We actually talked to a couple of the neighbors, Aliana using her professional skills. Mostly they told us to mind our own business. But a couple people said that Ted was a great guy who had suffered a terrible loss quite recently but was doing his best to get over it and get on with his life.
Aliana made further use of her police contacts and we ended up one night at the Crooked Cookoo, located at some obscure intersection in Scarborough, a corner that I had never seen despite my decades of living not far from it. It was archetypical enough to be a parody of itself. Dark, crowded, noisy with raucous music that I thought was being piped in until I caught sight of the band that was playing in a corner of the place lit only by one red bulb and one blue one.
“How can we talk to anybody here?” I asked Aliana. I was shouting over the noise, but she didn’t hear me.
“What?”
“I can’t hear myself think. How are we going to get anything in a place like this?”
“You don’t need to think,” she said. This time she was standing so close to me that the sound of her voice reached my ear unimpeded by the ambient racket.
I had to admit she looked great in tight jeans and a black sweater that showed she hadn’t lost any of the youthful attractiveness of her figure. I realized I had never really looked at her before. I’ve always been a one-woman man, even if it’s been three different women at three different times. I could easily figure out Aliana’s age, based on the difference between us that I’d known since she was a kid. But the music and the push of the crowd and the fact that Aliana was alternately shoved right up against me, then torn away was making it hard for me to concentrate.
“Just stick with me and listen,” she said, leading me to a table where she was soon joined by three or four men. I couldn’t see all that clearly, but they looked tall and rather muscular and handsome in a bald-headed tough-looking sort of way.
“Ted? Great guy. Shame what happened to him.”
“Downs? He’s retiring, isn’t he?” I heard he was handing over the job to his brown-nosing little sidekick!”
This elicited a laugh from the group, a laugh in which Aliana seemed to join.
“He’s got a shadow, a little shadow that goes in and out with him. That’s Ted and Al,” somebody said. And they laughed again.
At the end of the evening, I felt I’d learned nothing new about Ted Downs, but I learned a lot about Aliana.
She was a skilled actress. I was sure the talent had served her well over the years. I couldn’t help wondering whether she’d ever exercised it on my behalf—or, come to think of it, on me.
The next thing she reported to me was that she had been doing some research at the coroner’s office.
“I know you spoke to Singh, but he can be pretty tight-mouthed. I loosened him up a bit, reviewed his whole report with him. It’s true that the Juicer didn’t die on the street. He died in the hospital in which he’d been a patient for several days prior, due to his recurring mental problems. He passed away of a massive coronary. At the time of his death, he was heavily bruised from the take-down at the shelter—there were lacerations and contusions all over his body. That fact rendered some details of his condition incapable of analysis.”
“I don’t get this, Aliana. A man is beaten by the police and he dies of a heart attack and the coroner concludes he died of natural causes?”
She shrugged. “I can’t argue with the coroner, Ellis. But I will say that I spoke to a nurse at the hospital who had worked on the Juicer. By the way, he had a name.”
“William Collins.”
“Right. He was only forty-four.”
“I thought he was much older than that!”
“So did everybody else. But he wasn’t. He still had a life ahead of him.”
“And so did Ted Down’s son,” I couldn’t help saying.
“Anyway,” Aliana went on, “the nurse told me that the strength of people who are hysterical—even if they have no previous history of mental illness—can be phenomenal. She said you might think that a sedentary man not in top physical condition might be a weakling—and he might be until enraged. I’m sure it’s hormonal. It may even have something to do with the survival instinct.”
I had to smile at her despite the grim details of this conversation. “You’re going all Darwinian on me, are you?”
She looked at me as though she’d forgotten that I was capable of humor. She shook her head as if to dismiss the distracting thought and pressed on. “While I was talking to the nurse, the facility’s grief counsellor came in.”
The mention of such a person made me suddenly uncomfortable, as if I had, for a moment, forgotten my own grief and now had had it shoved in my face.
Aliana didn’t seem to notice my brief discomfort. “The grief counsellor told me that it would not be unusual for a deeply grieving person—especially one whose beloved died with issues remaining, such as the criminally-detained son of a cop--to occasionally feel homicidal rage when trying to deal with the demise of the loved one. But, she also said that in all her years of doing this work, she has never encountered anyone, nor heard of anyone, who actually committed murder out of rage at their grief for a lost one.”
I thanked her for the information. And she told me that I was welcome. I told her I’d think about it all and get back to her. She stuck out her hand for me to shake it, and when I took it, she gave my fingers a little squeeze.
I didn’t intend to let matters drop. Not at all. I intended to continue the surveillance on my own.
But when I went back to Ted Downs’ house and saw him arriving home, probably after a long shift, I realized that Ted, like me, myself, was bearing the burden of sorrow over the death of a loved one. To pretty much ambush him on his own territory would be little short of cruel.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
But if I thought that it would be easy to sneak around spying on a cop, I had another think coming.
I was, for a change, minding my own business down in the valley. I wasn’t visiting Jeffrey, or even thinking about anything except the beauty of the trees covered with new snow and the sound the river makes as the fast-flowing center section slides past the tinkling ice closer to the shore.
