Red Mass

by Rosemary Aubert

  I wanted him to tell me what his stake was in all this. Why was he insisting on me as his lawyer? Was he guilty or innocent? Was he trying to save himself or to harm me? If the former, how? If the latter, why?

  But his attention drifted away from our conversation, his eyes seeming to seek those of the guards. His hair had lost the sharpness of its previous cut. His skin was sallow, his posture stooped. It was now two months since the day of the Red Mass, and already he was exhibiting behavior typical of a prisoner. He didn’t need words to tell me that he wanted to go back to his “house”—his cell.

  “Please, Stow, at least tell me why you are here,” I persisted. “Why are you not out on bail, or at the very least in a remand facility?”

  “I have friends,” he said, as if I had asked him about some exclusive club. “They look after me.”

  He signaled. The guards approached, and without a word, he was escorted away. I noticed that he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn during our first interview at Fernhope. The lean, well-cut trousers, the pale finely woven cotton shirt and the cashmere sweater looked clean and fresh. There was no laundry in the prison capable of washing a four-hundred-dollar cotton shirt without ruining it. Stow’s clothes were fresh because between visits he was probably wearing jail clothes—either a bright orange pumpkin suit or, worse, prison-issue sweats that were passed from prisoner to prisoner after having been laundered, and sometimes before.

  “I’m going to build a case whether you help me or not,” I called after him. He stopped abruptly, throwing the shorter guard off balance. The man swore under his breath as he missed a step and reached out his free hand to right himself.

  Stow glanced at me for a split second. There was a tiny movement at the corner of his mouth, a low light suffusing his eyes. He stood taller, inclined his head toward me just a fraction, then turned away. His smile, his glance, his posture formed one smooth, consistent gesture. Was it a gesture of gratitude? Or was it contempt?

  “How do you go about reconstructing one day in somebody’s life?”

  Nicky McPhail and I walked along Queen Street West, passing cafés, funky little clothing shops, a bookstore with a black metal bin of tattered titles on the sidewalk. We hung a sharp left and headed up McCaul Street. Ahead of us loomed a two-story rectangle about the size of a football field. It was raised above the other buildings on the block by gigantic multicolored metal poles rising from the ground.

  “That is so cool,” Nicky said. “What the heck is it, anyway?”

  “It’s the new building for the art college.”

  “I know that, you silly geez. What I mean is, what does it symbolize?”

  “It’s a profound statement of art’s ability to soar above the mundane at the same time as it is deeply grounded in the everyday experiences of the man on the street.”

  “Wow,” Nicky said, “did you just make that up?”

  “Sure.” I laughed. “Seriously, Nicky, I’ve got a client who won’t help me at all, so where do I start?”

  “Start looking for another client.” We turned again, this time onto busy Dundas Street.

  “Not an option. I owe Justice Stoughton-Melville big-time—for reasons I can’t explain, by the way.”

  “Explain to me or to yourself?”

  “You’ll make a good lawyer, Nicky. Did anybody ever tell you that?”

  Over doughnuts and coffee at the Tim Hortons on the corner of Dundas and Simcoe, Nicky’s conversation grew more serious.

  “Until you get full disclosure from the Crown,” he began, “you’re going to have to wing it. Best way is to start from what you can get right now, then work your way back.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Let’s talk hospital. That’s where Harpur died. The scene of the crime. We still haven’t heard what the police learned that caused them to bring charges. So you need to know what they found at that hospital.” He thought for a moment. “Wasn’t there a preliminary inquiry, a hearing to set out all the evidence?”

  “The Attorney General waived the prelim.”

  “On murder one? How can that be?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing’s been done according to procedure here. I do know that there’s some sort of bizarre medical evidence. It seems the police were called in by the hospital when researchers got some inexplicable results from one of those studies that require follow-up every five years.”

  “Where did you get that information?”

  I smiled at Nicky. He was such a pleasant young man. Everything about him was easy to take: his casual good looks, his unassuming air, his understated manner, his intelligence. I liked to please him. “I found it on the Internet.”

  “Good, Judge Portal,” he said grinning, “good start. But now you have to get on the ground. That hospital, does it still exist?”

  “It’s a government facility. It’s still in operation, but it’s sort of been commandeered.”

  “You’re going to have to get in there, which is tough. Since SARS and 9/11, hospital visiting is not so easy. You’re going to have to do some sneaking around. Are you up for that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I bit into a strawberry vanilla doughnut and munched for a few minutes before I conceded, “But whether I’m up to it remains to be seen.”

  We went back to my office. Nicky patted the distressed leather of the chair in front of my desk. “Nice,” he said. He threw himself into it and swung his leg over the chair’s stout arm. “I could get used to this.”

  It never occurred to me to be bothered by his frequent show of what I once would have considered disrespect. All I felt at Nicky’s nonchalance was amusement. “So get used to it,” I joked.

  He glanced up at me a little surprised. I let it pass. “We need a plan,” I told him.

  Nicky turned his lithe body around so that he was sitting properly. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and pulled out his electronic organizer. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said.

