Do or Die

by Barbara Fradkin

  “I’ll do my best, Adam,” he replied. “Kick me if you see steam starting to come out my ears.”

  Jules’ smile faded. “For all the good that’s ever done. Just solve the case for me, Michael. Brian is waiting for you outside.”

  * * *

  Sergeant Brian Sullivan was a former high school linebacker who took up most of the free space in Green’s little office, particularly when he paced. His blonde hair stood in tufts, and his square jaw was set.

  “What a fuck-up!” he exclaimed as soon as he shut the door. “Everything that can go wrong in a homicide case went wrong in this one, and who does it turn out to be? Some friend of the goddamn Police Chief!” His expression changed abruptly as he registered Green’s suit, and he burst out laughing. “You look like a bargain basement shoe salesman!”

  “Don’t start.” Green grinned as he stuffed the reports back in the file and pocketed his keys. “Let’s go over to the crime scene. You can fill me in on this stuff as you drive.”

  Outside, they found themselves in the crush of the morning rush hour. The June sun glared off chrome and glass, making Sullivan squint as he bulldozed the unmarked blue Taurus into the traffic. In front of them, traffic oozed along the elevated Queensway which bisected the city. Exhaust fumes shimmered in the rising heat. Another scorcher, Green thought, wondering how the city’s tempers, frayed by unemployment and government cutbacks, would handle yet another stress. He glanced at Sullivan, who was fuming at a red light.

  “So tell me about the fuck-up.”

  Sullivan rubbed his face wearily. “First of all, some moron sounded the fire alarm, so when the fire trucks arrived, there was near-panic on the main floor. Firemen rushing in, students trying to get out. Any hope our suspect was still in the building went up in smoke. Then the security guard who called in the 911 only asked for an ambulance, said someone was hurt. Didn’t say stabbed. Didn’t know, apparently. So the dispatcher sent a routine patrol unit along with the fire ambulance. One constable—a rookie who hardly even remembered the procedure book. He tried his best. I mean, the victim was still alive, so I know his first concern had to be…anyway, he got there about two minutes after the firemen, who were giving CPR, so he rushed in to help them. But meanwhile, they trample all over the scene, they move the victim. Nobody takes pictures, nobody secures the scene, a whole bunch of other people—firemen, rubberneckers, university security—come up in the elevators and get in the way.”

  The light turned green. Sullivan squealed the tires, accelerating around the corner, only to stop short at the next light. He sighed.

  “Finally one of the firemen takes charge and, thank God, he has a brain. He asks the rookie if Ident’s been called, and the kid says Jeez, I forgot, and he starts remembering his guide book. So he calls for back-up. I get a call and so does Ident. Lou Paquette was on—one lucky break. There were a dozen cops on the scene when I got there, but the paramedics took off to the General with only one patrol officer. Nobody thinks to take fingernail scrapings or bag the hands. Nobody thinks to stop the emerg doctors from tossing all his clothes into a bag. We got them back, but, oh Jesus, Mike, they’ve got to be contaminated as hell.”

  Green had listened to this rambling tirade without interruption, but now he looked across at his colleague, who had stopped for air. In the silence, their police radios chattered in mindless bursts which they no longer heard. Brian Sullivan looked beyond tired. His normally ruddy Irish farm boy face was white with fatigue, and new lines were beginning to pull at the corners of his eyes. It seems like yesterday we were rookies together, Green thought, but look how this job has battered him.

  Green’s first wife had stomped off in disgust with their baby in tow after only three years of marriage, leaving him without ties or obligations for nearly ten years, but Sullivan had married his first love, had three children in rapid succession, and now struggled to keep his life compartmentalized. He was too much of a professional to bring his home worries onto the job, but sometimes, as now, the stress seeped through. As they inched over the Pretoria Bridge across the Rideau Canal, stuck behind a line of cars doing an illegal left turn onto Colonel By Drive, he drummed his fingers and cursed. Green wondered what else was eating at him.

  “Does it get any worse?” he asked gently.

