Red Mass

by Rosemary Aubert

  “Stow must be thinking the same way, Ellis.”

  “Oh, great. So he thinks this is an easy case—so easy he doesn’t even have to talk to his attorney? I solve it and my big comeback is a done deal?”

  “Yeah. You succeed. You get him off. Your comeback is a triumph and ...”

  “And I ruin my daughter.”

  “What?”

  I looked at Angelo. Maybe he was too far away to hear us.

  “I’m working on those witnesses,” Nicky said. “And—”

  Whatever Nicky was about to say was drowned out by the sudden sound of applause. Johnny Dirt was standing on a table, and his posture and the motions of the crowd around him told me that he was about to launch into another tirade about wresting ownership of the downtown core from the rich.

  “This guy sucks,” Nicky said. “I’m out of here—and so is he in about ten minutes. My father donated the tent and the tables and chairs. The truck’s coming to pick all this stuff up.” He waved goodbye to Angelo, who seemed mesmerized by Johnny’s fiery oration.

  “That guy talks really loud,” Angelo said as we headed away. “Why is he so mad?”

  “Angelo, sometimes people sound angry just because they care so much about what they are saying.”

  “If Mommy puts Mr. Justice Stow in prison, will he be mad at you, Grandpa?”

  I unlocked the car door and waited for the boy to climb in. “I don’t think you really need to worry about that,” I answered.

  “But will he?”

  Angelo had only just become big enough to sit on the regular car seat. I had to admit a certain pride in having him riding with me and asking questions about the profession I had passed down to my daughter and perhaps carried on by my grandson. When I was Angelo’s age, I had ridden beside my father in his truck, avoiding at all cost any tales of the old man’s livelihood. And Jeffrey had never shown the least interest in the law.

  “If I did something that resulted in Stow going to prison, I suspect he’d be very disappointed indeed, Angelo,” I said.

  Then why does he choose to remain in Fernhope?

  “Grandpa?” Angelo wrinkled his smooth little nose. “You mean you can’t feel sorry for a guy if the jury says he has to go to the slammer?”

  I laughed. “Not exactly, son, but that’s close enough for now.”

  We rode through the empty city streets for a few minutes longer before Angelo asked another question.

  “Grandpa, is everybody who talks in court called a witness? Mommy says if she thinks a person knows something, then they have to talk in court and be a witness.”

  “Witnesses are people who promise to tell the court the truth when the lawyer or the judge asks them questions about facts,” I told him. “The answers they give are called evidence or testimony. Everybody who testifies is a witness. But not everybody who talks in court is testifying. Lawyers like your mother and me are not witnesses.”

  “So a person can’t be a lawyer and a witness at the same time?” the boy inquired.

  I shook my head no, but I didn’t have time to explain further because we had reached the house, and Angelo flew to his mother to tell her about our afternoon together.

  But something about this last innocent query stuck in the back of my mind, and it was still there several hours later when I was in the library in my apartment, mulling over the case.

  I pulled a pad of paper toward me and began to list all that I knew about Harpur’s last day on earth. She had awakened in a state of agitation. It was the Feast of Stephen, the day after a Christmas she had been too ill to spend at home. Our long history of failed flirtation, of jealousy, of the near violence I had perpetrated on her so long ago, was almost over.

  But Harpur still seemed to want something from me. Whatever it was could not make its way through the mists of her Alzheimer’s-fogged mind. Did she want me to forgive her for never loving me or did she want to forgive me for loving her? I remembered her desperate last embrace. I remembered disengaging her from my arms and laying her back down onto her deathbed.

  I thumbed through some files I’d brought home from the office. I took a look at a log kept by the volunteer coordinator of visitors to Harpur’s floor. It was vague. It listed “private visitor” for anyone who was not part of an organization. From this slight information, I couldn’t figure out the exact hour of my own visit that last day. But I must have left before the end of visiting hours at 8:30 p.m.

