Downfall

by Robert Rotenberg

  “Melissa probably put the confetti in the cuff of her pants as a keepsake. What do you think?”

  “I think,” Greene said, fishing the recorder and the notebooks out of his briefcase, “that Hodgson still wanted to love her, but that he knew it was impossible.”

  TUESDAY AFTERNOON

  46

  “Nance, have you heard?”

  “I’m still in shock.”

  “It’s horrible. Poor Britt. We told her, and she’s so upset. Karl is beside himself. We’re all shattered.”

  Parish nodded. She was squeezing her office phone so hard that her fingers hurt. She didn’t know what else to say. Lydia had called her, and Parish could hear from her voice that she was crying. It was unlike Lydia to be so emotional, but this was overwhelming.

  “Nance, the Three Amigas. We were happy. We loved each other.”

  “I know,” Parish said.

  “What happened to us?” Lydia’s voice was faint. Parish could hardly hear her.

  What had happened to them? They had been young, smart, with the whole world at their feet. Then it all fell apart. Melissa went crazy. Lydia married her friend’s husband, and they cut Melissa off from her daughter. That’s what happened, Parish thought. But she didn’t say it.

  “I still don’t know,” she said.

  Really, who was at fault? Karl? For years he’d tried to deal with Melissa’s mercurial behaviour. Could he really be blamed for eventually giving up? What about Lydia? Was she to blame for falling in love with him? And how they kept Melissa away from Britt—did they really have any choice, given how erratic she had become?

  “I need to see you,” Lydia said, her voice stronger now, sounding more the businesslike corporate lawyer Parish knew.

  In the background Parish heard a car horn honk. Lydia was talking to someone else: “No don’t go that way, turn here.”

  “Where are you?” Parish asked her.

  “In an Uber. I’ll be at your office in about five.”

  Speaking to the driver again, she said, “There, turn at the light.”

  Then back to talking to Parish: “Almost there. I need to see you.”

  This was classic Lydia. Emotional one moment, then cool and clinical the next. At the firm, lawyers used to call her “To-Do List Lydia” because she was one of those straightforward people who was always on the go, always eager to put a check mark beside the next task done.

  “I’ll unlock the front door,” Parish said.

  She hung up and opened Melissa’s book and reread the last page, titled “J’Accuse.” It was incredible, wasn’t it? Melissa had accused Lydia of murder.

  Her reasoning was typically complex and compelling. Was she crazy or was she brilliant?

  Melissa argued that with the proliferation of safe injection sites and methadone clinics for drug addicts, the government had created an underclass of people dependent on free drugs. They had no incentive to work or change their lifestyle thanks to all the Good Samaritan types who handed out free sleeping bags, socks, toothbrushes, and the like. Then there were the Law Society lawyers and drop-in centres that gave them free food, and the state shooting them up with free narcotics.

  Because the government was more than willing to quietly pay whatever it took to keep the masses stoned and out of sight, the drug companies had stumbled on a gold mine. A guaranteed market with a never-ending supply of return customers, with the taxpayer paying the bill.

  Melissa had dug deep into volumes and volumes of the corporate records Lydia’s company had filed with the regulators and had discovered that much of their profits were based on the production of methadone for heroin addicts and sterile equipment for safe injection sites. In the last few years, thanks to the burgeoning opioid crisis, they’d created a new income stream by selling the antidote drugs.

  The only threat to their unbroken circle of profit was an end to homelessness. Imagine if all these street people were well housed and healthy? And take a closer look at the two people who had been murdered. A doctor and a nurse. Professionals who were helping people get off the needle. They knew what was really going on with these corrupt drug companies and were a threat to expose them.

  Lydia was the murderer. She had to eliminate them.

  It sounded crazy, Parish thought. Like every bogus conspiracy theorist, Melissa had worked backwards, saying, “Follow the money.” Look at the person who benefits from a murder and assume they are responsible. It was the kind of motive-only thinking that leads to “Lyndon Johnson wanted to be president, so he had Jack Kennedy killed.”

