Stranglehold

by Rotenberg, Robert

  “How much time do you have?”

  “I don’t know. Kennicott’s smart. He’s going to figure this out very soon.”

  “That’s how much you loved her. That you are taking such a risk.”

  It wasn’t a question, Greene realized. But a statement of fact.

  “You know I hate the Poles,” his father said. “But their vodka is the best. They make it with potatoes. You’ll take a bottle for tonight.”

  There was a rattling sound at the front of the house. Greene looked up and saw Klavdiya struggling with the old screen door, the same one he had run in and out of since he was a little boy. At last she got it open.

  “Stupid.” She slammed it shut behind her. “Yitzee, we need to get rid of this.”

  We, Greene thought.

  His father shrugged.

  She strode across the porch and glared down at them. One of her high heels caught on the concrete steps and she grabbed the black railing to steady herself. “These stairs have to go too. They’re awful.”

  “Don’t worry, Ari, there’s more to life than good tits,” Greene’s father hissed under his breath. He passed his rake to Greene and raised his voice to Klavdiya.

  “They’re my steps,” he said. “I like them.”

  19

  “TWO ORDERS OF PAD THAI,” DETECTIVE ALPINE SAID AS HE CAME INTO THE LITTLE VIDEO room where Kennicott had been setting up the DVD player. “Chicken with yours. Mine’s with shrimp.”

  “Thanks,” Kennicott said, without looking up. His eyes were glued to the monitor in front of him that had just come to life. “I got this working.”

  Alpine looked over his shoulder.

  Kennicott hadn’t thought he was hungry, but as soon as he smelled the food he realized he was starving. His stomach started to churn.

  One of Alpine’s men had found that the Coffee Time doughnut shop two blocks west of the Maple Leaf Motel had four cameras. He’d seized the DVDs.

  Kennicott pushed play on the remote. Four videos came on at the same time, each taking up a quarter of the screen. Camera One showed the entrance to the doughnut shop and the sidewalk and street beyond heading east. The other three cameras covered different locations inside. The counter on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen read 9:49:52. The images were jerky, like a cheap cartoon.

  “There she is,” Alpine said.

  He pointed to Camera One. Clear as day, there was Jennifer Raglan dressed in running gear, walking toward the front door and moving quickly inside. Camera Three caught her heading straight for the washroom, as if she knew where it was. She wore the Lululemon sweatpants and Roots T-shirt they’d found under the bed in the motel room.

  Kennicott took the carton of food, grabbed the chopsticks that were sticking out of the noodles, and started eating.

  They watched in silence.

  There were no cameras in the washroom. The time clicked by, one minute, two minutes. He tore through the noodles. Alpine had asked him if he wanted some soup as well. He’d said no, and now he regretted it.

  “You get the feeling this wasn’t her first time doing this.” Alpine pulled out his notebook. “No one at Coffee Time remembered seeing her. Not surprising. You can see how crowded the place is. We checked every motel on the strip. Found five other owners who remembered a woman with red hair and sunglasses. They all said the same thing. She’d called them the week before, asked for room 8. Paid cash each time. Always for a Monday-morning rental.”

  “Got her on video at any of them?”

  “No. None of them have cameras. She must have scouted them out, because most of the have-a-naps out there have them.”

  Kennicott dug out the last bit of noodles from the corner of the carton and pointed to the screen with his chopsticks. “She forgot about the cameras at the Coffee Time,” he said. It had been three minutes now, and she still had not come out of the bathroom.

  “The husband’s alibi is solid?” Alpine asked.

  “As a rock.” Kennicott opened his notebook. “We’ve got him on CCTV at the Queen subway station at 8:23. Exactly what he told me. He said he rode around to Eglinton West and we have him getting off there at 8:45. The camera at Randy’s Roti shop picks him up at 9:38, and Louisa, the woman who works there, remembers the white guy in a suit and tie who thought her beef patties were too spicy to eat for breakfast. We showed her his picture and she said it was probably him but white guys in suits mostly looked the same to her. He hangs around for a while and chats with people. Looks like he’s enjoying himself. Leaves at 10:06.”

