When the silence was finally broken, it was still Stow who spoke. It took me awhile to hear him. And awhile after that to understand.
“But I knew then that Ellis would never kill Harpur,” Stow said. “I realized that Ellis Portal was different from me in every way.”
What? Stow seemed almost in a trance. To interrupt him now seemed downright dangerous.
“Yes, my counsel, Ellis Portal, is a man of dignity, of ambition. He is a survivor. But he is not a man with the courage, the sheer guts, to kill the thing he loves, even from feelings of mercy. Knowing him, he would have just talked to Harpur ...” He glared at me. “Maybe he tried to talk her to death.”
One member of the jury smiled as if this were a joke, as if I were a joke.
“But running into him,” Stow went on, “when I was planning a dreadful act stopped my hand. Ellis Portal did not have the courage to put Harpur out of her misery. And I knew that I couldn’t, either. A sudden conviction told me that what I was going to do was wrong. I realized I had no right to take her life. I realized that I was as cowardly as Ellis Portal. I had no part in my wife’s death, and I will forever mourn the loss of the only woman I’ve ever loved in my long and miserable life.”
Stow’s voice sank to a whisper and he wiped his eyes. McKenzie, for once in his life, was struck dumb, and the sound of weeping began to insinuate itself into the stillness. Stow had chosen the wrong profession. He was a tragedian, a great actor. The only dry eye in the house was my own. Trumped again!
Ellen didn’t even attempt a cross-examination. No legal formalities seemed necessary to the jury. They returned with their verdict within the hour.
“Not guilty.”
Chapter 18
A week later, I met Stow approaching me on Bay Street. I was so used to seeing him shackled or in a glass box that my first thought was of an escaped lion coming for my throat. We stood face-to-face across the street with a red light between us. Stow made a slight gesture that I understood to mean that he would remain and I must cross.
The lion was wary. But I did as he bid. Whenever had I not?
“No hard feelings?” was the first thing he said. I thought he was going to clap me on the shoulder. He hesitated before adding, “And we have honored Harpur’s memory in a fit and worthy manner. You’ve lived up to your promise to me and to the law.”
I lost it completely, realizing finally how much I hated him. Nearby was a small park on the corner of Hagerman and Bay. I grabbed Stow by the lapels of his silk suit and dragged him a few feet into the bushes that shielded the park and its resident druggies from the view of passersby.
“You son of a bitch,” I yelled. “You’ve always been a liar and a schemer, especially toward me! So I’m gutless, am I?”
His tailor-made was soiling from my sweating palms. He tried to push my hands off him. Around us, the druggies perked up and started to pay attention.
“You knew I was the only witness in this case! You decided to screw me one last time!”
“Ellis, please, stop,” he said feebly, waving his hands and gasping for breath as I pushed him to the ground and tried to ram my knee into his stomach. My leg slipped, and my shin hit the dirt with a sharp pain. I kept at it anyway.
“Why did you do it, Stow?” I pulled at his lapels again. The silk began to come apart beneath my fingers.
“Ellis,” he said, still gasping, but making no attempt to push me off. “Everything I said in court was true.”
“Need help, man?” A fellow who resembled Johnny Dirt was looking us over.
“Get lost,” I snarled.
“Let me up,” pleaded Stow. “My suit ...”
I got off him but, still holding his lapels, I hauled him to a nearby bench, shoving away two sleeping bums.
“Give me a minute to explain,” Stow begged. “When Pipperpharmat got the test results about Harpur, I informed them that I was going to instruct my arm’s-length counsel to initiate a class-action suit on the part of her estate and of others who’d been part of the drug trials. Counsel came back with the information that Pipperpharmat would countersue, and that I stood a strong chance of losing Harpur’s estate. So—”
“So you engineered a dramatic criminal trial to forestall the suit?”
Stow didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“But what if it hadn’t worked? What if the jury had found you guilty?”
He didn’t have to answer that, either. If the jury had found him guilty, he would have appealed and claimed that I was the killer. Me, the once and future object of his scorn.
“You really are a low-down mother, Stow.”
“And you really are a good lawyer, Portal.”
For a moment, we just sat there staring at each other. Until we realized we had nothing more to say to each other. We dusted ourselves off and walked up Bay. We caught separate cabs. We never spoke again.
Suddenly I was the darling of the press, for the first time in over a decade. Reporters followed me; they e-mailed, faxed, phoned and lay in wait outside my door. Years before, when I had been the youngest and most controversial judge in the Provincial Court of Ontario, they had hounded me similarly. I had forgotten how much I had loved that attention and also how much I eventually came to hate it.
At first, Aliana was not among the admiring throng. She had given me up as a lost cause. She wrote a searing article for the World, suggesting that Stow and I had cooked up the whole murder case in order to, in her words, “grab the fame of sports stars or rock bands.”
