Stranglehold

by Rotenberg, Robert

  Jennifer had never told Greene this. He remembered once she’d mentioned that her oldest son was extremely bright and complained about how he’d bounced around from school to school. Her exact words had stuck in his brain: “Being ‘gifted’ is just another term for being disabled.”

  But he had no idea it was serious. Now that he thought of it, she’d insisted they wait until September before she finally left her husband because she said she needed to get Aaron settled in a new school.

  Something else fell into place. The last time he was at a motel with her, Jennifer had asked him what he thought about a cop on the drug squad. Drugs were a federal matter. She was a provincial Crown and would never have reason to deal with the guy. He’d thought the question a bit strange.

  “What kind of serious?” he asked Kennicott. “Drugs?”

  “Big-time. He started as a graffiti artist, spray-painting everywhere. He caused a lot of serious damage and got arrested a few times for mischief. They kept letting him off if he paid restitution, so he’d sell drugs at school to pay the fines. Then, of course, he got kicked out of school. The cop I talked to this afternoon said he’s turned into a major dealer. He’s out on bail for the third time in twelve months. The parents, I mean Jennifer and Howard, had to put up twenty thousand bucks. And they’ve just put him in a special private school.”

  Jennifer, Greene thought, you had so many secrets. You carried so many burdens without complaint. Now he understood why it had been so hard for her to break away from her husband.

  “Did you know Raglan was a cop before she went to law school?” Kennicott asked.

  “What?” he said, probably sounding too surprised. He had no idea at all. At every turn he was learning things about her that he’d never known.

  “Morality squad. Apparently she was really good.”

  The morality squad was a euphemistic term for the pretty young policewomen who posed as prostitutes in high-traffic residential areas plagued by hookers. They’d wait for johns to proposition them, then signal for backup and arrests. Greene could picture young Jennifer Raglan as a beautiful and tough cop, excellent at the job.

  Okay Ari, quit stalling, he told himself. This was the moment. He had to tell Kennicott right now that he’d been in the motel room this morning. That he’d found her dead body.

  But something made him pause again. The all-too-perfect setup. The squad car and the ambulance screaming past him on Kingston Road, how they’d arrived just at the time when he was supposed to be in the room.

  That voice in the back of his head was telling him to be careful.

  And Jennifer. He wanted to find out more about her. Needed to. Everything. Once he told Kennicott, he’d be totally sidelined.

  “I can handle this,” Kennicott said. “We need to keep our talks up here completely off the radar. Okay?”

  Perhaps her husband, Howard, was right. The affair wasn’t the important thing, Greene thought. He had to find the killer. That was all that mattered. Then again, what would it look like if he didn’t tell Kennicott everything, right now?

  “Ari?” Kennicott said.

  Greene snapped his head up. Kennicott had never called Greene by his first name before. “Yes, what?”

  “You okay?” Kennicott asked. “You look pale. I know you and Raglan did a lot of cases together. Maybe I’m asking too much for you to be involved in this.”

  Greene felt faint. He’d been thinking so intently, he’d hardly breathed. He had to decide. How could he deceive Daniel Kennicott like this? How could he let himself be cut out of investigating Jennifer’s murder? And how much more was there about the woman he’d been in love with that he didn’t know? He had to find out.

  “We should meet here every day,” he said.

  Kennicott smiled. “That would be great. This is between you and me.”

  “On one condition,” Greene said. “No secrets. You need to tell me everything.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Kennicott said.

  There are a thousand reasons why you shouldn’t, Greene thought as he sat on the broken chair and felt the drying rack vibrate beneath his feet.

  17

  THE DISHES IN THE SINK HAD PILED UP FOR THREE DAYS. THIS IS WHAT USUALLY HAPPENED TO Amankwah during the weeks when he didn’t have his two children. He got slovenly and depressed. And he threw himself into work more than ever.

