01 - Old City Hall

by Robert Rotenberg

  “I’m fine, Ted,” she said, forcing a smile.

  “Listen,” DiPaulo said. “Tell me to shut up whenever you want. But this case cries out for a plea to second. Ten years, Brace will be seventy-three when he gets out, for God’s sake. A first would be a death sentence. Have I missed something?”

  “That’s what Summers said. He tried to ram a plea to second down our throats. But Fernandez wasn’t biting. It’s clear he’s got a lot of pressure from the higher-ups.”

  DiPaulo nodded. “Even if Fernandez wants to make a deal, Phil Cutter and that crowd at the Crown’s office won’t let him. Still, how does he justify first degree without evidence of motive?”

  Parish balled her hand into a fist and put it in the air. She put up one finger. “Katherine Torn was found stabbed to death in the bathtub.” She put up a second finger. “The knife is found hidden in Brace’s kitchen.” She put up a third finger. “He confesses to the newspaper guy, Mr. Singh.” She put up a fourth finger. “And we’re not going to talk about it.” She put up a fifth finger. “Go home and have fun cooking dinner for your kids.”

  DiPaulo, a former Crown, had become a defense lawyer four years earlier, when his wife got sick. They had two kids, ages fifteen and thirteen. He thought it would give him more flexibility, which it did at first. His wife died a year later. Parish had noticed recently, as the kids got older, that he was burying himself more in work.

  “The Crown wants to point to Kevin Brace and say, ‘See, any man at any time can snap,’” DiPaulo said.

  “Ted, go cook,” she said.

  “Watch Summers. He’s an old fart, but don’t underestimate him. If he’s pissed off at the Crown, he’ll try to do you a favor. Did he give you any hints?”

  “Not that I heard,” Parish said. “What’s for dinner?”

  DiPaulo took a deep breath. “It’s lasagna tonight, with Caesar salad, spring rolls, and hot and sour soup. Got all the cultural bases covered.”

  “See you tomorrow, Superdad,” Parish said. DiPaulo’s wife was Chinese. His kids were fashion-model gorgeous. “I’ve got sixteen more stupid voice messages to check.”

  “Don’t stay too late, Nance,” DiPaulo said, and gave her a final smile. “And by the way, happy Valentine’s Day.” He pulled his arm from behind his back and tossed her a box of very expensive chocolates.

  A few seconds later there was a slam as the outer door closed. Parish stared at the phone. Then she looked at the computer screen. Finally her eyes settled on Ted’s box. Suddenly she was starving.

  She ripped the box open. There were a dozen handmade chocolates, each one a different shape. She popped the first one into her mouth. It was delicious. She thought to herself, Did Summers give me a hint? She ate the second one. It tasted wonderful. Something clicked in her brain. The third one. Mmmm. What was it? The fourth one. Yummy. Think, Nancy, think.

  It wasn’t until she got to the ninth chocolate. “Oh my God,” she said as she swallowed. Each one tasted better than the last one. “How could I have missed that!” She counted off her fingers again and started to laugh. Did Ted catch it? she wondered.

  I’ve got to call Awotwe, she thought, looking for the phone number of her friend, who was a reporter for the Star. Parish grabbed the last three chocolates, and as she flew out of her chair and rushed toward her wall of boxes marked B-R-A-C-E, she jammed them into her mouth.

  38

  When you spend two months with a guy 24/7, sharing his cell, working with him in the hospital wing, sitting beside him at meals, and playing as his bridge partner, after a while you get used to the fact that he doesn’t say a word. You even begin to like it, Fraser Dent thought as he rubbed his hands over his face before dealing out a new hand to the other three players around the metal table. Besides, Dent himself was a quiet guy. He didn’t mind sitting with someone and just saying nothing.

  The four men were the oldest prisoners in the Don, the “four-eye” set, as a black kid had nicknamed the bespectacled quartet. Because they were quiet and old, none of the young punks really bothered them. And now that they were up on the hospital range, everything was nice and quiet. The way veteran cons liked it.

