by Scott Mackay
“That would be a Michelin XGT,” he said, without preamble. He spoke with the remnants of a Scottish brogue. “Has to come from a big car, a luxury sedan. We see that particular Michelin on the Lincoln Town Car, the Crown Victoria, the Mercury Grand Marquis, the Buick Roadmaster…” He shook his head. “You see it on a lot of the larger luxury cars, about a dozen in all.” He stood up and looked at the contralateral track. He measured the distance between the tracks. He slid his tape measure back into his pocket, took out a pack of Players Light, stuck one in his mouth, and lit up with a bulky brass lighter. He took a large pull and rubbed his nose with the back of his thumb, as if in this cold he had to make sure his nose was still there. “You give me the photos. I’ll do some comparisons back at the shop. I might be able to narrow it down for you, but I doubt it. You’ve got a tough one here.”
Gilbert and Lombardo watched the ambulance attendants slide the corpse onto the stretcher and cover it with an orange blanket. He would go home tonight to his wife and two daughters, and he would have a hot meal, and watch some television, and maybe browse through the latest issue of National Geographic. This woman would spend the night in the morgue. And once the girls were settled, and the furnace was humming in the basement, keeping them all warm, he and Regina would make love. And Regina’s body would be soft, and her breasts would be pliant, and she would be breathing, and her heart would be pumping. She would be alive. This woman was dead. Even when they finally thawed her out she would still be cold. As he watched them load the woman’s body into the back of the ambulance, he felt the old darkness coming back, his cynicism, and the sense that no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t make a difference. This woman would never breathe again. And the blood would never move through her veins. He shook his head. There would never be any comfort for this woman ever again.
Two
Gilbert stood at the fourth-floor window of the duty room staring at Addison Cadillac and Buick across the street, listening to the detectives of the Homicide Squad gather behind him. He wasn’t sure if he liked the new building here on College Street; he missed Jarvis Street. His eyes strayed to the corner, where cars, trucks, and buses rolled ceaselessly by on Bay Street. He missed the sense of community on Jarvis Street. He missed his coffee and brown toast at the Carlton Grill. He even missed the hookers on Isabella. Here on College Street, a few blocks from the Parliament Buildings, with the Coroner’s Office just across the street, the sidewalks at lunch hour were thronged with civil servants. He missed all the old bag ladies with their bundle buggies, the panhandlers asking for change on Sherbourne Street, and the bright young kids from Jarvis Collegiate Institute.
He turned around. Lombardo approached with two cups of coffee. The young detective looked worried. His heavy brow had settled into an even line and his dark Piedmontese eyes smoldered with quiet wrath as he handed Gilbert his cup.
“I don’t like it when Marsh calls a meeting out of the blue like this,” said Lombardo.
Gilbert shrugged. “We’ve got to have meetings, Joe,” he said.
“Why don’t we have them in the office?”
“Because the office is too small.”
Staff Inspector Bill Marsh, head of Homicide, entered the duty room carrying a few sheets of dog-eared paper. He was an older man, barrel-chested, with hair combed severely to the left, his face heavily wrinkled from years of liquid lunches. Today he wore meticulously creased grey flannels, black brogues, and a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, black tie loosened, tufts of grey chest hair spilling from the undone button at the top.
“Move in, move in,” ordered Marsh. “I don’t want to shout. Gilbert, Lombardo, get up here.”
The two detectives moved forward. Gilbert looked around the room, caught Bob Bannatyne’s eye, nodded, then scanned the rest of the room. The members of his team—Jim Groves, Petro Halycz, Gordon Telford—were staring at him, each of them looking to some extent as if they had been betrayed, as if they believed Gilbert had been holding back on them. Gilbert shrugged, trying to look puzzled.
“Are we all here?” asked Marsh. “Where’s Birnbaum?”
“He’s out on a case,” said Hetherington.
