Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  He sat, but he remained on the edge of his chair. “I want you to tell me, son. You tell me how the investment I’m making in you is going to pay off. I didn’t send you to school so you could help strange people. I mean, strangers. I sent you to carry our family forward in the world and to preserve the honor of Italians in America.”

  Uncle Salvatore’s sense of geography was different from mine if he thought Canada was part of America, though that would certainly explain his unwillingness to challenge the United States government. “Yes, sir.” It is, I was learning, useful for a lawyer to appear to agree when there is no advantage to disagreeing.

  As if changing the subject, Uncle Salvatore gestured toward the windows. “You like it here, Angelo?” I knew he meant more than the richly adorned study, more than the big house and the great view. He even meant more than the Kingsway. By “here,” he meant the top of the heap.

  “Yes,” I said sincerely. “Yes, I do.”

  “A man who is smart and who works hard should have something to show for it.”

  I wondered what my father had to show for his years of bricklaying. Our own house needed tuck-pointing. The mortar was wearing away. The shoemaker’s children go without shoes.

  “What your father has to show for his hard work is you, Angelo,” he said, reading my mind. He hesitated, as if an idea had just occurred to him. “Maybe you spend too much time studying. Maybe you and that brother of yours—did he get a haircut yet?”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, maybe you and that brother of yours need a change. Maybe I should send you away.”

  “What?” I said in alarm.

  Uncle Salvatore eyed me. “Away for a vacation,” he explained. “How would you and Michele like to go down to the World’s Fair over Easter?”

  My first reaction to this offer was relief, a sense that Uncle Salvatore’s interest in my studies—and my welfare—was as it had always been, that of a kindly benefactor. But I could not get over my feeling of unease at his apparent attempt to manipulate my law project. I also didn’t want to interrupt my work, not now when I needed to talk to Billy Johnson again, despite my uncle’s view of his case. Not now when Gleason Adams was acting so weird and had as yet offered no indication that he’d returned the pilfered rings.

  Uncle Salvatore took my silence for consent. “Consider it arranged,” he said. Then he appeared to reconsider. “Not for Easter,” he declared. “Your mother will want you with her in church. The day after Easter. I’ll get one of my secretaries to send a plane ticket to the house for both of you.”

  I nodded, smiled. A free trip to New York? Why fight it?

  I can’t say the rest of this visit was exactly fun, but at least Uncle Salvatore had said what he’d apparently summoned me to hear, so we could both relax. We drank the muscatel. We chatted. My uncle asked me about my friends and I told him a little about Gleason and the other law students I “ran” with, to use his term.

  Then Uncle Salvatore began to tell me about his friends. At first he spoke of his neighbors on the Kingsway, their houses and servants, their horses and the summer cottages they kept on the wooded lakes in the district of Muskoka a hundred miles north of the city. He drew a verbal picture of a life of splendid leisure in which intelligent, influential people with exquisite manners took turns providing elegant entertainment for one another.

  “On summer mornings,” he said, “Fietta and I eat breakfast in our teak gazebo overlooking the lake. We own every lot on the shore. Nobody’s going to ever be able to build there but me.”

  I wondered whether my uncle knew there was a sadness to this display, an undercurrent of loss and regret. He had no children to inherit his money, his land or his name. Aunt Fay had been perfectly capable of bearing children; she’d had two with her first husband. I sometimes speculated, when I became old enough to understand the complex morality of Catholics, that Uncle Salvatore and Aunt Fay had a platonic marriage in order to avoid the sinful consequences of divorce. My mother had told me to remember that I was like Uncle Salvatore’s son, and that since he had no boy of his own, I should treat him with a son’s respect.

  So I listened. And before long, Uncle Salvatore’s discourse shifted from the heights and settled down into the gang-riddled streets of the Toronto that existed before I was born. Now he became animated. He told tales of Italian cops he had known, the only “foreigners” allowed on the English-Canadian police force, and the crooks always one step ahead of them. Despite my ambitions, my fondness for Whitney Square, I found these tales more interesting than the stories about the Kingsway and Muskoka. And when Uncle Salvatore began to talk about his pals in the funeral business, I sat up.

