Honour Among Men

by Barbara Fradkin

  “Good morning, sir!”

  He nodded to the group clustered by the water. “What do we have, Peters?”

  “A body, sir. Looks like a working girl stayed out too late.”

  Green shot her a scowl, bristling at the flippancy in her tone and the haste of her conclusions. The body wasn’t even out of the scene. He prayed someone other than Peters was in charge. “Who’s lead?”

  The dancing eyes faded slightly. She nodded toward the parking lot. “Bob Gibbs. He’s up at the car.”

  “Do we have an ID?”

  “She had no wallet or purse on her, sir. But Gibbsie’s running her specs through the system, and maybe Missing Persons will come up with a match.”

  Green raised his head to scan the scene. As he’d expected, there was no sign of any of the NCOs from Major Crimes. A brawl in one of the Byward Market clubs two nights ago had resulted in the stabbing of two college students in a room full of underage witnesses, who had scattered before the police arrived, tying up a dozen detectives in the search to track them down and leaving enough prints and blood spatters to keep the entire Ident unit poring over their microscopes for a month. There were precious few resources left over for this luckless Jane Doe, and with Barbara Devine clutching the purse strings, Green feared there was little chance of more.

  The one positive was the presence of Sergeant Lou Paquette, an Ident officer who drank too much and whined too much, but who’d lived and breathed forensics for over twenty years. He was crouched by the stone bank, snapping photographs. When he moved aside, Green glimpsed a lanky figure on his knees beside the victim, his wild white mane of hair tumbling into his eyes. Green’s pulse quickened. Dr. Alexander MacPhail was the region’s senior forensic pathologist. What had prompted Gibbs to call in the big guns?

  Green took a quick breath to steel himself before heading over for a closer look. He loved the thrill of the hunt, but quailed at the gut-churning stench and gore of death. Images of splattered brains and amputated body parts crowded his subconscious, clamouring for memory whenever he approached another death. Three years behind a desk had not improved his defences either.

  To his relief, the victim looked almost peaceful curled up on her side on the cold stone bank. Her eyes were half shut, and she had no apparent marks on her. A working girl, Peters had concluded, but at first glance Green didn’t think so. She looked thin and sick, as if she’d taken a beating from life, but her clothing had been chosen for warmth rather than titillation, and her porcelain-white face had not a trace of make-up. Crow’s feet were beginning to tug at the corners of her eyes and her matted blonde hair was shot with grey.

  MacPhail was bent over her, inspecting her face with a powerful flashlight.

  Green crouched as close as he dared. “What can you tell me?”

  MacPhail cast him only the briefest glance of surprise. “This is an interesting one, laddie,” he announced in his customary Scottish boom. Green had never known the man to whisper, even in the presence of the most heart-wrenching death. MacPhail waved his beam. “See the colouring on this side of her face?”

  Green forced himself to study the woman’s face carefully. Where the frost had melted, beads of moisture clung to her lashes and to the down on her cheeks. But beneath the waxy pallor of death, he saw what MacPhail meant. Faint red blotches discoloured one side of her face.

  “She’s been moved some time after death,” he said.

  “Aye. Now the lass who found her . . .” MacPhail cocked a brow towards a group of people clustered at the base of the graffiti wall. In the middle sat a familiar figure with a mop of stringy grey hair and a paramedic’s blanket draped around her massive frame. Calling her a lass seemed a stretch. Nonetheless, MacPhail continued with no trace of irony. “She says she tripped on her last night in the dark.”

  “That would be enough to dislodge her, certainly.” Considering the weight differential, Green thought.

  “Aye.” The pathologist’s blue eyes twinkled briefly. “But not to roll her over. I’ll know more when I can check the lividity in the rest of the body. However, my considered opinion, based on having seen a few corpses in my day, is that she was dumped.”

  Green glanced at MacPhail sharply. The pathologist made no attempt to suppress the broad smile that cracked his features. So that was why Bob Gibbs had called in the big guns. Sharp boy, Green thought with a twinge of pride. “So we’re talking what?” he said. “Murder?”

