied about the ID of the body and removed the photos so we wouldn’t be able to disprove him.”
“That’s what I figure,” Sullivan said. “Beats me why he’d lie, though. Just to throw us off the track?”
Absolutely, Green thought with that familiar rush of excitement when a suspect began to come into focus. Tom had been trying to sabotage the investigation all along, by misleading them on the identity of the dead man, by preventing Green from talking to the father, by claiming to have heard from Derek over the years, and now by removing the photos from the album. Why would he go to such lengths? Simply to cover up a murder that had occurred long ago?
Or one that had occurred less than a week ago.
“Maybe he lied because he killed Lawrence. And he thought if we were tracking down Derek’s movements rather than Lawrence’s, it wouldn’t connect back to himself.”
Sullivan snorted “That’s pretty stupid. He must have known we’d catch the lie eventually, and that it would look more suspicious than ever.”
“I’m not saying he’s smart. Just desperate. Brian, I think we should bring him in.”
“On what grounds? We don’t have solid evidence that Lawrence was even murdered. And what’s Tom’s motive for killing him? Revenge for Derek’s murder? We don’t have proof that he was murdered either, for fuck’s sake. This entire theory is a house of cards!”
Green knew it was, but he couldn’t ignore all the dark hints of menace. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said as mildly as he could. “We’ve got Gibbs and Peters tracking down the past, and if the proof is there, we’ll get it eventually. But if we don’t bring Tom in now, we’ll lose him. If I’m right, he’s got to know he’s only one step ahead of us.”
To Green’s relief, Sullivan gave up the argument. He pulled out his notebook, flipped back a few pages and reached for Green’s phone. “I’ll check with Robbie to see if Tom’s still there, and to make sure Robbie didn’t take the photos himself for some reason.”
Green held up a cautionary hand as Sullivan punched in the number. “Try to be subtle. I don’t want to tip off Tom that we’re suspicious.”
As it turned out, Robbie was in no mood for subtlety. His voice was elevated an octave and shaking with rage. “I don’t know anything about the pictures,” he snapped. “All I know is, Tom’s disappeared and so has the hundred dollars I had stashed in my desk drawer! Some things never change! Some people never fucking change.”
* * *
Isabelle Boisvert sat at the kitchen table, her phone in her hand and her address book open to the Fs. Outside, a sodden gray had descended, matching her mood. Rain lashed the windows and wind swept across the field, ripping through the bushes and swirling dead leaves across the yard. The damp seeped into every corner of the old house.
Jacques had roared off that morning in a cloud of rage. He had arrived home last night to find the last of the police units leaving, and so fortunately had been spared the full details of Tom Pettigrew’s visit, including Isabelle’s escapade with the axe. Nonetheless, Tom’s uninvited visit had been the last straw, and Jacques was now insisting that the farm be sold. Isabelle had refused, prompting him to demand that she choose between him and the house. She had tried to calm him, but to no avail. Gentle and mild-mannered though he was, when he reached his limit he could be more intransigent and irrational than anyone she knew. She had tried to buy them both time by suggesting she call the real estate agent to see how much money they would lose. Jacques had countered with the announcement that while she was playing nice with the real estate agent, he would con
sult a lawyer about nullifying the sale.
The truth was, she was ambivalent. Sitting in the damp, drafty house, battered by rain and facing a long bleak winter, she wasn’t sure she wanted the cursed place either. But the prospect of spring, with ponies in the paddock and green shoots of corn in the field, renewed her hope. She was damned if his stubborn fear would make her give up her dreams.
Finally, she took a deep breath and dialled Sandy Fitzpatrick’s number. She was hoping he’d be out so she could delay any decision, but he picked up cheerfully on the second ring. When she explained her request, there was a long pause.
“But you’ve only lived in it a month,” he said, his cheer dying abruptly.
“My husband finds it very long to drive,” she said. “We didn’t realize how bad the traffic was along Prince of Wales Drive into town.”
“It’s a very bad time of year to sell country property. Buyers look in the spring, sometimes in early fall. But we’re getting towards November. Nothing looks appealing in November.”
She sighed. “I know. Just give me some idea how much we’d get for it, so I can discuss it with my husband.”
“You’d have to take a huge loss on it.”
“How huge?”
“Twenty or thirty thousand. If you can even find a buyer, which I doubt.”
Twenty or thirty thousand... She glared out into the gloom. He must have sensed her dismay. “You know what I suggest you do? Spend the winter fixing it up like you planned. Get as much done as you can by spring, and then if you still want to sell it, you can put it on the market then. It’ll be much more likely to sell and if it’s fixed up, it’ll go faster at a better price.”
Her spirits lifted slightly. This was a possible compromise that made enough business sense that she might be able to persuade Jacques. Yet the renovation project seemed endless. “Seems like we’d just throw good money after bad. Where would we even begin? The basement is damp and smells. It’s even still full of the Pettigrew junk!”
Fifth Son Page 17
