“By the time I started here, she’d stepped down as head Crown. Did she used to come by often?” he asked.
“More than the other head Crowns ever did. She was a very hard worker. But always had time for a chat. A few years ago when my mother was sick, she asked about her every time she was here.”
“Detective Greene and I worked on two murder trials with her,” he said. “Greene must have known her well.”
“Very,” she said. “He took two days off after she died. Can’t say I blame him. He always tries to be the strong, silent type, but I could see how see how upset he was.”
“It’s hard to imagine Greene taking any days off,” he said. “He’s always in at work so early.”
“That’s Ari for you,” she said, her eyes warming with affection. “I’m always telling him that he works too hard. Take some long weekends in the summer, for goodness’ sake. A few weeks ago he told me he’d be coming in later on Mondays for a while and I said it’s about time.”
There were many facts in the case that Kennicott had been careful to not let anyone but Alpine and Greene know about. Probably the biggest one was that Raglan had booked into a motel on Kingston Road on each of the five Monday mornings before her murder.
“That’s hard to believe,” he said. “He always seems to be here when I get in in the mornings.”
“Well, take a gander at the logbook.” She turned it toward him, open to the charts for August and September.
They were easy to read. For the five Monday mornings before the murder, and on September 10, Greene hadn’t come in to work until one in the afternoon.
“I was very happy for him,” she said. “First time in years he’s taken time off for himself.”
“Really.” His eyes were glued to the times on the chart. He could feel his hands starting to shake.
“A few days ago he told me his Monday-morning vacations were over and that next week he’d be back to his usual routine,” she said. “To me, though, he still looks tired. I’m sure he misses Jennifer, just like we all do.”
“I’m sure he does,” he said, handing her back the logbook before it fell out of his hands.
39
THE LAW OFFICE OF ANTHONY CARPENTER WAS ON THE SECOND FLOOR ABOVE A GREEK RESTAURANT, accessed by a long, narrow staircase. A receptionist who introduced herself as Mrs. Stanopolis showed him straight into Carpenter’s office, a high-ceilinged room with fake wood panelling that Greene thought had probably been installed in the 1960s, and a pine desk that appeared to be even older. As did the standing lamp in the corner, the battered steel filing cabinet beside it, and the high-backed leather chair where Carpenter sat. He wore a bow tie that was clipped on at a crooked angle and plastic-frame glasses with lenses as thick as a thumb.
“My apologies for being so circumspect yesterday,” Carpenter said as Greene took a seat across from him. His desktop was empty. “But my client’s instructions were very specific.”
“Jennifer?” Greene said.
“Yes, Ms. Raglan. She told me to contact you on the evening of Thursday, September thirteenth, which I did last night, and to meet with you on the morning of Friday, September fourteenth, which I am doing now. But we can’t discuss anything until I am retained. Did you bring the money as I requested?”
“I did.” Greene took an envelope out of the thin leather briefcase he usually carried and passed it over.
Carpenter looked inside, fingered the hundred-dollar bill, closed the envelope, took out a pen, and wrote the date on the back. “Good,” he said. He got up and pulled a file folder out of the top drawer of his ancient filing cabinet, put the envelope inside, put the folder away, pulled out another file folder, closed the drawer, and sat back down.
He smiled at Greene. “I believe in doing one task at a time. My desk is always clean.”
“A good way to work,” Greene said.
“Been doing this for forty-seven years,” he said, opening the file. “I have here a prepared retainer agreement in duplicate. Please review the top copy and then sign both documents.”
He handed Greene a ballpoint pen, his business card, and two sets of papers, each perfectly stapled in the left-hand corner. Greene read through the agreement, signed at the bottom of each copy, and passed them back.
Carpenter took a close look at his signature, put one copy in his file and the other in a large white envelope that had Greene’s name typed on it. “This is for your records.”
Greene put the envelope back in his briefcase.
