How could I have missed this? he thought as he sat slowly back down in his seat, keeping the two glasses of drooping lilacs in front of him.
“You’re wrong about me not missing much,” he said to Sarah McGill.
She looked at Greene. Fire in her eyes.
“Your son. Kevin junior. The one they took away as a boy. He’s been living here with your mother,” Greene said. “His grandma’s here, and his father’s right down the hall to help out. He’s tall, like his dad. That’s why the Maple Leafs glasses are on the second shelf. And that’s why these same glasses are over in 12A.”
He turned to Edna Wingate. “That’s the other reason you kept me out of your apartment that first morning. So your grandson could leave too.”
No one spoke.
He turned back to McGill. “You’re looking ahead. Your mom can’t walk those stairs forever. You have your daughter renovating her basement so Kevin junior has a place to live. I’ll bet he’s there now. Where was he the morning Katherine Torn died?” Greene asked McGill.
“He needs us,” she said.
“December seventeenth?”
“And his Maple Leafs glasses.”
“In this apartment? Or was he with you and Kevin next door?”
“He won’t let anyone else wash them.”
“Was he with you in 12A?”
“He needs his things with him.”
“Was he angry?”
“If they take him away, he’ll die.”
“Did he stab her?”
This seemed to snap McGill out of her mantra. “No,” she said. “My son did not stab Katherine Torn. My son cries when a leaf falls off one of his tomato plants.”
Greene turned to Wingate. “Where was your grandson that night?”
Wingate looked at him. Her eyes narrowed. There was steel behind those laughing eyes. The steel of a woman orphaned at nineteen, three times widowed, her only grandson severely disabled, but still carrying on. “The boy was not in 12A. You can do all the DNA and fingerprint tests you like. He’s never walked in that door. Never even been as far as the elevator. The only times he goes out, we use the back stairs.”
There are two things you think when a witness answers a question in absolutes, Greene always taught the young recruits at Police College. Words like “never” and “always” are very dangerous for a witness, and for an investigator. When someone tells you she’s never done something, it is either the truth or a desperate, bold-faced lie. If you can contradict her, then you have her. But if the story holds up, she has you.
“I believe you,” Greene said.
He turned back to McGill. “We really have no choice.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the subpoena and touched her hands with it. “I’m sorry, Ms. McGill. With all my heart, I wish there was another way.”
“You don’t understand about Kevin and his son,” she said.
“I’m sure he loves him,” Greene said.
McGill laughed. Her old, deep laugh. She shook her head. “Kevin loved Katherine. I had to accept that, and eventually I did. That she couldn’t accept that he still loved me was her problem. But both of us didn’t stand a chance next to Kevin junior. Don’t you see that? Kevin hated his own father; his son is everything. Twenty-five years in jail. He’ll do that without blinking an eye if it means saving Little Kevin one minute of fear. One more second of pain.”
Greene looked back at Wingate. She was nodding her head. Her eyes closed.
“It’s over, Detective,” McGill said, turning the subpoena in her hand. “I know my husband. He’ll have already figured this out.” She looked over at Kennicott. “Amanda was in court when you testified the other day, Officer. She could see you piecing it together when you looked at the diagram of the apartment. It would be dead obvious to my husband.”
Greene looked across the table at Kennicott. There comes a point in an investigation when there are simply no more questions to ask. When all the answers suddenly line up. He could tell by the look in Kennicott’s eyes that they’d both seen the same thing. That they’d got to ground zero.
“You’re wrong about just one thing.” It was Wingate talking. She’d opened her eyes. “We’re not moving because I can’t do the stairs,” she said.
Greene found himself smiling.
“Oh, Mother,” McGill said. She was smiling too.
“The stairs are getting too hard for Kevin junior. That’s the only reason. My yoga instructor says I’ve got the strongest quads he’s ever seen in an eighty-three-year-old.”
Greene nodded, about to tell Ms. Wingate that, yes, she’d told him that before. But he stopped. He sat back and caught Sarah McGill’s eye. She’d heard it too. The repetition. He saw the perfect facade her mother wore to hide the early signs of decay.
Sarah McGill, he thought, you’re the one who doesn’t miss a thing.
He took one of the lilacs in front of him and passed it over to Edna Wingate. “I’d love to take a yoga class with you when this is all over,” he said.
