Honour Among Men

by Barbara Fradkin

  Mrs. Oliver’s tone was high and querulous. “To this day I’ve never forgiven her. It was all her doing, Danny’s troubles. And then after he’d gone, she never even bothered to pick up the phone.” Belatedly her voice dropped. “Why? What’s happened to her?”

  McGrath recalled that the mother’s feelings had been very different ten years earlier. Patricia was to have been her future daughter-in-law, and she and the baby were supposed to make the world of difference in Danny’s life. “I just need to get in touch with her,” McGrath hedged. “If you do hear from her, please ask her to call the Halifax police.”

  There were two other official avenues of inquiry she could pursue in her search, but both the Health Department and Revenue Canada would not be accessible until business hours in the morning. She was just about to give up for the evening when her phone rang. It was one of Daniel Oliver’s old friends, for whom she had left a voice mail message earlier. He had a deep drawl with a hint of Cape Breton in his vowels.

  “I did run into her a year or so ago, and we had a couple of drinks for old times. Never found out where she lived, but she seemed a regular at the Seaman’s Watch. They might know.”

  McGrath glanced at her watch. It was just past eight o’clock—peak time in the Halifax bar scene. She dived for her jacket, clipped her gun and phone onto her belt, and went in search of a partner. The Seaman’s Watch was a well-known sleaze bar on Gottingen Street just a few blocks north of the police station. It attracted a prickly mix of sailors and students, as well as the whores who serviced them and the petty thugs who thought there was money to be made. McGrath knew better than to walk in there alone. She commandeered a beefy young constable who was just coming in to write up a traffic accident. Minor, he said, no injuries. It can wait, she replied and led the way to the car park.

  At nine o’clock on a Tuesday night, the Seaman’s Watch was already crowded. The yeasty stink of beer and sour bodies choked her as they walked in, but she stifled her grimace. A lively, inebriated band was banging out drinking songs at the end of the room, and the audience was singing along. Ignoring the leers, McGrath sought out the bartender and drew him close so that she could shout in his ear. She gave him a vague story about needing to locate Patricia for her own safety. Once he’d deciphered her request, the bartender’s brow furrowed.

  “Yeah, she comes in here regular like, but I haven’t seen her the past couple of weeks.”

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  He hesitated, then glanced at the table nearby, where a group of sailors were roaring lustily. “A few of the lads have taken her home, like, you know, not a regular thing, but from time to time. She’s kind of a sad case, is our Patti.”

  You don’t know the half of it, McGrath thought to herself as she signalled her bodyguard towards the table. Five minutes later, they were back out in the crisp, salty night air, armed with a street name and number. They drove slowly up the street, scanning house numbers until they came upon a tall, narrow clapboard house perched near the top of the hill. It was impossible to be sure of the colour beneath the peeling layers of grime, but McGrath suspected it had once been robin’s egg blue. She rang the top buzzer. It had no name, but the sailors had said she lived on the top floor.

  No answer. McGrath rang again. Still nothing, although she could hear the abrasive buzz reverberate inside. Her sense of foreboding grew.

  It took an hour to locate and summon the landlord to open the apartment door. He was a familiar figure to the police, a low-level drug dealer who laundered his money through several of the less savoury properties in the downtown core. He fumed as he stomped up the stairs to her floor.

  “She’s one of my most reliable tenants. Clean, quiet, always pays on time. Fuck, she better not have done a runner. She knows I need a month’s notice.”

  McGrath didn’t even dignify his whining with a response. As he unlocked the door, she shoved past him into the room. It was almost bare. Only a bed, table and chair, dresser and an ancient TV with rabbit ears. On the bed were neat stacks of old letters, photos and a folded Sunday Herald. In the closet, jackets and pants hung on three forlorn hangers, and the dresser itself was half full of clothes. The cupboard above the sink in the tiny kitchenette still held crockery and pots. McGrath ducked into the bathroom. The shampoo and soap were still by the tub, but her toothbrush was gone. So was her purse.

