I glanced down at the pages. I expected to see the pretend writing of a child, scribbled sentences, amateurish drawings.
What I saw was nothing like that. I took one of the sheets from her hand and studied it for a moment. A neatly printed headline in rather large letters spread across the top of the page. It said, “Desserts Made With Fruit and Flowers for Special Parties”. And beneath the title was a tidy list of ingredients that, yes, included both ice and snow. For an instant, a long-ago memory worked its way into my consciousness. It was of my mother who was a very good ordinary cook but who, every once in a while jumped into some sort of culinary disaster that was clearly beyond her skills.
“Aliana” I said. “Look at this.”
She studied the page as I had, and her reaction was the same. “Kezia, this is amazing!”
“How long have you been working on this?” I asked.
“A real long time. I was almost finished with it once but one of my brothers came over and he got mad at JoJo for something and then he started tearing the place up and he just grabbed all my papers and he burned them in the sink. JoJo and me, we were afraid to stop him, so I lost everything I wrote.” She stopped to draw a breath.
“But that was the old days when I had to write it all by hand. Now I only got to write notes by hand because I go to the libary down the street and I type all my writing in on the computer. Then I put it on the cloud.” She looked at me. “You know what that means, right?”
“Right.”
“Kezia,” Aliana said, “this is wonderful—I mean about you going to the library and working on your book. Does the librarian help you?”
“Sometimes.”
“How do you feel about adults helping you?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Did Officer Hopequist ever help you?”
“Who?”
“Mark Hopequist. You told us before that you knew him from the Youth Bureau.”
The girl smiled. “Oh, yeah. Officer Mark.” She thought for a minute. “Yeah, he helped me a lot. We used to read books together. They were like mystery stories and that. I really liked it when we read because he explained all kinds of things about the police, about how they catch criminals from clues and like that. He told me how cops have special powers.”
“Powers?” I asked.
“Yeah. Like how they can arrest people and that. Course I knew that already because of my brothers being in jail and all, but they got other powers, too. Like they can ask people questions and make them answer. And they can read your email if they have permission from their boss. And they can take your car away, too. Except none of us here got any cars.”
“Kezia, the last time we talked to you, you said that Officer Mark told you a secret. Do you remember that?” I asked.
She looked puzzled for a second, then she seemed to remember. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I did. He was real nice. He told me that he’s a preacher.”
“A preacher?” Aliana failed to hide her surprise.
“Yeah, like in a church. Only they call it a ‘prayer palace’. He told me lots of people go there on Sunday. Maybe even hundreds of people. And he stands up in front of them and gives sermons about being good and helping the unfortunate and them and not belonging to gangs or shoplifting.”
“Is this the secret?” Aliana asked sounding disappointed. She seemed to have abandoned her usual reporter’s cool.
“No.”
There was a long silence then. Neither Aliana nor I seemed to know what to say. It wasn’t an easy thing to get a person to divulge a secret. I knew that as a lawyer and a judge and even as a father. Of course it was Aliana’s job to get at things people didn’t want to say. And from what I understood about her, she’d won a lot of awards for doing so successfully. But her reputed skill seemed to fail her now. The two of us just sat there.
“No,” Kezia said again. Then she shrugged. “I promised not to tell anybody this secret, but you’re a judge, right?”
“A retired judge.”
“That’s the same thing isn’t it? I mean a retired guy is the same as a real guy?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“And people say things to judges all the time, don’t they? I know that because I went to court once and I heard them—the lawyers and the witnesses and everybody. The judge, he just sat there and everybody said everything in front of him so he could hear the whole case. Right?”
“Right.” I could see where this was going.
“So I s’pose I could tell a judge the secret.”
Aliana sat perfectly still and quiet during this exchange. I think the two of us were afraid of what we might hear.
“Okay. Here’s the secret. One time we were reading a story and there was something in it about weapons. There was guns and that stick the cops can hit people with—“
“The baton?” I asked.
“Yeah. Something like that. So anyway, I asked Mark if they had weapons like in the movies, with guns that killed people with a big ray of red light and things like that. He said that they did have something. He said it was called a Taser.” She hesitated.
I could hear Aliana breathing. But she said nothing. And Kezia went on.
“I asked him what that was and he said it was a ‘non-lethal weapon.’ I remember these things—I mean about the Taser and what it was called—because I keep a notebook and I write everything down when I hear it.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Aliana smile faintly at this. I had never seen her without a notebook tucked away somewhere on her person, though they had eventually been replaced by her Blackberry and her phone.
“Yeah,” Kezia continued, “The secret is: Mark told me that maybe someday he could show me a Taser, maybe even show me how it worked. He said that right now only the police bosses had them, but that sometimes ordinary policemen like him got to have one for a little while and that if that happened to him, he would show me.”
Then Kezia sighed. “Course that’ll never happen because now he doesn’t work with kids anymore and I’ll never see him again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“It’s not much of a secret, is it?” Aliana said. “And a preacher? What can that mean?”