“Hot yoga,” she said, putting the purple twig to her nose and inhaling deeply.
“Hot yoga it is,” he said. And, as so often happens at times of extreme tension, everyone laughed.
N
ow, this is as good as it gets, Awotwe Amankwah thought as he lay in his small bedroom watching the lights of passing cars crisscross on the white ceiling, listening to the revelers outside on the street honking their car horns, blowing long plastic trumpets, and cheering and carrying on.
He couldn’t care less about the Leafs. What made him so happy right now were his children, who lay asleep softly on his shoulders. The bedtime story he’d been telling them hours ago—about a town in a big valley, which one morning awoke to the rumbling of a volcano, and the two children who rushed from door to door waking up all the villagers, saving the old people—had lasted a long time. He could feel his kids struggling to stay awake, as the molten lava rushed down the hillside and the young heroes raced to get to the last cabin in the village along a winding, deserted path.
And now, in the early hours of the morning, he was still basking in the afterglow, the wonder of finally being alone with his children. Who would have thought, two years ago, that living in a stinking one-bedroom apartment on Gerrard Street—with the screeching sound of all-night streetcars passing by the flimsy window, his upright piano from home replaced by a used electric, the smell of cornstarch and garlic wafting up from the Chinese restaurant below—would ever feel like paradise.
From below on the street he heard a particularly loud whoop of revelers, and they began to chant, “We’re number one, we’re number one.” No one ever gave Toronto hockey fans points for originality, Amankwah thought, shaking his head as he cradled his sleeping children.
What did it matter that his credit cards were maxed out? So what if he hadn’t been with a woman for almost a year? Right now there were two hearts pounding next to his, the two chests rising and falling in the eternal rhythm of children’s sleep. With all the overtime from covering the Brace trial, he’d finally saved up enough money to rent a place of his own.
“Enjoy your time with your children, Mr. Amankwah,” Judge Heather the Leather had said to him last week when she gave the order allowing him overnight access.
Thank you, Kevin Brace, for stabbing Katherine Torn in the bathtub, he thought. Where would he have been without this lucky break? Amankwah shuddered to think. He’d have lost his overtime gig and fallen further behind on his support payments, and they’d have thrown his photo up on the Internet as a deadbeat dad.
The shouting outside grew particularly loud again. Someone kept blowing one of those blue plastic horns while a bunch of voices yelled out “Leafs! Leafs! Leafs!” and another set started singing an out-of-tune version of “We Are the Champions.” He slipped over to the window. A few young Vietnamese kids, their black hair dyed Maple Leaf blue and white, were spilling out of the pool hall down the road, drunk.
He wondered what Nancy Parish would ask Detective Ho today. Yesterday after court everyone in the press corps was talking about her cross-examination of Mr. Singh. Amankwah smiled. If they only knew all the work he’d done through the
Star
’s India correspondent to get Mr. Singh’s work history. It had been worthwhile.
He thought back again to when Officer Kennicott was on the stand. Amankwah picked up something he thought no one else saw. While he testified, Kennicott had kept his eyes on Fernandez, then Parish, with laserlike precision, except when Fernandez brought him
to the floor plan of Brace’s apartment. When Kennicott was back on the stand, Amankwah saw him sneak another look at the drawing. When he finished testifying and was walking out, Kennicott looked at the plan again. He’d seen something.
What was it? Amankwah said to himself, not quite sure if he’d said it out loud. He watched a near-empty streetcar roll by. The hockey fans seemed to have finally scattered.
Kennicott, what are you up to? he wondered as the car squealed its way down the street, curving at the end of the block.
He checked the time. It was just past six. He decided to send Nancy Parish an e-mail, but before he started typing, he saw that she’d just sent him one: “Call when you get up. How was the first night with the kids?”
He dialed her number.
“Hi, Awotwe,” Parish said. “I thought you’d be asleep.”
“Wide-awake,” Amankwah said. “I was about to e-mail you.”
“How was your night with the kids?”
“Fantastic. I can’t even describe it,” he said. “It’s my name.”
“What do you mean?”
“Awotwe. Means ‘eighth.’ I was the eighth child in my family. To live alone, for me, is torture.”
“I’m so glad for you. Why were you e-mailing me?”
