(2012) Cross-Border Murder (8 page)

“What kind of evidence?”

“He was at the scene of the crime the night the murder was committed. His fresh fingerprints were in the office. His relationship with Mrs. Monaghan provided a motive, at least for the kind of confrontation with Professor Monaghan which could have resulted in Monaghan’s death. When we questioned him, he was obviously in a state of deep depression. He did not protest any of the evidence.”

“But he didn’t confess.”

“No. But no one expected him to.”

“In fact he told you he did not murder Professor Monaghan.”

“True. But he said that kind of pro forma.”

I was sitting between them, shifting my head left and right as they spoke as if I were at a tennis match rather than a baseball game. “Could you explain that?” I asked puzzled.

“It was the way he said it.” Ryan explained. “His tone was indifferent. He sounded like a man who had given up hope. It was not unusual. Experienced detectives almost expect it from people who are guilty of unpremeditated manslaughter, particularly if they have had no previous experience with that kind of violence. It’s as if the act caught them by surprise. They’re in a state of trauma. They’re not yet ready to explain the how and the why. Or their degree of guilt, which may be minimal.”

Gina had been watching his face carefully. “But you charged him with first degree murder.”

Ryan nodded. He too had lost interest in the game. The Expos had yet to get someone past first base.

“But,” Ryan said, “the charge would probably have been downgraded, if and when he decided to explain how and why it had happened.”

“But he was innocent.”

It was Ryan’s turn to study her face. “Tom has told me of your certainty about his innocence. Why are you so sure? The fact that the case was dropped only acknowledges his legal innocence.”

“The legal question doesn’t interest me. The law,” Gina scoffed, “is an ass. Everyone knows that. It’s making amends for what happened to him after he was released that I care about. I care about that because of how he will be remembered, because of what it might mean to my mother, and because of what it might mean to me.”

Her emotional concerns had not side-tracked him. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

I would have been happier if he had shown some sympathy. I put it down to his years of being a hard-nosed detective. But Gina did not seem to care. It was almost as if she wanted him to be tough and unemotional.

“He wrote me a long letter a month before he died.” This was news to me. Ryan and I both waited. “I think he knew he was dying. He wanted to be sure I knew everything that he knew about what had happened. He wanted to be sure, also, that I would continue to believe in his innocence after he was dead. He emphasized that a number of times and with a reason.”

“What reason?” I asked.

“Because he believed the real murderer, to protect himself, would subtly let the word out, once my father was dead, that my father had indeed been guilty.”

“Did he suspect anyone in particular?” I asked. I was annoyed that she had kept this pertinent bit of information from me.

“No.”

I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. Surely he must have advanced some thoughts about the possible motives of others who had been part of that inner circle. But maybe not. I had little experience about letters from dying men. The Expos began a rally and our attention was forced back to the game by the screams of the die-hard fans who were still in the park.

I was surprised to find myself watching with lukewarm enthusiasm. Last year’s strike still bothered me. So too did the loss of key players to teams with big money south of the border. I used to listen to every game, sometimes late into the night when the Expos were playing on the West Coast. Beside me Phil Ryan was shouting encouragement. I looked at the field of players and their hunger for the big bucks. I could no longer cheer for them now, anymore than I could cheer for Ted Turner or members of the Saudi royal family. The rally petered out. A glum silence descended on the stadium. Gina resumed where she had left off.

“You see, he really did not know whom to suspect because he had lost his grip. That’s also why he could no longer teach or function as an historian. To teach history you have to believe in your capacity to understand at least something about what has happened in the past. He had believed in his friends at the university. People he thought he understood, people he believed understood him. With his arrest all of that got turned upside down. Events had traumatized him. He could make no sense of what had happened. As he put it in the letter, his world had turned into a purgatory of smoke and mirrors. When he opened a book or tried to teach, words seem to float about and change meaning on him in mid-sentence.”