  The conversation tonight was, as usual, about the Toronto Maple Leafs. Up here on the fifth floor, the four-eye gang got special privileges, one of which was getting to watch the whole game, even if it went into overtime.

  “I used to blame the coach, but now I blame the general manager,” Dent said as he picked up the cards to deal out the last hand of the night. “The trading deadline is past, and we’re stuck with this old goalie no one’s ever heard of. They say he even went to law school. We’re fucked.”

  The previous night had been another typical disaster for the home team. Playing out on the West Coast, winning 2 to 1 late in the third period, the hated Los Angeles Kings scored a tying goal, and in overtime they scored the winner. Even worse, the goaltender, the only player on the team even worth watching, broke his hand on the final play. A thirty-eight-year-old journeyman goalie, who’d spent almost his whole career in the minor leagues, was going to have to take over in tomorrow night’s game in Anaheim.

  Dent finished dealing and picked up his cards. Three aces and a bunch of high spades. Looks good, he thought as he sorted his hand. “I’ll start the bidding at one spade,” he said.

  He looked Brace straight in the eye. If his partner had the fourth ace and a few high cards in some other suits, they were in great shape. As always, Brace was impossible to read.

  The bidding moved quickly. Brace was a quick study at cards. When it was his turn to bid, he’d hold up his fingers and make a signal for the suit. For spades he’d point to his hair, even though it was now more gray than black. For hearts and diamonds, he’d point to his own heart or his pinky, where, as he told them in a note a long time ago, he usually wore a diamond ring. For clubs he pointed to his right foot. In that same note he told them that as a child, he’d had a clubfoot and had worn a cast for two years.

  “Three spades,” Dent said when the bidding came around to him a second time, eyeing Brace hopefully. Still no reaction from the former radio host.

  The guy was a closed book, Dent told himself yet again. It had been his assignment to try to pry him open. Good luck.

  Dent had followed Detective Greene’s instructions to a T. “You’re being charged with fraud over. Just let it be known that you got caught kiting some checks at Zellers and Office Depot,” Greene told him. “If Brace ever asks, tell him you needed the money for some payments, and if he pushes, then tell him it was support payments. A kid you had out of wedlock.”

  Greene had instructed Dent to take things slowly. “He likes smart people, but not braggarts. When the newspaper arrives, everyone will grab the sports section. He’s a hockey nut. You take the business section and study the stock pages. Let your story out slowly. How you were a top money trader, started drinking, wife left, ended up on the street. That part, just tell him the truth. And when you play bridge, play smart.”

  The bidding came around to Brace. He passed.

  He was a good player, Dent had learned. Never overbid his cards. This time his message to Dent was clear: “You may have good cards, partner, but I’ve got squat.”

  Just like what I have on you, Dent thought to himself. Squat. Nada. Nothing. In almost two months Brace hadn’t said a word. And most of the notes he’d written to Dent had been totally perfunctory. “Can I borrow a pen?” “Would you like to read this book?”

  The guy to his right, who was east, bid four diamonds.

  We’ve got ya, Dent thought. “Double,” he said when the bidding returned to him. Bidding went around the board one more time. Pass, pass, pass, pass.

  Should be fail, fail, fail, fail, he thought as he pondered the meeting he’d had with Detective Greene this morning.

  “Last game, professors,” a heavily accented eastern European voice called out from over Dent’s shoulder. It was Mr. Buzz. He paused at the edge of their game. “What�
��re they in?” he asked Dent.

  “Four diamonds doubled,” Dent said.

  “A girl’s best friend,” Mr. Buzz said, tapping Dent quietly on the arm as if to say, “Nice bidding.” “Happy Valentine’s Day, boys. I’ll round up all the riffraff, and you gents pack up once you’re done.”

  Dent and Brace easily won the final round and soon were making their way back to their shared cell.

  “Sleep tight, my children,” Mr. Buzz said as he sauntered by, fiddled with his oversize key chain, and locked them inside. “Tomorrow night the Leafs start that old guy in goal. Should be a slaughter.”

  Mr. Buzz was a Montreal Canadiens fan, and he loved to rub the Leafs’ continuing failure in their faces.