Amankwah told her about watching Kennicott on the stand and how, when he was leaving the court, he was looking at the floor plan. A thought occurred to him. “You weren’t just e-mailing me about the kids, were you?” he asked.
There was a long pause on the line. “Just make sure you’re there on time today,” Parish said. “I can’t tell you anything else.”
After he hung up, Amankwah found himself looking at the phone in his hand, the way they do in the movies. Her message was unspoken but very clear: solicitor-client privilege—there was something happening, but she couldn’t say what.
Back at the bookshelf beside his bed he pulled out a large notebook with
BRACE
written on it. He had extremely neat handwriting.
The teachers back home would slap the back of your hand with a ruler if you didn’t hold your pencil properly. Not like these lax teachers his kids had in Canada. It amazed him how many Canadian journalists didn’t know how to hold a pen.
This was his private diary of everything since the start of the Brace trial. He began to reread it page by page. Kennicott had seen something. What?
He finished the diary and, as he always did when he wanted to think, sat down at his keyboard. Slipping on some headphones, with the volume low, he began to play a gentle Chopin nocturne.
Through the sound of his music he heard another streetcar squeal its way down Gerrard, curving at the end of the block, until the sound faded and his own music took over again.
He thought back to the night he’d been at Brace’s apartment with his ex-wife for their annual Christmas party. The place was exclusive, the only apartment on the whole half of the floor. The big front door and wide hallway. Brace had joked that it would be large enough to fit a wheelchair in there one day.
Amankwah’s mind began to drift. He compared Brace’s penthouse with his hovel over a store. He’d been so afraid of what his kids would think when they came here for the first time last night, but their resiliency amazed him. They just ran in and jumped on the bed in his little bedroom, and within minutes they were playing hide-and-seek.
The ability of little kids to hide, he thought, laughing to himself now at how they’d fooled him. When he was “it,” he’d gone into the bedroom and counted to ten. Coming out, he searched the whole apartment, surprised that he couldn’t find them. For an instant he had a flash of panic. Where had they gone? He yelled their names, and they came running out of his room. They’d slipped back in while he was counting and had sneaked behind the door. He, of course, had walked right past them.
It was the oldest trick in the book, he thought, laughing at himself.
His hands froze above the keyboard. Behind the door. Brace’s wide hallway. Kennicott looking at the floor plan.
That was it. There had been someone else in Brace’s apartment. Playing hide-and-seek, but not a child’s game.
He banged down on the keyboard so hard it sent a jolt of sound into his headphones. He ripped them off and grabbed the phone.
“Nancy, he wasn’t alone,” Amankwah said when Parish answered the phone. “There was someone else in the apartment. Behind the door.”
“Ahhh,” Parish said, exhaling hard. “That’s why—”
“Why what?”
Parish hesitated. “You know I can’t tell you. But parade or no parade, don’t be late.”
E
ight in the morning, and there was already a two-block lineup of cars outside Gryfe’s Bagels. Along the east side of Bathurst Street, expensive foreign models were parked illegally, their emergency flashers blinking. Unshaven men dressed in sweatpants and running shorts rushed out of the store, clutching paper bags filled with warm bagels.
Ari Greene pulled his Oldsmobile up behind a Lexus. He got out slowly, tossed his badge on the dashboard, and didn’t bother with his flashers. Gryfe’s was a simple storefront, and the lineup of men stretched back out onto the street. Most of them were bent over, tapping at their BlackBerrys, talking to their wives on their cell phones, or reading portions of the sports pages, which blared headlines about the Leafs’ victory.
The line progressed slowly inside. The bakery was a long, rectangular room. In the back were rows of tall metal racks filled with fresh-baked bagels. On the mostly bare walls there were scattered old black-and-white photos of the early days in the bakery, dating back to the early 1900s. The side of the old white refrigerator was plastered with cheaply made signs advertising everything from Jewish musical theater productions to hand-sewn religious wigs to travel agencies specializing in trips to Israel. There was a particularly colorful one that read “TORAH 4 TEENS: Earn Ministry-Approved High School and Pre-University Credits!” Incongruously, on top of this ad someone had
stuck a black-and-white business card for Super Movers, with the name Steve S. and a phone number on it. An empty metal newspaper rack was behind the door. It looked like it had been there, unused, for years.