“Let’s get this straight, right from the ruddy beginning,” Church said, a goofy grin on his face as they shook hands. “How the fuck am I supposed to pronounce your first name?”
Amankwah laughed. He’d been explaining this for a lifetime. “Start with a as in a reporter. Wat as in lightbulb and way as in that’s the right way to pronounce my name. A lot of people simply call me Double A.”
Church motioned Amankwah to a seat, sat down himself, wheeled his chair up close, took off his glasses, and cleaned them with his shirt. “I’ve got it. Start with a as in my editor’s an arsehole, wat as in wot the hell does he want me to write about?, and way as in which way is the exit so I don’t have to work for this twit? How’m I doing?”
“Not bad.” Amankwah smiled.
Church slapped his hand hard across his knee, grabbed a thick file from his desk, and waved it at Amankwah. “We’ll be on a first-name basis for sure. Awotwe,” he said, pronouncing the name perfectly. “There isn’t any room in my pea-size brain for your last name.”
“No problem,” Amankwah said.
Church bounded out of his chair and tossed his hands in the air like wings. “Awotwe, why don’t you just take my seat? Do my job? Bloody hell, except for Queen Oprah and the Tiger, you own the front page. Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic stuff.”
“It’s been a good twenty-four hours,” Amankwah said.
“Oh no. None of this boring Canadian modesty, please.” He grabbed Amankwah by the shoulders. “Please, please, please. I mean it. Sit in my chair.”
He pulled Amankwah over and sat him down.
“I bow down before talent,” Church said.
Amankwah couldn’t believe his eyes. The editor of the Toronto Star, the biggest newspaper in Canada, was down on his knees, throwing his arms up and down, like a devout Muslim at prayer.
He couldn’t help himself, he started to laugh.
Church sat back on his haunches and clutched his hands to his heart. “Yes, at last” – he beamed – “we are having fun.” He duckwalked on his knees over to his desk, reached up for the thick file, pulled it down, and waved it at Amankwah.
“I’ve read every article you’ve written for the paper since you joined. Shit, man, you were red-hot for the first six or seven years. Brilliant stuff. Then you went right in the crapper.” At last he got up and sat down in the visitors’ chair. “I looked at your personnel file. Bingo. No fucking wonder. Your wife left you for a boring white guy and suddenly your copy is as wet as a baby’s nappy. Nobody’s having any fun. That about right?”
“I – I guess so.” Maybe this guy really was an asshole, Amankwah thought.
Church tossed the file on the floor and looked straight at him. “Mine left me for a Chinese chappie. Hong Kong money. Yachts. Country houses, horses and dogs, and all that hang-around-and-do-nothing rubbish. Creep was about five foot four and she’s almost six foot. I went quite dotty. Even did a bit of a slasher.”
Without ceremony, he rolled up his sleeve and showed Amankwah a number of deep scars on his left arm. “They do the counselling thing with you? Depression. Lithium. All that touchy-feely, voodoo, boo-hoo stuff? Must have, because the last two years you’re filing ace stories again.”
“Thanks,” Amankwah said, breathless. “Part of the deal when I almost got fired was the counselling. But I didn’t do the drugs.”
“Good move. I tossed them after a month. Pills make you as boring as a roomful of newspaper executives. What’s this nonsense about you doing night shifts in the radio room? That’s no bloody fun.”
Amankwah shrugged. “Support payments. I want to see my kids.”
“Well, screw that. I told the publisher we’re bumping you up to feature writer, that’s a fifteen percent raise. Should have been done two years ago, so today you’re getting a catch-up cheque for twenty thousand. That enough? I can’t have my top talent doing the job of an intern at three in the morning.”
Amankwah tried to stay calm. He wasn’t even sure whether he nodded.
“Done.” Church grabbed the front page of the paper from his desk. “Bloody good story, isn’t it? Brilliant. Former head Crown attorney strangled to death in a sleazy motel.” His eyes grew wide with excitement.
“Raglan was a very good lawyer.”
“Even better. Front-page stuff for weeks.”
“She has three teenage kids,” Amankwah said.