  “Mr. Buzz,” Dent said, “one day the Leafs will have a good team.”

  “Yeah,” Mr. Buzz said, “and one day every criminal will be reformed and I’ll be out of a job.”

  He walked away from the cell laughing wildly at his own joke.

  As he did every night, Dent turned to his cell partner: “Good night, Mr. Brace.”

  Dent moved over to his bunk, expecting, as always, only silence from Brace in return.

  As his head hit the meager feather pillow, he heard a voice.

  “My father died in this place,” Brace said in a voice so hoarse Dent could hardly hear him.

  Dent sat up in his bed. “Kevin?”

  “That young goalie lets in too many goals late in the period,” Brace said. “This older guy will be better.”

  “You think so?” Dent said, keeping his voice soft, echoing Brace.

  There was a long silence. Dent waited. At last he heard his cell mate start to snore. He lay back on his bunk and chuckled to himself. The Leafs drive everyone in this town crazy, he thought. Everybody.

  39

  In the early 1950s, a group of young politicians at city hall, determined to drag their drab, functional metropolis into the modern era, held an international design competition for a new city hall. The surprise winner, an unknown Finnish architect, created a postmodern building of two facing concave towers with a bubblelike council chamber in the middle. He put it on the north end of a large open square, right across the street from the former, now the “old,” city hall.

  City Hall Square took up a whole block. The only open space in the increasingly crowded downtown core, it quickly became the home to civic celebrations, outdoor concerts, protest rallies, open-air markets, and the like. Its most prominent feature was a large skating rink—a perceptive addition by the designer, who understood the northern climate—on the southwest corner of the square. In winter the rink was a magnet for all kinds of skaters: couples on first dates, immigrant families eager to indoctrinate their children into Canadian rituals, rowdy teenagers, even office workers—whose skates had been tucked under their desks—on lunch break.

  Late at night, when the lights in the white overhead arches were turned off and the city staff had gone home, a ragged collection of hockey players emerged. Mostly poor downtown kids, with a smattering of university students up late and suburban players in search of open ice, they walked through the darkened streets of the city, hockey sticks over their shoulders, like lonely samurai warriors on their way to do battle.

  Laces tied up, sticks thrown in the middle of the ice and divided into teams, they played a chaotic yet organized game that lasted through to the early hours of the morning. The puck was lit from above by the refracted lights of the high-rises that towered across the street like tall trees next to a clearing and from below by the shimmering white of the hard ice. Every quarter of an hour, the sound of the cut of blades and the slap of sticks was punctuated by the ding-dong of the clock tower atop the Old City Hall, hovering just across the street like a watchful moon.

  Nancy Parish started playing late-night hockey here when she came back to the city after going to college in the States. Most of the players were much younger. One night she found herself on a pickup team with Awotwe Amankwah, a newspaper reporter she recognized from the courts. They struck up a friendship based on what they called the three h’s: hockey, helping each other out, and high regard for each other as professionals.

  The rink was a perfect place for them to meet, and talk, in secret during the Brace trial. They’d developed a simple code if either of them wanted to get together. Earlier in the day, Parish had left a message on Amankwah’s voice mail at work.

  “Mr. Amankwah,” she’d said, making sure to mispronounce Awotwe’s last name, “I’m calling from Dominion Life Insurance to talk about your coverage.” She then left a phone number, with the last four digits 1145. Amankwah arrived at the rink just as the Old City Hall clock started playing. It sang out three parts of its tune. The time was a quarter to twelve.

  “How are things going?” Parish asked. She was sitting, doing up her skates on a flat wood bench well away from the other skaters.

  “My editors are going nuts because there was nothing to write about your pretrial with Summers,” Amankwah said in a hushed voice as he sat down beside her and pulled off his boots. “They’re on my ass to come up with another scoop. I could do a story about Brace’s kindergarten teacher and they’d put it on the front page above the fold.”

  “Off the record,” Parish said, “Summers tried to force a plea to second, but the Crown isn’t budging.”

  “Would Brace do that?” Amankwah said as he tugged on the laces of his skates. “Plead?”