It was as if the ice itself had sprung up and smacked me. A cold, hard, sharp slap stung my cheek and my jacket was pulled so forcefully from the side that I lost my balance and slid down onto the icy path. I struggled to get up, but when I got halfway to my feet, my shaking knees gave way under me and in utter fear and humiliation, I ended up on my bum at the large feet of my attacker.
“What the hell do you think you’re up to? You’re asking for it, Portal. You’re going to find yourself where you’ve always belonged in spite of your fancy legal footwork, you common thug, you piece of shit...”
I turned away from the kick I could see coming.
But before his foot met my face, something or somebody pulled Ted Downs away
“Leave him alone,” I heard Jeffrey shout. I didn’t think I’d ever heard him say anything that loud before. “Just get the fuck away and get the hell out of here.”
I’d never heard him utter profanities, either. But I had to admit, he sounded pretty frightening.
“Get up, Dad,” my son said, lifting me by the arm and helping me to stand, which was suddenly difficult on the icy path. “We’re finished here and so is he.…”
Jeffrey turned in the direction from which I’d come, intending to lead me back down the path, but as soon as we turned our backs on the enraged cop, he was on me again, jumping on my back and pushing me down. This time his heavy boot met its target. I felt a searing pain in my side, heard the crack of a rib, suddenly found it hard to breathe.
I was as frightened for Jeffrey as I was for myself. Not only afraid that Downs would hurt him physically, but afraid he would arrest him—or both of us—for assaulting an officer.
“Lay off, son,” I struggled to say. “He’ll arrest us.”
“For what? He attached you.
And anyway, he can’t. He’s not in uniform. He’s not on duty.”
This opinion came not from Jeffrey but from a ragged-looking man who, with several others had suddenly appeared on the path. Despite my pain, I struggled to think where I’d seen this man before. And I remembered. He’d once been a lawyer, had even appeared before me several times. But then, like me, he had hit the skids. He’d never made his way back up though, even if he did feel qualified to give a legal opinion.
“Let’s go, Jeffrey. Please, let’s just get out of here now.”
“I’m saying it again and this time I mean it,” Jeffrey answered with a power in his voice that I suddenly realized must always have been there. How else would he have managed the village? How else would he have managed his life as my son? “Get out of here and stay out. This is private property. You have no right to be here if we are not breaking the law. And I assure you, we are not. Just go.”
I thought for sure we were doomed. The pain in my side was getting worse by the second. The temperature seemed to have dropped about twenty degrees since I’d set off on my walk. I was beginning to shiver, and each quivering movement sent new spasms of wild, jabbing hurt. And bad as the reality was, I was beginning to imagine worse. Any minute now, I was sure, I would feel the frigid steel of handcuffs.
But it didn’t happen. Maybe the village lawyer was right. Maybe Downs wasn’t going to haul me in and arrest me for resisting arrest or something similar. Maybe he was just going to keep me there, yelling at me until I passed out.
“Lay off, Portal,” he shouted. “Leave me alone. You have no right to come to my house. It’s none of your damn business what goes on there. And it’s none of your concern what’s going on with the case of William Collins. Or with my son. Just keep your damn ideas to yourself and stop prying into my life. You got that? Because if you don’t get off my back, you’re going to find yourself right back where you belong—with other no-good criminals just like yourself…”
He made another lunge for me, but Jeffrey held him off.
“We’ll stay away, I assure you,” Jeffrey said. “Now please leave. You can see that you’ve hurt him. I’m going to have to attend to his injuries. I’m going to have to get him to emerg.”
The way Jeffrey said this was reassuring. For the first time since before Queenie got sick, I had the feeling that somebody was watching over me. I only had the feeling for a few seconds because right after Jeffrey spoke, I passed out, and I didn’t wake up until we’d been in the RAZ unit at Scarborough General for six of the twelve hours we would spend there.
When I got home, Jeffrey put me to bed. It was a strange reversal of roles and in my analgesic-induced state, I sped back in memory to the time when he was a quiet little child. His sister, my daughter Ellen, was a spitfire. Always something on the go: Girl Guides, church groups, the soccer team… But Jeffrey had always kept quiet, kept to his room reading or as he often told me, thinking. “I’m just thinking about everything,” he would say. The two could not have been more different then as now. Ellen was a top-notch legal whiz, and the general feeling was that she would soon follow me to the bench, though all bets were that, unlike me, she would have a long, completely distinguished and absolutely uninterrupted career.
As I lay there floating in the sea of dreams, it seemed to me that a cloud of attendants came and went. I woke often to find Jeffrey beside the bed and sometimes Ellen and sometimes Angelo, my teenaged grandson. Once I thought I heard and saw Aliana, but decided that was a dream or a hallucination.
I stayed at home in bed for six days, until the pain in my side let up enough for me to get up and walk around the apartment. At first I was happy to be relieved of the responsibility I felt about the insoluble mystery of the death of William Collins.
But the more I got back to being myself, the more the whole thing bugged me.
And then I realized that I was bored. That was all it took to get me back on my feet and back in the game.