  He constantly calculated how long it would be until his daughter, Fatima, and his son, Abdul, would be back racing around his tiny apartment, causing havoc, spreading joy. He’d brought them to school this morning and their mother had picked them up there. This was the start of the longest, and saddest, gap in his access cycle and he wouldn’t see them for nine days. Though he had to admit, with so much going on in the city right now, and this incredible story of Jennifer Raglan being murdered in a tacky motel out on Kingston Road, if he had to be alone, this was a good time for it.

  There was no more dish soap left and he didn’t have the energy to go back outside to buy any right now. Of course his ex-wife had a dishwasher in what used to be their home, but he’d been doing dishes in the sink his whole life.

  Like many people who had grown up poor, Amankwah had had no sense of his family’s poverty until he was a teenager. His parents left Ghana during a political coup in 1981, when he was six years old and his sister was ten. A lot of African immigrants to Toronto back then ended up living in high-rise apartments in Thorncliffe Park, a place always described in the press as a “densely populated, multicultural neighbourhood.”

  His father had been a newspaper editor back home. Amankwah’s fondest early memories were of his dad reading the Toronto Star at the kitchen table of their two-bedroom apartment every morning before he went to the factory. He’d fold the paper to a page and leave a note on it telling him to read a certain story when he got home from school.

  It was not until he won a scholarship to go to university in Ottawa that he met people his age who had expensive clothes, owned cars, and had no idea how to cook. When he got the job at the Star and his new wife, Claire, was hired as the anchor on the morning breakfast TV show, overnight they had money coming in. They bought a downtown condo. Shopped at the hippest clothes stores. Dined at the newest restaurants. Glossy magazines all wanted to do a feature story about Toronto’s sophisticated, media-savvy black couple. Invitations to big charity parties poured in.

  Then, after the children were born, Claire left him for a white TV sportscaster and Amankwah crashed. His dream of becoming the newspaper’s first black foreign correspondent was in tatters. Replaced by his fear of getting fired as his performance plummeted. Now he lived in this two-bedroom apartment above a Chinese restaurant on Gerrard Street, about the size of the Scarborough apartment he grew up in, and had to struggle every month to pay the rent and support payments. For the first time in his life, he felt poor.

  His apartment was hot, so he opened the front window. The sound of a streetcar rumbling by mixed with the chatter of shoppers buying their fresh vegetables from the grocery stores below, whose produce spilled out onto the crowded sidewalk.

  He was hungry, but he wanted to put in a good hour or two of work before he went out to grab a bite to eat and get some dish soap. Tomorrow was an important day.

  In early August, when Barclay Church had arrived as the paper’s new editor, he’d called a general meeting with all the reporters. A tall, skinny man with an unruly tuft of red hair, the man dressed terribly and wore remarkably unfashionable glasses. Michelle Goates, the style reporter who was also the newsroom wit, called him a cross between Woody Allen and John Cleese, with an accent you could barely understand.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” he had said once everyone had assembled in the fourth-floor cafeteria, the beautiful view of the lake behind him. “No doubt I must seem like a strange bird to all of you, with my fucking thick northern English brogue.”

  A ripple of laughter slid around the room. “Fucking” had come out sounding like “fogging.” My foggi
ng thick brogue.

  “I have the distinct advantage of knowing nowt about your city or any of you lot. I plan to spend the next fortnight walking around, and then I’ll chat with each one of you in turn. But for now, I say we have some fun putting out this ruddy paper.”

  And that was it. No big cheerleading session. No talk of some grand vision. Strange.

  Everyone assumed when Church said he was going to walk around, he meant he’d be lurking over their shoulders in the newsroom and fine-dining in trendy restaurants with the higher-ups.

  Instead he completely disappeared. After a couple of days, reporters started sighting him on a streetcar, or walking by the lake, or browsing in some suburban shopping mall. One day, Amankwah was at the overcrowded and run-down courthouse in a strip mall in Scarborough, covering a preliminary inquiry into a shooting that had killed two innocent people at a street party, one of them a child. When he went to the washroom, there was Church, washing his hands in the dirty sink. An old camera was slung over his shoulder.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, as if they were fast friends.