  Parish finished lacing up her skates. She stood and flexed her hockey stick on the rubber padding on the ground for protecting people’s skates. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Understood,” Amankwah said. He was still lacing up his second skate.

  Over at the rink, a game was already in progress, and the grunts and groans of the players filled the thin night air. Parish twirled her hockey stick in her hand. “I need to ask you a favor,” she said.

  Amankwah didn’t say anything. Silence. Good interview technique, she thought.

  Parish sat down beside him again. “This might be the key to my defense. It has to do with Brace’s so-called confession.”

  “Happy to help,” Amankwah said.

  She exhaled, and a white plume of steam rushed out. “You’re going to need to get someone on the foreign desk to assist you,” she said.

  “The foreign desk is where I’m going in my career. I’ve got great contacts there.”

  The Old City Hall clock tower began to play again. This time it chimed through all four parts of its tune and then drummed out twelve steady beats.

  Freedom at midnight, Parish thought, turning to Amankwah and tapping his skates with her stick. “I’ll tell you about it after. First, let’s go get some hockey therapy.”

  40

  Daniel, you’re the last person I’d expect to see here,” a familiar female voice said from the other side of the laminated Chinese menu that Daniel Kennicott was holding up and studying. He lowered it and saw Jo Summers standing in front of him. Her great mane of hair, as always, was clipped up over her head. A nearly bald man who was immensely overweight stood beside her in a floppy double-breasted blue suit.

  “Hi, Jo,” Kennicott said, standing up.

  “Daniel, this is Roger Humphries, Mr. Everything at my old firm. Roger, this is Daniel Kennicott. We went to law school together.”

  Humphries reached out and gave him a firm handshake. Even firmer than Terrance’s handshake on College Street, Kennicott thought. “It’s just great to meet you,” he said. “Any friend of Jo’s is a friend of mine.”

  “Why don’t you join us?” Summers said, tugging at Kennicott’s arm.

  “No, I really wouldn’t want to impose.”

  “Oh, come on,” she insisted. “Chinese food is always better with more people. We have a table in back.”

  “I’m telling you, man, this is going to be terrific,” Humphries said, his big face beaming. “There’s a bunch of us from the firm. I’m the head of the social committee.”

>   “My old law firm,” Summers explained. “It’s a Valentine’s Day tradition. Anyone in the office who’s single, we all come here.”

  “Yeah, and we still make Jo come, even though she deserted us moneygrubbing Bay Street bums for the path of truth and justice,” Humphries said. Impossibly, the smile on his face just grew bigger. “Need her. She can order in Chinese.”

  “Really?” Kennicott said, looking at Summers.

  “Yep,” she said, pulling the menu out of Kennicott’s hand. “Cantonese and Mandarin.”

  They went together through a curtain of red and white hanging beads and entered a big square room that was all fluorescent lights, plastic tablecloths, and clattering dishes. The place was packed with groups of hip young Chinese couples, chopsticks in one hand and cell phones in the other, and multigenerational families, the grandparents hovering over the babies. There was a big round table in the middle with a number of people in business suits sitting around it. They were the only white, black, and East Indian people in the room.

  Summers led Kennicott over to the table and introduced him to the sea of faces as she sat beside him.

  “Listen, people,” she said. “Everyone put down your menus. We’re ordering the daily specials.” She pointed to the far wall, where rows of colored construction-paper signs were filled with Chinese characters. The only things Kennicott could read were the prices.

  A thin waitress approached the table. “Hello, how are you?” she said, smiling down at Summers. Her English was very poor. “We have nice food today. Which number on menu?”

  Summers pointed to the wall and started speaking in fluent Chinese. The waitress’s eyes widened. Then she started nodding enthusiastically, writing away on a small pad of paper.

  When she left, Summers turned to Kennicott and gave him a sly smile. She shrugged her shoulders. “I grew up around the corner from here. My father insisted that we not live a pampered suburban lifestyle. There were only two Caucasian kids in my grade-one class. Then, after university, I taught English in Hunan Province for two years. It comes in handy sometimes in court, when they arrest a Chinese gang and I hear them all talking to each other in the prisoners’ box.”