  I’m holding her in my arms. I have spent a good part of my life dreaming of holding Harpur, but now all I want is to get out of here. I want the stupid Christmas carols to be silent. There is no other sound except—

  Suddenly I remembered something I’d forgotten. I remembered that the phone had rung. That I had picked it up and said “Hello.” There had been no one on the other end. Or had there?

  If whoever had answered that phone had recognized my voice, he or she would know that I had been in Harpur’s room shortly before she died.

  The thought gave me pause, but why? I had seen and heard nothing that night. None of this had anything to do with Stow. No matter how many lists I made and how many times I went over them, I found nothing that would inculpate my client—but nothing that would exonerate him, either. I couldn’t prove to myself that he was guilty and a scoundrel. I couldn’t prove to the court that he was innocent and a victim.

  Back at the office on Queen Street, I quailed at the sight of all those boxes. Sealed with that absurd red tape, they had an air of leftover Christmas presents. Apparently Nicky had cleaned up his act. Everything was piled in the order in which the boxes were numbered. There were so many still to go through that I just picked one on top of a pile. “Financial Records.” Why not?

  I slit open the tape, removed a number of files and dug in. Soon there wouldn’t be any more paper files, not even in the law trade. Soon everything would be electronic. But not yet. The papers gave off the scent of the old ways. My ways.

  As had been a requirement when he’d been elevated to the Supreme Court, Stow had transferred all his personal financial assets to a trust. An affidavit to that effect taught me nothing I didn’t already know. I was also not surprised to see that Harpur’s assets had been put into a separate trust at the time of her demise. The couple had no children. Perhaps, however, another relative or a charity had inherited her money. I made a note of the trust company named in the documents pertaining to her fortune. I would check out that company next.

  Among the papers in the box, I also found copies of deeds: the deed to Stow’s amazing pied-à-terre, a twenty-thousand-square-foot condo occupying an entire floor of a building balanced at the point of a spit of land that stretched out into Lake Ontario. There was no deed to the family mansion on Highland Avenue in Rosedale. Perhaps Stow himself had never owned that sprawling Victorian hulk. No doubt his immensely wealthy father and grandfather had had trusts of their own.

  At the bottom of the box, I found a sheaf of papers clipped together. There were twenty or thirty of these, and each appeared to be the deed to a single-family dwelling situated in the older sections of the downtown core. There had been a time—though not within recent memory-when ordinary houses like those could have been had for less than a hundred thousand dollars each. Now that handful of deeds represented property worth about fifteen million dollars.

  Later that afternoon, I made a few phone calls, aided by my own banker. “I spoke to your son,” he told me.

  “About the Don valley property. We ...”

  We were cut off for some reason, and I wasn’t able to get back to him, but it didn’t matter because I had enough information to wrangle a half-hour appointment with the trust company that handled the real estate portion of Stow’s estate.

  “Under ordinary circumstances, sir,” the trust officer told me, “we would require several days’ notice and a notarized written request before we could allow access to the personal records of a client.”

  “I understand, of course,” I answered,
“but I am entitled to see anything that the court would consider a matter of public record.”

  I am drunk out of my mind. The room is reeling, and the employees of the bank are standing still and circling wildly. “It’s my damn money, and I want it now.” “I am shouting. No one is paying any attention to me except the two big police officers headed my way.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, as I was saying, I’d like to see any record of a significant change in any trust held by my client or his family, that is, anything registered in the public record of transfers and trades.”

  The officer led me to a small room, touched a computer mouse and discreetly withdrew, while the screen sprang to life.

  It took a couple of hours of searching databases before I found what I was looking for. Stow regularly transferred the ownership of downtown houses to other parties. I wondered whether he was using them as lesser men might use currency: for gifts, for payments, for bribes.

  When I finished checking Stow’s name, I checked Harpur’s. It took less than one second because all her assets were sheltered in one numbered account. Naturally the number itself was not available to unauthorized parties.

