Stranglehold (30 page)

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to get involved with bullcrap like this.”

IT WAS FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON AND GREENE WAS STILL SITTING WITH DIPAULO AND PARISH
in the boardroom of their law firm. They’d been here for hours, meticulously going through every witness statement, all the police officers’ notes, the autopsy and other forensic reports, and a large binder filled with photos of the motel room and surrounding area. The air in the room felt stale, accentuated by the smell of the remaining slices of the pizza that had been delivered twenty minutes earlier.

“This will not be fun for you to watch,” DiPaulo said. He motioned to Parish, who pushed a button on the remote she was holding. A video started on a screen in the corner of the room.

Greene watched in silence as Jennifer came into view on the camera outside the Coffee Time. She went inside and cameras there showed her going into the washroom, coming out a few minutes later wearing her wig and sunglasses, making the phone call to him, and then walking out the door.

“Please turn it off,” he asked Parish, after they’d watched Jennifer take a few steps outside.

The screen went blank. No one spoke.

“It’s never fun seeing a video like that,” DiPaulo said at last. “But it had to be done. I don’t want you to react to it at all in court when Kreitinger plays it in front of the jury.”

Greene nodded. He wasn’t ready to speak.

“Let’s get to the bottom line here,” DiPaulo said, between bites of pizza.

Greene nodded again.

Despite being shut in this room all afternoon, DiPaulo showed no signs of slowing down. He opened a can of Coke, making a loud pop. “Assume the worst. Let’s say that Kreitinger can prove you were having an affair with Raglan for at least the last six weeks, that she can put you in the motel room on the morning of September tenth, that she convinces the jury you ran away from the scene, then misled Kennicott and used him to try to influence the investigation.”

“Sums up the Crown’s case against me, doesn’t it,” Greene said.

DiPaulo slugged back the Coke and seemed to drink half of it in one gulp. “Here’s my problem. Once the jury hears that you were in that room and you took off, all they’re going to think is: He’s a homicide detective, for God’s sake. Why the hell did he take off if he didn’t kill her?”

“But I didn’t kill her. That’s the truth.”

“I don’t care if it’s true or not.” DiPaulo grabbed another piece of pizza. “The point is it doesn’t sound true. It doesn’t sound believable.”

Greene looked at Parish. She looked as tired as he felt. “Sorry, Ari,” she said. “Ted’s right.”

Greene stood and stretched. “So what do we do?”

DiPaulo took a bite of pizza, then threw the rest in the box and snapped the lid shut.

“Enough of this shit,” he said. “Ari, listen, and sorry to be blunt, but this is not a charity fund-raiser that we’re going to. It’s a blood sport. And right at this moment, the Crown has all the facts on their side. What I need is some fucking facts that refute their story.”

“Such as?” Greene asked.

All day Greene had watched DiPaulo take meticulous notes on a long pad of lined yellow paper. At some point he realized that DiPaulo had a second pad he wrote on occasionally. DiPaulo pulled that one out.

“Time,” he said, waving the pad in Greene’s direction. “Time.”

“Time?” Greene asked.

“People can say anything they want in court. But no one can bend time. I’ve been taking notes on this pad of every indication we have of when things happened that morning. If we can prove, and I mean prove objectively, factually, irrefutably, that Raglan was dead by the time you got to room 8 at the Maple Leaf Motel, then maybe at last we have something other than your word for what happened.”

He turned to Parish. She perked right up.

“Nancy, put up a new piece of Bristol board. We’re going to make a minute-by-minute chronology. Write three headings: ‘Time,’ ‘Person,’ and ‘Event.’ ” He pulled the pizza box back toward him, opened it, and retrieved his slice.

“Here’s what I have.” DiPaulo looked at his pad of paper. “Eight
A.M.
Howard Darnell leaves home saying he’s going to work. About 8:15 the three kids leave for school. Assume Raglan starts on her run about 8:30. We know from the cop’s
notes it’s fifteen kilometres to the Coffee Time and she gets there at 9:49:52. At 9:56:12, she makes the phone call to Ari’s cell, which shows up on Ari’s invoice. They talk for a minute and thirty-two seconds.”

