I could have been forgiven for having lost track of the news over the past few weeks. I quickly learned that the story of the death of a homeless man less than an hour after he had been subdued by four police officers in the presence of twelve other officers had slipped quite a way down into the back pages of the paper from the headlines it had occupied a few days earlier.
Less than an hour at my computer, though, got me up to speed. The Juicer had originally been apprehended several days before his death because he had “lost it” in front of a house in a run-down neighborhood, a house into which he had finally been able to move after years spent sleeping in doorways and shelters. There was no mention of what, exactly, had caused this sudden lack of all control.
At the time, he had been taken to the mental hospital on Queen Street, had been treated and was believed to be improving.
The articles I read made no mention of the possible reason for what happened next. The man came to the attention of the Toronto police when he was seen parading in front of the hospital on a cold night with nothing on and brandishing weapons in each hand. These turned out to be pieces of a broken towel rack, but the sight of him had resulted in the staff making a frantic 911 call. As soon as he saw the police, the man went completely berserk.
After a brief but violent struggle, he was subdued. No shots were fired. One witness later said that she had seen one of the police officers use a Taser, but it was quickly established that that was not possible because none of the four officers was a supervisor and only supervisors had been allowed to carry and discharge so-called “stun guns”.
Several of the articles I read noted that the incident would probably have been unremarkable, an incident similar to scenes played out across the city night after night. An old guy goes nuts. He runs around with nothing on, swearing he’ll get his own back for whatever reason and brandishing the feeble weapons of the disenfranchised. Somebody calls the cops. They come. They calm him down. Somebody puts him to bed. The end.
I thought, as I read, that it would have been like that for the Juicer, too.
Except that within an hour of the incident, he was found dead in his hospital bed. Dead of apparent heart failure, possibly as a result of his recent “misadventure.”
Again, it might have ended there. But the chief of police, sensitive to public demands concerning security issues around the upcoming International Seminar of Global Partners had, in an unusual move, asked PIC, the Police Investigative Committee, to look into the incident, the same way they would have if a citizen had clearly been harmed as a direct result of police action. Apparently the chief was still smarting from the negative press his force had received over their part in the mishandling of security at the recent G20 summit.
I read all this with not much interest but with a good deal of relief. Because it seemed to me that this was going to be an open and shut case. A simple matter of over-diligence on the part of the force. Commendable perhaps, but unnecessary.
My years on the bench had taught me a lot of things about the Toronto Police—some good, some bad. But nothing I had experienced so far had ever convinced me that any member of the force had been a murderer.
Was this conviction about to change?
I hoped not. I had enough to deal with without returning to the thankless job of being some sort of part-time amateur private detective.
Nonetheless, just to play it safe, I decided to visit my friend Matt West.
Matt and I went way back, and he had always been accessible to me if I dropped by police Headquarters on business—legal business, friendship business, or just the business of being in the neighborhood and looking for somebody to have a coffee with.
But I knew the minute I entered the lobby that things weren’t the same at Headquarters.
For one thing, there was some sort of “community co-operation” campaign going on.
This sort of thing had never been necessary in Toronto in the old days. People had trusted the police. That was before they were all bald. I knew I was being petty, like the old man I am, but I couldn’t understand how the complete removal of hair from a young man’s head made him feel like a hero. To me, all these bald police officers just looked like feeble knockoffs from American cop shows.
But of course, that was just my opinion, and it apparently wasn’t shared by everybody—or even by many, judging by the scene that met my eyes. The entire lobby of Headquarters—a large room that took up a great deal of the first floor of the station—was filled with screaming children, many of them jumping up and actually grabbing at the five or six young cops who were trying—without much success—to get them to calm down. I couldn’t help wondering where the Tasers were when you needed them.
It took me a minute to figure out what was going on and that was only possible because my eye caught a giant banner—it must have been ten feet long—hanging somehow from the two-story-high ceiling. It depicted a friendly cop—a female—showing some sort of crime-fighting device to a child. The photo was gigantic, much larger than life. The banner read, “We’re all in this together—young and old.”
“Can I see your gun?” some little voice called out. And half a hundred others joined in with the same question, “Can we? Can we?”
As the officers herded the children toward several exhibits, including a police car with huge eyes and a mouth, I made my way toward the duty desk to ask for Matt. For the first time in a long time, I couldn’t see anyone that I knew. Several officers behind the desk were carrying on an animated conversation that my presence did nothing to interrupt. I cleared my throat. Nothing. I coughed. Nothing. I ventured to say, “Excuse me,” Still nothing.
“Ellis, long time…” I heard Matt’s deep voice behind me and turned to see the handsome, huge black cop. “What’s up, man?”
“Lots,” I answered. “Got a minute?”
In the old days, I wouldn’t even have had to ask for Matt’s time in that casual manner. He’d always been happy to see me. But things were different now, and I could tell the second I saw him that my presence was going to be an annoyance unless I kept it really short.
