Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

  Sharon looked at Tony’s big trusting brown eyes and his dimpled cheeks, at the mop of chocolate curls and the gooey cookie clutched in his fist. She felt a rush of protective love. “On the other hand, you can hardly blame people. An acquittal doesn’t mean innocence. It means reasonable doubt. Would that be enough for you? Would you let him around your own children?”

  “Absolutely. At least as far as the risk of pedophilia is concerned. But as far as the paranoia business…” Her certainty began to fade. “I’m not sure I could trust him. Matt felt trapped. He felt betrayed. And deep down, I think he had an incredible amount of rage. That’s what scares me.”

  Sharon knew little about the case or about Matt Fraser himself, but she knew what could happen when a shy, timid man felt cornered, or nurtured a rage deep inside for ten years.

  It was a chilling scenario, except for one small point. “But if he was guilty of the molestation and got away with it, he’d have a whole different set of emotions,” she said. “Then every funny look or small slight would be a reminder of what he in his heart knew to be true. Surely he wouldn’t feel angry or betrayed. Trapped and cornered, perhaps, but mainly by his own guilt and shame. If he has a normal conscience, that is,” she added, remembering that many pedophiles do not see themselves as villains but as lovers of children giving natural expression to that love. Lost in these thoughts, she became slowly aware of the silence at the other end of the line.

  “Leslie?”

  “I don’t think he’s guilty,” Leslie replied, so softly Sharon barely heard her. “Sharon, you must never tell anyone that I told you this. Neither Dr. Emmerson-Jones nor I think he’s guilty. Matt had a sexual behaviours assessment, you see. When he came back to Ottawa three years ago, when his life was falling apart and he was sinking further and further into his panic attacks and paranoia, he went to his doctor and asked for a referral to Dr. Pelham. He said he needed someone to believe him, to prove to the world that he wasn’t aroused by children. So he took Pelham’s tests.”

  “You mean with the plesthmograph and the whole bit?”

  “Yes. And he passed.”

  “I don’t remember any news about that,” Sharon said. “Did he tell anyone?”

  “No. That was the odd thing. Dr. Emmerson-Jones and I only learned it because we read it in his file. Sharon, I’m telling you this because I don’t know what to do, and I’m scared to be the only one who knows.”

  Now it was Sharon’s turn to be silent. Although she had never worked in the forensic unit at the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital, she knew the forensic psychiatrist Dr. Pelham’s reputation as an expert in sexual deviance. He had provided testimony at countless trials across the country on the sexual proclivities of accused men, which he assessed not merely by skilled interviewing and standardized questionnaires but by measuring the amount of blood flow to their penises in response to pictures and stories depicting different sexual themes. Matt Fraser had willingly submitted himself to the humiliating experience of having his erections measured while he looked at pictures of all sorts, including children. It would be like opening the curtain on his most intimate, private dream world. Why would he do that seven years later, when he’d already been acquitted? When people had begun to forget.

  Was it to prove his innocence once and for all, or more sinisterly, to add further weight to his deception? Sharon didn’t know if the test results could be faked, or if treatment in the interim could have suppressed the urges. He had been away for several years; maybe he had secretly enrolled himself in a treatment program where he’d learned to control his fantasies, and then returned in the hope of clearing his name beyond all doubt.

  In which case, why had he told no one? Surely, with his deep-rooted cynicism, he would not have trusted others to get the message out through word of mouth or staff room gossip. Regardless of whether he was truly innocent or guilty, he should have trumpeted this finding from the rooftops. Something didn’t make sense, but before she revealed any of this news to Mike, she needed to doublecheck the whole story. Because if what Leslie said was accurate, then Mike might need to look in an entirely different direction and possibly for an entirely different crime.

  “Leslie, would you do me a big favour?” she asked on impulse. “Could you requisition his file tomorrow and let me have a peek at it?”

