Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  “How ignored, precisely?” I inquired.

  As if not wanting to restate the obvious, Dr. Slater hesitated before he answered. “I’ve never been relieved of my duties prior to the completion of the autopsy, never even had an assignment altered without my prior knowledge and written consent. Dr. Rosen prides himself on the respect he has for his colleagues. His record-keeping is extensive and meticulous. He keeps track of even the most minute details of procedures at the morgue.”

  “What about outside the morgue?”

  Dr. Slater looked confused by my question. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Are you personally aware of the unexplained absence of any living person in the last little while?” This was a long shot, so I was not surprised when Dr. Slater took his time answering. I was surprised when Gleason gave a start as though he’d been slapped.

  Dr. Slater finally said, “Apparently there was a young prosecutor who disappeared, a man by the name of Neil Dennison. I have heard that nobody’s seen him since he was found in a compromising position in a public place.” He gave a small grimace that I found unpleasant.

  I did not miss the look of alarm that crossed Gleason’s face at these words. He shot Slater a glance, to which the pathologist responded with a discreet nod. I had the uneasy feeling that these two had some prior arrangement between them, some secret knowledge.

  “Dr. Slater,” I said, “since you’ve been kind enough to spend time with a couple of law students, not only at the morgue, but here this afternoon, I guess you must think there’s some lesson in this for us. So what do you make of this case?”

  I watched his face as he pondered the question. Unlike Gleason’s, his demeanor could not have been calmer.

  “As I stated, Mr. Portal, without a thorough examination of the body, anything I say is only speculation. I am not in a position to come to a conclusion. But if I were in a position to do so, I might conclude that the bag over the head was hiding something that someone didn’t want me to see.”

  “Such as?” I persisted.

  “Such as proof that the deceased was not the victim of suicide but perhaps the victim of a killer who knows how to make homicide look like suicide.”

  “Is that possible?” I asked in alarm.

  But apparently, Dr. Slater had told us all he was willing to tell. He made hasty apologies and said he had to leave. His provocative statement seemed to echo in the room after he was gone. Homicide made to look like suicide!

  “How did you get him here?” I asked Gleason.

  “Easy,” Gleason answered. “You remember that guard who tried to keep us out the night we went to the morgue?”

  “Yes,” I answered, beginning to feel uneasy again.

  “Well, I went back to the morgue while you were babysitting Kavin the other day, and I gave the guy a little something to find Slater and talk him into a short visit to Whitney Square.”

  I was again so furious with Gleason for his obstinacy that I neglected to ask myself why Slater would agree to visit Whitney Square at the request of a guard. Or whether Slater was the sort of man to accept a bribe indirectly. “You bribed an official?” I challenged my friend. “You really are out of your mind.”

  Now Gleason gave me a look of hurt feelings. But it was fake. He’d heard my objections before. And I, remembering the look that had passed between the two men, could have sworn that Slater and Adams were no strangers. But why would Gleason lie? And in a way that made him look like a worse scoundrel than he really was—if such a thing were possible. I decided to give up on him.

  “Bastard,” I said coolly. “You’re going to screw things up for both of us.”

  “Screw what up? Your next date with Sheldrake Tuppin? You’re a self-righteous prig, Portal.”

  I decided not to examine that remark. “A member of the legal profession is obliged to go to the police if homicide is suspected,” I declared.

  “Oh yeah? Well, you’re not even a member of the legal profession. And you know why? Because you’re a boring brown-nose. You’re worse than boring . . . you have the imagination of a plumber! And always will have. Plus which you’re a coward.”

  We were both enraged, but this was no place for a fight. If I broke even one of the costly objects, it would wreck my law career. I’d have to pay for the damage instead of my courses. I stifled my rage and made for the door.

  But Gleason intercepted me, reaching to a gleaming side table for a finely wrought box made of twisted silver studded with blue enamel medallions. He grabbed my arm and pushed the box at me. Inside were the two strange rings.