  “Guy was making sure we could trace his alibi,” Alpine said.

  “Perhaps.” Kennicott crushed the carton and tossed it into the wastebasket in the corner.

  Alpine reached into the plastic bag that he’d brought the food in and pulled out a bowl of soup. Then he brought out a second one. “You said you didn’t want soup, but I knew you’d be hungry.”

  “Thanks.” Kennicott could smell the fresh coriander and it made his mouth water. “The rest of his day is just as Darnell told me. We got him on the bus down to St. Clair, the streetcar across, and the librarian at the Deer Park Library, Anna Tharyan, remembered him being in that day. Says he comes in a few afternoons a week and reads magazines.”

  Up on the monitor, at 9:55:45, almost six minutes after Raglan had gone into the washroom, a woman of the same height came out wearing casual shoes and a nondescript blue dress. Her hair was red – the same colour as Raglan’s wig – and she wore the same wraparound sunglasses they’d found in room 8. She carried a backpack. Same as the one in the motel room.

  “She was determined that no would recognize her,” Alpine said. “No doubt about that.”

  She walked over to the far wall, her back to Camera Two, and stopped. There was a long line up at the counter and the people obstructed the view. Only the top of her head was visible when someone shorter passed by.

  “What’s she up to?” Alpine asked.

  “Don’t know,” Kennicott said. He stared at the grainy images as they went by.

  “Here, you can expand it.” Kennicott touched a button on the remote and the image took over the whole screen. The resolution was even grainier, but it was easier to see what was going on.

  “Shit,” Alpine said. “The people are in the way.”

  “Wait, there’s a little boy coming up in line,” Kennicott said. The kid moved forward and they caught a glimpse of Raglan. She had finished whatever she was doing, and walked off the screen toward the door.

  “Damn,” Alpine said.

  “Wait, I saw something.” Kennicott reduced the image and hit reverse until he got to the point where the boy in line was in front of her. He pressed another button and the images advanced frame by frame. “I saw something.”

  Like a badly animated cartoon, everyone moved in herky-jerky slow motion. The boy came in front of Raglan and for a moment they could see her. She turned from the wall just before a taller woman took the boy’s place in line. Raglan moved toward the door and disappeared.

  “Nothing,” Alpine said.

  “Wait.” Kennicott reversed the video again until the moment Raglan moved away. He expanded the image to full screen.

  “Look,” he yelled, pointing at the wall. “Look.”

  “What?” Alpine asked.

  “A pay phone. She was calling someone.”

  Alpine whistled. “She had her cell, but that could be traced.”

  “Who was she calling and why?” Kennicott asked.

  “Has to be Mr. Monday Morning,” Alpine said. “We can’t trace a call from a pay phone. Ask any pimp or drug dealer. But if we find this guy, let’s hope she called on his cell. Then we can match it to this call in a heartbeat.”

  The video went off pause automatically and started on its own again.

  Camera One caught her outside again, walking quickly, swinging her backpack back and forth. Kennicott imagined Raglan smiling. Happy. The camera tracked her for quite a distance. There was no one else on
the narrow sidewalk.

  Greene had taught him that as a homicide detective, you formed an intimate relationship with the deceased. You learned everything you could about her. Came to know and care for her. Kennicott was no longer a lawyer, but in many ways she was his client.

  “I’ve seen enough,” Alpine said.

  Kennicott felt the same.

  Before he switched off the screen, he took one final look at the last live images of Jennifer Raglan as she headed unknowingly toward her terrible fate.

  20

  “HELLO. IT’S ALLIE HERE. MUMMY TOLD ME TO TELL ANYONE WHO CALLED THAT WE ARE AWAY on holiday,” a young girl with a British accent said on the answering machine that had just picked up. “Please do leave us a message at the beep. Bye-bye.”

  Greene felt like an idiot. He also felt drunk. And stoned. And both at the same damn time.