“That he’s not a murderer?” Of course I knew it was an absurd thing to say, and Aliana laughed pleasantly. I had invited her back to my place for a coffee. I realized that having her in my home was a more personal gesture than I’d engaged in with her, but since it was pretty much halfway between Kezia’s place and hers, it seemed the logical thing to do.
The place was spotless and in good order, with nothing lying around except a pile of books that I’d been reading. In the first weeks after Queenie’s death, I had let things go until my daughter, Ellen, had insisted on coming over. I couldn’t stand the thought of Ellen seeing my home—or me—in disarray, so I had hurriedly cleaned up before she’d arrived. After that, I got back to the usual standard of neatness and cleanliness that Queenie and I had always maintained.
“I think we should go and hear him. I’m sure it’ll tell us something about the man.”
“How are we going to find out where this so-called ‘prayer palace’ is?”
“There aren’t very many of them around town,” Aliana answered. “Leave it to me. I’ll call them all and ask them when Mark Hopequist is appearing.”
“Not appearing, Aliana. He’s not a rock star or anything!”
“Wanna bet?”
Of course she was a good as her word, and a couple of nights later, we found ourselves in the huge parking lot of a west-end church. It was a massive building whose architecture was something between a cathedral and a hockey arena.
At first I was concerned that Hopequist might see us and figure out why we were there, but it was such a big hall with a so large a number of people! We slid in at the very back and tried, unsuccessfully, to blend into the crowd. Within seconds we began to be greeted by members of the congregation who immediately considered us as possible
new participants. We politely declined invitations to Bible Study and the Welcome Club. Most of the people in the congregation were racial minorities, another reason why we failed to disappear.
“Mark seems to be the featured speaker of the evening,” Aliana said, studying the program we’d been handed. “I don’t think this is a service. I think it’s some sort of a lecture….”
I didn’t want to admit my relief at this news. I had fallen away from the religion of my childhood, a fact that still made me feel guilty sometimes. Guilty enough to be uncomfortable in any church or church-like atmosphere that wasn’t Roman Catholic. Better to be damned for not going to church at all than to be damned for going to the wrong one!
I felt a tug at my sleeve. “Earth to Ellis. What are you thinking? You seem to have gone away there for a minute.”
I was spared having to answer by a sudden extremely loud slam of the huge organ at the front on what looked more like a stage than an altar, followed by about a thousand people singing a hymn that sounded typically Protestant to me. I noticed Aliana did not join in. She had been raised the same way as I had been, give or take the slight changes in the Church during the thirteen or so years between us in age.
Hopequist’s topic was the evil of guns and how the congregation should continue to work as hard as they could to remove them from Toronto streets. He also spent quite a bit of time explaining that each of us is responsible for alleviating the suffering of others. I felt he could alleviate my suffering by cutting his sermon short.
During the obligatory Q & A following his talk, someone in the audience mentioned the use of non-lethal weapons used during police work.
Hopequist seemed to go a little wild at the question. His talk had been calm, reasoned, more like that delivered by a professor than a preacher. But on this topic, he was clearly emotionally involved in some way.
“There is no such thing as a non-lethal or less-lethal weapon!” he declared, his voice rising both in tone and volume. “When a weapon is used, a police officer intends one thing and one thing only: TO KILL. We must stop this. We must stop the police killing of our citizens. Whether guilty or not guilty, no man woman or child deserves to be shot dead on any street in our city—in any home or business—in any park or place of recreation!”
The congregation went wild, too. Their shouted amens echoed all the way into the parking lot.
I couldn’t image how such a person could be a police officer.
“Do you think his supervisors know about his feelings on this?”
“I can’t imagine that they don’t,” Aliana answered.
“Then how can they keep him on the force?”
“By assigning him to deal with the young people?”
“But he doesn’t do that anymore,” I responded. “The night that the Juicer died, Hopequist was on the beat. That’s how he got to the scene. And remember, he had had a confrontation of some sort with the Juicer the day before. None of that would suggest that he’s been relieved of regular duties.”
“There’s no way of getting around the fact that the Juicer didn’t die on the scene,” Aliana said. “There’s also no way of knowing why PIC initially got involved then refused to lay charges and cancelled the investigation into the incident. But everything points in the same direction, which is toward ordinary police action. The evidence of wrong-doing against Mark is slight. Confrontations like the one you mention are part of life on the street.”
I nodded. “And as for Feeance and Ted Downs. They’re just regular cops as far as I can see. That leaves Al Brownette. I know we haven’t talked to him, but the people we have talked to seemed to suggest that aside from his being an obnoxious person and a lackey to Ted, there’s no evidence against him, either.”
Aliana opened her mouth to speak, but before she got a word in, I went on. “Aliana, I don’t think you and I need to work together anymore. If you want to keep helping Kezia, that’s fine. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m finished.”
She kept her face perfectly still, her fine reporter’s face. “What about your promise to Queenie?”