“Yes, very tragic, absolutely horrific, our hearts go out blah, blah, blah. Anyone know who she was doing the horizontal dance with?”
Church’s counselling clearly didn’t include sensitivity training, Amankwah thought. “No clue.”
“Well, mate, this is your story. Gold mine if I ever saw one.” He flipped the paper over and stabbed a long finger at Amankwah’s second story. “I love this ‘Deirdre, the After Date’ piece. Love, love, love it. What the hell is going on with the cops and the call girls?”
“Exactly what I want to find out,” Amankwah said.
Church threw the paper on his desk and jumped up. He grabbed a phantom shovel and made exaggerated digging motions, flinging imaginary dirt everywhere. “Dig, Mr. Amankwah,” he shouted. “Dig, dig, dig.”
Mr. Amankwah. Church had pronounced his last name perfectly. A as in I’m a reporter. Man as in the Isle of Man. Kwah like the French word quoi. A . . . man . . . kwah.
Yes, he thought, watching Church flail away like a child at the beach with a new toy shovel. This was going to be fun.
22
EXCEPT FOR THE TWO HOURS OF SLEEP HE’D GRABBED ON ONE OF THE BEDS IN THE NAP room in the basement of police headquarters, Daniel Kennicott had spent every moment working on the case.
The autopsy had been performed after midnight. The only evidence they’d got from it was some fragments of black leather from under her fingernails. The leather most likely came from a pair of gloves. She’d probably tried to scratch her attacker, but he hadn’t left any skin exposed. And under her right forefinger, a bit of paper and glue.
Then he and Alpine had meticulously combed through the records of every person Raglan had prosecuted for murder in the last five years. Three were gangbangers, still in jail. One was an alcoholic who’d killed another alcoholic in a bar fight. He’d been deported back to Barbados. Another was a mother who had severe postpartum depression and killed her twin babies. She was still institutionalized. A man who’d murdered his wife after she found him sleeping with George, her personal trainer, had pled to manslaughter and was out on parole. He’d returned home to Niagara Falls, where he worked as a boat hand on The Maid of the Mist. When Raglan was killed, he’d been passing out rain slicks to tourists before they came on board.
It turned out that Seaton Wainwright, the film producer charged with fraud who’d threatened Jennifer Raglan in the courthouse last week, secretly had a Lithuanian passport. He used it to fly to Paris on the Sunday night, hours before the murder. Apparently he had a new Brazilian girlfriend there and no plans of coming back to Canada.
Finally there was a woman named Samantha Wyler, convicted two years earlier of stabbing her ex-husband to death in the kitchen of his suburban Toronto home the night before their divorce trial was set to begin. Raglan had won the trial, but a few weeks later Greene and Kennicott, who were both on the case, discovered that the husband’s disabled brother was the killer just before he jumped off a bridge to his death. Wyler was released from jail.
Kennicott, determined to leave no stone unturned, wondered if it was possible the brother, who was in love with Wyler, had literally taken the fall for her. Perhaps she was an enraged, pathological killer, bent on revenge?
This morning he’d walked out of the building and used his cell to call Greene. He caught him on his car phone and told him about his idea.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think anything of it,” Greene had replied, “until you find out if she has an alibi.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“Why don’t you find ou
t, before you start worrying about the ifs,” Greene said.
It had taken two phone calls to establish that yesterday Wyler had been up north in Cobalt, a small town six hours from Toronto where she was born and had gone back to live. She’d been teaching an adult reading class in the local library.
Some killer, Kennicott thought. He felt like an idiot and promised himself not to ask Greene any more stupid questions until he checked things out himself.
Right now all they had for suspects were Raglan’s unknown lover and her husband, Howard Darnell, the man with the perfect alibi. Kennicott had put him under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Yesterday evening, on the live feed from their mikes inside the house, they’d heard one of the kids crying, all of them talking with their dad, phone conversations with friends offering condolences, a pizza being delivered. The oldest son, Aaron, even got in an argument with Howard because he wanted to go out. Classic family dynamics of shock and stress.
Kennicott felt horrible listening to it.