  There was utter silence at the end of the line. Inwardly Sharon cringed, for she knew what she was asking. Her request violated every mantra of confidentiality they’d ever been taught to recite. Leslie would not only have to go out on a limb, she’d be twisting in the wind.

  “I know it’s asking a lot,” Sharon added as the silence lengthened. “I promise I won’t ever let on how I got the file, but it’s important.”

  “I have to think about it,” Leslie replied. “I’ll call you at noon tomorrow.”

  Six

  Trying to be unobtrusive, Green inched his sleeve up to sneak another peek at his watch. Superintendent Jules had placed him at the head table so that the thirty-five pairs of eager middle management eyes seemed to catch his every move. For the occasion, Green had even put on a proper suit, which bunched at his crotch and pulled across his back. His tie chafed, and despite the frigid climate control of the windowless conference room, perspiration beaded his brow.

  An OPP officer droned on in a dusty monotone as he led the group through a series of computer slides on the pattern of drug crimes in the Province of Ontario. The lights were dim, adding to the challenge of staying awake.

  Green’s watch read 10:22. An hour and a half until lunch, but only eight minutes until break time. Thank God. No doubt Sullivan had already finished his canvass of the streets around the rooming house, and with any luck he was just winding up his visit to Josh Bleustein. One quick phone call to Sullivan during the break, and Green could be back in his seat at the head of the table before anyone noticed he’d gone.

  The lights came on and a buzz of conversation rose around the table. Spotting an inspector from Montreal plowing a path towards him, Green jumped to his feet and brandished his cellphone as if to imply he had an urgent matter to attend to. He took the stairs two at a time on his way to the privacy of his office, but when he reached the Major Crimes squad room, he stopped short. Sullivan was already back at his desk, hunched over his computer.

  “What are you doing here?” Green demanded. “I wanted you to see Bleustein ASAP .”

  Sullivan straightened slowly from the keyboard, and Green had the sense he was counting to ten. Green knew tact was not always his strong point, but the fifteen-minute break was slowly ticking away. He held back his impatience.

  “Bleustein threw me out,” Sullivan replied. “Barely let me in the door. ‘That’s attorney-client privilege, Sergeant! You should be ashamed of yourself.’”

  “Did you tell him Fraser was missing?”

  “Of course I did. Attorney-client privilege was all I got back.”

  “But—”

  “I tried everything I could, Green, and that’s what I got. A goddamn giant clam.”

  “He knows something. Fraser’s been to see him, and whatever it was about, Fraser wanted nothing to do with the police.”

  “I didn’t get that impression. I think old Josh Bleustein was just getting a big charge out of being obstructive.”

  “In that case, he better be prepared for round two, with me. And he might be sorry he wasn’t nicer to you.” Green glanced at his watch irritably. Two hours minimum before he could get away. Two more hours of beady middle management eyes and droning lists of names, photos and stats. Still, he could use that time to figure out how he was going to tackle Josh Bleustein, all the while appearing to listen to the speaker with rapt attention. An art he’d perfected years ago in the back row of his high school classrooms.

  Sullivan grinned. He was built like a bear, six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier that Green, and at first glance he might appear the more threatening of the two, but only to those who didn’t know Green. “And when
are you going to fit in this rematch?”

  Green shrugged. “Lunch. I never was much for small talk anyway, and I don’t want anyone to ask me how the profiling program actually works.” He glanced casually at the computer screen. “Any progress on your John Doe?”

  “Almost no one saw the guy. The rooming house is owned by some Indian guy who works for Nortel and hasn’t been near the place in months. He hired a management firm to take care of it, and those guys have new building managers every month or so. There’s not much job satisfaction in running a flophouse, evidently. So I tracked down the manager, some Iraqi refugee who drives a taxi too, and he does remember the renter paying cash for a week in advance, but he doesn’t remember much else. Describes the guy as a businessman.”