“All right,” said Marsh. He had a rough voice—too many years of smoking. “I’ll tell him later.” Marsh put his papers on the table; he looked out of place in this new modern building; he looked more at home in the dirt and clutter of the old one. “I’ll give you the straight goods,” he said. “Homicide has been asked to take a cut. We knew things were going to change once we moved up here. I’m sorry, but we don’t have a choice. They look at our case clearance rate, and how it’s dipped in the last few months, and they find their justifications. There’s nothing I can do. Some of you are going to have to go.”
Marsh stopped and looked at each and every one of the squad sergeants, Gilbert included; he perhaps looked at Gilbert longer than anyone.
“Ling calls me to his office, and he asks me, what’s with these low clearance rates in Homicide? Why aren’t you guys arresting anybody?”
Bob Bannatyne, one of the squad’s veterans, spoke up. “You tell Ling, give us more manpower and we’ll solve more murders. We haven’t increased staff here in five years. But now we have more than double the murder rate. Tell him he can’t read the numbers the old way anymore.”
“You think I haven’t told him that?” said Marsh. The Staff Inspector put his fists on his hips. “He says you got to work harder. They all think that way now. Ever since Tom Webb came down with his package last fall. Ling says to me, don’t look at it as a cutback, look at it as a challenge. Don’t look at it as more work, look at it as an opportunity.”
Detective Fanshaw, from Kilbourn’s quadrant, spoke up. “And meanwhile we haven’t had a raise in five years. Meanwhile, they jack up the price of our long-term disability and completely discontinue our drug formulary so every time my little girl gets an ear infection I’m out twenty-five bucks for penicillin. And Ling says look at it as an opportunity?”
Marsh shrugged. “What do you want me to do?” he said. “I didn’t vote Tory. I knew the Tories were going to do this from way back. You get a guy like Webb in there and you know the axe is going to fall.”
Gilbert asked, “So how big a cut are we looking at?”
Marsh looked at him, then at all the other detectives.
“Eighteen percent over the next three years,” he said. “And that’s for everyone. Burglary, Vice, Sex Crimes, the SIU, the Bomb Squad, everybody. Some of you guys are going to be bumped, maybe back to patrol, maybe somewhere else. And I’m sorry, but some of you will just be canned outright, so you better start working on your resumes. Seven percent by April, six percent next year, and five percent the next. That’s the way it is. That’s what we got to deal with.”
When Gilbert left the duty room and went back downstairs to the office, Carol Reid, one of the squad’s secretaries, handed him a message slip: Dr. Blackstein. Please call.
He looked at Carol Reid as she weaved among the cubicles back to her own desk; her phone was ringing.
“Did he say?” asked Gilbert.
Carol glanced over her shoulder; her square-rimmed glasses magnified her milky blue eyes.
“Something about the new Jane Doe,” she said.
Gilbert walked to his own desk, much larger than the one he had on Jarvis Street, and called the Office of the Chief Coroner of the Province of Ontario. Got Dr. Blackstein’s voice mail. Damn. He was curious now. An identification? Maybe. One thing about the new building, it was convenient to the Coroner’s Office. Blackstein was always happy to see him. He put the phone down and pulled on his coat.
He caught Lombardo standing at the security access doors next to the third-floor elevators with a couple of other young detectives; they all looked worried. And Lombardo looked more worried than the rest. His easygoing Mediterranean charm had deserted him. It wasn’t the money with Joe; it was the job. He loved the work, would never want to give it up. Gilbert touched his
sleeve.
“I’m going to the coroner’s,” he said.
Lombardo’s eyes widened. “What’s up?”
“Don’t know,” said Gilbert. “Something. You want to come?”
Lombardo shook his head. “Wish I could,” he said. “I’ve got to see that social worker. The Wesley Rowe case?”
Gilbert’s mood soured. “She’s going to show you fake documentation.”
“I know.”
“Remember, she’s not a typist, she’s a social worker. You’re going to see that in anything she gives you.”
“I know.” Lombardo glanced nervously across the atrium, where they saw Bill Marsh enter the Homicide Office. “We’re going catch it, aren’t we? Marsh isn’t going to like this manslaughter charge, especially when the Crown is pushing for first-degree.”