  We talked for the next two hours, beginning with an honest assessment of the amount of work it would take us to get through the mountain of disclosure material that would soon arrive. “Major work. And Stow’s reluctance to help us with his own defense? Major problem.”

  “Yes. Sooner or later,” I told Nicky, “Stow is going to have to relinquish his silence and tell us how he wants this case conducted. I’ve known the man for years, but I can’t claim to be able to figure him out. His uncooperativeness may be shame, or fatigue, or despair. Or consciousness of guilt.”

  “Never say guilt,” Nicky recited. It was an old law school adage.

  “I accepted a retainer, so like it or not, I’m committed to Stow as my client,” I said, “and I’m committed to his acquittal, too. So, in the absence of any instructions to the contrary, I intend to mount a straightforward defense.”

  Nicky nodded. “We’ll check out all their potential witnesses ...”

  “Right.”

  “The people at Riverside ...” He began to count off on his fingers, but I lost track of the names he mentioned. All I could think about was how hard it would be to get inside the hospital. What had been a low-security private care facility when Harpur had died was now a high-security contagious disease isolation unit.

  “ ... the police ...”

  “For sure. I can contact my old friend Matt West. I think it would be wiser to deal with him than to try to get anything out of Ellen’s police contacts.”

  Nicky nodded again and made a note. “We’ll need to check out that rental car that Stow is supposed to have driven to Riverside that final night,” he said, “and the bank for anything we can get on Stow and Harpur’s finances.”

  I was beginning to feel dizzy at the thought of all this work, but I could see that Nicky was growing more enthusiastic with each addition to our task list.

  “And Pipperpharmat,” he said. “That’s the far-out name of the pharmaceutical company that was conducting the drug trials, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And we s
hould also try to get a look at the drug vault that Stow is accused of raiding.” Once again, the problem of getting into Riverside arose. And even if we could find a way to get in, there was no guarantee that the present layout of the hospital would even resemble what it had been at the time of Harpur’s demise.

  Nicky furiously jabbed his stylus at his handheld device. He didn’t look up for several seconds. “How do we do this?” he finally said.

  “Have any ideas?”

  I expected him to remind me that I was the boss, which is exactly what he did do. “Whatever you have in mind will be fine with me,” he said.

  I went over the onerous list of tasks in my mind. Nicky should do the running, and I should do the digging. “How about you check out those witnesses, and I handle the pharmaceutical company?”

  “Sounds good, but ...” He hesitated, checked the screen of his handheld. I waited for him to ask for clarification on some particular matter. I was surprised when he said, “All these lines of inquiry sound fine, but where is it all leading? What are we trying to prove here?”

  “Nicky, you know as well as I that we don’t have to prove anything. All we need to do is to make the jury doubt Ellen’s proof.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said impatiently, “but what I mean is, what’s our theory?” He reached for the folder on my desk that held my summary of Ellen’s proposed case. “What are we holding forth as the explanation for Harpur Stoughton-Melville’s death? For Stow being seen at the hospital the night of his wife’s death? For his using a rental car to get there instead of his own vehicle? For leaving fingerprints on surfaces in the hospital’s drug vault? For his wife having died with elevated levels of an experimental drug in her blood, a drug stored in that same vault?”

  “Nicky,” I said, getting up from my new, beautifully aged leather armchair and putting my hand on his shoulder in a paternal way, “Nicky, my boy, Stow’s defense is the most time-honored one of all. ‘I didn’t do it!”’

  We both laughed, even though it was an old joke. “What about natural causes?” Nicky asked when I had resumed my seat. “Can’t we use that as a defense?”

  “If there were some way we could eliminate the blood-level evidence,” I answered, “there might be a natural-cause defense. After all, Harpur was ill and had been for a long time—years, in fact. But I saw her myself the same night ...”

  Nicky looked shocked. “What?”

  “It shouldn’t come as a surprise to you, Nicky, that I knew Harpur. I went to law school with Stow. So did she. We were friends. True, we had become estranged, but in her last months, Harpur asked me to visit her, and I did.”

  “Ellis,” Nicky said, “I’m a little concerned ...”

  “That I visited Harpur? Common knowledge.”

  Nicky didn’t look convinced by my nonchalance. “Everyone at Riverside,” I went on, “including the volunteers who visited her, knew that the greatest conundrum of Harpur’s condition was how close or far from death she might be. Physically, she had rallied more than once. Her strength seemed to come and go. Mentally, however, she was gone all the time. She could have died that night—or she could have lived on for years.”

  “Doesn’t that uncertainty itself present a motive for murder?” Nicky asked. “I mean anyone around her might consider mercy killing.”

  “Yes. But nobody is accused of killing Harpur except Stow.”

  “But what if one of the nurses administered the fatal dose?”

  “Don’t you think Ellen would have checked that out, Nicky? Don’t you think every suspect, every witness would have already come to her attention?”

  “I don’t know, Ellis. I don’t make assumptions. I make it my job to discover anything that serves the interest of my client.”

  He sounded determined, almost belligerent. Perhaps he had some new idea for our large to-do list. I made a mental note to check the police fingerprint files and the surveillance videos from the hospital lobby.

