Stranglehold (27 page)

“We’ve been spotted,” he said.

“So, let them look,” his father said.

“I bet there will be a bunch of camera crews at your house.”

“Who cares?”

They drove in silence for a long time.

Greene had been in jail for only four days, but in that short time the city had changed. Summer had turned to autumn. There was a chill in the air. People in the street were no longer wearing shorts and sandals. And with the election officially on, campaign signs had sprouted on almost every street. Again and again they passed Hap Charlton’s garish sign, with the photo of him, his sleeves rolled up, showcasing his powerful forearms.

“Looks like your old boss is going to be mayor,” his father said when they got about halfway to his house.

“That’s what Hap’s always wanted,” Greene said. “You never told me your first wife’s name.”

Sarah, he thought. Sarah. He didn’t dare say the name out loud.

“I never wanted to tell you that story.”

“I know.”

“Your lawyer is a very smart man.”

“He is.”

“You told me you were in love with this woman who was murdered,” his father said.

“I’m discovering that I was in love with someone I didn’t really know,” Greene said.

“What’s unusual about that?” his father asked.

They drove in silence again until Greene got to his father’s street. It was packed with TV trucks waiting by the curb. Cameras flashed as he passed the crowd of reporters and steered into the driveway. He put the car in park and turned to his father. “I’m going to walk you to the door. You go inside. I’ll talk to them.”

“What are you going to say?”

“Nothing. They don’t care what I say. They want a photo. Much better that I do it head-on than look like I’m trying to hide. I’ll make sure you are kept out of this.”

“Okay.”

“How’s Mrs. Greenglass?” he asked.

“I hope you like casseroles.”

He walked his father up the concrete steps to his house and waited while he unlocked the front door. As he was about to walk back down, his father grabbed his arm. “Ari, time to start thinking how you can get out of this mess.”

“It all still seems unreal.”

“It’s very real. And don’t be foolish. Just because you found out some surprises about a woman doesn’t mean you weren’t in love with her. You knew who she was and she’d want you to take care of yourself.”

Before he could respond, his father let go of his hand and disappeared inside the house. Greene’s whole body felt lighter, as if a second pair of handcuffs had been removed.

He walked over to the reporters, who were waiting at the edge of the property. They jostled around him, some stepping on the grass. Cameras and microphones
were jammed unnaturally close to his face. The
click, click, click
sound of the cameras was like crickets. But louder and more annoying.

He shook his head and pointed to the feet of the reporters on the lawn. “We need some ground rules, folks,” he said. “No one on my father’s property. And no one says anything about his address. And no funny stuff, like saying it’s in the Bathurst and Lawrence area. And no pictures of him or the front of his house. Judge Norville slapped a publication ban on the bail hearing. Simple. You play ball and I’ll play ball. Agreed?”

The people on the grass stepped back to the curb. A few of them looked at each other and nodded.

“Agreed,” Awotwe Amankwah said. He was one of the few reporters Greene trusted.

“I’ll make a statement, then you’ll all leave. Deal?”

“Deal,” Amankwah said, without consulting his peers.

“Okay. You’ve got your picture of me. Here’s my statement: ‘I am grateful to Justice Norville for releasing me on bail. I look forward to the opportunity to defend myself on these charges.’ ”

He turned and started to walk back to the house.

“Detective Greene, how does it feel to be arrested by Detective Kennicott, the officer you trained?” someone shouted. “Detective, what was your relationship with Jennifer Raglan?” another voice said. “Are you going to testify at your trial?” a third asked. Then someone yelled, “If you get off, are you still going to work on Kennicott’s brother’s unsolved murder?”

That last question almost made him stop in his tracks. He longed to talk to Kennicott. Apologize. Tell him that this would only make him more determined to find his brother’s killer.

Instead, he waved without looking back. Their clamour died down as he climbed the front steps. Like well-trained pets, none of them had dared step onto his father’s property.

Sarah
, he thought again. He pulled hard on the sticky screen door he’d opened several times a day for most of his life, and headed inside the home he grew up in.

THERE HAD BEEN MANY TIMES IN HER LIFE WHEN KREITINGER HAD WISHED SHE’D BEEN A MAN.
And now, inside a stall in the women’s washroom at the Crown’s office, pissing into a bottle, was one of them.

