Don't Forget You Love Me

by Rosemary Aubert

  “A suck buddy? That’s a guy that hangs around with a more important guy and spends all this time sucking up to him in order to impress him for some reason or other.”

  “So who was this, uh, buddy?”

  “Al? He’s like those cops they got on TV now. Always frowning—like a smile would break his ugly face or something.” He shook his head. “Head shaved. A lot of muscles. Hand always at his side like he’s just about ready to pull his baton—or his gun.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I know the type. Pain in the butt.” I was trying to sound tough, which was ridiculous. Even in my most dire days, the manner of speaking I had acquired in my education and my work on the bench had stayed with me. “What about the other one. There were four, right?”

  “Right. But I don’t know nothing about that last one. And I told you everything I got on the other three. So, if you’re going to try to track them down and talk to them or something like that, well, I gotta tell you, you’re on your own, your Honor.”

  He snickered. And the door to Johnny’s willingness to help slammed shut.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I made my way home along Eglinton Avenue, a major thoroughfare that runs east and west across what used to be the top of the city but what is now practically the bottom. The usual eighteen-hour rush hour was starting to peak now that it was two in the afternoon.

  I live in a renovated apartment building, what they call in this city, a “low-rise”. I own the place and I’ve had it restored to what it was when it was built sometime in the late sixties. The best thing about it is that it sits right at the edge of Wigmore ravine.

  Toronto is a city of ravines, river valleys really. There are three great rivers, the Humber, the Don, and the Rouge that run through the city. Though high-rise office buildings and thousands of giant glass condos have taken over the cityscape in recent years, the rivers retain a margin of wilderness around themselves. When I lived as a vagrant in the valley of the Don, there were days, a lot of days, when I avoided setting my eyes on any building whatsoever, though high above, the houses and apartment buildings that surround Wigmore, looked down on me, a fugitive and squatter at their feet.

  Of course, being the owner of the building, I had the best apartment. It had been two and was now combined into one. It was on the top floor, the eighth, and it looked out over the river and the ravine the way a stately home of England looks out on its park. Only my park wasn’t a huge garden. It was a wild place with vegetation untamed since the last lone farmer had given up trying to subdue it a hundred years before.

  I owned not only my building, but also a bit of land down in the valley. How I came to have the money for my real estate ventures is another story for another day, but suffice it to say, that I took advantage of the fact that a few acres of Wigmore remained in private hands—now my hands—and the rest belonged to the city.

  On my land, I and my son Jeffrey had, over the course of the past few years, built a modest retreat that we called The Village in the Valley. We—Jeffrey really—ran it as a refuge for homeless people who didn’t want to live in shelters in downtown neighborhoods.

  Despite actually being at the heart of the city, the village was isolated, cut off by the steep walls of the valley and inaccessible except to those who knew the way of the river and its meanderings.

  The site consisted of about a dozen one-room wooden buildings surrounding a central structure that had showers and other washroom amenities as well as a kitchen and a large room intended as a gathering place, though the denizens of the valley never gathered there. The main reason many of them had taken to living in the valley in the first place was to get away from other people.

  I scrambled down the path from Eglinton to the site.

  “Dad, I’ve been worried about you!” Jeffrey ran his fingers through his long blonde hair. He looked nothing like my daughter Ellen, who had inherited the creamy coloring of her Italian ancestors. “Where’s your cell phone?”

  I shrugged. Jeffrey clicked his tongue in mild disgust.

  “How are we doing down here?” I asked him, surveying the village with a glance. “Looks good….”

  Jeffrey smiled slightly. Another thing he had not inherited was the propensity to display a lot of emotion. “It’s good, Dad. No fights. Nobody’s sick. Nobody nosing around.” He hesitated.

  “What?”

  “I’m a little worried about our people having to spend another winter without proper insulation. And if there’s a freeze-up, I’m not sure how our water supply is going to handle it.”

  Jeffrey was adept at dealing with the city, the province and the feds, the main sources of our funding, aside from the foundation I’d been able to set up. We’d had arguments about private funding from outside sources, but I never brought the issue up if I didn’t have to.

  “Have you heard anything about the municipal grant application?”

  “No. Of course I’m hoping that the city will come through the way it has over the past three years….”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Sure.”

  I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. Jeffrey smiled that small smile again. “You keep your phone where you can get at it. I need to know that you’re okay, especially right now.”

  Of course he was referring to Queenie.

  “And I’m right down here if you need me. Two minutes away.”

  “Right.”

  I turned and made my way through the trees toward a second path, one that led directly up out of the valley and into the parking lot at the rear of my building.

  When I got to the top, I looked out over the expanse of the ravine. Sometimes I still had nightmares about my years of living rough down there. I would dream that it was winter but that I had no clothes—literally--and that I crouched naked in drifts of snow that blew from the river into the snow-laden branches of the trees. I always woke up from those dreams shivering and shaking, even if it was the middle of summer.

