01 - Old City Hall

by Robert Rotenberg

  When he finished, he looked at Peel’s card again. In contrast to everything else in Torn’s well-ordered wallet, and every other scrap of paper that was carefully folded and neatly stored, all four corners of Peel’s card were cracked and bent over. It was as if Torn had worried the edges of the fine paper, the way a nervous suitor pulls the label off a wine bottle at a good restaurant.

  He looked back at the contract. It was dated December 12. Kennicott riffled through the videos from the lobby and played the tape from that day. It was the day Torn had skipped her riding lesson. He fast-forwarded to the part where she and Brace came back into the lobby late in the afternoon. Something about it had seemed off the first time he’d watched it. What was it?

  He had to play it three times before it struck him. This was the only tape in which Brace and Torn walked into the lobby together and they were not holding hands.

  16

  Just to the west of the Market Place Tower, Ari Greene watched a group of mothers pushing strollers and sipping their midmorning lattes. Maybe I should start drinking coffee, he thought, yawning, as he fell into line behind them. It was his third covert pass by the condominium in the last half hour. This time the lobby was empty.

  The concierge, Rasheed, was alone. He was reading the front page of the Toronto Star, which featured a big picture of Kevin Brace being led out of the condo in handcuffs by two young police officers, Mr. Singh in the background. A banner headline read CAPTAIN CANADA CHARGED WITH MURDER, and the subtitle said STAR REPORTER’S EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS OF ARREST.

  “Good morning, Detective,” Rasheed said. He had a ballpoint pen in his hand, which he clicked a few times. “Going up?”

  Greene stopped and lifted a thin leather briefcase onto the reception desk. “Not yet,” he said. “First I want to ask you a few questions. Routine stuff.” Greene unzipped the case. The cool metallic sound of the zipper crackled in the marble foyer.

  Rasheed clicked the pen in his hand and ticked off something in his logbook. “I made a statement and gave all the videos and the logbook to Officer Kennicott.”

  Greene nodded. He opened the notebook he’d pulled from his case. He wanted to take this slowly. “You know how we police are, always asking more questions.”

  Greene had been up all night, overseeing the investigation. Reading the various witness statements and police reports as they came in. At eight in the morning he’d gone and had tea with Edna Wingate, the neighbor in suite 12B. Her apartment was a mirror image of Brace’s suite, but unlike his place, it was filled with plants and was extremely neat. Everything seemed to have little labels, right down to the place for her winter gloves. She’d reminded him again that her yoga instructor said she had the best quads he’d ever seen in an eighty-three-year-old.

  Rasheed stopped clicking the pen and met Greene’s eyes. For a moment his eyes flickered toward Greene’s briefcase. Good, Greene thought.

  Greene opened his notebook. “What’s your full legal name, sir?”

  “Rasheed, Mubarak, Rasman, Sarry.”

  Greene began to write. “Date of birth?”

  “The fifth of the second, nineteen hundred and forty-nine.”

  “Place of birth?”

  “Iran.”

  “Education?”

  “I’m a civil engineer, graduate from the University of Tehran.”

  “You came to Canada when?”

  “September 24, 1982, as a refugee claimant. I became a Canadian citizen the first day I was eligible to do so.”

  “At a ceremony in the Etobicoke Civic Centre,” Greene said, raising his voice a notch and closing his book with a hard snap. “Correct?”

  Rasheed looked taken aback by Greene’s sudden change in tone. “That is correct,” he said. The man seemed a bit shaken. Exactly what Greene wanted.

  “After the fall of the shah, you were captured and held in captivity for nine and a half months. Your wife’s family bribed an official, and you walked to freedom. It took you twenty-five days. In March of 1980 you ended up in Italy, went to Switzerland, then France, and from there came to Canada.”

  Greene spoke quickly, never taking his eyes off Rasheed.

  Rasheed held Greene’s gaze. He looked trapped. Finally he glanced down at Greene’s briefcase. “I see, Detective, that you have read my refugee claim file.”

  “It’s right here.” Greene pulled out a white file. There were five fresh yellow tabs marking off various points.

  Rasheed’s pen started to click again.

