This Thing of Darkness (3 page)

“Any leads from Missing Persons?” Sullivan asked her, nodding towards the cellphone in her hand.

She shook her head. Her pony tail swished distractingly. “I just checked with them again. No one called in a missing senior.”

Green wasn't surprised. How long would it take before his own father was reported missing? Sid Green lived alone and rarely went outside any more. The circle of cronies he used to meet for card games had dwindled through illness and death. Green tried to phone him every day, but some days there weren't enough hours in the day. If this old man had a wife or lived with someone, he would probably have been reported by Sunday morning, but if he lived alone, it might take days.

“Do we have anything to go on?” he asked. “A monogram on a handkerchief, an
ATM
slip in a pocket?”

Levesque nodded. “They may find more when they examine the clothes and the body, but we found one item in his coat pocket—a receipt from the Rideau Pharmacy from last April. I asked Detective Charbonneau to follow up with them. And...” She paused, then slipped her hand into her handbag and withdrew a plastic evidence bag. Inside, Green could make out an object on a gold chain.

“We found this beside the body. It looks like gold.” She held out the bag. “It's a Jewish star, right? What's it called?”

Sullivan cast Green a sharp look, but Green barely noticed as he took the bag and held it up to the sunlight. He twisted the piece this way and that. It was hammered gold, exquisitely delicate and old. Dread crawled down his spine.

“A
Magen David,”
he said, then grimaced at the irony. “Literally, Shield of David. It's meant to protect.”

Mort Fine, the owner of Fine Antiques, was just flipping the sign in his shop window to “Open” when Green pushed through the door. He scowled as if a customer were an inconvenience, but then his pig-like eyes lit up at the sight of Green.

“Mr. Yiddish Policeman!” he exclaimed, trundling his squat body along the narrow aisle of his shop. “More mysteries for me?”

“You remember me?” A few years earlier Green had enlisted his help in identifying some old keys found at a crime, and since then Fine had provided the occasional tip about the fencing activities of his more dubious competitors.

“How could I forget? I get so many customers here?”

Green glanced around the shop. The place was a fire trap. Curios, figurines, tarnished silver and old lamps were still jumbled without apparent order on the shelving that crammed the aisles. Antique chandeliers covered the ceiling like stalactites in a cave. It didn't look as if a dust mop had passed over anything since Green's last visit. He could feel his bronchial tubes closing up at the mould and dust.

“Business good?” he asked, trying to keep the irony out of his voice.

“Oy...”
Fine scrunched up his rubbery face. “So what can I do for you? We'd better talk fast before the crowds come through the door.”

Green laughed. “You know anything about jewellery?”

Fine's eyes danced. “You want to buy your wife a special something? I could give you a very good price on a sapphire ring that just came in.”

Green laid the evidence bag on the counter at the cash so that the small gold Star of David was visible. “What can you tell me about this piece?”

Fine picked the bag up with pudgy but surprisingly nimble fingers. He turned it over and over, frowning.“Besides that it's old, not much unless you let me take it out of the bag.”

Green had him sign the evidence log, then followed as the man carried the bag into the workshop at the rear and turned on a powerful light. He slid the contents out onto a white enamel tray. The chain tumbled out along with the star Fine weighed first the whole pendant then the star alone. He held it up to his jeweller's loupe and peered at each square millimetre of it. In the small, stifling confines of the workshop, the silence was broken only by his asthmatic breathing and the occasional grunt.

Green sneaked a peek at his watch. Tony and Sharon were expecting him at Nate's Deli at one o'clock, and he had tried their patience enough for one day.

“You in some kind of hurry?” Fine demanded, without taking his eyes off the star.

“How long will you be?”

“Can you leave it with me? I can research in my spare time.”

Green shook his head. “It can't be out of my custody.”

“I don't work miracles. It's good quality. Twenty-two carat gold maybe, not the
dreck
they make nowadays. Hand shaped and hammered by a goldsmith, not off the assembly line in China.”

“China makes
Magen David
s?”

“China makes everything.
Mezzuzahs, yarmulkes...
You go to Israel today, half the Judaica in Old Jerusalem is from China. But this...” he smiled enigmatically, “this is from Russia.”

“You can tell that? Something different about the gold?”

“Probably, but who knows?” His smile broadened, showing a row of unnaturally straight, white teeth. In his lumpy, pockmarked face, their perfection was jarring. He stepped back, removed his loupe and held it out to Green. “Have a look. There's a jeweller's monogram on the back. Cyrillic letters. ASM, I think. There's an inscription as well.”

Dutifully Green peered through the magnifying glass, astonished that he could see every scratch and speck of dust on the gold. At first he could make out nothing beyond a few faint etchings, well worn by the passage of time. Then slowly a pattern emerged. He couldn't read Russian, couldn't recognize anything but a few loops, but he took Fine's word for it.

“Can you photograph this?” he asked. “Would that help you research it?”

Fine scowled, but Green could see the glint of intrigue in his eye. Objects told a tale, and the older and more widely-travelled they were the more fascinating the tale. Without another word, he had his state-of-the-art digital camera out and was fiddling with lenses.

Ten minutes later, Green left the shop deep in thought about the elderly victim. Having an old piece of jewellery from Russia meant very little, of course. The old man could have purchased it in an antique store here or in any one of the hundreds of Judaica shops in North America. He could even have purchased it online. Fine might be able to pinpoint who the goldsmith ASM was, and when and where he had lived, but that would tell the police nothing about where the victim was from. Green himself had bought a pair of antique silver
Shabbas
candlesticks from Fine, who claimed they had come from the Ukraine. Green had never been near the Ukraine.