  “Ellis,” Nicky said, “I’m not blowing you off. When I spoke of people near Harpur having a motive to kill her, I didn’t mean ...” He hesitated.

  “Me?” I inquired, hurt innocence strong in my tone.

  Chapter 6

  “‘Disgusting!’ is the general consensus on your cooking lessons,” Queenie told me. “My clients like the idea that you come down and talk to them, but they don’t want to hear one more thing about squirrels and frogs and ...”

  “All right. All right. Maybe I can think of something else. If they don’t want to eat squirrels, maybe I can show them how to make a hat out of squirrel fur.”

  “Oh, puh-lease!”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “There was a woman down here the other day handing out baked potatoes,” Queenie said. “And it was great. Everybody put them in their pockets to keep themselves warm. The potatoes stayed hot for hours. When they were still a little warm, we all sat down and ate them.”

  “I don’t think I can beat that, Queenie,” I said, holding back laughter.

  “You don’t have to. Come down and see us anyway.”

  The next night, I parked on a small side street just east of the Queen-King Bridge. As I made my way down the embankment, mulling over the relative heat-retention properties of Styrofoam versus bubble wrap, I overheard a loud voice raised in a rant.

  A bonfire roared in the middle of the riverbank Tent City site, throwing light on boxes, shacks and tarp-covered lean-tos laid out in neat rows with paths between them. A few figures huddled in the shadows between these makeshift dwellings, caught fleetingly in the headlights of a car passing overhead.

  But for the most part, the twenty-five or thirty squatters gathered near the blaze had their eyes glued to the figure who stood beside them, waving his arms and stamping his feet.

  “This is public property. This whole city was once public property. Now rich people are everywhere, and they got everything, including all the land that really belongs to us. We should get all this land back instead of being kicked off it whenever rich people want us out of here.”

  Johnny Dirt’s notions of private and public property were a little confused, but his command over his audience was total. “City Hall and them counselors say we got two weeks left and then we gotta go? Well, I say they gotta go!”

  A cheer rose from the little crowd. Quite a hearty cheer for people whose meals, when they didn’t come from the garbage, came from the leftovers of the food bank.

  Queenie, I noticed, was not cheering. I made my way to her. As I did so, Johnny Dirt caught sight of me among his listeners.

  “Some people,” he said, “act poor even when they’re really rich. Them people we got to watch out for special because them people got friends at City Hall.” A low murmur rumbled around the camp, echoing the rumbling of the cars above.

  “Lay off His Honor, Dirtbag!”

  Grateful for this vote of confidence from an invisible supporter, I moved through the crowd, acknowledging a wave here, a nod there, until I reached Queenie’s side. I hunkered down near her and she reached out and gave my arm a squeeze.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said softly. The red firelight made her hair look like the fine copper wire I used to steal scraps of as a boy on my father’s building sites. It seemed to erase the years from her dusky face and smooth the planes of her high-boned cheeks.

  “The firelight makes you look beautiful,” I said.

  I could see surprise flash in her dark eyes before she lowered her gaze.

  “I came to take you home. You shouldn’t be down here so late,” I whispered. “You’ve put in a full day at the clinic, I’m sure.”

  She nodded, sending the copper lights dancing. “Yes. And I suppose you’ve put in a full day lawyering. Tired?”

  I shook my head. “I’m up to my ears in papers. Ellen has finally finished shipping boxes of photocopies to my office. Under the law, she has to disclose all information that she intends to use against Stow.”

  “I don’t get it,�
� Queenie said, speaking close to my ear in order to be heard over the great orator. “How come she has to show you what she’s got?”

  “In order that my client—Stow, of course—in order that my client can make full answer and defense.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that should he so choose, Stow can answer the case the Crown is making against him and raise a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury.”

  Queenie looked up at me. “Is that all you’ve got to do, Your Honor—make them doubt that Stow could have killed his wife?”

  “Yes. That’s all. Seems simple, doesn’t it? Especially considering his position in this world.”

  Queenie gave the matter some thought. “You know,” she finally said, “it works both ways.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A biting wind seemed to rise from the river as night deepened over the waters. Queenie pushed a lock of hair away from her eyes. “It’s a two-way street, his being a famous judge. Some people feel sorry for him. They think he’s getting picked on because he’s rich and successful. After all, why does the court want to open up a murder case against him now? It’s been five years since his wife died, hasn’t it?”

  I thought of the rows of banker’s boxes growing like mold up the wall of my little store-top office. “That’s what I’ve got to figure out,” I answered.

  “You’re not going to figure it out sitting down here,” she said. She glanced across the river. Near the bank, the water was dark and still. But a current roiled in the center of the stream, breaking up the reflections of lights from the bridge and the street and the buildings into a scattering of jewel-like sparkles. “There was a time,” Queenie said, “when you and I could go without seeing each other for a month, then catch up in about five minutes flat. But it’s not like that now, is it?”

  “No,” I said, reaching for her hand in the dark shadows between us, seeking the warmth of her skin. “We were bums then—and for quite a while, we were drunks, too. We didn’t have a lot to report to each other.”