Do or Die

by Barbara Fradkin

  He shuddered as he entered the empty, too-quiet apartment, and he felt a powerful urge to go across and fetch Tony. But reason soon prevailed. Tony and Mrs. Louks were probably both fast asleep, and he was too exhausted to face night bottles and diapers. Self-preservation won and instead, he set the alarm for six-thirty and fell into bed. A night’s sleep would restore his equilibrium and as long as he picked up the baby before Sharon got home from the hospital at seven, he would be safe from her censure.

  But when Sharon came home the next morning to find Tony in his high chair and pablum all over his face, she gave the baby a warm, knowing smile.

  “So, pumpkin, did you have a good time sleeping over at Mrs. Louks?”

  Green thought of protesting but decided against it. Somehow, she knew. The truth, humble and apologetic, was the wiser course.

  “This case will take a lot of my time, Sharon. I can’t help that.”

  Sharon kicked her shoes off, poured herself a cup of coffee, and reached over to wipe Tony’s chin. The baby responded by pounding his table with his spoon and laughing in delight.

  Oh great, thought Green, the famous Levy silent treatment. He gritted his teeth. “It’s a mess, and there’s big pressure from on high.”

  Sharon chucked the baby under the chin, picked up her coffee, and headed towards the bedroom, unbuttoning her cotton dress. Tony’s face fell as he stared at her retreating back, and in the next instant, he began to wail.

  “Fuck it,” Green muttered and pulled him out of the high chair. He found her sitting on the bed in her underwear, massaging her swollen feet, and he sat the baby down beside her.

  “I gotta go. Nice talking to you.”

  He fumed all the way to the university. Maybe he was wrong, but she was barely cutting him any slack. Relationships were hard work, but you had to be willing to do the work. All right, he knew that she had a demanding job too, that wrestling with psychotics and talking down suicides could leave a person drained at the end of the day. But when would she understand that his wasn’t a job like any other, that he couldn’t just leave it behind at the end of an eight-hour shift? People’s futures, their freedom, sometimes their very lives depended on his being right. In his job, one slip-up could shatter a life. He was acutely aware of this when he arrived at Halton’s laboratories to check further into Jonathan’s data and found David Miller already summoned to the great man’s office. The secretary had no idea how long he might be there, but Green had only waited five minutes before Halton’s door flung back and Miller blundered past him unseeing, his skin the colour of parchment.

  Green sprang forward. “Dr. Miller, a word in your office, please.”

  Trancelike, Miller turned towards the sound of his voice and stared uncomprehendingly.

  “Inspector Green of the Ottawa Police. We spoke yesterday.”

  “Oh…” Miller passed a hand over his eyes as if to clear them. “Ah…now is not a good time, Inspector.”

  “This can’t wait, I’m afraid.” Green took his elbow and steered him bodily down the hall into his office. Once inside, Miller collapsed onto the swivel chair in front of his computer and plunged his head into his hands.

  “What did Halton say?” Green began carefully.

  Miller rocked his head back and forth. “I’m ruined. He cut off my fellowship, he’s throwing me out of the university. All my work, all my hopes…”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He says I sabotaged Joe’s work. I can’t believe it! He believes that putz over me! He thinks so little of me that he’d believe... Shit!” Miller broke off, sobbing. “Shit! Shit! Shit! It’s not fair! That guy has been out to get me ever since I got here and finally he’s succeeded. But how? That’s what doesn’t make any sense!”

  “Did Halton tell you how he came to this conclusion?” Miller wiped tears from his eyes and tried for a deep, steadying breath. “I’m sorry. I’m not up to this right now. I can’t think straight. I need to get out of here and clear my head.”

  Green rose to his feet. “I’ll buy you a coffee somewhere.”

  Five minutes later, they were settled over coffee at a little sidewalk café across from the library. Although it was just after nine o’clock, the sun was harsh and the air already soggy. Traffic crawled by in front of them, exhaust fumes mingling with the heat off the asphalt, and Green felt sweat trickling down his back. He studied Miller surreptitiously. Something in the man’s initial raw shock touched a chord. It was hard to imagine that the anguish had been faked, and that the man was capable of the calculated betrayal of which he’d been accused.