“Now I need to go to my safe,” Carpenter said. “Please wait here a moment.”
Without fanfare he left the room.
Greene looked around the sparse office. He tried to imagine Jennifer sitting in this same chair. Why, he wondered, would she pick a lawyer like Carpenter? And for what?
He got up, went to the window, and looked down on the busy street. He noticed a dark car pull up on the near sidewalk. He watched three men get out.
“Here you go,” Carpenter said, returning to the room and sitting behind his desk.
Greene backed away from the window and sat across from him.
Carpenter was holding a sealed envelope, and he showed its back to Greene. “After it was sealed, Ms. Raglan and I both signed across the flap,” he said. “My specific instructions are to deliver this to you and no one else on today’s date.”
He passed the envelope over, along with a long silver letter opener.
“Now, I am to leave you alone to read this for five minutes.” Carpenter left the room again.
Greene looked at the signatures. He’d seen enough of Raglan’s writing to know it was hers. He sliced open the envelope. Inside was one sheet of paper with a handwritten note.
SUNDAY NIGHT, Sept. 9
Ari, I’m writing to you tonight before I see you for our final motel rendezvous tomorrow. (I can’t wait to see you, and I can’t wait till we don’t have to sneak around like this anymore!)
By the time you read this, I will have held my press conference and gone public with my terrible secret. I’ll be bombarded and hounded by the press, so I’m going to lie low for a while. Once this blows over, I’ll get in touch and we’ll be together.
I picked Mr. Carpenter randomly so there would be no way for anyone to trace my contact with him, and through him my contact with you. I also made him promise he would never call or e-mail you.
Don’t be angry that I didn’t confide in you earlier. I couldn’t. You had nothing to do with any of this, and this scandal is going to be so big that anyone close to it will be damaged. Give me points, at least, for keeping you out of it.
I always thought you’d wonder why I insisted on going to such extreme lengths to keep things between us secret. Well, after Thursday you will understand.
I know you will be shocked by what I was forced to do. The price of love is so very high. I had to save my son.
Always.
J.
He read the letter again and then turned the paper over. It was blank, as he knew it would be. Still, he’d been hoping there would be more words. More of her.
There was a quiet knock on the door. “I was instructed to inquire, after five minutes, if you required more time,” Carpenter said, standing in the doorway.
“I’m done,” Greene said. “I need a large blank envelope and some stamps.”
Carpenter returned to his desk and opened a drawer. He produced an envelope and a roll of stamps. This guy must have won a ton of Boy Scout badges in his day, Greene thought.
“When did you meet with Ms. Raglan?” Greene asked.
“She came in early in the morning on the seventh, a Friday, and asked me specifically if we could meet that Sunday evening. I’d never met her before and she didn’t have an appointment. She looked very distressed. We met on Sunday at four P.M. and I waived my usual weekend surcharge.”
The price of love is so very high.
Greene wrote out an address on the large envelope. He looked at Carpenter’s bus
iness card for the return address. He put Raglan’s letter in the envelope, sealed it, put a stamp in the corner, and passed it over.
I had to save my son.
“Can you mix this in with all your regular mail and post it later today, please?” he asked.
“Consider it done,” Carpenter said.
“Anything else?” Greene asked.
“Those are all of my instructions,” Carpenter said.
Greene stood slowly. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
They shook hands.
Two older women wearing white gloves were sitting in the lobby. The receptionist said a few words to them in Greek and they both smiled.
Greene made his way down the long staircase to the street.
The morning sun was out and it hit him in the eyes. His mind was reeling, so it took a moment for him to focus on the man standing right outside the door.
“Detective Greene,” Daniel Kennicott said.
“Hello, Daniel.”
Kennicott’s face looked ashen. Two uniformed police officers moved in on either side of him. He knew them both. To his left was Arnold Lindsmore, a big lug of a man whom Greene had been friendly with since they were in police college together. To his right, Clyde Newbridge, Hap Charlton’s nasty pal.
