Читать книгу This Thing of Darkness - Barbara Fradkin - Страница 8
ОглавлениеOmar Adams rolled over to the wall and pulled his pillow over his head. He still couldn’t block out the incessant natter of his three younger brothers, who were crouched on the floor in the little space between their beds, playing Warcraft II on their Play Station. In the background he could hear his mother and father arguing, his mother in Somali and his father in English. As usual, his mother shrieked like a demented crow, but the scary one was his father, who got quieter the angrier he was. The old man was deadly quiet this morning.
Morning? Omar lifted the pillow to check. No sunlight was poking through the small, narrow window in the corner of the room, and the smell of spices and onions filled the air. Fuck, had he missed half the day? His stomach lurched, and he had to swallow hard to keep the bile down. His head ached, and his mouth tasted of stale puke. When he shifted, pain shot through his arms. He couldn’t remember why. He couldn’t remember a fucking thing about last night, after that last bottle of vodka and the weed they’d passed around. Special weed, Nadif had said, scored from a new source. Some special!
He wondered how the other guys felt. Besides Nadif and Yusuf, his street buddies, he knew there were others, even though he couldn’t remember who. Or how he’d got home, or what time. He remembered them all sitting around drinking in the gazebo in Macdonald Gardens, talking about Nadif ’s court case, about the brothers who were refusing to testify against him and the old man with the lousy eyesight who’d fingered Nadif. He remembered them all walking down Rideau Street, ogling the hookers. Yusuf said he did one once, for fifty bucks behind the construction fence for the new condo, but then Yusuf ’s big brother ran a slew of them himself, so he probably got a family discount.
The thought of drinking brought the bile up again, so Omar tried to make his mind go blank. Blank out the pounding in his chest and the pain in his hands. Blank out the flashes that danced behind his eyelids, the clenched fists, long, glistening ropes of blood, jagged bone, panicked eyes. And the long, thin glint of steel.
It was the last image that forced him out of bed, tripping over his brothers and staggering down the hall to fling himself over the toilet. For five minutes he heaved, resting his head on the bowl, tears and snot mingling with God knows what as he tried to purge last night from his system.
What the hell had they done?
Afterwards, he flopped back against the wall and cradled his head in his hands. That was when he noticed the crusted stains on his hoodie. He must have fallen into bed last night fully dressed. He pulled at the baggy shirt and peered at the stains. Blood. A shiver ran through him. Grabbing the edge of the sink, he hauled himself to his feet and propped himself against the bowl. A freaky sight met him in the mirror—his face, smeared with dirt and crusted with puke. Dark red was caked around his swollen nose. He touched it carefully, swore out loud as the pain shot through his brain.
The bathroom door opened silently, and his father loomed in the mirror beside him. Omar recoiled in shock and gripped the sink. His father fixed him with his pale blue eyes. Those cold, creepy eyes. The only sign of trouble was the vein pulsing under the skin of his neck.“Where were you last night?”
Omar tried a little shrug, but his shoulders screamed in pain. “Just out with the guys.”
“Nadif.” He said the name like it was a cockroach. “What did I tell you?”
“Not Nadif. Just Yusuf.”
The flat eyes never blinked. In a contest with Omar, they never blinked. Omar knew he could see right through the lie. “You got in at three o’clock. That’s unacceptable.”
Omar wanted to ask what he was like when he got home, but he didn’t dare. He just nodded, hung his head, and his father turned away.
“Clean yourself up before your mother and your brothers see you.”
The bathroom door closed. Omar reached for a towel, wetted it and began to dab at his face. Slowly his ebony skin emerged from behind the puke and blood. It was scraped. Raw. What the hell? He tried to think, but his brains felt fried.
He could phone Nadif and try to find out what he knew. But Nadif was already up for attempted murder on that Rideau Centre knifing, and he was going to cover his own ass. No matter what happened, he’d lie or rat out someone else, rather than add to his sheet.
He could phone Yusuf, who at seventeen was still a young offender and under the cops’ radar. Yusuf would tell it straight, and he’d be on Omar’s side if it came to ratting anyone out.
Or he could just lie low. Nurse his hangover. Wait till the fog lifted and the crazy jumble of flashbacks faded away. Maybe then he’d remember what had happened. What was real and what was from a horror flick he’d seen in some freaked-out, wasted state.
Maybe nothing was real at all.