  “Business is always good for the undertaker,” he said, “good in the funeral parlor and good in the basement.” A hint of a smile curved his lips. “Who counts how many caskets go out of a funeral home? Or how many bodies are in each casket, for that matter.” He hesitated and as if to caution me in some way, added, “Of course they’re all legit now. You don’t find any of the old boys pulling those tricks these days. Every Italian funeral is loaded with cops. You can count on it.”

  “Uncle Salvatore,” I asked, “are the same people still in the funeral business?”

  “What do you mean, Angelo?” I could see that my interest pleased him. I was also beginning to see a new avenue open in my investigation of the fate of the missing body. “Are the same families still undertakers, nipote? Of course they are.”

  “What are their names?”

  He looked surprised. “I guess you’re still too young to know the undertakers,” he said after a pause. “Spardini, Bianco, Cataroli . . .” He rattled off six names. I wrote them down, along with their phone numbers, which Uncle Salvatore appeared to know by heart.

  Again, my intense interest seemed to soften Uncle Salvatore. He rose, walked over to where I sat and put his hand on my shoulder. “Angelo,” he said, “it’s time for Aunt Fay and me to go to dinner. Our friends eat in the middle of the day on Sunday.”

  “Yes, sir.” I made an attempt to rise, but he held me down in the chair. I wondered what next, until I looked into his eyes and realized the pressure of his hand was meant to be paternal.

  “If there’s anything I can do for you, Angelo, you just let me know. Anything.”

  His kindness was overwhelming. It called for a response and I found myself saying the first thing that came into my stupid head. “There is one thing, Uncle.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Tickets. Beatles tickets. Could you get two tickets to the Beatles concert in August?”

  Uncle Salvatore looked as if he had lost all hope for me. He took his hand from my shoulder.

  Then I heard Aunt Fay’s high voice. “Sammy,” she called from just outside the door. “We have to go.”

  Uncle Salvatore laughed, a strong, genuine laugh. “Her, too,” he said, nodding toward the voice in the hall. “She loves the Beatles, too. An old lady like her! I’ll get the bunch of you all the Beatles tickets you want. You’re my family, Angelo. Anything you want from me, you get.”

  Chapter 9

  The days passed and still I had no word from Gleason. I wanted to tell him again he must be very careful. If the attorney general and the chief coroner were aware of our visit, we might be pawns in their feud. More realistically, I wanted to tell Gleason that my uncle was watching me. My only chance to work up a decent law project for Sheldrake Tuppin was to stick to my own work by writing a proposal about Billy Johnson.

  I had to admit to myself, though, that what I really wanted to share with Gleason were the results of my “investigation.” I wanted to tell him that the pawnbroker had said the rings were worth half a semester’s tuition. And I also wanted Gleason to know that, just out of curiosity, I was planning to visit the people on Uncle Salvatore’s undertaker list.

  But when I called Gleason’s home, nobody answered, not even the maid.

  Nor had I seen Billy Johnson. I expected Michele to
arrange for us to meet. He’d been annoyingly eager for this to happen before I’d decided to use Billy for my project, but now that I was depending on doing so, Michele was suddenly evasive.

  “Don’t bug me, man,” Michele told me when I asked him to set up a meeting. “I’m really hung up on Selma right now. We’re doing a sit-in at the American Consulate again tonight.”

  “Michele,” I reminded him, “Easter’s less than a month away. I’ve got to have this project completely finished by then. Especially since we’ll be going to New York City right after.”

  Michele looked up from the protest sign he was lettering. “New York!” he said. “That is just far freaking out!” He shook his curly head. “Look, man,” he said, “write out some questions—like what you need Billy to answer. I’ll talk to the guy.”

