The hard blue eyes flashed. Anger at my impudence? Kavin drew an audible breath. Tuppin spoke. “You think you have the right to aspire to the bench, Mr. Portal? Is that why you wish to dog my steps? You think you can be that good? Well, young man, I have only two words for you. They are words you’d best be prepared to hear every day of your life. You think you’re the best? Well, Ellis Portal, prove it!”
As we made our way out of the building, Kavin was silent. I wasn’t sure what he had hoped to accomplish by springing the Tuppin meeting on me unannounced, nor did the professor reveal what he thought about my exchange with the old judge. Personally, I felt exhilarated. If Tuppin wanted me to prove my worth, clearly he thought I had worth. I hadn’t the least idea what to do next, but I knew I could figure something out. The intimate tête-àtête with the best-known magistrate in the city fuelled my ambition, made me more determined than ever to prove to Tuppin that I was his man.
Kavin and I headed back toward University Avenue and passed the Supreme Court of Ontario at Osgoode Hall. Just behind it, on Armoury Street, construction had stopped for the day on the site of the new county courthouse that would hear superior court cases, including murder. Murder. Nothing could be more important to the justice system than bringing a killer to justice. I felt I’d done fine on this first “test” with Tuppin because the door was still open. But I realized that now that Tuppin was aware of me, I was vulnerable to his displeasure. A wrong word from him could ruin me. If he thought I could work up a credible homicide case, he might be impressed. If, on the other hand, he ever found out that the evidence for that case was illegally obtained, he’d have me thrown out of law school.
“I’d get busy working up that international law matter if I were you, Portal,” Kavin said when we parted company.
I GOT HOME TO find the house on Clinton Street empty except for my father. “Your uncle wants to see you,” he said by way of greeting.
I didn’t need to ask which uncle. Salvatore, my father’s brother, the moneybags, was paying for my education and was becoming uncomfortably and increasingly interested in the outcome of his investment. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll give him a call.”
I went to the fridge. More out of habit than hunger. Kavin had indeed come through with a significant hamburger.
“Where is everybody?” I asked, but my father didn’t answer. I noticed a glass of wine on the kitchen table in front of him. “Why are you drinking? Is something wrong?”
As was his habit, he spoke to me in Italian, but I was beginning to find it hard to understand him, as if I’d begun to forget his mother tongue, which was emphatically not my own. I had to strain to get what he was saying. “Today,” he began, “Vince Caterina, my assistant, and I took off from the job early and went to Mass.”
“Mass!” My father never went to church.
“We went as a remembrance for Giovanni Fusillo and the Mantellas and Carriglio and Allegrezza. You know who I mean?”
“Sure, Pa. The construction workers who died a few years ago digging the water-main tunnel up at Hogg’s Hollow.”
“Five years ago today.” He took a sip of wine and stared at the golden liquid left in the glass. “Those men were down there with no hard hats, no flashlights, no equipment for oxygen. When the tunnel caved in, they were trapped, choked by smoke from burning cables and stuck in mud. There were no safety rules. None.”
“I know, Pa,” I said softly.
“Listen, son,” he said, making eye contact with me, another thing he seldom did, “when you see Salvatore and he tells you how you’re going to be as rich as he is being a lawyer with a lot of big clients, you tell him you’re going to be the kind of lawyer who helps people like Giovanni Fusillo. Not rich people, but people like us. You tell Salvatore that, you hear?”
“Yeah, Pa,” I said, convincing neither my father nor myself. “Sure I will.”
Chapter 5
The x-ray showed more than a dozen wounds peppering the chest of what appeared to be an adult male. Against the fragile outline of his ribs, the dark shadows looked like moths caught in a cage. I studied the text, searching for the explanation of the photo, which I thought was of a man sprayed by machine gun fire. But, I soon discovered, this was not a gangster shot many times by a rival thug. It was instead a farmer hit once by the accidental discharge of his own shotgun. I closed my book and drifted off to sleep.
When I woke up, I saw that my brother’s bed had not been slept in.
