She shrugged. “It was okay. Exciting. Dangerous. The place to be. But a few things went sour, and I asked to be transferred home.”
I could have asked exactly what had gone sour, but I didn’t want to. Besides, there was a mark on Aliana’s ring finger that four or five years of wearing a wedding ring might have left. I asked her again. “What are you doing down here? Nosing out terrorists?”
“I came to find you, Ellis,” she said. She leaned back and crossed her long legs with a slow ease that made her beauty seem like a cliché against the backdrop of the old furniture.
“To find me?”
“Yeah. Because of your nomination. I thought maybe you’d grant me an exclusive—for old times’ sake.”
“Old times?” I smiled. “You were good to me, Aliana. If you hadn’t written those articles about me ten years ago, nobody would have thought that an old judge who’d lost it and turned to drugs deserved any sympathy at all. I admit I owe you, but ...”
“But what?” A drop of liquid had settled on her wide bottom lip. She ran her tongue along the curves of her mouth. Kissing Aliana had once been a rich fantasy.
“But I think you better tell Nicky to lay off the practical jokes. I’m on to him.”
She looked confused. “Nicky? Nicky who? Do you mean I’m too late for an exclusive? You gave somebody else the first interview?”
“Aliana, cut it. You know as well as I do that Nicky McPhail got the Deputy A-G to send me a fake letter and even take a meeting with me, as if he were really considering me for an appointment. It was amusing, but enough is enough. Go back to Nicky and tell him to quit fooling around.”
Aliana stared at me. “Ellis,” she said, “what are you talking about? I never heard of Nicky McPhail, and nobody sent me here. I’ve been chasing you around town for a couple of days.” She reached down into the depths of her Fendi bag and extracted a slim leather portfolio. From it she took a newspaper clipping. It was a column wide and a few inches long. I could tell from the crispness of the paper that it was recent. When Aliana handed it to me, my name jumped out as if written in neon.
“This is an announcement from the A-G’s office,” I sputtered.
“Yes. Yes, it is. Accompanied by a nice little write-up, even if I do say so myself. But I want to give you more than two and a half column-inches, Ellis. I want to know why you’re the best candidate for the appointment as Judge of Orphans.”
I’m in the witness box. Aliana is watching me with her dark, intense eyes. Every trace of every drug, even the drug of pride, has worn off. They are all waiting for me. The judge, the cops who picked me up, the two lawyers. They want me to tell them why I attacked Harpur Blane and tried to choke her to death. Defending on my answer, I will go to jail or I will go free. I look around the room. Suddenly I can no longer recognize anyone, not even the intense young zuoman whose long black hair brushes her page as she writes.
“Aliana, I have nothing to say to the Daily World—or to any paper for that matter. I’m trying to resume practice as a lawyer. I haven’t the least intention of ever being a judge again.”
It was a lie and we both knew it, but she did a little huffy thing with her jacket and her briefcase and sashayed out. I was relieved to see the back of her. And then I was sorry she had left so soon.
“We’re going to the parade, and Chief Justice Stoughton-Melville is going to the slammer.”
“Angelo, be quiet and watch for the clown. He might throw you some candy.”
The raw November wind didn’t seem to bother my grandson, but it was killing me. I couldn’t concentrate on the floats as they lumbered by our choice viewing spot on the front steps of the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor Street by Philosophers’ Walk. I did notice that no float, banner, sign or flag bore the “C” word. In a metropolis in which possibly half the four million inhabitants had been born elsewhere and in which every conceivable “religion,” including atheism, was represented, political correctness frowned on a public holiday being called by a religious name. “Christmas,” some feared, was becoming a relic of the past. “We’re only allowed to call it the Festive Holiday,” Angelo explained. “So we are watching the Festive Holiday parade.”