I didn’t meet her eyes. “Queenie was dying. I don’t think she knew what she was saying. There’s been no murder here. Just a tragic death brought on by severe stress.”
I wasn’t sure who I was being disloyal to here and whether it was the oddness of having another woman in Queenie’s and my home, but I suddenly felt done. I just couldn’t handle this thing any longer.
CHAPTER THIRTY
My abrupt “dismissal” of Aliana and my sense of relief that I no longer had to worry about solving a murder case lasted about twelve hours.
Then the doubts began to assail me, as they used to say.
Why would PIC have been involved at all unless they had had at least a suspicion in the early stages of their investigation that the cops had been involved in the killing of the Juicer? Why would there be such conflicting evidence about whether or not the Juicer was violent? And if he were violent, what had set him off the day of the incident?
And then there was the fact that it was quite possible that Aliana and I had been deliberately shot at, either to wound us or to scare us. Try as I might, I couldn’t convince myself that the shooting was a coincidence. There are only two sets of people who regularly roam the streets of Toronto with loaded guns. Cops and gang members. It was certainly true that my recent adventures had put in touch one way or another with each of those groups.
Plus, when I thought about it, there was clearly something mysterious going on in the village in the valley. I thought about Jeffrey’s recent behavior, his neglecting to fill me in on important information. I couldn’t recall his ever doing that before. Was he acting in a secretive manner—one not usual with him?
And what about the day that I was convinced that someone was following me? And, oh yeah, the note warning me to mind my own business. About what? The Juicer? The village?
I needed a rest. I needed to think about these things. I needed to figure out whether all these threads were connected to each other or to nothing or, as Queenie had believed, to murder.
Of course, I was fooling myself if I thought Aliana was going to stay away. She didn’t phone. She didn’t email. But after a week of nothing, I got a forwarded invitation to a very swish banquet. There was a nice paragraph announcing that Aliana Caterina was to be a guest of honor because she had written so many fine articles about the city. The banquet, the invitation explained, was being held in honor of women and men who had furthered the cause of Toronto in the world view.
That sounded rather grandiose to me, and I nearly erased the thing, but something stayed my finger at the last moment and instead, I phoned Aliana to ask her what it was all about.
“Oh, hi, Ellis,” she said with a breeziness I’d never noticed her use before, “It’ll be a fun occasion. It’s going to be held in a restored building down at the Brick Factory, in the valley. The speakers will all be people who have worked to develop the city in a way that respects its history and the environment. The tickets are five hundred dollars each, but that as a celebrity guest, I’ve got two complimentary ones.” I could hear her draw in her breath on the other end of the line. “It would be a shame to waste them.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” I heard her breathe again. Pause. “Would you like to attend?”
“I…”
“I think you’d really enjoy this. A number of the speakers will be dealing with the Don River valley and the impact on the city of the development of land surrounding it. I mean since you’re a stakeholder—being a landowner, I can’t see how you could fail to be interested in this topic.”
I was interested. I gave it a few minutes thought, for the sake of propriety if nothing else.
“Thank you, Aliana,” I said with a bit more formality than I’d really intended. “I’d be honored. I would very much like to accompany you to this affair.”
At the word “affair” she actually giggled. “Great,” sh
e said. “I’ll email you the details.
It turned out to be a black-tie event. I hadn’t worn a suit since Queenie’s funeral, and I was surprised that I couldn’t help feeling good about myself when I looked in the mirror. Not bad for an old guy. The sight of myself in a tux lifted my spirits, in fact, they soared.
I could tell that Aliana was mightily impressed when she set eyes on me!
The banquet was wonderful with several courses, each prepared by one of the city’s top chefs. There were exotic cheeses wrapped in crisp phyllo for appetizers and a salad made of greens I’d not seen since summer. There was a fish course, a lovely smoked salmon, accompanied by plenty of comments about the fact that wild salmon had returned to the Humber River in the west of the city, and even perhaps to the Don, which I knew they had once inhabited.
There was a beautiful beef tenderloin done to just the shade of pink that I preferred, accompanied by asparagus cooked with olives and fennel. At the end of it all: an amazing chocolate cheesecake.
I had always been a man who enjoyed his food, and I was really having a good time. It didn’t even put a damper on things that I couldn’t share the fine wines that went with each course. There were a number of teetotalers at our table, men and women who felt that drinking alcohol was somehow bad for the environment. I privately remembered how bad for the environment it was in the old days when Queenie and I went on benders and tore up various elements of Queen Street—even sometimes including our fellow denizens!
All went well until the speeches started. Then I came to my senses about where I was and what was going on. Not only was this recently-built, multi-story building an intrusion on the pristine setting of the valley, but many of the speakers—and quite a number of the sponsors of the banquet--were real estate investors determined, as they would have it, to up the monetary value of the valley lands. Since this could only mean development, it meant that these people were determined to ruin the valley by building on its banks and even, I was horrified to learn, on its floodplain, since at least three of the speakers were contractors who boasted of having developed new methods of flood control that would allow buildings to be built right up to the water’s edge.
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