Red Mass

by Rosemary Aubert

  Stow shrugged, his sudden verbosity apparently quelled.

  “When we couldn’t locate her through the Crown’s office, we learned that shortly after Harpur’s death, she set up practice on her own in an office downtown.”

  A small smile crossed Stow’s thin lips, but he continued his silence.

  I pressed on, hoping to startle him once more into speech. “Ellen’s disclosure states that several employees at Riverside intend to testify that they saw a man that might have been you in the hospital lobby, in the first-floor corridor and in the elevator at some time on that date.” I hesitated. “I’ve not been able to get into Riverside myself,” I admitted, “but Nicky has checked out each of these witnesses. We’re confident that none of these people can say with any certainty that you were on Harpur’s floor or in her room until the next day.”

  I didn’t add, By which time, she was already dead.

  Stow looked at the ceiling. I had an impulse to vault the desk and get my fingers around his throat. But I only looked down at the two sheets of paper I had been allowed to carry into the visiting room. One was the indictment.

  “I know you’ve seen this,” I said to Stow, holding the document up. I felt the guards move almost imperceptibly closer to us as Stow moved closer to me.

  He examined the indictment carefully but silently.

  “And you know the police would not have been able to lay this charge of first-degree murder without much more than the circumstantial evidence I’ve just described.”

  “So—”

  “So now we have to talk about Pipperpharmat.”

  “I don’t own stock in it, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he broke in, as if only the topic of money could make him talk. I thought of other high rollers who had fallen and landed in jail because of stock deals. Did he identify with them?

  “Okay, Stow, be as wiseass as you like. It doesn’t bother me. It’s not my future that’s on the line here.”

  Nothing was further from the truth, and we both knew it.

  I searched the second piece of paper I held for the exact name of the drug that was the reason Stow was in so much trouble.

  “Ellen’s case relies heavily on the Somatofloran evidence,” I said. “I’m not going into the technical details here. Suffice it to say, Ellen will attempt to convince a jury that you poisoned your horribly ill wife, and that even though it took scientists almost six years to discover that, the proof is incontrovertible.”

  Stow turned inward again, demonstrating not the slightest interest, not even boredom, in what I considered a damning piece of information.

  “It may work in your favor that a jury will almost certainly find the pharmaceutical information hard to understand. It will take a lot of explanation on Ellen’s part to suggest to them that you injected a fatal dose of a harmful substance. That’s her problem. The fingerprints are our problem.” I was almost babbling, so anxious was I to get Stow to respond.

  I heard a loud yawn. But when I looked around the little room, it was impossible to tell who was the culprit. A rush of embarrassment heated my face.

  I’m on my hands and knees like a dog. A man is yelling at me and swinging a newspaper. He finds his mark. My face stings with his blow. Twenty other people are laughing. “Get out!” the man yells. “Get out, you filthy beggar, and don’t come back. ”

  “Portal,” I heard one of the officers say, “get on with it, man.”

  “I’ve not yet confirmed this to my own satisfaction,” I said, conscious I was rushing my assertions, “but I believe Ellen is going to maintain that you broke into the drug vault on the floor beneath Harpur’s and stole a quantity of hypodermic syringes. Five years ago, at the time of that theft, there was no reason to connect it to Harpur’s death, which was considered natural. Years later, Pipperpharmat had reason to revisit the results of the study it had conducted at Riverside. It was then that excessive blood levels of Somatofloran in Harpur’s blood at the time of her death were discovered.”

  As I gazed hopelessly at the silent man before me, a thought came to me, based on the conversation Nicky and I had had about civil litigation. “Unless you were the one who reopened the issue by suing Pipperpharmat!”

  This statement apparently hit its mark. “What would I have to gain?” he inquired, as calmly as a normal person.

  “You tell me, Stow.”

  He rubbed his hands together in a gesture that had the effect of directing the overhead fluorescent light onto the golden surface of his ring and into the intricate shadows of the embossed design. It looked as though he were trying to wipe prints off his own fingertips.

  “Stow,” I said, “the fingerprints on the drug vault at Riverside are yours, and you know they are. You knew that long before the day of the Red Mass. You knew it because Ellen subpoenaed those prints. There is no record of your having refused to be printed—or even of calling a lawyer at that time. Why? Why won’t you defend yourself? Who are you trying to hurt, besides me?”

  “How much longer have I got here?”

  This was addressed not to me, but to a guard, who did not look at his watch before he answered. “Three minutes.”

  “Three minutes,” I repeated. Plenty of time to remind him of one other little fact that will be easy for the jury to understand. “On Harpur’s death,” I said, “her entire estate would have passed into your possession. You and she were childless. She had no siblings. Her parents had long since predeceased. No will has been probated. No money has been transferred into the trust that you set up to handle your own assets since you became a judge. Harpur’s fortune at the time of her death was approximately seventy-eight million dollars. That money is still intact. Why has it remained untouched—not even aggressively invested? What nefarious plan do you have for that money?”

  Stow made a show of beginning to rise. “What’s the difference, Portal?” he asked. “Motive is not one of the elements of a criminal offense.”