  But in the real world, I had little to fear from the coming of winter anymore, except ice on the sidewalks and other old-man things. So I could enjoy the magnificent array before me—the autumn trees, just beginning to turn. No. I had nothing to fear. Except of course, failure to keep my promise.

  When I got to my apartment, I found my cell phone sitting on a table by the door, a table on which I always put things that I was supposed to remember to take with me when I went out.

  There were two calls. Ellen again. I’d have to call her later when I had time to listen to her complain about my not keeping in touch.

  Aliana again. This time I listened to her message.

  “Ellis, hope you’re okay. I was expecting to hear from you. I’ve got some information I think you might find helpful.”

  She sounded professional. Her voice was smooth and the years had deepened it. She sounded like a woman who had wrangled a thousand interviews from recalcitrant strangers who had warmed in the end and given her the great story she was always after.

  The message went on, “I heard you’re asking around concerning the four officers who were involved in the apprehension of that homeless man who subsequently died. Well, you may be interested to know that I can give you quite a bit of information about one of the cops. Call me.”

  She didn’t say which cop.

  But this time, I was careful to write her number down.

  CHAPTER TEN

  She wasn’t there when I called, which, I have to admit, gave me a feeling of relief. But I left her a message asking her to email me with a suggested time and place and she did and I emailed her back and agreed to meet her for coffee the following afternoon.

  Perhaps for some sentimental reason, she chose a coffee shop that had been in Little Italy before Little Italy had disappeared altogether. The shop was run by a nice couple from Pakistan now. And all who wanted to preserve their Italian essence in the middle of our multicultural city had moved north to the suburb of Woodbridge.

  The Toronto Italians weren�
�t bricklayers anymore. They were property developers, among other impressive occupations. Woodbridge was a model of an Italy that their grandparents had remembered with the blind fondness of the dispossessed. It sported newly-constructed Italy-like buildings like the campanile—the bell-tower that was the signature of the enclave. I had heard that you had to prove that you were really Italian to live in Woodbridge, but I wasn’t sure about that.

  Anyway. Aliana. As I may have said, I had known her since she had been a little girl sometimes coming to work with her father, Vince, who was my father’s right-hand-man on the bricklaying jobs that provided our livelihood. I was a young man then so I had no interest in little girls, especially pesky, smart ones like Aliana. Sometimes-- lucky times-- she ignored me altogether. But other times she followed me around, peppering me with questions. How had my father learned to make designs in the driveways and the garden patios with bricks? How come our trucks were old and ugly when other people had brand new ones? What did it mean that I was going to go to university? Did they have a lot of books there? Did they have any girls there?

  I lost track of Aliana for a very long time. I became a lawyer, then a judge. I married and had my two children. During all those successful years, I never saw her, though I gradually became aware of her reputation as a journalist, eventually, an award-winning writer.

  And then, during the time of my troubles, somehow she had come back. Granted I was a great story: Prominent judge hits the skids. During my days of shame, she was my constant chronicler, trying, I imagine now, to touch the hearts of her many readers with the story of a man who had once lived as decently as they did, but now lived as a homeless vagrant in the ravines. It could happen to anyone, Aliana seemed to be telling her readers. It could happen to you.

  Aliana remained faithful to her old friend and sensitive to the desperation I faced. In a sense, in those years, she wrote my life.

  But she had always seemed to want something from me, something I just couldn’t give. And when, at last, I’d returned to respectability, restored in the practice of law and eventually invited to return to the bench, Aliana had taken off with no goodbye

  ***

  Preparing for our meeting, I surprised myself by taking some care with my clothing. I had never returned to the sartorial splendor of my pre-fall days, the made-to-measure shirts, the silk ties, the suits that filled two whole closets. But as I looked at myself in the mirror I felt almost proud. I still looked like a man of consequence. My gray hair was now pretty much white, and my face etched by the finger of time, but considering what I’d been through over all the years since Aliana had first set eyes on me, I thought, Not bad. Not bad at all.

  And then, without warning, an image of Queenie smiling up at me and telling me that I was darn handsome for a bum, took my breath away.

  ***

  The years had not been unkind to Aliana: still slim, still bright-eyed, still possessed of an amazingly thick head of black hair—now a little streaked with silver but not much.

  She rose from the small table at which she’d been waiting and extended her hand, which I took in mine for only a second.

  “The last few weeks must have been unbearably difficult,” she said, gesturing for me to take the chair opposite her. “I know that when Ed died, I drifted in and out for some time….”

  “But,” she said smiling and, with a graceful motion of her fingers, summoning the boy who was serving the tables, “you look quite wonderful.”

  I smiled, not knowing exactly what to say. It occurred to me that this was going to be going on for some time. People telling me I was taking Queenie’s death like a trooper and fighting the urge to tell them I was glad they were fooled but I wish they would mind their own business.