  Businessmen wear grey suits and carry briefcases, Green thought excitedly. “Then he really should stick in the guy’s mind! Why don’t you—”

  Sullivan seemed to read his mind. “Yeah, yeah. I’ve got the Iraqi coming down to the station this afternoon to try to work up a composite, but businessman or not, I’m not hopeful. The guy’s English isn’t great, and he’s going to be damn uncooperative because he didn’t want to miss his fares at peak time.”

  Green retrieved Fraser’s police file from his desk and took out the police photo. “Show him this in a line-up. It might speed things up. This is ten years old, but it’s worth a shot.”

  Sullivan took the picture and studied it in silence a moment, his brow cocked in surprise. “You think Matthew Fraser’s our John Doe? What would he be doing holed up in this dump? Doesn’t he have an address off Merivale somewhere?”

  “Maybe he was hiding from someone.”

  “And then after a week with the roaches, he suddenly flips out and torches himself?”

  Green hesitated. His mind was already leaping ahead, spinning wild theories, but it was too early even for him to speculate, at least aloud. “Not necessarily.”

  “Okay, so he drinks himself into a stupor and sets himself on fire by accident?”

  “Or so someone wants us to think.”

  * * *

  True to character, Superintendent Jules adjourned the conference for lunch on the stroke of noon, and Green was just beating a hasty path to the door when Jules caught his arm. Jules had one of the beady-eyed inspectors in tow, although at second glance, this one’s eyes were more bloodshot than beady, and everything about him drooped. His moustache, his jowls, his rumpled suit—everything sagged as if under the weight of years in the trenches.

  “This is Inspector Alain Levesque of the Montreal Police. He’s interested in setting up a joint initiative against the Hells Angels, and I thought we could talk over lunch.”

  Levesque’s eyes regarded him with sorrow, as if he fully expected to be turned down, and Green’s heart sank. The one thing he dreaded almost as much as meetings was initiatives— in tandem with “proactive”, it was one of the favourite buzzwords of the brass. Not that crime prevention and strategic deployment of resources were not worthy ventures, but let someone else have the visions and the paradigms. In the end, criminals still committed crimes, someone had to catch them, and that was all Green had ever wanted to do.

  But with Jules’ pressure on his elbow, he allowed himself to be steered upstairs to the cafeteria, where Jules ensconced them at a quiet corner table while they debated the expansion of the Quebec-based biker gangs into the nation’s capital, where the newly wealthy high-tech industry had opened up lucrative drug opportunities. The biker gangs had their own decisive enforcement methods which kept Montreal’s homicide division hopping, along with its drug squad.

  It wasn’t until the afternoon break-out sessions that Green was able to escape. As he approached the squad room, he heard a chorus of voices arguing heatedly in some guttural foreign tongue. Inside, he found a senior Ident officer and Sullivan seated at the computer, surrounded by a knot of excited men. That must be the Iraqi building manager and his support group, Green surmised, here to develop the composite of the rooming house DOA . Refugees rarely went to meet anyone official, especially the police, without a bevy of advisors.

  “What’s going on?” Green demanded over the din.

  Sullivan looked up wearily. “Mr. Ahmad has brought some taxi-driver friends to help him, and they’re having trouble being specific enough about the features.”

  “Well, did any of his friends even see the man?”

  Sullivan shook his head, and Green raised his hands in exasperation. “Then clear them out.”

  Sullivan gave him a “been there, tried that, how stupid do you think I am” look, but held his tongue. “He wants them here. Anyway, I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere with the composite.”

  “Did you show him the mug shot?”

  “Not yet. I was saving it to see if I could get anything unprompted first.” Sullivan reached into the file by his side, pulled out the photo line-up he’d worked up and placed it on the desk. He gestured to the man nearest him, a tall, emaciated man with dark flashing eyes and a broken tooth. “Do you see the man among these? He may be older now, with different hair.”