A cheery buffoon in a big blue wig waved at Angelo, winked in an exaggerated fashion and tossed the boy a candy cane, which my grandson caught without missing a beat of the chatter he’d carried on the whole time we’d stood there freezing. “Mommy says justice has to be done no matter how important a person is, because everybody is under the same law. That’s true, isn’t it, Grandpa?”
“Here comes Santa Claus. Do you want me to pick you up so you can see him better?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a baby. And it’s not a him. It’s a her. It’s the Festive Lady.”
I studied the figure on the white sparkling sleigh. It was indeed a middle-aged woman. An Asian woman dressed in red trimmed in white fur.
“Mommy says next year Sal will come with us to the Festive Parade. She says by that time Chief Justice You-Know-Who will be in a real jail instead of Club Fed.”
“Angelo, what are you rattling on about? Forget about jail and watch this damn parade. Look at Santa Claus’s helpers. Aren’t they funny? They’re Christmas elves.”
“They’re Festive Season assistants, and don’t say ‘damn,’ Grandpa,” Angelo answered.
The next day, Monday, I got a call from Queenie. “What are you doing over there?” she asked. “Have you got any clients yet?”
“I went up to see Stow ...”
“And?”
“And not much. He made me his lawyer. And a lot of good it’s going to do him. I can’t find anything out about him that other people couldn’t find out.”
“You’ve got to get out on the street. You’re not going to find anything sitting in an office.”
“Did you call me just to give me a hard time?”
“Yeah. And I’m not done yet. I need you down here to do what you promised. To give my clients some survival advice.”
“Down here” meant Tent City. When I arrived later that afternoon, I found twelve men and seven women huddled around a fire they’d built in a rusty old barbecue. They were about as interested in hearing me lecture as I was in lecturing them, and I suspected the whole exercise was a ploy on Queenie’s part to get matching funding for her clinic by hauling me in as someone who was making a contribution.
“I realize I’m a little late in telling you about preparing for winter,” I began.
“Whatever,” I heard someone mutter under her breath.
I glanced around the shabby circle and started again. “It’s usually best to have your winter site chosen and your shelter pretty much built by the first week in October because by November, all the good spots are usually taken.”
“Tell us something we don’t know,” muttered the same woman.
“The valley is much warmer than the city streets,” I soldiered on, “so you’ll want to sleep down here instead of in a doorway.”
“Especially if you don’t have Queenie to keep you warm like you used to.”
This malicious statement from Johnny Dirt. His companions seemed to find the remark hilarious. I shot a glance at Queenie, expecting her to reprimand her motley assortment of misfits. I was surprised to see that she was smiling along with the rest of the vagrants.
“Go on, Your Honor,” she said gently when she saw how angry I was at being mocked.
“The best place to make a home in this valley is a cave,” I said. “But they’re few and far between, and you’d have to leave the downtown area and go upriver where the banks are much steeper than they are here.”
“I ain’t climbin’ down no high banks,” an old crone protested. “It’s bad enough I gotta sleep down here in the damp.”
“Shut up,” a man shouted at her.
“She’s right,” I said. “You people shouldn’t be this close to the river. You should ...”
“Stick to your helpful house-building hi
nts, Judge,” Johnny Dirt taunted, “and leave the location of Tent City to us. It’s none of your damn business where we set up.” He shifted from foot to foot at the edge of the fire, moving between light and shadow, like someone waiting to rob the unwary. I tried to ignore him.
“A good way to keep warm even in a damp location like this,” I told them, “is to build what the old-timers used to call a ‘fagot shack.’”
The name elicited a commotion. When the hoots died down, I demonstrated how to take long straight branches from the trees, stand them upright by implanting them in the ground about a foot apart in two rows, then make bundles of smaller twigs and stout grasses and jam those bundles between the standing sticks to make a wall a foot thick. They tried it. It took them awhile to catch on, and the ground was hard, nearly frozen, but as soon as the wall was only a couple of feet high, they could feel it block the cold wind off the water.