  The hot, bitter coffee seemed to steady Miller, drawing colour to his cheeks. Green took up the thread obliquely.

  “This place hasn’t changed at all since I came here eight years ago. There’s still only one outdoor café on the whole campus.”

  Miller frowned. “You went to university?”

  “Masters in Criminology, piece by painful piece. Evenings, nights, weekends. Took forever!” He grinned. “You look surprised.”

  “I am. I mean—a cop. I never expected...”

  “I did research, I did a thesis. I know how you get to live the stuff day and night, how important it becomes to you.”

  Miller shook his head. “Not enough to sabotage somebody else, if that’s what you’re suggesting. You see, I don’t view Joe’s work as competition. Joe does. His mind is full of dreams of a post-doc at Yale, and he thinks he has to be right. But that’s not how research works. I was really interested in whether his model would work. That’s what’s important, finding theories that work, building on them and chipping away bit by bit at the mystery of the brain. All our theories are wrong, Inspector. Mine is wrong, Joe’s is wrong. We’re still light years away from the truth. All we can do is find which is a little less wrong, so we can keep expanding. Ten or twenty years down the road, scientists will look back on our work and shake their heads at the simple-mindedness of it all. Where would we be if Best had sabotaged Banting’s work? I thought Halton knew how I felt. I thought that’s one reason he took me on. I can’t believe Joe pulled it off.”

  “Did Halton tell you why he believed Joe and not you?” Miller gestured vaguely. “He said something about independent data corroborating Joe’s. I was so upset I couldn’t take it all in. But it doesn’t make sense. You can’t get the data Joe says he got. Vanessa and I ran simulations. Simulations aren’t perfect, and maybe mine were way off base, but I couldn’t get them to give figures anything like those Joe reported. And Joe’s scores were faked. I saw it with my own two eyes. The numbers didn’t match!”

  “You’re absolutely positive? You weren’t looking at the wrong data?”

  “Oh, no.” Miller took a big bite of muffin and shook his head vigorously, sending crumbs flying. He was quite in control now that outrage was taking hold. “After I ran the simulations, I broke right into his raw data. I know I was out of line to break into his files, but I wasn’t going to go to Halton with an accusation about a fellow student until I had proof. Joe’s raw data bore absolutely no resemblance to the figures he used in his analyses. But I never dreamed the slippery bastard would turn the tables on me. In one fell swoop he wipes out his raw data and blames it on me.”

  Green studied him carefully. He had seen a lot of liars in his day and had learnt to be suspicious. Still waters run deep, Difalco had warned him, but Green could not sense even a hint of deception in the man before him. Something did not add up. Blair’s own research supported Difalco’s claims, and yet Miller argued just as convincingly that it was impossible.

  “Do you know where the independent corroborating data came from?” Green asked quietly.

  There was no hint of deception in Miller’s reaction either. His bewildered shrug seemed genuine. “I have no idea. Halton himself, I guess. Unless…” His colour fled. “My God, Jonathan Blair!”

  “What about Jonathan Blair?”

  Miller covered his mouth in horror. “No! Could it be? That’s impossibl
e!” He looked up with stricken eyes. “Inspector, this is awful!”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I can’t believe I’m thinking it. I know Joe really wanted that Yale appointment, but I didn’t think he’d go as far as murder!”

  “How do you figure that?” Green demanded. “Joe’s claims have been substantiated.”

  “Not necessarily.” David Miller was already rising from his chair, stumbling as he groped around the table.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To check Jonathan’s files for myself,” Miller shot back.

  “No you don’t! Miller! Wait!” Green watched the balding man blunder through the maze of tables toward the street. “Damn!” He threw a couple of loonies on the table and headed in pursuit. As he ran, he groped at his belt for his radio.

  “Get me a twenty-four hour police guard on Jonathan Blair’s office. ASAP!”

