At first, a pang of grief gripped me, but I pulled myself together and I ate. It wasn’t the same as it used to be. But it was good. It was damn good.
After dinner, I got an unexpected phone call. Mark Hopequist.
“Ellis, I enjoyed our conversation,” he began. “I’m really happy that you’ve taken an interest in Kezia.”
“Yes,” I said. I still wasn’t sure why people thought I could do something to help this child, though Kezia herself seemed eager to pick my brain, and I was certainly willing to share my adventures in the valley with an eager young person. It was beginning to occur to me that one of the things I might consider doing now that I was pretty much fully retired from the law was to write my memoirs. When I thought about that idea, I had to laugh. But then, I always came back to thinking about it
“I have someone else you might like to talk to about teens and gangs,” Mark said. “Her name is Feeance Blake, and she’s willing to give you a call if you’re interested.”
He said nothing about who this person was, but I knew. And I wondered whether he had some reason to draw me into the matters he had refused to talk about in our meeting. Of course, with PIC off the case, everything had changed. But that still didn’t explain why these two cops were suddenly willing to talk. Once again I got the feeling that I wasn’t getting out of dealing with a murder—I was getting deeper in.
“I can give her your phone number,” Mark said.
“Sure.”
Only a few seconds after I hung up the phone rang again. A low, smooth, cultured voice told me she was ready to meet me and she set the time and the place.
Tim Hortons again. The next day at eight a.m. I thought maybe she was meeting me after a night shift or before a day shift, though I couldn’t pretend to know how the cops at Headquarters were assigned their work times.
She was beautiful. Dark, smooth skin, wide eyes, high cheekbones and a lovely wide mouth. But oh, the attitude! I was afraid to look at her. Afraid that she wasn’t a keen fan of old white guys.
Her greeting of me was neutral. Officious. No smile. No handshake. No coffee offered, until I asked her to wait and that I’d get her whatever she wanted, which, to my immense surprise turned out to be some big-cup thing with a lot of froth and a skinny piece of chocolate sticking out of it.
“Thanks.”
She took a sip and for a moment, the white of the cream on top of the coffee sat in a line over her mouth until she reached up with her tongue and licked it off. The gesture made her seem human and I felt less apprehensive about dealing with her.
“So,” she said, “you’re the man who lived in the valley all those years.”
“One of them.”
She gave me a look that seemed to say, “If you’re going to be a smart ass, this conversation is over right now.”
“Unfortunately,” I added, “there are quite a number of people who find it necessary to live rough in Toronto.”
She nodded. “I always wanted to meet you. Your story is not unknown around the city. I’ve considered the fact that you are a sort of model.”
I grinned uncomfortably.
“It’s a story that young people can relate to—if it’s told in the right way,” she went on. “And I’m sure you’re the right person to tell it.”
Oh no! I could see it coming. An invitation to address countless bored students to tell them how I rose and fell and rose again. This was not the first time I’d been asked to “share my story” with the masses, and it wouldn’t be the last time that I would steadfastly refuse.
There was a moment’s awkward silence, during which I studied her. You could tell just by looking that she was the no-nonsense type of modern cop. She was dressed in civilian clothes, but everything about her screamed police, her neat hair, her almost stiff posture, and her clipped way of speaking. I figured that the fact that she was female, black and beautiful probably had no bearing on how she carried out her job—which was, I suspected, with conscientious thoroughness.
I sensed that being straightforward would probably net the best results with a person like her, so I got right to the point. “Why did you agree to meet me? What’s in it for you?”
She smiled as if she appreciated the question. “Kezia,” she answered. “And kids like her.” She took another swig of her latte supremo, sat back a little and said, “I’ve been aware of Mark Hopequist’s work with kids for some time now. I understand that family matters got in the way of his continuing. So I help out now when I can. As you can imagine, I haven’t got a lot of time to engage in off-duty volunteer work….”
I couldn’t really imagine anything about her off-duty life, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask. I didn’t quite have the nerve yet to ask her about her on-duty life either, specifically whether it included physically subduing the mentally ill.
“When I heard that you had taken an interest in the girl, I thought it would be good to meet with you. The thing about Kezia is that her problem is a gang problem and the sooner gang problems are solved in Toronto, the longer people like Kezia will live.”
I was alarmed at this information. I wasn’t trying to solve a gang case, I was trying to find out who killed the Juicer.
But Feeance suddenly seemed obsessed. Without my asking, she started to spout facts and figures about teens—mostly black—who had been killed in Toronto in the recent past. Their names were a sad litany and I recognized a lot of them from the news. Targeted shootings, mistaken identity shots fired from fast-passing cars, young men—it was usually men—shot outside of clubs, in shopping malls, and even outside their own homes, which were as often as not in fine suburban neighborhoods.
I expressed my genuine concern over these horrible facts, but I had to gently steer our conversation toward what I really wanted to know, which was Feeance’s view of what had happened the night of the Juicer’s death.
