Don't Forget You Love Me

by Rosemary Aubert

  There was a third call. Aliana Caterina. Wanting to talk to me for some reason. I erased the message before I’d made a note of her number.

  I cooked a bit of pasta added tomato sauce from a can and sprinkled it with grated parmesan. I ate a few forkfuls but my mind started to wander and I more or less forgot about the food.

  Queenie and I always ate simply. She didn’t cook much and the few things she did make were basic Canadian dishes: hamburgers, macaroni and cheese, baked chicken pieces. Every once in a while, I made a good, big Italian meal for her, which she consumed with enthusiastic delight. I had learned to cook Italian food not from my mother but from my first wife who was by no means Italian but who had loved my mother and had dogged her steps in the kitchen—which made my mother inexpressibly happy.

  When I was still spending a lot of time in court during my “restored” legal career, I often had to go back to the courthouse in the evening. And Queenie worked lots of nights, too. Sometimes overnight. But we had managed quite a number of suppers at home. How precious those plain ordinary meals had become in my recollection.

  I had to remind myself to get back to the supper at hand, but my appetite had deserted me. I ended up putting most of it in the fridge, where, I noticed with chagrin, it joined other suppers that I had not been able to get through.

  I thought again about how little I knew about this “case”. I intended to go to bed, but instead found myself on the internet. I inadvertently ended up at Queenie’s obituary when I tried to look up the shelter where she had worked. That drove me into a few rounds of Angry Birds. Of course I well realized that not only are there new games to play, but also internet challenges more in keeping with my age, my education, and my profound disgust with the idea of wasting time during these, my declining years!

  While I was idly confronting the birds, a thought occurred to me. Whether or not they had actually killed the Juicer, there had been four officers involved in subduing him in front of the mental hospital. This I knew from the newspaper reports published the day after the incident, reports that I had just read on the net. As I said, the story had quickly moved off the front page, and as I had been led to suspect, subsequent stories gave scant information and always seemed to end with the remark that further details were unavailable due to the possible involvement of PIC.

  So, four officers. If they were four honest officers, four people determined to do their job, then presumably, all four would have the same intent, that is, they would have made the same deliberate choice to do whatever they did, a choice based on their training, training designed to control their reaction to dangerous situations.

  I well knew that officer safety was the first concern in any takedown. That made perfect sense. An injured officer can do no good. Besides, no one is required to give his life for his job. So, four officers in danger, four legitimate choices to stop an aggressor from seriously or fatally wounding a cop.

  But suppose one or more of the four had his or her own agenda, their own reason for fatally taking down the Juicer?

  The more I thought about this, the more my mind began to swing into the habit of legal thinking. Queenie wasn’t a judge and she wasn’t a lawyer, but she was no fool. I was certain that she knew that intent was the crux of homicide. You could, God forbid, kill a man by accident. But you couldn’t murder him by accident. Of course, in an individual case, that fact might become a technicality, and many a day was spent in court arguing about such an issue. But Queenie had to have thought that one of those officers had intended to kill her patient. Hence her conviction that there was a killer. Hence her making me promise that I would find that killer.

  Did one of the four intend to kill the homeless man?

  Which one and why?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I finally found the Wholeness Spirit Centre on the internet. And yes, it had moved. I was surprised to find out where.

  When I checked out the location on Google maps, I saw that it seemed to be in an office building much closer to the downtown core than the old shelter had been.

  On the one hand, this seemed strange, since the new location was right on Bay Street in the heart of the business district, which meant it could only be a multi-story office building. Anyone using the clinic would run into well-dressed business types who might not look kindly on the street people who would frequent the service. On the other hand, the business district was empty at night—just when the denizens of the street were most active, and in winter, most in need of shelter.

  There were two other reasons why the shelter might have relocated to the business district. It was now considered socially acceptable to show that you were helping those less fortunate, which, mercifully resulted in financial help from the fashionable. And it was also possible that the shelter had secured corporate funding from a charitable trust set up by a large company.

  So the location was possibly less surprising than the next fact I learned, which was that the center now had an official “Executive Director,” and that that person was none other than E. Jonathan Dirk, previously known as the obnoxious thorn in my side, the ubiquitous, recently cleaned-up Johnny Dirt!

  I had to hand it to the man, he certainly had a lot of experience that would qualify him for the job.

  He and I went way back and my memories of him were not happy ones. I couldn’t exactly remember the day I met him, which is no surprise. Until I gave up drinking, there were lots of days I couldn’t recall. But I did seem to remember that once, during a hurricane-like storm that had ravaged Toronto, I had helped pull Johnny out of the Don River. If, however, I had done Johnny any favors, there would be no use trying for payback, because one thing I knew for certain was that from the start, he and I had nearly come to blows every time we encountered each other. Johnny seemed to harbor the notion that I, because of my fine education and my previous “job”, lacked the qualifications to be a real street person. “Street cred,” as it’s known. In a word, he looked down on me.