Good cop, bad cop, Greene thought. Nicely played, Daniel.
“Hi, Arnie,” he said to Lindsmore.
“Hi, Ari.” Lindsmore looked grim.
“Clyde,” Greene said to Newbridge
“Ari,” Newbridge replied, with a snarl.
Give me points, at least, for keeping you out of it.
Kennicott put his hand on Greene’s shoulder and looked him straight in the eye.
Exactly how I taught him to do it, Greene thought as he heard the young man he’d mentored for five years, making him into a very good homicide detective, say, “Ari Greene, you are under arrest for the murder of Jennifer Raglan.”
PART
FOUR
40
THE CN TOWER.
The second tallest freestanding structure in the world, and the first thing that came into view as Angela Kreitinger swung her old Toyota southbound on the Don Valley Parkway toward Toronto’s downtown.
The CN Tower.
It had been the last thing she’d seen in the rearview mirror of the same Toyota six years earlier when she’d headed out of the city. Humiliated. Her life and career flip-flopped from promise to disaster.
Six years, and Kreitinger hadn’t come back to Toronto once. She’d severed all ties with her friends, stopped reading the city’s four newspapers, and had even avoided using the airport. Last winter, when she took her first beach vacation in a decade, she booked her flights out of Montreal and drove two extra hours each way. Happily.
On Wednesday, she’d got the call to return to Toronto to prosecute Detective Ari Greene. Her chance at redemption at last. She’d had the file, two full banker’s boxes of evidence, couriered to her and had worked on it while packing up her life in Belleville, the town where she’d been marooned.
Her old vehicle must have muscle memory, she thought, because as her mind wandered over the rocky road of her past, it seemed to drive smoothly on its own down the DVP and through the city’s empty, early-morning streets.
At every turn she spotted election signs. Hap Charlton’s featured a photo of him with his two big fists clenched in front of his chest and the slogan VOTE HAP. TAKE OUR CITY BACK. She’d heard he was doing well in the polls, and he seemed to have more signs up than the current mayor, Peggy Forest.
She pulled into the parking lot north of the high court on University Avenue. It was before 7 A.M. and few cars were there. One had a vanity licence plate that she recognized: A F CROWN. Some things never change, she thought. Albert Fernandez was an ambitious young Crown attorney who, like Kreitinger, always got to work early and stayed late. A fellow workaholic. And a fellow true believer in early-bird parking.
She opened her car trunk. Careful of her bad back, she lifted the two boxes, marked R. v. Ari Greene: First Degree Murder, and roped them onto her old metal pull cart. It was the only thing she’d taken from the Toronto Crown’s office when she’d left. It was creaky and one of its wheels wobbled, but she felt a loyalty to the contraption she’d used to carry files to and from court for almost twenty years.
The code for the side door entrance had changed in six years, and she had to fish around in her too-large purse to find the sticky note she’d written the new one down on. Inside the Crowns’ office she inhaled the familiar smells of day-old pizza, stale coffee, and microwave popcorn, which seemed to have been stitched into the DNA of the place.
Fernandez, the only lawyer already in, was sitting at his desk in the head Crown’s corner office. A picture of his beautiful Chilean wife holding a dark-haired baby was displayed prominently on the credenza behind the desk. Seven in the morning and he was impeccably dressed in a suit and silk tie.
“Hello, Ms. Kreitinger.” He stood and extended his hand for a formal handshake.
“Albert, I think you can call me Angela. I was hoping that after all these years you’d loosened up a bit.”
“Not yet.” He smiled. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks. Feels strange.” She kicked the bottom box on her cart. “Looks like I jumped right back into the frying pan.”
Fernandez’s smile faded.
He was so well mannered and buttoned up that Kreitinger sometimes forgot that he’d come to Canada from Chile as a teenager. And although his English was excellent, he had no feel for nuance or slang. She had a hunch he’d never heard the expression “jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”
“Everyone is in shock,” he said. “First Jennifer is murdered. Then Detective Greene is charged.”