  “You come from a prominent family,” Greene said as he zipped his bag closed. “At your hearing, you told the Refugee Board that in the early days of the revolution your younger brother and your father were killed.”

  Rasheed looked back at Greene. “The murder of one’s family is a terrible thing.”

  Greene thought of the numbers on his father’s arm, but he resisted the urge to nod his head. Instead he told a story. “Sir, in the late 1970s I spent a month in Paris.”

  “A most beautiful city.”

  “But for a foreigner, in January, cold. One day I stumbled into a tea shop on the rue de Malte. There were warm pillows on the floor, lovely tea brewing, soft incense burning. The owners were Iranians. Recent refugees from the ayatollah. We became close friends.”

  Rasheed smiled, a plastic, pasted-on smile. He’s been wearing that facade for years, Greene thought, and it’s not going to crack easily. “Many of my new friends had walked through the mountains to Turkey,” Greene said softly.

  The concierge’s smile seemed to slip.

  “I must have heard twenty such stories,” Greene said. “And it never took anyone more than four days to get across the mountains.”

  Rasheed’s nostrils flared, and he gave a hearty laugh. “There were many mountain passes, Detective.”

  Let him get a bit cocky, Greene thought. He opened the file at the first yellow tab. He wanted Rasheed to see that he was reading a section with the heading CLAIMANT’S HISTORY IN HOME COUNTRY.

  “Detective,” Rasheed said, staring at the file, “I had a full refugee hearing—”

  “At which you denied ever having been a member of the shah’s notorious SAVAK guard. Denied working for Nemotallah Nassiri, the head of the agency.”

  “Of course—”

  “Of course,” Greene said, his head down, still reading the file. “Nassiri was flown to Paris by some sympathetic members of the Iranian Air Force. Wasn’t he?”

  “I believe I heard about that, yes,” Rasheed said.

  Greene flipped through some more pages. “You’re a trained civil engineer.”

  Rasheed looked at him without saying a word.

  Greene’s eyes drifted back down at the file. “Came to Canada from France.”

  “As you said yourself, Detective, many of us ended up in Paris.”

  Greene stopped flipping the pages and let the file fall open at a page titled EVIDENCE OF TORTURE. “Mr. Rasheed,” he said, “many of my friends in Paris were tortured. I saw horrible scars.”

  “It happened to all of us.”

  Greene looked back up at Rasheed and leaned over the desk. “But you never had any scars. Did you?”

  “Detective, please.” Rasheed didn’t know where to look. Greene could smell him sweating. “I have never taken a penny of welfare from this country. Never been arrested or gotten a parking ticket. My wife works full-time at the bakery. My children, both in university. Two girls—”

  “At the University of Toronto,” Greene said, leaning in even farther. “The oldest is in dentistry, the youngest in pharmacy.”

  “Detective, please. I gave Officer Kennicott all the tapes, the log-book, made a statement . . .”

  Greene slowly unzipped his briefcase. He slid his hand back in and pulled out a color-coded piece of paper. “Officer Kennicott went through every tape, cross-referenced them with the logbook, and cross-referenced both with the different doormen who were on duty for the last week. Here, look, your shifts are highlighted in bl
ue.”

  Greene held out the paper. Rasheed looked at it reluctantly, like a man peering over the edge of a railing as he walks across a high bridge.

  “It didn’t take long to realize that the story you told us when we first interviewed you about Mr. Brace was not the whole truth,” Greene said. “Just like it wasn’t hard for me to conclude that the story you told the Refugee Board was full of lies.”

  Rasheed stared at Greene. The light had gone out of his eyes.

  Greene leaned in closer. “Rasheed, I don’t want to do this. My own father was a refugee. Had to do things to get into this country that I still don’t understand.” He touched the file in front of the concierge. “I’d like to put this away and forget about it.”

  “Detective, please,” Rasheed said. “If they send me back, that would be the end—”

  “This is a murder investigation. Katherine Torn is dead. Mr. Brace is looking at twenty-five years in jail. I need to know what happened.” Greene put his hand on the zipper.

  The concierge stared at his file, appalled. As if he were looking at a corpse that had just come back to life.

