Honour Among Men

by Barbara Fradkin

  “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. When she calls back, set up a meeting to see what she’s got. I’ll have someone nearby, and we’ll pick her up.”

  When Green finally escaped the office, his spirits were greatly buoyed and his headache gone. The case was breaking open, with new leads unfolding in all directions. He held fast to his good mood throughout yet another hectic evening as sole cook, babysitter and dog walker, and poured himself a well-deserved shot of single malt as he settled down to the eleven o’clock news. Only as he sat through the usual stories of global carnage and the endless spats on the federal campaign trail did his mood begin to sag.

  Politics. It was a game too often won by opportunists and manipulators, who mouthed platitudes about the public good, but whose real passion was power. The Liberal Party, having been ousted from power after years of corruption, was pulling out all the stops to reverse the Conservative backlash. High-profile candidates for both parties were being bribed with promises of cabinet posts and plum appointments. Jubilant reporters were crisscrossing the country, stoking the flames of division in key ridings where election races were most heated. The real losers, Green thought, were the genuine good guy candidates who wanted to make a difference for their country. And the country itself.

  It was no different in policing, where, once in the public spotlight, who you knew and how well you could play the game were often more important than what was right. A victory of form over substance. And we have only ourselves to blame, Green thought as he groped sleepily for the remote to shut off the latest Conservative rant. Because people like him refused even to get in the game.

  Unexpectedly, the phone rang, sending a spike of fear and excitement racing through him. At this hour, a phone call almost always meant trouble.

  “Inspector Green?” It was a woman’s voice, curt and authoritative. “This is Sergeant McGrath of the Halifax Regional Police. Sorry to disturb you at home, but the detective down at your headquarters insisted you’d want to be informed.”

  Green bolted upright, wide awake and rooting on the side table for a pen. Years of hounding the duty desk had paid off. “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “Good news. I believe we’ve identified your Jane Doe.”

  SEVEN

  The next morning Green waylaid Barbara Devine the moment she arrived at her office.

  “Good timing,” she said as she swept past him through her door, her plaid cloak trailing. She headed for her closet. “You were the first item on my agenda.”

  “I need to go to Halifax.”

  She whirled around, her cloak in hand. “Why?”

  “Because Halifax has a tentative ID on our aqueduct murder, and it may be connected to a cold case of their own.”

  “So get them to fax the file.”

  “It’s several boxes. And I want to re-interview the witnesses myself, in light of our case.”

  She finally hung up her cloak, then paused to look at herself in the mirror. She patted her helmet of hair, denting it slightly, then moved behind her desk with exaggerated calm. Only then did she meet his gaze. “Well, you can’t. You’re needed here. Send Detective Gibbs, he’s the lead investigator.”

  “Gibbs has to stay here to coordinate things at this end. Besides, he hasn’t the experience to handle this on his own, and I can’t spare two officers.”

  “Then get the Halifax detective to do the interviews for you.”

  “It’s our case, Barbara.” He restrained his irritation with an effort. Like it or not, he needed her cooperation. He held out the travel requisition. “I’ll be there and back in forty-eight hours, guaranteed, and I’ll keep in constant touch by phone and email.”

  He’d already packed and tentatively booked himself on the eleven a.m. flight to Halifax, but by the time he emerged from her office with her signature on the requisition, he had little more than an hour to make the plane. Barely time to brief Gibbs on the newest development in the case and to tell Frank Corelli that if his mystery woman phoned, he was to work through Bob Gibbs on the meeting.

  Only once he was up in the air, heading east over the farmland of Quebec, did he have a chance to reflect. The truth was, he should have given the trip to Gibbs. It was his case, his chance for glory, but the lure of an unsolved homicide had proved too strong for Green. He could hear the excitement in Sergeant McGrath’s voice when she talked about it. For her too, this new development, despite its tragic outcome for Patricia Ross, breathed new life into her case and gave her a chance to catch the bad guy who had foiled her for so long. She sounded like Green’s kind of detective. Driven, determined and exhilarated by the hunt.

