Stray Bullets (16 page)

“Until Dewey quit,” she said. “After one of his dads died.”

He picked up another folder, entitled
SUZANNE HOWETT—JAIL VISITS
. “Dewey’s first year and a half in Kingston Pen, you went to see him twenty-four times. Then you stopped. How come?”

She shook her head. Her blond curls rippled across her face. “It sucked taking the bus out there all the time.”

“That the only reason?”

She stared straight at Greene for the first time. “Stupid trailer visits are, like, gross.”

He looked down at her left hand, with the baby finger curled inside.

“He got pissed when I told him I was breaking up with him.” She pulled out her finger and rubbed it. “He’s never going to forgive me.”

He picked up a third file, labeled
SUZANNE HOWETT/JAMES ERIC TRAPPER WIRETAPS & SURVEILLANCE
. He made sure she saw it. “It didn’t take us long to make the connection between you and Dewey and we started listening within a few hours of the shooting,” he said.

She hid her finger again. “So you know everything.”

“I know you are scared of him.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Probably.” He’d left the composite drawing of Jose Sanchez facedown on the table. He turned it over. “What do you know about him?”

She shrugged her shoulders very high. “Like I said, he’s just a guy I know at work. What’s he got to do with this?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. He left after the shooting and didn’t come to work the next day. Not answering his cell. We’re searching for him.”

She gave Greene a sullen look.

“When’s the last time you saw him?” he asked.

“We always had a smoke out back at the end of my shift. We were there just before everything happened. I think he liked me. He’s from Portugal. Real smart, speaks a whole bunch of languages.”

“Where does he live?”

“I don’t know.”

“What else do you know about him?”

“Nothing. I swear. I’ve never seen him anywhere but work.”

Greene thought about how Jet drove her to and from both her jobs all the time. The guy probably never let her out of his sight. “Okay. Can you describe him to me?”

“Jose’s funny. Changes his look all the time. Said he could grow a beard in a week. Sometimes he had long sideburns, or a mustache, or a goatee, or nothing. When he was clean-shaven he had a baby face.”

This guy is smart, Greene thought. “Give me the basics. How tall was he?”

“A little taller than me, about five-six, five-seven. Skinny.”

“Skin color?”

She flicked her hair out of her face. “Dark. Like Portuguese guys. Brown eyes. That’s about it. He hated wearing the Tim Hortons uniform.”

“How old would you guess?”

She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know. Like he could look real young, but I think he had to be older. Late twenties maybe.”

“Glasses, tattoos?”

She giggled. “I never saw his tattoos.” She pointed to the drawing. “See? He has this little birthmark thingee by his eye.”

“That night, what did you talk about?”

“I told him about Dewey. How I’d heard he was out of jail and that he’d found out where I worked. That he hung out with that jerk Larkin.”

“Did you tell him you were afraid of Dewey?”

“It was pretty obvious.”

“Then what happened?”

“We finished our smoke and Jose went back to work. I went around the side of the building away from the parking lot to wait for Jet. It’s dark there. A few seconds later I heard Jose yelling to me from the back door. He warned me that Dewey and Larkin were inside. Then Jet’s Cadillac drove in. I ran across the lot and told him we had to get out of there fast. I didn’t even notice the father and his kid. Never saw them.”

“What happened next?”

“Someone said, ‘Here, take this,’ then I heard the shots. We jumped in the car and took off.”

“How many shots?”

“I don’t know. A lot.”

“Did Jet have a gun?”

“No. He didn’t have a gun.”

“You sure? You’re under oath now and I’m going to get this statement typed out and have you sign it.”

“I’m sure. Jet didn’t have a gun.”

“Where did the shots come from?”

“Behind me somewhere. Near the Timmy’s, but …” She put her head in her hands. “I didn’t know anyone was hit. I didn’t see anything. We heard about it on the radio driving home. I couldn’t believe it. I totally freaked. If it wasn’t for me that little boy wouldn’t have been …” She started to cry.

He thought of how dark the spot was where Booth and St. Clair had
been standing. How Suzanne had told Jet on the intercepted phone call that she hadn’t seen anything. And her story was consistent with the witnesses who saw her running across the lot. He passed her some tissues and waited. “You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?”