“He could have got counseling.” As soon as I spoke, I wanted to take back the words. What do I know about such things?

“He tried that. But it didn’t work. He wrote that he became a frightened man. Never knowing when a few days of normalcy would be replaced by weeks of horror and despondency. It was his fears, the humiliation, and the shame he felt at his inability to control those fears that finally drove him away from us. My mother was aware of what he was going through. I wasn’t. I only saw the front that he tried to put up to protect himself, and us, I guess. He wrote that doing simple tasks, washing floors, cleaning up, kept the fears at bay best. But in the end he could not even look at wood or stones without the knowledge that they were not what they seemed and that he could never know them for what they really were.”

“I think you’ve lost me.” Ryan said. “Wood and stones are wood and stones and nothing more.”

The ball game had dwindled down to a depressing end. A strike-out, a pitiful grounder, and a weak pop-up to center field. But we remained in our seats. Gina tried to explain. “I once watched a documentary on PBS where some scientists using computer graphics explained that a baseball and a baseball bat are really nothing more than a lot of magnetized space, with atoms and particles rushing around doing god knows what! But the important thing was that they were certainly not the hard, solid objects we think we perceive with our senses.”

“Okay. Maybe the scientists are right,” Ryan said simply, “but so what? Most of us don’t dispute what science says, but we stick it in the corner of our minds somewhere, trust what our senses tell us and get on with our lives.”

“But my father couldn’t.” Gina said with a touch of anger, “the trauma he suffered at Winston stayed with him. Psychologically, his mind had gone out of sync. He lived, he wrote, like a mature Alice in a horrible wonderland beyond the looking glass.”

Ryan frowned. Gina waited until both our gazes had shifted back to her from the empty field where the tarps were being rolled out. A nervous smile trembled at the corners of her mouth, but her voice came through strong and clear. “That’s why I’ve agreed to sit here with you two bozos and try to explain about my father.”

Here we go again, I thought. Another attempt at aggression and intimidation. But her phrasing only seemed to amuse Ryan. Perhaps he was impressed by her determination. Or maybe it was the respect and concern she had shown towards her father.

“I want you to find a way to help me to make amends,” She spoke firmly looking at both of us. But her eyes shifted past me and focused on Ryan.

“And how do you think we can to do that?” Ryan prodded.

“By finding the real killer, and then writing a letter of apology to my father and mother.”

“I see.” Ryan stared at her. There was a glint of anger in his eyes. “There are billions of people in this world who suffer injustice. Millions are traumatized by violence each year. Amends get made to only a pitiful number of them. Life moves too fast. Besides, the resources are simply not there.”

“That doesn’t justify not trying. Particularly now that you both have the time.”

Ryan seemed unmoved by the taunt. His eyes remained locked on her. There seemed to be some struggle going on between them. It was the only explanation I could find for what he said next.

“If we now have the time, we should probably be using it to prevent new injustices, not trying to make amends to those who are now dead.”

A fragile mask clouded Gina’s face. I sensed how difficult it was for her to say what she said next. “I’m asking you to help in my father’s case. Please. If only because there may still be a killer out there.”

“Okay. Okay.” He looked at me. I was startled by the sudden way in which he shifted gears, almost as if he had been prepared to do so from the outset. “Sure. We’ll both try to help. First to catch a killer. Second to make amends to your father. What else have we old codgers got to do? Besides, I’ll admit I may have made a mistake in you father’s case. Maybe I owe him one.”

We all rose. Apart from a few young boys, we were the last to leave the ball park. On our way out we all decided to use the washrooms before heading for our cars. As Ryan and I stood next to each other at the urinals, I asked him whether he had done anything about getting the police file on the Monaghan murder.

He gave me a smug, self-satisfied smile. “I have a copy of it in the car.”

My raised eyebrows conveyed both surprise and pleasure. “That was fast.”

“After I spoke to you, something about the case bugged me. I decided to act while I still had friends in the department. It wasn’t easy.” He grunted.