  Her gruff tone on the phone had prepared him for a square-shouldered matron in a dour suit and sensible shoes. He was surprised when he emerged from the arrivals gate at Halifax airport to see a tall, slender woman wearing a tailored navy pant suit and holding a sign saying “Inspector Michael Green”. She had fine silver hair and deep-set blue eyes that widened with equal surprise as he approached. He knew his deceptively youthful air and bargain basement polyester confounded a lot of people, but he wondered what she’d expected an inspector from the nation’s capital to look like. A balding, fiftyish pencil pusher with a poker up his ass?

  He smiled broadly as he extended his hand, thinking this forty-eight hours was going to be even more interesting than he’d anticipated.

  She gave his hand a brief, formal shake. “I’ve arranged for lunch to be sent up to the incident room, sir,” she said as she led him toward the exit. “I expect you’ll want to get a look at the files right away.”

  Despite her formality, the mischief of Newfoundland still clung to her speech in her flattened vowels and Irish lilt. Green winced at the prospect of police cafeteria sandwiches and wilted celery sticks eaten within the windowless, airless ambiance of a police incident room. “Actually . . .” he said. “I’ve had a rushed morning and a cramped flight. What I’d really like is a proper lunch in a real restaurant, while you tell me about the case in your own words.”

  She looked dubious as she approached the unmarked car sitting at the curb in the pick-up zone. “Inspector Norrich of Special Investigations is planning to join us, sir. At least initially.”

  Green smiled. Policing has its protocol. One inspector deserves another, even though he suspected Norrich knew nothing about the case and had much better things to do.

  He tossed his bag in the trunk and climbed in beside her. “Tell Inspector Norrich that I’m in good hands and don’t want to put him to any trouble. I’ll drop by to keep him apprised after our meeting.”

  Her lips twitched, and her stiff posture eased. “Your first time in Halifax?”

  He nodded. “First time east of Montreal. That’s shameful, I know.”

  “It is. You like seafood?”

  He hesitated, picturing scaly fish with dead eyes staring from the plate. “Does pickled herring count?”

  She actually laughed, a musical trill that almost erased his hunger pangs. “There’s a place down on the harbourfront that serves terrific crab cakes. Worth a barrel of pickled herring.”

  She drove for what seemed like hours through a wooded countryside dotted with lakes. Once they hit civilization, Green was struck by the bright colours of the woodframe houses. The sun shone in a cloudless cobalt sky and glistened off the harbour below. She wove past shabby warehouses and shipyards to the historic downtown waterfront, parked the car and led him onto a wooden boardwalk. She headed straight for a white woodframe restaurant at the edge of the wharf, where the owner greeted her with a huge grin.

  “Crab cakes to go, Kate?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got a newcomer from Ontario with me, Jim. Have you got a table overlooking the waterfront?”

  He led the way through the restaurant and peeked out the back door. Outside, the patio adjoining his restaurant was drenched with afternoon sun. “If you’re brave, I can open up the patio for you.”

  A brisk breeze blew the scent of salt, fish and die
sel fumes in off the harbour. Ice crystals still clung to the water’s edge, but already the gulls were circling and the shops were setting out their tourist wares. McGrath cocked a questioning eyebrow at Green, and, not to be branded a wimp, he nodded.

  Her formality slipped away as she settled into her seat. She waved away the menus Jim brought and ordered them both crab cakes with organic greens on the side. When they came, Green was relieved to see no fish heads. The cakes were exquisite, breaking up in his mouth like a feather light mousse. She waited until the magic of the first morsel had passed, then sat back and took a deep breath. Suddenly, she was all business again.

  “Patricia Ross was the fiancée of a mechanic named Daniel Oliver.”

  Green reacted to the name with surprise. “Fiancée? Are you sure she wasn’t his wife? She registered as Patti Oliver in Ottawa.”

