Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  “Almost,” I answered. “But what would I have said? I don’t even know what we were doing down there. Did we go to Lombard Street to assess the legal implications of an unexplained death? Did you expect that you could build a proposal around something as vague as that?”

  “Don’t be so arrogant, Portal,” Gleason said, springing up and nervously grasping the back of the chair—it looked like Chippendale—he’d vacated. “Unlike you, I may not have top marks, a stunning academic record, impeccable work habits and the ability to brown-nose Kavin, not to mention Tuppin, but I’ve got better than nothing. I’ve got a disappearing human body. Now you see it. Now you don’t. And. . .” He drew out the word as he reached into the pocket of his jacket, “I’ve got this!” Like a magician holding up a coin he’d just pulled from behind someone’s ear, Gleason held the little cloth packet between his fingers.

  “I told you I don’t want anything to do with that. You said you’d give it back!” I shouted indignantly.

  “Keep your voice down,” Gleason warned, making me feel loud and crude. I shrank back, humiliated. “If you came here to lecture me, you’re wasting your time.” He came close to the chair in which I sat and held the packet near my cheek. “I found this, Portal. It’s my evidence now. And I’ve got a topnotch project, as far as I’m concerned. People don’t just disappear. Not even dead people. I don’t know about you, but I have every intention of finding out who that person was, why the coroner didn’t want us to see her body, but the pathologist did. Somebody is trying to hide something.”

  “Oh, that’s brilliant, Gleason! A brilliant conclusion. A dead woman with a bag over her head and you conclude someone is trying to hide something. Do you have any other startling observations?”

  “Don’t be a wise guy, Ellis. Something odorous this way comes. That fact alone is worthy of investigation.”

  “What were you doing at the morgue, anyway? Tell me, Adams.”

  He turned and walked a little distance away. I couldn’t see his face, of course, but the set of his shoulders indicated his usual relaxed posture. “I was doing research, what else?”

  “Why did you call me?”

  “Because you’re my friend.”

  He said it as though it were an answer on a pop quiz. I didn’t have the heart to say he was wrong. Or the folly to admit he was right. “A friend would advise you to drop the matter, Gleason. The pathologist made a mistake showing us that body. I think the coroner might have wanted to spare us law students a bit of embarrassment. I got some books out of the law library at lunchtime. The most likely explanation for what we saw is—”

  “Suicide? Some kind of perverted auto-eroticism?”

  I glanced at him in surprise. I didn’t know Gleason knew about the more bizarre manifestations of human desperation. Why should he? As far as I knew he’d had all he needed or wanted from the day he was born. He certainly didn’t bother taking books out of the library to read the gruesome facts of other people’s pathetic lives.

  “Portal,” he said, “that’s the point, don’t you see? No matter what caused that death, something exceedingly strange happened to the body.”

  “Forget it! You can’t frame a law proposal on what we saw—which was next to nothing. We didn’t even get to the point at which the clothes came off. And the evidence you have in your possession was illegally obtained. It’s stolen!”

  Gleason rarely showed anger, but when he did, it was as unpredictable and wild as his other mercurial traits. “You’re a self-righteous prig!” he spat at me. “You’ve got a lot of pride for the grandson of a Dago monkeyman!”

  No. No. I am not the grandson of an Italian street musician. But yes, I am Italian and passionate anger is no stranger to me. But I was beyond anger now. I’d had enough of this spoiled, ignorant brat. I yanked my coat from the back of the chair. The spindly furniture teetered but remained upright. I didn’t bother to put my coat on as I made for the door of the room.

  But Gleason was in the doorway blocking my exit before I could get there. “Aren’t you forgetting something, Portal?” Once again he held up the little packet. “You were in that lab, too.”

  “So what? Get out of my way.”

  “I need your help, Ellis. I have to do this law project and I can’t handle it alone.”

  “Why don’t you do what you always do? Snow your way out of a problem. Or call Daddy and get him to donate a new building.” I tried to push past him, but he wouldn’t budge.