It was part of the deal she had agreed to when she took on this case. She had to go to the Canterbury Clinic twice a week to get her urine tested. Canterbury was a no-nonsense drug-and-alcohol rehab place, different from any of the other rehabs she’d been to. It wasn’t fancy. The people were friendly. They called you by your first name. No bureaucracy. No bullshit. And Marshall McGregor, the director, was no fool. Twice-a-week testing wasn’t enough to stop a smart drinker, who could get the alcohol out of her system in twenty-four hours, and he knew it.

At their first meeting, she and McGregor had sat for an hour in cheap plastic chairs on a skinny little rooftop patio. It had taken him about ten minutes to tell her his life story as he chain-smoked no-name cigarettes he’d bought in Chinatown. A farm boy from Wisconsin, he’d been blessed with a great pitching arm and “too much brainpower to keep me on a tractor.” A baseball scholarship landed him at Cornell right in the midst of the Vietnam War. “Then my Nixon number came up, forty-one, which was ironic since Eddie Matthews was my favourite player when I was a boy.” In 1969, he crossed the border as a draft dodger, got married, had two kids, realized he was gay, and hid it for ten years with booze.

“When my wife kicked me out, I did every self-destructive thing in the book for five years, got into rehab, thought, ‘Hey, I’d be good at this,’ went back to school, and graduated with honours. I worked for ten years at big, fancy clinics for rich people and couldn’t stand all the bullshit bureaucracy. Now I have this.”

Kreitinger was a big Blue Jays fan and they talked baseball and literature and politics. Everything but addiction. When she got up to leave, he gave her a big hug. “I have to warn you, Angel, I’ll pop up when you least expect it with a bottle for you to do a little pee-pee in. The big bad government is going to cover the costs of my keeping an eye on you. Even my cab fares.”

Sure enough, there he’d been, sitting in the waiting room this afternoon when she left the office. What luck. After one of the worst days in court in her life.

“Rough job you have, huh, Angel?” he’d said, standing and giving her a hug.

“That’s why they invented tomorrow,” she’d said, hugging him back.

“Come on, my dear, do your little tinkle” – he’d waved a brown paper bag at her – “then I’m taking you to the game. Those Republican Yankees are in town, and I love to hate them.”

The clinic had bottles with broad rims, which made the task of giving a urine sample a little less humiliating. She loosened her bladder and felt the jar grow warm in her hand. She finished, put the top on tight, washed her hands twice, put the bottle back in the paper bag, and headed outside.

It wasn’t alcohol that was a problem for her anymore. It was the little blue pills, Percocets, that she’d started taking two years earlier to relieve the pain in her twisted back. It had all started innocently enough. Her car was rear-ended in the Walmart parking lot, and she thought all that she’d suffered was a mild case of whiplash.

But it turned out she had a bad curvature in her spine, made worse by her being overweight and doing no exercise. A week after she was hit, she ended up one night in the emergency department, writhing in pain. She was given a little blue pill, and half an hour later, her body felt the sweet glow it had craved for the whole six years she’d been on the wagon.

She was worried about Marshall McGregor. He was street-smart and wise to addicts’ tricks. He took her paper bag and put it into his knapsack. “It’s a beautiful night and the dome is open. A client of mine’s a lawyer with seats right behind third base. We can jeer at A-Rod and Jeter and eat candy popcorn.”

It sounded a thousand times better than going home alone to the one-bedroom apartment-hotel suite she was renting month to month. Until she knew whether she would be able to stay in Toronto, her whole life was in storage. Again.

“It’ll be a lovely walk,” he said once they’d passed through the security doors and were outside. “Besides, it’ll be good for your back.”

“You read my file, didn’t you,” she said.

“Every word of it, my dear. And remember. My instructions are to keep you off the booze and report back that you’re not drinking.” He linked his arm with hers. “As for keeping you off the Percs, that’s between you and me.”

“Thanks,” she whispered, and squeezed his arm, trying not to cling to him.

JUDGE NORVILLE KNEW HOW HIGH PROFILE THIS CASE WAS, AND SHE KNEW EVERY RADIO
talk-show host in the city would rant and rave about a police officer charged with murder being given bail. As a result, she’d locked Greene down with strict conditions.