  The seconds ticked away in silence as he held the phone. He’d figured that one in the morning was seven o’clock in England. Or maybe six, he could never remember when it was five and when it was six hours’ difference.

  The silence on the line seemed overwhelming.

  “Hello, Allie,” he said at last, working very hard not to slur his words. “Tell your mommy that her old friend Ari just phoned from Canada.”

  He sounded so. So what? Stupid? Pathetic? Stoned and drunk?

  “Beep,” the machine said.

  Damn, he’d forgotten to wait for it. Just hang up, he told himself.

  “Allie, tell your mom her old friend Ari called from Canada,” he managed to say in one breath. A slight improvement, perhaps, over his first unrecorded message.

  What else to say? Allie’s mother had been a professor at the University of Toronto a number of years earlier. Her husband then, also a professor, had been stabbed to death by a deranged student from his linguistics class. It had been Greene’s case. A year after it was over, he’d hooked up with her and they’d lived together for a while, until she returned home, got married, and had her daughter, Alison. He’d seen the child grow up in the photos she sent him every December, but they hadn’t spoken in years.

  He closed his eyes. His living room was starting to spin. Quit while you’re ahead, he thought, and hung up. He looked at the half-smoked joint on the plate in front of him. When he’d showed up at the bakery this afternoon, before Kennicott arrived, Brian Silver had taken one look at him and said, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but you look like total shit.”

  Silver had never gotten entirely beyond their last year or two of high school, when they’d spend most afternoons getting stoned in Greene’s basement. “Be careful, this is really strong stuff,” he had warned Greene, giving him a couple of joints. “Not like when we were kids.”

  He was right. It was powerful as hell. Especially on top of the half bottle of Polish vodka his father had given him, which Greene had already almost finished.

  Pulling himself up, he stumbled to the washroom and braced himself, holding the sink. He ran the cold water and put his head under it. Boy, he’d love to vomit.

  He lifted his head, dripping water all over the floor. He didn’t care. He cupped his hands under the tap and drank cold water from them. Then he grabbed a towel, dried off his hair, and wrapped the towel around his neck.

  Wait. He thought of another woman he knew. She lived in New York. It’s Monday night, which was her deadline. She’s probably long gone, but what the hell, leave another message. Just keep calling women and leaving messages. Shit.

  Back in the living room he found his cell phone. Let’s see. There it is. Cell, home, work.

  He lay on the floor and tapped the work number.

  “Kwon,” she said a second later. The phone had hardly rung.

  “Oh, Margaret, hi.” Greene heard typing and the clatter of busy office in the background. He thought about hanging up.

  “Ari, is that you?”

  He swallowed hard but couldn’t speak.

  “Ari? Your name came up on my call display.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think you’d be there. I was going to leave message.” Had he just said “leave message” instead of “leave a message”?

  “Hang on,” she said.

  Her voice was muffled by her hand over the phone receiver. He picked up a few words. “Amazing . . . We need a picture . . . Fuck that, no way we’re using a stock shot.”

  Kwon lived and worked in New York, where she was a story editor at Faces, a weekly celebrity gossip magazine. Last year she’d been in Toronto covering a high-profile case of his. They’d become friendly, but nothing more. She loved poking fun at him, and right now he just needed to hear a woman’s voice.

  “Ari Greene, Mr. Nice Guy,” Kwon said, her voice now clear. “Amazing to hear from you. Any more good crime in Toronto?” She laughed.

  “I remembered that Monday night is your deadline night, so, you know, I thought I’d give a quick call.” His voice was higher than usual. And it felt like he was talking very slowly.

  “You never forget a word,” she said. “We’re having a crazy night. How are you?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Perfectly great.”

  “Ari, you don’t sound right.”

  He breathed. Why did I do this? he thought. “Long day. I’ll let you get back to your celebs.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Don’t hang up. I’ve got some great news to tell you.”

  She put her hand over the phone again. He was too tired to listen to the scraps of her conversation.