I hurried down to find him sitting at the kitchen table with his head half-hidden by a large bowl from which he drank caffe latte like a puppy lapping up its breakfast. Michele was wrapped in a dusty, damp-looking sleeping bag and my mother was buzzing around him like a helicopter, alternately berating him in loud, angry Italian and tousling his curly hair, which seemed to have bits of debris stuck to it. When he put down the bowl, I thought his lips looked blue. But otherwise, I couldn’t see anything wrong with him.
“What’s up?” I asked, grabbing the top slice from a pile of Italian-bread toast in the center of the table.
“Non capisco questo!” my mother screeched, “that’s what’s up. We come to Canada so your brother can sleep in the street like a dog. Eat this.”
She plunked a bowl of mashed bread sweetened with honey and soaked with milk in front of Michele. He frowned and pushed it in front of me. I pushed it back.
“She’s uptight because I stayed out all night.”
Glancing at his rumpled, stained clothes, I couldn’t pass up the chance to tease him. “Must have been some date. Are you sure she’s the kind of girl you should be going with?”
“Yeah,” Michele answered with a sneer, “I go for girls who sleep in the street and you go for girls whose fathers own the street!”
“Shut up!”
“You shut up!”
“Stop!” my mother yelled. “This is the holy season of Our Lord’s sacred Passion. No loud voices in my house!”
Michele and I simultaneously burst out laughing. “Right on, Ma,” Michele said.
“So what is up?” I asked, helping myself to a couple more pieces of the crusty toast, brown and crisp at the edges, soft, golden and dripping with butter in the center.
“A few of us skipped classes yesterday,” Michele said, “and went down to University Avenue to demonstrate in front of the American Consulate. Show our solidarity with the Selma marchers. More and more people kept coming, and the pigs, the cops, I mean, were getting really uptight. Man, it was cool.”
“You’re not going to think it’s so cool if you land in jail,” my mother warned.
It wasn’t a wise thing to say. At the very mention of jail, Michele’s eyes lit up. I already harbored the legal professional’s terror of having a criminal record. I was appalled at my brother’s disregard for the likely consequences of arrest. He would surely become a hero among his friends if he were arrested, especially if it took place in front of the American Consulate, the most preferred site in the whole city to demonstrate for or against any cause.
“Anyway,” Michele went on, “somebody thought it would be groovy to sleep there all night. So we did. Only, the pigs kept picking us up and dumping us farther and farther down the street, like in front of the Canada Life Insurance building.” He shook his head. “It got pretty exhausting toward dawn. Plus it rained all night.”
“Listen, Michele,” I said, “maybe this isn’t the best time, but I have to talk to you about Billy Johnson.”
“He wasn’t there. Selma’s not his bag. He’s more into Vietnam,” Michele said. “Besides, he can’t hang out near the consulate. Some Yank coming out of there might see him and turn him in.” He cast me a hopeful glance. “Why do you need to talk to him? Are you going to help him? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I may be in a position to suggest something,” I told my brother. “But I need to know the details of his case. If you can arrange a meeting, I’ll talk to him and see what I can do.”
“Far out!” my brother
exclaimed. He rose and reached across the table to give my shoulder a grateful squeeze. As he sat back down, he accidentally hit the table, causing it to jerk and tip his bowl of latte. A stream of brown liquid splashed up and landed on the sleeping bag he was wearing. He stared at the big wet spot, then rubbed it hard with his hand as if to massage it into the cloth. One more badge on the uniform of the resistance.
THE DAY TURNED OUT TO BE yet another on which there was no sign of Gleason in class. I didn’t have a lot of time to waste looking for him or even thinking about him, I told myself. Yet I found it hard to ignore the fact that he had something on me. He could accuse me of stealing evidence, just as he had threatened to do. In reality, though, there were two more pressing reasons I needed to know where and how Gleason was. First, he held the only clues to the homicide, and second, more importantly, whether I admitted it or not, Gleason was my friend.