  “You want to tell the police, you sissy britches? There, give them those. Tell them everything. Confession is good for the soul. Tell them your mommy told you that.”

  But at last I had shut out the sound of his silly ravings. I was distracted by something about the rings I’d noticed but not thought through. I stared at them as they lay in the box. I thought about all the rings I’d seen in the pawnbroker’s shop. I even thought about my mother’s wedding ring. It was iron. She’d sent her gold one to Italy to help Mussolini before he became a dictator.

  The two rings were exactly the same size. Whoever heard of a set of wedding rings that didn’t consist of a small one for the bride and a larger one for the groom?

  Chapter 10

  On the thirtieth of March, 1965, Viet Cong terrorists bombed the American Embassy in Saigon, killing 13 employees and injuring 180. The next day, the word “firestorm” was born. The day after, Dean Rusk told seventeen neutral countries that he wasn’t interested in talking about peace in Vietnam. At the same time, Dr. Martin Luther King was calling for a boycott of the entire state of Alabama to protest the killing of a civil rights worker, and Virgil “Gus” Grissom and John Young were back home after the first American two-man spaceflight. On the radio, the Supremes were singing “Stop! In the Name of Love.”

  In a world like that, a lawyer who couldn’t find a way to make his life useful didn’t deserve to practice.

  I left Gleason’s house and I left the rings with him. Seeing those unusual objects, staring at their identical size and shape, I feared an unknown that was brand new to me then, though it became familiar as the years rolled by. It was that feeling of encountering something or someone on the wrong side of the normal, the ordinary, the good. Standing on that threshold as a young person, you’re sure you stand on the right side. I told Gleason that he’d better inform Professor Kavin I would have nothing to do with his project.

  There were no railroad tracks separating Rosedale, Gleason’s part of town, from the rest of the city, but there might as well have been. I walked south and away from Whitney Square through the tree-shaded streets, and soon I found myself on an old wood-slat bridge that crossed Rosedale ravine before leading abruptly into a rather dilapidated neighborhood.

  I dug in my jacket pocket for the scrap of paper on which Michele had written the street address of Billy Johnson’s rooming house. As I walked south on Bleecker Street, each house looked worse than the one before: unpainted wooden porches sagging, windows broken and missing, bricks chipped, chimneys collapsing. I knew a lot about the maintenance of houses because of my father’s profession as a brickiere. One thing for sure, a house neglected is a house destroyed. But these houses, as Michele had told me, were being neglected on purpose. Intent on building high-rise apartments, a major real estate development company had acquired pretty much the whole district, an area of several square blocks in the northeastern section of the downtown core. The developer had used classic techniques of blockbusting. First, while the neighborhood was still whole and apparently stable, the company had paid top prices for a few single-family dwellings whose surprised owners were thrilled to get so much for houses they hadn’t even thought of selling. Into these homes, the developer had placed employees pretending to be the new owners but really acting as agents dedicated to destroying the values of the adjoining properties in any way possible, usually by the ordinary way of infuriating neighbo
rs: dirt, noise and neglect. When those neighbors had had enough, the developers moved in with more offers of purchase, still higher than expected, but only marginally. Eventually the whole neighborhood fell like a row of dominoes until no one was left on streets like Bleecker except a few pathetic tenants of owners afraid to evict them without due cause, owners waiting for disgust alone to drive them out.

  Spring is always a dirty time in a country of snow. The melting drifts free all the debris frozen in place since the autumn and leave deposits of refuse instead. Bleecker Street was no exception. I had to wade through ankle-deep litter to get to the path to Billy Johnson’s door. However, once I got to that path, I saw it was swept clean. In fact, a slender young woman was standing on the rickety bottom step of the porch with a broom in her hand.

  In those days, I could not yet tell the difference between Algonquin and Sioux, knew no distinction between Ojibway and Oneida. Even Michele had yet to read The Book of the Hopi six times and often forgot to use terms like “original people.” He, like me, would have called a girl like the girl before me an “Indian.”