  On the way out, I was required to sign the obligatory visitors’ log. The officer thrust the book at me and stood right behind me as I signed. As I wrote my name, I managed to glance at a few names on the opposite page, those, I assumed, who had been in the building the previous day. Apparently Ellen had been among them. I saw “Portal.” Was there nowhere I could go that the Crown had not been? I craned my neck to see the exact time and date of her visit, but behind me, I heard a disgruntled sigh. I crossed the “t” in my name, turned and walked out.

  Chapter 8

  When I first fled to the Don River valley to live alone with my madness and my regrets, I had done nothing but sleep, forage for food and think. Time, however, taught me many skills, one of which was how to make ice skates. I tried wood first. Being a pretty good whittler, I was not wholly unsuccessful. But metal was best, and I soon learned how to make blades out of scraps I found in back alleys, strengthening them by a process of folding and refolding the metal, heating it, hammering it and eventually sharpening it with stones I found in the river. By the time of Stow’s murder trial, I’d graduated to store-bought. Nothing cleared my mind like a few sweeps around the rink in front of City Hall, even on a bitter January afternoon. Everyone who lives in Toronto owns skates, or so it is rumored, so I wasn’t surprised when Nicky pulled up beside me. By now, he knew me and my habits.

  “Can you take a meeting?” he asked.

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “The Crown’s got the usual police witnesses,” he began. “Set the scene, establish the time ... I went over the file on them, but I didn’t think it necessary to make any calls.”

  “Okay.” I executed a rather skillful little turn right around Nicky, who seemed suitably impressed.

  “Where’d you learn to skate?” he asked.

  “Private instruction,” I lied. “What else have you got?”

  “I think the Crown is basing its case on three main witnesses,” he answered. “The first will probably be a Dr. Swan. He’s the chief research specialist at Pipperpharmat—now and at the time Harpur died. He’s the man who ran the drug study. Iceman. You’re going to have trouble with him.”

  “Point taken,” I replied, glancing across Nathan Philips Square where people were beginning to gather on their way home from the offices, hotels, stores and legal buildings that surrounded this plaza at the heart of the city. I could see the courthouse on 361 University Avenue at the northwest edge of the square. I felt a sudden surge of eagerness to get into the court arena, to do battle for my client, however evasive and elusive he might be. “Who else?”

  “Well, number two witness for the prosecution has got to be some hospital administrator, most likely the volunteer coordinator. Five years ago, she was the person whose job it was to keep track of the comings and goings of any nonstaff.”

  “I took a look at those volunteer records,” I told Nicky. “They’re uninformative. That’s to our advantage because they’re not going to help Ellen, either.”

  “Yeah, right. Anyway, everything’s different now. Those amateurs have been replaced with professional security personnel since 9/11 and SARS.” Nicky shook his head. “Fort Hospital.”

  “Who else?”

  Nicky skated with effortless ease all the time he talked. I remembered how I had tried and failed to teach Jeffrey to skate when I had been Nicky’s age. Then my son had been as old as little Angelo, who, I recalled now, wanted to grow up to be Wayne Gretsky.

  “Who else? Our nemesis—the fingerprint man, that’s who else,” Nicky answered. “He’s a world expert, and he’s really got the goods on Stow.”

  We were both silent for quite a while. “So Ellen will bank on those three. What about witnesses on our side?” Nicky asked.

  “Let’s have a separate meeting on that,” I replied. “On dry land.”

  We did meet later, but it was a short encounter. It was clear that I had never worked on a case with so few compelling—or compellable—witnesses. The classic Crown case that Ellen seemed to be preparing was always designed to lead the jury toward one spectacular witness whose testimony would pin the accused like a butterfly to a board. Where was the eyewitness testimony that Ellen had to put Stow on the scene?

  Ellen had disclosed nothing about such a witness. And Nicky and I had found no one, either.

