Old City Hall (34 page)

She flopped back onto her pillow. Her bulky cotton T-shirt was soaked. Last week, when the courtroom nightmares started, she’d sweated through all four of her nightgowns. Now she was working her way through her T-shirt collection.

Sitting up in bed, she pulled the shirt over her head. I’ll just add this to the laundry pile, she thought, turning the shirt back from inside out and tossing it into the bulging bin in the corner.

Her mouth was dry. She hauled herself off the bed and to the bathroom. She’d left her glass downstairs, so she ran the cold water over her hands, letting the cool settle in before she cupped her fingers and brought the water to her mouth.

These court nightmares were getting worse. In the first one she opened her boxes in court and found that the papers were all for the wrong case. The next night, she had the right boxes, but for some reason she’d driven to a suburban court out in Scarborough and no one had heard of the case. Or of Brace. She woke up when she’d started screaming at some confused-looking Somalis in the hallway, “Kevin Brace, the Voice of Canada, and you’ve never heard of him?” The third night, she’d made it to the right court, but she’d missed a week of the trial, and Judge Summers ordered that no one was allowed to tell her what had happened. Two nights ago she’d finally started cross-examining a witness. It was the Iranian concierge, Rasheed, and he was speaking some foreign language. Parish couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but no one seemed to notice. Finally, Summers peered down at her over his reading glasses and said, “Ms. Parish, didn’t you take your Farsi classes?”

She took a facecloth, soaked it in the cold water, squeezed it, and ran it over the back of her neck, her forehead, and the rest of her face. She clicked off the bathroom light and felt her way to her clothes cupboard. There were just two T-shirts left. After that she’d have to do the laundry. Unless she pulled some T-shirts out of the bin and hung them over a chair.

Parish folded the covers back on the side of the bed where she hadn’t been sleeping. All week she’d been alternating sides, letting the sweat-soaked side dry out while she switched to the dry one. This is not why they invented queen-size beds, Parish thought as she bulked up the pillows on her new side and flicked on the reading lamp.

It was always like this once she started a big trial. The rolling nightmares, the slow descent of her personal life into a slovenly mess. When she was in court all day and running to the jail at night, there was no time for anything. Forget cooking or cleaning, just managing to eat was an accomplishment.

Before a long trial she tried to plan ahead. Stock up on provisions, like those people on the Gulf Coast battening down before a storm. She’d get money from the cash machine, boxes of pens and paper,
piles of frozen meals, fresh stockings and underwear. Inevitably she forgot some vital cog in the wheel of her life, and disaster loomed. The printer for her computer would run out of toner, she’d be out of shampoo, her period would hit and she’d be down to her last Tampax.

Maybe I should strip the bed and do the laundry, she thought, knowing there was no way she was going back to sleep. Maybe, she thought, yeah maybe. Instead, like a rejected lover rereading a Dear John letter, she picked up her trial binder and turned to the notes she’d made to herself about her visit with Kevin Brace last night.

As she looked at the page, the fog of her sleep cleared immediately. She remembered exactly how it had happened. She’d decided to write out what she wanted to say to him, so she took his notebook and printed:

Mr. Brace, the Crown has just told me that within the next 24 hours they may have some new evidence. At this stage they won’t tell me what it is. They’ll probably want to adjourn the hearing tomorrow and let you out on bail.

Parish watched Brace’s eyes as he carefully read her note. For once, he showed some emotion. He seemed alarmed by this news. He wrote back:

No adjournment. No bail. Please proceed.

Well, you couldn’t call the man verbose. That would make a good cartoon, she thought. A lawyer is at the counsel table with her client, who passes over a piece of paper just as the trial is about to begin. He’s written, “I hate to tell you this now, but I did it.”

She took Brace’s book, doing a little tit for tat, and wrote back:

I understand you don’t want bail. But why not adjourn this?

He looked her straight in the eye and held her gaze for a long moment before he wrote back to her. The joke she’d just told herself was
playing in her brain, and she’d just allowed herself a little smile when she read his reply:

I am going to plead guilty.

She couldn’t shake the look she’d seen in his eyes. To her amazement, he had looked relieved.