  “No one knows this here yet,” she whispered, coming back on the line. “I’m engaged.”

  “Wow,” Greene said. “Wonderful.”

  “He’s even a nice guy, can you believe it. All your fault, you know.”

  “Oh, why’s that.”

  She laughed her big hearty laugh, which always seemed too loud for her slight body. “Fill in the blanks. I got to go. Keep in touch.”

  “Of course,” he said, but she’d already hung up.

  You’re being pathetic, he thought, rolling over on the floor. He reached for the joint, lit it, and inhaled as deeply as he could. Held the smoke down. One, two three, four.

  His lungs were searing. He blew it out and started to cough. Violently. He grabbed the bottle and swigged it back.

  There was a sound. His phone was ringing.

  “Ari Greene,” he said very slowly. Who the hell would be calling so late?

  “It’s me,” Margaret Kwon said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “You sounded so bad on the phone I checked the newswires for Toronto. I can’t believe Jennifer Raglan was murdered.”

  “Tell me about it.” He was definitely slurring his words now.

  She sighed. “Ari, I know about you and Jennifer,” she said.

  “What?” he practically shouted. “What do you know?”

  “Please,” she said. “I’m a woman. I saw the way you two looked at each other in court.”

  “Shit,” he said. “I shouldn’t have called.”

  “Ari, I’ve never heard you sound like this.”

  “What’s your fiancé’s name?” He needed to change the subject.

  “Anton. He’s a Greek dentist. Couldn’t be less like me if you tried. Thirty-eight, never married, and normal. My friends say in Manhattan that’s an endangered species.”

  He lay back on the floor. He’d never see Jennifer again. How could this have happened? He felt the tears running down the sides of his cheeks. “You deserve him,” he managed to say.

  She must have sensed he was crying, because neither of them spoke for a long time.

  “I know you loved her,” she said at last.

  “It’s impossible to believe,” he said.

  Again they were silent.

  “Ari, that night you drove me to Niagara Falls, and we sat together at your spot, where the water goes over the edge,” she said.

  He nodded. It was the only time they’d been out of the city together. A quiet, special moment betwee
n them.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” she asked.

  He closed his eyes. “Yes but –”

  “I know, bad timing. Now Jennifer’s gone, and I’m getting married.”

  He was starting to fade out. “Be well, Margaret,” he whispered. “Be happy.”

  He hung up, and a wave of exhaustion hit him so hard he knew he had no chance of getting off the carpet before he fell asleep.

  PART

  TWO

  21

  “HELLO, HELLO, HELLO. COME IN, COME IN,” BARCLAY CHURCH SAID TO AWOTWE AMANKWAH, swinging around in his chair and popping up out of it, an oversize arm extending a huge hand in greeting.

  Amankwah had not been in the editor-in-chief’s office for a few years. The first thing he noticed was that Church had completely rearranged the furniture from the way his predecessor had it. He’d pushed the desk against a wall, so when he swivelled his chair he was right in front of whoever had come to see him. That meant employees no longer had to talk to their boss over the barrier of an imposing desk.

  Amankwah had been warned by his colleagues that their meetings with Church had been unusual, to say the least. The guy was eccentric as hell. But everyone seemed to like him.

  In just a few weeks he’d radically transformed the newspaper. Especially the front page. Church wanted the most sensational stories and he played them up big-time above the fold. This morning there was a photo of Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods, who were in town for the film festival and, along with other big-name celebrities, had attended some charity event at a local golf club yesterday morning. Beside it was the Jennifer Raglan murder story Amankwah had thrown together, complete with a smaller picture of the entrance to the ultratacky Maple Leaf Motel. The headline read: STRANGLEHOLD: CROWN ATTORNEY MOTEL MURDER MYSTERY. And to top it all off, below the fold, Amankwah had a second byline with an equally lurid headline: DEIRDRE, THE HOCKEY PLAYERS’ AFTER DATE, IN THE PENALTY BOX.

  Could there be a better moment to have his personal meeting with the paper’s new editor?