She laughed quietly. “Yeah. That’s one way of putting it,” she said. “But now I’m running the clinic, helping out here at Tent City, going to meetings, sitting on committees ...”
“Yes.”
“And you, you’re working on a murder case again.” She slipped her fingers away from mine. “So if we don’t pay attention to each other, we’re going to lose track. I wouldn’t want to do that, Your Honor.”
A loud burst of applause drowned her words. Johnny Dirt had apparently reached the rousing climax of his speech.
“Tent City stays!” the crowd began to chant. “Tent City stays!”
“Queenie,” I suddenly thought to ask, “what’s gotten Johnny going, anyway?”
“There was a newspaper reporter down here,” Queenie answered. “That one you know, Aliana Caterina.” She made a face. “She and her photographer were looking to take a picture of you teaching one of your so-called cooking classes. When she realized you weren’t here, she got the photographer to take pictures of the shacks and lean-tos. Next thing we know, five city counselors are down here making loud noises about poor homeless people camping out in the middle of the city. Whatever they said about improving the situation set Johnny Dirt off. Now he’s a crusader. And you know as well as I do that when a crusader gets a crowd worked up, the crusade itself is sure to follow.”
Queenie refused my ride home, claiming she still had work to do at the site. Leaving her, I crossed the river and walked north through the valley for half a mile or so until I crossed again and came near Riverside Hospital, the imposing semicircular building from which I’d once watched tobogganers on the hill from Harpur’s room.
It was pitch-dark and cold, and the white tents of the isolation units set up in the parking lot behind the hospital stood out like tombstones. Riverside had gone from a private care facility to what my mother used to call a “pest house,” a public facility for contagious disease. Anyone admitted to the hospital was forced to stay for a minimum of ninety days. No visitors were allowed, even to attend the dying.
I crept closer to the barbed wire that separated the park from the hospital. Two armed officers stood beside the door to the building, but no one seemed to be guarding the tents themselves. A ventilation system, connecting all the tents and composed of twisted pipes and stream-releasing valves, hissed its white breath into the frigid night. Suddenly the guards snapped to attention. A heavily gowned figure, masked and with a white plastic helmet, moved from one tent to another, genderless in thick protective garments, taking slow laborious steps hampered by heavy white rubber boots.
I moved farther into the shadows. The last time I’d been in Riverside was the night Harpur had died there. Unless I contracted something like a flesh-eating disease or antibiotic-resistant T.B., I’d never get in there again.
I trekked back to my car and drove straight to my office. I spent quite a long while washing my hands, as if the contagion of Riverside had somehow crawled onto me.
Then I searched the pile of boxes for one I knew must be there—the medical records that had made the police change Harpur’s death from a closed case to a cold case.
My daughter had been tidy and thorough. Each box was labeled with a printed sticker. I had to move a few around before I found the one I needed, but it was there, just as I thought.
I undid the tape around the box. Red tape. That wasn’t Ellen’s joke, it was Nicky’s. After we’d made a preliminary assessment of a box’s contents, we taped it shut as a reminder that we’d cursorily examined it. Masking tape would have done just fine, but Nicky said red tape was “more Dickensian.”
I lifted the relevant files out and began to read, making a list of things to check. I was concentrating so hard that I didn’t hear footfalls on the stairs. Suddenly, someone was standing right behind my chair. Startled, I jumped up, dropping papers in a shower at my feet.
A teasing liquid laugh changed my fear to anger.
“Aliana! How did you get in?”
“Through the door. You should be more careful about locking it. There are a lot of crazies on Queen Street.”
“Why didn’t you call first?”
She held up a waxy white bag. “I’ve been looking for you. I drove by and saw the lights on. So I got us a couple of subs. I thought you could use something to eat.”
I was hungry. I took one of the sandwiches, sat down behind my desk and allowed her to make herself comfortable.
“Wow, Ellis, this is a great chair. Where did you get it?”