  “Can it get worse?” Sullivan countered. “Put it this way. It doesn’t get better. I leave Lou Paquette and his Ident team to get what they can from the mess in the library, and I rush off to the hospital, but the victim’s in surgery. No instructions to anybody to listen for dying declarations. And worse, the guy has no ID on him. Not even a library card!”

  “His wallet was probably lifted.”

  “I figured that.” Sullivan broke off long enough to accelerate around a red Honda waiting to turn left. The car beside him blasted its horn, and he raised his middle finger. “Unless of course it fell out while the guys were moving him. Anything is possible in this fiasco. But as a result, we didn’t know who the John Doe was. I ran a description through missing persons and checked recent reports, but it was only a bit past midnight by then, and who the hell reports a fully grown man missing at that hour? Probably not even at four a.m. Anyway, the victim comes out of surgery and into recovery, but he hasn’t regained consciousness and it doesn’t look like he will in a hurry, so I post a uniform by his bed and I go back to the scene. No—first I checked his clothes. Expensive, so I know the guy’s not starving. Conservative, so I figure he’s not a punk, but that’s no surprise. He was stabbed in the Shakespeare section of the university library. Not your average street punk’s stomping ground. That’s why dispatch screwed up so badly on the 911 call, by the way. Sergeant Jones says ‘Who the hell expects a stabbing in a library, for God’s sake! If the call had come from a parking lot in the Byward Market, we’d have sent four experienced teams down there right away. Not one poor rookie.’ And it’s not the kid’s fault, after all. There was a lot of blood around, and he just wanted to save the boy’s life. I’d have forgotten all the procedural shit myself fifteen years ago.”

  Sullivan pulled the Taurus to a halt behind a police van near the entrance to the library, and the two jumped out. A police officer was posted at the entrance to the library and another at the elevators. One elevator had been commandeered for use in the investigation, and the fourth floor button had been taped on the other elevators. Students gathered in whispering clumps, gawking curiously.

  Sullivan led Green into the elevator and punched four. “Looks great now, doesn’t it? Everything according to procedure, every ‘t’ crossed. The Ident team has cordoned off the entire fourth floor, and they’re probably still there.”

  The elevator door slid open, revealing yellow plastic tape across the exit. They logged in with the uniform on guard, and ducked under the tape. Ahead of them, half a dozen men were crawling around on the floor with magnifying glasses.

  “Yes, they’re still here.”

  “And we’ll probably be here till Christmas,” came a gravelly voice from behind a bookcase. An instant later the senior Identification Officer, Sergeant Lou Paquette, emerged around the corner, red-faced from crawling. “We haven’t found a damn thing yet.” He peeled off his latex glove and held out his hand to Green. “Glad to see you, Mike.”

  “You’ve got nothing?” Green echoed in dismay.

  “Oh, we’ve got tons of shit. Fingerprints, hair, fibres, bloodstains. There’s blood all over the place. The witnesses tracked it around, the paramedics tracked it around. The only thing I can’t tell is if the killer tracked it around. And this is a public place. There could be fingerprints and fibres from half the city of Ottawa here. The half that doesn’t have prints on file downtown.” Paquette grinned at his own attempt at humour. His mustache quivered. “I’ve sent a guy to collect the shoes from every fireman and paramedic who was at the scene. That’ll be fun.”

  Green took out his notebook. “Can you tell us anything?”

  Paquette sighed and grew sober. “As far as
I can tell, there was no struggle. No books were pulled down, nothing kicked out of place. It’s a narrow space. It would be hard to fight without knocking the bookshelves.”

  “And the young woman who found the victim heard no sound of an argument, no screams,” Sullivan added. “Libraries are pretty quiet. She would have heard a violent scuffle.”

  “Did she see anything unusual that evening? Anyone suspicious or out of place?”

  “Nothing that she remembered, but she was pretty shaken up. She got covered in blood, and all she could think about was getting cleaned up. After the preliminaries, I let her go home.”

  Green nodded. “We’ll get to her later.”

