Stranglehold (2 page)

He parked the scooter beside a bank of newspaper boxes between the Money Mart store and the Cupid Boutique. The city had four major dailies, and all but one of them had huge front-page pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie getting out of a stretch limo or walking up the red carpet to a movie theatre. It was all part of TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, a September ritual that saw top-flight movie stars parachute in each year. In his early days as a division cop, Greene had been one of those policemen he now saw in the photo, holding back the crowds.

He walked past a poster featuring a group of bulky high-school boys in rugby uniforms. They were black, Asian, East Asian, and white. Typical of a suburban Toronto school. In big type the words
SCARBOROUGH SCRAPPERS NEED YOUR SUPPORT!
In smaller type there were details of how to send money to help the team.

The sign was a typically clever move by Hap Charlton, the chief of police and Greene’s mentor for many years, who now was running for mayor. Since becoming chief, he had got a huge amount of publicity for his work as the coach of this team of underprivileged students. Most of it very positive, except for the time when former U.S. president Bill Clinton was in town for a conference and Charlton missed it because of a game.

Charlton was a master at knowing the rules, and bending them just enough so they wouldn’t break. The election rules very clearly stated that no signs could go up until thirty-eight days before the vote. This was his way of getting his message out there, without showing face.

A month earlier, Charlton had gone on a talk-radio program and announced he was running for mayor. His campaign pitch was that he was tough on crime, that he was going to get rid of wasteful spending at City Hall, that he would drive his own car, no more limo service for the mayor, and his own personal obsession: He’d declared war on graffiti. He’d held his first press conference in front of a vacant suburban warehouse where he’d taken a power washer and cleaned off a whole wall of what his critics called urban art and he called garbage. Pictures of him wielding the nozzle like a gun had been picked up by the press across the country.

The local media pundits, who almost all lived downtown, were not impressed. But Charlton immediately jumped to an early lead in the polls, leaving his main challenger, the left-leaning mayor, Peggy Forest, flat-footed. Since then he’d kept gaining momentum. On Wednesday night, he was going to have his
first big rally at a hotel near the airport. Greene would be there, along with every other homicide cop on the force.

Someone had spray-painted in
HAP IS A HAZARD
on the sign. The poster and the graffiti pretty much summed up the radically divided sentiments about his campaign.

There was no one else on the narrow sidewalk. In the six times Greene had driven his scooter out here, he’d never seen a pedestrian or even the occasional cyclist. This was suburbia, where people drove their cars everywhere.

The exterior of the Maple Leaf Motel featured red brick with white trim. Continuing the design theme, the signage was also red type on a white backdrop. All of it was accented by a healthy dollop of metal maple leaves, fastened to the facade. A huge, green Dumpster in the front driveway squatted atop cracked concrete and a bed of weeds. There were no cars parked anywhere. The motel was two stories high. There was a passageway that went under the second floor in the middle of the side facing the street. It was the only way into the courtyard where all the rooms were located. He went to room 8.

Earlier, just as Greene was leaving his house, Jennifer had called him on his cell from a pay phone at a Coffee Time doughnut shop up the street.

“Ari, Howard just texted me,” she’d said. “His meeting in Boston cancelled at the last minute.”

“Oh.”

“He wanted to get together for coffee.”

“Okay, then –”

“No,” she said. “I texted him back that I was doing a fifteen-K run.”

They had talked for about another minute, both excited that their lives were soon going to come together. “Don’t be late,” she’d said before she hung up.

He took a last look at his watch. It was 10:40. In a few seconds he’d be with her. Jennifer always insisted on having half an hour by herself to set things up. Now the fluorescent overhead light would be off, and her usual array of white candles would be lit. There would be fresh pillowcases on the pillows and on her iPod Oscar Peterson would be tickling the piano keys. Today there’d be a small bottle of champagne chilling in the ice-filled bathroom sink. His mouth was dry in anticipation of kissing her.

She always lowered the blinds, closed the door, and left it unlocked. He always left his helmet and gloves on, until he was safely inside.