As Green expected, the old synagogue on Chapel Street was locked up tight on a Sunday afternoon, but he had a back-up plan. He had a personal connection with the rabbi who’d served the aging inner city congregation for twenty-five years before being forced to face old age himself. Rabbi Zachary Tolner had not slipped into retirement easily but spent most of his spare time, when he wasn’t training for marathons, badgering the new rabbi and the board to ensure they didn’t forget how things should be done.
When Green’s mother had been dying of breast cancer more than twenty years earlier, Rabbi Tolner had tried to visit her in hospital. Sid had thrown him out in a rage.
“Where is your God!” he’d screamed, in one of the rare moments of animation Green had seen during his mother’s long ordeal. “Where was He in Auschwitz? In Majdanek, where she was a girl—a fifteen-year-old girl who had to sell her soul for...” He’d never said for what, but it was more than Green had ever learned in the years before. Or since. The rabbi had tried to calm him and simply to be with him, but Sid had retreated back into that numbness which had probably served him well in Auschwitz.
At twenty-five, intoxicated with police work and with Hannah’s featherbrained but perfectly-formed mother, Green had been no more receptive to Tolner’s spiritual overtures than his father had been, but that had not dampened Tolner’s belief that he had a personal line of influence in the police department. Green had a stack of letters Tolner had sent him over the years complaining about everything from drug dealers on the synagogue steps to bums sleeping under the tree by the back door.
Green knew where to find the man. Now it was time for a little payback.
Tolner had changed little in the ten years since Green had last seen him. He was bent over the postage stamp-sized garden outside his townhouse, wearing a warped Tilley hat pulled down snug over his bald head and a pair of powder blue jogging pants concealing his spindly legs. His arms stuck out from his T-shirt, sinewy and tanned almost nut brown from a lifetime worshipping the outdoors. As Green approached, he straightened and drew every inch of his five-foot-four-inch frame to attention. His face was a web of wrinkles, but in their midst, his pale blue eyes lit with interest.
“The mountain comes to Isaac!”
Green laughed and extended his hand. “How are you, Zak?”
Tolner peeled off one gardening glove and encased Green’s hand in a powerful grip.“Bored! I hope you brought something interesting.” Worry flickered his gaze. “How’s your father?”
“Fine. Going to live to be a hundred, kvetching all the way. This is another old man. Maybe you’ve heard? Beaten to death just off Rideau Street?”
The ready grin fled. “A Jew?”
Green tilted his palm in uncertainty. “Possibly. We’re trying to identify him. Early seventies, five-ten, a hundred and seventy pounds, thick white hair, used a burled maple cane. Harry Rosen suit, out of date?”
Tolner had been listening intently, his blue eyes flickering with each new description as though he were searching through some internal database. At the end of the list, he shook his head slowly. “You could try being more specific. You’re describing everybody.”
“His hair was long and frizzy. Picture Einstein.”
This time a faint glimmer of recognition shone in Tolner’s eyes, but still he shook his head. “Can’t you show me a picture? Even of the corpse?”
“Too much facial damage.”
Tolner winced. “Oy.”
“You have an idea, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. You blinked.”
“Nothing that I’m going to tell you based on ‘Einstein’s hair’. What makes you think he was even Jewish?”
Green extracted the evidence bag containing the Star of David from his pocket. “He had this in his possession.”
Tolner took the plastic bag and held it at arms’ length. He squinted, and Green saw another flicker of recognition. “Ahh.”
“What do you mean, ahh?”
“Just...” Tolner lifted his shoulders in a classic Yiddish shrug. “This I recognize.”
“Does it fit with the Einstein hair?”
“Yes. Damn it, yes. And with the out-of-date Harry Rosen suit.” Tolner handed back the evidence bag. “Sam Rosenthal. Been a member of the shul for years, although he doesn’t come very often. Busy man, back in the days when I knew him. Travelled a lot to medical conferences, lectures and stuff.”
“So he’s a doctor?”
“Psychiatrist. Very well-respected years ago, when he was at the height of his career. Got a little wonky near the end, but then half those guys are wonky to start with, so it wasn’t far to go.”
Green had been jotting notes. “Wonky how?”
Tolner hesitated, and Green suspected he was weighing the wisdom of discretion against his love of gossip. He brushed at some specks of dirt on his T-shirt. “This is from congregants, you understand. When his wife was dying, he got Eastern religion and started meditating and searching for the deeper meaning of life. I gather he started to question all the drugs his psychiatric colleagues were prescribing. Claimed we had to respect nature’s diversity and the patient’s right to be different. Became the darling of the new age types, I think, but his colleagues were less amused.”
“You said his wife is dead?”