  Michele was as good as his word. The very next day, he gave me a sheet of paper covered with the tidiest handwriting I’d ever seen. On it was Billy Johnson’s own record of the history of his birth. He had been born near Buffalo, New York, during a short period in which his Cree mother had been staying with a Tuscarora Indian friend. At the law library, I researched the American federal statutes that affected Billy and found this clause:

  The Immigration and Nationality Act . . . distinguishes between citizens at birth and those whose citizenship was acquired after birth. . . . The following shall be citizens of the United States at birth: . . . A Person born in the United States to a member of an Indian, Eskimo, Aleutian or other aboriginal tribe: Provided that the granting of citizenship under this subsection shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of such person to tribal or other property.

  I studied the limiting clause. Did it mean that Billy’s being a United States citizen could not prevent his owning tribal property? Or did it mean that if, under the rules of the tribes, Billy could not own property if he was a citizen of the U.S., then he could not claim such citizenship? Clearly the answer to this question, the interpretation of this section, decided his citizenship. It was an area I’d have to research further by coming up with some authority, that is, case law, to support the view I wished to take, which was that Billy was not subject to the draft because he was not a citizen of the United States. Would such a position prove untenable? That question would be, I decided, at the heart of my law project. I was pretty proud of myself. This was just the sort of legal reasoning a man like Magistrate Tuppin would appreciate. But I knew Tuppin’s first question would be “What does your client think of this tactic?” Obviously, to see Billy Johnson in person was still a pressing necessity.

  I handed the federal statutes back to the reference librarian. “Thank you, Mr. Portal,” she said. She checked a mimeographed sheet taped to the wall beside her desk. “Your name is on the request list this morning, by the way. Check at desk three. I believe an interlibrary loan has come in for you.”

  I thanked her and went upstairs to the desk she’d mentioned. There waiting for me was a book far more interesting than the statutes. I buried my nose in Auto-Erotic Suicide: Psychological, Pathological and Legal Implications. Not only did I forget about Billy Johnson’s citizenship problems, I forgot the time of Professor Kavin’s tutorial.

  “Well, Portal,” Kavin declared when I finally arrived, five minutes before the tutorial was supposed to end. “Here’s Adams early and you late. That’s an unexpected and unwelcome turn of events.”

  I glanced over Kavin’s shoulder. Gleason sat in the chair in front of the professor’s desk, a Cheshire-cat grin directed my way.

  I shot him an inquisitive glance.

  “Didn’t your father give you the message?” he asked. “I called you—three times, in fact. Once to remind you of today’s tutorial.”

  My father had given me no messages. I frowned at Gleason. The deceitful little fiend. But on second thought, I decided I was glad to see him, relieved to be able to verify that he was indeed alive and in no trouble.

  “Adams took your time slot, Portal. We’re finished,” Kavin said.

  The professor nodded toward Gleason, who sprang out of the chair and grabbed the doorknob, pushing my hand from it. “I’ll leave you two alone, then,” he said with a leer. “But come by the house tomorrow, Portal. Don’t forget. I’ll fill you in.”

  Fill me in on what? What had he and Kavin been talking about? Had Gleason taken it upon himself to conduct some sort of investigation? Was that why he’d been absent from school? I glanced at the professor to see if I could read anything unusual in his demeanor. I couldn’t.

  “Adams claims the two of you are studying a homicide,” Kavin said. “I’m puzzled as to how he expects to construct a criminal-law proposal at this late date and surprised to learn you’re involved, but I’m going to give both of you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’ve got your signals crossed and failed to communicate with each other before you came to me. I took you at your word regarding the international law project for Magistrate Tuppin. He may have chosen to spend the final years of his legal career in the trenches, but he has been a distinguished scholar of the law for far longer than he’s been the drunk-court judge.”

  “Professor, I don’t know what Adams has in mind. I am certainly working on the other matter, just as I said I would.” An urge to beat up Gleason came over me.

  “Sit down, Portal. I trust that you’re on target with your own project. But I’m concerned about Adams. I have very little respect for him as a scholar of the law, but I do care about him as a student in this program.” He looked around as though searching for his pipe. Finally, despite being unable to locate it in the mess on his desk, he resumed talking. “Sometimes I fear that young man is in danger of going off the deep end.”