Reluctantly, he forced the mystery of the dead man from his mind. The routine homicide investigation was being capably managed by Sergeant Levesque and overseen by Staff Sergeant Sullivan, who had fifteen years in major crimes under his belt. The body had been removed to the morgue, and before heading off to the Britannia Yacht Club for his Sunday afternoon sail, Dr. MacPhail had scheduled the autopsy for Monday morning.

The Ident Unit was still at the scene, painstakingly collecting cigarette butts and trying to lift footprints from the tiny patch of dirt between the sidewalk and the building. The killer might have hidden there, pressed up against the wall in the shadows, waiting to ambush the old man. A team of uniformed officers under Levesque's direction was conducting a street canvass, searching for anyone who might know the old man or might have witnessed the assault. In the middle of a weekend market day, a near-futile task.

Against Levesque's obvious but unvoiced objection, Green had taken over the tracing of the Star of David, arguing that he had the connections and knew more about the significance and possible origins of the religious piece than either she or Sullivan, both lapsed Catholics. But the truth was, he couldn't resist the lure of the case. It wasn't simply the desire to be back in the trenches, following up leads and tracking down killers instead of sitting behind his desk. This victim felt special to him. The death of a courtly old Jewish gentleman out for his evening stroll hit a little too close to home for him. Who knew what this man had accomplished and endured over his life? To meet such a brutal and pointless end was an affront to all that Green believed just and fair.

His resolve hardened as he helped his father through the glass doors of his seniors' residence and into the staff car parked illegally at the curb. Nate's Deli was a mere five blocks away, but at his father's creeping pace, too far for him to walk now. The deterioration had been slow, almost imperceptible, but every spring, Sid Green seemed never to bounce back to the form he'd had the autumn before. The snow, ice and bone-chilling cold of winter sapped his strength more each year.

Sid leaned on his cane and eyed the alien car with dismay. “Where's Sharon? And the baby?”

The baby was now nearly five years old and had just begun kindergarten, but in Sid's eyes, he would always be the new arrival.

“They're going to meet us at Nate's.”

A smile spread across Sid's face, momentarily erasing the pinched frown and the perpetual melancholy in his rheumy brown eyes. “And Hannah?”

Green didn't know where his daughter was. She was not answering her cell, and in typical eighteen-year-old fashion, she had not come home Saturday night. She had called just after the eleven o'clock news to say she would be staying at a “friend's”. Judging from the loud chatter and the booming bass music, it was “friends” in the very plural.

At least she had called. When she'd first arrived on their doorstep, fresh from a fight with her mother and spitting mad at the world, she had planned to stay only long enough to punish her mother, Green's ex-wife, and put a face to her father. Two years later, she was almost finished high school, had found a part-time job as a special needs companion and had learned to meet them halfway on rules. Most of the time.

Green too had made progress as a father in the past two years, but he knew the main reason Hannah had slowly been won over was Sid Green. She adored her grandfather almost as much as he adored her. In looks, she was the incarnation of his dead wife, for whom she'd been named —small and delicate, with an elfin innocence that hid a steely spirit. In Hannah's presence, Sid shed ten years and half a century of sorrow.

When Green had to tell his father she wasn't coming, he could see the old man deflate. Sid lowered himself into the passenger seat with a sigh and barely spoke as they drove to Nate's. Green knew the sight of Tony would reinvigorate his father, but he'd asked Sharon to come a little later, because he wanted a few minutes alone with his father before the energizer bunny burst in, full of bounce and chatter.

He waited until Sid was settled with his customary weak tea before broaching the subject on his mind. He was still summoning the words that would not alarm his father when the elderly man raised his hands expressively.

“Nu,
Mishka. You look worried.”

Green hesitated. Nodded. “Just wondering, Dad. There's a case...”

“Voden,”
his father said softly. “The old man killed on Rideau Street.”

Green suppressed his surprise. “You know?”

“I heard it on the morning news. You want to tell me not to walk alone on Rideau Street. Never mind I haven't done it for five years.”

“I know. But just in case you should feel like it...”Green toyed with his spoon, avoiding his father's skeptical eyes. “But also I wanted to ask if you know a well-dressed Jewish gentleman maybe ten years younger than you, who lives alone around here, walks with a cane and wears a beige camelhair coat.”

Sid looked thoughtful. “Well dressed. What—a tuxedo maybe?”

“A suit and tie. But expensive. Classy.”

“So, rich.”

“Well off, probably. His camelhair coat is a Harry Rosen.”

“That you can buy off the rack at Neighbourhood Services.”

Point taken, Green thought. MacPhail had thought the suit was twenty years out of date, so it was possible it had been given away to a charity shop and snapped up by an elderly man with tastes beyond his current means. But the Star of David had also been good quality gold, and the shoes had been nice enough to steal.

“I think he had—or used to have—some money, and whatever he'd done for a living, expensive clothes were important.” Green was grasping at straws, but he hoped some small detail might twig Sid's memory. “It's possible he was also from Russia.”

“Ach.” Sid waved a dismissive hand. “Russian Jews are everywhere.”

“He had an antique gold
Magen David
from Russia. Think, Dad. Well-off, well dressed, lived alone, might have had a Russian accent, used a cane.” Sid was still looking blank. “Could he have lived in your building?”

“Not in my building, no. But you could ask at the
shul
up on Chapel St. If he lived downtown around the old neighbourhood, they might know. The
alter kakers
go there for services, to say
kaddish
for their wives and parents who've died.” Sid said the word for old men with contempt. He had tossed his faith, and his trust in old men, on the funeral pyres of Auschwitz.