  “Yes, but the sudden acquisition of nearly eighty million dollars would strike any juror as a good reason to kill one’s wife. Eighty million dollars is beyond ordinary people’s comprehension.”

  Stow was now standing, studying me as if to assess some previously undiscovered quality after forty years. “The jury will not be ordinary, Ellis,” he said. “You are going to see to that.”

  His parting words rang in my head on the way back to Toronto, until a blinding blizzard drove out all thoughts except safety. The squall abated when I got to the northern outskirts of town, and I thought of Queenie down in Tent City with her ragged regulars. I’d not seen her for twelve days—not since I’d taken Angelo down on New Year’s. I had no idea how she would receive me, for she had certainly ignored me on that day, so I prepared myself for at least more coolness, if not outright anger. I wasn’t prepared for the calm with which I was received. She appeared to have forgiven me for spoiling New Year’s Eve by my inappropriate request that she help me breach the security of Riverside Hospital.

  “Your Honor, it’s good of you to come down. We always can use help.”

  The frosty cloud of Queenie’s breath wreathed her face. The wind was so bitter that my breath froze on my eyelashes after a few moments’ exposure. How did she work out here day after day? I buried my face in the warm folds of my cashmere scarf and made my way single-file behind her along the ice-encrusted path of the Tent City site.

  “Your friend Aliana has been writing about us again, I think,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Some people from the city were here earlier. They said we’ve got to get out right now, but they promised the move would just be temporary. They said we have to evacuate for our own good.”

  It was 5 p.m. and getting dark. The river, which was almost always too warm to freeze, danced with a soft light that I knew was telling Queenie and her little band of vagrants to hang on, that despite today’s lung-numbing cold, the sun was inching north toward the vernal equinox and the first day of spring.

  “Most of my clients ha
ve been evacuated to shelters, anyway,” Queenie explained. “I promised those who couldn’t carry their belongings that I would lock up their valuables.” She shrugged. I knew what she was thinking. The valuables of a street person are not like the valuables of anyone else.

  We worked side by side for an hour, our hands protected by several layers of latex gloves. I kept hoping she’d start a conversation, but she was totally silent. As for myself, I didn’t even try to talk. I knew that unless Queenie spoke first, there would be no dialogue.

  By six, we’d filled two shopping carts with tattered plastic bags, frozen cardboard boxes, rusty coffee cans and all sorts of shabby fabric bundles.

  “That nice Nicky guy gave us this,” Queenie finally told me, leading me to a sheltered bend in the river where a new metal shed with a good strong lock on it graced the riverbank. “We can lock this stuff up until everybody can come back.”

  I helped her heave the pathetic bundles into the shed and lock it up again. I felt filthy, and there was nowhere to wash my hands, so I walked to the riverbank and hunkered down over the water. “Don’t put your hands in there, it’s not very clean,” Queenie said over my shoulder. “We can go back to the clinic to clean up.”

  I stood and faced her. The sun had set, but in the glow of the city, in the light that never dies, I could clearly see her face. She was tired and no longer young, but I thought she looked more beautiful there in the semidarkness than she had in all her finery on New Year’s Eve.

  “Use this,” she said, pulling a small plastic bottle of alcohol from her pocket. “I said use it,” she joked, “not drink it.”

  I cleaned my hands, handed her back the bottle. She smiled at me for the first time. “Come with me for supper,” I invited.

  “After we shower,” she answered.

  “Shower?”

  “Separately, of course,” she answered mischievously.

  I took her to a cozy place I knew in Little Italy. It was getting harder and harder to find anything Italian in the neighborhood where I’d grown up hearing my parents’ language more often than my country’s own.

  “What do you call this?” Queenie asked, spearing a piece of chicken with her fork.

  “Chicken cacciatore,” I answered. “It means ‘chicken hunter style.”’

  “Like you’d really need to hunt a chicken,” she laughed. “I’m surprised you came over here to eat. If you want Italian food, why don’t you just cook it?”

  “Except for tomato sauce, I don’t know how, Queenie. It was my wife who always cooked when we were ...”

  “Together?”

  “Yeah.”

  It made me uneasy to talk about Anne with Queenie, so silence came between us again, and the evening ended no more warmly than it had begun.

  In Toronto, there is always a day in February when the temperature soars a degree or two above freezing, the sun melts the snow and spring pretends it’s just around the corner. Such days are most often followed by the swift return of merciless cold and virulent wind, but on such a day it was nice to walk down Yonge Street toward College. I turned off the bustling main drag onto the wide side street crowned by the massive pink-granite police headquarters.

  In the not-too-distant past, I would have dropped in to see my best friend in the police service, Matt West. But Matt had been booted upstairs big-time. He was now a superintendent heading up a large division in the east end of the city.

  Fortunately, however, a mere phone call from Matt to headquarters had resulted in my being given my own private office for an entire day, with a secretary and a police detective on call to answer any questions.