In the following days, however, she took a new tack and wrote a flattering little profile of me. She said she had never found me gutless, but “dogged and determined.” At the end was a short paragraph written by the editor, thanking Aliana for all her years of insightful journalism and wishing her well on her return to the Middle East.
Later that week, Anne and I met. She, like everybody else, seemed to need absolution. She spoke in a rush.
“There’s no easy way to tell you this, but before I begin, I want to ask for forgiveness. I know you’re not a man who goes to church often—”
“I seem to have repented,” I joked, remembering the Red Mass, the christening ...
She didn’t smile. “Ellis, those DNA tests for Sal?”
“Yes?”
“The sample from Jeffrey showed my DNA, but not yours.”
With that absurdly brief sentence, my ex-wife informed me that Jeffrey was not my son.
I stared out the window. In the deep shadows of the forests of the ravine, the white trillium was beginning to unfurl its three petals, its dark green leaves. In the distance, the newly verdant boughs of an old apple orchard awaited blossoms and then fruit. “Every spring,” my mother used to say, “everything changes.” I was thinking about how right she’d always been when I heard a knock on my apartment door.
“Can I come in?”
Did Jeffrey expect me to say no? No, because you are not my son. No, because for some reason you broke into my office and read my files and stole a document. No, because you’ve trespassed on my investigation and my life.
“Of course.”
“I guess you know about the result of the DNA tests,” he began awkwardly.
“I heard your daughter’s just fine, thank God. Was there anything else?”
The pain in his face shamed me for torturing him. What had happened was no fault of his. “Sit down.” I gestured toward my living room, and Jeffrey took a seat near the door.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
He answered, “Water,” and I went to the kitchen. When I opened the cupboard for a glass, I knocked one off the shelf into the sink. It crashed and shattered. Jeffrey came running.
“I’m okay, Jeffrey.”
“Dad—”
“You don’t need to tell me how long you’ve known that I’m not your natural father. Or how you found out. Or what knowing has done to the relationship with your mother and sister—half sister. That is, I assume Ellen
is related to me in some way.”
“Dad, please.”
“I knew long ago, but refused to consider the evidence. Was it when I realized—the day I watched you being born—that you bore no resemblance to my family? Or the first day of kindergarten when your teacher initially refused to let you come home with me? Then there was ...”
I turned my back to him, stood still for a moment. Then I went back to the window. Over the valley, a hawk circled, effortlessly gliding on the currents rising from the ravine. Watching it, I regained composure. “I loved you then and love you now as if you were my natural son.”
He answered softly, “I’m sorry about ransacking the office. Are you going to charge me with B & E?” He brightened a bit with his small joke. “After all, it was because of the money.”
“What money?”
“Harpur’s money. My father put her estate into a numbered account in my name.”
“Jeffrey, weren’t you worried that you yourself would be a suspect in Harpur’s death?”
“No, Dad, no! I followed you around because I had to know for certain that my father didn’t kill his wife. I had to make sure her money wasn’t blood money.”
Jeffrey’s blond hair lay only slightly mussed on his fair brow. His blue eyes held my gaze, his slender body sat poised, his long-fingered hands folded on his knees. Never had he looked less like my flesh and blood. Never had he seemed more like my child.
“Son,” I said, “your sister is a fine lawyer, and she put together a strong case. Despite all her efforts, the Crown was unable to prove that your father killed anyone. You may have all sorts of theories as to what really happened that night, but if you have any respect for the law, you have to accept that John Stoughton-Melville is not guilty of premeditated homicide.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“My life in the law would be a mockery if I didn’t.” I watched as the young man I loved gave a tentative smile, as if the assurance of my words had relieved him of a terrible burden.
I took Nicky to visit Queenie in her small house on the old narrow street at the bottom of the city. He was hanging around me like a dog that thinks his master will soon leave on a long journey. I think he was still recovering from our narrow squeak in the case. “Ellis,” he commented as we drove through the city, “your daughter is brilliant. She gave us a great fight! Are you ever going to tell her so?”
I shook my head in an emphatic no, and squeezed the car into a space at the end of the street, where the houses gave onto a little park. I wondered if my decision to bring Nicky to see Queenie demonstrated my desire to avoid further commitment.
When Queenie opened her door, it was immediately clear that I didn’t need Nicky as a buffer. Outlined in the wooden frame of the door, shaded by the cool darkness of her hallway, Queenie was a raven-haired girl. Lost in the mists of memory was the abuse we’d both put ourselves through together, the nights we’d huddled drunkenly against the cold of the city and the cold of our despair, the mornings we’d spent walking the streets in the heat of summer. All I could think of was tomorrow.
She stepped into the sun, and I saw a woman in the fullness of her years, a woman of wisdom and strength.
I introduced Nicky, who sized up the situation in an instant and shook Queenie’s hand with the ardor of pupil to master.
