Do or Die (7 page)

“Well, if I were you, I'd check into the dark-haired bitch he's had on his arm for the past two months. Raquel's Arabic, and you know how protective those guys can be about their women.”

As a Jew, Green had a finely tuned radar for prejudice and was no longer surprised when it cropped up in the most unexpected places. In some ways, the subtle bigotry of the educated white elite was more deadly than the crude ignorance of the streets. Vanessa Weeks probably didn't even think of her remark as racist, merely factual. But prejudice aside, in this case she had a point, he realized, particularly when he considered the murder weapon MacPhail had described. An eight-inch, smooth-bladed knife. If folklore was to be believed, the weapon of choice among Arab desert tribes.

He excused himself and slipped into the hall to call the station. He reached Sullivan at his own phone.

“Any breaks yet?” “The guys are collecting a lot of stuff, Mike, but we don't have a clear-cut motive or an obvious suspect yet. No sign of our mystery student in the plaid shirt. Paquette has come up
empty on the fingerprint analysis so far. MacPhail says the body has no defensive wounds on it, so Blair didn't try to block the blow. Looks like he was taken by surprise. “

“That suggests somebody smooth and quick with a knife.”

“Ruthless, too. The guy couldn't afford to hesitate.”

“Did MacPhail speculate on how much strength it would take? Could it have been a woman?”

“It was a hell of a sharp knife. Double edge and pointed tip. A woman could slip it in without trouble.”

“Have the guys got anything on the dark-haired girlfriend yet? Her name's Raquel Haddad.”

“Yup. Jackson's already heading out to her home as we speak.”

*    *    *

The University of Ottawa was scattered through the aging downtown district of Sandy Hill, once the elegant home of the lumber barons, entrepreneurs and founding politicians of the fledgling town. Some of the stately mansions of a hundred years ago were now embassies, but many had been subdivided into cheap tenements filled with immigrants and the transient poor. Green dodged swaddled Somali women pushing strollers as well as the usual throngs of scruffy students as he raced to the university administration building to track down Raquel Haddad before Jackson did. He was fuming. Jackson was supposed to contact him, not blunder off after sensitive witnesses on his own.

Green was glad he knew every pothole and stop sign in the neighbourhood, for he had been born in a dilapidated little house a mere mile away in Lowertown, on the working class side of Rideau Street. After his first brief, but expensive foray
into marriage and home-ownership, which had scared him off both for years, he had moved back to the inner city to a rundown brick low-rise in Sandy Hill. He had always referred to it, rather proudly, as “the dump”. With each promotion and pay raise, he kept intending to move into larger, sleeker, more modern quarters but always found himself reluctant to part with it. It was in the heart of his daily life, a short drive from the police station, Nate's Delicatessen and his father, who now lived in a seniors' apartment just off Rideau Street.

Green's apartment was cramped and drafty; it had no balcony, only one bedroom, creaky floors, balky plumbing and a shower that never stopped dripping. There was no room large enough for the spectacular, four-speaker sound system he wanted to buy so that he could blast the great rock classics from the four corners of the room. His mother had come from a musical family in Warsaw, before they all perished in Treblinka, and while he was growing up, she had supplemented his father's assistant shipper's salary by giving piano lessons. The children had been excruciating, but his mother's fingers could make the dullest Bach
étude
come alive. His taste ran to a more raucous sound than hers, but even now, fifteen years after her death, music still brought her back to him.

But musical yearnings aside, a single man could live in the “dump” quite nicely, as long as he wasn't picky. Three, however, was a definite crowd. When Sharon had given up her modern high-rise apartment to move in with him, both had understood the accommodations would be temporary. She had grown up in a sprawling suburban bungalow, and she did not share his attachment to noise, car fumes and crumbling corner stores. She had been a good sport, but the arrival of the baby, which had ousted his favourite green lazee-boy from the
living room corner to accommodate the crib, had given the matter a new urgency.

