Old City Hall (36 page)

Gild jumped in. “The law is clear. Absent evidence of mental incapacity, which she doesn’t have, Parish has no right to prevent her client from pleading guilty. Worst-case scenario, she steps down as counsel, Brace enters his plea. He should be off doing twenty-five years by ten thirty this morning.”

“And, Albert,” Cutter said, “you’ll be undefeated in your murder prosecutions. Perfect start to your new career.” Cutter had never called Fernandez by his first name before. “We’re thin on talent at the top, buddy. There’s going to be a lot of work for you.”

Fernandez nodded. Then he smiled. The tension in their little booth seemed to ease. Cutter ripped up his napkin.

“I assume this meeting never happened,” Fernandez said.

Charlton gave a big laugh. “We’re paying cash. Nick behind the counter there, he’s known me since I was a beat cop. We’d come here on slow nights and drink coffee for a few hours, and every fifteen minutes one of us would go outside and report in a new position. Nick never said a word. Anyone comes snooping, he’ll tell them he hasn’t seen me in months.”

Fernandez looked back at the counter. A tall man with a graying mustache was wiping it down with long, relaxed strokes. His white uniform and apron had a night’s worth of stains on them. The black-and-white clock on the wall said it was 2:30.

“Looks like I’ve got an interesting day ahead of me,” Fernandez said, picking up his notebook and pen. “I’ll see all of you in court.”

And Marissa, I’ll be home early for a change, he thought. It should be a very nice evening. With something special to celebrate.

W
e lose ten, sometimes fifteen pieces of cutlery a month, mostly knives,” Sarah McGill said, raising the plastic bag with the spoon in it and waving it accusingly at Ari Greene. “It adds up.”

“I’m sure it does,” he said.

Greene had seen this over and over again with witnesses. And it never ceased to amaze him. Faced with the biggest crisis of their lives, people would focus on alarmingly trivial matters. Losing everything else, they grasped at the small things they could control. And clung to them hard.

During the last murder trial he worked on, the prisoner was more concerned about what he got for lunch than the evidence that kept piling up around him. The worse the case got, the louder his mealtime complaints became.

Still holding the bag in front of her, McGill began to worry the edges of the plastic, like a little girl holding the corner of her favorite blanket.

“I won’t go to court,” she said at last.

Greene had expected this. He tapped the inside of his jacket pocket. “I have a subpoena for you right here,” he said. “I’d hate to force you to go, but your husband is looking at a possible twenty-five-year sentence. Clearly you have material evidence.”

“Children’s Aid will be there.”

Greene hadn’t expected this. Never underestimate the deep currents that run through people’s lives, or their unseen motivations, he thought. “Ms. McGill, this is a murder trial. I can’t imagine Children’s Aid would have any interest in it.”

McGill brought her fist down on the table.
Bang.
She hit it with such force that he was afraid the glass would break. “Can’t imagine. No, you can’t imagine, can you?”

Greene met her eyes squarely without saying a word.

“These people just don’t give up,” she said. “Never. If they hear I was in the apartment when Katherine died, they’ll never let me see my children again.”

“But, Ms. McGill, your daughters are grown,” he said. Greene glanced at Kennicott. He seemed equally bewildered. “The Children’s Aid Society has nothing to do with them anymore.”

McGill tightened her lips in anger. “You don’t get it, do you?”

Suddenly he understood. Despite all her appearance of well-adjusted normalcy, McGill was paranoid beyond reach. And with just cause. Like his parents and all their survivor friends. He, of all people, should have seen this coming.

“Your grandchildren,” he whispered.

McGill stared straight ahead. No eye contact. She was shutting down.

“Those bastards,” McGill said at last. “I’m not going to let them keep me from my babies again.” She shook her head hard, in a way that said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“We know that Katherine had problems with alcohol,” Greene said. Using “we” made it seem more authoritative, and more comforting. He needed to kick-start the conversation. Get her talking. “Officer Kennicott here has spoken to a number of people about Ms. Torn. The people she injured.”

McGill nodded. That was a start.

Greene kept going. “We know that Katherine was a penny-pincher. Officer Kennicott found a whole stack of food coupons in her wallet. Her Visa bill shows very modest spending. How did she feel about Kevin giving you two thousand a month?”