  “Hi,” she said, shyly glancing up at me, her eyes black beneath the thick, straight fringe of her hair. “You lookin’ for Billy?”

  Surprised, I held out my hand for her to shake and replied, “As a matter of fact, I am.” She ignored the hand and after a few moments, I awkwardly withdrew it. “He lives here?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but he don’t get home from work for half an hour. You a friend of his?”

  “I’m Ellis Portal,” I explained. “Michele Portalese’s brother.” I felt a slight embarrassment at the discrepancy, which she couldn’t help but notice. She drew her perfect eyebrows into a frown that did not reach the soft curve of her lips. Her skin was as dark as a termitana’s, but golden instead of olive.

  “You mean Mike?” she asked. “You’re Mike’s brother? Something else!”

  She went back to her sweeping and, uncertain what to do next, I just stood and watched her. I couldn’t see her figure because of the large parka she wore and I thought about how hot she must be. In this neighborhood, the concept of owning a winter coat and a spring coat would have been unfamiliar. The distinction here was between a coat and no coat.

  As she worked, the weak early-spring sun caught her thick, shining hair, fell along the smooth, high-boned planes of her face and seemed to settle on her slim hands wrapped tightly around the handle of the broom. On one of those hands was the same strange configuration of markings I had seen on Billy’s face. I wished I could ask what those marks were, but I lacked the words that would be polite in such an inquiry. I found myself tongue-tied in her presence. She was as foreign to me as my Italian ancestry was to the Anglos. But she seemed unaware of my scrutiny, which made me bold enough to study her longer. I took her to be a teenager, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. She reached up to push the rich fall of hair away from her eyes and I realized how beautiful she was, the way one realizes the beauty of a bird when it tilts its out-spread wings toward the sun and the light turns them iri-descent.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Kee Kee.”

  “That doesn’t sound Indian,” I said with a smile.

  She didn’t smile back. “It’s short for my Indian name.”

  I waited for her to tell me her Indian name, but she didn’t. “You can wait inside if you want,” she said. “Billy and me, we live on the first floor. Just go in.” She gestured to the front door, which I now noticed was slightly ajar. I nodded, walked past her up the rickety steps and into the dim hallway of the house.

  The front room was dark, a heavy curtain on the front window blocking the daylight. From one corner, a low lamp cast soft light over the furnishings of the pleasantly cluttered room. It was the sort of room Michele loved. Bookcases made of bricks and boards lined all four walls. Three easy chairs, each covered with a colorful throw, invited me to make myself comfortable. Above the bookcases, unframed pictures were tacked to the wall. I had not seen such pictures before: stylized animals in bright, clear colors and bold black-and-white renderings of what looked like the city, but painted in a style that was simultaneously primitive and polished.

  I stepped closer to the wall.

  “Like them? I did them myself.”

  I turned at the sound of the slightly familiar voice. Silhouetted in the doorway, Billy Johnson’s posture had the same bold lines as his paintings. He looked smaller than when I’d seen him in the light of the stage, but better-looking in every other way. In fact, an unexpected bolt of envy shot through me—the envy a soft, pudgy man feels at the sight of someone slim and clearly strong. The envy a man feels when face-to-face with the fortunate lover of beautiful Kee Kee. Like her, he had long black hair, but his was fine, almost wispy. It had the surprising effect of making him seem intensely masculine, of setting off the powerful structure of his face.

  “Yes. I like them very much. I see you’re an artist as well as a poet.”

  “Not a poet, really,” he said as he moved into the room. He gestured toward the chairs. I took one and he took another. Awkward silence fell between us as each, apparently, waited for the other to begin.

  “I’m Mike’s brother,” I began clumsily, the unfamiliar nickname feeling odd on my tongue.

  “Mike’s a great guy,” Billy Johnson said. He put out his hand. “I’m proud to shake the hand of the brother of a man like Mike.”

  We shook. I noticed marks like those on Kee Kee’s hand but fainter. When I glanced up at his face, the marks were faint there, too.