“Nothing. Nothing happened that night that doesn’t happen somewhere in the city every night of the week—more than that. Time after time, night after night. Somebody loses it. Somebody gets to the point where they can’t take it anymore.” She shrugged. “Anyway, there were no charges, no misconduct at all. Just a sad case of an old guy losing control and ending up giving himself a heart attack. It’s nothing. There’s no need to even think about it anymore.”
She didn’t sound hard. She sounded tired.
“Have you ever worked with the homeless?” I asked her.
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “How could I work downtown—or anywhere in Toronto—without working with the homeless?”
“I’m sorry, I…”
“To tell the truth, though,” she went on, “before the night of the incident, I was never in the presence of a homeless person who was in any way apprehended except in a completely peaceful manner. Now I think I was lucky all these years—I mean never to see anything like what that old guy was doing….”
“What? What exactly was he doing?”
She didn’t answer. She started quoting again: use-of-force policies, police-treatment-of-the-mentally-ill regulations, use of less-than-lethal devices…
“Less-than-lethal devices? What’s that—Tasers?”
“Yeah. But only supervisors have them. Never touched one myself.”
“Had you ever seen the man they called the Juicer before?” I asked, trying once again to get back on track.
Feeance shook her head. “Before that night, I never met him, didn’t know a thing about him.”
“What do you know about him now?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
At first, Feeance just stared at me, as if she had no intention of answering that question.
Then slowly and thoughtfully, she began to talk, sounding more like a person than a cop. “I had heard about the good work that Queenie did with the homeless, and when I was radioed to attend an incident that I soon learned involved one of Queenie’s clients, I was a little surprised. I was starting to feel that even the safer shelters and hostels in the city were becoming incr
easingly violent.
“Al Brownette…” She glanced up to see whether I recognized the name and when I nodded, she continued. “Al and I were walking the beat that night, not far from the hospital. We ran over as fast as we could to answer the call.”
She hesitated before she went on. As if she had decided to open up to someone who might really understand what she was talking about, she got personal. “To tell the truth, I sometimes feel a little uncomfortable working with Brownette. He’s just so damn tough. Working with him makes me feel like a pussy.”
I was shocked at the word. In our politically-correct city that word was never spoken in public. But I said nothing, not wanting to interrupt her.
“When I first joined up a few years ago, I felt nothing but pride. There were—still are—few young black women in the police service here. I really believed I could help people by keeping the peace and maintaining order.”
She lifted her coffee cup to her lips, but put it down again as though she had discovered that it was empty. I resisted the urge to offer her a fresh one.
“My people came to Canada more than a hundred years ago. I grew up on a quiet street in Scarborough. All the families except mine were white. But that was no problem. Sure, I was teased in school, but I was smart and strong even as a little girl.
“Three families on the street had fathers who were police officers, and from the time I was small, I wanted to be a cop, too.
“As a kid, I never saw a gun, but I knew the cops had them, and I knew, even then that having a weapon meant that you could go places and do things in the city that other people could never do.
“My own neighborhood was perfectly peaceful—always. But sometimes my family went downtown and I saw a city different from the street we lived on.
“I knew from talking to the kids whose fathers were cops, that was where the action was, and I wanted a piece of it.”
“A piece of what? What action?” I asked.
“You tell me,” she answered sharply. “You tell me that there weren’t days—and nights—lots of them, when you’d rather have been out there—she gestured toward the window and the street—than anywhere else?”
She’d opened up to me and I felt I could safely return the favor.
“Listen, I’ve had a very long time to think about how my life has worked out. Yes, I’ve had freedom and yes, I’ve had adventure, but my life would have been much more peaceful and productive if I had lived it square and straight.”
“Oh, yeah? How about your village with all those people you’re giving a home? How about your wife? Would you have had Queenie if you’d played it straight?”
“No. No I wouldn’t.” I had to gather myself. “But what does all of this have to do with the death of that man?”
“The Juicer? Everything. Nothing. Except I’ve seen dozens like him over my time as a cop, and they all have one thing in common as far as I can see.”
“And that would be?”
“That they’re asking for it. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I feel sorry that the guy bought it. But sooner or later, it would have happened with him one way or another. I’m not exactly saying he had it coming. I’m not the kind who believes that crazy people are bad. But they are dangerous—very dangerous. And anybody who doesn’t believe that just isn’t being honest.”
“He must have been dangerous if it took four of you guys to subdue somebody as old as him….”
“Listen,” she said, “the main reason the investigation into our actions was dropped was because the man didn’t die on the scene. You gotta get your facts straight. He died the next day of a heart attack. Natural causes. No big deal.”
“But the news reports say the coroner is still investigating…”
She laughed. “Come on, don’t tell me you believe that crap. I guess in the absence of facts they initially figured we did the old guy in. But, like I said, he did himself in. If he hadn’t put up such a fight, we wouldn’t have had to subdue him.”
