SEE JANE RUN!
A Jane Yeats Mystery
A Jane Yeats Mystery
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Brady, Elizabeth
See Jane run! / Liz Brady.
(A Jane Yeats mystery)
ISBN 1-896764-91-6
I. Title. II. Series: Brady, Elizabeth
Jane Yeats mystery.
PS8553.R24S43 2004 C813’.54 C2004-905270-5
Copyright © 2004 Liz Brady
First published in the USA in 2005
Edited by Doris Cowan
Copyedited by Alison Reid
Cover photo © Getty Images
Cover design by Laura McCurdy
Text design by P. Rutter
Printed in Canada on 100% post-consumer recycled paper
Second Story Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
Published by
Second Story Press
720 Bathurst Street, Suite 301
Toronto, ON
M5S 2R4
www.secondstorypress.on.ca
This book is for my father, James Anderson Brady (1919-2003), in memory of what might have been …
I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse …
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond …
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.
— Seamus Heaney
from “Casualty”
I AM SO GRATEFUL TO DORIS COWAN, my editor, for her expertise, encouragement, and entertaining remarks; to Alison Reid, for a superb job of copy editing and for making valuable suggestions; to Second Story Press — especially Margie Wolfe, Laura McCurdy and Corina Eberle — for their many efforts on my behalf. To the Ontario Arts Council, Writers’ Reserve program, I extend my appreciation for a grant that enabled me to finish this book.
For keeping my pantry well-stocked with their laughter and support, I am deeply indebted to Patti Brady, Teresa Galati, Leona Gom, Lena Iannaci, Michelle Lawrie, Lucy Robinson, and Landsay Tom.
Also, my love and gratitude to Annie Hoover, dear friend of many years (notwithstanding her professional inclination to practice therapy), for advising me on subjects germane to this novel. Any mistakes are my own. I still see through a glass, darkly!
I’d tell of that great queen
Who stood amid a silence by the thorn
Until two lovers came out of the air
With bodies made out of soft fire. The one,
About whose face birds wagged their fiery wings,
Said, ’Aengus and his sweetheart give their thanks
To Maeve and to Maeve’s household, owing all
In owing them the bride-bed that gives peace.’
Then Maeve: ’O Aengus, Master of all lovers,
A thousand years ago you held high talk
With the first kings of many-pillared Cruachan.
O when will you grow weary?’
They had vanished,
But out of the dark air over her head there came
A murmur of soft words and meeting lips.
— W. B. Yeats,
“The Old Age of Queen Maeve”
SHORT WILLIE WAS SWEEPING his cell. In this skit, he was always Fred. The broom got to be Ginger. He bowed to his lady. “Shall we dance?”
They waltzed across the small floor, while Willie, his cobalt eyes expressionless, crooned in her ear:
The way you flashed your cunt
The way you tried to flee
The memory of the hunt
Oh, no, they can’t take that away from me
The way I creamed my jeans
The way you screamed off-key
The way you haunt my dreams
No, no, they can’t take that away from me.
Prison is only a cage if the bird forgets what it feels like to fly. Willie proved that every time he soared into one of his fantasies. It was all about focus, what you concentrated on. He tugged the broom closer to his chest, glided it past the stainless steel toilet bolted to the wall and across the concrete, humming a dead monotone into the bristles:
We may never, never meet again
On the bloody road to love
But I’ll always, always keep
The memory of …
The way I held my knife
The way we shagged till three
The way I snatched your life
No, no, they can’t take that away from me.
No, they can’t take that away from me.
Willie knew what the dickheads were up to, transferring him here. He didn’t belong here and they knew it. In the Special Handling Unit, the super-max slammer for the elite, Willie had got respect. SHU was a gladiator school for killers so violent they got their own penitentiary, way out in Sainte-Anne-desPlaines, a desolate armpit on the outskirts of Montreal, but it gave its inmates real distinction. Millhaven, this place, was a kiddie joint by comparison.