  They had walked to the far end of the library along the path Ident had laid out and now stood in front of the large, browning pool of blood where the body had been.

  “The victim was stabbed once in the abdomen,” Sullivan said. “According to the emergency room surgeon, the weapon pierced the stomach and lacerated the liver, nicking an artery as it went by. It sounds like a horizontal thrust directly forward, made by a knife held at waist level.”

  “I suppose nobody took photographs of the wound before they sutured it all up?”

  Sullivan grinned. “You got it.”

  Green looked up from his notes with a snort. “Jesus. Jules said the case needed me, but what it really needs is a goddamn miracle.”

  * * *

  The two detectives stayed at the scene another fifteen minutes reviewing the meagre forensic harvest. No murder weapon, no signs of disturbance or misplaced property, hundreds of latent fingerprints which would take days to analyze and could not be tied definitively to the murder anyway. Blood had been tracked up and down the aisle leading to the elevator as well as the two aisles on either side, but the traces were consistent with bloodstained shoes rather than with drops of falling blood. The only spilt blood was the large pool where the body had been and a fine spray of arterial blood on the bookshelf nearby.

  “The perpetrator would have got blood on himself, without a doubt,” Paquette said. “On his hand and sleeve, probably also on his shirt, pants and shoes. The body fell forward. The perpetrator would have had trouble jumping out of the way in time, especially since he was trying to pull out his knife. Some of these bloody footprints may be his, once I eliminate all the other assholes who were on the scene.”

  Green sketched the scene, noting the rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves which effectively blocked any overview of the area. Jonathan Blair’s killer had trapped him in a remote corner, where the chances of anyone witnessing the crime were even fewer. By luck or design?

  Green glanced at his watch. “Brian, I want to meet with the mother before she calls the Chief again, and I need you to tell me what else you’ve got. Come on, I’ll buy you a coffee. I missed having mine this morning.”

  Seated over two mugs of scalding coffee at Harvey’s, Green mustered a smile for his weary colleague. There was no one he respected more. The two had been friends since they started together on the streets twenty years earlier, and although Green had risen further through the ranks, placing strain on the friendship in sensitive moments, he secretly considered Sullivan the better cop. The Deputy Chief was right. He, Green, was only good at detective work. Sullivan was good at everything, paperwork and organization as well as handling people and crises. And in the middle of a case, you couldn’t ask for a more careful, thorough investigator.

  “How did you finally identify him, by the way? You didn’t get that far in your depressing tale of professional incompetence.”

  “His mother called in, finally. Actually, her personal assistant called in, guy by the name of Peter Weiss. Apparently the victim was the quiet type, no wild parties, no late nights, a bookworm. Never stayed out all night. Maybe he’d have one drink with friends after the library closed, but he was usually home by midnight. Certainly by two. So when his mother woke up at five in the morning—she’s some kind of early morning freak—and saw he never came home, she heard on the early morning radio about a stabbing in the library, and she got worried. So Weiss called the station. By then Blair was dead. He died at three fifty-six a.m. without regaining consciousness. When the assistant called I was just trying to wake MacPhail and get him down to the hospital to take over the body. I let him have all the beauty sleep I could spare, but I didn’t want the ordinary doctors screwing up the evidence any more than it already had been.”

  Sullivan took a sip of coffee and cradled his chin in his massive hand. Some life suffused his reddened eyes as he grinned. “That old Scot is a bugger to wake up. I always have to hold the phone two feet from my ear when I call at night. But he came through for us. He got to the hospital in half an hour, reeking of whiskey but at full steam. He ranted up and down about the suturing, but after he’d examined the body and looked at the medical records, he came out with his theory. Sharp, smooth-edged knife, at least six-inch blade, he guessed about an inch to an inch and a half wide. He’ll know more after the autopsy. One smooth horizontal stroke in and out.”

  Green whistled. “Neat job.”

  “Yup. And into the middle of all this, without any warning, just as MacPhail is loading the body bag into the elevator to go down to the morgue, along comes the little rookie again wanting us to unbag the body so mummy’s assistant can have a look.”