  “Help me, old lady, or I’ll have to tell Kavin how hard I worked to convince you to give back what you stole.”

  “Save your threats, Gleason,” I said through clenched teeth. “For all I know, there isn’t even anything in that pouch.”

  He grinned at me. He thrust the tips of two fingers into the gap made by the pathologist when he’d snipped the packet off the deceased. He pulled. The tiny cloth bag split and two items flew out, clinking onto the marble floor. Instinctively, both Gleason and I dove for the objects. He managed to retrieve one, then looked around for the other, but this time I blocked him. Behind the base of a stone urn, I saw the glint of metal. I stretched out my fingers and grabbed what looked like a wedding band. Holding it in my palm, I observed that it was a ring, half a gold circle welded to half a silver circle. In the glow of afternoon light through the sheer silk curtains at the window, I could see the ring bore an inscription. I read it out loud: “‘If you love me . . .’” I glanced at Gleason. I’d already forgotten that I was angry with him. “That’s all it says, Gleason. ‘If you love me . . .’”

  He looked inside the ring he held. It was also half gold, half silver. “‘Leave me by dying,’” he read, then looked up. “‘If you love me, leave me by dying.’” He slipped the ring on his finger. It fit. Strangely, at that moment, I had to admire Gleason. There was no way I’d put on my finger the ring of someone I had just observed cold and stiff in the morgue, not if I could help it.

  “They look like wedding rings, don’t they?” Gleason said softly.

  “But why would a woman wear her rings pinned to her like that?” I asked.

  “So nobody would steal them,” Gleason speculated, rather ironically, I thought. “Or to keep them secret from somebody. Or from everybody.”

  I handed Gleason my ring. “Put this one on,” I said. He didn’t ask why, he just did it. The second ring fit him, too. “Wow,” he said, “big fingers.”

  “Big feet, too,” I said, remembering the run in the dead woman’s stocking, the scuffed black pumps.

  “Ellis,” Gleason asked, again seeming so serious that I wondered what he’d really been up to that morning, “somebody made these rings out of other rings, don’t you think?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “We have to check this out. What else can it be but murder?”

  “Gleason, we have to take these rings back. If not to the morgue, then to the police.” I glanced around. It took me a minute to locate the phone—gray and matched to the decor of the room. Just about every phone I’d seen was black.

  “No!” Gleason, agitated, jumped up and moved between me and the phone.

  For a moment I stood motionless beside the stone urn. I experienced the intense desire to push him away, to go home and forget about him and the dead woman. Why was I bothering, anyway?

  “Look, Ellis, you and I have been in classes together all year. I’m just asking for a little help, that’s all. This school stuff is easier for you than for me. I’m not the student you are. Kavin’s really into getting me kicked out. But if this is a homicide and we can work together to solve it, we’ll have a joint project that we can present to Kavin.”

  He was nuts. I couldn’t imagine that Kavin would ever accept such a vague and inappropriate project. Playing detective would just about finish Gleason off entirely as a law student and it wouldn’t do much for me, either.

  “Justice, Portal,” Gleason whispered. “Truth . . .”

  “What?”

  His uncharacteris
tic intensity was alarming. “I need to know, Ellis. What does that inscription mean? Who made new rings out of old ones and why? Why did that woman have them pinned to her underwear instead of being on her finger and her husband’s?” He paused. “And most of all, Ellis, who killed her and why?”

  “An even more pressing inquiry, Adams, is how would you get anywhere on a case if your only clue was evidence you were withholding from the police?”

  He turned from me and held his hands out, studying the two rings the way a wealthy woman might contemplate her jewels. He made me stand there watching this display until he finally said, “Portal, let’s just do it. Forget about that Tuppin character. He’s a drag. You’ll be bored following him around. We’ve got something here that nobody else in the program has got.”

  “Yeah, stolen evidence.”