I wouldn’t tell her I’d spent enough on the chair to keep Tent City in shacks and tarps for a year.
“Forget the furniture, Aliana,” I said, gesturing toward the banker’s boxes that filled the place. “I’m busy. Whatever you want, keep it short. And,” I thought to add, “lay off Queenie and Tent City.”
“Don’t be so unfriendly,” she said, pursing her remarkably red lips into an attractive pout. “How do you justify living so well when your friends are sleeping under a tarp, by the way?”
“Why is it, Aliana,” I said, only half teasing, “that when I slept under a tarp myself, you were interested in my story? You made it into quite a good one.”
“A lot of thanks I’ve gotten for it,” she said. Her dark, long-lashed eyes never left my face. She had the reporter’s trick of always appearing totally engrossed in her subject.
“What do you want now?”
“To hear the rest of the story ...”
Her voice was sweet, cajoling. But what story? I couldn’t tell her about Stow. And I didn’t want her bothering Queenie. So I told her what it felt like to be a lawyer again after being a nutcase and a bum. Somehow, it got to be midnight before she left. I walked her downstairs and stood with her as she posed on the curb, arm gracefully outstretched to snag a cab. I watched the taxi speed east on Queen until it disappeared.
When I got back upstairs, I realized that I had just wasted my whole evening. But the sight of the photocopies urged me to continue my search.
The oldest-looking medical records were routine reports on Harpur’s deteriorating condition. It pained me to read them. “Advanced Alzheimer’s disease.” “Rapidly progressing dementia ...” Nothing new there. I reached into the open box again.
The records with the most recent date were on the letterhead of Pipperpharmat, a pharmaceutical firm with worldwide interests. I forced myself to analyze what these reports were saying.
There were two sets, one referring to tests done on Harpur before her death, a second dated about five years later, just about the time the police had decided to bring charges against Stow.
The language was scientific and difficult. Columns of figures blurred and danced. After about half an hour, my eyes grew too heavy for reading.
A thin layer of snow covers the low bushes beside the river. Our breath is a silver cloud against the whiteness. Is she singing? Is that the sound I hear? Behind me the footfalls of the doctor, the hospital volunteer. But I am first to round the curved path. She wears the loose hospital gown. Her long red hair against it is like the wing of the cardinal against a branch. Come back. Oh, Harpur, please come back. Her feet are bare. She is standing on ice. Tears freeze on my cheeks.
Startled, I looked down to see a document I had not expected, although I should have known it would form part of the record of any hospital patient: a list of Harpur’s visitors on her last night. I took the single sheet with its list of names to the desk so that I could see it better. I read it, then I read it again. I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. The record was incomplete. My name was nowhere on it.
I gave up and fell dead asleep in my chair without dreaming.
The next morning, I awoke to find that Nicky had been in while I slept and had rearranged the files. I spent twenty exasperating minutes until I could pick up where I’d left off the night before. Nicky was going to get it when he returned.
Morning light filtered through the windows as I read some old medical journals detailing a f
ew studies on Somatofloran, a drug that had been tested on Harpur. Beneath me, Queen Street was springing into life, but not the desperate life of the blocks near Queenie’s clinic. There, the late-night drinkers were relinquishing the least desirable sleeping places, those on the open sidewalk. Here, young people on their way to work carried lattés in one hand and the morning paper in the other. I opened the window and breathed deeply to wake myself up and went back to the boring journals.
Only about a thousand elderly people had ever taken Somatofloran. The drug had proven benign. From what I could understand of the cumbersome medical jargon, when the drug worked, it made breathing significantly easier for those with previous and mild respiratory impairment. When it didn’t work, the subjects, for the most part, just seemed to fall harmlessly asleep. Perhaps I was missing something. Somatofloran didn’t seem like a murder weapon to me.