  “In the middle of the hospital hallway?”

  Sullivan laughed. “That was my reaction. I was tired and I was mad about all the mistakes people had made, especially him. So I told him to follow proper procedure and take the assistant down to meet us at the morgue.”

  “Nothing wrong with that, Brian. Rigid, maybe, but by the book. No one can fault you for that.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, the Deputy Chief did. Showed up twenty minutes later with this Weiss guy in tow, ripping a strip off me for caring more about procedure than about the decent citizens of Ottawa. I saw my whole career flashing before my eyes. My mortgage, my three kids, tuition for college—all bye-bye.”

  “Ach! Political grandstanding to impress the Chief, that’s all. You’ve done the right things, Brian. You were the first person to act like a professional in this whole mess.”

  “Yeah. We’ll know soon, won’t we? When I’ve been assigned to permanent traffic detail.”

  Green grinned. “You’ve been assigned to me. So let’s get on it. Did you have time to find witnesses or interview anyone?”

  Sullivan rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Besides the young woman who found him? Are you kidding? I was so busy chasing the body and mopping up everyone else’s mess, I had no time to investigate! We don’t have one lead, we don’t have shit, but every ‘t’ has been crossed.”

  Green felt the caffeine from his second cup beginning to spread through his system, bringing with it a return of optimism. He glanced at his watch. Nine oh-five. “Right now I’m heading over to interview the mother. That’s going to be a tough one, so I’ll be turning off my radio, but you can reach me by cell if you have to. Arrange a briefing for ten-thirty with all the men Jules gave me.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “We’ll find a trail, Brian, once we start talking to Jonathan Blair’s friends and family. A nice kid who studies Shakespeare and lives with Mummy can’t have too many enemies.”

  Two

  The Village of Rockcliffe Park was not a village in any normal sense of the word, except perhaps in exclusivity. It was a tree-lined enclave perched on a bluff above the Ottawa river, surrounded by the bustling city and boasting the highest per capita income of any municipality in Canada. Mercedes and Volvos sat discreetly on shaded drives, and massive beds of peonies and irises framed the old stone mansions. Even the heat was tempered.

  The living room of Marianne Blair’s Rockcliffe mansion was painted Wedgwood blue, perfectly offsetting the rose floral love seats which framed the Persian rug. A discreet, oldmonied room, perfect for a rich benefactress, Green thought, except that the designer had neglected to take a good look at the owner. Marianne Blair
contrasted harshly with her surroundings, at least in her current raw state. She hunched on the edge of a love seat, dressed in a shapeless brown sweat suit, her gray hair askew and large jowls quivering.

  Her personal assistant stationed himself at her side, glaring at Green. Weiss had met the detective at the front door, wrinkling his nose visibly at Green’s suit and inspecting his ID for a conspicuously long time. Green knew that at five feet, ten inches, with mousey brown hair and hazel eyes, he was remarkable only for his nose. It was the only visible trace of his Semitic heritage, which was generally honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

  His parents were both Holocaust survivors who had lost their first families to the ovens, and they had an almost paranoid fear of public exposure. They had met in a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after the war, but it had taken them nearly fifteen years to risk having a child, and even then the Jewish festivals had been muted, secretive affairs. Green had grown up with Hasidic folktales and Klezmer clarinets ringing in his ears, but outside the family walls, his parents cautioned their sandy-haired, hazel-eyed boy to keep his Jewishness to himself.

  In the modern, urban world into which he moved, that proved seductively easy. He belonged to no synagogue or Jewish groups, worked in an entirely non-Jewish environment, had almost no Jewish friends and none of the previous women in his life, including his first wife, had been Jewish. His recent marriage to Sharon Levy had been as much of a surprise to him as it had been to his father. Although Sharon had been trying to introduce some Jewish traditions into their family life since the birth of their son, Green’s identity still found its main outlet in his commitment to smoked meat, bagels and Nate’s Delicatessen.