Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  IT WAS NOTHING more than an address in a part of town I didn’t know. It was nearing 10 p.m. I was exhausted from having written the exam and I faced hours of study before I’d be ready for another exam in the morning. The last thing I needed was another confrontation with Gleason, one in which he confessed that his carelessness had resulted in an action capable of ruining his life.

  I went to the address anyway. The neighborhood, a little north of the central core, was not a bad one, not at all. It was the sort of neighborhood the destroyers of not-real Bleecker Street probably had in mind, a series of white, high-rise apartment towers set amid open green spaces vibrant with the increasing lushness of spring, not now visible to the eye, but fragrant in the night’s light wind. Outside the tower that matched the address Dr. Slater had given me, a fountain gurgled and splashed. Well-dressed couples lounged beside late-model cars parked in the drive that circled in front of the building’s impressive entrance, all glass and curved concrete.

  Just inside the doors stood a console of black marble and atop it was a chart listing all the tenants’ names and their apartment numbers. Gleason’s name was not there, but Neil Dennison’s was. At the sight of the name, I almost lost my nerve. No matter how disillusioned I might be about Gleason and his secret life, I still wanted nothing to mar my name, nothing to taint my chance to become more than the lawyerly drudge I was well on the way to being. Despite my current complications, my ambitions were pristine. I dreamed of the day I, too, could invite influential people to Osgoode Hall for lunch.

  So I hesitated before I pressed the button beside Neil Dennison’s name, as if the button itself could somehow contaminate me.

  Which did not matter at all. Because when I did press the button, no one answered.

  No one answered the next morning, either, when, at the end of a sleepless night, I’d borrowed the truck before my father went to work and driven to Dennison’s building.

  After I’d written the day’s exam, my thoughts returned to Dr. Slater. I’d seen him at work, so I felt sure he was legitimate. Nonetheless, as I reconstructed what he told me and matched it against what I remembered about our trip to the morgue, I decided certain events there did not lend themselves to logic. Once more, my insane curiosity bumped against my cautious nature. I had to find out how a body could be reclaimed by relatives in the middle of an autopsy. And if Slater—and presumably Rosen, too—had known the next of kin were in the building, how could they allow that autopsy to begin in the first place?

  I remembered, too, that when I’d visited the morgue alone that subsequent afternoon, I had not found any coroner’s report on the body we’d seen.

  I decided to visit the morgue again, but I phoned first and asked if Dr. Rosen was in. I had no intention of speaking with him. I still felt ill when I remembered how he had yelled at me. No, I phoned to see if he was out and the coast was clear. He was. It was.

  The receptionist at the morgue, the same pretty girl who’d helped me before, recalled me, and she proved to be even friendlier than the first time. She seemed exceptionally chirpy and cheerful and, suspecting she might be happy to see me, a young man with a future, again, I decided to ask her out before I left her that day.

  “I need more information about standard procedure here,” I said when we’d completed smiling preliminaries.

  “Sure,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  I leaned on the counter, gazing down on her where she sat at her very tidy desk at the front of which, with its felt back toward me, stood a picture frame.

  “If next of kin arrive here to pick up a body and the autopsy doesn’t get completed, would there be a report filed the same as when the autopsy is complete?” I asked.

  “Normally,” she answered, “no body is ever released before an autopsy is complete.” She seemed lost in thought for a moment. “Unless . . .”

  She rose, approached the counter and nodded for me to step aside so that she could open the counter section that allowed her to exit. She crossed to the filing cabinet I’d checked the last time I was there. I watched as she went to the same drawer, pulled it open and flipped through files until she came to the document she was seeking.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “we’re advised that a body has been re-venued after an autopsy has begun. Under those circumstances, we file a ‘to-come’ instead of a report, meaning the autopsy results will be forwarded from the new jurisdiction.” She held up a typed white index card as though it were some sort of trophy. “This might be the case you were here about before,” she said, handing me the card. “That body was re-venued, released on the sworn assurance of the next of kin that an autopsy would be performed as soon as the body reached its destination.”

  “You mean whoever picked up this body intended to take it out of Toronto?” I asked, studying the card. I recognized the address of the person who had brought in the body as that of Neil Dennison, the disgraced prosecutor, but I was not prepared for the address of the people who had taken the body away. Once again I found myself staring at Gleason’s address on Whitney Square. Once more I was filled with the painful ambiguity of my feelings. Pity for the man who was my sometime friend warred with rage for someone who had manipulated me, with rage in the ascendant. Had he been involved in this corpse-moving from the start, even before that night in the morgue? Had he known on that night who the murdered woman was? And that his parents were involved? Clearly he knew now.

  The girl took the card from my hand. As she did so, I noticed that on her left hand, a brand-new engagement ring sparkled. So much for her eagerness to go out with a young man with a future. This was not turning out to be my good-luck week.

  She studied the card. “It’s a code L-7,” she said cryptically. Then, seeing my puzzlement, she explained, “They didn’t just sign an affidavit to take the body out of the jurisdiction. They signed an affidavit to take it right out of the country.”