“I need exercise. Nice-looking park down the street,” he said quickly. “Good to see you, Mrs. Johnson.” And before either Queenie or I could exclaim, he was off and out of sight.
“Nicky wanted to tell you a few things about how he helped me win the case, but I guess he’s shy.” I laughed, a ripple of happiness flowing over me.
“You better come in.”
Before we had gone two steps, I grabbed her. “I love you, and I want you to marry me.”
I felt her hold her breath, but otherwise she remained silent and unmoving against me. The warmth of her, the dusky scent of her skin. I breathed deeply even if she would not.
“Look,” she said, “before I make any promises, I got to tell you that Stow told me a secret—as a way to get me to help him. He said that you were the only person who could win his case and that winning would make sure that your son would have his rightful fortune. He—”
“Queenie,” I interrupted, “Jeffrey and I have been strangers most of our lives. In the last couple of years, since he came to live and work in our apartment building, since he married Tootie and had my granddaughter, Jeffrey and I have had a relationship as friends and business partners that we could never manage as father and son. But since this trial ...”
Queenie waited for me to compose myself. “All his life,” I went on, “I looked at Jeffrey as an incomprehensible alien, a puzzle, an enigma. But now that puzzle is solved. He is another man’s natural son. I accept that. But he’s my boy, too. We’ve made our peace.”
“What about our peace?” she asked.
“It’s in the bag,” I said lightly. And when she smiled, I pressed on. “Think about it, Queenie. Say you’ll be my wife.”
She did think about it. Four days later, she called me. “Yes, Your Hon—I mean, Ellis, yes I will.”
But before we became legal, Queenie and I had a project to complete. Which is why she and I, accompanied and assisted by Johnny Dirt, grunting and complaining throughout, sought out every homeless person we could find in the valley to offer them a chance at a new home.
“They ain’t gonna go for this,” Johnny had insisted when I showed him the map.
“It may be remote from downtown,” I conceded, “but it’s close to major suburban streets, and it’s close to me.”
“Why would you want a bunch of bums livin’ right under your nose?” Johnny asked with a skepticism honed by a lifetime spent at the bottom of the barrel.
“Because I like them, and because you’re my kind of guy.”
“Yeah, and I’m the Lord Mayor of London.”
Eventually he got into the spirit and helped Queenie and me round up almost fifty homeless and assist them in discarding belongings they didn’t need and packing up the remainder. Finally, on a cool morning in mid-June, we all met at the Bloor Viaduct and wound our way up into the wilderness of our chosen ravine. When we arrived, we forded the shallow Don and set up a new Tent City, whose denizens I could guarantee permanent habitation. “Because nobody could find it if they tried,” Johnny said with satisfaction.
And because Jeffrey and I owned the land.
June turned to full summer, and summer slid into August. My “victory” in gaining an acquittal for Stow meant I had gained some prospective clients, too. When a courier brought news from the Attorney General that I’d been appointed the Judge of Orphans, I was pleased, but remembered the price I’d pay in giving up my law practice yet again.
At Mechanises in the autumn of the year, it was time once again for the Red Mass.
The judge’s deputy assigned to me carefully adjusted the red sash that crossed my new black silk robe. “You look splendid, sir,” he said.
“You sure do!
I turned at the familiar voice. It was Ellen Portal, chief Crown prosecutor, mother of Angelo, my daughter. I hugged her. “You’re a good sport,” I said, and hugged her again. “Nicky McPhail is taking over my practice. He says if he ever comes up against you again, he’s going to concede on the spot. He thinks you’re a genius. Way smarter than your old man.”
“I am,” she said. “Smart enough never to be in the same courtroom with you again. Promise you’ll recuse yourself.”
“I promise,” I said. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek. I took her arm and together we walked toward the door of the great cathedral. She left me in the company of my fellow judges.
Soon we entered in stately procession. I glanced ahead to see where Queenie was sitting. Ellen and Angelo were on one side of my wife and Nicky and Ellen’s husband on the other. Jeffrey and Tootie sat at the end of the pew. Ellen and Tootie were whispering to each other, perhaps about Tootie’s hat
, which resembled a large, burnt-black marshmallow.
The row behind was full of our homeless friends from the valley, and everyone was clean and appropriately dressed. My heart swelled with pride.
Anne sat a distance away, not with the family but with the spouses of some of the most senior-ranking judges in the court. Her future with Stow seemed assured. Forgive us .... as we forgive.
My thoughts of the turmoil of the years were distracted by the roll call of judges.
“Supreme Court Justice John Stoughton-Melville,” I heard.
Slowly, his head as elevated as his position, Stow turned away from the head of the procession and took his seat in the first row. He was wearing his ring, the one he had bestowed on five of us so long ago, conferring loyalty to our friendship. All our debts to each other had been paid. Justice may be balanced, but it is also blind.
I walked on. Then I heard my name. “His Honor, Judge Ellis Portal.”
It was enough.
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