“About ten years ago. Her death was a long ordeal— ” He broke off, as if remembering Green’s mother.
“We’re going to need DNA for a positive ID. Does he have any other family?”
“A son somewhere in the States.” Tolner nodded towards the west.“Sam used to live in one of those mansions on Range Road overlooking the Rideau River—it’s an embassy now— but he sold it and gave half the proceeds to some group researching meditation, and he bought a falling apart Victorian dump in Sandy Hill near the university. He lives in a cramped one-bedroom on the bottom floor and rents the rest of it out to students for bobkes. I often see him out walking along Rideau Street.”
“Was he still practising?”
Tolner shrugged. “He might have been, but I’d be surprised. He’d be up around seventy-five by now.”
“Do you know the son’s name?”
Tolner shook his head. “Like I said, he moved to the States to study right out of high school, and he never came back. That was maybe thirty years ago.”
“Study what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sam wasn’t very active in the synagogue and his son was even less so. I met the son exactly once, at his mother’s funeral. Didn’t even stick around for the Shiva.”
“Can you remember any details? A first name maybe?”
“David? John? Some common name.”
Green sighed. There were probably hundreds of John Rosenthals listed in the United States. He had to hope that a search of Sam Rosenthal’s apartment would yield a lead.
“One more question,” he said. “Did Sam Rosenthal have any enemies or recent disputes with anyone? Assuming it is Sam, can you think of anyone who might have done this?”
Tolner had leaned down to yank a weed from the edge of the walkway. He straightened slowly, squinting into the slanting afternoon sun for a few long seconds. Finally he shrugged. “He spent years dealing with the mentally ill. Maybe one of them? He could be a little... arrogant, you know how doctors can get. Maybe some punk accosted him on the street, and he didn’t give in quick enough. What a crying shame. It’s always the good guys, isn’t it? Like the coyote, nature’s bad guys are too wily ever to be victims.”
Green could have phoned the information in to the station. It was his day off and, as everyone kept reminding him, he was an inspector, whose job was to oversee and administer, not to scrabble around in the streets unearthing leads, but he was curious to see their new Sergeant Levesque in action to reassure himself that she hadn’t booked off early or settled in to conduct the investigation with her feet up on her desk.
The Major Crimes squad room was deserted except for the familiar sight of Bob Gibbs bent over his computer. The young detective’s head shot up in alarm at his superior officer’s arrival, but he looked relieved when Green asked for the sergeant.
“She’s out, sir. Checking s-security tape from the pawn shop on Rideau Street.”
“Has Staff Sergeant Sullivan been in this afternoon?”
Gibbs shook his head, and Green suppressed his frustration as he pondered his next move. He felt restless and dissatisfied. So many dangling unknowns. He should go home to spend the rest of Sunday with his family. He could simply phone Sergeant Levesque to pass on the information on the victim’s possible identity. Or he could check out just one more little piece of information to round out the story before he handed it off to her.
His little alcove office smelled stuffy as he squeezed inside and booted up his computer. Stacks of rumpled reports, files and official manuals overflowed the bookcase beside his desk and teetered on the guest chair just inside the door.
In the Canada 411 online directory, there were two listings for S Rosenthal in the Ottawa area, but neither were anywhere near Sandy Hill. Well, well, he thought. Dr. Samuel Rosenthal might have an unlisted phone number. Not so unusual for a psychiatrist, he supposed, since like cops, they would deal with the troubled and potentially unpredictable underbelly of society.
He tried a standard Google search—Samuel Rosenthal, psychiatrist—and received 442 hits. He added Ottawa to narrow the search down to 164 hits. A quick scan of these revealed that Dr. Rosenthal had been a prolific author of academic papers on depression, schizophrenia, the role of stress, and the efficacy of various unpronounceable drugs. He had given public lectures, sat on the boards of mental health and community agencies, and taught at the university medical school. Almost all the references were more than ten years old, but the most recent ones dealt with drug efficacy in the treatment of adjustment disorders in adolescence.
What the hell is an adolescent adjustment disorder, Green wondered in astonishment. Is it a label for kids like me, who’d run a little wild in rebellion against the obsessive overprotection of panicky parents? Out of curiosity, he clicked on the reference but couldn’t access the article without subscribing to the journal. The brief abstract that preceded the article, however, was illuminating.