  I had to admit that sitting somewhere in the center of a huge law enforcement complex, in the middle of a city of millions of citizens, with the latest technical equipment and expert personnel at my command, almost prevented me from getting any work done.

  I started by scanning six-year-old surveillance videos taken from Riverside Hospital. The angle of the camera was such that only the backs of heads were visible. The day in question was December 26. Most people wore winter hats. I marveled at how much things had changed since people had become serious about security post-9/11. Great gaps in the video record, times when the camera had been off or out of videotape, were the norm. On one occasion, a cleaner had left a dust cloth draped over the camera for two days before it was discovered and removed. Stow appeared nowhere on the tapes, though I myself was on them a number of times. Had Stow been on the tapes, I would have used them to show his devotion in caring for his wife. I decided against using them. They really could not prove that he hadn’t been at Riverside. Plus, the thought that he could never be proved to have been there could turn some jurors off, making him look like he didn’t care enough about Harpur to visit her.

  Even Matt’s clout did not permit me to see on-the-scene police memos or any originals of supplementary reports on the case that officers might have submitted. For these, I learned, I would have to find the photocopies Ellen had included in those red-taped boxes. Ellen only had access to photocopies of the police records, too, but originals might have showed me something she hadn’t seen. No such luck.

  But I did gain an advantage about fingerprint evidence. Ellen had reports only, but I had a password that allowed me direct access to the police file of all fingerprints found at Riverside five years earlier during the investigation of the drug vault break-in.

  Technological advances over the past ten years were astonishing. In the old days, the police could get fingerprints in only three ways: by finding a visible print; by securing materials, such as mud or soap, in which an impression had been made; or by “raising latents,” a process of applying fine black dust to an area suspected of having prints, which produced images as the powder adhered to the oils secreted by fingertips.

  But now, I concluded, police were using a handheld digital laser beam. By pointing the beam at any area of interest, fingerprints stood out like diamonds in coal. When I entered the password on the computer, page after page of prints sprang into view, each accompanied by a time, date, location and, sometimes, the name of the owner of the print. I was startled to see my own name twice, until I realized the location was the elevator button on Harpur’s floor of the hospital. Much more damaging were three crystal-clear prints on the shelves and inside door of the drug vault itself. They were labeled with Stow’s name.

  Several hours later I left headquarters. On the way home, I phoned Matt West to thank him for his help. I also took a chance and asked him whether he could get me past the heavy security at Riverside. He just laughed at such a naive question.

  When I got to my apartment building, I stopped off to help Jeffrey prepare the February rent payments for deposit.

  “Son,” I said as we worked on our financial records, “I don’t know what I would do without you here, but shouldn’t you and Tootie be thinking about your future?”

  “What do you mean?” Jeffrey looked up from the piles of paper. Despite his avowed love for the outdoors, his daily walks in the ravine abutting our building, his cross-country skiing in the valley, he was pale and seemed so much less robust than his sister—or his wife.

  “Well, you’re spending a lot of time supervising this building. And now that we’re looking into that extra acreage down by the river—well, I just hope you’re able to spend time with your child ...”

  “I’ll be able to take Sal down in the valley with me soon, Dad,” he said, showing no irritation at my implications. “And Tootie’ll come too. We’ll show little Sal where her mother stayed in a cave by the river when she ran away.”

  It was a pretty odd sort of legacy, showing a daughter how her mother survived as a street kid. But Jeffrey was so clearly in love with both of his girls that I wasn’t worried about Sal’s roots.

  I left him to his accounting.

  Sometimes I worried about Nicky, too. I often found him burning the midnight oil. He was being extremely careful with the files and boxes, I noticed. Whenever he op
ened a box, he took great pains to seal it up again, as if he were trying to replace the red tape exactly. I appreciated his care. However, I did not appreciate it when I got a call from a senior security official at Riverside, complaining that someone from my office had tried to gain entrance into the hospital.

  “I understand from the head of security at Riverside that you inquired about access. I found that a little surprising, Nicky, considering that you and I had not discussed the matter.”

  Nicky had been so diligent, so skillful, in all the work we’d done thus far on the case that I hated to question or criticize him, but I did feel some explanation was called for.

  “Ellis, please,” Nicky said, his voice trembling, whether from fear or anger, I wasn’t sure. “We’re not on the same page. I have never deviated from any agreement we’ve had on handling this case. And I would never jeopardize our eventual access into Riverside. Accusing me of that is totally uncool.”

  “Nicky,” I answered, trying my best to sound fatherly, “I’m sorry. I certainly didn’t mean to offend you. But I was informed that a young man mentioned my name at the hospital a few days ago and—”

  “It wasn’t me,” Nicky said, more confident now, “so forget about it.”

  With that, he stormed out the door.

  After half an hour, the phone rang. Naturally, I thought it might be Nicky regretting his impetuousness. It wasn’t.

  “I need you to help me,” a melodious voice breathed.

  “Aliana—what’s up?”

  “I need a story for page one of the Life section this Saturday. Can I interview you again?”

  “Forget it,” I replied. “There’s nothing to say. The judgeship won’t be decided for months.”