Willie thought of his peers: the “Beast of British Columbia,” Clifford Olson (serial child killer: eleven hits); New Brunswick’s Allan Légère, the “Monster of the Miramichi” (ambidextrous: three women, one elderly priest); William Fyfe (five women and counting …); Michael Wayne McCray (five women and counting …). Bit of a pissing match, though, with all that competition, but there was always some kind of diversion popping up to break the boredom — a hostage taking, a riot, a rape, an attempted escape, a suicide, only one successful murder while Willie was there, but people kept trying.
In SHU he’d been segregated and safe from the freaks (Willie included the guards) who’d prey on anything with a pulse. His only company in the square cell was the camera in the upper corner whose beady little eye tracked his every twitch. Some of the inmates went all paranoid because of the cameras. Not Willie. They could watch him if they wanted. He liked the attention. He got out only one hour a day to exercise alone. Even his meals were delivered to his cell on a tray pushed through a narrow slit in the door. He was excluded from crap jobs like cleaning floors and doing meals on wheels. Couldn’t go to the common room for a game of cards. Nobody visited him. He refused to meet with the prison chaplain. He experienced less fellowship than a Trappist monk. SHU thought denial of privileges was a hardship — Willie didn’t give a rat’s ass. His need to socialize was non-existent: his real audience was on the outside. Other needs he took care of himself.
So when they sent him over here he knew it was a setup. Here, twice a day he got put into general population. The authorities had deliberately put his ass on the line to ensure that he wouldn’t survive long enough to watch his pubic hairs turn gray. His transfer warrant, signed by the deputy commissioner himself, noted that William Shortt “had participated in constructive activities and demonstrated increasing capacity to interact with others.” Had this capacity ever been put to the test, Willie would have made short work of the “others” at the end of a long blade. He’d told the psychologist about his genuine loathing for contact with other inmates, yet the asshole had rated him “pro-social.” But the shrink was the one who designed the correctional treatment plans, so he had a vested interest in claiming success, thereby proving they all worked harder than Jesus on the incorrigibles.
For sure, his transfer was a frame. Sooner or later he’d get stabbed up. That was okay, given how he’d taught himself to live one day at a time to the max. Ginger the Broom was only one of his props. Prison had not stifled his creativity.
Maximum security also carried the burden of rehabilitation, a project Willie was not committed to. He no more thought that monsters like himself were capable of self-improvement than he believed Jesus was hot on saving him. But going along with the programs was part of the gig, another way to while away your time. Willie enrolled in them all: drug and alcohol abuse, anger management, problem solving and redirectional goal setting.
But it seriously pissed him off that he got no respect. It was a bit of joke when you considered the trash doing their time in this particular joint. If you judge a man by his body count, Short Willie figured he should be the godfather of woman-hunters. So many violent rapes he’d forgotten half of them. Plus the five kills he’d copped to. For that, he got shunned and reviled. They treated him like a perv with AIDS.
On the outside, he’d been a celebrity. Probably got more headlines in his prime than Mike Tyson. But fans are fickle. After he got sent down, the spotlight — still focused on Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka — had shifted to fresh monsters. Just this February the cops finally arrested a suspect in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside hooker murders. Robert “Willie” Pickton, of Piggy Palace fame, had been charged with fifteen murders so far. By the time they got through digging up his body farm, Pickton would have dozens of wasted broads to his credit, and Willie Shortt would be looking like Mr. Nice Guy. He’d be demoted to the minor leagues.
Short Willie chuckled. Always keep your best card up your sleeve. Soon he’d be playing his ace. Yesterday he’d phoned his lawyer and asked for a meeting. Told the fat slug to plan for a big press conference afterward. What Willie had to say was so shocking his ratings would soar right off the top of the charts. They’d really be paying attention then. That’s what he’d always craved way more even than raping and slashing: attention. All eyes on Willie.
The guard came and opened his iron-grille door. Willie headed for the cafeteria, grabbed a tray and joined the line, keeping a wary eye out for any shit that might go down around him. Pity you couldn’t watch your own back, except on a surveillance camera. Even then, the momentary time lapse between what you saw and what was happening would give your assailant the edge.