  It couldn’t possibly be true, though, could it? A voice in the back of her head whispered to her that Melissa was killed at the golf club while Lydia was there at the party. Think. During the video about Britt, she could have slipped outside and…

  Parish closed the book, pulled out her bottom desk drawer, and slid it inside. DiPaulo had reminded her that alive or dead, Melissa was still her client. Her instructions to Parish from the grave were clear: prove that Lydia is the killer. And implicitly now, prove that Lydia killed me.

  Parish took her cell phone, pushed the record button, and popped it in her pocket.

  She walked down the hallway toward the front door, a cascade of emotions coursing through her. Anger, confusion, betrayal.

  She opened the front door and Lydia stood there. Her eyes blotchy.

  “Nance,” she said.

  “Lyd.”

  Lydia fell into her arms, heaving.

  47

  “This is my mom’s photo album. Here she is with my grandmother when they first came to Canada from Holland. This is her high school graduation picture. This was her favourite wedding picture, then there are a bunch with her and me when I was a baby.”

  Gina Frankel was seated in the window seat, in the ground-floor living room of her well-appointed home. Her two-month-old baby girl was bundled up in a tiny Hudson Bay blanket and tucked in beside her.

  “And this picture is when…”

  She stopped. Shook her head. Closed the album and caressed her baby’s cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is really hard for me.”

  “There’s no need to apologize,” Alison said. She signalled to Krevolin to put down his camera. She walked up to Frankel and knelt down to be at her eye level. “We can stop at any time.”

  “I want to do this,” Frankel said.

  “You’re brave.”

  “Am I?” She flipped back to the photo of her mother and her grandmother. “Or is it that now that I have a baby, I don’t want to end up like my mom?”

  Alison grasped her hand. When she’d realized that it would be impossible to get a homeless woman to go on camera, she came up with this idea of doing a story about the families who got left behind when one of their members ended up on the street. She wanted to show this unseen side of homelessness and the enduring pain it caused. Persaud loved the idea and gave her the go-ahead right away.

  Alison had called Frankel and explained what she wanted to do, and she agreed to go on camera on the condition that they not use her name or her mother’s. Alison and Krevolin had rushed over to her home and started filming.

  Frankel let go of Alison’s hand. “I’m ready. This is important for me. For my daughter.”

  Alison went back behind the camera. She’d placed herself there because she didn’t want to be on screen for the interview. Persaud had suggested that she be an unseen voice asking questions so that all the attention would be on Frankel.

  “We’re filming again,” she said. “Gina, are there many supports out there for your mother?”

  Frankel snapped the photo album closed. She looked right at the camera. Her whole demeanour changed. To Alison’s surprise, she was angry.

  “Supports? There’s a whole business built around so-called homeless people.” She spit out the word homeless as if it were a swear word. She was not trying to hide her bitterness. “People like my mother get everything for free. Social workers, drug
counsellors, doctors, therapists. All the food she can eat. She’s classified disabled now, so she gets a cheque at the beginning of every month.”

  Alison looked at Krevolin. She saw him zoom in on Frankel’s face. The dam had burst. Frankel was putting her pain and grief and frustration on full display.

  “Don’t forget the free narcotics,” she said, rubbing her hands across the top of the photo album. “How about the do-gooders who give out sleeping bags and hot coffee? Great, so my mom can live on the street without any responsibility. And who helps me out? Or my dad? Or my husband and our baby?”

  “What supports are there for you and your family?” Alison asked.

  Frankel shook her head. Clenched her jaw tight.

  “You must be kidding. They came to interview us. Once. I could see it in their eyes. We must be to blame for my mother abandoning us. I must have been a bad daughter, Daddy a bad husband.”

  “How does that make you feel?” Alison asked. It was an obvious question but she needed to stay in the interview.

