This Thing of Darkness

by Barbara Fradkin

  As interesting as the information was, however, none of it yielded any clues as to Rosenthal’s current address or telephone number. Green reached for his phone. It took him a few minutes to round up his back-door contact at Bell Canada and secure a listing for the doctor. Rabbi Tolner was right. Sam Rosenthal lived on Nelson Street, only a block from Rideau Street. And also, in a coincidence too close for comfort, only a block west of Sid Green’s seniors’ home.

  I’m coming home, I’m coming home, he promised Sharon silently as he drove to the old doctor’s home. He knew the building, a grand old Victorian mansion that would once have housed a member of Parliament or senior civil servant in burgeoning post-Confederation Ottawa. In its heyday, it would have seen its share of soirées and political intrigue, but it was now divided into six flats, each with its own doorbell and mailbox in the front hall. The apartments were probably occupied by a mix of university students, fixed-income seniors and new immigrants. From the medley of smells in the hallway, some East Indians and Latin Americans were among them.

  The front yard betrayed the same descent from elegance to pragmatism. Most of it was paved over to house a jumble of bicycles, garbage and recycling bins, but under the bay window was a well-mulched rose garden still producing vibrant pink and red blooms at the end of the season. Someone must be weeding it, fertilizing it and encouraging it to grow in this toxic waste of asphalt and dust. Probably Dr. Rosenthal himself, accustomed to the stunning perennial gardens that surround the houses overlooking the Rideau River.

  According to Tolner, Dr. Rosenthal occupied the ground floor flat, but there was no name on his buzzer or mailbox. Anonymous to the end, Green thought, and wondered whether it was professional paranoia that had lingered into retirement, or simply a sense that this place would never be home. Ringing the buzzer brought no response. His fingers itched to ring one of the neighbours. This was not his investigation, he castigated himself, and the follow-up really belonged to Sergeant Levesque.

  He was rescued from his dilemma when one of the interior doors opened, and a young woman came out into the hall. Small, blonde and impossibly skinny, she was dressed in jeans and a frilly purple jacket, with the trademark book bag slung over one shoulder and a bike helmet under her arm. Her weary eyes widened with alarm at the sight of him. He hastened to introduce himself, which reassured her only marginally. She edged towards the door as he recorded her name—Lindsay Corsin—and asked her about the occupant on the ground floor.

  “The landlord? He’s quiet and nice, but he keeps to himself.” Lindsay had a breathy, singsong voice that phrased everything as a question. “I’ve talked to him like maybe three times? Since I moved here. Why?”

  “Can you describe him? Height, weight, hair colour?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Medium, you know? About the same as you, only way older.”

  Green suppressed a smile. In the past, his fine brown hair, freckled nose and medium build had made him look deceptively youthful, but recently strands of grey had appeared at his temples. It was reassuring to know that seventy-five still looked a long way off.

  “What can you tell me about his clothes?”

  “He’s a funny dresser. Always has a suit, even a tie. He’s old-fashioned that way.”

  Mentally Green was ticking off the points of confirmation. “Have you seen him today?”

  “No, but I’ve been upstairs. I don’t think he’s in.”

  “Does he have visitors? Go out much?”

  She wrinkled her brow as if puzzled by the question. Her gaze darted to his closed door, and she seemed to vacillate. “Sometimes he has visitors. I hear them talking, like? You can hear everything through these walls.”

  “Talking about what?”

  “I couldn’t hear. Just, like, conversation? But mostly he’s alone.” She shifted uneasily. Took the helmet in both hands and twirled it. “Umm, I gotta go. I’m late for my study group.”

  “I won’t keep you much longer. One last question. Does he go out at night?”

  She frowned as though trying to figure out why he was asking. “Sometimes, I guess. I think he has trouble sleeping, because he gets on my case when I have friends over. Keeps pounding the ceiling with his cane.” Her face cleared with sudden understanding. “Oh, this is about last week, eh?”

  “What happened last week?”