A tray crashed on the far side of the room. A crowd quickly circled the downed man. Somebody shouted, “It’s Fats Oliver. He’s pitched a heart attack.”
Willie was pissed off that everyone’s attention got diverted to the victim. Now he’d have to wait for his corned-beef hash.
The attack didn’t come from behind. He instinctively turned to face the guy tapping him on the shoulder. The knife slipped between Willie’s ribs and into his heart as smoothly as navigating soft butter.
Two words burbled from his mouth before he hit ground. “I lied.”
Nobody seemed to be listening.
Oh yes, they just took that away from him.
EARLY ONE JUNE MORNING five weeks later summer struck like a steam hammer. For three months it beat the bejesus out of us. The city fathers declared heat emergencies and smog alerts, warning people to find relief indoors, embrace their air conditioners, drink lots of water. The garbage collectors heeded their bosses by declaring a strike that persisted until green plastic mountains grew on street corners. City parks were converted to dump sites. Only the rats were smiling.
Catholics felt obliged to add huge dollops of guilt to the stew. The Pope was scheduled to visit for World Youth week. The faithful shuddered at the thought of the Infallible nostrils quivering to the stench of simmering megatons of festering meat scraps infused with discarded diapers. No one could be blamed for failing to forecast that the poop from thousands of devout bums would flood from the Porta-Potties into adjoining businesses. The insurance companies did not interpret this messy mishap as an act of God.
Under the sweltering sun rap music blared from the open windows of muscle cars. Seagulls screamed an unholy accompaniment as they scavenged abandoned pizza slices. Above the ubiquitous humming of air conditioners rose an awful buzzing as millions of sated maggots metamorphosed into blowflies.
Clouds held dust instead of rain. Grass yellowed to straw, dry tree leaves fell to dry ground, flowers grew dejected and no breeze blew. The city took on the character of a ghost town when the midday sun was working its worst. Those who had shelter retreated into it. Homeless people abandoned the streets for ravines and parks. Nights weren’t much cooler because the humidity persisted. Sex slumped in the popularity polls. Only the criminally minded maintained their nocturnal activity levels. Pinheaded bigots torched a synagogue and murdered a Hassidic Jew, father of six. Gang members shot other gang members for violating their moral code. Hypervexed husbands and lovers still managed to exterminate their exes and offspring. Yet more felons found the energy to rape, rob and rook. Crooked CEOs and accountants cooked the books, whole libraries of them.
Toronto the Good was rapidly shaking off its halo, its degeneration presided over by the worst municipal government in two decades and a mayor so stupid that he’d be an embarrassment to a flock of turkeys. Maybe I’ve become jaded. Proximity to the mean streets has changed my way of seeing. Losing your virginity is like that.
I will always remember those months as the Great Inferno. Especially because they turned into my own personal blast furnace …
It began as a simple project. A built-in bookcase to house the spawn of books proliferating faster than dust bunnies. With neurotic precision, I’d measured the wall, designed the unit to house everything from paperbacks to oversize reference works and compiled a materials list. Even incorporated some display cases to accommodate the beyond-tasteful objets d’art I’d collect when I won the lottery. Just a simple saw-sand-screw job. What I hadn’t prepared for was what the jigsaw would break open: my latest worst memory was blasted instantaneously into overdrive.
Last year I donated the tips of four fingers on my left hand to a homicidal maniac equipped with a darkroom guillotine. A crafty surgeon spent six hours reconnecting the severed bits to their stumps. For all his finesse, my restored hand resembled an artifact from Dr. Frankenstein’s apprenticeship. The sensation in them was iffy, they tingled when they should have slumbered and my grip was way under par. Still, it was much better than the alternative. What bothered me most were the flashbacks, sudden as summer lightning, triggered unexpectedly one day, more predictably another — like when I try to perform any operation that involves a blade. Chopping vegetables for an innocent stir-fry can rocket me back to the moments preceding the deadly whoosh of the slicing arm. Some nights these fright videos bolt me into sweat-heavy consciousness. Some days they paralyze me in midstride. Usually I can drink them back into abeyance.