He didn’t answer the phone and I ran out of dimes trying, so I decided to ambush him at his home again.
This time, a maid in a black dress with a white apron answered the chime. She let me step inside when I told her I was a friend of Gleason’s from law school, but made me remain near the door while she went to announce me. She came back after a few minutes, took my coat and showed me into a sitting room, not the same one Gleason had ushered me into earlier, but a larger, more opulent one. Wallpapered in what looked like gray silk, it was dominated by an ornate, startlingly white fireplace and mantel, over which hung a life-size, three-quarter portrait of a young man whom I at first took to be Gleason. The subject of the portrait was as boyishly handsome, cheekbones and all, as Gleason, but, I soon noticed, looked taller and stronger, wirier.
On the mantel at the base of the portrait sat two black vases, each holding a bouquet of white lilacs and orchids, which sent a sharp, sweet scent into the cool air of the parlor. Threaded through each of the bouquets was a black satin ribbon that had been tied in a small bow in front, then left to trail down to brush against the stark white marble.
“There we have Gerard Alexander the Dead,” came Gleason’s voice behind me, surprising me so that I dropped my hat and had to suffer the indignity of picking the cheap thing off what was clearly an expensive Persian carpet.
At my look of confusion, Gleason smiled and said, “Sorry to keep you waiting.” He gestured at a chair. “Sit down, Portal.” He himself perched on the edge of a small couch upholstered in the same fabric as that on the walls.
I took a chair opposite him. He was dressed in a suit again. But not the same one. His attire struck me as appropriate for a house of mourning. “Gleason,” I said, “I’m sorry I’ve been, uh, harassing you. I missed you at school and I thought I should come over here and check. I didn’t know your brother had died. I . . .”
I didn’t want to admit I’d forgotten whether he’d even told me he had a brother.
“Gerard died four years ago in a skiing accident in Switzerland,” Gleason said. “He was caught in an avalanche and disappeared under a thousand tons of snow. They never found his body.” He recited these facts with a chilling lack of emotion. I thought of Michele, grubby after a night working for the cause of justice for Negroes. If anything had happened to my brother, I’m not sure I could have borne my grief. “Three days ago,” Gleason continued, “a ski patrol found what was left of Gerard at the base of a slope that had begun to thaw after an unusually warm winter. Ain’t spring wonderful?”
His odd behavior at the morgue and in the days since seemed to make sense. Despite his cavalier attitude, he must have been profoundly disturbed by the grim discovery.
“Gleason,” I said, looking at him, though he refused to make eye contact, “I’m so sorry.”
He ignored me. “Now,” he went on, “the parents have flown to Switzerland. Gone to get Gerard and haul him back. I offered to go with them, but they ordered me to stay home and work on my studies, such as they are, including my so-called law project.” He laughed. “Sorry about telling Kavin you’d brief him,” he said. “I presume he grilled you to find out what we’re up to.”
“It was careless to mention anything about that night at the morgue, Gleason,” I admonished. “Kavin didn’t ask any questions, but what would I have said if he had? You don’t have a project here. You—”
“Not yet,” Gleason interjected, springing up from his seat and reaching into his jacket pocket. With alarm but with no surprise, really, I saw he had not returned the rings. “But we have these. Don’t you remember how in Criminology, old What’s-His-Name told us that evidence is like a brick road? You lay the first brick, then you stand on that to get a view of where to lay the next brick.”
“Look, Gleason, I know you’re shocked about the finding of Gerard’s body, but like I said, you’ve got to return those rings. Even if the death of the woman at the morgue was homicide, you’re a law student, not a detective. Give back the evidence and forget about this. Let the police handle it.”
“What police, exactly, Portal? Would that be the police who accompanied the body? Remember that cruiser? What was it doing there? Did it remain after the body was brought in? Was it the police who carted the body off before Slater could even start the autopsy?”
“Slater? Oh, the pathologist.”
Have you seen anything about this in the paper, Portal?” Gleason asked.