  “Well, someone trashed his place. Broke a window in the back? Boy, was he mad. But you guys know all that. He wanted you to fingerprint his whole place.”

  Having now run roughshod over Levesque’s first homicide investigation long enough, Green realized the sergeant needed to be brought into the picture. The obvious next move—checking out the apartment and the Break and Enter investigation—was hers to make. So he thanked Lindsay and handed her his card with the usual request to contact him if she remembered anything important. She snatched it and scurried out the door without a backward glance. She and her bicycle were already out of sight by the time he got back into his car.

  He found Levesque crammed into the small utility closet that passed for the security and housekeeping office at the back of the Rideau Street pawn shop. She looked up with excitement, and if she was unnerved or annoyed by his appearance, she betrayed no sign. All business, she gestured towards the grainy monitor in front of her.

  “Lucky for us, the shop has the tape on a two-day loop over the weekend so the shop owner can check for intrusions or missing merchandise when he arrives Monday morning. So we have coverage for the critical time period between ten p.m. Saturday and five a.m. Sunday.”

  Green peered at the monitor. The date and time, down to the second, were stamped in the bottom right corner of the image. The camera seemed to be mounted in the upper corner of the main door frame, and its wide-angled lens showed a blurry, fisheye view of the barred entranceway to the store along with the edge of the shop window and the sidewalk beyond. As it rolled, Green squinted, trying to make out details. “Any sign of the victim?”

  She shook her head. “He must have been on the other side of the street at this point.”

  That makes sense, Green thought, since his home was on the other side of the street. However, in his experience, elderly people with canes were careful to cross at a traffic light. “I wonder what made him cross in the middle of the block,” he mused. “Any sign of trouble?”

  “Just the usual Saturday night. Half a dozen drug deals, a girl having a shoving match with her boyfriend, I don’t know how many drunks pissing in the gutter, sex trade workers strolling by...” Levesque tapped the screen as a figure limped by, trundling a pull cart behind him. “There’s Screech, on his way to his sleeping quarters. Time is 1:33 a.m. He still has his sleeping bag.”

  “Have we talked to him? He may be able to ID some of these people.”

  “We took his statement, but his memory is unreliable.”

  An understatement, Green thought. Screech was a proud Cree from Labrador who’d once worked the mines in Northern Quebec until his lungs gave out, but ten years on the street had not improved his health. Nor his mind. But even so, sometimes Screech knew things about the street that no one else did. The trick was in persuading him to share them. Money usually improved his mood, a fact Green mentioned to Levesque.

  She reached over and rifled a stack of papers at her side. “I’ve printed off stills, and once the pathologist gives us a better idea on time of death, I’ll show them to him. I’ve also put a call out on the street. But we did find one promising lead.” She leaned over and began to fast-forward the tape. Green watched the jerky flashes of people scurrying past the shop.

  In the silence, he plunged ahead. “I have a probable ID, address, and next of kin on the victim.”

  Her finger jerked off the button, freezing the frame, and she swung around to gape at him. In terse, professional clips, he summarized his discoveries of the day. She had the discipline to listen without interruption, but her jaw grew tighter with each revelation. Beneath her dispassionate gaze, he kne
w she was fuming. Her blue eyes smoked.

  “So I leave it in your very capable hands.” He flourished a grin he hoped would take the sting out. “Public records should turn up the son easily, and the B & E follow-up may give you some very useful information about motive.”

  “I appreciate all of this, Inspector,” she said, not bothering to fake sincerity. “We’ll get a warrant for that address as soon as possible, and I’ll have one of my detectives pull the B & E file. But I have a much more promising lead right here on the tape.” She tapped the play button, and within a few seconds a group of young black males slouched by the camera, their hoodies bagging and their shoelaces trailing. They jostled one another as they fought for space on the narrow sidewalk.

  “Street gangs,” she said with a smug smile. “That’s what this is all about. It isn’t important who he was or what went on last week. It’s only important that at that moment of that night, he crossed their path.”

