Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  He concentrated on the traffic headed north on Yonge Street as if too absorbed in his driving to answer any questions.

  I tried again as we turned onto College Street and drove west toward Clinton. “Did you find out who the rings belong to?”

  Still no answer. There was something so shaken, so shattered about Gleason’s demeanor that I began to feel an emotion toward him that I didn’t remember feeling for him before: pity.

  Which is why, when he finally got to my house, stopped and waited for me to open the door to get out, I tried one last time to patiently inquire about what he’d found out in Letros. “Adams,” I said calmly, “we’ve been friends. And now we’re starting to hate each other. Maybe friendship is more important than these stupid law projects. If you learned something in there that’s going to damage your project, believe me, you don’t have to worry.” I hesitated, thought, then plowed ahead. “We can work together. We can share the Billy Johnson project and go with it as a joint submission.”

  It wasn’t until later that the utter folly of this idea hit me. If Sheldrake Tuppin was reluctant to take on one intern, why would he consider two? But it didn’t matter. I didn’t think Gleason even heard me.

  “Ellis,” he said, his voice flat, “they’re closing ranks against me.”

  “What? What are you talking about? Who are ‘they’? The men in the bar?”

  “Yes. They knew all about the rings.”

  “They know you stole the rings?” I asked in alarm.

  “Not exactly,” he answered haltingly. “They believed me when I said I found one ring. I didn’t say anything about there being two. But they said somebody must have stolen two rings and then lost one, because everybody knew the dead person had been wearing two rings secretly since the breakup.”

  “A breakup? That doesn’t cut it. The dead woman broke up with her boyfriend but still kept their rings pinned to her underwear? That’s pathetic!”

  Gleason looked as if he were going to cry, as he had earlier that day in church. How could he care so much about this caper? Again I thought about how a few of the brightest and the best, a certain number of every first-year law class, suffered nervous breakdowns, often in the last few weeks of second term. Is that where Gleason was headed? Over a pair of rings and a murder ? I felt sorry for the deceased, but really, this was just a practice law school case. If it was even that.

  “Gleason,” I said softly, “those guys in there, maybe they were putting you on. Did they tell you how they knew all this? Did they tell you who this woman was? If they knew so much about her, did you ask them to prove it by giving you something that can be checked out? Like, for instance, her name?” I laughed, beginning to feel that maybe somebody had finally pulled a trick on the trick-ster.

  I reached out and put my hand on his sleeve in an awkward gesture of comfort. I felt I was being magnanimous, ignoring his constant epithets for the good of our friendship. But, as I expected, he ignored my touch. “Gleason,” I practically begged, “please tell me why this is so important to you.”

  “Practically everyone knew the dead person, Ellis,” he answered. “Practically everyone saw the rings on both partners. Everyone knew they broke up. Nobody had heard anything of the deceased since several days before the body turned up at the morgue. Nobody had seen the other partner for the same period of time.”

  “You mean both the woman and the man have disappeared?”

  He raised his bent head and looked me straight in the eye. Despite his emotional turmoil, he couldn’t hide his usual opinion of me, which was that I might be smart but I was a child compared to him and his more worldly take on life. “Portal,” he said, “you really don’t get this, do you?”

  THE CLINTON STREET KITCHEN door was locked and my hand trembled as I fumbled with the key. When I finally managed to turn it, the door flew out of my hand, sprang back and banged hard against the wooden salt box that had sat by the door all winter and was now waiting for Michele or me to take it to the basement.

  I waited for an outcry against this racket, but no sound came, no voice of sibling or parent. I sniffed the air like a hound. Even though I was too disturbed to eat, I longed for the reassuring fishy comfort of a saved Good Friday supper, the rich smoky fragrance of coffee thickening in a carafe on the back burner. But I smelled nothing. Glad everybody was out and hoping for a few moments’ privacy in my room, I walked through the kitchen, but didn’t quite make it to the door into the dining room.

  “Where do you think you’re going now?”

  I jumped at the voice and turned. Sitting at the table in rigid and stony stillness was my father. I’d walked right past him.

  “I’m going upstairs,” I answered. “To study.”

  He stood up. He was almost sixty and the years of construction work had taken their toll on his knees. Sometimes his legs seemed bowed, but now they looked perfectly straight. His arms were locked at his sides, his fingers clenched into fists. My father’s anger was not the firecracker that exploded in me when I was angry. His anger was the slow burn, the smoldering ember, the fire thought extinguished until it rose again hot enough to ignite everything in its path.

  “Why,” he said with clenched-teeth control, “did you bring that boy to your mother’s holy play?”

  “What?”

  “I asked you a simple question, Angelo, and I expect an answer.”

  “Where is everybody, anyway?” I said nonchalantly, as if his question would disappear if I ignored it.

  He took a small step forward. The sound of his foot shuffling against the kitchen linoleum brought to mind the image of the chains of the prisoners shuffling beneath the courtroom of B. Sheldrake Tuppin. The image made me step back, away from my father.

  “I told that boy not to call here,” my father said. “I told him you’re a Catholic. You don’t do what boys like him do.”