  “Please, Detective. Put it away.”

  Instead, Greene began to slowly close the zipper, leaving the file out. The only sound in the lobby was the click-click-click of the teeth touching as he moved the zipper forward.

  “Stop,” Rasheed said when it was almost closed.

  Greene tightened it one more notch before he stopped and met Rasheed’s eyes.

  “Trust me,” Greene said. “Nothing would make me happier than to bury this file where no one will ever, ever find it.”

  17

  Daniel Kennicott loved walking up the wide granite steps to the Gothic building that years ago was converted from Toronto’s city hall into the city’s main criminal courthouse, now known as Old City Hall. Known affectionately as just “the Hall” by everyone who used it—cops, criminals, Crown Attorneys, defense lawyers, court reporters, judges, interpreters, clerks, and journalists—it was the only building in the downtown core that was elevated above the street, making it stand out above the surrounding sidewalks like a judge’s dais looking down on a courtroom.

  The Hall covered a whole city block. Five stories high, it was a massive stone structure, asymmetrical in design, filled with curling cornices, rounded pillars, marble walls, smiling cherubs, overhanging gargoyles, and the big clock tower to the left side of the main entrance, which topped it off like a gigantic misplaced birthday candle. Above the arched front entryway, the words MUNICIPAL BUILDINGS hidden among a swirling band of curlicues and bows, denoted its initial use.

  The entryway was guarded by a tall gray stone cenotaph, a monument to the city’s GLORIOUS DEAD WHO FELL IN THE GREAT WAR. The names of the battlefields in France and Belgium—Ypres, Somme, Mount Sorrel, Vimy, Zeebrugge, Passchendaele, Amiens, Arras, Cambrai—were chiseled into its four sides. Cold and permanent as death.

  A few nervous-looking defense lawyers and their clients huddled on the front steps, finishing their cigarettes, the whiff of tobacco hanging in the air. Kennicott strode past them and yanked open one of the wide oak front doors. Inside, a long, scraggly line of people waited to pass through the security check. All the usual suspects were there: twitchy drug addicts, burned-out prostitutes, jewelry-laden young men in running shoes and baggy jeans, and the odd fellow in a business suit, in shock that suddenly, in the midst of downtown Toronto, he’d been plunked right into the middle of this third-world ghetto.

  Kennicott lifted his badge high above his head, saying, “Excuse me, police, excuse me, police,” and squeezed his way to the front of the line. When he finally got to the security desk, the court cop insisted on examining his badge.

  “Sorry, pal,” the young man said. “New regulations. Even need to check our own people.”

  “No problem,” Kennicott said as he walked up into the big open rotunda. Facing him was a two-story-high stained-glass window, a workmanlike tableau of the founding of the city—complete with kneeling Indians bearing food offerings, muscled laborers forging steel, and stern-looking bankers doing business. In front of it was a large landing, with two broad staircases leading to the second-floor courtrooms. Two five-foot wrought-iron “grotesques”—sculptures fashioned in the shape of huge griffins—guarded the base of the staircase, like remnants from a Harry Potter movie set.

  The main floor, with its tall Corinthian columns and mosaic tile floor, had the feel of a Turkish bazaar. In the early-morning pre-court rush, the air was abuzz with urgent conversations, made all the more pressing by the coming holiday. Families frantic to get their loved ones out on bail, defense lawyers trying to cut a deal and get the hell out of court, cops sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups, waiting to get their court cards stamped so they could get paid double time, and Crown Attorneys hustling into courtrooms, their arms laden with overstuffed files.

  Kennicott made his way down the west corridor past a row of columns topped with cherubic figurines. The architect, Edward James Lennox, who’d supervised building the Hall in the late nineteenth century, had filled it inside and out with these strange and eerie stone faces. Near the end of his commission, Lennox got into a fight with the city aldermen. As a parting shot, he had the lead mason sculpt caricatures of each of his enemies. Kennicott loved to pick them out—fat-faced men, men with overhanging mustaches, men wearing round spectacles or chomping on cigars, each face contorted in some strange way. These were discovered only years later, and by then it was too late to change them. And the only sculpture that wasn’t humorous was the one Lennox had done of himself. He also had his name carved on the stone corbels beneath the eaves. Kennicott admired a man who could make a mark in such a subtle, and lasting, fashion.