“How’s life as Deputy Chief?” I asked.
“Busy, my man. Busy. What can I do for you?”
I expected, as always, to be escorted to his office by a quick wave of his hand toward the stairs to the second floor.
But this time, he just stood there as if he wanted to conduct our business, whatever it might be, right there in the lobby.
“Uh, could we go upstairs?” I asked, feeling awkward, feeling, I soon realized, like some ordinary citizen who had the temerity to disturb the second-in-command of the Toronto police with a personal question of little importance.
“Sure, Ellis, sure.”
In the old days, Matt’s office had been a homey sort of place with an old wooden table instead of a desk, with antique bookcases lining the walls. It had been small, cozy, almost comfortable, and I used to feel that if I were a homeless person—one of the “clients” Matt used to help in those days, I wouldn’t have felt afraid.
But that was all changed now. Matt’s new office was huge. A wide window overlooked College Street. There were no books, no pictures on the wall. The desk was a big metal thing. When I sat in the chair in front of it, I had the feeling that Matt was interrogating me before he even sat down some distance beyond me behind it.
Before he said anything, he looked at his watch. “What can I do for you?”
I told him about Queenie.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said in a way that reminded me of the old Matt. “She was so good. She was a saint.” He shook his head. “I went down to her shelter a number of times. Just to check on her. Just to make sure she was doing okay.”
“That was good of you, Matt, I—”
He shook his head again. “She didn’t need any help, did she? She ran that place like a clock. And man, that couldn’t have been easy with some of the people she had living there!”
�
�Matt,” I said, “that’s what I came here about.”
“About the shelter? I heard the man who replaced Queenie when she retired is very good. Plus,” he looked up at me as if he were about to say something that he knew was bound to upset me, “It’s closed now.”
Of course I knew this already. “Moved,” I said. “It’s moved. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
He hadn’t been made deputy chief for nothing. Matt West was a top-notch investigator, a cop’s cop. He knew damn well what I wanted to talk about.
“Look,” he said, “I know Queenie really cared about all those people she helped. I know she would have been upset about…”
“Yes,” I interrupted, “upset about the Juicer. And so am I.”
“You? What did you have to do with him? I always thought Queenie was very careful about confidentiality.”
“Of course she was. But as you know, Queenie had strong views about everything, and once she made up her mind about something, there was no changing it.”
“Made up her mind?” Matt’s handsome face was screwed up with, I thought, suspicion. “What exactly has—I mean did—she make up her mind about?”
“She thinks the Juicer was murdered.”
I didn’t have to say anything more about the case. I was sure that Matt knew every detail. Especially since the minute I mentioned the “victim” by name, I could feel him shut down the way a machine shuts down when you pull the plug.
He was silent for a moment. “Listen,” he finally said, “I don’t think I have to tell you that the minute PIC gets involved, nobody here—and nobody in the divisions or on the street--is going to tell you anything about him.”
“So the PIC is involved?”
Matt was too good a cop, too experienced an officer, to let the completely neutral expression on his face change, but both he and I realized he had just made a mistake. He had just revealed something about “the case” that I hadn’t been sure about before. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good news for me. How could I find out anything if I couldn’t even talk to the people most involved in the Juicer’s death?
There was a moment’s silence. Matt looked at his watch again.
“Matt,” I finally said, “I’ve got no stake in this myself. I’m sure your people did the job they had to do. I’m sure the Juicer’s death was just what the hospital said it was, a heart attack, but Queenie thought otherwise.”
He looked at me as if I were crazy. I could almost read his mind. She’s gone. What difference could it possibly make what she thought about a police matter?
“Matt, she was convinced that the Juicer was murdered. She was so sure, that she made me promise that I would look into the possibility—the certainty.” I was afraid to look up at him. “I’m not at all convinced myself, but to honor her last wishes…”
“Forget it,” he said. It was his cop voice, his “I’m in charge here and I’m telling you to leave and be about your own business” voice.
But then he softened. “Listen, Ellis,” he said, “I can see you’re hurting. I know you would have done anything for Queenie. Anybody who knew her felt the same. But sometimes we make promises we just can’t keep. I gotta tell you, my friend, this is one of them.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I didn’t know what to make of what Matt had said and I didn’t have one minute to think about it because on the way out of Headquarters, I ran smack into the mysterious woman I’d seen at Queenie’s funeral.
Aliana Caterina.
I’d known her since she was a girl. My father, a bricklayer with skills acquired in the old country, had hired her father, Vincenzo Caterina, to help him cater to clients in wealthy neighborhoods of the city who wanted artisans to build their mansions from brick and stone. Nowadays, glass and some sort of pressed-wood chipboard is what’s used in the construction of even the finest homes, but in the days of Vince and my father, only the best would do for the best.
Aliana was at least fifteen years younger than me, which put her well into her fifties, but she still looked lovely, a classic Italian-Canadian beauty. The years had strengthened her features, and her thick black hair was now touched, I saw, with silver, but she had remained thin and graceful.