  “We do not have stolen evidence,” he said. “What we have is an overlooked exhibit that we rescued when others failed to observe it.”

  “Stop saying we.”

  Gleason laughed, then made a face of mock displeasure. I didn’t bother to comment on his childishness. I had begun to see a solution, not to the mystery of the dead woman, but to Gleason’s predicament. “Maybe you can go back to that pathologist. You can say that you realized the packet had been left behind when he was called out of the lab, that you retrieved it, but that when you attempted to give it back, we were so quickly thrown—I mean, seen—out of the morgue that you didn’t have time.”

  Gleason appeared to give my suggestion serious consideration. “That’s cool, Portal. Truly excellent.”

  I didn’t like it when Gleason agreed with me so readily. It usually meant that he had already discovered a way to act in exactly the opposite manner than I had proposed. “And while we’re at it,” he said, “we can question the pathologist a bit. We can find how the body was brought in, who the relatives are, that sort of thing. And we can see if he’ll tell us why we were allowed to see the body for only a short time.”

  Those were exactly the sort of questions I was sure the pathologist would not answer. Like many workers for the solicitor general and the attorney general of Ontario, he would have taken a sworn oath not to reveal anything he had learned in the course of his duties.

  “I don’t think so. I . . .”

  “If we could get back in to see the pathologist, we could watch and listen carefully to get some clue, some idea as to whether the pathologist thought the woman’s death was a murder. Maybe we can find someone who actually saw the woman and her husband wearing the rings.”

  No, no, I couldn’t allow myself to be enticed into this. The best thing was simply for Gleason to give back the rings and choose some other way to placate Kavin. I told him to forget about getting me involved.

  But the image of the dead woman and the puzzle of the rings were not so easily put out of my mind.

  Chapter 4

  The man lay in a dark pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs. From the wound on his head, the blood had spread to soak his hair, his clothes, the carpet beneath his arms—they had clearly been held out in some futile gesture of self-protection. Blood had splattered the open door at the foot of the stairs, staining it with a spray of drops that radiated from the victim’s head like the halos in my mother’s prayer book. Halfway down the stairs, a thin, five- or six-inch line of blood marked the wall. The awkwardly twisted body with its grotesque, smashed head seemed to clearly indicate a merciless crime, but it was not.

  I read on. The man had been descending the staircase slowly. Halfway down, a broken stair rail bracket had snagged his hand and cut it. Distracted, the man lost his footing and plunged down the remaining stairs. At the bottom, his head, backed by the full weight of his body, had hit the knob of the door. That knob had made a hole in his skull the size and shape of a fist.

  My nose buried in Suspicious Death Scientifically Explained, I didn’t see Professor Kavin as he slipped into the library out of the drizzling rain and brushed the moisture from his collar and sleeves. “Got a minute, Portal?” he whispered.

  “Sir?”

  “I saw Adams this morning,” Kavin confided, leading me toward a settee in the students’ lounge, an open area at the front of the library. “He said that if I asked you, you’d be able to give me the details on something the two of you worked up yesterday.”

  I experienced an instant flash of anger, but I hid my reaction from Kavin. If Gleason thought he could manipulate me into helping him by telling Kavin about the body at the morgue, he was dead wrong, so to speak.

  “Professor,” I improvised, “the other night, I learned of a man my brother, a sociologist, thinks might have an interesting case. I met the man briefly but haven’t spoken to him at length. My brother tells me that though Canadian, the man appears to be in danger of being drafted into the United States Army. He’s an Indian, native. If you think Magistrate Tuppin would take an interest, I could examine all the arising legal questions concerning his status as a Cree, his citizenship in Canada and his eligibility to be conscripted into the service of a foreign military force.” Buoyed by the sound of my own voice, I rushed on. “I can draft a proposal showing the kind of interviews that would be necessary to conduct with the man and his associates. I can do some preliminary research into relevant statutes and case law, as well as work up a few queries that could be addressed to citizenship officials. I can show that, depending on the findings, counsel can either suggest that the man surrender himself to American authorities or else assist him in possibly instigating civil litigation against the United States government.”