Essentially he was under house arrest. He wasn’t allowed to leave his father’s home “except for medical appointments, visits to his lawyer, or for religious purposes.” He couldn’t “associate with any person known to him to have a criminal record” and he had to “keep the peace and be of good behaviour.”

He’d been in his father’s house for only two days, and already he was going stir-crazy. Some leaves had fallen and he’d raked the square front lawn within an inch of its life. For years he’d taken out all his meals from all sorts of different restaurants throughout the city, and now he was having to teach himself to cook all over again. His father had become an avid CNN watcher, and the endless loop of overexcited news was on all day long.

He’d already made about twenty pots of tea, started and tossed away five paperbacks, cleaned up the basement, and made list after list of things he’d like to do to investigate Jennifer’s murder, if only he wasn’t locked down like this.

Sleep was a real problem. He couldn’t get to sleep, and when he did, he couldn’t stay asleep because he kept replaying each step in his relationship with Jennifer. Seeing everything from a different angle and feeling like a fool. How could he have been so naive? So unaware of what was really going on?

And an unexpected and unwelcome emotion was creeping in: anger. It was ridiculous, but still that’s how he felt. Mad at her for not being honest with him. For using him. For not turning to him for help. If he’d known what was going on, maybe he could have saved her, but now she was gone and he was stuck in this prison of a world, without her.

Tonight, even though he hadn’t gone to synagogue in years, he was going to
go to Friday-night services with his father. Anything to get outside, and out of his head, for a few hours.

He was putting on his suit when there was a knock on the front door. It better not be a reporter, he thought as he went to answer it. He yanked the door open to find Arnold Lindsmore, one of the cops who’d helped Daniel Kennicott arrest him, standing there. His considerable frame took up much of the small concrete porch.

“Arnie,” Greene said to the officer he’d known since police college. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re under house arrest, Ari. Remember?”

“You checking up on me? Here I am.”

“Looks like you’re going out.”

“With my dad. To synagogue. For religious purposes.”

They both laughed.

“Trust me, I don’t usually spend my Friday nights with a bunch of old Jewish men,” Greene said.

“Sounds like a hot date to me.”

“I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Me, I don’t blame you. I’d be going nuts stuck inside.”

“I’m having a lot of fun. There’s still an old tabletop hockey in the basement I got when I was a kid. Now I’m learning to play it against myself. I take a shot, get up, go to the other side, take another shot, go back again.”

“Boy, that sounds exciting.”

“A thrill a minute. You want a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.” Lindsmore lumbered in. He saw Greene’s father and his face lit up. “Hello, Mr. Greene. We met once, years ago, when Ari and I graduated police college. I was a lot thinner then.”

“And I was taller,” Greene’s dad said. “I only make Sanka, not that fancy stuff. And Ari doesn’t drink coffee.”

“I know,” Lindsmore said.

Greene’s father looked closely at Lindsmore. “You two go on in the living room. I’ll bring the coffee.”

No one could read people as well as his father, Greene thought. They could both tell Lindsmore had something to say to Greene in private.

They sat on the old sofa. Greene said a silent thank-you once again to his father’s
ex-girlfriend Klavdiya for getting him to throw out the decades-old plastic cover.

“How come you’re the one doing this checkup?” Greene asked. “Usually it’s some rookie cop who runs around knocking on doors.”

“It was Kennicott’s idea.”

“Kennicott?”

“He thought you might be a little lonely.”

“My dad and I are playing gim rummy for two or three hours a day. What else could a guy want?”

“Seriously, he thought you might need some help.”

“Help? With what?”

Lindsmore leaned closer. The fat in his stomach rippled over his waistband as he bent forward. “Help you figure out who the fuck killed Jennifer.”

DANIEL KENNICOTT BENT DOWN TO LACE UP HIS OLD RUNNING SHOES. HE WAS ON THE SIDEWALK
a block north of Jennifer Raglan and Howard Darnell’s house, about to follow Raglan’s footsteps on the last morning of her life. Run a few miles in her shoes, so to speak. He checked his watch. It was 8:30, the time he’d estimated she would have left home on her jog to the Maple Leaf Motel.