  Four

  Green’s late night walk around the block with Modo was a ritual he’d grown to love. His huge dog padded peacefully at his side, stopping to browse the scents in the bushes along the way, unhurried and unconcerned. Their street of modest old homes tucked behind overgrown maples and shrubs was never busy, and by ten o’clock it was a morgue. Not a single person passed him in the crisp autumn night. It was a time he could lose himself in thought, sort through the events of the day and ready himself for the next.

  Some nights when Hannah was home to babysit, Sharon would join him, and they would walk hand in hand. She’d talk about a difficult patient, or he’d talk about a heartbreaking case. It was a refuge in their busy lives, for which he was grateful.

  He hadn’t expected to like Modo. When he’d agreed under duress to take in the abandoned hundred-pound mutt—half Lab, half Rottweiler, as close as the vet could tell, but with the temperament of a dwarf rabbit—he’d sworn it was only for a month or two until a proper home could be found. Green had never had pets as a child. His home had been full of irrational fears and long, secretive silences that were oppressive to an only child. His mother had flinched at the mere sound of barking. Forever seared into her brain was the memory that dogs had terrifying magical powers to sniff out hiding places and hunt down fugitives. But Sharon had grown up with dogs in her happy suburban Mississauga home, and she’d taken to the traumatized animal instantly. Modo and Green had needed much longer to trust and value each other.

  That evening, Sharon was still doing laundry in preparation for the busy week ahead when he set off for his walk. Random threads of the homicide investigation drifted through his mind as he walked. He considered the theory he was constructing about the victim, once a respected psychiatrist but torn from his moorings by the death of his wife. Like a man of faith, he had questioned the very nature of his professional beliefs. He’d sold his gracious home and bought instead a rundown turreted mansion, where he had to tolerate garbage bins in his front yard and student parties overhead. A solitary man who went out for his daily walk dressed in a suit from his professional days. A creature of habit like Green’s own father, but proud, elegant, unafraid, and unlike Green’s father refusing to be intimidated by the human dangers on the street. Refusing to be violated, even when the violators came to his own home. Ready to fight.

  Tragically, ready to die.

  For once, the walk did not put Green in a better frame of mind. It did not energize him for the week ahead but left him feeling outraged and ready to fight as well. When he came back inside, he found Sharon curled up on the living room sofa with her petite feet tucked under her, sipping a cup of tea. Finally at rest. He made himself a cup and sank down beside her, reluctant to drag her back into the ugly reality of murder. In the end, his expression must have given him away, because she snuggled against him.

  “What is it, Mr. Bigshot Detective?”

  “You know the man who died on Rideau Street? We still need a positive ID, but it looks like he was a psychiatrist named Samuel Rosenthal. He used to work at Rideau Psychiatric.”

  She pulled back, looking puzzled. Recognition widened her eyes. “Dr. Rosenthal! Of course. I didn’t know him while he worked there, but everyone knew of him. My God, poor man.”

  “Was he controversial?”

  “Well, I remember we often had to patch up patients whom he’d taken off their meds. He was into patient empowerment and natural remedies. St. John’s wort for bipolar disorder, for example.”

  “Do you remember anything about what he was like?”

  She took a slow, thoughtful sip of tea. “It was awhile ago. His patients were very loyal to him, so I think he meant well. And he was right, sometimes we are far too quick to pump patients full of drugs when psychotherapy or a healthy lifestyle change would be better. Drugs are faster and cheaper for the healthcare system.”

  She was slowly waking up. She uncurled herself and set down her tea as if to better marshall her arguments. Sharon had been on this high horse before, railing against a public healthcare system which funded doctors to dole out pills during fifteen-minute sessions but not other therapists who might actually talk to the patients to help them sort out their lives. It sounded as if Sam Rosenthal had shared her view.

  “Still,” he said, “he must have made some enemies that way.”

  She chuckled.“Looking for a colleague driven mad by him contradicting their advice?”