She sniffed and nodded. “I’m telling you the truth. This is what happened.”

“That night, did you see Dewey?”

She blew her nose hard. “No.”

“Larkin?”

“No.”

“Did you see Jose outside again?”

“Not after our smoke.”

“Where do you think Jose went?”

She balled the tissues in her hand. “I have no idea.”

“We need to find him.”

“He was just a guy I worked with. There’s nothing else to tell you.”

“You said you thought Jose liked you.”

She laughed. “I’m blond. He’s Latin. Happens all the time, believe me.”

Greene laughed too. “Think. What did he tell you about himself? His family, friends, school?”

“I guess he’s illegal or something, because he was paranoid about the cops. He loved reading. Always had a book in his back pocket. Once he said he had wanted to be a professor before he came to Canada.”

“Of what topic?”

She shrugged.

This conversation wasn’t going anywhere, Greene thought. He started to put the folders together in a neat pile. “What else? You talked to him every day for months.”

“He knew tons of languages. The Yuens—they’re the owners—really liked him because he could speak to all sorts of customers.”

“I’m sure that was useful working downtown.” He was just making conversation now. Time to wrap up this interview.

“I remember one day these people came in looking for the Eaton Centre. They were so lost. Jose started yakking away with them. I had no idea what language he was speaking.”

“Did you ask him?” There were probably about a hundred thousand illegals in the city, Greene thought. A million ways for this guy to hide. He squared the bottom of the folders on the table.

“When we went for our smoke. He said it was Romanian. I said, ‘How do you learn Romanian in Portugal?’”

Greene dropped the folders. They landed with a smack.

“He gave me that cute little smile of his,” she said. “Put on a fake accent: ‘Comrade. Please. No further questions.’ We both laughed. He sounded just like one of those bad guys you see in the movies. Know what I mean?”

Romanian, Greene thought. Of course. It’s a Romance language. Jose had put on his job application that he spoke French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and English, which made sense. But he hadn’t mentioned that he spoke Romanian. Which also made sense if this guy really wanted to hide.

Dragomir Ozera recognized the guy on the front page of the newspaper right away. He was Ralph Armitage, the prosecutor in the Wilkinson case, whose picture had been featured in every Toronto paper for weeks after the little boy had been shot at the Tim Hortons. The guy was a publicity hound, and here he was again, a huge grin on his face under a big banner headline: F
EATURE
S
TORY
: C
ROWN
A
TTORNEY
R
ALPH
A
RMITAGE AND THE
D
EAL
B
EHIND THE
T
IMMY’S
S
HOOTING
C
ASE, BY
S
TAR
C
OURT
R
EPORTER
A
WOTWE
A
MANKWAH
.

Ozera had been working for a month as a dishwasher at the Le Petit Déjeuner, a hip restaurant down on the old part of King Street. His new fake name was Arkadi Denisovich, and he’d told his employer he was Russian. He was having fun making up all these new names and stories about himself. Now he sported a full beard, with no mustache, Alexander Solzhenitsyn style.

It was two days after Christmas and yet another big snowstorm was hitting the city. Already it had been a hell of a winter. Meant there were hardly any customers. That made it easy for him to grab the paper, slide downstairs to the bathroom, lock the door, sit on the toilet, and read.

He kept thinking about that horrible night. Everything he’d seen. And that little boy shot dead, his father calling for help. All the sirens. How he’d panicked and run. What else could he do? There were more than enough people there to help. He figured there’d be a lot of other witnesses. If he’d waited for the cops they’d have arrested him, probably deported him. But even worse, his name and picture would be in the papers and Suzanne’s ex-boyfriend Dewey would know who he was.

The original newspaper reports didn’t give much detail about the police investigation, other than the arrest of Larkin St. Clair and some comments by witnesses that they’d seen him with a shorter guy. Ozera had been watching the newspapers closely. No one had identified Dewey by name, but he assumed the cops were looking for him. Ozera kept hoping they’d catch the guy and put him behind bars. Then he wouldn’t have to lie awake at night, sweating and afraid.