Under the guidance of Mary, Brian Sullivan's wife, they had looked at half a dozen houses in the price range they could afford, which wasn't high, because in addition to child support for a daughter he barely knew, Green paid almost all his father's expenses at the seniors' home. But the houses Mary had found had been soulless chunks of vinyl and particle board; none had felt like homes to him.

This was home, he thought, as his car wove in and out between parked cars and potholes on the back streets of Sandy Hill. He covered the six blocks to the administration building with his accelerator foot to the floor. For once he appreciated the spritely little blue Corolla Sharon had insisted he buy last winter. At the time he'd considered it an alien yuppie affectation, but his rusty yellow Pony had been twelve years old by the time Tony was born, and Sharon had refused to allow the baby anywhere near it.

His first impulse had been to buy a Suzuki Swift, which was one step above a moped and the cheapest, most anti-inspectorish vehicle he could find, or, as a concession to his incipient midlife crisis, a used Mustang convertible. But Sharon was pushing for a mini-van. The Corolla was her bottom line, and given that choice, Green considered himself lucky. He'd parted with his Pony reluctantly because, like his apartment, it had sentimental value, but as the Corolla leaped in response to the gas, he realized how loathe he'd been to admit that everything, including himself, was growing old.

His old Pony would have been smoking by the time he pulled into the parking lot of the University of Ottawa administration building. He parked the Corolla in a spot marked “Dean of Arts”, slapped a police sticker in his window
and headed for the records department. The mention of murder and Professor Myles Halton sent the chief records clerk scurrying for the confidential file on Raquel Haddad.

Raquel was twenty-two, born in Beirut to a Lebanese physician, but she was listed as living with her uncle Pierre Haddad, a Canadian citizen with a local Loretta Street Address. Green jotted it down, then scanned the rest of her file. She appeared to be in the fourth year of an Honours Biology program with a heavy emphasis on physiology, anatomy and biochemistry. Something Vanessa Weeks had said came to mind. Jonathan had told her Raquel was only a research assistant. Did senior Honours students help Masters students with their research?

A visit to the eminent Dr. Myles Halton was certainly in order, but first he had to check out Pierre Haddad. The Loretta Street address proved to be a corner convenience store on the fringe of Little Italy. The front door sagged and the “L” and “Y” on the sign “Loretta Confectionery” had peeled off. Another victim of big box stores, Green thought as he pushed the door open with a screech of rusty hinges and entered a room full of dark, half-empty shelves. No wonder business was bad. Mr. Haddad needed some pointers in presentation.

In response to the screech, a curtain parted at the back of the store and a man emerged. Early forties, swarthy and prematurely gone to fat. He rolled down the aisle to the cash.

“Pierre Haddad?”

The man scowled, drawing his heavy black brows over his eyes. Green produced his badge and kept his voice soothing. Experience had taught him that people from violence-plagued countries were easily alarmed. “I'm Inspector Green of the Ottawa Police. As you probably know, a student at the University of Ottawa named Jonathan Blair was murdered last
night. I'm told that Raquel Haddad was one of his research assistants. We are asking everyone who knew him if they know anything that might help us. Raquel listed you as next of kin, and this as her address. I wonder if I could speak to her.”

Haddad had betrayed nothing during the entire speech, no doubt a habit learned on the streets of Beirut. But once Green had finished, he arranged an expression of dismay on his face.

“Murdered! No, I did not know that. How terrible.”

A foolish error, Green thought; he had passed the newspapers stacked for sale by the door. The news was blazoned across the front in large bold print.

Green let the lie pass. “Yes, it's terrible, and we need all the help we can get. She's your niece, I understand? Living here with you?”

“She is the daughter of my brother in Beirut. But we don't live here. This is my business.”

“Did she ever talk about someone named Jonathan Blair?”

He shook his head, then smiled and became effusive. “My brother sent her over here to be safer with me, but Canadian girls, they have much more freedom than Lebanese girls. She doesn't like to talk to me about her school. I try to take care of her—keep an eye, you know, but not too much. I know she studies science, but I don't know who are her friends.”

Green knew it was ludicrous to think Haddad knew little of his niece's university life. Mediterranean families brought their traditional values and their protectiveness with them, and it took several generations to wash out. Raquel might have refused to tell him anything, but he would have found out anyway.