In the early hours of the morning, after he woke from his short nap, he collected the statements that the police officers on the scene had taken and put each one in a file, which he labelled by hand. It was the way he used to organize papers when he was a lawyer preparing for a big trial. He placed the files in a banker’s box in the homicide-bureau boardroom and wrote RAGLAN HOMICIDE, ACCUSED UNKNOWN on the side with a thick black marker.
Alpine, who’d been tracking down all the officers’ notes and compiling Zeilinski’s identification photos, walked in.
“There’s a new café north of Grenville,” he said, carrying a coffee tray in one hand and a bag of goodies in the other. “Guy’s Italian. Wouldn’t sell me a latte. Said real Italians drink cappuccinos before noon, lattes in the afternoon, and espresso at night, to help them sleep. Go figure.”
Kennicott eyed the cappuccino.
“I told him we had a long day ahead of us, so to expect me back a few times.” Alpine put the tray down and opened the brown bag. A yeasty smell filled the room. “His mother bakes these every morning. They’re still warm.”
Kennicott reached for the coffee, trying not to grab it.
“An older lawyer named Lloyd Gramwell recruited me to the law firm where I used to work,” he said, after his second long sip. “He hates technology. Says it makes us stop thinking. When I had an important case, he’d make me bring the file into his office and read every witness statement out loud. At first I thought it was a waste of time, but then I found it made me hear the story, which helped me to see it.”
“Never done that before.” Alpine tipped his paper cup at Kennicott. “Good coffee, eh?”
“Great. Thanks.”
“Try a pastry,” Alpine said.
Kennicott picked out a tiny, crusty croissant. It was delicious. “There are twenty-two witness statements,” he said, reaching into the box nearest to him. “We’ll take turns. I’ll read one out loud, then you do the next.”
“Okay.” Alpine pulled out a pen and pad of paper. “You start. I’ll take notes.”
“No notes,” Kennicott said. “That’s another one of Gramwell’s rules. No notes. Too distracting. Learn to listen.”
They started with the statements from the people at the motel: the owner’s, the translated versions of the Taiwanese girls’, and the schoolteacher-turned drunk. Alpine picked up the transcript of the interview of the prostitute who worked in the room above the passageway.
“Question: Did you see anyone come in or out of the courtyard this morning?”
“Answer: What time?”
“Question: Between ten and eleven?”
“Answer: One. A new client.”
“Question: What did he look like?”
“Answer: The john? He looked like a john.”
“Question: Come on, you can do better than that. Was he white, Asian, black? Tall or short, skinny or fat? You know the drill.”
“Answer: White guy. Big belly. Probably couldn’t see his own cock.”
“Question: Facial hair?”
“Answer: Most of the time, I was on my knees. I wasn’t exactly looking at his face.”
“Question: Age?”
“Answer: Old enough that it took him a while to get hard.”
“Question: Thanks for that. How long did this take?”
“Answer: Like I said, he wasn’t exactly a smoking gun.”
“Question: Where did he go after?”
“Answer: Out my door.”
“Question: What kind of car?”
“Answer: No idea.”
“Question: What time did he leave?”
“Answer: Like you said, between ten and eleven. Then I heard the sirens. Then you knocked on my door.”
“Question: You see anyone else walk under the passageway into the courtyard?”
“Answer: The ambulance and the cruiser.”
“Question: What else can you tell me?”
“Answer: That I’ve got nothing else to say to the cops.”
“Askari, the cop who interviewed her, says she slammed the door in his face.” Alpine tossed the file on the table. “Lovely. Well, she’s one witness we want to keep off the stand.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Kennicott said.
“So much for the Maple Leaf Motel,” Alpine said.
By the time they were on their afternoon lattes, they’d read through all the statements of the employees at the Coffee Time doughnut shop, the people in the mall across the road – all of whom saw nothing – and the other motel owners on Kingston Road.
Kennicott intentionally left the interviews with the people in the strip mall next to the motel until the end. He thought they were his best hope. They were having their shots of espresso when they read through the statements. Seven store owners claimed they had seen nothing. Of the nine shoppers they found, four said they hadn’t seen anything unusual and three refused to even give their names. Only one woman would talk to them at all.