  “I’m here to see the Crown doing bails in 101,” he said as he entered the Crown’s office at the end of the west hall and waved his badge at the secretary who sat behind the flimsy protective glass.

  “Come in,” the woman said, without even looking up.

  Kennicott worked his way through a narrow hallway of makeshift rooms to a tiny office where a hand-scrawled sign with “101” was taped up at an angle. A woman with a pile of blond hair tied up over her head was working her way through a stack of beige folders while curling a renegade strand of hair with an expensive-looking metal pencil.

  “Excuse me,” Kennicott said.

  “What’s up?” she said, not lifting her head.

  “I’m here on the Brace murder,” he said. The woman had an unusual dark wooden clip in her hair.

  “Brace. Captain Canada and the pretty, younger second wife stabbed in the bath,” she said, still not looking up. “The courtroom will be packed. It’s ‘cry me a river day’ in 101 bail court. Everyone wants out for the holidays. Just seven more shoplifting days until Christmas.”

  Kennicott laughed at her joke.

  She looked over at him, flashing a pair of stunning hazel eyes, still curling her hair with the pencil. Kennicott recognized the hair and the hair clip from his law school days. And those eyes. She looked at him for a long moment before her face warmed. “Daniel,” she said. There was a slight gap between her two front teeth, and her tongue slid over it.

  At law school she’d worn that same hair clip every day. One night he was working late in the library and happened upon her slouched in a deep leather chair, books stacked high on both sides, and her hair unleashed from the clip, which she clutched between her teeth.

  “Oh, hi,” Kennicott had said. Unlike most first-year students, who clustered together in study groups, she rarely interacted with fellow classmates.

  “Hi, Daniel,” she’d said, elbowing herself up to a sitting position and pulling the clip out of her mouth. “Surprised to see me with my hair not tied up?”

  Kennicott had laughed a bit nervously. He was surprised she knew his name. “Surprised to see you in the library,” he said.

  “I got this in Tulum, Mexico,” she’d said, rubbing the clip in her hands. “It’s May
an.”

  Back then, Kennicott and his girlfriend Andrea had just entered one of their “off-again” phases. He hovered a moment, smiled. “Good luck with your studying,” he said before he walked on.

  Seeing her again now, he remembered the hair clip and he remembered the hair, but he couldn’t remember her name. On her desk he spotted her copy of the Criminal Code of Canada. The letters S-U-M-M-E-R-S were printed in black Magic Marker ink across the exposed white pages, something all Crown Attorneys did to try to keep from losing the book that was their lifeline in court.

  She caught his eye, smiling. “It’s Jo—Jo Summers.”

  Kennicott smiled back. “It’s been a while, Jo, and I haven’t slept for a few days. What’re you doing as a Crown? I thought you were going the big-firm route?”

  “Got bored saving rich people’s money. Besides, it’s family destiny.”

  Kennicott nodded, making the connection. Summers. She was the daughter of Justice Johnathan Summers, the most difficult judge in the Hall. Despised equally by defense, Crown, and cops. A navy veteran, he ran his courtroom with everything on time, in order, shipshape.

  “I’m the fourth Summers generation practicing criminal law. My poor little brother, Jake, he has the wife and two kids and has made zillions with his Internet company. But he’ll come up to the cottage and tell my dad about some multimillion-dollar deal he’s just made in Shanghai, and my father’s eyes glaze over. Then Dad will ask me about some stupid shoplifting trial I prosecuted, and he’ll be enthralled for an hour.”

  “He must be proud of you,” Kennicott said.

  Her face turned serious. “Daniel, I was very sorry to hear about your brother.”

  Kennicott inhaled. “Thanks,” he said. His eyes drifted to the window behind her and the new City Hall Square across Bay Street. People were skating in the big open rink, the early-morning sun casting long shadows.

  “I meant to call you,” Summers said.

  “It really isn’t a problem,” Kennicott said. “Look, I’ll see you in court.”