  “Or a simple cover-up. She could have OD’d, and her friends didn’t want the police snooping around their hang-out, so they brought her out here. Pretty isolated this time of year.”

  Green glanced around at the surroundings. MacPhail had a point. Lebreton Flats had boasted a colourful history of sex and wild times since the years when fur traders and lumbermen first ran their goods down the Ottawa River in the late 1700s. But in the past fifty years, the area, which sat virtually in the shadow of Parliament Hill and constituted some of the choicest urban real estate in the country, had gone to seed while politicians and bureaucrats bickered about what to do with it.

  During that time, street people and squatters had filtered in, bringing sex, drugs and booze to the decrepit shores of the abandoned aqueduct. Recently, though, construction had begun to clean up the Flats for fancy condos and museums, and now the Flats were crisscrossed with construction fencing. Heavy machinery sat idle amid piles of dirt, and in the middle sat the old stone pumphouse through which the aqueduct ran. But above the pumphouse, tucked in below an old wall and invisible from the street, a little pocket of trees still formed a natural hangout. In summers past, the area had been popular with transients and street artists, who had painted the wall with huge, colourful images. At this time of year, however, with the ice barely gone from the shoreline, the street trade would be nonexistent. Whoever brought the woman here had probably hoped she’d go undiscovered for days.

  “Can you give me a preliminary cause of death?”

  MacPhail shone his flashlight at the victim’s nose and mouth. Pinpoints of red dotted her eyelids and some water clung to her upper lip and the corners of her mouth.

  “Drowning?” Green ventured.

  MacPhail frowned as he probed the woman’s neck. His tone was distracted. “Possibly. I need to get her on the table to be sure. Paquette’s taking samples of the water to compare with her lungs, and I’ll need a thorough tox screen. From the looks of her, I’d say she hasn’t been putting too many healthy things into her body for the last while.”

  Green studied the woman’s clothing. Her long, narrow feet were encased in a pair of worn leather boots, and her faded jeans fit neatly over her thin hips, as if they’d been made for her. Only the jacket, a man’s khaki parka which hung down over her fingertips, looked out of place.

  “I guess she probably picked up that jacket from one of the missions. Or traded another one for it.”

  MacPhail was bagging the hands and he barely paused to glance at it. “That’s military issue for both men and women.”

  Green perked up. A lead. “Any idea what regiment?”

  MacPhail moved the hood aside. “No sign of a regimental insignia, but it’s standard army. Mind you, it’s known some years. It could have been passed around like a paper bag at a temperance rally, so it’s pretty cold as trails go.”

  “Still, it’s a trail.” Green turned to find Sue Peters at his elbow, clipboard in hand.

  “You want me to contact the military, sir? See if they have a soldier gone AWOL from CFB Ottawa?”

  “No.” Green scrambled for a safer assignment to occupy her. With only a few months of Major Crimes under her belt, Peters still had all the subtlety of a charging rhino, and Green shuddered at the thought of the military in her sights. Spotting Paquette, he gestured towards him. “As soon as Ident gets a good photo of the deceased, start showing it around on the streets, including the shelters, Byward Market and the Rideau Centre. Someone should have seen her.”

  “Do you want me to ask abo
ut pimps too, sir?”

  Green bit his tongue. Jeez, she was going to screw up even that. “Stick with the victim, Peters. Find someone who’s seen her, or knows who she’s been associating with.”

  “Who should I report to? I mean . . . are you running the case?”

  Green hesitated. As he stood at the edge of the crime scene, breathing in the scent of excitement and the urgency of death, watching the ident officer combing the grounds and the pathologist circling the victim, he felt the old passion for the hunt. People suffered, people died, and all he’d ever wanted to do was to track down the tormenters and bring them to account. Nothing thrilled him as much as making the bad guys pay. But now, in the larger, amalgamated police service, he was a middle-management bureaucrat, trapped between the field officers who wrestled with flesh and blood suffering and the senior officers, whose main battlefield was the committee rooms and ledgers of Elgin Street Headquarters. He’d stopped off here because he couldn’t resist the call of the field, but he belonged, even at this moment, in Barbara Devine’s office.

