Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  “But what about Gleason?” I asked in confused alarm. “Where is he?”

  “He couldn’t care less about this place. He already moved out.”

  “He moved?” Now I felt that ancient fury begin to rise from the back of my brain and settle in my stomach. It was the old joke. I took a vacation and when I came back, my “friend” had moved without telling me. Once more, I was about to decide to give up my association with Gleason and his whole family forever, had not the conversation with the maid taken a completely unexpected turn.

  “Gleason came with some other guys in a couple of cars and they took some pieces of his furniture, some books, all his clothes. He said he was moving to an apartment downtown and that he’d send his father the address. Then he went and I didn’t see him since. That was about a week ago, maybe the day after Easter or the day before, I can’t remember. To tell the truth, this whole family has acted weird for a long time, since just after I came here a year ago.” She took another slug of Coke. “You see, there was this robbery.”

  “In this house?” I asked in surprise. Surely there were locks on every sparkling window and a burglar alarm hooked into the local police station.

  “Yeah. Like in the middle of the night and everything. Except the police never caught the burglar or even figured out how he got in. And only a few things were stolen, too. Gleason’s mother’s room was messed up a little, but nothing was missing. Everything that got stolen was out of Gleason’s father’s room. And it was all jewelry. But the thing that really drove Mr. Adams off the deep end was that whoever the thief was, he stole something from right by Mr. Adams’s face, from the table next to his pillow. Mr. Adams said the thief stole the piece of jewelry he cared most about in the whole world.”

  “What was it?” I asked. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath. I exhaled.

  The cute little maid smiled sadly. “It was a really mean thing to steal,” she said, shaking her head again. “That lousy burglar took something Mr. Adams wore every day for thirty-five years.”

  “His wedding ring,” I said softly.

  “Yeah,” she repeated. “His wedding ring.”

  I WENT STRAIGHT from Whitney Square back to the Continental bar, back to the prossies, the other women, the odor. From the sublime to the ridiculous. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and I figured the place would be pretty empty. By the time my eyes adjusted to the dark, I’d found the burly waiter/bouncer I’d encountered the last time. “I have to talk to you right away,” I said, trying to sound tough and almost succeeding.

  More used to peering into the semidarkness than I, he studied my face. A look of recognition crossed his features and I assumed that he remembered me.

  He had the archetypical mug’s face, the nose crooked from too many fights, the jaw hard and perpetually clenched, the eyes just deep enough to hide the fact that they were shifty. “I seen you in here before, didn’t I?” Before I could answer, he added, “You’re Sal Portalese’s boy, ain’t you? Not his son. One of his nephews.”

  The question startled me and I blurted, “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  A slow smile split the face of the man. “You better not let him catch you down here with the ladies—or with the fancy boys, either. Sal, he don’t like those kinda people.”

  I thought about the society dolls I’d seen in the back room. “Look,” I said, “I need to know if my friend has been in here again. The guy I came with a couple of weeks ago?”

  The man smirked, opened his beefy lips as if to offer an opinion about something, but changed his mind. “I ain’t seen that kid since the time I seen him with you, but that don’t mean he ain’t been around.”

  “Alone?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” he answered. “How is Sal these days, anyway? You see much of him?”

  I had the feeling that if I answered his question correctly, I had a chance of getting some answers to my own questions. “I’m on my way over there right now,” I offered.

  The man made a kind of growling noise, which I took to be laughter. “You’re a big boy so you should know without my tellin’ you that your little friend is a beard.”

  “A beard?”

  “Yeah. A guy that escorts ladies who maybe would rather be with other ladies.” He shrugged. “And if he needs a skirt for some fancy do, he’s got a skirt. That’s how it works.”

  “Did you ever see Gleason—my friend, I mean—in here with a woman? Maybe with a, uh, skirt?”

  The thug looked at me like I was from another planet, which in a way I was.