This minor success resulted in a seemingly sincere invitation for me to return, which I did a couple of days later, to hold what I planned as the first of a series of wilderness cooking classes. To the credit of my little group of students, as many men as women attended. Unfortunately, the first part of the lesson, about the necessity of marinating wild meat, broke out into an argument over whether the drunks in the group would ever part with enough wine for the procedure. When I suggested using juice instead, we were able to get down to business.
“Today I’m going to show you how to cook small animals that you catch in the valley. Always be sure to catch and kill what you eat yourself. Don’t ever—I repeat—ever—take an animal that’s dead, even from your best friend. And also, don’t eat rats. Don’t ask me why. Just don’t.”
“This is going to make me sick,” one of the younger women said. “Can’t we just, like, pick the garbage at a fast-food place?”
“That ain’t healthy,” somebody remarked. And they all burst into laughter.
“The point here isn’t what you should eat,” I told them. “It’s what you can eat if you absolutely have to.”
“Like what?” someone asked.
From my backpack, I took out a book that I’d ordered on the Internet. It had a lot of recipes for game and the names of places in Canada that shipped frozen caribou and venison, moose and bear to gourmet cooks around the world. The recipes called for vintage wines available only by special order from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. Also required were balsamic vinegar, pure olive oil, capers, pine nuts .... The irony of the publication was not lost on the more literate of my students. “Do they tell rich people not to eat rats, too?” one person asked.
I ignored the question and explained, “There are some pictures here that I want you all to look at. They show you that the edible valley animals—raccoons, squirrels, groundhogs, porcupines, muskrats—all have a few things in common. If you know how to cook one of them, you can pretty much cook all of them.”
I showed my rapt audience how to locate the scent glands under the legs and on the back of a raccoon, how to remove those hard little nodes so that the meat stayed sweet and delicious. I showed them how to skin the animals in such a way that the fur never touched the meat. “That’s so that no germs get on it,” Queenie explained. “Fur is dirty—like your coats. Or else covered with animal saliva. Not anything you want to touch your food.”
Spoken like a true public-health nurse, I thought with pride.
“Groundhogs are not too hard to find in the valley,” I told them. “And if you ever feel that you can’t bring yourself to eat something like that, just remember that groundhogs are vegetarians. They only eat healthy food themselves.”
I explained that porcupines were edible but maybe not worth the risk, and I didn’t even bother mentioning skunk. “As for squirrel, you can eat one if you can catch one, but I wouldn’t bet on that ...”
Though I had once been adept at snatching apples and onions from sidewalk markets and stealing bottles of juice out of stores, I refrained from imparting suggestions in regard to the acquisition of ingredients, though I did tell them that muskrat cooked with onions and celery could be called “Marsh Rabbit” and served to guests. That got another laugh.
“Next time,” I told them, “I’ll talk about wild geese, ducks, pigeons and doves. And the time after that, about frog legs and fish.”
“Count me out. I’m going to the food bank,” a man in ragged jeans and a beautiful leather jacket said.
“He’s the type who can take care of himself without wringing the necks of squirrels,” Queenie said of him later.
“Maybe they all are,” I replied, convinced my homeless survival lessons had bombed.
“I think maybe you need to teach them something simpler,” Queenie suggested as we walked toward the doughnut shop on King near Church Street that we had frequented for years. I remembered times when we’d only had enough money to order one coffee and one doughnut between us. Sometimes we still ordered like that because coffee now gave Queenie heart palpitations and doughnuts were bad for my cholesterol.
“Simpler? How?”
“What they really want to know is how to sleep in shelters without getting their stuff stolen or exposing themselves to T.B. And they’d like to ride transit without having to stand in line at some charity and beg for tickets one at a time. They’d like to have telephones so they could call family members—or even each other. Most of all, they’d like what everybody else would like: an easier, calmer, freer life.”
“Queenie,” I said, reaching across the table and touching her hand, “you’re working too hard. You’re going to burn yourself out.”