Parish got out of bed and walked to the little bay window in her front room. Even though she lived four blocks south of the Danforth, one of Toronto’s busiest streets, she could hear car horns blaring up and down the big street. I should feel relieved too, she thought. Be out celebrating because the Leafs have won the cup and I’m going to get my life back.

Yay. Celebrate losing my first murder trial. Lucky me. I’ll be able to go home for Mother’s Day.

She looked back at her rumpled sheets, the pile of laundry, unread books and magazines stacked high beside the bed. And a box marked
BRACE
beside them.

There was no way she’d get back to sleep. Instead she sat down cross-legged on the floor next to the box and pulled it open. My last night on this case, she thought as she hauled out her trial binder marked “Witness Statements.” What is it, Kevin Brace, that I’m missing here? she wondered for the thousandth time. What is it?

A
ri Greene looked hard into Sarah McGill’s eyes. He’d expected that she’d be shocked to see him here in the empty hallway of the Market Place Tower in the middle of the night, but her eyes were calm. Waiting. Refusing to be surprised by anything. The eyes of someone who’d been through enough torment in her life that there was nothing left to shock her. He recognized those eyes. They were the eyes of the survivors. Of his parents and their friends.

Greene turned to Edna Wingate. She still looked stunned. He nodded his head back toward McGill.

“Sorry to interrupt your mother-and-daughter reunion.”

Wingate looked at McGill, then back at Greene. Her face was flushed.

Greene reached into the pocket of his sport coat and pulled out an official-looking envelope. “You know, I can organize a big criminal file perfectly, every page in the right spot. But when it comes to my own paperwork, I’m a disaster. The other day I got this in the mail.”

The envelope made a crinkling sound as he extracted a single sheet of paper. “Damn parking tickets. I get a ton of them, especially when I’m on a big case. Always forget to pay them on time, so I get one of these: Notice of Trial. It always takes months for the paperwork to come through. This ticket is for December 17, Market Lane. The street beside this building. Officer Kennicott used my car and parked it there the day
Katherine Torn was killed. He didn’t have my badge, and we both forgot about the meter. Yesterday when I got this in the mail, I thought back to that first morning and the pickup truck that was parked in front of me. The one piled with snow on it. From up north somewhere.”

Greene reached into the envelope again and pulled out a second piece of paper. He took a moment and looked at it, as if he were reading it for the first time.

“Ms. McGill, I got your license plate and ran it to see if you’d gotten any tickets. Only one.” He held up the piece of paper for her to see. “Your truck was parked on the side street beside the building on the night of the murder. I parked behind it when I came in that morning.” He looked McGill full in the face. “Usually you’d leave before six so you wouldn’t get a ticket. But with everything that was going on, you were delayed. Needed a place to hide for a while until the coast was clear. Then I thought, Where did you go? Must have stayed with someone you knew in the building. But, I thought, how would you know someone on another floor?

“Tonight I was at my dad’s house watching the game. You could smell the lilacs out back. Mother’s Day is coming up. It’s the first one since my mother died. I used to pick those lilacs for her as a present. And I thought about you, Ms. McGill. You’re a botanist. What, I wondered, did your girls give you for Mother’s Day? Amanda and Beatrice. My father commented a while back about how you gave them very British names. And it came to me. Edna Wingate’s your mother. The night Katherine was murdered, you stayed right here with your mom until the coast was clear.”

He turned back to Edna Wingate. “And, Ms. Wingate, that morning you had to get to your yoga? I called the place. Your class didn’t start until nine. You invited me to come back the next morning, so it gave your daughter time to make good her escape.”

Both women were stone silent. Greene was doing more talking than he usually did with witnesses. But in a situation like this, their silence spoke volumes. He was guessing a lot here, and their lack of response was all the confirmation he needed.

Greene looked back to McGill. He reached into the inside pocket of his sport jacket and, feeling a bit like a magician now, pulled out a plastic bag. There was a thin metal spoon inside. A big green label taped across it read
R.V. BRACE: SPOON FROM HARDSCRABBLE CAFÉ, DECEMBER
20.