The next time I saw Aliana in my apartment, she was really there.
“I went back to see Singh at the coroner’s office,” she reported. “I just wanted to clarify some details about the state of the body at the time of death.”
She sounded like a pathologist herself and I wondered whether each time she conducted research for an article she sounded like the subject of her piece for a while.
“Of course he confirmed everything we’ve heard a million times before, but he added something that nobody has ever mentioned.” She stopped. “Can I get you anything? You look a little pale.…”
“I’m fine. Don’t leave me hanging here. What did he tell you?”
“The pathologist said that the Juicer was in a state of high excitability. He died of heart failure brought about as a result of stress caused by several types of injury, including possible injuries from a Taser.”
“A Taser? Singh actually used the word? Nobody had a Taser during the incident.”
Aliana nodded.
“Everybody’s been very definite about non-lethal weapons being authorized to supervisors only….”
“I know. Anyway, Singh said he couldn’t conclude decisively that a Taser had been involved. Nor would he say that had a Taser been involved it was the cause of death. All he would say was that the body showed signs of pressure injuries and of bruising consistent with being struck several times with a blunt object or objects.”
“He told me that, too.”
“He said the injuries were consistent with the victim having been hit with some sort of stick and that he may have been struggling against being held down by more than one person, which possibly could have resulted in the type of pressure injuries on the corpse.”
“Sticks? Tasers?”
“I know. The pathologist said that even taking into consideration the effect of the victim being in a state of high excitability, the pressure wounds alone would not be sufficient for a finding of anything other than ‘death by natural causes.’”
“The pressure wounds were from batons.”
“Yes.”
“And the Taser wounds?” Whatever the answer to this question, we were treading on new ground.
Or not.
“They may not have been Taser wounds at all,” Aliana answered. “I tried to get as much out of the pathologist as I could. He would only say that the marks were different from the other bruise marks and may have been consistent with Taser wounds. I don’t think he even put that in his report—the conclusion was that vague.”
“Taser wounds…. Where does that leave us? Matt West told me a long time ago that no officer involved in this incident would have been carrying a Taser. Of course, being authorized means nothing if you can get your hands on something with nobody stopping you.”
Aliana looked at me as if to say I was the Apostle of the Obvious. Or maybe as though she forgave me for being dull because I was in such bad shape.
“How would we ever find out?” I persisted. The pain in my side had all but stopped since we’d begun this conversation. But the minute I let my mind wander away from the topic of Tasers and wounds, it came back.
“Are you okay?” Aliana asked. “Let’s leave things for the moment. A little bit is enough for you right now.”
I didn’t need to be babied, but I didn’t mind having someone so obviously concerned about my welfare. “I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.”
“Are you going to have charges laid against Downs?” Aliana asked, confusing me for an instant. “For kicking you, for assault. There were plenty of witnesses to the unprovoked attack.”
“To tell the truth, Aliana, I never gave that a moment’s thought. There’s no way in the world Downs would be called to account for knocking down an old geezer who’d be seen to be unsteady on his feet.”
She smiled, but I knew she didn’t think the attack against me by a younger, stronger man—especially one called upon to maintain the peace—was in any way humorous.
“You’re a brave man,” she said. She s
ounded like she meant it.
“If I could get Ted Downs charged with a crime,” I went on, “it wouldn’t be for the misdemeanor of having his foot slip on an icy path and ending up between my ribs.”
Aliana nodded. Then she got up and made me a cup of tea. It was nice. And it didn’t even hurt me to drink it. I could tell that the healing of my body was progressing. And from the guiltless gratitude with which I could accept the ministrations of Aliana’s kindness, I could tell that my soul might be beginning to heal, too.
She waited a few more days and then she came and got me and told me that we had a mission to perform. She said she could tell that I was ready to get back at it. Though at what, I wasn’t sure.
“It’s Kezia. She wants to see us. I think we should go over right now.”
Aliana drove like an Italian. I couldn’t have said that if I weren’t one myself. But I lacked the verve and the nerve as we used to say.
Kezia was waiting for us. She wasn’t in the lobby this time, but she answered the buzzer so fast I was sure she’d been standing right beside it.
She looked beautiful. Her curly hair had been left to grow long. It formed a big dark halo around her pretty face with its youthful and makeup-free beauty.
She held a sheaf of papers in her hand. The package of pages was bound with a cloth band a couple of inches wide, a blue and silver band exactly like the one that held her hair away from her eyes.
“Here it is,” she said with such pride that it brought tears to my eyes. I could see Aliana was moved, too. But I had the feeling that the source of Aliana’s vicarious pleasure was different from mine. I had the sense she was looking at the manuscript as a job completed.
“It’s heavy, isn’t it?” the girl said. She hadn’t moved from the door. As Aliana took the manuscript in her hand, Kezia said, “It’s on the cloud, too.” She wrinkled her pretty nose, “at least I hope it is. But just in case, I want you and Mr. Portal to take it now, to keep it safe. In case anything happens.”
Unmistakable fear underlay the celebration of the moment. “I need you to take this out of here now and maybe not come back.”
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