She turned her hand under mine in a gesture of intimacy that surprised us both. She pulled away, but then her fingers returned to mine, and she lightly stroked my gold ring, running the tip of her forefinger over the embossed symbols that adorned it. “You still wear this,” she declared. I slipped the ring from my finger. This gesture seemed to shock Queenie.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not a wedding ring.”
She glanced away in discomfort, as if I’d embarrassed her. “What did you promise Stow’s wife before she died?” she asked after a while.
“She asked me to do the one thing I just couldn’t do.”
“Hurt her again—on purpose, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“It’s easy to make promises,” Queenie said, taking the mug of coffee from me. “When you owe promises, that’s a different story.”
“To whom do you owe promises?” I asked in alarm.
“Not Stow, if that’s what you mean. You two ought to leave the past buried,” she added. Her eyes strayed to the window. It had started to snow, and I knew part of her mind was, as always, out in the streets and down in the valley with her clients.
“Easier said than done, Queenie. Without Stow’s intervention, I would have a criminal record for assaulting Harpur. And that would have cost me not only any future hope of earning money, it would have cost me five years’ back sick pay.”
“He forgave you. You ought to forgive him, too.”
“For what?”
“I got to get back to work.” She looked out at the snow again. It was beginning to thicken, to gather in long streamers that skittered across the sidewalk. “He stopped phoning me. So you must have agreed to be his lawyer.”
“What does he know about you? How did he get your number?” The sharpness of my voice surprised me. It seemed to surprise Queenie, too.
“Your Honor,” she said, smiling only a little, “if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were jealous.”
Maybe she didn’t know me as well as she thought. I was jealous.
“Look,” she said, “anybody can get my number. The clinic number, anyway. And as for how he knew about me, I thought maybe you told him.”
It touched me to think that Queenie would consider herself a topic of conversation between me and the Supreme Court Justice. “Queenie,” I admitted, “I haven’t spoken about you, or anyone else, with Stow si
nce ...”
“Since he said you killed his wife?”
“How do you know about that?”
“He told me you had it in for her because she always rejected you. He told me you tried to strangle her once, but that didn’t surprise me because I knew that’s why you ended up on the skids. But he told me something I didn’t know. He said you were the last person she was with before she died. He said he lost it at her funeral and told everybody it was your fault she was dead. He said all that was five or six years ago. Now’s he sorry and he wants things to be better between the two of you. He said you’re the only person who can prove what happened the night Harpur died. He said you have to save him the way he saved you.”
“Queenie, I can’t defend a man accused of murder. And one who blames me for upsetting his wife to the point where she gives up the ghost. Even Stow must know how ironic and just plain stupid that is.”
“He’s a famous judge. He has to know what he’s doing.”
“The murder charge is absurd. Harpur Blane died in a hospital. She was failing. There would be records. Every minute of her final hours would be accounted for.”
Queenie leaned closer. “It’s a cold case, right? Isn’t that what you call it?”
“I guess so.”
“It seems like a long time ago, but obviously the police have a reason for opening the case back up. They think Stow killed his wife. You have to prove them wrong. That’s how it works, isn’t it?”
“Sort of.”
“All you’ve got to do,” Queenie said, “is figure out what happened every minute of the night she died. Then you can show that Stow didn’t do anything wrong.”
“What if he did do something wrong?”
Queenie looked stunned. “Is that what you think?”
Outside the hospital window, the tobogganers in their bright pink and yellow jackets zip down the hill in Riverdale Park, haul their sleds back up, zip down again. Harpur lies still. I can feel her eyes on my back. I can hear her even breath, not Labored, thank God, but not strong, either. Everything is finished between us, and everything is forgiven, too. We’re even. She could never love me, and I could never save her from herself. I can only image-ine the joyful shouts of the tobogganers, but I can clearly hear the bustle in the hospital hall. Busy place. I ran into a staff member coming out of Harpur’s room as I headed in. We collided and something flew out of his hand and landed at my feet. Just then Harpur called my name.
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