  “Hi,” Amankwah said, stunned. “You out here to watch this shooting case?”

  “Of course not,” Church said. “Everyone else is fucking doing that. I’m taking pictures. I started out in the business as a photog. This place is a disaster. Imagine putting a courthouse in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere? Who in the world thought this is a good idea? Well, must be off. Ta-ra.”

  When Church came back from his two weeks of “walking around,” he called everyone together again. “The only fucking promise I’m going to make,” he said, to the group of now very intrigued reporters, “is that no meetings like this will last more than five minutes. Every ass-sitting, scumbag-sucking media pundit out there says newspapers are dying. Probably bloody right. Look, we’ve got the fifth-biggest city in North America here. There’s got to be much more sex, drugs, and rock and roll going on, with a lovely dose of crime and corruption thrown in for some fun. If we’re sinking anyways, let’s at least kick in some windows.”

  Over the next few weeks, reporters talked about their “chats” with Church. He’d read each of their articles for the last few years, and wanted to know how to help them have more “fun.” Even the most cynical, veteran reporters found themselves inspired.

  Amankwah’s turn was tomorrow afternoon. He’d been fretting about it for days. Worried that he hadn’t landed a good story all summer. What new and exciting things could he offer up to fit Church’s idea of fun?

  Now he had the after-date story, with hockey players and call girls, and the hint of cops being involved. Add to this the Raglan motel murder. He’d have to come up with a good headline for that and call it in to the desk to impress Church.

  Maybe CASE CLOSED ON PROSECUTOR. Or MOTEL MURDER MYSTERY. How about HEAD CROWN CAUGHT IN STRANGLEHOLD?

  That’s the ticket.

  He couldn’t wait until tomorrow when he could reboot his career. It had turned out to be a great Monday after all.

  18

  “DAD,” GREENE SAID, LEANING ON THE RAKE HE WAS USING ON HIS FATHER’S LAWN, “SHE’S twenty-five years younger than you.”

  Greene’s father was staring at the backside of his latest girlfriend, a larger-than-life Russian bombshell named Klavdiya, as she strutted up the concrete steps to his little bungalow. He snapped his head toward Ari. “Twenty-three and a half,” he said. “And you won’t let me drive at night. She drives at night.”

  It was a beautiful evening and all Greene could think was, Jennifer’s dead. She’s missing this gorgeous sunset. And everything else.

  He bent down, grabbed a pile of weeds, grass clippings, and a few early falling leaves, and dumped them in the paper yard-waste bag by his side. “I bet she does,” he said.

  His mother had died two years earlier, after an extended descent into Alzheimer’s, and since then Greene’s father had been making up for lost time. First came a parade of women near his age, and almost his height. Armed with casseroles, they arrived at his front door, blush freshly applied to their cheeks, lips tight with determination. Then there were taller women, ten, maybe fifteen years younger. They showered him with tickets to the ballet, the symphony, and the theatre. And one, to Greene’s utter amazement, even got his father to go to the opera.

  Somehow, a few months ago, he’d discovered Russian woman. Were they really Jewish? Or just Jewish enough to get out of the old Soviet Union thirty-five years ago, grab a cup of coffee in Tel Aviv, then hightail it to North America. Klavdiya claimed to be in her early sixties. Although that fact, along with a host of half-truths she’d told his father, was shrouded in mystery.

  None of it seemed to bother Yitzhak Greene, who clearly loved that the top of his bald head aligned perfectly with the top of Klavdiya’s wide shoulders, giving him a front-row view of her pumped-up breasts.

  Greene dumped a second pile of garden waste in the bag. “She can get rid of my bar mitzvah photos in the living room, but just don’t let her take Mom’s picture off the mantel,” he said.

  In the nine weeks since Klavdiya had appeared on the scene, she’d taken to renovating every aspect of his father’s life, starting with ditching his decades-old wire-rim glasses for three new pairs from the three-for-one optical store her cousin ran on Bathurst Street. Next came new shirts and pants from her brother-in-law, a jobber down on Spadina who got everything wholesale.