  Patricia Ross had gone away, but she had intended to come back again.

  McGrath returned to the main room to find the landlord rifling through the Sunday Herald. “Don’t touch that, please!”

  He tossed the papers down sulkily. “Just seeing if she left me a note.”

  The papers fell open to an inside page, half of which had been torn off. McGrath looked at it curiously. Page 10, which was full of local news. She hunted briefly through the rest of the paper, but there was no sign of the missing page. “Did you tear this?”

  He scowled as if affronted. “It’s two weeks old! The kid downstairs probably took it. They fought all the time about that.”

  He could be right, she thought. A torn page didn’t mean much, although it might be interesting to check its contents. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  He scanned the room, then shrugged. “She brought April’s rent to my office three weeks ago.”

  McGrath unfolded the photo of the dead Jane Doe and held it out. “Do you recognize this woman?”

  The landlord glanced at the photo and to his credit, he blanched visibly in the dingy apartment light.

  SIX

  April 6, 1993. Zagreb, Croatia.

  Dear Kit . . . We’re in the airport waiting for our ground transport, so this is my first glimpse of the country. Zagreb airport looks like any other modern airport. I don’t know what I was expecting—snipers, tanks and big craters in the ground from mortar fire. But there’s nothing but wall to wall peacekeepers in the pouring rain. It’s wet and cold, but everybody’s excited.

  April 10, 1993. Pakrac, Sector West, Croatia.

  We’re at our position now and getting dug in. Our section house is a bombed out farmhouse in the middle of a field. There’s mud everywhere from the winter rains. We’re all pitching in, learning the jobs from the 3 Pats who are leaving. Today I did six hours at the hot dog stand. That’s what they call a checkpoint. It can be boring you sit there and search each vehicle that comes through, write down the licence plate, who’s in it and where they’re going. Sector West is a UN protected area with a Serb side and a Croat side, and the ceasefire line in between runs right through the Canadian Battalion’s area of responsibility. The CO says they put the Canadians in the toughest spot because we’re the only UN peacekeeping battalion that has the equipment and the training to do the job.

  Anyway, there aren’t supposed to be any weapons inside the UNPA, but both sides are always trying to sneak them in, and it’s our job to stop them. Sometimes we have a translator but a lot of times we just use hand gestures and it can get pretty funny. Us pointing go back and them pointing forward. There’s a Muslim kid Mahir from the nearby village who knows some English, so we use him when he’s free.

  April 15 1993, Sector West, Croatia.

  Dear Kit . . . The past couple of days we’ve noticed this dog hanging around the woods near the hot dog stand. She looks like a border collie and shepherd mix with sores on her legs and her ribs sticking out. Mahir says she belonged to a Serbian family who abandoned their farm. She was so spooked it took us three days to coax her to come near. Today we got her in the APC and took her back to the section house, and tomorrow we’ll build her a dog house. She’ll probably end up sleeping with us, but Sarge says when the Hammer’s around, she’d better stay in her kennel. Rules are rules, after all. I’m looking for a good name for her.

  May 1, 1993. Sector West, Croatia.

  Good things and not so good. Our dog’s been gaining weight steadily and the platoon medic treated her sores with antibiotics. Sarge swore him to secrecy. I swear she’s the smart
est animal I’ve ever met. She knows about fifty English words already, more than the Croatian kids we’re trying to teach. I’ve named her Fundy. The guys tease me about my new girlfriend, but I don’t mind. She’s no competition for you, but she reminds me of home.

  Today our section did patrol, which is more interesting than the hot dog stand. We drove all around the countryside in the APC checking for weapons caches and looking for troop movement. The countryside’s green and beautiful, but a lot of the villages are destroyed, and hardly anyone lives there any more. Everything is bombed to hell. One of the patrols came across this Serb village where there were no people, just stuff left on the ground, like sneakers and kids’ clothes. Word is there’s a mass grave there, but we’ll never know. Kind of creepy, that only half a klic away, everyone’s just carrying on.