Or did Ellen intend to use this evidence in a way that I didn’t yet understand? She was obligated by law to reveal to me any evidence she had found that could incriminate Stow, but she was under no obligation to let me know how she proposed to use her material. In fact, the strength of her case might well lie in tricking me into thinking that a piece of evidence was harmless to Stow’s defense when, in fact, it was fatal.
When Nicky arrived, I intended to give him hell for messing up my papers, but the sight of him cheered me after my long night in the office. I wondered how he could look so fresh when he, too, had been so late. “Thanks for not waking me,” I told him, “and no thanks for getting my files out of order.”
“What?”
“I appreciate your coming by after hours, but the next time you decide to sneak up on me like that, let me know you’re here so I can show you what I’m doing and save you from redoing work I’ve done already.”
Like all the other youngsters on Queen that morning, Nicky sported the requisite gigantic cup of expensive coffee. He took a dramatic gulp. “I guess I need this more than I thought I did,” he said. “I must still be asleep. Nothing you’re saying is making any sense.”
“Forget it,” I answered. “Take a look at this.”
“Somatofloran?” he asked. “What’s that?”
I found it a puzzling question coming from someone who’d just read a file on the topic. “It’s the drug Stow is accused of using on Harpur,” I answered. “When patients overdose, they just conk out.”
“Conk out? What does that mean, exactly?”
I laughed. “They fall asleep.”
“No,” Nicky said, cocking his head, partially leaning over my shoulder to see what I’d been reading. “How can that be?” He studied the page in front of me. I didn’t know how he could read at such an odd angle.
“That’s old stuff you’ve got there,” he concluded. “Let me go over to the Med Sci Library and see what I can dig up.”
“Never mind,” I said, “I’ll go over myself.”
“Whatever,” he answered.
At the Medical Sciences Library on the campus of the University of Toronto, I did find more information about Somatofloran, but I couldn’t say it was current. I noticed that Ellen had been there before me. Nearly every journal I signed out had previously been signed out by “Portal.”
In an appendix to a report published by Pipperpharmat, I discovered a list of test subjects that included the name “Harpur S.-M.” I photocopied all that I found to discuss it with Nicky. But there would be no discussion of the effect on me of seeing Harpur’s name in the cold print of a table of statistics, or of reading about the blood that had once coursed through her heart. My youthful love for Harpur had been foolish, but like most foolish love, it had endured long beyond the fleeting moments in which I thought it might be returned.
“Any luck?” was Nicky’s greeting when I got back.
“Bad luck,” I answered. “Wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time-type bad luck.”
I opened my battered briefcase, which I’d bought secondhand so that I could have an old one like the other old lawyers, and pulled out the copies I’d made at Med Sci. “Somatofloran was a loser drug from the start,” I told Nicky. “It was abandoned as useless only two years after the Riverside Hospital trials.”
“If it hasn’t been used in years, then why the follow-up study?” Nicky said. “I don’t get it.”
“I don’t get it, either. Why would anybody care about a drug that didn’t work and was never even marketed?”
Nicky rifled through some papers on the desk. “According to disclosure,” he said, studying a page of close-typed text, “Stow’s involvement in the case was discovered when Pipperpharmat conducted follow-up tests on breakdown products in the subjects’ blood.”
“Yes. We know that. One set of tests when Harpur was alive. Another set five years later. Ordinary follow-up. So?”
“So—” Nicky screwed up his face as though he were thinking hard. “I’m thinking litigation one-oh-one. I bet somebody sued the hospital. Put them up against it big-time”
“You mean the second set of tests might have had nothing to do with the first, but rather with litigation resulting from the administration of a debased drug to a patient?” I thought about that for a minute. “It’s possible, I suppose. But who sued?”
“I don’t know. And I haven’t seen anything to suggest that in any of this.” Nicky gestured toward the pile of files.
“If somebody sued, and Pipperpharmat went back to check its original study, discovering irregularities, there’d be a hefty class-action vulnerability on the part of Pipperpharmat, wouldn’t there?” I speculated.
“Yes. But there’d also be some record of that,” Nicky concluded.