“Thanks for giving me this opportunity,” she said.
“We cleared out your old office for you,” he said.
“Thanks, Albert.”
Her cart seemed to have the same muscle memory as her car. It squeaked and rattled down the main corridor, turned left at the last hallway, and went down to the last room in the row. She’d always liked being at the end of the line.
Inside, the office was empty, except for the government-issue desk that had been there the day she’d started work here, a wood chair behind it and one in front. There was an institutional smell to the room. She could picture Esmeralda, the Portuguese cleaning woman she’d come to know over the years while working deep into evenings and over weekends, scrubbing hard to erase all traces of whoever had been in what she still thought of as her office.
All you get in the end is a box, she thought, looking at the blank walls.
After she’d finished university and her marriage had failed, she had packed up everything she owned, hauled it to a storage locker on College Street, and taken off. She’d spent a year hiking around the south island of New Zealand, travelling to distant parts of China that were barely opened to foreigners at the time, and fulfilled a lifelong dream by taking the Trans-Siberian Railway through all eleven time zones of what was then the Soviet Union.
She came back to Toronto in the middle of a steaming-hot summer. Opening her storage locker, she’d stared at the IKEA shelving units, three lamps that were even uglier than she remembered, a lumpy futon, two boring chairs, at least twenty pairs of shoes she would probably never wear again, boxes and boxes of books, and a coffee table she’d bought at a yard sale that desperately needed to be sanded down and refinished.
Her heart felt like she’d been walloped by a prizefighter’s punch. This is it, she thought. After all I’ve travelled, all I’ve seen, all I’ve done. Everything I own in the world is in this box.
“Jo, do you know who’s doing bail court this morning?” she heard a male voice say out in the hallway, steps from her office.
“I am,” a woman replied.
The Crown attorneys were drifting into work. Kreitinger shut the door behind her, lifted the first evidence box, and plunked it on her ancient d
esk.
That endless ache in her heart was digging at her. The list of “I won’t evers” played in her head like an old record stuck in a groove: I won’t ever be a judge like my father wanted me to be – so much for Your Honour Justice Kreitinger; I won’t ever be the successful politician that my mother had thought I would become – so much for Prime Minister Kreitinger; I won’t ever get married again, have children, or be the kind of wonderful aunt to my brother’s kids you see in the movies – so much for Auntie Angie. And when I retire, or get kicked out of here again, I won’t even have a best friend I can travel with on package tours to the Valley of the Kings or the fjords of Norway.
I’m going to be nothing more, and nothing less, than a damn good prosecutor.
Everyone loved to talk about how Crowns never win or lose a case. Well, fuck that, she thought as she lifted the second box too quickly and felt a sharp pain in her lower right back.
Know this, Detective Ari Greene, she thought, dumping the box on her desk and reaching to massage her back, it doesn’t matter that I never liked Jennifer fucking Raglan, or that you never liked me, because I’m going to get you convicted.
41
DANIEL KENNICOTT WAS SURPRISED THAT HE WAS NERVOUS. USUALLY HE WAS A CONFIDENT public speaker. It came from growing up as the younger child in an accomplished family. His father was a judge, his mother an investigative journalist, and his older brother, Michael, a top student. It meant that from a young age he’d had to hold his own at the family dinner table in debates about everything from politics to law to journalistic ethics to bass fishing.
As a lawyer, he’d had no trouble appearing in court before the toughest judges, arguing cases before the Court of Appeal, and even once before the Supreme Court.
But tonight’s audience was a special group, and that’s why he felt shaky.
There were twenty retired homicide detectives in the small banquet room. They got together every few months in this suburban Italian restaurant, to feast on pasta and veal and red wine. Over their after-dinner brandies they smoked cigars, and listened to young homicide detectives present their current murder cases.
Stranglehold Page 17