I raised my eyebrows again. “How come?”

“It was in the archives labeled, SECRET, requiring a signature from pretty high up in the department for its release. But again I was fortunate. The sergeant in charge of the archives was an old friend who was also about to be put on the shelf.” He grinned. “I told him that I had a few minor questions about the case that were bugging me in my retirement. He decided to break the rules for me. He just made a copy and spirited it out. Career cops hang together you know, or hadn’t you heard that?”

Of course I had heard that. Doctors hang together, so too do lawyers, journalists, priests, professors, the list is depressingly endless. “So when do I get to see it?”

“You don’t. Phone me tonight and I’ll answer any reasonable questions you have. I may even suggest some leads. But I have to protect my friend from anything appearing verbatim from it in the press.”

I didn’t like his decision, but for the moment I decided not to argue about it. After all we were hardly close friends, and to him I was still a journalist. “Okay, I’ll give you a call when I get home.”

When we emerged Gina was waiting outside the door. We headed in the direction of our cars. When Gina spoke I wondered for a moment whether she could have overheard any of our conversation in the washroom.

“I believe,” Gina said, “that Mr. Webster asked if you could get a copy of the original police file. Will that be possible?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Ryan shrugged. “I’m working on it.”

Gina seemed satisfied. But I felt a sense of discomfort at what I considered to be a lie, a “white lie” maybe, but a lie nonetheless. Gina had been misled. But then Ryan wasn’t a saint, just a career cop pushed into early retirement. And he had his reasons. As I drove off with Gina beside me I thought about the kind of misleading statement Ryan had made.

It was a form of casuistry. I had participated in numerous discussions about the morality of such statements in a course on ethics I had almost failed while in university. I remembered the example which had been used for discussion purposes. Someone comes to your home wishing to see your parents. Your parents do not want to see that person. The person asks you, “Are your parents at home?” And you answer, “No.” Except that you say only the word “No” out loud, and under your breath you mutter the rest of the phrase, “they are not at home to you.” In your mind you have uttered the whole truth, but with your voice you have misled. Ethical or not. The argument in favor went this way: you can assume that the person at the door understands the social convention you have employed and so is not misled. It is like the conditions one encounters on a used car lot. Since the onus is on the buyer to beware, the seller can say almost anything at all. Ethical casuistry. It is used by doctors, lawyers, politicians, bankers, parents, and yes even very young children. Is there anyone who has not used it and felt justified in doing so? Yet it has become a social malady, I thought, as widespread as the common cold. It spreads suspicion like a virus, fosters resentment, and if it is not used sparingly where does the damage end?

“I think there’s something strange about that police file,” Gina said.

“Oh?” I asked. I pretended to be concentrating on the driving, although the streets were almost deserted.

“It was the odd way he responded to my question about it,” she said. “From the moment we met, whenever he said anything to me, he would stare right at me assessing my reaction. But when I mentioned the file, he looked down at his feet as if he didn’t want me to see his face. Strange. Isn’t it? I think he knows something about it that he doesn’t want us to know. You’ll keep after him about the file?” She asked.

“He already has a copy of it,” I muttered.

“The file?”

“Yes. He just doesn’t want us to see it yet.” I explained about his friends and the danger of the contents being traced back to them. She thought that over.

“Do you think he really intends to help us?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think he’s happy about his retirement. And I think there may be something specific about the case that is bothering him now.” I sighed. “Maybe it was the interference from higher up. Maybe he wished he had pushed harder about that at the time. I don’t know. And the fact that I think he liked you doesn’t hurt.”

“Liked me?”

“Yeah. It was obvious. There was a certain chemistry going on between the two of you. I think, maybe, you have similar character traits.”

“Oh, like what?”

“You both like challenges. You’re both strong, determined, opinionated.”

“Is that what you think I’m like?”

“From what I’ve seen so far. Yeah.”

“And you’re not like that?”