“Why did he have to put up a fight?”
“Beats me. So to speak.” She crushed the empty coffee cup in her long fingers. “Listen, nice talking to you but I’ve got to go on shift. Good luck with Kezia. You’re going to need it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
As I drove across the entire huge city to get to the brand-new facility housing the coroner’s office and the centre for forensic sciences, my mind sped back to the old days. There had been a time when my long-dead friend, Gleason Adams, and I had solved a sad and mysterious death that we had become interested in as students. I remembered the old morgue on Lombard Street and how what had begun as what I had believed was nothing more than a law-school assignment became a tangled tale of shame and violence.
The new facility, far in the west end of Toronto was, like the thousands of new buildings rising all over town, a fortress made of glass. By a freak of the time of day, the sun glinted off the front of the structure and blinded me for an instant as I pulled into the parking lot. I assumed there must be a secure parking area for the professionals who worked in the building, but for me, I had to pay a considerable amount to park and walk a long way before I got to the door.
At the reception desk, I used Matt’s name as a reference, and to my immense surprise, was told that he had called and told them I was coming!
I was given instructions as to how to reach the office of Dr. M.M. Singh, and all I needed to do to get to him was to walk down a startlingly clean, well-lit corridor. I wasn’t even sure whether there was a morgue in the building, but as I walked down that hallway, I thought I could catch the lingering smell of death. Or maybe that, too, was a memory of the night that Gleason and I had spent among the deceased.
Dr. M.M. Singh turned out to be a chipper young man with an obvious love of his odd work and a high regard for brief, fact-filled sentences.
“The man’s name was William Collins. He was a 49-year old male, in fairly good physical condition, considering his life-style, which was one of intermittent poverty and homelessness.”
He glanced at his notes. “There was no indication of an overdose of any kind of drug, nor was there any involvement with alcohol. There was indication of a past addiction to nicotine, but the lungs were in an acceptable condition for a man of the deceased’s age.”
“And the cause of death?” I asked.
“The man in question died of heart failure. The post-mortem showed a heart relatively undamaged considering years of living a difficult and unhealthy lifestyle.”
“Then why…?”
“The records show that this man had a long history of mental illness of one sort or another. He was highly excitable. The night of his death, he was subject to what is commonly referred to as a ‘take-down’ by the police.” He glanced at me again. “I don’t think it’s commonly known how powerful a person can become while in a psychotic state. It’s perfectly within reason to expect that even a man of the age and physical condition of William Collins could threaten and possibly seriously harm four police officers at least three of whom were younger than himself.”
“Would being in such a state harm his heart?” I asked.
“Mr. Portal, I’m a coroner, not a physician. What I can tell you is that his heart was harmed.”
“Could that have been the result of some sort of shock—perhaps the shock of being treated roughly by the officers?”
“I can’t say. Theoretically, a great shock can cause harm to the heart. Whether physical or psychological shock…”
I thought about what I had been told about “body-and-fender” men.
“Where there marks on the body—bruises, for example?”
Again he consulted his notes. “Yes. There were a lot of bruises—but none serious enough to cause lasting damage. There were no fractures and only a few lacerations.”
“Were those bruises consistent with being assaulted with police batons?”
He smiled. “I can’t say ‘assaulted’ Mr. Portal, I can only say the bruises were c
learly the result of the repeated application of pressure.”
“Anything else? Any other marks on the body?”
“Yes, there were two small marks on the inside of his left arm. They were obscured by bruises perhaps caused when he raised his arm to defend himself against the batons. Examination of them was inconclusive.”
An idea that had been forming for a while, I now realized, struck me. “Were these marks consistent with Taser burns?”
The coroner smiled like a man who thinks he is being tricked and isn’t going to fall for it.
“Yes. And also consistent with careless smoking, with a cooking accident, with a fight involving a cigarette lighter. In short,” he said, “consistent with the life of a sometime vagrant and a person whose life has probably been cursed by violence from birth.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
When I got home, Aliana called. “How are you making out, Ellis? How did things go with Mark Hopequist?”
I was happy to unload some of what I’d done and learned in the few days since I’d last spoken to her.
“Mark was very pleasant and cooperative—especially for a police officer--but as far as offering any real clues as to what is going on, that just didn’t happen.”
“Nothing?”
I thought back on our talk. “He did mention one thing that I’d more or less forgotten about.”
“What’s that?”
“The gang angle.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. As if Aliana had stopped breathing.
“Aliana?”
“I thought that was fairly clear,” she said with an edge to her voice. “I mean Kezia was very forthcoming about her brothers.”
“True, and I suppose I shouldn’t have lost track of the fact that you’re writing about gangs in the city, it’s just that…”
“What?”
“Aliana, I’m no police officer. I can’t get involved in something that so clearly has nothing to do with me. I’m only interested in finding out what happened to Queenie’s client. That’s all.”
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