  After Gibbs had sent his priority request to Halifax earlier that day, Green dispatched him to meet up with Peters at the train station. Peters had proved that she had more detective instincts than Green had initially thought, but he didn’t trust her not to get carried away when those instincts took her on the hunt. He recognized the danger signs of over-exuberance bordering on obsession, because he’d been there.

  Besides, if she was going to go poking around in the low-cost accommodation facilities in Vanier, she’d better not go alone. Vanier had proud, francophone working class roots, but like many inner city neighbourhoods, it was now an uneasy mix of immigrants, transients, drug addicts and the working poor. Crack houses stood side by side with the modest woodframe cottages of the founding families.

  Green himself spent the rest of the day managing the developments in the Byward Club investigation, which was fast deteriorating into a circus of lying teenage brats, irate parents, and their threatening lawyers. Fortunately, they kept Barbara Devine so busy that she had little time to agitate about the murder of an unknown, unlamented Jane Doe. Not even the women’s groups seemed interested in taking up the cause.

  By five o’clock, Green’s patience was expired, his head ached, and he knew he still faced several more hours of diplomacy and hard work once he got home. He was just returning to his office from his third lawyer meeting when Gibbs and Peters came off the elevator from the basement car park. Gibbs moved at a purposeful lope, and Peters had to hustle to keep pace. Spotting Green, they changed course to intercept him.

  “Let’s get a coffee,” Green said, steering them towards the stairs to the police cafeteria, although they both looked as if they’d already overdosed on adrenaline. Green bought them coffee and muffins before sitting down opposite to listen. They sat side by side, he noticed, looking very comfortable with each other.

  “Any news from Halifax?” Peters asked as she added three packages of sugar to her coffee.

  Green shook his head. “Did you have any luck with the porter at the train station?”

  Gibbs nodded proudly. “Sue hit the jackpot on that one. Y-you tell it, Sue.”

  She clasped her hands and leaned forward on the table, her coffee forgotten. “Marier Street. That’s the street our Jane Doe was looking for. So we drove down there and canvassed every house and building on the whole street. We found her at #296. It calls itself a motel, and it’s one of those long, two-storey 1950s buildings where the clients either stay an hour or a week. She’d booked in for a week on April 11th, and she paid another week on the 18th.”

  “How did she pay?”

  “Cash. And she registered under Patti Oliver from Sydney, Nova Scotia. There are two Olivers listed in Sydney, but neither of them have ever heard of a Patti.”

  “We c-could find no such person listed anywhere in Nova Scotia,” Gibbs added. “Although we’ve still got some calls to make.”

  “Did she at least provide the motel with a phone number or a contact name?”

  Gibbs shook his head, but before he could untangle his tongue, Peters jumped back in. “Cash, no questions asked, works fine for these guys. But we got the motel manager’s permission to search the room. We found the duffel bag the porter told me about, mostly full of clothes and food. There was food on the dresser—bread, juice, tea, canned soups and beans—low-cost stuff. Everything was healthy, and her clothing was mostly clean, even if it was old. It looked like she tried to take care of herself and watch her money.”

  Green was again pleasantly surprised by her perceptiveness. “Any scotch?”

  “No, she must have bought that at a bar.”

  “Or someone bought it for her. Any clues to suggest who she was or why she was here?”

  Peters glanced over at Gibbs as if in silent invitation, which he accepted. “Just one small thing, sir.” He reached into his jacket pocket and handed over an evidence bag. Through the transparent plastic, Green could make out a small leather box. Slipping on latex gloves, he opened the box. Nestled inside was an embossed silver disk attached to a red and blue striped ribbon. On the front was a maple leaf inside a wreath, and on the back were engraved the words “Bravery—Bravoire”.

  “There’s a little card underneath, sir,” Peters burst in, unable to contain herself. She plucked the card out and began to read. “This Medal of Bravery is awarded to Corporal Ian MacDonald for acts of outstanding heroism in hazardous circumstances, September 10, 1993.”