Today’s article started out by profiling Armitage. Talked about his wealthy family, his father, grandfather, and even his great-grandfather, the original Ralph Armitage, who created the family fortune in Toronto exporting lumber back to England. Now the Armitage family was famous for their civic pride and philanthropy.

That’s why the name sounded familiar. Ozera often took books out from the Ralph Armitage Memorial Library. Once he broke his arm and had gone to the Armitage wing of Toronto General Hospital. From time to time he picked up a shift as a cleaner at the opera house Armitage Hall. The job paid cash and he could listen to the singers from the locker room in the basement.

The guy had four doting older sisters, who all worked for the various family-run charities. And he had a beautiful wife who was a fitness trainer at one of the city’s top gyms and this year was planning the family’s huge, annual, May Two-Four fireworks display for poor city kids.

“We lead very busy lives,” Armitage told the reporter, Amankwah. “Thursday nights are sacrosanct. We call it our midweek date. Right now we’re taking cooking classes together.”

The article tracked his rapid rise in the Crown’s office, talked about how charming he was, how he insisted on being called Ralph, “or Ralphie,” he said, “which is what most people call me once they get to know me.”

“Ralphie” suggested to Amankwah that they have lunch at a nearby dim sum restaurant in a basement on Dundas Street. Apparently he knew half the people they passed on the street, the Chinese family who ran the place, and just about every judge and lawyer who came in to eat.

“Why do you bother with such a tough job,” Amankwah asked him in the interview, “when you could take the easy route and work in the Armitage financial empire?”

“My family imbued us all with a passion for public service,” Ralphie replied.

“Bullshit,” Ozera muttered under his breath.

The second part of the article described the man accused of the murder, Larkin St. Clair. How his father was a career criminal, his mother a drug addict. It talked about Larkin’s own criminal record and how he’d befriended a short guy in prison named Dewey Booth. A source had told the writer that a number of witnesses saw a short young man who fit Booth’s description sitting with St. Clair at the Tim
Hortons minutes before the shooting. The source also claimed that Booth had led the police to the murder weapon, which was found in the backyard of St. Clair’s aunt’s house.

At the end of the article, clearly relishing the moment, Armitage told the writer he’d made a deal with Booth’s lawyer. Booth had showed them where to find the gun. Now he would testify against St. Clair, and in exchange he wasn’t going to be charged with murder.

By the time he finished reading the article, Ozera was shaking. He flushed the toilet and staggered out of the stall to the sink. An old
EMPLOYEES MUST WASH THEIR HANDS
sign hung beside the corroded mirror. He looked at himself. He had turned thirty years old a few weeks earlier, and all of a sudden he looked his age. Gone was any trace of boyishness. His skin was pale and sallow. His dark hair was starting to thin. His eyes were red. He’d been crying and hadn’t even realized it.

What was he going to do now?

He ran the cold water, filled the sink, and lowered his face into it. It hurt. Stung real hard. That was the idea.

The concierge in the lobby of the apartment eyed Ari Greene with suspicion. A metal label on the counter he sat behind said his name was Iqbal.

“Good morning,” Greene said. “I’m here to see Mr. and Ms. Wilkinson.”

Iqbal shook his head. “We do not reveal the names of our residents. No visitors are allowed unless I have a specific request.” He jutted out his jaw, like a bulldog.

Greene pulled out his badge and business card. “I’m glad you are protective of the family.”

Iqbal made a show of checking his various security screens before he looked at Greene’s identification. He shrugged. “Police or no police, without an invitation, I cannot let you in.”

Greene dialed his cell. “It’s Detective Greene,” he said when Cedric Wilkinson answered. “I’m in your lobby and am very impressed with your concierge. If it’s not a bad time, I’d like to drop up and pay a quick visit.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Wilkinson said. “I’ll call down to Iqbal. He’s been great at keeping the press away. My wife and the baby are having a nap. I’ll meet you at the elevator.”

Iqbal picked up his phone a few seconds later, and then, with little enthusiasm, unlocked the glass door that led to the marble-lined main lobby.