Adjustment disorders are by definition short-lived reactions to stress, characterized by mood and anxiety symptoms or acting-out behaviour. Despite the well-documented stress of adolescence, the diagnosis of adjustment disorder in this population is generally overlooked by mental health practitioners in favor of old standbys like anxiety disorder, mood disorder and even the major psychoses, thus squandering the opportunity to provide genuine help. In this rush to pathologize them, the adolescent’s own analysis of his or her experience is viewed of no account.
And I thought police lingo was indecipherable, Green thought, but there was no denying the challenging tone. He scanned the bio that followed. Samuel Rosenthal had been born in Capetown, South Africa and had been educated at Capetown University and Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London before emigrating to Canada in 1964 to accept a post in Montreal. He had moved across the country, working his way up the academic ladder, before ending his career as professor and a chief psychiatrist at the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital, where Sharon worked.
Green wondered if Sharon had known him before his retirement, and if she knew anything about his reputation as a man and as a psychiatrist. He was tempted to call her, but her reaction to his mid-afternoon detour into work had not been encouraging. He could tell she was hiding her annoyance for Tony’s sake, but neither of them needed what remained of their weekend further invaded by his work. Besides, Rosenthal’s work as a psychiatrist was probably utterly irrelevant to his death at the hands of street punks.
Green smiled wryly at the irony. Street punks—homeless, drug-addicted and alienated from the world—were the ultimate example of adolescent adjustment disorder.
As interesting as the information was, however, none of it yielded any clues as to Rosenthal’s current address or telephone number. Green reached for his phone. It took him a few minutes to round up his back-door contact at Bell Canada and secure a listing for the doctor. Rabbi Tolner was right. Sam Rosenthal lived on Nelson Street, only a block from Rideau Street. And also, in a coincidence too close for comfort, only a block west of Sid Green’s seniors’ home.
I’m coming home, I’m coming home, he promised Sharon silently as he drove to the old doctor’s home. He knew the building, a grand old Victorian mansion that would once have housed a member of Parliament or senior civil servant in burgeoning post-Confederation Ottawa. In its heyday, it would have seen its share of soirées and political intrigue, but it was now divided into six flats, each with its own doorbell and mailbox in the front hall. The apartments were probably occupied by a mix of university students, fixed-income seniors and new immigrants. From the medley of smells in the hallway, some East Indians and Latin Americans were among them.
The front yard betrayed the same descent from elegance to pragmatism. Most of it was paved over to house a jumble of bicycles, garbage and recycling bins, but under the bay window was a well-mulched rose garden still producing vibrant pink and red blooms at the end of the season. Someone must be weeding it, fertilizing it and encouraging it to grow in this toxic waste of asphalt and dust. Probably Dr. Rosenthal himself, accustomed to the stunning perennial gardens that surround the houses overlooking the Rideau River.
According to Tolner, Dr. Rosenthal occupied the ground floor flat, but there was no name on his buzzer or mailbox. Anonymous to the end, Green thought, and wondered whether it was professional paranoia that had lingered into retirement, or simply a sense that this place would never be home. Ringing the buzzer brought no response. His fingers itched to ring one of the neighbours. This was not his investigation, he castigated himself, and the follow-up really belonged to Sergeant Levesque.
He was rescued from his dilemma when one of the interior doors opened, and a young woman came out into the hall. Small, blonde and impossibly skinny, she was dressed in jeans and a frilly purple jacket, with the trademark book bag slung over one shoulder and a bike helmet under her arm. Her weary eyes widened with alarm at the sight of him. He hastened to introduce himself, which reassured her only marginally. She edged towards the door as he recorded her name—Lindsay Corsin—and asked her about the occupant on the ground floor.
“The landlord? He’s quiet and nice, but he keeps to himself.” Lindsay had a breathy, singsong voice that phrased everything as a question. “I’ve talked to him like maybe three times? Since I moved here. Why?”
“Can you describe him? Height, weight, hair colour?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Medium, you know? About the same as you, only way older.”
Green suppressed a smile. In the past, his fine brown hair, freckled nose and medium build had made him look deceptively youthful, but recently strands of grey had appeared at his temples. It was reassuring to know that seventy-five still looked a long way off.
“What can you tell me about his clothes?”
“He’s a funny dresser. Always has a suit, even a tie. He’s old-fashioned that way.”
Mentally Green was ticking off the points of confirmation. “Have you seen him today?”
“No, but I’ve been upstairs. I don’t think he’s in.”
“Does he have visitors? Go out much?”
She wrinkled her brow as if puzzled by the question. Her gaze darted to his closed door, and she seemed to vacillate. “Sometimes he has visitors. I hear them talking, like? You can hear everything through these walls.”