  “Ian MacDonald. Have you checked this out?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “It was awarded on a peacekeeping mission in Croatia, where he was serving with the Second Battalion of the Princess Patricia Light Infantry Regiment.”

  Green saw the suspense in their eyes as they waited for him to digest that information and to ask the obvious question. “So did you track down this Ian MacDonald?”

  “Well, that’s the thing, sir,” said Gibbs, so excited he didn’t even stutter. “Corporal Ian MacDonald died September 10, 1995, and we can’t get anyone in the military to talk to us.”

  It was now past six o’clock, and Green was unable to rouse anyone official at DND. He left an urgent message on Captain Ulrich’s voice mail to phone him the instant he got the message. Then he turned his attention back to the two detectives, who had followed him hopefully back to his office. Both were beginning to sag as the adrenaline wore off. Peters, he recalled, had now been on the job at least twelve hours.

  “Okay, good work, you two. Assign the follow-up work to someone on the night shift. Let them try to locate Patricia Oliver and Ian MacDonald through the various databases. You can pick it up again in the morning.”

  After the two detectives had walked back to the elevator together, Green glanced at his watch and cursed. Sharon was working the evening shift again, which meant that Hannah had been in charge of the household for three hours now. Dinner was going to be very late, even if he picked up something easy from the Bagelshop again on his way home, and Tony would be apoplectic with hunger.

  He locked his drawer, logged off his computer, and was just grabbing his jacket when his phone rang. He considered letting it go to voice mail, but thought it might be Captain Ulrich.

  Instead, a familiar, manic voice came through the line over the background of chatter and office machines. “Mike!” The man hailed him like a long lost friend. “Glad I caught you. These murders are keeping us both hopping.”

  Green muttered a soft oath. This is what voice mail was for—to intercept unwanted calls from the press at the worst possible moments. Frank Corelli was the crime reporter for the Ottawa Sun and, as crime reporters go, he was smart and reliable. They’d known each other for four years and had helped each other out when Green needed a certain spin put out on a case and Frank needed a story. But no publicity was going to be good publicity in the Byward murders.

  So he dusted off the classic departmental evasion. “Frank, you know I can’t comment on the Byward case at this time. Superintendent Devine has scheduled a press conference for—”

  “I know, I know. And I’ll be there, duly copying down the party line. But this is the other case, and I’ve got something for you for a change.”

  G
reen perked up. “The aqueduct case?”

  “The very one. Now you know I always play straight with you guys. You don’t want something reported, I keep it under wraps. I learn something, I pass it on. Right?”

  “Frank, spit it out.”

  There was a pause, during which Green could hear a phone ringing. “I got a call from a woman. She wouldn’t give her name, just said she knew who killed the prostitute in the aqueduct, and was I interested. I played dumb, what do you mean am I interested? Well, she says, how much is it worth? Nothing, I said, that’s obstructing a police investigation. You call in the cops, she says, and I’ll take it to the competition. I says nobody will touch it, and she says you got no imagination. Anyway, I thought you should know you got information out there somewhere.”

  “Or maybe not.” Whenever a major crime occurred in the city, the wackos and the wheeler dealers came out of the woodwork.

  “Maybe not, but she sounded like she was holding some good cards. Not a wingnut, clear, calm, seemed intelligent. She knew the body had been moved after death. That true?”

  Green said nothing. Inwardly, his thoughts raced over the scene at the aqueduct. How many people knew that detail, which had been held back from all press reports. He tried to sound disinterested. “So what did you tell her?”

  Frank chuckled knowingly. “I told her to give me a day to set it up and to call me back. She wasn’t happy about that, but I told her I had to get the money approved. We gotta figure out how you want to play this.”

  “Did you record the phone number?”

  Corelli read it out, and Green put him on hold while he logged back onto his computer and searched the phone number database. His momentary excitement faded. The call had come from a payphone on Bank Street near Wellington, which was the major intersection almost opposite Parliament Hill. Thousands of people, tourists and government workers alike, passed by it every day. Green weighed his options.