  I thanked the girl, disappointed that I would never get to know her better, but staggered that I’d been struck such a blow. The pieces of the puzzle of the body in the morgue were falling into place. I didn’t need to see Spardini the undertaker again, fortunately, to be able to picture that “mistaken” entry on the Board of Health manifest. Gleason’s parents had not returned to Canada with a body. They had left Canada with a body. Why? Because they were in a perfect position to cover for their son, Gleason Adams, a murderer. Not only were they powerful people who could influence the chief coroner to release the body of the victim, they also had the perfect cover: the excuse of having to bury the supposedly just-discovered body of the son who had died years before. Gleason had killed and his parents had saved him by covering it up. Perhaps his so-called friends had helped, too.

  I needed time to think. I walked up Church Street past the shops of the pawnbrokers. Of course Gleason would steal those two rings on the body. Hadn’t he already stolen his father’s wedding ring to make the rings for himself and Neil Dennison? What had the two of them done to that poor, pathetic woman? And why? Was she blackmailing the two lovers?

  The more I thought about it, the more I knew I really, totally despised Gleason Adams. Everything between us had been bogus from the start: he had used me in the “project” for Kavin, involved me in the theft of the rings as part of that project, dragged me to homosexual haunts like the Continental and Letros. What fun he must have had with his buddies inside Letros as he joked about the naive fool he’d left standing outside, the fellow who was lending him credibility.

  I also felt profound contempt for his rich parents. Even if he had the resources, my father would never have aided and abetted a homicide in an effort to save my sorry hide.

  I worked my theory over and over in my mind just the way I would someday work on my jury presentations as a criminal defense lawyer. I tried to construct a scenario that fit all the facts. I thought about the shabby clothing of the deceased, the absence of any jewelry except for the concealed rings. Obviously the woman had obtained the rings u
nder questionable circumstances, then refused to return them to Gleason. Blackmail or not, the result from Gleason’s point of view was the same. Having those rings fall into the wrong hands meant ruination.

  Gleason could have read the same books I’d read. He could easily know as much about homicide that looked like suicide as I did. And he would have delighted in the double puzzle. A homicide that looks like a suicide that looks like a homicide. He could easily have strangled the woman with the cord, catching her unawares from behind. Then he could have rigged up the suicide ruse.

  I walked more rapidly, hardly realizing that I was storming toward Yonge Street, toward the subway that could take me to Neil Dennison’s apartment one last time.

  Then, I thought, Dennison discovers what Gleason has done. He’s got nothing to lose since his career is already over, but he wants to protect his lover. Between them, they come up with a plan. First Gleason goes to Whitney Square and talks to his father. Then he comes to me and tells me we have an appointment at the morgue. Dennison brings in the body. It’s brilliant. What killer would deliberately show up at the morgue just as the body of his victim is being brought in? In the meantime, old man Adams does whatever it takes. He pulls strings and gets the body out of there before anyone can examine it properly and ask the right questions. Slater, I thought, Slater, who is the only honest man in the whole scenario, wants to put right anything that, in his limited capacity, he can. He comes to me.

  I was truly boiling over now. Enraged for the sake of the unknown deceased. Enraged at having been duped. Enraged at the position Dr. Slater had been put in. But when I realized the thing that enraged me most, I was shocked enough to stop momentarily in my headlong rush to the subway. I was enraged that Justice, that mysterious mistress to whom I was about to pledge myself, had been prostituted by evil men. It was in her cause that I flew down the subway stairs and grabbed the northbound train to Neil Dennison’s apartment.

  If you love me, the blindfolded goddess whispered, leave me by dying.

  Chapter 16

  I found them as I had feared: in each other’s arms.

  I didn’t bother trying to ring the apartment. I followed one of the tenants in the front door and found the apartment shown on Slater’s note. I knocked but nobody answered. I tried the door. It wasn’t locked.

  The man who had to be Neil Dennison was naked. Limp, sick, emaciated, as though he hadn’t eaten properly in months, he still projected the aura of a male model. Gleason, incongruously dressed in a white shirt open at the neck and the wrinkled trousers of one of his fine suits, sat on a couch with his arms around Neil and the man’s head on his shoulder. This was one of those charged moments in which one notices every detail, and the detail I noticed first was that the cording on the well-made couch was exactly the same as the cord around the dead woman’s neck.

  When Gleason’s eyes fell on me, his face filled with such relief that I simultaneously felt both my own power and a fearful sense of the responsibility that had suddenly been thrust upon me. I did not know it then, but I would come to experience that expression on the faces of clients a thousand times as the years went by, at first on the faces of the ordinary people of my parents’ community when I began my practice, then, as I became defense counsel, on increasingly high-profile defendants. Most often, I would come to see that expression of hopeful gratitude on the face of a man sitting in custody. I feared, of course, that Gleason would soon be in jail. For now, he was smiling, a weak and thankful grin. I hesitated. What is more frightening than to be called upon to be a savior? What calling is more impossible to resist?

  “Ellis,” he said, “thank God. Thank God you’re here.”

  Gingerly, I moved toward the couch. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked, nodding at Neil.

  With a tenderness I could never have imagined him possessing, Gleason slid Neil’s body away from his own, stretched the thin legs out on the couch and, reaching down, picked up a blanket from the floor and carefully covered his friend.