  As for our own potential witnesses, without Stow’s cooperation, there would be none. And Stow’s cooperation was still not forthcoming, even when he called and commanded that I come up to see him.

  It had been snowing for four months at Fernhope. The startling whiteness against the bright blue sky hurt my eyes. They kept wandering away from the road, toward the deep green forests of fir and the black waters of small streams.

  I tried to be hopeful, but mainly I felt frustrated by my lack of progress on Stow’s case and angry that Stow had summoned me in his familiar imperious way. Come immediately; I need you. As if I were his servant. But I had to watch myself. To lose control with Stow would be to endanger both of us. As his reluctant but de facto attorney, I couldn’t take that risk.

  I managed to sit calm and still in the little waiting room. I heard him coming long before I saw him. Far in the distance, a buzzer sounded. A door slid open with what seemed like infinite slowness. Then it slid closed. Then a nearer door opened. Another buzzer. Another set of sliding sounds. And then the click of three sets of heels on concrete. Just before the door to the room in which I sat was thrown open, I heard a sound that truly shocked me.

  A key turned with a rasping sound, followed by the soft clink of metal on metal. Then I heard the same sound nearer the floor.

  These rasps and clinks need to be heard only once to be engraved on one’s memory. I had heard them a thousand times before.

  The first was the sound of handcuffs being unlocked. The second was the sound of shackles.

  I felt a jolt of panic. Why was Stow suddenly being treated like a dangerous criminal? Had he become violent during his incarceration? I waited forever while the guards removed the restraints and escorted my client to the small wooden table that would be the only barrier between us.

  As on my two previous visits, Stow was wearing the Turnbull and Asser shirt, the cashmere sweater, the bespoke slacks. He even had his ring and his watch. All of these items were as pristine as the first time I’d seen him inside.

  But Stow himself was dramatically different. His hair had turned from blond to white. And it was untouched by a barber—even a jailhouse barber. It brushed his shoulders. The costly clothes, once carefully tailored to his measurements, hung on his shockingly thin frame. His skin was gray, and so was the stubble that covered his jaw. With embarrassment I noticed that his nails were broken and dirty.

  I almost took pity on him.

  Almost.

  For Stow was glaring at me from
gray-blue eyes that were perfectly steady and clear. His touching decrepitude was nothing more than an elaborate act. Beneath the damaged exterior of the “prisoner” lay the same undiminished sense of power. It was as if he wanted his appearance, his refusal to cooperate, to ruin me. It was as if he wanted Ellen to handily win her case. If I lost my temper with Stow and, subsequently, the case for my high-profile “comeback” client, even Aliana’s skills wouldn’t make me look good. Not to mention the judgeship that would fly out the window.

  For a few seconds we stared at each other like two adolescents in a contest of endurance. I dropped my eyes. “As you know,” I began stiffly, “it is my obligation to put before you the particulars of the case the Crown has against you—”

  I expected Stow at least to nod in response to this simple information, but he just kept staring straight ahead. I felt the urge to tell him to stuff it, but the guards were like hawks on a couple of chickens.

  “Stow, as you are well aware, you have the right to make full answer and defense to these accusations.”

  His eyes shifted, met mine, but still he said nothing.

  “My assistant, Nickel McPhail, and I are in the process of interviewing witnesses and examining records. You can assist us greatly if you’ll just clarify the facts as we present them. For instance, it appears you drove a rental car to the hospital the night of Harpur’s death. Naturally the question arises as to why.”

  “Did anyone get the license number of the car?”

  Finally he had deigned to speak, surprise almost silencing me. “N-no,” I managed to stutter out. “No one had reason to at the time. However, car rental records show that a late-model Buick had been rented earlier the same day by a young assistant prosecutor who worked at the courthouse on University Avenue. In the space on the rental application allotted for the business phone number of the applicant, the private number of your Ottawa office appears. This same young person refused to speak to us.”