  “Sonny,” he said, “I don’t know what you’re after, but whatever it is, you ain’t gonna find it here. You wanna know about your pal, you go to Letros.” He smiled widely. “Better stand with your back against the wall when you get there,” he added.

  I ignored his vulgar comment. “Just tell me if you ever saw Gleason with a woman, somebody he was with more than once—on a regular basis, that is.” I could have added, “My uncle wants to know,” but I wasn’t about to lie again, especially about Uncle Salvatore.

  “Nah, I ain’t never seen that kid with a broad.” He hesitated. “But,” he said, “I heard he hangs out with some guy now and then.”

  “A guy? What does this guy look like?”

  From somewhere on his person, the bouncer pulled out a twin to the filthy rag he’d had the other day and swiped the table between us in the same contemptuous way he had before. “He looks like a fag,” he said. “What do you think he looks like?”

  THE SAME SMARMY doorman I’d seen before stood outside Letros, and when he recognized me, he again had that tables-turned look of a man who was once bullied, now bully. “Hi, honey,” he oozed. “All alone tonight? Maybe your pretty friend prefers somebody who’s got enough nerve to actually come in.”

  He giggled lasciviously, obviously a person who could make a double entendre out of anything. I would have hit him, but I didn’t want to get grease on my hand.

  Reluctant as I was to enter the homosexual hangout, my drive to find Gleason grew stronger at every obstacle. The impulse that had sent me to the police on Easter Sunday, the determination that had made me seek out Levi Rosen—both were back in full force. It was now perfectly clear to me that Gleason had used me as a pawn. He had lured me to the morgue that night. He had lied about having an appointment. That had been a ploy to get me there, to use me to cover up that he was not at the morgue for a law school project. Gleason must have known in advance that the rings were on that woman’s body. He had needed me to bolster his presence there, to further his sole objective, which I now saw more clearly than ever. Far from being a moment’s careless impulse, a prank, taking those rings had been Gleason’s sole purpose that night. He had taken them to save himself—at the expense of jeopardizing me. What better way to hide his deed than to present the case as a study to the Law Faculty? Such a clever way to divert suspicion from himself was exactly the sort of thing Gleason would cook up. And he was arrogant enough to pull it off, too, dragging me down with him. I didn’t know what Gleason had really done to that poor woman or why, but despite Rosen’s anger and warning, I was not going to let this matter drop. I was not going to let Gleason Adams get away with murder. I was going to find him and hold him to account.

  “Let me by,” I said to the doorman, who stood squarely in my path, grinning. He refused to move; I felt an energizing jolt of dangerous anger. “Get the hell out of my way.”

  “You need a password, doll,” he taunted. “I can’t let just anybody in here.”

  “I’ll give you a password,” swinging at his smirking face and surprising myself. The good little Catholic boy?

  But he was faster than I was. He grabbed my wrist, pulling it up between us, with such a hard grip I thought he would twist my hand off. His eyes were steely now and they held mine in the age-old challenge. Whoever dropped his gaze first, lost.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the rules had changed. “People like you aren’t in charge anymore,” my enemy hissed. “
You remember that, sister.” He dropped my wrist, got out of my way.

  Entering from the bright street, I had to stand still for a few moments for my eyes to adjust. I also had to calm down and slow down. My objective was clear. I had to find Gleason. Exactly what I would, or could, do with him when I did find him was far less clear. I forced myself to head further inside.

  Maybe it was the early hour, but except for the fact that everyone in the bar was male, a not unusual situation for most bars in Toronto in 1965, I didn’t see a thing in Letros I wouldn’t have seen anywhere else. It had decent decor, reasonable bar service. I didn’t even feel the need, as the bouncer had suggested, to keep my back to the wall.