  She shook her head. “They never got to the altar, unfortunately. Daniel was from down Cape Breton way originally, but he’d come up to Halifax in the mid nineties to find work, and he met Patricia here. But employment was sporadic and money tight, and the last winter he was having trouble keeping body and soul together. Then at approximately 12:08 a.m. on April 9, 1996, police officers responded to a disturbance at the Lighthouse Tavern on Barrington Street. The Lighthouse is a strip joint with a rough clientele, mainly sailors off the ships, some armed forces personnel . . .” she smiled wryly, “and students slumming it. The staff usually handle their own disputes without calling in police. But that night the bartender himself put in the call, and when the first squad car responded, the fight pretty well involved the whole place. By the time other officers arrived and broke it up, there were four individuals wounded, one mortally.”

  “Daniel Oliver.”

  She nodded. “He was the instigator. According to witnesses willing to talk, he started an argument with another male customer. When that customer’s companion came over as backup, Daniel’s friends jumped in to take his side, and before you know it . . .” She shrugged in distaste.

  “Who was the other man?”

  “That never came to light.”

  Green’s eyebrows shot up. “You never caught him?”

  She shook her head. “While the officers were breaking up the brawl, he apparently just walked out. Daniel’s friends said they didn’t recognize him, and the bartender said he’d never seen him before. He wasn’t even a Nova Scotian according to witnesses who overheard him speak, but then they were well plastered by that hour of the night, so you know what that’s worth.”

  “How did Oliver die?”

  “Blunt force trauma to the left side of the head, the pathologist said. Caused massive intracranial bleeding, and he died four hours later in hospital without regaining consciousness.”

  “What caused the trauma?”

  “According to the pathologist, a bare fist, driven with such force it left the imprint of knuckles imbedded in the man’s skull.”

  Green digested this image soberly. It suggested either one hell of a strong guy, or one hell of an angry one. “Did you get any leads? Do you have a suspect but can’t prove it?”

  “Patricia was convinced it was someone from Daniel’s past. She and Daniel and four other friends were at a table near the back. They’d been drinking for three hours by then, and the bartender estimated they’d consumed about a dozen pitchers of beer between them. The stranger walked past and Daniel called him over to the table, saying something like ‘Hey, you son-of-a-bitch’. Now Daniel Oliver was a big guy, and when he was drunk, he could look pretty mean. And he was apparently yelling something about it being all this man’s fault and calling him a traitor and a lying bastard. There was a lot of noise in the bar, making it difficult to hear the whole conversation. Patricia was farthest away from the shouting match—”

  “So the stranger was shouting too?”

  McGrath fell silent, thinking. “No. If I remember the witness statements, he was speaking very softly, almost not at all, then suddenly he came over the table at Daniel with a deadly right hook.”

  Green’s surprise must have shown, for she grinned. “I have five brothers. All boxing fans.”

  “Your suspect had to have some expertise in that area too,” said Green. “Or it was one lucky punch. Unlucky, if you’re Daniel Oliver.”

  “Yes, it was one of the specs we fed into his profile, along with coming from away.”

  “What other facts did you learn about him? Witnesses must have observed something during the evening. Or the bartender. They usually watch the unknowns like a hawk.”

  “The man didn’t draw attention to himself. He’d come in alone about an hour earlier, sat in the corner at the bar by himself . . .” Here she paused, wrinkling her brow in her effort to remember. “Watching TV and drinking pretty heavily over the course of the hour. The man next to him struck up a conversation at one point, and the two of them got pretty chatty. When they got up to go to a table in the corner, that’s apparently when the confrontation took place.”

  “What did this third man say about him afterwards?”

  “Claimed he didn’t know him, they just talked about the news on TV.”

  “Did you think he was lying?”

  “If I recall correctly, I did. But I don’t know why.”

  “Who was he? Local?”