  Unlike me, he apparently came from a long line of reprobates who had passed their legacy of presuming upon the kindness of strangers for a livelihood down to Johnny. He had always seemed proud of that. It was all he had to be proud of.

  Until now...

  I actually had to make an appointment with his secretary to see him!

  I figured he had to know a great deal about the Juicer and maybe about those four cops and what involvement they may have had with the man before his untimely demise.

  ***

  The next day, I made my way downtown to Bay Street. I had to pay $30 to park for two hours, of which I used up a goodly portion by having to search among the marble and glass skyscrapers to find the right building. Even having the address didn’t help because of the complexity of numbering the buildings, not to mention the suites.

  The idea that Queenie’s shelter now occupied a suite made me dizzy.

  About as dizzy as it made me to look up toward the gigantic cranes that lifted their steel arms above construction sites that seemed to sit on every corner. I tried to remember how Bay street had looked twenty years before when I had been a judge the first time, but I couldn’t get past the image before my eyes, which was of a city reaching toward the sky with nothing presently at its feet but piles of rubble behind wooden hoardings that tried, but failed, to hide the destruction of the old city.

  Finally, I found the office building that now housed Wholeness Spirit.

  With some difficulty in using the building’s directory and the multi-stage elevators, I finally located the shelter, designated a “clinic” on the electronic directory board. I found that it was in the basement, which reassured me for some obscure reason.

  The place was very clean, very bright, painted in white and light yellow with posters on the wall showing, presumably, street people who had “made it”. There were a few clients waiting to be served. Even they look clean and bright!

  I gave my name to the receptionist, who recognized me. It took me a minute to realize
that she had been one of Queenie’s most desperate clients, a young woman who had never lived anywhere except in other people’s homes, their basements, their garages, their backyards when it wasn’t winter.

  “Susanna,” I said, “You look wonderful!”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” She smiled shyly, “Off the drugs. On the job.” She pointed to one of the posters where that slogan was prominently displayed.

  “Good for you!”

  “Thanks. Take a seat…”

  I was kept waiting a long time, imagining the parking police hovering about my vehicle, but eventually I was summoned into Johnny’s office.

  “Hello, Ellis. Come in. Have a seat.”

  As though his surroundings had greatly affected his manners and his manner toward me, Johnny was remarkably polite. “I don’t think I told you that I’m real sorry for your loss. I miss Queenie a lot, myself, so I hope you’re getting along okay…”

  “Thanks, Johnny, uh John, uh Jonathan…”

  Johnny Dirt laughed his old hoarse guffaw. “I’ll always be Johnny to you, and you’ll always be a river rat to me,” he said. Then he adjusted his facial expression. “No hard feelings, eh?”

  “I should think not,” I offered stiffly, and we both laughed, finally breaking the ice.

  “What can I do for you?”

  I cleared my throat. “Johnny, I did something I’ve come to regret.”

  He looked shocked, but then he smiled as if he were used to my inflated way of talking.

  “What?”

  “I made a promise I don’t think I can keep.”

  “Hey, man, we all do that. Who was it to—this promise?

  “Queenie.”

  “Shit.”

  “It gets worse. I made it to her only a few minutes before she died.”

  “A death-bed promise,” Johnny said softly, as though he’d read books and seen films that I was sure he hadn’t.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you promise?”

  I took a minute. I wanted to say just the right thing in the right way. I wanted information and I was sure that Johnny had it, but to be fair, I figured he was probably mourning Queenie, too, in his own way. I didn’t want to press him, just as I didn’t want people to press me.

  “What I promised,” I began slowly, “was to find out who murdered the Juicer.”

  “Murdered,” Johnny said. It wasn’t a question. “So she told you that the Juicer was murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look, man,” Johnny said after a moment’s silence. “Queenie had what I guess you’d call a different take on the Juicer.” He smiled, “Anybody tell you why we all called him that?”

  “Of course I thought it referred to drugs,” I answered, “but I heard something about orange juice.”

  “Yeah, you got it. The thing is, living with people in a shelter, well sometimes it ain’t—it’s not—so different from living in a family or something like that.”

  “Yes.”

  “So people got their little habits and all. The Juicer, he started every morning with a glass of orange juice that came right from an orange—not from a carton or anything like that.”

  “He made orange juice from an orange?” I hadn’t heard about that in a good long time.

  “No,” Johnny said carefully, “Queenie made it for him.”

  I felt a ridiculous pang of jealousy. Queenie had never made orange juice for me!

  As if he could read my thoughts, Johnny smiled. “She wasn’t no cook,” he said. “She stayed out of the kitchen. Plus, we had lots of volunteers for that. But the Juicer, he was sure he couldn’t start his day unless he had that juice.” He paused, “I think it was just one more way that Queenie made him feel special, and that was real important because it calmed him right down.”

  “He needed calming down?”

  “Yeah. Just about every day. See, he had this problem—” Johnny smiled again as if he couldn’t help himself, “Actually, he had a lot of problems, but anyway, he had this one big problem which was that he couldn’t stand anybody to touch him.”