“Ellis,” she said with a warm smile and extending her hand, which I noticed at once held her wedding ring, showing she must be a widow, “I’m so happy to run into you!”
“It’s been a long time.” I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see Aliana. I had always felt that she wanted something from me that I wasn’t prepared to give. In her work as a journalist, she had followed my decline and had reported on it in her capacity as the chief city correspondent for the Toronto Daily World with compassion. Over the long years, I had completely lost track of her as a person, though I read her work from time to time.
“I am so sorry about your loss,” she said. “I tried to talk to you the day of the funeral, but of course…”
“It’s fine, Aliana. Thank you for your consideration.”
She nodded toward the door I’d just exited from and smiled again. “Police business today?” she asked pleasantly.
“Just checking on some unfinished business for Queenie,” I said, not really wanting to give Aliana any information. She wasn’t an award-winning reporter for nothing. One wrong word and I’d find myself staring up at me from the pages of the World.
“Yes.” She hesitated, “Listen,” she said, “I know there are some questions about the police involvement in the death of that man that was Queenie’s client….”
“Still on the prowl, Aliana?” I couldn’t help myself. There was a time when nobody knew more about what was happening around the city than she did.
She looked at me with a serious expression. “Ellis,” she said, “like you, I haven’t been idle in the years since we last talked. I’ve been in Italy most of the time, but now that Eduardo is dead, I’ve come back. I’m working on a couple of things here right now.”
“Good, Aliana,” I said, trying to sound interested.
“I assume you’re here to talk to Matt West?”
“Just to say hello,” I answered.
“If you’re trying to get anything out of him about that client of Queenie’s, you’re wasting your time, you know that.”
I glanced at my watch, just like Matt had glanced at his, and for the same reason. “I’m sorry, Aliana, but I’m on my way to…”
“I can help you. I’ve got workarounds when it comes to PIC.” She reached into her bag. I recognized the label—a top Italian designer. It must have set her back a few thousand euros. She pulled out a business card, finely printed in English and Italian. “Give me a call.”
I didn’t have anything to hand back to her, not that I wanted to anyway. The last job I’d had was as a judge. After I had been restored to the bench, I had thought it unseemly for a judge to have a business card.
“Yeah, well, thanks,” I said. “Nice to see you.”
I felt guilty to be happy to get away from her. Aliana had always been a bit of a pest with her constant sniffing around for a story.
But considering how things had just gone with Matt West, if she really had ways of getting around PIC, maybe I shouldn’t be so fussy about becoming “friends” with her again.
***
Whether or not I had the help of Matt and Aliana, I decided I’d better get as many of the facts of the case myself as I could. When I think back on this now, I wonder if my “investigation” was just one more way of pushing away my grief. But every time I thought of giving up the whole ridiculous “case”, I felt as though I heard Queenie’s voice saying, “Don’t forget you love me.”
To tell the truth, I felt the same way about the city. I knew that to get any information of real value, I’d have to go back to the streets. And the prospect frightened me. There had been a time when I felt like a free man, despite my destitution, just because I could walk the streets without hindrance. Now, even the best neighborhoods, even the most popular and well
-peopled shopping plazas, even the schools, for heaven sake, were places where a man could be shot dead on the spot.
By rival gangs who didn’t care if a few people got between them and their intended victims. By a gunman who had mistaken an innocent bystander for his real target. By an enraged spouse or a despondent mother. By a bank robber or a person who had decided to snatch the till of the subway token-seller. It was mean and it was mine and a lot of the time, I didn’t know how to think about what the city had become. Especially on a September morning when the trees were hinting at the coming autumn, and the Don flowed clean and as pretty as the river that runs through the city of God.
One material thing that Queenie and I did care about was our wardrobe. Before my fall, I had been quite the dandy. I’d had my suits made to measure. And there were a lot of them. I had a separate closet for my shirts: Turnbull & Asser, Thomas Pink… Ties, ascots…
I never went back to dressing like that. But after several years of wearing things that were literally rags, when I returned to respectability, I developed a style that was comfortable and somewhat casual but still appropriate for anything from a dinner at the home of the chief justice to a holiday party at Queenie’s shelter.
I tried to choose something nondescript for my foray. A faded worn blue casual jacket, old jeans, scuffed shoes that I had intended to polish the last time I’d worn them, but had apparently failed to do. The thought of actually going out like this made me queasy, but looking at myself in the mirror, I realized that my most worn and least formal clothes would still look better than the clothes of anyone I was likely to meet if I went back to the haunts of the homeless and the bereft.
CHAPTER FIVE
I decided that my first stop should be the place where Queenie’s clinic used to be. It had gone through several names during Queenie’s reign as supervisor, sometimes because of City policy, sometimes because of donor requests, sometimes because of occasional volatility around Native issues.
Don't Forget You Love Me Page 2