Gilbert frowned as he looked at Marsh. “I don’t care what Marsh likes,” he said. “I just care about what’s fair. Get the record. I guarantee it, she’s going to try something. She’s fumbled, and now she’s going to try to recover. Even if Wesley has to go to prison for twenty-five years.”
He went the back way out, onto Grenville Street.
Out on the street the wind struck him like a fist. He pulled his collar tightly around his neck. He tried to forget about Marsh. Bay Street was clogged with the tail end of morning rush hour. The wind was so fierce he turned around, protecting his face from the sub-zero blast.
He looked at the life-size statue outside the Grenville entrance: a boy pulling a wagon; in the wagon, a large stone obelisk; on the obelisk, four words: TO SERVE, TO PROTECT. A bizarre piece. Half the detectives didn’t understand it. A small boy struggling to pull a stone obelisk in his wagon. Gilbert had his own interpretation. The stone obelisk was murder; you solved murder only by the most strenuous efforts; solving murder was as hard as pulling this big stone obelisk around in a wagon.
Dr. Blackstein was in a meeting when Gilbert got to the Coroner’s Building; Blackstein’s assistant asked Gilbert to wait in the hall outside the morgue, told him the meeting would be over in fifteen minutes. So Gilbert went downstairs.
The hall was lit with fluorescent lights. A few snack machines stood by the fire exit.
He was just feeding some quarters into one of the machines when the elevator doors opened and out came Dr. Mervin Blackstein. He was perhaps a little older than Gilbert, but a lot shorter, with a bald pate, a black rim of hair around his head. He had a paunch and wore surgical greens and a lab-coat. Half-rim glasses sat on his prominent nose. His face was set in neither a smile nor a frown. He looked at Gilbert, his eyes even-keeled.
“Your face is red,” said Dr. Blackstein.
“Have you been outside lately?” asked Gilbert.
“I don’t go outside,” said Blackstein. “They won’t let me. I live here.”
Gilbert pressed the appropriate buttons and a ham and cheese sandwich slid down the chute.
“We might as well have a look at her,” said Blackstein.
The doctor took out his keys, opened the morgue door, and in they went.
Twenty-seven bodies lay on metal gurneys on either side of them, each one covered with a sheet, some with toe tags, others with scrap paper taped to gurneys: men, women, children, the latest crew of suspicious deaths.
“You’ve got an identification,” guessed Gilbert. “Right?”
They walked to the second last gurney to the left; Blackstein pulled back the sheet.
“Do you follow politics at all?” asked Blackstein. “Did you watch any of the Provincial election on television last fall?”
Gilbert stared at the woman; she didn’t look so good, now that she was starting to thaw.
“My daughters don’t give me much chance at the TV,” he said.
Blackstein nodded. “I think you have yourself an interesting case, Barry.”
Gilbert’s shoulders sank; he wished now that the woman just might remain a Jane Doe.
“Who is she?”
Blackstein gazed at the body and nodded. “Her name is Cheryl Latham. One of the attendants recognized her. She’s been on TV a few times. She was a high profile campaigner for the Tories last fall. That’s how the attendant recognized her.” Dr. Blackstein shrugged. “Actually, she’s Tom Webb’s stepdaughter.”
Tom Webb. Life was always full of little connections. Tom Webb, the Tory axeman, the man ultimately responsible for Homicide’s eighteen-percent cut. Cheryl. She had a name now. She had an identity.
“What do you make of that gunshot wound?” asked Gilbert.
Blackstein pulled the sheet a little further down. Her flesh looked bruised down there. “I won’t really know until I cut her open,” said Blackstein. “But there should have been more blood. I think we have a good chance of recovering a decent slug. We’ll let her thaw a bit. If I try to retrieve the slug while she’s frozen like this, I might damage it.” He pulled the sheet over Cheryl Latham’s face and looked up at Gilbert. “I guess you better make an appointment to see Tom Webb.”
The Ontario Legislative Building—the province’s seat of power—stood at the top of University Avenue in Queen’s Park. The nineteenth-century building with its multitude of wings was of some architectural interest, especially to Gilbert, who had taken two years of architectural school before going into police work.