  The man picked up the page of photos, and the others clustered around to peer over his shoulder. Arabic flew back and forth, and Green tried to read Ahmad’s face. The man looked uncertain as he studied the photos, frustrated as he listened to his friends, and decidedly reluctant to be in this position at all. The other men sliced the air with their hands, gestured to the photo and shrugged expressively until finally, with one last examination, Ahmad tossed the sheet down on the desk. His finger landed on Fraser.

  “This is the man.”

  Green felt a brief stab of regret at the death of the sad, tormented man he’d been tracking, but this was superseded, in spite of his finer instincts, by triumph. Someone up there is looking out for me, he thought, as he thanked the men and left them to Sullivan while he headed down to his car. At noon, when he’d originally planned to go into battle against Bleustein, he’d had nothing but a lot of bluff and bluster, but now he had a real weapon. Attorney-client privilege was irrelevant now, because the client was dead, and surely even Bleustein would cooperate with the police in the attempt to solve his death.

  * * *

  It took less than one minute for Bleustein to disavow him of that notion. Bleustein’s law firm occupied half of a renovated brick Victorian off Elgin Street, across the street from the court and a short stroll to the roast beef house and the pubs where he spent the rest of his time.

  “Green!” the man roared through his open office door before Green had even finished introducing himself to the pretty young secretary sitting outside. “Don’t even think I’m going to help you with that damn case! After all the shit you’ve given me?”

  Green stepped over and poked his head through the door. Inside, Josh Bleustein’s office was a reflection of the man. It was oversized and expensively furnished in black leather and cherry wood, but it looked like Miami after a hurricane. Stacks of papers littered every surface; some had toppled and cascaded onto the floor. His jacket and tie lay in a heap on a chair, and his court gown had been tossed over a four-foot bronze statue of Lady Justice as if she were nothing but a cheap coat rack. Bleustein himself was kneeling on the floor, pawing through a stack of files. His white shirt was rolled up to his elbows, damp with sweat, and his jowled face was bright red. From behind folds of fat, his eyes skewered Green. Green had never met the man on his own turf, and he had to suppress a twinge of awe.

  “Josh,” he replied, leaning against the door frame casually, “you dish out as good as you get, and I’m still talking to you. It’s business, right? And speaking of shit, how do you get any clients with the place looking like this?”

  “Because I win, that’s how.”

  “And so do I.”

  Bleustein paused, then hauled himself to his feet and pulled his trousers out of his crotch. He approached to loom over Green. “Well, don’t expect a mutual admiration society.”

  Green ke
pt his own gaze steady. “Luckily, we’re both on the same side on this one, so don’t unsheathe your sword just yet. I’m worried about your client.”

  “Ex-client.”

  “In fact, I’m afraid he may be just that. I’m afraid he may be that burned body in the Vanier flophouse.”

  “With all your fears, you should see a shrink.”

  Green grinned. “Give me a break. I was talking to one yesterday, and I think I’d do better just drinking myself silly like the rest of the world. Matthew Fraser’s been ID ’d as the man who rented the room.”

  For the first time, Bleustein’s gaze flickered, as if he couldn’t hide his surprise at the news. Green pressed his advantage. “The death is looking like a homicide,” he said, deciding that the situation called for tweaking the truth slightly. “I know Fraser was worried someone was following him. I know he was hoping to get a restraining order, but there’s no record of an application. Did he come to see you, or should I start hunting down your competitors in the yellow pages?”

  Bleustein had recovered his footing, and his face was deadpan. “Be my guest. The guy’s a nutbar anyway, and I’m surprised no one bumped him off earlier.” He gave a dismissive shrug as if the matter were no longer of importance to him. “Yeah, he did come here—maybe a week ago? Sandy!” He shouted in the general direction of the outer door. “What day did that wacko kiddie diddler come to see me? The one with the briefcase that weighed fifty pounds?”

  There was silence for a moment, broken only by Bleustein’s dangerously asthmatic breathing. “Monday, ten a.m.,” came the sweet reply.