  “Except Queenie?” I was getting that jealous feeling again.

  “Oh no. Queenie was the best at never touching him, not on purpose, not by accident, never at all. That, and the fact she was always so nice to him, was probably what made him act so good whenever she was around.”

  “So what happened if somebody touched him?”

  “Well,” Johnny said, “it didn’t happen that much. Because he had this weird way of, I don’t know, staying away from people. Like if he talked to you, he stood really far away. And if you accidentally got too close, man, he let you have it.”

  “You mean he hit you or…”

  “No. He didn’t need to hit you. All he had to do was yell at you. The way he went at it was worse than being hit. He could think of things to say to you and about you that just made you sick.”

  “Like what?”

  Johnny shook his head. “I don’t really want to say,” he answered.

  I was stunned. I would never have expected such delicacy on the part of my old enemy.

  “Johnny,” I said, “I went down to where the shelter used to be the other day…”

  He shook his head. “It’s a mess down there.”

  “Yes. Anyway, I went down there and there were a couple of people hanging around—“

  He interrupted, “Yeah, there’s people that still go there even though there’s nothing there anymore but a pile of ripped-up concrete. Strange!”

  “Strange, yes. And sad. But, as I was saying, a few guys were hanging around and they told me that the Juicer went ballistic when somebody showed up from a collection agency. That’s when he got hauled off to the mental hospital.”

  “Don’t you mean the mental restoration sanctuary?” Johnny said, and we both laughed.

  “There’s nothing to laugh about, I guess,” I finally said. “No matter what really happened, the Juicer ended up dead.”

  “Yes,” Johnny said. “Yes he did. He definitely did.”

  We were both silent for a moment. Then I took a deep breath and got down to my real reason for the visit. Johnny must have figured I was there for more than a friendly chat.

  “Listen,” I began, “I’ve got to do something about that promise I made. I’ve at least got to find out as much as I can about what really happened to that guy. Maybe everybody hated him except Queenie. That’s a lot of suspects….”

  “Suspects? Man, you sound like a cop!”

  “No. But I heard there were four cops involved, four cops who took the Juicer down outside the mental hospital the night he lost it.”

  “Yeah. I heard that, too. Four of ‘em. I’m not sure what they were doin’ at the hospital because three of them been on duty near the shelter lots of times, and that’s in a different neighborhood.”

  “Does that mean you knew them?” I asked, a little too eagerly.

  But Johnny didn’t seem to notice. He was being surprisingly co-operative. As if he respected Queenie’s request. “Yeah,” he said. “The one I seen most often is a guy named Mark Hopequist. About thirty-five. Probably only been a cop for five, ten, years. Might have been something else before. Seems like the kind of guy who always wants people to like him.”

  “Not your typical cop.”

  “Not by a long shot,” Johnny said, “and I do mean shot!”

  It was a bad joke.

  “I think they been moving him back and forth between things,” Johnny said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, you know, he’s not that scary. Not like most of the cops these days. So they put him on youth work and work with the homeless—that sort of thing. That’s probably why I used to see him around the shelter. There was another thing about him, too, another thing you don’t get in cops, at least as far as they show it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He was religious.”

  “Religious? What do you mean?”

&nb
sp; “Sometimes he said things that came from the Bible. Like quotes or something. And once I caught him and Queenie together. I’m pretty sure they were praying.”

  “Praying at work?”

  “You got it.”

  Somehow the idea of two people getting caught praying at work was more shocking than other accusations that might be made against them.

  “There was rumors, too.”

  Johnny was on a roll now. As if he’d been wanting to talk about these things for a long time and had finally found someone to tell them to, surprising though the thought was to me.

  “Yeah. You know, like gossip. People said things about Hopequist.”

  “What, for instance?”

  “They said that he had to take time off once to spend a few weeks in the looney bin.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows?” Johnny shrugged. “People would say that about any cop who’s sensitive.” He made a face that let me know what he personally thought about people who were sensitive.

  “What about the others—the two other cops that you knew?”

  “Know,” Johnny said. “I still know them. And they’re a lot easier to know than that Hopequist weirdo. I mean person.” He smiled, “I gotta watch what I say about people now that I got this position.”

  “Sure. So the other two, who are they?”

  “Ted Downs and Al Brownette. Typical pain-in-the-butt cop types. Ted’s an old guy—but not as old as you.” He smirked. In the good old Johnny Dirt way. “He’s old and he’s wanting to retire from his life-long job as a body-and-fender man.”

  “A cop not afraid to use the old billy-club when called upon to do so?”

  “You got it. And the other guy, Al, he’s Ted’s suck-buddy.”

  “Uh, what exactly is that?” I asked. Of course I had a pretty good idea of what Johnny meant, but I wanted to keep him talking. This little interview was proving a lot more fruitful that the one with Matt at police Headquarters or the scattered conversation with the men at the construction site.