01 - Old City Hall

by Robert Rotenberg

  Kennicott looked over at the man. “I see, Mr.—”

  The elderly man jumped to his feet so quickly that Kennicott took a step back. “Gurdial Singh,” he said. “I am Mr. Brace’s morning newspaper delivery person. I contacted the police service.”

  “Morning newspaper delivery person,” “police service,” Kennicott thought. The phrases sounded so odd, he had to stop himself from smiling. He reached for his hand radio.

  “I arrived a minute earlier than my usual time, at five twenty-nine, and called at five thirty-one, once I had confirmed the fatality,” Mr. Singh said. “Mr. Kevin and I have been having our tea, awaiting your arrival. This is our second pot. It is a special Darjeeling I bring the first of each month. Most effective for constipation.”

  Kennicott looked at Brace. He was studying his spoon as if it were a priceless antique. Sliding the gun into its holster, Kennicott took a step back toward the table.

  He touched Brace lightly on the shoulder. “Mr. Brace, you are under arrest for murder,” he said. He advised Brace of his right to counsel.

  Brace didn’t change his gaze. He just flicked his free hand toward Kennicott, like a magician pulling something out of his sleeve. There was a business card between his bloodied fingers: NANCY PARISH, BARRISTER AND SOLICITOR, PRACTICE RESTRICTED TO CRIMINAL LAW.

  Kennicott clicked on his radio. “Kennicott here.”

  “What’s your location?” Bering asked.

  “I’m in the condo.” Kennicott kept his voice low. “The suspect’s here with the witness, Mr. Gurdial Singh, the newspaper . . . delivery person. The scene is calm. The victim is in the hall bathtub. Appears DOA. I’ve made an arrest.” Reporting that a victim appeared to be deceased, dead on arrival, was the top priority.

  “What’s he doing?”

  Kennicott looked at Brace. The gray-haired broadcaster was pouring milk into his tea. “Drinking tea,” he said.

  “Okay. Just watch him. Backup is on the way.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “And Kennicott. Record every word he says.”

  “Got it. Over and out.” Kennicott put the radio into its hip holder, and he could feel the adrenaline in his system begin to slow down.

  What would happen next? He studied Brace. Now his spoon was on the table and he was sipping his Darjeeling tea. Looking placidly out the window. Kennicott knew that a case like this could go in all sorts of unexpected directions, but as he looked at the little tea party in the kitchen, there was no doubt in his mind that Kevin Brace wasn’t going to say a word.

  3

  Damn it, stop yawning,” Detective Ari Greene muttered to himself as he parked his 1988 Oldsmobile in the narrow driveway of his father’s split-level bungalow and grabbed a paper bag from the passenger seat. Good, he thought as he felt around inside it, the bagels from Gryfe’s are still warm. He reached inside a second bag and extracted a carton of milk. He fished under his seat until he found a stash of plastic shopping bags and yanked out one from the Sobeys grocery store.

  This will work, Greene thought as he plopped the milk into the bag. If his father discovered that the milk came from the bagel store, there’d be hell to pay: “You bought the milk at Gryfe’s? How much? Two ninety-nine? This week, at Sobeys, milk is two forty-nine, and two fifty-one at Loblaws. I have a coupon for an extra ten cents.” The words would tumble out in his dad’s unique mixture of English and Yiddish.

  Greene was coming off his tenth straight night shift. He’d been too tired to make a second trip to the grocery store. His father had been through enough in his life. The last thing he needed was to find out that his only surviving son was a lousy shopper.

  A thin layer of snow had fallen overnight. Greene took the shovel from the metal railing and carefully cleared the concrete steps. He picked up the copy of the Toronto Star from in front of the door and stuck his key to his father’s house into the lock.

  Inside, he heard the hum of the television set coming from the living room. He sighed. Since his mother died, his father hated to sleep in their bedroom. Instead he’d watch TV in the den until he fell asleep on the plastic-covered couch.

  Greene kicked off his shoes. He stacked the bagels on the counter, put the milk in the fridge—making sure to leave out the Sobeys bag—and walked noiselessly into the living room. His father was curled up under a tattered brown-and-white afghan Greene’s mother had knitted for his seventieth birthday. His head had slipped off a small pillow and was hard against the thick plastic.