DiPaulo put his pad down. “Ari, that puts you at your house at 9:57
A.M.
A few minutes after ten she’s in the room. At 10:39 someone makes a 911 call. You tell us you arrived at 10:41 and found her dead. At 10:44 the cavalry arrives: cop cars and the ambulance.”

“Wait,” Parish said, rummaging through one of the sets of files and pulling out a piece of artwork. “Sadura Sawney, her drawings. Look. There’s Ari from behind, about to call on his cell phone. But check out the background. The ambulance is rushing past at the same time.”

“I hadn’t notice that,” Greene said. “That puts me there at 10:44. I was in and out of that room in less than five minutes,” Greene said. “Felt like a lifetime.”

Parish stood back and looked at her chart. “In that approximately thirty-seven minutes between Raglan arriving in the room and the 911 call, she’s killed.”

“In his notes,” DiPaulo said, “Alpine shows he did a test drive from your house to the Maple Leaf Motel leaving at 9:58. Took him twenty-three minutes.”

“That puts Ari arriving at 10:21. Eighteen minutes before the 911 call,” Parish said.

“It’s tight, but they’re going to say that was all the time he needed to kill her,” DiPaulo said. “Ari, tell me how can I get rid of those seventeen minutes and we’re home free.”

Greene shook his head. “I parked the scooter about ten minutes’ walk from my house. On a normal day, it took me about twenty minutes to get to the motel strip. This motel was a bit farther than most of them. Twenty-three minutes sounds right. But that day the traffic on Kingston Road was terrible. Obviously on a scooter there’s no radio and I couldn’t get a traffic report. I really didn’t think much of it. What else can I tell you?”

DiPaulo frowned. “You didn’t stop anywhere for gas? Go to a florist that has a video camera and buy her some roses?”

“I wish,” Greene said.

DiPaulo strode up to the Bristol board and studied it. He took out a red marker and circled 10:41. “It only works, Ari, if we can prove you went into that room at 10:41. Two minutes after the 911 call. Right there. That is the fucking fact we need to prove.”

He turned to Parish. “Nancy, check with that media monitoring firm we use. Get the tape of the morning radio and TV traffic reports. The local traffic cops’ notes. Hourly weather report. Maybe there was a hailstorm farther up the road or a Martian landing we don’t know about.”

He looked back at Greene. “The one thing I know for sure is that there is never a
Perry Mason
moment when someone stands up in court and says, ‘I did it!’ or runs in from the hallway and says, ‘Detective Greene is innocent, I saw the murder and it was Colonel Mustard, with a candlestick, in the library.’ ”

They all laughed. DiPaulo was good at defusing tension with humour.

DiPaulo turned serious. “Ari. Anything else you can think of?”

“I know I got there at 10:41. I hate being late and I know I checked my watch before I walked into the room.”

“You’re sure it was 10:41.”

“One hundred percent.”

“And no jury in the world is going to believe that, unless we come up with some solid proof. Why don’t you stop thinking like a defendant, or like a man who’s lost the love of his life, and start thinking like a detective?” DiPaulo spread his arms. “Look at all of this. Four boxes of evidence. What am I missing? Be a homicide cop.”

Greene felt he’d been slapped hard across the face. Twenty-five years of his life were on the line and he was drawing a blank.

And then it came to him.

Of course.

If things don’t work in one direction, look at them the other way.

“Ted, you’re right,” he said.

“About what?” DiPaulo said.

“I haven’t been thinking like a cop.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, I can’t believe I didn’t see this before.” He reached into his wallet, took out fifty dollars, and slapped the bills on the table.

“Here take this,” he said to DiPaulo.

“What for?”

“We need to rent room 8 at the Maple Leaf Motel.”

FOR YEARS AWOTWE AMANKWAH HAD BEEN AMUSED BY THE LEVEL OF CORRUPTION IN STORIES
that made the headlines in Canada. Coming from a country, and a continent, where bribery, nepotism, electoral fraud, to say nothing of rape, murder, and continual warfare, were as ingrained into the culture as the monsoons in rainy season, he found it hard to get too worked up about what passed for scandals here: government-hired consultants who had lattes and muffins, protesters at the G8 summit in Toronto who had to go half a day without their vegan meals, and, imagine this one, a federal cabinet minister on a foreign trip to London who spent sixteen bucks for a glass of orange juice. Soon after this stunning revelation, she’d resigned.