  “Pa,” I said as calmly as I could, “I think you ought to mind your own business.”

  “Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” He slammed his meaty hand, his workman’s callused fist, hard on the kitchen table. China rattled. A little cup jumped out of its tiny saucer, rolled to the edge of the table and crashed to the floor, spewing a red-brown liquid the color of dried blood.

  “Leave me alone, Pa. I’m tired. Church is God’s house. Anybody can go there. As for Gleason, he’s my partner at school. We’re working on something together. We have to—”

  “You use school as an excuse to run around with a boy like that?” He shook his head as if he was unable to comprehend my ignorance. “What would your uncle think if he knew where you go and what you do instead of going to the library and the classes he spends so much money on? Why does a lawyer need to go see somebody like Spardini? Or to the morgue? Or those other places you go?”

  “How do you know where I go and what I do?” I screamed at him. “And who do you think you are, accusing me? I go where I have to go and I do what I have to do. If that’s a problem for you,” I railed, “I’ll go live someplace else. Then you won’t have to worry about who my friends are.”

  “You do that, you ungrateful—”

  “And you can tell your snitches to lay off, too,” I threw at him.

  He turned his face away as if the unfamiliar word was a special kind of insult to him.

  “Yeah, Pa. Snitch. Dirty little stool pigeon. Who told you where I was? Who have you got watching me? I’m a man. I’m not your little boy anymore. I’m not anyone’s little boy.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, a little calmer. “Nobody’s watching you. But I am warning you, you stick to school. You stop sneaking around in that boy’s fancy car and bringing him to church for everybody to see. You’re a man, all right, Angelo. You better remember that and start acting like one.”

  My fury, that quickly boiling stew of perceived injustice, was now as intense against my father as it often was against Gleason. Not even conversation with Michele when he finally came home and told me that it was my
mother who had told my father that I was, as she put it, “helping that sad boy, Gleason” could stem it. Or study, for which I could not concentrate. Not sleep, which adamantly refused to come.

  In the middle of the night I silently descended the stairs, went to the closet in the foyer by the front door, found my father’s bottle of sweet Italian wine and drank until it and the night were gone.

  THE NEXT DAY I was so sick I could do nothing to get ready for New York except say yes and no to clothes my mother was selecting for my suitcase. Late in the afternoon I picked up the phone to call Gleason, but all that I had seen and heard the night before reeled out in my mind like an X-rated movie. I put down the phone.

  I HAVE NOT HAD many mystical experiences in my life, but I thought I was having one at Easter Mass the next day. The crucified Christ looked at me from the wall at the side of the altar and said clearly, “Put your hands in my wounds.”

  The voice terrified me utterly. I decided I had to give up my friendship with Gleason. I decided I had to come clean about the stolen evidence, the secret meeting with the pathologist at Gleason’s house.

  I could think of only one reason Gleason would be so obsessed about that woman’s death, one reason he would bribe the pathologist, one reason he would steal evidence. I had to go to the police. And right now, too, because the next day I’d be on a plane headed for New York City.

  It was not easy to get to the police on Easter Sunday. I had to listen to the entire lengthy Mass, eat the huge breakfast, help my relatives stage the Easter egg hunt for the extended family’s dozens of small children, eat the huge dinner and then wait until the entire household had nodded off for a late-afternoon nap before I could get away without my absence again being noted and commented upon.

  I also had to choose a police station outside our neighborhood, since all the local officers knew the families on the street by name. When I finally found myself before an officer at police headquarters on Jarvis Street, who agreed to listen to me, I was suddenly sorry I’d wasted my time and my energy. Not only was he sly, contemptuous and unhelpful, but for some unaccountable reason, telling him what I knew, or was convinced I knew, suddenly seemed like too big, too overwhelming a betrayal of Gleason, and I could hardly force myself to give the details necessary to form the basis for an investigation, let alone a case.

  As I struggled, the officer grew increasingly impatient. A phone rang in the next room. “I gotta do everything around here today,” he complained, and left me alone.

  I drew in a deep breath and stood to stretch muscles cramped with anxiety. When I went to sit back down, I noticed the officer had left open on his desk a file he’d pulled at the very beginning of our interview. I glanced down at it and could see this file seemed to be a thorough dossier on the murdered woman. I read a description of the body, just as Gleason and I had seen it. There was an autopsy report, but all I could catch on that were the handwritten words in the space labeled “Conclusion.” The words were “to come.”

  I dared not move any papers, though I could not see the name on the report or on the file tab. But on one of the papers, I could see that the space labeled “address” was filled in. I craned my neck to see what was written there. If the form referred to the deceased, I would have expected the address to be some street in a disreputable part of town.

  It wasn’t. The address in the file was one of the best addresses in town, Whitney Square.

  I WALKED HOME, despite the distance, despite the unseasonably cold mid-April day. The sun, if it shone at all, seemed incapable of delivering any warmth.

  What had Gleason Adams done? I took my mind back one more time to what we had seen and heard at the morgue. Everything hinged on the moment I’d stood on the threshold of autopsy lab C, the moment Gleason had hesitated and I had given him a little push to get him to enter that room. What had been on his face in that instant? Guilt? The guilt of a man who’d been caught?