  “Like no one really cares. There’s no money for real help for my mother or for us. No real family counselling. Why should we get any assistance? We just get up every morning, go to work, obey the law, pay our taxes.”

  Alison had learned that once you got the key parts of an interview, it was best to wrap things up. She asked a few more questions and finished.

  “One last request,” Alison said. “Could we take some close-ups of the pictures in the photo album?”

  Alison knew that Persaud would want them. They would make ideal cutaway shots.

  Frankel hesitated.

  “We’ll blur out the faces,” Alison said.

  Frankel picked up the photo album, and Alison thought she was going to agree. Instead she clutched it across her chest with both hands.

  “I can’t,” she said. Then, in a whisper so soft that Alison had to strain to hear her, “What if one day Mom does get better and comes home? I don’t want her to think that I betrayed her.”

  48

  Although Toronto lies on the shores of Lake Ontario, during the city’s postwar building boom, civic politicians did everything they could to ignore the waterfront and to keep it from view of the local populace. The most egregious example of this was the Gardiner Expressway, named after Fredrick C. Gardiner, a highway-obsessed 1950s alderman. “The Gardiner,” as it came to be known, is a mammoth raised highway that for decades has acted as a barrier to the lake.

  The nadir of this ignore-the-waterfront trend came in the late 1990s when fly-by-night builders threw up a pair of Stalin-era-like concrete condominiums on the narrow strip of land between the Gardiner and the lake. This happened in the era when there was a gradual awakening to the notion that cities did not have to be only about cars. At the same time, the 1950s highway started to crumble. Since then, seemingly endless debates have raged about the raised road: an eyesore to most downtowners, a transit lifeline for most suburbanites. Ideas were tossed around ranging from burying the damn thing to ripping it out to simply leaving it alone.

  In the end, a small part was torn down, most of it stayed, and massive development sprang up on both sides: glass towers and a regenerating waterfront with widened sidewalks, outdoor cafés, and extensive bike and jogging paths.

  The lakeshore was Angela Breaker’s favourite running route. Kennicott ran with her whenever he could. She preferred to head east, where the shoreline was underdeveloped and wilder, but today he’d persuaded her to run west, over to the Humber River. He wanted to take another look at the crime scenes.

  They hit the crowded path at the foot of Spadina Avenue, near the spot where starving Irish immigrants had once landed, and today small jets arrived at the Island Airport. They ran along, sailboats to one side, the city’s iconic fairgrounds, the CNE, on the other. As they headed farther, the path hugged the lake, and the air was fresh. Kennicott began to hit his stride.

  “It’s beautiful down here,” he said.

  Angela tapped him on the shoulder and pointed ahead to a modern-looking white pedestrian bridge. “There’s the Humber. The running path’s on the west side.”

  He nodded and kept going. Angela was fast, and he didn’t want to waste his breath. She’d taught him a new running technique, to lift his foot high over his knee and create a circle so that when his foot landed it was propelling him forward.

  “Most people run in a teardrop shape,” she’d explained to him. “It’s called heel strike. It slows you down and causes injury.”

  He’d tried it. It felt awkward at first but he was getting used to it.

  “Remember Jose Reyes, the baseball player who used to play for the Jays,” she told him. “He learned this growing up in the Dominican Republic by running downhill.”

  They’d gone on YouTube together and watched highlights from his career. Reyes was what the commentators called “sneaky fast.” Angela said it was because of his stride.

  The bridge was packed with families and kids in strollers, bike riders, and joggers. They dodged their way through the crowd, cut down to the path below and headed north.

  The trees and underbrush on the side of the river were thick. They kept running, the sounds and the feel of the city falling away. Except for the occasional kayaker paddling on the water, they were in near-complete wilderness. It was remarkable, how quickly they’d gone from the noise of the city to near-total silence, the only sound the slap of their feet on the path, the huffing of their breath. Well, his breath. Angela didn’t even seem to be breaking a sweat.