The door was slightly ajar, which was unusual. Usually she kept it closed but
unlocked so he could walk right in. The overhead light was on inside. The candles were set up all around the room, but only the one on the far bedside table was lit. He could see it had burned down quite a ways. No music was playing, though her iPod was set up in its speaker dock. And even with his helmet still on, his visor still down, he could tell the smell of the room was off.

There was an ugly comforter on the bed, the kind that Jennifer always hid away, and there was a body-shaped mound under it. He took another step inside and glimpsed a strand of her brown hair. She was facing away.

How odd.

Had she fallen asleep?

He smiled. She was playing a joke on him.

He tiptoed to her side of the bed and flipped up the visor. Her head was covered by the comforter. He bent down and gently pulled it back with his gloved hand.

“Hello, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “It’s time to –”

Then he saw her face.

Her brown eyes were bloodshot and bulging. Her forehead had a slick line of sweat over her eyebrows. The skin on her neck was red. Her tongue hung helplessly out of her wide mouth.

He couldn’t breathe.

In five years on the homicide squad he’d seen enough death to know it instantly. He yanked off a glove and touched the carotid artery on her neck. No pulse. Her skin felt pasty. He put his hands in front of her nose and mouth. Nothing.

He had to think. Had to call 911.

How could this be?

Tears jumped into his eyes. His stomach lurched and he started to gag.

He turned away from her and felt for his phone. The bathroom door right in front of him was closed. The killer. Maybe he was in there.

He lifted his heavy boot and, anger coursing through his body, kicked in the door.

WHAT A BORING MONDAY, AWOTWE AMANKWAH, COURTROOM REPORTER FOR THE
Toronto Star,
thought as he flipped through the trial list on the centre hall desk at the 361 University Avenue Courthouse. For the last two months there’d been nothing decent to write about thanks to the court’s annual summer break – when all the well-heeled judges were up north at their family cottages. He could barely remember the last time his byline had appeared on the front page. And now the film festival was monopolizing half the ink in the paper with paparazzi crap.

The
Star
’s new editor, Barclay Church, a British transplant who lived for stories filled with sex and scandal, would have no interest in the handful of run-of-the mill crimes on this court docket: a stabbing; two shootings; a dead body found in a ravine; a real dumb drug-importing case (a bunch of boxers from the islands who shipped the stuff up in their gym bags); and the inevitable sexual assault cases. One pitted a stepfather against his stepdaughter, another featured a drunk, minor-league hockey player versus a failed actress-turned-waitress.

All the usual suspects. Strictly six-paragraph, page-eight filler.

None of this was going to help Amankwah reboot his career. He needed the ink to earn a promotion so he could start doing feature stories. That would give him more exposure and more money to maintain his support payments so he could keep seeing his two children. For the last few years he’d been doing extra overnight shifts in the radio room to make his nut. And now, with the hotly contested election for city mayor about to start, only the biggest and sexiest crime stories had a chance of not getting buried, if not cut out altogether.

His best bet this morning was Courtroom 406, where Seaton Wainwright, the high-flying filmmaker who was charged with scamming investors out of millions, was scheduled to make an appearance. Last Wednesday things had heated
up when Phil Cutter, Wainwright’s aggressive, bald-headed lawyer, had tried to change the bail conditions to allow his client to go to New York for five days to “work on some deals he planned to sign during the Toronto Film Festival” before his upcoming trial.

Jennifer Raglan, the lead Crown on the case, had produced copies of Wainwright’s Visa card that showed the last time he’d been in the Big Apple, he’d hired a series of high-class Manhattan hookers and charged them to his company as “promotion.”

The judge, Irene Norville, no shrinking violet herself, was not impressed. She gave Wainwright forty-eight hours in New York, ordered him to be back in court this morning at ten, and rushed off the bench.

Wainwright, who was about six feet ten and weighed close to three hundred pounds, ploughed out of the courtroom. When Raglan walked into the hallway with the other lawyers and reporters, he accosted her.

“Why the fuck are you trying to ruin my life,” he shouted. “Do you know how many jobs I’ve created in this town?”