  I remembered the shifting shadows in the little parlor at the foot of the stairs leading up to Levi Rosen’s office, the figures in the dim light at the end of the corridor. Had there been an air of conspiracy in that fetid place?

  And what was I to make of Gleason’s suspicious behavior since? True, he had the excuse of family difficulties, but could that explain his erratic appearances and disappearances at school? His peculiar emotional displays?

  And what could possibly explain our strange pilgrimage to the places we had visited on Good Friday, the holiest day of the year?

  I had not seen anything connected to Gleason but his address on that police form. Yet it had led me to the inescapable conclusion that the police were interested in him. Did they know he was secreting evidence in a homicide investigation? Well, I knew, and the time to do something about it had come.

  I decided to give up on any story I wanted to tell and started home. Halfway there, exhausted, I stopped and sat for a few minutes in a park. Though it was cold, the grass was green and daffodils in full bloom nodded in the cool air. I wondered how they survived, considering that temperatures still dipped below freezing at night. Sometimes, I reflected, things that appeared to be delicate were, in reality, stronger than supposed.

  How strong was Gleason Adams? More to the point, how strong was I? If I suspected the police were after my friend, was it my moral duty to warn him? My legal duty to turn him in?

  As I sat there, the weight of my decision to become a lawyer felt crushing. Was it always going to be like this, facing conflicting courses of action, knowing that to obtain justice for one person meant the ruination of another? Knowing that in the same world in which innocent families ate Easter dinner in homes surrounded by budding daffodils, other families hid the murderous deed of one of their members? For, it suddenly occurred to me, Gleason’s rich father had the connections, the resources, to do whatever was necessary to protect his son from the consequences of any behavior he might wish to engage in.

  I wished I could talk to someone, but who? Not Gleason himself, surely. Not Kavin. I couldn’t admit to the professor that I’d failed to alert the authorities about the stolen evidence. Not Michele or my father or Uncle Salvatore. What about Sheldrake Tuppin? I pictured myself approaching the great man, laying out with precision all that I knew. I could tell him how I’d followed the trail of the rings to the pawnshop on Church and the questionable haunts of the city’s underbelly. I could explain how I’d searched for, yet failed to find the autopsy report . . .

  No. No. I couldn’t talk to Tuppin. Impossible in every way.

  Then it occurred to me to find Chief Coroner Rosen. I was not so far from the neighborhood in which he lived, a section of the city that rivaled Rosedale and Whitney Square in elegance, but which, unlike Gleason’s neighborhood, housed the families of highly successful Jews. It was not Easter Sunday to them. I would be interrupting nothing special by showing up at Rosen’s house.

  The idiocy of this idea did not fully strike me until I’d managed to find the address and was standing on Rosen’s veranda. Through his front window, I could see him and his family sitting down to dinner. I also saw that a maid had noticed me and was coming toward the door. I turned and fled, ashamed to find myself in such a distraught state.

  I walked for another hour and was almost home before I realized what I had to do.

  The café at the corner of Clinton and College was crowded with men who had escaped from family Easter festivities. I glanced over the throng and, relieved to see that my father was not among them, I sat down at a small table near the window, ordered a double espresso and, borrowing a piece of paper and an envelope from the barrista, began to write.

  I put it all down. Everything I had seen. Everything I had heard. Where I’d been and when. What I had concluded and why. When I finished, I put my name and address at the bottom. On the way back home, just up the street, I dropped the letter in the mailbox.

  By the time it reached Levi Rosen, I would be in New York City, six hundred miles away.

  Chapter 13


  The entire 1964–65 Flushing Meadow New York City World’s Fair was insufficient to take my mind off the troubles I’d left behind in Toronto. It was crowded, hot, costly and gimmicky, handily summed up by the fake word that for years to come would instantly call it to the mind of anyone who had been there: Futurama. The fair, like so many other predictors of things to come, had been right about some things—that someday every home would have a computer—and dead wrong about others—that men would live in leisure and harmony with other men. The fair had nothing to do with my future, but other things I saw on the trip to New York City changed that future forever.

  “Have some more. Don’t be shy. There’s plenty more where these came from.” Uncle Tony, aka Zi Antonio, my mother’s “little American brother,” speared an extra T-bone steak, held it up and glanced around the picnic table. “No takers?” He shook his head in amazement, as if each one of us hadn’t already consumed a whole steak still sizzling from the barbecue set up on the rear patio of his ranch house in Massapequa Park, Long Island. I was a city boy, unused to the lack of sidewalks and amazed by the house lots that seemed to cover a Toronto block. Michele and I were treated like honored quests. Uncle Tony worked for the City of New York as a sanitation supervisor. Around here, in New York State, in much of New England, there were dozens of municipalities, but there was only one city and that was Manhattan Island. This uncle called himself “your average Joe Blow,” but his house had nearly as much space inside as Uncle Salvatore’s and considerably more outside. On this spring evening, far warmer than spring in Toronto, we could hear the cheery loud voices of my uncle’s fellow Americans as they entertained in their yards on the other side of Uncle Tony’s tall fence.