“Ms. McGill, I’m afraid I owe you a spoon,” Greene said. “The first time I visited your café back in December, I picked this up on my way out. Bad habit of mine, collecting things.” He waved the spoon back and forth slowly, like a snake charmer’s flute. Really, this was just a prop, not evidence. Officer Kennicott had found her prints on file months ago, and McGill would realize this if he gave her time to think about it. The idea was to throw her off guard. Get her talking. “We found some fingerprints on the inside front-door handle of apartment 12A and matched them with this spoon. They’re your prints.”

Greene had rehearsed in his head many times what he’d say to McGill at this moment. Should he say, “Kevin Brace’s apartment” or even “your ex-husband’s apartment”? He’d decided to be strictly legal about it. The Braces had never gotten divorced, and Greene wanted McGill to know he knew that. Besides, in her mind, maybe Brace still was her husband.

Looking at the spoon, McGill’s eyes widened. Greene wasn’t sure if she was surprised that he’d found her prints in Brace’s place or if she was just glad to recover her lost spoon. Greene had the feeling that not one piece of cutlery went missing from the Hardscrabble Café without Sarah’s knowing about it. She didn’t say a word.

“If your prints were on, say, a jar in the back of a kitchen cupboard or an ice-cube tray buried in the freezer, it wouldn’t mean much. Those are places where a print could remain for weeks, months. But prints in a high-traffic area like the inside front-door handle are presumed to be very recent.”

McGill flicked her eyes toward Wingate, then back at Greene.

Greene had no grounds to arrest McGill. He had a subpoena in his pocket and could force her to testify at the prelim, but the questions she could be asked there were limited. Right now was the time to get her to talk. He needed to get her out of the hallway. He took a step
closer—not too close, but close enough to let her know he wasn’t going away.

“It gets worse,” he said, lowering his voice. “We found another of your prints on the metal bracket behind the door.” Greene still had the plastic evidence bag in his hand. “Mr. Singh, the newspaper delivery fellow? We’ve established that he never looked behind the door when he walked into the apartment. Kevin pushed it all the way over to the wall to let him in. When Officer Kennicott arrived a few minutes later, the door was halfway open again. That could only mean one thing. Someone was behind the door when Singh first walked in.”

McGill was staring at the plastic bag with the spoon inside. For a moment Greene thought she might try to grab it and run.

Just then he heard footsteps in the stairwell, coming up quickly. A moment later the door behind McGill swung open. Officer Kennicott, gulping air yet remaining very calm, stood in the doorway. He wore a business suit and tie, just as Greene had instructed, and carried a small briefcase under his arm. Kennicott had effectively—and, more important, psychologically—cut off any means of escape.

“This is Officer Kennicott,” Greene said calmly, as if it were an everyday occurrence for the four of them to meet in the hallway of the Market Place Tower in the middle of the night.

He turned back to Edna Wingate. “May we come inside for some tea?”

Wingate simply nodded.

Without being asked, McGill led the way in.

Wingate followed her daughter, and Greene let Kennicott go in before him.

Everyone sat around the circular glass-topped kitchen table. No one spoke.

McGill pulled out a package of cigarettes. It was already open. She tapped hard on the bottom of the pack, trying to get out a smoke. It wouldn’t come.

“I fell off the wagon, Detective,” she said to Greene, who was sitting across the table from her. “Tried to quit. No dice.” She smacked the pack again until a filter finally emerged.

Greene smiled. McGill was playing for time. He tried to track the emotions he saw running through her cool exterior. Shock, anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance. What was it? The key thing was that she was talking. She hadn’t denied the fingerprints or that she’d been in 12A on the morning Torn was killed. That was a good thing because the fingerprint evidence in and of itself was not as open-and-shut as he’d presented it to her.

He decided to completely change the topic. Take them by surprise and put them at ease a bit. “Ms. McGill, I saw your daughter Amanda a few months ago. Before the baby was born. I heard she had a girl. Your first grandchild. And, Ms. Wingate, your first great-grandchild. Congratulations.”

This seemed to transform McGill. She slid the cigarette pack onto the table. The cellophane made a squeaking sound. Her face broke out into a magnificent smile.