“Your turn,” Kennicott said, taking out the second-last file and handing it over. “Here’s the woman who was in the Money Mart that morning. Cop found her shopping with her daughter at Kaks Hair Emporium.”
“Annabel Sawney, DOB, May fifteenth, 1958,” Alpine read.
“Question: Ms. Sawney. Where were you earlier this morning?”
“Answer: When we first got to the plaza I went to the Money Mart with Sadura, my daughter. She had a sore throat, so I kept her home from school so she wouldn’t infect the other kids. I needed some cash for the week because one of my customers was late in paying me. I had my welfare stub, so I got a three-hundred-dollar advance. You promised that this wouldn’t be reported. I didn’t see a thing.”
Alpine shrugged. “Hear no evil, see no evil,” he said. “I told you what it’s like in Scarborough.”
“I’ll read the last one.” Kennicott opened the file. “I appreciate your patience. It was worth a try at least.”
“It’s the job,” Alpine said. He didn’t look happy.
“Sadura Sawney, ten years old,” Kennicott said. “It’s one page.”
“Question: Sadura, were you with your mom earlier this morning at the Money Mart?”
“Answer: Yeah. Mommy took me to the bank. I wanted to get some red licorice and she said we could after she got her money out.”
“Question: What did you do at the bank?”
“Answer. Nothing. Just looked out the window.”
Beside him, Kennicott felt Alpine edge forward on his seat.
“Question: Did you see anyone in the parking lot?”
“Answer: I don’t know. Just cars.”
“Question: Anything else. Anyone walking fast or running?”
“Answer: No. Just a man on a funny motorcycle. A little one, like a scooter or something. And he was tall. Wearing black boots.”
“Question: Did you see what the man looked like?”
“Answer: No. He had on a helmet and gloves and everything.”
Kenni
cott looked at Alpine. They were both thinking the same thing. The killer had covered up his skin. The bits of leather under Raglan’s fingernails.
“Question: Did you see where he went?”
“Answer: He drove off.”
“Question: Which direction, did you see?”
“Answer: Yeah. Like up into the alley beside the Pizza Nova.”
Kennicott looked at Alpine. They knew where that alley led and were both thinking the same thing. Why wouldn’t the killer escape by driving onto Kingston Road, the big, anonymous street right in front of him, instead of risking being seen on a side street?
He closed the file folder. “That’s where the interview ends.”
“Sounds like our man was driving a scooter,” Alpine said. “There are thousands of them in the city.”
“It’s not much,” Kennicott said. He put the file back in the banker’s box and stacked their paper cups in a tower. “But at least it’s more than we had when we started with those cappuccinos.”
23
SEVEN DAYS A WEEK, FIFTY-TWO WEEKS A YEAR, IN THE HALF HOUR BEFORE 6 P.M., A GROUP OF homeless men gathered on the north side of Queen Street, east of Sherbourne, in front of the Moss Park Discount Store. Huddled together, they sipped sugary cups of coffee from the Popeye’s fast-food restaurant across the road while waiting for the three nearby men’s shelters to open for dinner.
Many of the names and faces change daily, Ari Greene thought as he parked his Oldsmobile on the south side of Queen, between Rady Hair & Barber Salon and the Schnitzel Queen restaurant, but one man was usually there. Fraser Dent. He looked like a circus clown: bald on top, stringy hair down the sides, always wore a long jacket made of bits of cloth he’d sewn together. He never told anyone that the cloth came from his former life – each one lovingly cut from the expensive cotton shirts he used to wear to work when he was one of the city’s top foreign-currency traders.
Dent was in his usual spot, two doors down from the corner, in front of Artatorture Tattoo Parlour, a few steps away from the crowd on the corner in front of the discount store.
This was prime real estate, where he could best catch the late-afternoon sun. But not quite as prime as the penthouse condo where he’d once lived. It overlooked the harbour and was a ten-minute walk to the bond-trading floor, where for fifteen years he logged ninety-hour weeks. That was before he started living inside a bottle. Then needles.
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