I decided to try the law library at Osgoode Hall to investigate cases that might shed light on our speculations.
Ah, the beauty of the afternoon light streaming delicately through the etched-glass windows of the library onto the long oak tables and the tall portraits of famous old judges! Was there any other research venue that could match this one? Beneath the molded plaster garlands of the ceiling, there was no sound except for the occasional whisper of a turning page or, far in the distance, the click of someone’s heel on the mosaic tile floor. I loved the smell of Osgoode Library, the feel of books old Magistrate Tuppin had called the “leather-clad soldiers of long-ago battles won and lost.”
I found no cases that enlightened me about Pipperpharmat, but I did find precedent for Stow’s predicament. Regina vs Smith: A man is accused of clubbing his son to death, calls no defense and is found guilty. The appeals court sets aside the verdict and orders a new trial because the judge on the original trial suggested to the jury that the accused was unable to defend himself, which was illegal, rather than that he was unwilling to defend himself, which was his most basic right.
If Stow refused to defend himself, there would still be a case against him, and I was in charge of that case. Maybe I could win it by causing a judge to make a mistake.
Or maybe not. Perhaps I was the judge making a mistake by taking on a client like Stow.
I was pondering that angle when I looked up and saw that the past—the distant past of my earliest years at the bar—had returned.
Illuminated in a ray of red-gold sunlight stood my ex-wife. Her hair was not its normal ice-blonde, but the soft golden blonde of the early years of our marriage. Motherhood had added curves to Anne’s slim figure, and the years had added lines to the face I had gazed at across the pillow, across the table. But now, by a trick of the sun, those lines were gone. The black cashmere coat with its upturned collar looked identical to one she had worn in the early years of our marriage, and so did the diamonds that sparkled at her ears. A gift from her father, she’d worn those gems nearly all her life.
Just as she would have done forty years earlier, she took a step toward me and raised her hand in a wave that asked, “Are you finished working? Can you get away? Can you spend time with me?”
Once, I would have closed the books immediately and gone off in a New York minute for a
romantic dinner in some cheap but charming restaurant.
Now, as she took a step toward me out of the golden light, she became a sixty-year-old grandmother. I realized then I was never truly in love with Anne herself, only with her image. But she had been in love with me, and sometimes that is all it takes to make a successful marriage.
“You look tired, Ellis. Can I tempt you to take a break?”
“How did you find me?” I asked, flustered.
“I took the liberty of inquiring of Queenie Johnson where you are spending your time these days. She was kind enough to give me suggestions.”
It bothered me to think about Anne and Queenie communicating. I almost said something to that effect, but Anne spoke first. “Let’s do dinner—the way we used to.”
She must have been reading my mind. I put away my papers and followed her out of the room.
Chapter 7
Anne asked me to spend Christmas Day with what she called “our family.” So, early on Christmas morning, I dutifully had breakfast with them all, but I was distracted because I couldn’t get Stow and his case off my mind and neither, I could tell, could Ellen. “Everything I have so far bolsters your case, not mine,” I told my daughter with a rueful smile.
“Come on, Dad,” she answered, “don’t be such a wuss. You’ll think of something. And if you don’t,” she added, “I’m going to cream you!”
That was such a harsh warning that I left before lunch.
The day was bright and cold, which was about how I felt myself, my mind too occupied to notice the pleasures of the season. I remembered how it used to feel to pass the homes of people celebrating the holidays when I was on the skids. All their bright decorations were a rebuke, their kindnesses extended to a stranger, to me, a profound embarrassment. I wandered up from Anne’s and stopped by the community center that Queenie and I used to call “the Shelter” in our days on the street. I peeked in long enough to see that she was serving the homeless Christmas dinner. But I didn’t have the heart to join her.
At the end of the day when the sun was a golden red behind the black outline of bare trees, I heard the sound of carols flooding out from a tiny church on an obscure block running up from Queen Street.
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