Last spring, when Barclay Church had arrived at the
Star
, determined to find dirt in squeaky-clean Toronto, reporters in the newsroom had rolled their eyes. “Dig, dig, dig” was his mantra. And to everyone’s surprise, soon there were front-page stories with screaming headlines about filthy restaurants that had been badly inspected, private schools where kids bought good grades, public-school repair bills that were as inflated as the Pentagon’s budget, and aquatic theme parks that abused their cuddly dolphins.

Church had breathed life into the newsroom, but no one had cracked anything as big as a major police corruption scandal. A story like that could make Amankwah’s career.

For the last week he had been busy doing his own version of the Big Dig. It took him a couple of days to enter all the information from Carmichael’s files in an Excel spreadsheet, and even longer to figure out what it all meant. But, like a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces eventually started to fit together.

Two years earlier, in anticipation of the G8 summit that was going to bring the world leaders to Toronto, the police had put together a number of three-officer units to clean up the streets. Their main task was to make sure no problems occurred between prostitutes and politicians while the whole world was watching Toronto.

Amankwah noticed that the names of three cops kept coming up in case after case. Then he realized they were working together in the same unit. Through persistent access-to-information requests, he was able to profile them.

Colin Kimber, a twelve-year veteran, had faced internal disciplinary hearings three times and had two reprimands on his record. Plus a female colleague had filed a sexual harassment complaint against him that she later withdrew.

George Noguchi had been on the force for twenty-one years, much of his early years on the holdup squad, and was still there when it was investigated for “alleged” violent interrogation techniques. Five years earlier he’d been charged with assault by the Special Investigations Unit for stopping and beating up a black man who was walking home from work. The guy wore baggy jeans and a do-rag on his head. Noguchi thought he was a teenager, but in fact he was a thirty-six-year-old nurse. It was a high-profile case. Noguchi was acquitted, but the judge made it clear he was not impressed with the officer’s testimony, even though he was not quite persuaded of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The man who’d put this ragged group together, nicknamed “Trio,” was its leader, Clyde Newbridge. A big, fat, intimidating cop, Amankwah had often seen him swagger through the halls of the Old City Hall courthouse. Newbridge had been on the force for thirty years. No official complaint had ever been filed against him, and he’d never been subject to any disciplinary hearings. But his reputation was that he was “old school,” meaning he was not afraid to lay on the lumber if need be to force a confession. He certainly was a curious choice for such a sensitive job. This looked like his reward for sucking up to Charlton for all those years.

Amankwah dug deeper. He got the court records of the other special units working at the same time. Most of them had pretty good conviction rates, ranging from 40 to 60 percent. On average, 20 percent of their cases were withdrawn. But with Trio, an amazing 84 percent of their cases had been tossed out. The contrast was startling.

He focused on Newbridge. And that’s where he hit a wall. Every access-to-information request was either denied or so redacted it was useless. All he could find was a meager biographical sketch. A high-school graduate, he’d joined the force when he was nineteen. Spent his career moving from division to division, doing a bit of everything. Knew everyone. Divorced twice, both ex-wives alleging mental cruelty. Pretty standard stuff for a veteran Toronto cop.

But Amankwah knew it was only the tip of the iceberg. Newbridge was a
big player in the combative police union and a buddy of Hap Charlton. Always popping up at the chief’s side at important events. And these days a constant figure on the campaign trail.

But how to find out more? Amankwah needed to get someone to talk to him, and that’s why he was standing on University Avenue at 6:45
A.M.
, watching the parking lot to the north of the courthouse. He had finished reading the lead story in the newspaper about how Hap Charlton was pulling way ahead in the polls when he saw Albert Fernandez drive his car into the lot.

He waited until the young Crown attorney collected his briefcase from his trunk before approaching. This was going to be tricky. Unlike defence lawyers, many of whom were very adept at dealing with the media, most Crown attorneys were very bad at it and simply chose to avoid all contact.

“Good morning, Mr. Fernandez,” Amankwah said when he was a few steps away.

“Hello,” Fernandez said, surprised, his eyes wary. “What brings such a well-known newspaper reporter here this early in the morning?” He tried to smile but it was obvious he was nervous. He glanced at the envelope in Amankwah’s hand.