But it was not yet time to get tough. “Can you give me the address where I can find her?”

Haddad sighed. “This is too bad, because I just put Raquel on the plane back to Beirut yesterday. Her school was finished,
and she had been looking forward to going home.”

Green's thoughts raced. The trip to Beirut could easily be verified through the airline records, but he suspected Haddad was not lying. Raquel had suddenly flown halfway around the world to a country where it would be almost impossible to find her. The question was why? And how much did Haddad know behind his impenetrable smile?

Green jotted down the Beirut address Haddad gave him and dashed back to his car to use his cell phone. A quick call confirmed that Raquel had been on the eight p.m. flight from Ottawa to New York the night before. It was interesting, though, that the flight for the long-awaited visit home had been booked only two hours before.

Green arrived back
at his office six minutes later, his colour high with excitement.

“We're on the scent! I can feel it!”

Sullivan looked up from Green's desk with relief. His eyes were half-shut with fatigue, and he stretched noisily to get the stiffness out of his joints. “Jeez, Mike, I should be the inspector and you should be the field man. I thought you said you'd be back in an hour. I've been manning the fort for two and a half hours. This Peter Weiss creep has called three times. Jules is circling. There's so much stuff coming in, I can't keep up. So I set a progress meeting for three-thirty. I hope that's okay.”

Green glanced at his watch. It gave him barely half an hour, but the meeting was timely. He needed to get an overview of the findings and then focus the investigation to follow the leads he had uncovered.

“That's good. Anything on the student in the red plaid shirt?”

Sullivan shook his head. “But your wife called. She wants you to call, because she's got the long night shift tonight.”

He frowned as he calculated his time. Sharon worked as a psychiatric nurse on an inpatient ward at the Royal Ottawa Hospital. The long night shift meant seven p.m. to seven a.m., which gave him barely three hours before he had to be home.
To encourage father-son bonding, and to help them save money for a house, he had agreed to babysit in the evenings and nights if Sharon had to work shift, and they would only pay a sitter if both were working days. But things kept getting in the way, and the old excuses were wearing thin.

“Did you tell her I was on the Jonathan Blair case?”

“I told her you'd call.”

Even he wants me to grow up, Green thought with a sigh. He picked up the phone and could tell from Sharon's irritated croak that he had woken her. Oh no, Tony's nap time. When she worked the night shift, she caught sleep whenever she could. How different from four years ago, when he'd first walked onto her ward to investigate the death of a psychologist. He could still remember how her warmth and humour had taken his breath away.

“Will you be home, Mike?”

“Is Mrs. Louks available?” The elderly widow across the hall rarely went out and had often rescued him from a child care crisis.

“I'm sure she is, but I thought Tony might enjoy your company. It's such a rarity.”

He winced. “I'll try to get there.”

“Try?”

He suppressed a flash of irritation. There was nothing he hated more than being on the moral low ground. “I tell you what. I promise I'll do my best, and if you have to, take him to Mrs. Louks and I'll pick him up as soon as I can.”

He felt Sullivan's disapproving eyes on his back when he hung up, but he didn't turn. As if to counterbalance the depravity he confronted every day, Sullivan had dedicated his life to being the perfect father and he set a tough standard, which Green rarely met. Tossing a quick “Back soon” over his
shoulder, he headed for the door.

“Mike! Where are you going?”

Green paused on the threshold. “I'll be back for the meeting. I've just got one last thing…” Without waiting for the wrath, he ducked out.

*    *    *

The University Sciences building was a squat concrete bunker built in the psychedelic sixties, but more evocative of post-war Moscow. Virtually the entire fourth floor was devoted to the offices, labs and equipment rooms of Myles Halton's research group. Green imagined that normally it was alive with the bustle of students and the hum of equipment, but on the afternoon following Jonathan Blair's murder, everything was hushed. Most of the offices were empty, and only one secretary sat at her desk, staring at her blank computer screen. Somewhere in the background he could hear the murmur of voices, but there was no one to be seen.