  Moving aside the teak coffee table in front of the sofa, Greene knelt beside his sleeping father. As a homicide detective for the past five years and a cop for twenty, he’d seen some pretty tough characters. None of them could hold a candle to this little Polish Jew who, try as they might, the Nazis couldn’t kill.

  “It’s me, Dad. Ari. I’m home.”

  Greene touched his father’s shoulder softly, then quickly moved back. He braced himself. Nothing happened. Still keeping his distance, he squeezed harder on his father’s shoulder. He continued. “Dad, I’ve picked up some warm bagels and milk. I’ll get some denture cream for you tomorrow.”

  His father’s eyes flew open. This was the moment Greene had dreaded every morning since he was a boy. What nightmare was Dad waking from? His father’s gray-green eyes looked disoriented.

  “Dad, the bagels are warm. And the milk . . .”

  His father looked at his hands. Greene moved closer again and slid the fallen pillow under his father’s head. With his right hand he caressed his face. His father mumbled, “Mayn tochter.” It meant “My daughter.” Then he said her name: “Hannah.” The daughter he’d lost at Treblinka.

  Greene lifted him into an upright position on the couch. His father seemed to gather strength, like a blow-up doll slowly being inflated.

  “Where did you buy the milk?” his dad asked.

  “Sobeys.”

  “They have any coupons?”

  “They’re out. You know what it’s like at Christmastime.”

  His father rubbed his face with his hands. “Yes, I know. Christmastime you do extra shifts to help out your friends. You look tired. You work last night?”

  “For a few hours,” Greene lied. He was pretty sure his father knew it wasn’t true.

  “Today you off?”

  Greene touched the beeper on his hip. “Number one in the batting order.” The batting order was the “on call” list in the homicide bureau. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and it’ll be a peaceful day.”

  His father patted him on the shoulder and felt the fabric of Greene’s lapel. “That fancy tailor of yours, his stitching is improving.”

  In his heart, Greene’s father was still a tailor—the job he’d had as a young married man in his little Polish village until the morning in September 1942 when the Nazis surrounded it. In the line at Treblinka, a friend told the Ukrainian guard he was a cobbler. So that’s what he became. When he came to Canada, he opened his own shoe shop in a downtown neighborhood that was a smorgasbord of European ethnic groups. It turned out that the Nazis had given him the perfect training ground. Two years of mending shoes of Jews from all over Europe meant that he recognized almost every shoe that came in.

  “The stitching should be good,” Greene said, unbuttoning the jacket and showing his father the inside. “It took him two months to make it.”

  “Two months,” his father snorted. “Sit down, I’ll make myself some coffee. You want some tea?”

  Greene smiled. “No, I’m fine, Dad.”

  The only place to sit was the plastic-covered couch. He’d hated the thing ever since he was old enough to have friends over to the house—rich kids whose parents didn’t have accents, whose parents knew how to ski and play tennis, whose parents didn’t have numbers on their arms.

  All these years later, he’d still love to burn the darn sofa. But there was no point arguing with his father. Never was. And Greene was dog-tired. He lay down and pulled the coffee table back into position so he could put his
feet up on it.

  “Leafs lose again?” his father called from the kitchen. “I fell asleep at the end of the second period. It was two–nothing for Detroit.”

  “You’ll be amazed,” Greene said. “They scored three goals in the last ten minutes, beat the Wings three–two.”

  “Unbelievable,” his father said. “Maybe one game they won. Still they are terrible.”

  Greene maneuvered his back, trying to get comfortable. He grimaced as he heard the plastic crack and squeak under his weight. As the only Jewish guy in Homicide, he scored lots of points by taking shifts this time of year. He didn’t mind.

  For a rising star on the squad, with just one unsolved case, this time of year was a bonanza. The last three Decembers he’d had three homicides, but this year had been quiet.

  The smell of instant coffee wafted into the living room. It was a smell Greene had disliked since he was a child. He shifted a bit on the couch. The beeper attached to the back of his belt was caught on the plastic.