  They came to a short, steep part of the path. Angela scampered up it. Kennicott didn’t even try to keep pace with her. She waited for him at the top. There was a clearing where someone had made a bench out of cut logs.

  “This is a good lookout spot,” she said, not showing the least sign of fatigue. Kennicott was inhaling hard to try to lower his heart rate.

  He was grateful to sit. Angela kept standing and stretched. She carried a few small water bottles in a special belt around her waist. She took one out, shot some water into her mouth, then squirted some on Kennicott. It was one of their fun rituals, which dated back to the first time they’d run together before they became involved.

  “Hey,” he said. “Don’t waste it.”

  “Then open up.”

  He opened his mouth, and she squirted some water into it. It was warm but he was thirsty and it tasted good.

  “There’s the golf club,” she said, pointing across the river. “Down below is the homeless encampment. Every time I run by, it seems that there are different homemade tents. But no one has ever hassled me.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s left there,” he said.

  The path turned steep heading down. Kennicott focussed on his Jose Reyes technique. It seemed to work: he was keeping up with Angela.

  They hit the bottom and started alongside the river. There was scattered debris in the woods, some plastic sheeting that had once been makeshift tents, a few burnt-out fire pits.

  “No one’s home,” a man’s voice said, as they rounded the bend.

  Angela pulled up to a stop, and so did Kennicott.

  A man stood beside the path leaning on a long stick. He was dressed in old clothes but didn’t look malnourished. He seemed calm. Kennicott thought he looked vaguely familiar.

  “Good morning, Detective Kennicott,” he said.

  “Do I know you?” Kennicott asked him.

  “Fraser Dent. A friend of Detective Greene. You might recall I helped him out when you charged him with murder.”

  Now Kennicott remembered. Greene had told Kennicott the man’s tragic life story and how from time to time Dent was Greene’s eyes and ears on the street. He’d been in court on the last day of the trial, but had been much better dressed.

  “Hello, Mr. Dent. This is my girlfriend, Angela Breaker. She’s the real runner in the family.”

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” Dent said politely. “Detective, you here for another look around?
”

  “It never hurts. Angela knows this running path. I got her to forgo her usual morning run, get into work early, and run with me over her lunchtime.”

  “There’s not much left to see,” Dent said. “But if you’re looking for a place to build a home, with the price of housing so high in the city, you might want to buy a lot here. It’s a prime location. Any day now the real estate agents are going to name this place ‘Humber West Village by the Water.’ ”

  He laughed a deep hearty chuckle and started walking down the path with them.

  “Why don’t you give us a guided tour?” Kennicott said, playing along.

  As they strolled together, Dent pointed his stick up the valley at an orange plastic sheet that was strung between two trees. A few dirty-looking sleeping bags lay discarded underneath. There was an open fire pit with cans of food littered all around.

  “This two-bedroom beauty features an all-purpose kitchen, a sunken family room, and central air conditioning,” Dent said.

  “Don’t forget the riverside view,” Angela said, joining in.

  “A great feature. And how about that one?” Dent aimed his stick at a lean-to made from pieces of plywood nailed haphazardly together. The ground below it was littered with newspapers and garbage. “An architectural gem. Great views of the golf course across the river. This modern-design beauty is perfect for a young couple like you two.”

  They all laughed.

  As they kept walking, the hovels on the hillside looked more and more decrepit. One was made out of cardboard. Someone had dug out some earth and had been living in a small cave. But everything had been abandoned. There wasn’t a soul around.

  Dent pointed his stick at a rock face that was filled with graffiti. “Humber West even has a local art gallery,” he said.

  “True,” Kennicott said. “But no people.”

  “You can blame your friend Detective Greene for that. He got me to shoo everyone out of here,” Dent said, lifting his big stick and swinging it as if it were a baseball bat. “I’m leaving too. Everyone’s headed to the Don River Valley, and no one’s coming back here until you guys catch this killer.”