  “You want a beer?” he asked me.

  “No, thanks. I just dropped by for a brief chat about your matter.” I feared I sounded clumsy, like a boy pretending to be at work.

  As if he meant to reassure me, Billy leaned forward, smiled again, raised his hand in a gesture of welcome. “Hey, man,” he said, “you came here to do me a favor. Mike said you’d come and you did. That counts with me. I appreciate it.”

  “I’m happy to help,” I said, relaxing a little. “Maybe we should start at the beginning. Tell me about the circumstances of your birth.”

  Billy sat back and gave the simple question more thought than it appeared to warrant. When he finally answered, I got the feeling he’d decided I was worthy to hear the personal details of his origins. “Like I wrote down on that paper for Mike, my mother and father were what they call ‘Swampy Cree,’ from the muskeg country eight or nine hundred miles north of here, just south of James Bay,” he began. “I was my mother’s first baby, so when my father found out she was expecting, he wanted her to go south to have me, because the birth would be in the middle of winter and he didn’t want her up there in the cold.”

  I thought about Kee Kee. I could see how a man would be concerned.

  “My father, he had friends here in Toronto, so my mother came down. My father hadn’t seen these friends in a long time. They turned out to be drunks and bums. My mother had a sister who married outside of our nation. With no other place else to go, my mother got on the bus to Buffalo. Her sister took her out to the Tuscarora reservation. That’s where I was born.”

  “How long ago?” I asked, as if it made a difference. It didn’t if Billy was over eighteen.

  “February 12, 1946,” Billy answered. “I’m nineteen.”

  I nodded. “Certainly old enough to be required to register for the United States Selective Service.”

  “I did that,” Billy said matter-of-factly.

  “Why? Why would you register for the draft?”

  Billy’s eyes held mine. I was taken aback by his determined expression, one that made him look like a mature man. I was only twenty-three myself, but I considered anyone under twenty to be a child, except for my brother, whom I considered an old man. Such assurance as Billy’s in a youth of nineteen astounded me. “I think I’m a U.S. citizen,” he said. “Registering is the law and I obeyed it. Mike says it’s the white man’s law and the day will come when Indians stand up for t
hemselves.” He laughed. “Custer’s last stand.”

  “I thought you were a resister, Billy. What changed your mind about the draft?” I asked.

  “I am a resister,” he said, raising his voice slightly but chillingly. “And I haven’t changed my mind about the imperialist invasion of a sovereign country by aggressive outsiders.”

  “What?”

  He leaned closer. “The Americans are bombing ammunition dumps a hundred miles from Hanoi. The VC have already got within thirty miles of Saigon. You know what that means?”

  Actually I had no idea. Michele was always talking about Hanoi and Saigon, but I really didn’t understand which was which. Nonetheless, I listened as Billy Johnson went on in a restrained, yet passionate, voice. “The Russians are afraid the United States is going to attack them. And the Viet Cong say they can bring hundreds of millions of Asians into Vietnam to fight the capitalist aggressors if they have to. What this means is full-scale war. A year ago, the United States was talking about fact-finding missions. Now they’re bombing Hanoi. If I’m not a citizen, I want no part of this. But if I am . . .”

  I could see why Michele admired Billy. What I couldn’t see was why the two of them were so convinced that anything I might do would change matters.

  “I can’t help you on any political issues,” I said. “But I can check out the status of your citizenship.” I reached into my jeans pocket and pulled out the piece of paper on which Michele had written Billy’s address. On the back I’d jotted a few notes, reminders of what I’d read in the U.S. federal statutes.

  “What’s that?” Billy asked.

  “I did some preliminary research based on what my brother told me about your case,” I answered. “There are ambiguities in the law that might pertain to your circumstances. Specifically, there’s a suggestion that in a conflict between tribal law and American federal law, tribal rights might prevail.”

  Billy Johnson laughed. At least I took the low rumble emanating from his throat to be laughter.

  “What?” I asked.