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s been a long time,” she said. “And I’ve been away most of it.”

  “In the Middle East, I understand.” I hadn’t really paid much attention, but I knew she’d become a foreign correspondent for the Daily World. I wondered how much chit-chat we’d have to go through before we got to the point.

  “But I’m home now.”

  “Still looking for a story?” I tried to keep my voice light.

  “Sure.” She reached across the table but stopped short of actually touching me. “A couple of stories, actually. But don’t worry, you’re not one of them.”

  “Thank God,” I answered, and we both laughed, which broke the ice a little.

  “Look, Ellis, I don’t have time to waste and I’m sure you don’t either. I called you because I heard from one of my sources on the street that you’ve been asking about those four cops that are accused of somehow being involved in the death of that wild homeless man.”

  “Wild? Is that what you’ve heard? That he was wild?”

  “Something like that. And I also heard that you’re going back to solving murder cases.”

  “Listen, Aliana, I don’t know where you get your information but…”

  “Sure you know. I get it the same place you get your information—from people who have the facts.” She glanced out the window. The street was busy with pedestrians. They certainly didn’t look Italian, the way they would have when I was a boy. “I’m not trying to do you any favors, Ellis.…”

  “Of course you are,” I answered, trying to be nice, though Aliana was smart enough to read my mind. The rest of that sentence, the part I didn’t say out loud was and if you do me a favor, I’m going to have to do one for you in return.

  She didn’t respond. She drew in her breath as if she were going to give me a little speech or something. I was alarmed, until I started to listen.

  “I know you’re trying to get information about those four cops. I’ve got quite a bit of source material on the topic of police getting out of control. You may recall that I did a series on the topic a few months ago.”

  “Oh, of course…” I answered as if I had read every word, which I had not. “But…”

  “But what?”

  “Is that ethical? I mean you got that information when you were under contract to the World. Sharing it with me might breach confidentiality—at the very least.”

  She stared at me in astonishment. “You really never change do you? Still the little Catholic boy afraid to commit a sin.”

  “I didn’t know you kept track of my conscience along with keeping track of everything else about me, Aliana.”

  We were both silent for an embarrassing amount of time.

  “Ellis,” she finally said, “my sources and my research belong to me. All my career I’ve taken measures to safeguard the independence of my reporting. If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have been able to cover the things I have written about. Including you. You may have forgotten it after all these years, but you and I had an agreement. We agreed that anything I learned about you would be available for my use without restriction? Do you remember that?”

  Now she was talking to me as though I were a child, as though I were the destroyed man I’d been when she’d written those articles about me and published them in the World.

  I pushed my doubts aside. “What can you tell me?” I asked her. “What did you bring me here to tell me? What have you got on those cops and how did you get it?

  “Whoa! Not so fast.” She looked me straight in the eye, pinning me. I imagined it was a technique she used to calm down an interviewee. It worked. I took a breath and sat back.

  “You were right about the favor,” she said.

  I felt the old alarm bells getting ready to go off.

  But she sat back too, and I could see she was now all business. “I’m working on a new series for the World. It’s about gang members and the effect of their involvement on their families.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I commented. What I didn’t say was, why do you think this has anything to do with me?

  She nodded. “In the course of my research, I’ve come across a girl—a precocious twelve-year-old. She’s got three brothers who are suspected
of being deeply involved in gang activity. I feel that with the right approach, I can interview this girl and get information that nobody else will have, but to do so, I feel I need your help.”

  “My help?” I asked with surprise, but she didn’t seem to hear me. She just kept on talking.

  “If you’ll help me, I’ll help you.”

  “How? I don’t understand why…”

  “The thing is, one of the four cops you’re interested in, Mark Hopequist, knows this girl. He worked with her when he was assigned to youth detail.” She met my eyes again and I was sure she saw the spark of interest there. “You know about that, right? You know that Hopequist moved around quite a bit?”

  “I’ve heard something like that.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “But I’m not sure how you think I could…”

  “When I left Canada a couple of years ago, I heard that you had been named as the Judge of Orphans. Now that’s an assignment that would have put you front and center in legal issues having to do with the lives of children whose status before the law was uncertain.”

  The intensity of her conversation was increasing as though she were revving up. Instead of being put off, I started to find her almost charming. I started to see the little girl I’d once known. “Where do they get the bricks? Do they make them in a factory? Where is it?”

  “Aliana,” I said, “You’re such an excellent researcher and always so on top of things that it cannot have escaped your attention, even if you left Canada, that I never accepted that position, that I turned it over to another judge, a very promising young female.”

  “Cabrini, Capelli… Something like that. Sure I remember. I think you said at the time that you felt you needed to get back into full familiarity with the law before you could accept such a difficult and demanding role. Commendable.”

  She looked at me with admiration. I cleared my throat and resumed the conversation. “So my experience dealing with young people may not be as extensive as you imagine.”