  Kavin stared at me. Several students were smoking in the lounge and he glanced toward them as though sorry he didn’t have his pipe. He never liked to deliver an opinion without a cloud of smoke obscuring his face, giving him the advantage of inscrutability. Finally he returned his gaze to me. “I’m at sea here, Portal. This doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Adams was suggesting at all.”

  “Uh, perhaps not, sir.”

  “Portal,” he said, “you realize I am not recommending that you work with Adams. I’m much more impressed with this idea of yours. Magistrate Tuppin doesn’t often have the opportunity to consider international law. When you think about it, you are really dealing with three nations on a case like this. I don’t think you are going to find much on the man’s rights as an Indian.” He stared into space for a moment, as if mentally running through some book on the subject. “You can spend a few hours here in the library looking at treaty law for a start,” he finally said. “Then you’re going to have to see what we’ve got in the way of U.S. federal statutes.” He nodded, smiled the discreet little crescent that indicated his pleasure. “Work it up. I’ll present it as part of your proposal to intern for Tuppin when the project approval committee next meets.”

  I thought about Gleason, his unexplained urgency, his apparent desperation over the brilliance of his proposed project. Would Kavin’s enthusiasm for my idea wipe out his interest in Gleason’s proposal, which Gleason would now have to convince Kavin about himself? If that was the case, then so be it. I wasn’t Gleason’s babysitter, was I?

  “Are you done with your classes for the day?” Kavin asked, glancing at his watch. It was five o’clock and I wasn’t looking forward to another pile of dry, breaded fish and stiff, warmed-over pizza. I wondered what Kavin had in mind. Maybe he wanted to buy me supper, a big fat hamburger. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered hopefully.

  “How about a little walk down University Avenue?” he said. “We can take a look at the progress they’re making on the new courthouse and maybe drop in on a friend of mine at City Hall.”

  I agreed eagerly with Kavin’s suggestion. Together we exited the library and, ignoring the light drizzle, sauntered down the curved drive that circled between the two Law Faculty buildings—Falconer Hall and Flavelle House. Both were gracious old mansions, especially Flavelle House, an Edwardian masterpiece of wood, stone, iron and gl
ass built by the baronet, Lord Minto, in 1902 and willed to the university on his death. Kavin and I turned onto University Avenue, a broad boulevard that led south toward downtown and, at the bottom of the city, Lake Ontario. Ahead of us, the dark pink Victorian monolith of Queen’s Park, the provincial parliament building, loomed in the mist. It was surrounded on all sides by a park not unlike the manicured swath of Whitney Square, except that this park was fifty times as large as the one in front of Gleason’s house. As we crossed it, my stomach began to roll with anticipation. Had I already guessed where we were headed?

  Traffic on both sides of the elegant expanse of University Avenue was brisk, speeding both north and south toward the arterials leading out of the downtown core and toward the bungalows and waiting wives of the suburbs.

  “Wisdom begins in the street,” the professor said, rather gratuitously, I thought. At the intersection of College Street, Kavin and I negotiated the crossover to the east side of University, happily dodging a cloud of white-capped nurses outside Toronto General Hospital. I followed them with my eyes as they fluttered down the street.

  Kavin also studied the scene before us, the crowded sidewalks, the rushing cars. “There are those who think the law is an abstraction, a set of ideas, principles and rules,” he said. “Such thinkers are convinced that human nature, indeed nature itself, is constantly in need of the application of reason, that we live on the brink of chaos, separated from it only by the narrow barricade of logic.”

  Being rather of that opinion myself, I said nothing. But I did think about my brother’s nearly uncontrollable fury over the actions of the sheriffs of Alabama—and, of course, about Gleason’s possession of stolen evidence. Principles and abstractions drove Michele. He thought about little else. As for Gleason, I didn’t know what he thought about.