  By the time I was twenty-three, I had enough experience—I should say years of experience—of the geography and sociology of the bar. In this bar, as in every bar, at least one person was going to be there for the specific purpose of spilling his guts to some stranger for the price of a drink. And at least one person would be lonely enough or eager enough to probe the mundane secrets of the world that he would spring for that drink. The latter person today was me. The former was a guy in short sleeves and muscular biceps seated alone at the far end of the bar. I took a breath, walked over and asked if I could join him.

  I was nervous, but only at first. I asked him if he came to this bar often and he said he did. He told me his first name. I told him mine. We talked about work. I was a contractor. He was an insurance salesman. Blah. Blah. Blah. It took another drink before he was willing to tell me all about the Letros regulars, whom I said I’d never met because I was from out of town. It took one more drink before I got him to identify Gleason Adams as an habitué of the place.

  “He was here a week or so ago,” my new friend began. “I’d seen him a couple of times before. He came in with this ring and asked around to see if anybody knew who it belonged to. I thought that was very strange.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “For two reasons. First, a number of men have rings like that. Even the inscription isn’t unique. That poem by the monk, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “The other reason I thought it was strange was the way he asked. He acted like he was just going through the motions. It seemed like a put-on. As if he were trying to impress somebody or trying to prove something.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “As though he was establishing some sort of alibi?” I asked.

  The insurance man looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I answered, “not an alibi exactly. I mean, could he have been just pretending he didn’t know whose ring it was?”

  “Why would he want to do that?”

  “I’m not sure.” I recalled how distraught Gleason had been when he came out of Letros. “Did you see him when he left that day?” I asked.

  The insurance man wrinkled his handsome brow. “I think maybe he got in an argument right before he left. Maybe somebody called his bluff.”

  “Called his bluff?”

  “Yeah. I heard somebody tell him to grow up and face the facts. After that he got mad and stormed out.”

  If this was a clue to what was going on with Gleason, it wasn’t much help. He got told to grow up and face the facts about once a day, on average.

  I decided I’d got about as much information here as I was going to get. I thanked my new friend and got up to leave. As I turned to walk away, he put his hand on my thigh. “You have a phone number?” he asked.

  I smiled to hide my nervousness and stuck my hand in my pocket to buy time to figure out how to get away gracefully. “I’m staying with a friend. I got his number here someplace.” My fingers closed on a rumpled piece of paper. I pulled it out and studied it. “Here it is,” I said. I reached for a cocktail napkin and carefully copied a number from the list onto it.

  When I was a block away, my cowardly dishonesty hit me and I felt ashamed. But then, I thought, maybe the insurance salesman and Spardini the undertaker would dig each other. Stranger things had happened.

  “HE’S IN A rooming house on Parliament Street. He doesn’t drink at all, not a drop. And now he’s got to live in a neighborhood full of drunks.”

  “Alcoholics, Michele. You yourself told me never to use the word drunk.”

  “Yeah, man. Right on.”

  We sat at the kitchen table with huge slabs of beef in front of us. For about a month after Easter, my mother worked hard to compensate for all the meatless Lenten meals recently served. I, however, was not the least bit hungry. I had hit a dead end with Gleason and now I was about to hit a dead end with Billy Johnson, too. I could feel it coming

  “Can you give me the address, Michele?”

  My brother cut a hunk off the steak on his plate, speared the piece with his fork, lifted it toward his face, but stopped before the food met his lips. He pulled the fork back and stared at it intensely. “I just thought of something, Gelo,” he said.

  I leaned toward him. “What? Something about Billy Johnson?”

  Michele didn’t seem to hear me. As if hypnotized, he just kept his eyes glued to that fork.

  “Michele?”

  “Gelo,” he said, “I’ve just had an epiphany. Do you realize that animals are our brothers?”

  “For God’s sake, Michele! I’m your brother. And I’ve got a problem. If I don’t interview Billy again, Tuppin’s going to refuse me for sure. Then I end up with no summer placement. I would have to spend a whole extra year in the law program. It’s the tenth of May. There’s no time to lose.”