  She signalled to Jim and ordered two coffees. She seemed to be using the diversion to search her memory. “If I remember, he gave a fake ID. Lots of people do, when they don’t want to get dragged into an ugly investigation of a bar fight. And this was a strip club, remember. Wives and bosses might take a dim view.”

  “Still, couldn’t he even give you the first name of the assailant?”

  His skepticism must have showed, because for the first time a trace of irritation flickered across her face. “Listen, I investigated this case for months. I interviewed and reinterviewed dozens of witnesses, checked every hotel in Halifax and Dartmouth, and turned over every rock looking for the man. If he could have been found, I would have found him. We couldn’t even work up a decent composite of him, because the witnesses were all so contradictory.”

  He held up a soothing hand, impressed by her vehemence. At that moment Jim arrived with their coffees, and they both took some time out to add cream and sugar. On the wharf nearby, seagulls squabbled over a scrap of fish, and from the harbour came the mournful blast of a distant ship’s horn. McGrath sipped her coffee and shook her head slowly back and forth, as if caught up in the memories.

  “Some cases just stick in your craw, eh?” he said gently.

  She watched the gulls in silence a moment before replying. “It was such a pointless, brutal act. Not the bar fight. Men have been beating each other senseless since they first fermented the grape. It’s just that things were starting to turn a corner for Daniel. He didn’t deserve this, and neither did his fiancée.”

  “You said earlier that she thought the fight had something to do with the past. Did you find anything useful in his past?”

  “I went through it with a fine-toothed comb. It’s all in the files, but nothing jumped out at me. He was a tough, blue collar kid who was reportedly a bit wild as a teenager, but there was nothing in the RCMP or local police files. He joined the reserves because he liked uniforms and guns, and—”

  Her cellphone rang. She checked the call display and made a face before answering. Her expression was deadpan as she listened, her eyes fixed on a distant freighter being tugged into harbour. “Yes, sir, we’re on our way,” she said and disconnected. Tossing back the remains of her coffee, she shoved back her chair. “We’d better get back. Inspector Norrich is anxious to meet you. We can check the details of Daniel Oliver’s background in the files at the station.”

  Norrich was waiting for them in the incident room, seated at a long conference table with the case files spread open around him. His massive frame overflowed the molded plastic chair, and his face had a bruised, purple hue that Green recognized all too well. When he struggled to his fe
et and lumbered forward to shake hands, Green detected the unmistakable whiff of booze.

  “Mike! Leo Norrich. Welcome to the finest town in all of Canada.”

  Green tugged his hand free from the meaty grip and smiled dutifully. “You may convince me yet.”

  “Your first visit?”

  Green nodded.

  “Then you must come over for dinner tonight. Annie and I will show you what real down east hospitality is all about.”

  Green was conscious of Kate McGrath standing beside him. Norrich had barely acknowledged her presence, let alone included her in the invitation. The thought of a boozy, backslapping evening on his own with the inspector and his wife made him cringe.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, Leo. But judging from the number of boxes on that table, I may be here all night.”

  Norrich waved a dismissive hand. “Most of this is irrelevant. Witnesses interviewed five times over, who never saw anything in the first place. Or have forgotten anything they might have seen.” He winked. “It happens when you’re three sheets to the wind, eh?”

  This time Green didn’t bother with the dutiful smile. “Even so, I’d like to have a look. I’ve come all this way, might as well be thorough.”

  A scowl flitted across Norrich’s florid features. “Suit yourself. I can’t see why you think Patti Ross’s death is connected to this case anyway. This was ten years ago, just one of those pig-headed bar fights that gets out of hand when a little pussy starts ramping them up. I don’t know what things are like in Ottawa, but down here, sometimes guys just have to blow off steam. They’re cooped up all winter, jobs are scarce, and they’ve got too much time on their hands. And truth be told, Patti’s life hasn’t been all smooth sailing since then either, and she’s been known not to choose her company too carefully.”