  “Dad, try the cream cheese I got for you on Friday.”

  “I’m looking for it. Maybe I didn’t wrap it right. After three days it’s stale,” his father called from the kitchen. “You want some raspberry jam?”

  “Sure, Dad,” Greene said. His eyelids felt heavy. As much as he despised the sofa, right now it felt comfortable.

  He reached back, unclipped the pager from his belt, and held it. That felt better. He was so tired. His eyes began to shut.

  Suddenly he sat bolt upright, crinkling the hard plastic underneath him, and squeezed the pager. It was buzzing wildly.

  4

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  That’s it: All my money, Awotwe Amankwah thought as he doodled letters onto the back of his green reporter’s pad. Thanks to you, Madam Honorable Justice Heather Hillgate, you and your final divorce decree, I get access to Fatima and Abdul Wednesdays from five-thirty to nine, and Saturday afternoons from two to five, one phone call per night, between seven thirty and eight. That’s it. The price of admission? Eight hundred dollars a month in support payments.

  “If you want your children overnight, get a place of your own,” Justice Heather the Leather, as he liked to think of her, had lectured him the last time they were in court. Claire was there. Dressed all prim and proper, like the wife on The Bill Cosby Show, backed up by her high-priced lawyers, who filed motions against him quicker than his ex changed lovers. Amankwah couldn’t afford his lawyers anymore, so he was unrepresented.

  His next move—to get the kids overnight—was going to take months, and money he didn’t have, to go back to court yet again.

  To keep up with the court order, Amankwah had to do this graveyard shift in the Radio Room at the Toronto Star, the country’s largest paper, where he’d worked for almost a decade.

  The Radio Room—also known as the Box, the Rubber Room, and the Panic Room—was parked at the north end of the Star’s enormous newsroom.

  It wasn’t really a room, but a small glassed-in booth filled with a staggering array of equipment. There were five scanners, but only two worked—police and ambulance. They were on constantly, as was the twenty-four-hour TV news station that, in the middle of the night, went to mind-dulling infomercials about exercise or kitchen equipment. The twenty-four-hour radio news station ran at low level, to complete the constant cacophony of sound.

  He had to check all of them, plus two different news services rolling through the fat old computer screen in the corner. And there was a long list of calls to be made hourly: police headquarters not just in Toronto, but in the far-reaching suburbs and surrounding cities—Durham, Peel, Halton, Milton, York, Oakville, Aurora, Burlington.

  This whole area was known as the Golden Horseshoe, the fifth-biggest urban center in North America, so there was a lot of ground to cover. All the fire, transit, ambulance, and hospital authorities also had to be contacted. As well as the Ontario Provincial Police and, never forget, the lottery people. When things slowed down, you were expected to read through the daily paid obituaries to see if a story lurked there.

  At first it might look confusing, but the job was strictly entry-level, intern-journalism-student stuff. Not something a veteran reporter like Amankwah should be doing.

  He kept his BlackBerry on at all times to get e-mails from reporters in the field and in case something happened with his kids. Out through the front window, looking over the sprawling near-empty newsroom, a row of clocks on the far wall displayed the current time in major cities around the world: Paris, Moscow, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Melbourne, Los Angeles. Amankwah looked at them with the dreamy eyes of a poor child watching a limousine drive past. He’d wanted to be a foreign correspondent, the first black reporter at the Star to be sent overseas. But now that dream was in tatters. He looked at the clock labeled LOCAL TIME. It was 5:28. Another half hour to go. Then he’d have four hours to get back to his sister’s apartment in Thorn-cliffe, where he was living on a couch, grab a shower, and be here for his regular ten o’clock shift.

  He turned his gaze to the window in front of him. It was plastered with aged instructional memos, funny news clippings, and multicolored sticky notes. The protocol was for reporters to write out humorous things they heard on the scanners in the middle of the night and post them on the window. Amankwah looked at some of the funnier ones:

  Dec. 29, 2:12 a.m.: Dispatcher: “Did you say baklava?” Cop 21 Division: “Oooh . . . it’s been a long shift. He was wearing a balaclava.”