McGill flashed a look at Wingate, then turned back to Greene. She didn’t say a word, but at least she wasn’t refusing to talk.

Greene jumped into the silence. “Did she know about the money?”

“She found out.”

Good, Greene thought, relieved to hear McGill’s voice again.

“I imagine she wasn’t very happy,” he said.

“Nothing made Katherine
very
happy, Detective. Not having my husband, not having my girls, the apartment, the travel, the media attention. None of it. She was angry from the day she found out about her father.”

Greene glanced over at Kennicott, then back at McGill. “You mean Dr. Torn?”

McGill snorted loudly. “You don’t know, Detective?”

Greene shook his head.

“I mean her
real
father. Some horseback rider down in California her mother hooked up with on one of her riding competitions. Katherine found out when she was thirteen. Never got over it.”

Greene nodded at Kennicott. So that explained Dr. Torn, he thought. “Kate was
her
only child,” Dr. Torn had told Greene and Fernandez when they first met at Old City Hall.

“Why were you in your husband’s apartment the morning Katherine died?” he asked, echoing her phrase “Katherine died”—not “Katherine was killed.”

“I needed more money. The highway construction. They said it would take nine months. It’s killing the café. Even two thousand wasn’t enough.”

“So you came early in the morning?”

McGill didn’t say a word.

“And your husband was awake.”

“My husband never slept much. Katherine, she slept all the time.”

“Except that morning.”

“I thought she’d be asleep. It was five in the morning.”

“But you were wrong, she was in the bath.”

“Katherine? You must be kidding.” McGill started to laugh. It was her loud, real laugh. “You think Katherine Torn would ever take
a bath in the hallway tub instead of in her five-thousand-dollar Jacuzzi?”

Greene remembered all the receipts Kennicott had found in Torn’s wallet for expensive toiletries. And Detective Ho remarking that the hallway bathtub didn’t even have a soap dish. He thought of his house. How he preferred his own bathroom, the one where Raglan had joined him to soap his back, instead of the ratty one in the basement. And he knew that Sarah McGill was telling the truth.

“My husband’s a creature of habit. He’s taken a cold bath every morning of his life. When I got there, he was still in his bathrobe. He’d only just filled the tub.”

“Then how did Katherine end up in the bathtub, Ms. McGill? The one in the hallway.”

“Kevin put her there,” she said, as calmly as if she were telling a customer about the restaurant’s daily specials. “After she died.”

“Died” again. Not “was killed” or “was murdered,” but “died.” As if death were something that just happened to Katherine Torn, like night sweats or a migraine headache.

“And how did that happen? Katherine dying?”

McGill picked up the plastic bag with the spoon and rubbed it. “It’s amazing how fleeting life is. But I guess you know that from your job. My husband and I were in the kitchen, whispering like two teenagers who think their parents are asleep. He was just cutting up his morning oranges. Suddenly Katherine was standing behind us. Stone naked. I don’t know what woke her up. She grabbed Kevin by the neck. It happened so fast. She started yelling, ‘Bastard, bastard . . . you’ll never be on the radio again.’ Don’t feel bad for Katherine, Detective. She got everything she wanted out of this.”

No one in the room seemed to move or even breathe. Greene scanned back in his mind through all he knew about the case: Brace cutting up his oranges every morning; his hoarse, barely audible voice the one time he talked to Dent in his cell; the scratch marks Torn had inflicted with her bare hands on the two men who had tried to help her, Howard Peel, her AA sponsor, and Donald Dundas, her radio
teacher; the unsigned million-dollar contract; Torn and Brace not holding hands when they came back through the lobby after their meeting with Peel.

McGill’s eyes had lost focus. “It took forever to pry her hands off him.” She was looking vaguely over Greene’s shoulder. He could tell she was no longer seeing the apartment. She was staring into the past.

“Then what happened?” Greene asked softly.

McGill nodded as if in a trance.

“Kevin was saying, ‘Katherine, Katherine.’ He was making a gurgling sound. His face was turning red. I screamed something, I can’t remember what, and I grabbed her hands. She finally let go of Kevin and spun on me. Her eyes—they were so, so angry.”