  “I’m going to be a vegetarian,” was Michele’s reply. “From this hour, I’m never going to eat an animal again.”

  “Michele, you weirdo! Nobody is vegetarian except Buddhist monks and nonni without teeth! Forget this latest dumb craze! Tell me how I can find Billy.”

  “Gelo,” Michele said, finally putting down his fork, “I can ask Billy, but I don’t think he wants to go any further on this draft-resistance bag.”

  “What?”

  “He’s grateful that you met him and were willing to help him, but he’s starting to think he should just go.”

  “To Vietnam?” I asked in shock.

  “Look, Gelo, you have to respect everybody’s right to do their own thing, even if it’s different from your own thing. Dig?”

  “Yeah, Michele,” I answered. “I dig, all right. I dig my grave with my own stupidity. I trusted you and I trusted Gleason Adams. Now I’ve got no chance of interning with Tuppin.” And no chance of bringing a killer to justice. But I didn’t tell the vegetarian that.

  PREDICTABLY, UNCLE SALVATORE wanted a report about our trip to New York. Remarkably, he asked me out to lunch, and to the one place in town I would most happily have chosen had my preference been taken into consideration, which it most assuredly had not.

  I had never been in Osgoode Hall before and the simple majesty of the place took my breath away. From the outside, the golden-hued stone building looked like an eighteenth-century English manor house. A wide drive of gray, hand-hewn paving stones separated the front of the building from a formal garden enclosed by a tall wrought-iron fence. Its intricately curved designs and cleverly engineered gates were originally intended to keep cows off the property of the Law Society of Upper Canada—or Yankees, depending on who told you the story. A light breeze blew pink petals from a row of flowering fruit trees. The petals drifted like rosy snow over banks of white tulips and purple hyacinths.

  Inside were multicolored Byzantine-style mosaic floors, white marble balustrades, a double lobby two stories high topped by a square, stained-glass dome, portraits of chief justices throughout the decades of the administration of justice in the courts of Ontario, and also the only known portrait of Queen Victoria that showed her malformed left arm.

  “There you are!” I heard the voice echo in the spacious lobby and spun around to see from which direction it came. When my eye caught him just inside the twenty-foot mahogany front door with its etched-glass win
dows, I noted that Uncle Salvatore seemed at home in this elegant old Ontario setting. Walking toward me, he didn’t rush. He’d long ago told me that important men never hurry and had reminded me many times since. But there was a veiled urgency to his manner, as if he must not and would not keep some other important man waiting, a man, it could only be, who was even more important than he.

  Naturally his attitude made me extremely nervous. Uncle Salvatore had a way of interfering in my life at just those moments I teetered on the verge of disaster. I offered a silent prayer that he wouldn’t ask me about my law project, which, now that Billy was reluctant and Gleason fugitive, was not exactly about to win an award for academic excellence.

  A court officer in official dress, including a knee-length black jacket with tails and white gloves, escorted us along a red-carpeted hallway and into a mirrored elevator that rose and deposited us immediately outside of a room that I had previously known only as a legend: the gilded Barristers’ Dining Room.

  “I thought only members of the bar could eat here,” I whispered to my uncle.

  He ignored the comment. “In a minute,” he said, “you are going to meet a good friend of mine, a person who has reaped the full rewards of being a man of the law. I want you to pay attention, Angelo. I want you to listen to every word he says. You will lose if you don’t.”

  Throughout my life, Uncle Salvatore had introduced me to my betters with just such a warning. In one ear. Out the other.

  I nodded like a boy and followed as a uniformed waitress led us across the room. Hushed voices, the rustle of fine linen, the almost silent tread of feet on the smooth, royal blue carpet, the ring of crystal, the clink of silver against porcelain—these all seemed accompaniment to the melodious strains of a live trio softly playing in front of white silk curtains in a corner of the room.

  I was so taken by the ambience that I failed to see our host until I was too close to adjust my facial expression and hide my shock when I realized who he was.