Raglan was maybe five six and thin, but she stood her ground like a halfback confronting a charging linebacker. “Maybe you should start thinking above the shoulders,” she said, “not below the waist.”

Two court security guards ran over.

She waved them off and turned on Cutter. Her eyes flashed with rage. “Your clown of a client comes near me again, and I’ll have him in cuffs so fast it will make his fat ass pucker up like the scared chicken he really is.”

She stormed off, leaving everyone standing in stunned silence. Raglan was a well-respected prosecutor and known for keeping her cool in tough situations.

“Where’d that come from?” Amankwah asked the other reporters.

Zach Stone, the
Toronto Sun
writer who was the veteran of the crew, didn’t seem surprised. “That’s the old Jennie,” he said.

“Meaning?” Amankwah asked.

“Not many people know this, but she started out as a cop.”

“Raglan. A cop?”

“Long time ago,” Stone had said in his usual cryptic tone. He had begun his career at the old
Toronto Telegram
. When that paper closed he spent a few years at the
Star
, then moved to the
Sun
a long time ago. He had a million sources and even more secrets. It was clear he wasn’t going to say anything more.

Amankwah knew there would be no fireworks this morning between Raglan and Wainwright. Last week she’d told Norville she was taking Mondays off until the trial began, next week, and she wouldn’t be here today.

Five minutes before ten o’clock, Amankwah watched the junior lawyer on the case, a beautiful young woman named Jo Summers, come into court and set herself up at the Crown counsel table. There was no sign of Wainwright, who always made a grand entrance at the last moment, angering Norville more each time, but was never technically late.

Cutter scurried in just before ten. His bald pate gleamed with sweat. He strode over to Summers and whispered in her ear. She looked around the empty courtroom, frowned, and shook her head, like a vice principal frustrated yet again with a difficult pupil.

Watching Cutter wipe the perspiration from his brow, Amankwah could tell that this time there’d be no dramatic, last-second entrance by his mini-movie-mogul client.

There was a loud rap, and the oak door at the front of the courtroom swung open. Norville swooped in, followed by her robed registrar, an older gentleman named Mr. Singh. A former railway engineer in India, Singh had been a key witness in a murder trial a few years earlier and had become enamoured with the court process. Now he worked here. Courteous, efficient, and always with a smile on his face, he loved to chat with people and everyone loved to talk to him.

She ran up to her elevated dais, plunked herself down in her high-backed chair, put on a pair of plain but stylish black glasses, and scanned the empty seats in front of her. Her eyes fixed on Cutter.

“Counsel, where’s your client?”

Cutter, usually a fearless advocate, bowed his head. “I haven’t heard from him all morning.” He pulled out his cell phone. “Mr. Wainwright always e-mails and texts me about ten times a day. But he’s not responding.”

“Tell me that at least he came back from his Manhattan adventure.”

Cutter nodded. “Yes, Your Honour. I saw him at my office last night. But this morning, I have no explanation. This is not his usual MO.”

“Hah,” Norville said.

She looked like she wanted to spit at him, Amankwah thought. Now, that would be a front-page story.

“If by his usual MO you mean arrogantly striding into my court at exactly ten o’clock, not a second earlier, I have to agree with you.” She turned to Summers. “The Crown’s position?”

“Bench warrant,” Summers said. “Time to send the accused a message that this isn’t just another appointment on his busy schedule. The trial starts next Monday, let him have a week in jail to think about what it means to get to court on time.”

“Your Honour, I’ll admit my client regularly tests the patience of the court,” Cutter said, jumping in. “Last night he assured me he’d get here early.” He held up his phone. “His personal assistant hasn’t heard from him either. An hour ago, I had my partner, Barb Gild, rush over to his condo. She called five minutes ago. The concierge said that Mr. Wainwright left at seven
P.M.
last night and didn’t come back. I met with him at seven-thirty. He gave me his passport, as you requested he do when he got back from New York. He left my office at eight-thirty and that’s the last anyone has heard or seen of him.”

Norville yanked off her glasses and let them clatter on her desk. “Mr. Cutter, what do you want me to do?”