“Talking about what?”
“I couldn’t hear. Just, like, conversation? But mostly he’s alone.” She shifted uneasily. Took the helmet in both hands and twirled it. “Umm, I gotta go. I’m late for my study group.”
“I won’t keep you much longer. One last question. Does he go out at night?”
She frowned as though trying to figure out why he was asking. “Sometimes, I guess. I think he has trouble sleeping, because he gets on my case when I have friends over. Keeps pounding the ceiling with his cane.” Her face cleared with sudden understanding. “Oh, this is about last week, eh?”
“What happened last week?”
“Well, someone trashed his place. Broke a window in the back? Boy, was he mad. But you guys know all that. He wanted you to fingerprint his whole place.”
Having now run roughshod over Levesque’s first homicide investigation long enough, Green realized the sergeant needed to be brought into the picture. The obvious next move—checking out the apartment and the Break and Enter investigation—was hers to make. So he thanked Lindsay and handed her his card with the usual request to contact him if she remembered anything important. She snatched it and scurried out the door without a backward glance. She and her bicycle were already out of sight by the time he got back into his car.
He found Levesque crammed into the small utility closet that passed for the security and housekeeping office at the back of the Rideau Street pawn shop. She looked up with excitement, and if she was unnerved or annoyed by his appearance, she betrayed no sign. All business, she gestured towards the grainy monitor in front of her.
“Lucky for us, the shop has the tape on a two-day loop over the weekend so the shop owner can check for intrusions or missing merchandise when he arrives Monday morning. So we have coverage for the critical time period between ten p.m. Saturday and five a.m. Sunday.”
Green peered at the monitor. The date and time, down to the second, were stamped in the bottom right corner of the image. The camera seemed to be mounted in the upper corner of the main door frame, and its wide-angled lens showed a blurry, fisheye view of the barred entranceway to the store along with the edge of the shop window and the sidewalk beyond. As it rolled, Green squinted, trying to make out details. “Any sign of the victim?”
She shook her head. “He must have been on the other side of the street at this point.”
That makes sense, Green thought, since his home was on the other side of the street. However, in his experience, elderly people with canes were careful to cross at a traffic light. “I wonder what made him cross in the middle of the block,” he mused. “Any sign of trouble?”
“Just the usual Saturday night. Half a dozen drug deals, a girl having a shoving match with her boyfriend, I don’t know how many drunks pissing in the gutter, sex trade workers strolling by...” Levesque tapped the screen as a figure limped by, trundling a pull cart behind him. “There’s Screech, on his way to his sleeping quarters. Time is 1:33 a.m. He still has his sleeping bag.”
“Have we talked to him? He may be able to ID some of these people.”
“We took his statement, but his memory is unreliable.”
An understatement, Green thought. Screech was a proud Cree from Labrador who’d once worked the mines in Northern Quebec until his lungs gave out, but ten years on the street had not improved his health. Nor his mind. But even so, sometimes Screech knew things about the street that no one else did. The trick was in persuading him to share them. Money usually improved his mood, a fact Green mentioned to Levesque.
She reached over and rifled a stack of papers at her side. “I’ve printed off stills, and once the pathologist gives us a better idea on time of death, I’ll show them to him. I’ve also put a call out on the street. But we did find one promising lead.” She leaned over and began to fast-forward the tape. Green watched the jerky flashes of people scurrying past the shop.
In the silence, he plunged ahead. “I have a probable ID, address, and next of kin on the victim.”
Her finger jerked off the button, freezing the frame, and she swung around to gape at him. In terse, professional clips, he summarized his discoveries of the day. She had the discipline to listen without interruption, but her jaw grew tighter with each revelation. Beneath her dispassionate gaze, he knew she was fuming. Her blue eyes smoked.
“So I leave it in your very capable hands.” He flourished a grin he hoped would take the sting out. “Public records should turn up the son easily, and the B & E follow-up may give you some very useful information about motive.”
“I appreciate all of this, Inspector,” she said, not bothering to fake sincerity. “We’ll get a warrant for that address as soon as possible, and I’ll have one of my detectives pull the B & E file. But I have a much more promising lead right here on the tape.” She tapped the play button, and within a few seconds a group of young black males slouched by the camera, their hoodies bagging and their shoelaces trailing. They jostled one another as they fought for space on the narrow sidewalk.
“Street gangs,” she said with a smug smile. “That’s what this is all about. It isn’t important who he was or what went on last week. It’s only important that at that moment of that night, he crossed their path.”