Greene nodded. Once a witness started really talking, the best thing to do was to keep your mouth shut.

“Kevin was gasping for air. Katherine broke her hands free from my grasp and turned back to him. She grabbed his hand that was holding the knife and yelled, ‘Now you’re both fucked!’ I’ll never forget those words.”

McGill’s eyes turned back to Greene like a camera lens coming into focus.

“That’s what she wanted,” McGill said, her voice down to a faint whisper.

“What was that?” Greene asked, finally breaking his silence.

“To keep us apart. To fuck us over. She knew about the grandchildren and Children’s Aid and that, because I was there when this happened, I’d be screwed. She plunged Kevin’s knife right into her stomach. Kevin tried to stop her. My first thought was that this was another one of Katherine’s drama queen acts. I figured one stab wound, she’d be all right. But she slipped, fell somehow.”

Greene glanced at Kennicott. He was looking down.

“I slipped on that floor too,” Kennicott said.

McGill turned to him. She seemed to have forgotten he was there. “The knife must have hit an artery or something. She died so fast. In seconds.”

Greene remembered Dr. McKilty showing them the thin slice of her aorta. All it took to kill her in seconds.

“I couldn’t believe it. Kevin couldn’t speak. We heard the elevator down the hall. He barely whispered ‘Hide’ and pointed behind the front door. I was so stunned. It’s a wide hallway, so there was lots of room. When I got behind the door, someone was walking down the hall, humming away. I looked back into the apartment, and Kevin was carrying Katherine’s body into the bathroom. I wanted to call out, tell him to stop. But there was no time. The man was right at the door. I heard him shuffling his feet. He even dropped the newspaper on the floor. I just stood there, inches away, not moving.”

Greene looked over at Kennicott. Their eyes met for a moment; then he turned back to McGill and nodded.

“Kevin came to the door. I heard him whisper to the man, ‘I killed her, Mr. Singh.’ He could barely speak. Kevin followed him into the apartment, down the main corridor, without looking back. He signaled with his hands behind his back for me to leave. There was nothing else I could do.”

Greene replayed the scene in his head, trying to see how it had all unfolded. Katherine Torn, angry, crazed. Brace, shocked, panicked. Singh relentlessly punctual. And Sarah McGill, frozen behind the door.

McGill crossed her arms in front of her. She started to rock very slowly.

“Ms. McGill, your husband is charged with first-degree murder. Twenty-five years in jail if he’s convicted. Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

McGill looked over at Wingate. She rocked back and forth a few more times. “My husband wouldn’t want me to.”

“How do you know that?”

“He’s my husband.”

“Officer Kennicott and I are not in the business of convicting innocent people.”

“Then don’t call me as a witness,” McGill said. “You try to put me on the stand, and Kevin will plead guilty in the blink of an eye.”

“But what you’ve just told us would provide a complete defense. I can promise you we will deal with Children’s Aid.”

McGill looked over at Wingate. The daughter looking to her mother for something. What?

“If you testify, I can—”

“I won’t testify,” she said, slamming her hand down again. “I can’t. I won’t. I won’t let them. Not again . . .” Her voice trailed off.

The tension in the room was almost unbearable. It was important at a time like this to change tack, give everyone a breather. But still make your presence more permanent, so the witness forgets that she always has the option to simply ask you to leave.

The lilacs Greene had given to Wingate and McGill sat in front of them like purple place decorations. It had been more than two hours since he’d picked them. They were wilting but not beyond saving.

Amazing how fast life can go out of something, he thought as he reached out for both twigs. “I’ll put these in water,” he said as he stood up from the table.

He opened a cupboard in the kitchen to the right of the sink. The bottom shelf was filled with clear glass cups. But it was the glasses on the second row that caught his eye.

The whole shelf was filled with a vast array of blue-and-white Toronto Maple Leafs glasses. He reached up and took two out, filled them with cold water, and scored the bottom of the lilac twigs with a sharp knife before he plunked one in each.

He turned to bring them back to the table just in time to see McGill and Wingate exchange worried glances. They stared at the glasses in his hands.

Like a man digging for treasure whose spade had struck metal, Greene knew he was right.