  Now she was starting in on his house, getting rid of the plastic geraniums in the kitchen window and the faded tablecloth in the dining room. Amazingly, she’d somehow managed to convince his dad to throw out the yellowed plastic cover on the living room sofa. For that, Greene would be eternally grateful, no matter what other havoc she ended up causing in his father’s life.

  “I heard about this murder of the lawyer?” his father said. “Didn’t you do some cases with her?” He picked up a second rake from the lawn and began working beside Greene. The front yard had two trees near the house and a majestic red maple in the front, which they both liked the best. In the early fall its leaves turned bright scarlet, making the first ones to drop stand out on the lawn like scattered taillights on a near-deserted highway. Since he was a child, it had been a game between father and son to look for the most perfect one.

  “We did a lot of things together,” Greene said.

  “Who’s the detective on this?”

  It always amazed Greene how knowledgeable his dad had become about the inner workings of the homicide squad.

  “It’s Daniel Kennicott’s first case.”

  His father let out a low whistle. “You helping him on this?”

  “Not officially.”

  “Of course.”

  “I just met with him at Brian’s bakery.”

  “And what? Sound like the husband probably did it?”

  “That’s what we thought at first. But the man has an airtight alibi. Kennicott’s still suspicious of him, though.”

  “He thinks the man hired someone to strangle his wife? Even in the camps, when someone was killed, it was never by hand. Always with a knife, or a brick.”

  “I know. It’s hard to strangle someone to death. It’s a very angry crime.” Greene picked out a pristine, dark red leaf from the pile and handed it over.

  “A good one,” his father said, twirling the leaf by its stem. “And the man she was meeting in that motel?”

  Greene pulled a second leaf from the pile. One of its corners was bent. He tossed it back.

  His father examined the leaf in his hand, not saying anything. Greene knew him well enough to know that something was up.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Brian’s bread. Don’t bring me so much.” His dad shrugged, and pointed the leaf toward his front door. “She eats gluten-free bread. I’ve even started.”

  Greene laughed. “She got you eating quinoa salad yet?”

  “No. But porridge. First time I’ve eaten it since the Russians liberated us. An old Polish la
dy, wouldn’t let me eat meat for three days. Only Cream of Wheat. Saved me. Some of my friends ate so much their stomachs exploded.”

  It was a story Greene had heard many times. His father, weighing seventy-three pounds, walking the streets alone and ragged, taken in by a woman who fed and bathed him.

  “Okay, Dad. No more bagels. No more challah.”

  “Well, challah on Fridays.”

  Greene closed up his bag of leaves. “Don’t let her move in yet.”

  “I might. I might not.”

  “Don’t,” Greene said with force. “Not now.”

  His father heard the tone in Greene’s voice. He’d survived enough danger in his life to smell it miles away. He looked Ari in the eye, passed him back the perfect red leaf, picked up his rake, and started working. “What is it?” he asked.

  Greene had checked out Klavdiya on the police database. She had a dated criminal record filled with fraud convictions, mostly bounced cheques. Her ex-husband was more of a problem. He was in jail for five years on an extortion charge and was getting out in a few months. There had been no need to tell his father about any of this. Until now.

  “Klavdiya has a criminal record,” Greene said. “If I get arrested, the only chance I’ll have of getting bail is if I can stay with you. She can’t be here.”

  For a near-imperceptible moment, the rake in his father’s hand stopped moving. Then he kept going. He was a man who knew how to take a blow and not show it.

  “Did you love her?” he asked at last.

  “More, I think, than I knew.”

  “Have you told anyone else?”

  “Just a lawyer,” Greene said. “You remember Ted DiPaulo?”

  “Not Kennicott?”

  “I tried to tell Kennicott this afternoon,” he said. “But he’d have to make me a witness. I’d be off the case. I need to find out who killed her.”