“No.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? A woman is found dead with a bag over her head, then her body disappears—” he paused “—but not before we saw it. And saw that in addition to what appeared to be her horrifically unusual manner of death, the woman was also harboring unusual secrets.” Gleason began to pace, his leather shoes making no sound against the rich carpet. In fact, for a few moments there was no sound in the huge house at all except the stately ticking of a grandfather clock somewhere far off, like a heartbeat. “We can put this together, Ellis. We can build a case.”
“For lawyers, a homicide case doesn’t begin with a victim, Gleason,” I reminded him. “That’s police work. For us, a homicide case begins with something we clearly do not have here.”
“What?”
“An accused,” I answered.
“Exactly, Ellis. Exactly! That’s what we’re looking for. That’s what we can find. Have to find.”
I slumped back and the delicate chair in which I was seated creaked ominously. I felt defeated. Gleason was like a dog with a bone. With two stolen bones, actually. The easiest and maybe safest thing to do was to play along for now. I’d never known Gleason to be interested in anything for very long. In fact, the more unusual a problem was and the more passionately he embraced it at first, the more quickly and completely he forgot about it in the end. “So what are you suggesting, Gleason? What do you see as your next step?”
He sat down on the couch but leaned forward, eager to outline a plan he must have spent some time considering. I listened reluctantly at first, but soon found myself drawn in, if not by the logic of his reasoning, then by the intensity of his presentation.
“That dead woman,” he said, “wasn’t rich.”
“No. Her clothes were inexpensive. And the only jewelry she wore was a cheap watch on her right wrist. Do you remember how the pathologist said the hands were stopped at five minutes past twelve—like in some murder mystery?”
“Forget the time on the watch,” Gleason said, “it’s too small a detail to help us at this stage and may just be a coincidence in any case. I think the woman must have realized she lived in a neighborhood where it wasn’t safe to wear valuables. That would explain both the absence of jewelry on her body and the presence of jewelry secreted on her person.”
I thought about that for a minute. “That’s a narrow view of the evidence,” I finally concluded.
“How so?” Gleason’s voice had an edge of protest, as if he were unwilling to accept disagreement with his theory, whatever it was going to turn out to be. Too bad. I was already endangering my integrity as a future officer of the court by allowing myself t
o be in the presence of stolen evidence. I was not about to endanger my moral integrity—or my intellectual integrity, either—by keeping silent just because Gleason preferred me to.
“She may have been wearing jewelry when she died,” I said. “If she was murdered, maybe the killer stole her jewelry. In fact, she may have been killed for her jewelry. Or she may have been killed because of the jewelry the murderer failed to find.”
“That was a pretty complicated way to kill a person, and not possible without premeditation. The killer would have to have had the bag and the rope with him,” Gleason speculated. “Could you see both ends of the rope that was around her neck?”
It pained me to do it, but I closed my eyes and forced myself to picture as much as I could remember about the corpse. In my mind’s eye, I saw one end of the cord in the long, slender fingers of the deceased. Her nails were dark red. Or were they? I wondered. Was my memory now adding details to the scene? I also saw that one end of the rope was behind her back. And I saw something else that made my eyes fly open. The cord was just like the cord that lent a finishing touch to the silk upholstery of the couch on which Gleason sat.
No, Ellis, you fool, no, it isn’t!
“What’s wrong, Portal? You look pale. Almost like a white person,” Gleason laughed.
“I am a white person, not that that’s any guarantee of good manners, obviously,” I shot back.
“Just a joke, only a joke,” he protested. “You’re always so sensitive, old lady. You better toughen up if you plan on being a lawyer.” He studied my face and smiled. I had to smile back. There was something sweetly childlike about Gleason. It was hard to remain angry with him. “So, what did you remember just then?”
“I remembered that the cord or rope was more like this upholstery braid than the sort of rope you’d find in a basement or a garage. And I also remembered that one end was loosely in her left hand and the other end was behind her back. There’s not much I can make of that. The hands relax when someone is choked, don’t they?”
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