  Or a patient. The thought came out of the blue and seemed far-fetched the moment he formed it. Rosenthal had barely practised in years.“Did he treat all kinds of problems?”

  “I don’t know. Most of the trouble came with his young patients. Misdiagnosed bipolars or first-episode schizophrenics. Those were the real tragedies.” He must have looked blank, for she twisted around to study him dubiously.“Do you really want to know all this?”

  “I don’t have much to go on with this guy. The working assumption is a random gang assault, but you know me. Never overlook the longshot.”

  She laughed. “Yes, the champion of zebras. Okay. Schizophrenia can be a devastating lifelong disease, but if there’s any illness where proper drugs can make a huge difference, this is it. But to have the best outcome you should catch them early, before or during their first psychotic break. Typically that’s in their teens or early twenties, where it can be hard to distinguish from other problems, especially if there is illicit drug use. Kids, even their parents, don’t want to accept the diagnosis either, so they’re willing to grasp at straws.”

  “Like a nice herbal remedy.”

  “You got it. Megavitamins or some fancy diet. My favourite is Bach’s flowers, based on some guy’s wacky ideas from the 1930s, as if we haven’t learned a thing about the disease in the decades since then. I’m not saying Western medicine has all the answers in the treatment of mental illness and there’s no place for alternative approaches, but the field is full of quackery and fake science, trading on people’s fears and hopes. That was the biggest problem we saw with Rosenthal’s patients. They’d been treated at the hospital for schizophrenia or bipolar and stabilized on the latest drugs. Then after discharge they’d trot off to Rosenthal complaining of side effects, and he’d take them off. A few months later, bingo, they’re hearing voices again and they’re back inside. With each psychotic break, their life spirals down. Jobs are lost, marriages destroyed, dreams and plans shattered.”

  Green had seen enough schizophrenics to know they often stopped taking their meds of their own accord anyway. They’d cross his path when they ended up on the streets acting crazy enough to scare people. He’d heard their reasons often enough. They felt so good after awhile on the meds, they decided maybe they’d been cured and they didn’t need them any more. Or they hated the side effects, which gave them the shakes and made them feel they were living their life inside cobwebs. A doctor like Rosenthal, who told them they didn’t need the meds after all, would have been greeted like the Messiah.

  If they ever realized they’d been duped, however unintention
ally, they would have felt betrayed.

  Betrayed enough to seek revenge? he wondered, then shook his head at his own crazy thoughts. Blame it on the midnight hour. Levesque had her own, much more sensible line of investigation.

  A shadow fell across his desk. “You’ve been a busy beaver.”

  Green looked up to see Brian Sullivan lounging in the doorway. To his relief, the head of Major Crimes had a crooked grin on his freckled face and a twinkle in his blue eyes. Green hadn’t known what the fallout might be from his foray into the trenches yesterday, but now he guessed Sergeant Levesque was too smart and ambitious to complain about the meddling inspector to her NCO directly, particularly when it was common knowledge in the ranks that Green and Sullivan were not only former partners but close friends.

  He returned the grin with a shrug. “What’s a little help between friends? It was my day off, and I just used my connections to speed things along.”

  “She’s smart and she’s good, Green, even if she doesn’t know about your legendary investigative skills. Before her time.” He grinned. Nice payback, Green thought.“She looked into that B & E you mentioned, had read the whole file before roll call this morning. Doesn’t look like there’s much there. Might have been a random thing, or maybe they were looking for drugs or a prescription pad. They turned the place over, but Rosenthal didn’t have either.”

  “He wasn’t a big fan of prescription drugs,” Green said.

  “We’re concentrating on the gang thing, trying to ID the four punks on the security camera.”

  Sullivan’s six-foot-four footballer’s frame filled most of the doorway, but nonetheless Green could get a glimpse of the bustling squad room behind him. Tilting his head, he signalled Sullivan to come in and shut the door. Sullivan obliged, sinking into the plastic guest chair and propping his huge feet on the corner of Green’s desk. The grin had faded from his face, leaving a wary, questioning look.