  Eight

  Once the uniformed officer was installed outside Blair’s office, Green felt it safe to return to his own. He needed more hard facts so that he could make sense of the conflicting stories he was hearing about Halton’s research team. But when he arrived back at the station, he was assailed by half-a-dozen detectives clamouring to give him their reports and demanding their next assignment. I can’t operate this way, he thought. I’m a solo performer, not an orchestra conductor. I need an accompanist, maybe two, and occasional guidance from a music critic, but this cacophony of sound just blows my mind.

  Backing into his office doorway, he held up his hands. “Give me all you’ve got on the university colleagues, and leave everything else with Sullivan. Then if you’ve got nothing to follow up on from yesterday, go back to your regular duties. I’ll call you if I need you. And don’t anybody—anybody— disturb me for an hour.”

  Once the last of the reports had been handed to him, he shut his office door and took a deep breath. Peace. Swiftly he cleared the clutter from his desk and piled it on the floor, then spread the reports out on the desk. During the next half-hour he pored over every page, and gradually the community of scientists began to unfold. A diverse group drawn together only by their mutual fascination with the brain. And by the magnetism of Myles Halton. Myles Halton was born forty-eight years earlier in Vancouver, the son of a wealthy logging magnate. He spent his winters in the genteel, well-manicured Vancouver suburb of British Properties and his summers among the lumberjacks in the bush. He attended an elite private school, where he was always something of an outsider among the bankers’ and lawyers’ sons, then went on to Simon Fraser University and Berkeley for his Ph.D. in the fledgling field of neuropsychology. In the years since, he had earned a reputation as a rigorous scientist and a demanding professor who used his own personal charisma to keep colleagues, critics and students in line.

  At the same time, he liked high living and enjoyed the company of powerful friends. He married the daughter of a Toronto millionaire and sent his two daughters to boarding school in Toronto. It was rumoured that his wife spent most of her time in Europe, and that he had a girlfriend in nearly every major Canadian city. He owned a house in Rockcliffe Park, home of Ottawa’s moneyed and diplomatic elite, as well as a large summer house on the Ottawa River near Constance Bay, where he moored his single-engine Cessna seaplane. The bush was in his blood, and every summer he took two weeks off to fly north into the wilderness to fish.

  A man of contradictions, Green thought as he pictured the bearded giant wrestling with timber deep in the B.C. interior, learning the violence of nature and the supremacy of might. Halton had the capacity for murder, he decided. But unless a large piece of the puzzle was missing, he had no motive. And, Green discovered when he read the next report, he had an ironclad alibi.

  On the night of the murder, Halton had been in Toronto dining at the Whaler’s Wharf with a colleague from York University. He had driven down the previous evening, spent the day sailing Lake Ontario on the colleague’s fifty-foot yacht and driven back to Ottawa after dinner late Tuesday evening.

  Joe Difalco’s alibi was less ironclad but still impressive. He had spent the evening carousing with friends at the Royal Oak Pub on campus, and at least half a dozen fellow students recalled seeing him at one point or another. No one was very clear on the times, but he had certainly been there to close the place down at two in the morning. Everyone who knew Joe agreed that once he arrived at a watering hole, he rarely left before closing.

  Unlike his rugged mentor, Joe Difalco was a pampered city boy, the only son of a successful Italian restauranteur who had started as a dishwasher in a back street café and now owned four restaurants and a catering business. The family lived in a multi-turreted mansion on a rolling half-acre in the wealthy suburb of Cedarhill, and Joe drove a Jaguar to the university. In his undergraduate years he had earned a reputation as an amateur boxer. It was in this capacity, rather than through any academic distinction, that he first caught the attention of Myles Halton. Halton was a fan of the sport, which married agility, cunning and brute force, and had dabbled in it himself as a youth. People who knew him theorized that he always regretted not having a son and that he took Joe under his wing to fill that void.

  Joe’s lack of discipline and his love of wine, women and late nights proved to be his downfall, however, and he gave up serious boxing in his first post-graduate year. By that time he had already found a comfortable niche among Halton’s favoured few, and he had stayed there ever since. There had been no major concerns or complaints from his professors over the years, but most regarded him as flighty and self-indulgent. Hardly the blueprint for a cold-blooded killer, Green thought.