After leaving the Coroner’s Building, he walked west along Grenville Street. This took him directly to the east side of the Parliament Buildings. As he waited for the cars to pass, he looked up at the impressive landmark. As an architectural buff, he knew a thing or two about the building. Built in the 1890s, it was a Romanesque revival extravaganza made from ruddy red stone cut from quarries in and around the Credit Valley. Arches, buttresses, and turrets proliferated. The Canadian and Ontario flags snapped briskly in the cold north wind out front.
The traffic cleared and Gilbert walked across the street into the grounds. Some health-care workers were gathered with pickets by the main portico to protest the latest round of cuts. He couldn’t help noticing the words on one of the pickets: STOP THE WEBB OF DECEIT. He shook his head. Webb might have been the Premier’s axeman, but he was also Willis’ lightning rod. He passed the statue of Queen Victoria, hurried up the steps, and entered the spacious main hall.
He checked his watch. Nearly one. The Legislative Assembly would be breaking for lunch soon; his appointment with Webb was at one-fifteen. He showed a uniformed legislative security officer his shield and asked where he might find Webb’s office.
“Second floor, west wing, near the end,” said the officer.
Gilbert climbed the stairs, his footsteps muffled on the thick red carpet. Paintings hung everywhere, old ones, portraits of politicians and generals from Ontario’s colonial past, and a particularly large one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation above the large entrance to the Legislative Library. He glanced up at the panoply of foliage carved into the sycamore and mahogany trim. He hairpinned around the banister and climbed the next set of stairs. As he passed the doors of the Legislative Chamber, he heard the province’s parliamentarians pontificating within; a tattoo of bench slapping erupted; an honorable member was trying to shout over this bench slapping, pleading with the Speaker to bring the House to order. Gilbert shook his head and continued on.
He ventured into the west wing, past the white marbled colonnades, and soon came to the office of the chairman of the management board, the cabinet position Webb occupied, his name in gold lettering on frosted glass. He pushed the heavy mahogany door open and was greeted by a receptionist, a young woman with dark shoulder-length hair, pale green eyes, a complexion as fair as porcelain. Gilbert showed her his shield.
“I’m here to see Mr. Webb,” he said. “I have an appointment at one-fifteen.”
The woman glanced at his badge, lifted the phone, dialed an in-house extension, and paused.
“Jane?” said the woman. “Detective Gilbert is here. Should I send him in?”
Another pause. Gilbert looked ar
ound the office. Six or seven cubicles made up the central area; several doorways led to numerous separate offices, and through an open door in the corner he saw an empty meeting room, appointed in dark mahogany, with red carpeting, a large meeting table, and several chairs hobnailed with red leather. Various assistants and secretaries busied themselves at computer terminals.
“Thanks, Jane.” The woman put the phone down. “Jane will be out in a minute,” she said. “If you just want to take a seat.”
“Thanks.”
He took off his coat and scarf, hung them on an antique coat-tree, and sat down.
A minute later, a woman in her mid-forties emerged from one of the offices, a bright public-relations smile on her face.
“Detective Gilbert?” she said. “I’m Jane Ireland, Mr. Webb’s personal secretary. If you’d like to wait in his office.”
She was attractive, slim, wore a deep blue outfit with imposing shoulders and rigorous business-like lines, a suit that spoke of power and influence. Though her lips were rather small, and her chin and brow somewhat pronounced, she nonetheless had pleasing blue eyes. Her hair was a deep chestnut brown. He was surprised by how thick her wrists were, strong wrists, mannish wrists, as if she did a lot of heavy lifting.
“I’m a little early,” said Gilbert.
“That’s all right,” said Ms. Ireland, as if nothing could make her happier. “Just follow me.”
She turned and walked with prim steps, leading him to the office.
The Minister’s office consisted of two rooms; the outer reception room, where Jane Ireland had her desk and computer, and the inner office, Tom Webb’s office. As she closed the door, the smile slipped from Ms. Ireland’s face like leaves from a maple in fall.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
Gilbert’s face settled. He could appreciate Jane Ireland’s concern, how she wanted to protect her boss.
“I’m afraid I better talk to Mr. Webb,” he said.