  Yet there were elements in the case that could use an inspector’s touch. He dredged up his best bureaucratese. “Not directly. It’s Gibbs’s case. He’ll keep me apprised.”

  MacPhail straightened as he watched the redhead bound eagerly towards the road. Merriment shone in his eyes. “Not directly? You’ll be getting your nose indirectly in, then?”

  Green laughed. “Well, inquiries with the military can be delicate. Those army guys love their ranks.”

  January 15, 1993. Winnipeg, Manitoba.

  Man, it’s cold out here. The wind whips off the prairie like a nor’easter coming off the sound, so cold we can hardly do manoeuvres. We’re mostly doing weapons training and PT, and the sergeant major’s working us so hard my legs feel like they’re going to fall off. He says we only got two months to get in shape, and there’s going to be some of us won’t make the cut. There are guys here from all across the country, a lot of them weekend warriors like me, really excited to be on their first tour. My platoon commander’s a captain from the Princess Pat regulars who they call the Hammer, because he comes down hard if you mess up. They put Danny and me in the same platoon, but we’re in different sections so we won’t get to work together much. Your section’s kind of like your family, you rely on them.

  My section commander’s a sergeantfrom Winnipeg on back to back rotations to Yugoslavia. He’s been telling us horror stories about the shelling and the sniping going on all the time. But that’s mostly in Sarajevo, and we’re going to be escorting convoys and protecting civilians in Croatia, which is a little horseshoe-shaped country that curves through the mountains and down the Adriatic Sea. Maybe Danny and I can go to a Greek island on our leave. Far cry from the North Atlantic. This is our first taste of real action, and I sure hope we both make the cut.

  THREE

  Green was already formulating a battle plan for the military as he walked back towards Gibbs’s car, but at the last minute he detoured over to have a quick word with Twiggy. The uniformed officers had obviously decided they had gleaned all the information from her that they could, for they’d left her sitting on the ground by herself. Some thoughtful officer had brought her a cup of hot coffee and a cigarette, which hung from the corner of her mouth. She cradled the coffee and pretended to be engrossed in her paper, but she was rocking slightly as if to soothe herself. At the sight of him, her lips stretched around the cigarette in a jagged but affectionate smile.

  He extended his hand. “How are you doing, Twiggy?”

  She squinted up at him through the smoke. “Well, well, Mr. G,” she said, her voice rattling through the phlegm in her throat. “Been awhile. What is it now? Superintendent? Chief?”

  He feigned horror. “God forbid! Inspector, and that’s as high as I plan to go. I have a fear of heights.”

  She chuckled, thrusting her thick tongue through the gap in her teeth. It seemed to Green that she’d lost a few more since he’d last seen her. “I don’t see your buddy around much any more either. Sully. He retired or something?”

  “Just off on another assignment. And we got a great big city to take care of now, so we don’t get down onto the street as much as we used to.” He eyed the soggy ground beside her. She had spread out some of her newspapers to sit on. Without hesitation, she laid out the one she was reading, and he eased himself gingerly down beside her. The reek of booze and body odour almost made him gag, but he kept his expression friendly.

  “So,” he said gently, “this must have been an unpleasant surprise for you.”

  Twiggy shrugged. Green had known her since she’d first hit the streets, and he knew the reason, yet only a slight wobble in her chin betrayed the pain she must have felt. For Twiggy, like himself, dead bodies stirred up one memory too many.

  “Not the first time,” she said. “Won’t be the last. Some day it’ll be me.”

  He didn’t insult her by arguing. In truth, he was surprised she was still around. She was an alcoholic, a smoker and a diabetic. The only reason her heart and lungs hadn’t collapsed beneath the abuse was that she’d inherited the constitution of an ox. And the bloody-mindedness to match.

  He stuck to the facts. “Did you know the woman?”

  Twiggy’s eyes peered shrewdly through folds of fat. “Didn’t get a good look first time round, and wasn’t about to take another.”

  “Still . . . did she look familiar?”