  Cop 43 Division: “I’m not up on all the gangs in Scarborough but I’m pretty sure there isn’t one called the Nipples.” Dispatcher: “Regardless, they should be photographed anyway.”

  The Radio Room was warm. Amankwah had his jacket off and his tie loosened. Every fifteen minutes he made a detailed notebook entry in his neat script. This might be a lousy job, but he was still a good reporter. He did the work well.

  It had been a quiet night. The days before Christmas were a dead zone for news stories, and earlier in the night the desk had been hounding him to find something local for the front page.

  Amankwah had no good news to offer. Out in the suburbs there was an Iranian cabdriver—a former history professor—who got robbed at knifepoint by a couple of young Asians. The kids weren’t too bright. A bit of snow had fallen in the suburbs last night, and the cops followed the tracks in the snow back to one of their houses. And a group of Pakistani college students downtown brought some cricket bats into a doughnut shop and took some whacks at one of their former friends. A drunk driver in the Entertainment District ran over a cop’s foot. Typical stuff. None of it front-page material.

  At about one in the morning it had looked like he had some action. A rich doctor in Forest Hill caught his wife in bed with his teenage son’s best friend. He’d sliced the kid with a kitchen knife. At first it sounded as if he’d cut the young stud’s cock off. Amankwah called the desk, and they got all excited. They were hoping the doctor was a surgeon. But an hour later it turned out the guy was just a dermatologist and he’d used a butter knife. All the teenager had was a scrape on the back of his hand.

  A bloody butter knife, Amankwah thought. What a wimp.

  He checked the wall clock for Toronto: 5:30. He checked the wire services for fresh news alerts. Nothing. He listened to the half-hour report on the all-news radio station. Not a thing. He turned on the cabbie dispatchers and listened for a full minute. Nada. Finally, he checked the police scanner.

  There was the usual chatter. Then he heard “code red.” He turned up the dial. The cops changed their codes every week, but it wasn’t exactly hard to figure out that “code red” meant something urgent. Probably homicide.

  He heard the address: the Market Place Tower. Number 85A Front Street, Suite 12A. Amankwah’s body jerked. Holy shit. He’d been in that penthouse suite. It was the home of Kevin Brace, the famous radio host. A few years before
, Amankwah and Claire were on his show and they’d been invited to the Christmas party Brace and his younger second wife hosted every year in early December. Back when Amankwah and Claire were the city’s glamour couple—smart, black, and beautiful. Back when Amankwah, a hot young reporter on the city beat, was the token black face in all the newspaper promo ads.

  Amankwah bit his lip. Brace’s building was a few blocks away. He turned down the volume on the scanner and moved his ear closer to the speaker. He could pick up the cops on the street. They were smart enough to keep Brace’s name off the airways.

  Imagine. Kevin Brace. Mr. All-Canadian Good Guy, according to his adoring fans. The Voice of Canada, they called him. Recent j-school grads in the radio rooms of the other three newspapers in town wouldn’t pick this up. Red-hot news—maybe even a murder in Kevin Brace’s condo—was flying under the radar, and he was the only one who had it.

  Amankwah looked out at the near-deserted newsroom. There was only one editor manning the website and another babysitting some copy. He needed to alert them right away.

  But he knew what would happen once they got hold of this. They’d hand the story to one of the overnight writers who were on call. If Amankwah was lucky, all he’d get would be a nice little pat on the back and then he’d be forgotten.

  He started to pace. Any minute now an urgent alert would flash on the wires, and the news would be everywhere. Keep calm, he thought as he eased his wallet out of his jacket and slipped it into his back pocket. He palmed his digital camera, which was crammed with pictures of his children, and squeezed it in his hand. Trying to look casual, he walked out of the airless room and gave an exaggerated yawn.

  “Just going down to grab a coffee,” he said as he sauntered past the editor closest to him, jiggling some coins in his pocket with his free hand.

  The night cleaner, a large Portuguese woman, was at the bank of elevators outside the newsroom. Amankwah pushed the Down button and leaned against the wall, stifling another yawn. The cafeteria was one floor below. The Up button was already lit.