  I reminded myself that everything is a test. Dealing with pressure was part, a big part, of surviving first-year law. I would no sooner “rat” on a fellow student than expect one to rat on me if I were having trouble juggling my studies and my personal life. Actually, come to think of it, I was having trouble and would keep having it, if Gleason didn’t shape up.

  What had he meant when he’d claimed to have spoken on the phone with my father three times? That was a lie as deep as the ocean. I had to believe that Gleason was still suffering from the grim discovery of his brother’s remains in Switzerland. As far as I knew, he was all alone in his huge house and facing the return of his parents with the corpse. That, combined with what had happened in the morgue, would have been enough to make anybody lose his marbles. Wouldn’t it?

  But none of this was anything I intended to talk to Kavin about. “Look, sir,” I said, taking the seat Gleason had vacated and finding the professor’s pipe buried in the cushions, “I’ll talk to Adams tonight. We kicked around a few ideas and he’s been working on one while I’ve been working on another. We’ll—”

  “Don’t confuse charity with obligation, Portal.”

  “Sir?”

  “Adams is not the excellent student you are. You have to avoid jeopardizing your own project for the sake of assisting him with his.”

  “I realize that, sir,” I replied. But I was confused. What was Gleason’s project? How much had he told Kavin?

  To fill the tutorial time—and to get off the subject of Gleason—I told Kavin about the U.S. statutes. He listened as I outlined the cases I planned to research. Once in a while he nodded, always a good sign with him.

  “Stick to the international angle on this, Portal, and you’ve got something. Dig up the case law. The more cases you’ve got, the better your position is going to look. Be careful that the authorities, I mean the precedents, you choose are so close to what you’ve got with Billy Johnson that Tuppin can’t get you off guard by particularizing differences. Unless, of course, they’re truly inconsequential. You understand?”

  “Of course, sir,” I answered, though, to tell the truth, I wasn’t sure.

  He glanced at his watch. “Anything else, Portal?”

  I surprised myself by asking Kavin a question that seemed
to pop out of my mouth of its own volition. “Professor,” I said, “can a person have a decent practice defending people charged with homicide? I mean, can a man make a respectable living at it?”

  “Perry Mason seems to manage,” Kavin said with a smile.

  I smiled back. “Seriously, sir?”

  Kavin bit down on the stem of his cold pipe and stared into space for long moments before he finally lit the damn thing and said, “Homicide is a neutral act. By definition, it is simply the killing of a human being. It can be purely accidental. The term implies no moral content whatsoever. Homicide is nonculpable or culpable. Culpable—that is, blamable—homicide is murder. Whether it is suitable or unsuitable to defend a man accused of murder depends, in my view, not on the moral strength of the lawyer or the accused, but on the strength of the case. This, I warn you, Portal, is not the common view. I’m sure the Crown feels any accused killer must be brought to justice no matter how slender the evidence against him. And I’m equally sure that defense counsel feels a man should be rigorously defended regardless of the strength of the damning facts in his disfavor. For myself, despite my many years in this profession, or perhaps because of them, I feel a door must be left open, an opportunity, if you will, for the entrance of natural justice. It is unfair for a lawyer to prosecute those against whom the evidence is slight, and unwise to defend those against whom the evidence is overwhelming.”

  It was a nicely put, if unconventional, theory. But Kavin had missed my point, or so I thought.

  “As for making a living out of it, true, murder is the crowning offence of criminal law.” He glanced up at me from behind the thin haze of tobacco smoke that surrounded his head like a mini-volcano. “Portal,” he said, “you had the highest entrance exam scores in a generation of law school applicants. You should be looking forward to making law, not to saving reprobates from its clutches. You might have one or two good first-degree murder cases in a decade. Most of your time will be spent pulling desperate people out of fires started by their own foolishness. Those whom you save will love you at first, but they’ll soon come to associate you with the bad times and want to have as little to do with you as possible. Those whom you fail to save will consider you a fraud. And both groups of clients will most likely reach these opinions before they’ve paid your final bill.”