  “Like you said, it’s a big city.”

  “But you’ve seen a lot of it.”

  She chuckled. “Not so much recently. My knees don’t like to travel. But she wasn’t from around this part, that much I’ll say.

  “Did you see her arrive?”

  “She was already here.”

  “Already dead?”

  “Maybe. It was dark, and I didn’t notice.”

  “Was anyone else around here last night?”

  She shifted restlessly, wincing at the stiffness of her joints. “Mr. G, your cops already asked me all this. They took notes up the ying yang. Now I gotta go before I lose the best part of the day.”

  Green pulled his wallet from his inside jacket pocket. “It’s just that sometimes, after the shock wears off, witnesses remember more details.”

  Twiggy’s eyes flicked to his wallet before travelling up the slope towards the buildings on Bronson Avenue. She poked her tongue through her teeth. “I might have seen her earlier. With someone.”

  “Man or woman?”

  She stared into the distance, worrying her teeth with her tongue. “It was just a vague impression. I saw more the jacket than the woman.”

  “When was this? The same night?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. The nights all blur together, you know?”

  “What were they doing together? Did it look like drugs? Soliciting?”

  “I just remember them on a street over there, outside some fancy place.” When she pointed a stubby, yellowed finger towards downtown, Green noticed an oozing sore on the finger where the skin had cracked. “Talking.”

  “Hear anything?”

  She cast him a disdainful look before stubbing out her cigarette and beginning her struggle to rise. Green reached to haul her up, then extracted twenty dollars from his wallet. “Treat yourself to a proper breakfast, and check that finger out at the clinic.” He extended his card with the money. “And Twiggy, you be sure to call me if you remember anything more.”

  A jagged smile lit her doughy face as she plucked the bill from his hand. “Sure thing, Mr. G. My memory’s a funny thing these days.”

  Actually, Twiggy’s memory was still remarkably sharp for details that were important to her survival. Such as the whereabouts and activities of all strangers who came into her personally declared sphere of operation.

  She waited till Green had disappeared around the edge of the wall before she made her move. Stuffing her newspapers under her arm and dragging her garbage bag behind her, she struggled up the muddy slope and headed
to the seat in the nearby bus shelter. There, shielding her actions from the suspicious eyes of the police officer guarding the scene, she emptied her garbage bag onto the bench beside her. She pawed impatiently through the crumpled bedding and the pile of smelly clothing, picked up a small cardboard box and pried off its lid. Inside were two pairs of homemade bead bracelets and a gold ring now much too small for her swollen fingers. They were remnants of another lifetime, kept only because they were worth more in memories than in cold hard cash.

  She frowned at the inside of the box. Too small. She groped through the clothes for a better hiding place, but everything was damp and stained. As a last resort, almost reluctantly, she picked up the two books that had weighted down the bottom of the garbage bag. One was a paperback picked up at a church rummage sale for 25 cents. If Life’s a Bowl of Cherries, What am I Doing in the Pits?, by Erma Bombeck. Bombeck had been dealt one of life’s crappier hands but had risen to fame and happiness, only to be struck down by a fatal disease at the height of her success. Twiggy had been unable to resist the irony, and indeed, Bombeck’s humour had brought her through many a desolate night.

  But the paperback wasn’t big enough. Not for what she had in mind.

  The second book was a thick hardcover tome with gilt lettering and a splintering spine. The Collected Works of Charles Dickens. Twiggy picked it up and let it fall open naturally to reveal the treasures that lay inside. Two photos, lovingly preserved against the crush of life on the streets. Like the jewellery, they were remnants of another lifetime. Carefully, she tore the newspaper along its crease and folded the page into four. Flipping to a fresh spot, she tucked the small square between the pages of the book.

  Another remnant, valuable not to her past, but perhaps to her future.

  After Green left Twiggy, he headed up to speak to Detective Bob Gibbs. He opened the passenger door and slipped in just as the young detective was lifting his coffee cup from its holder. Gibbs started, spilling coffee all down the front of his impeccable white shirt. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he searched for his voice.