  I just stood there. I hardly knew where to begin. “Why did you send for me, Gleason? What can you possibly expect me to do to help you?”

  “For now,” he said, “I think I just need you to call an ambulance.”

  “Tell me what’s wrong with him. They won’t send an ambulance unless they know.”

  Gleason glanced at the man, who lay motionless on the couch, eyes closed. “He’s sick because he stopped eating weeks ago. He took pills, too. I had to leave, just to get some juice, which is all he’ll drink, and somehow he got to the pills. I thought they were all gone, but he must have had some hidden. I don’t . . .” He stopped, as if he’d forgotten the question he’d set out to answer. I had to get him to focus, because I didn’t need to call only the ambulance, I needed to call the police.

  “Gleason,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder, “you have to listen to me. I know what you did and I can help you.”

  His desperate eyes searched my face. “What?” he said, seeming genuinely puzzled, “What do I have to listen to? What are you talking about?”

  I gave his shoulder a gentle push and he sank into a nearby chair. I crouched down, the way you do when you speak to a child. “I know everything, Gleason. I know about the body at the morgue.” He flinched but I continued. “Neil here brought in the body. I know your parents came and took that body away—out of the country.”

  Gleason nodded. He glanced over at Neil, who seemed to be peacefully asleep.

  “Gleason,” I said, drawing his attention back to me, “I have to turn you in.”

  “Turn me in?” he gasped. “You’re going to tell Kavin about me? He’ll have me removed from the program. They’ll throw me out if they know. That’s exactly what Attorney General Garrey’s office did to Neil. Exactly.”

  He was clearly about to lose it. How else to explain that his first thought of the consequence of his murderous actions was being thrown out of law school? How could he imagine that a man who had perpetrated culpable homicide would ever be allowed to practice law?

  Again, I learned in an instant something that no law school could ever teach. I learned that a lawyer absorbs the panic of his client, retains it, keeps devastating emotion from overflowing and damaging the necessary interchanges. Calmly I said to Gleason, “If Neil is your lover, what happened to him may affect your defense, but for now—”

  “He isn’t my lover!” Gleason declared vehemently, his face incredulous. “I thought you said you knew . . .”

  “I know what you did and can speculate as to why you did it. We can work something out on a defense here, Gleason. We can—”

  “He isn’t my lover, you stupid fool!” He sprang up, sending me stumbling backward. It took me a minute to right myself and by the time I did, Gleason had already reached the telephone. Once more, I felt fury at this man who kept knocking me back on my heels, literally and figuratively. I grabbed the receiver, tore it out of his hand. Anything he said now, anything that was noted, even the observations of a complete stranger, of a telephone operator, for instance, could be used as evidence against him.

  “Gleason, wait,” I pleaded. “Before you talk to anybody, you have to agree not to admit that you killed that woman. Be rational. But you can tell me everything. I can help.” Would he ever, in this world or the next, do the same for me?

  He stood still, took a few deep breaths, for once seemed to be exposed, without his false cover of arrogance and superiority. Then, without looking at me, he said, “I didn’t kill anybody. And the dead person wasn’t a woman. It was my brother, Gerard.” His voice faltered. “Gerard of Gleason and Gerard.”

  THE AMBULANCE CAME. If the attendants were shocked by anything they saw in the apartment, they didn’t show it. Swiftly and efficiently, they bundled Neil into a blanket, strapped him to a stretcher and carted him away.

  Gleason’s Jaguar was in the parking garage in the underground. I took the keys and drove us down Yonge Street to St. Mike’s hospital. At first, Gleason was qui
et, but then he began to talk.

  “Neil was Gerard’s lover, not mine,” Gleason said. “It was Gerard who was with Neil when he was caught on Philosophers’ Walk. When Gerard found out that Neil was going to lose his job as assistant prosecutor as a result of the arrest, Gerard took both their rings and told Neil he’d found somebody else.”

  Gleason stopped talking and stared out the window as I drove. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see young women prancing down the sidewalk. I had to fight myself to keep watching the road instead of them. Skirts seemed to be getting shorter by the hour.

  “It was a lie,” Gleason resumed. “Poor Gerard, he never understood how things work. He really thought that if he broke up with Neil, Neil would get his job back. When that didn’t happen, he . . .” Gleason’s voice broke and he was silent again.

  “He what?”

  “He went to my father. It was the first time my father had seen Gerard since he’d disowned him four years earlier. My father told Gerard what he’d told him at that time. That he had only one son now. Me.”

  I glanced over at Gleason. His mouth was set in a grim line. I thought of all the times I’d wanted to wipe the smile off his face. “But Gerard came back,” Gleason said, choking on the words.

  “Dressed as a woman?” I was beginning to understand.

  “Yes. He thought that if my father refused to listen to reason, he might respond to blackmail. So he came back to Whitney Square. Gerard didn’t know that Neil was worried about him, was watching him. Neil followed Gerard to the house, and found Gerard and my father fighting. They were actually trading blows.” Gleason let out an ironic little laugh. “I’m not sure how Gerard learned to fight in high heels. Perhaps he’d done it before.”