  For that, David Miller’s profile held more promise.

  David Miller’s life was in some ways the mirror opposite of Difalco’s. He was the eldest of five children and had grown up in the tough blue-collar Montreal district of Park Extension. His grandfather had immigrated to Montreal from Russia in the wave of Jewish immigrants escaping the pogroms in the early part of the century. The grandfather had peddled rags, and the father had become a butcher. While his neighbourhood friends dropped out of school and squired girls around in stolen cars, David swept factory floors on evenings and weekends to earn enough money for the tuition. At McGill University he had no friends, played no sports, and belonged to no clubs. All he had were his books.

  “Dave Miller couldn’t sell himself to save his soul,” Halton had said. In his final undergraduate year, he had suffered a nervous breakdown and apparently required two more psychiatric hospitalizations at Stanford, where he had spent over ten years completing his Ph.D.

  But it was after graduation that his real troubles began. The job market was tight, and he returned to his family in Montreal penniless and depressed until Myles Halton tracked him down almost two years ago.

  A history of mental instability, Green thought. He flung open his door and spotted Sullivan hunched over his desk, talking on the phone. As Green approached, Sullivan caught his eye, finished his conversation quickly and hung up. Freshly shaved and wearing a crisp white shirt, he looked revived, but the worry lines were still there. Green eyed the phone.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  Sullivan shrugged. “It’s just as well. I was about to lose my temper.”

  Green frowned. His quick eye had noticed a letter from the Toronto Dominion Bank on the desk before Sullivan shoved it into a drawer. “Problems?”

  “Just the little guy against the system,” Sullivan replied with a grin. “It amazes me how the system always wins.”

  “Yeah, well, the rules are fixed, aren’t they? Sharon and I figure that even if we do manage to find a house we can both stand, after twenty-five years we’ll have paid the bank four times what it’s worth. Talk about indentured service!”

  “Why do you think Mary can’t sell any houses? Welcome to family life, buddy.” Sullivan shook his head wryly and nodded at the report Green held in his hand. “You want something, or are you just trying to depress me?�
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  It was Sullivan’s way of drawing the curtain, closing his personal life off from his professional, and Green followed suit. “I want you to dig around in Miller’s medical history. Especially the Allan Memorial in Montreal and the Royal Ottawa here.”

  Sullivan’s eyebrows shot up. “Is he a psycho?”

  “He’s done some stints. Find out why. Anything that looks like paranoia or violent outbursts, let me know.”

  “Is he our best bet?”

  Green hesitated. Miller’s anguish had seemed so raw and his protestations of innocence so genuine, that it was hard to see him as a killer. But if Jonathan Blair’s research was correct, he was the one with the strongest motive.

  “I’m still going through the reports,” Green replied. “Miller told Jackson he was working on his computer all evening when Blair was killed, but Jackson thought he seemed nervous. He was sure Miller was hiding something.”

  Jackson had drawn the same conclusion about Miller’s friend, Rosalind Simmons, Green discovered when he returned to the reports in his office. Before leaving the university that evening, she said she’d dropped in to see if Miller was hungry, because when he became absorbed in his work he forgot to eat and on several occasions had nearly passed out from hypoglycemia. But on the night in question, she found Miller sitting at his terminal with a coke and a half-eaten hamburger at his elbow, intent on his work. She had gone straight home, making no stops and seeing no one who could confirm the time she arrived at her apartment. Rosalind Simmons lived alone, and Jackson’s inquiries into her background had met with limited success.

  Her friends and colleagues knew surprisingly little about her. She was raised in Toronto by a single mother, attended local public schools and completed her undergraduate work at York University. She had been working on her Ph.D. with Myles Halton for two years, and Halton reported that her progress was so slow that he was considering dropping her from the program. Other professors recalled that she was not a memorable student; she lacked dynamism and insight, but she had a slow, plodding perseverance that kept her on track. They had no concerns about her ethics, however, and could not even remotely imagine her capable of murder. Socially, no one knew much about her, except that she kept to herself. She had no known friends or boyfriends, and some of her colleagues speculated that she might be gay.