Planks all marked up, I reached for the first board, aligned the cut mark with the blade, secured it with my repaired hand and turned on the saw. The tool kicked into action, pitching me straight into a panic attack. I collapsed to the floor and watched the saw boogie away in antic aimlessness beside me. My back pressed to the wall, heart thumping and chest as tight as cheap panty hose, I yanked the cord from the outlet. Forced myself to Zen-breathe.
Relaxing in the path of a speeding bullet is a challenge. A bigger one is putting yourself in the way of a second bullet. I recalled my mother’s words from once upon a time. “So you fell offa your bike and broke your arm. Coulda been worse. Bikes don’t grow on trees, but your arm’s healed, eh? So hop back on the goddamn thing and remember to steer better next time.”
I rose to my feet, steadied myself and plugged in the cord. Before the saw could vault back into freaky life, I turned to my mantra in the face of evil. Chanting fuck fear … ommm … fuck fear … ommm restored my courage. In a spirit of Amazonian mastery, I gripped the tool, flicked the red On button, then watched in horror as my body repeated its slapstick pratfall.
Maybe the sound was unnerving me. I cranked up the radio to full volume, with no regard for the neighbors on either side of my row house. The venerable Nina to the south was all but deaf. And call it payback time for the jerk tenant to the north, sixty years younger than Nina, whose ears had also gone the way of Eric Clapton’s — and for the same reason. “The Tracks of My Tears” drowned out the jigsaw. I was back in business. Forty sawdusty minutes later, several stacks of pine planks stood as aromatic witness to the triumph of Motown over mind.
My admiration for my own capacity to conquer fear by cunning, and without resorting to the enabling hand of alcohol, had tweaked my thirst. I headed for the fridge, where a shelf of Smithwick’s awaited my eager clutch. The phone interrupted my reward for outstanding bravery.
“Jane?” Male voice, familiar.
“Who else? My dog’s so smart he refuses to answer the phone.”
“It’s Sam.” Sam Brewer, retired crime reporter, good friend.
“What’s up, buddy?”
“Um … are you alone?”
“No, I’m cuddled up next to Russell Crowe. Why?”
“Because I need to tell you something that … um … might upset you.”
I rapidly scanned my crisis checklist: my mom, my dog and my best friend had been okay a few hours ago. “So spit it out, mate.”
“The cops have called a press conference for tomorrow morning. To announce the autopsy results on Ruth Rosenberg.”
I froze. “This should interest me?” For six years I’d made a career of avoiding any and all media coverage connected to Pete’s murder. Anyone even vaguely close to me knew that.
“Hear me, Jane. William Shortt was not responsible for Rosenberg’s death. Already some people are wondering if maybe he lied about the other murders he confessed to — including those of Laura and Pete. I thought you needed to know that before it hits the press.”
Sam’s words tocked around my skull, lunatic as errant pingpong balls. For six years the only certainty separating me from the occupants of padded cells was the knowledge that the bastard who stole my lover’s life and foreclosed mine was pissing away the remainder of his twisted days behind bars, and mere weeks ago I’d heard the welcome news that a fellow inmate had expedited him to that particular blast furnace in hell reserved for the souls of the eternally damned.
I screamed into the phone. “Thanks for the favor, Sam. You fucking thought I needed to know that? I need to know that like I need to know my mother’s died.”
“Jane, I’m coming over.”
He hung up before I could tell him to get stuffed.
I made my way straight to the refrigerator, unloaded six cans of Smithwick’s and set them on the coffee table. Set B. B. King to wailing and strumming, live at the Apollo. Cranked up the volume. A Rothmans between my lips, I popped the first can and began to lubricate my way through an unwanted trip down memory lane.
He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Alternative scenarios to avoidable disasters career through our brains relentless as the melody of a dreadful pop song. Had I but known … If only … In the years since Pete’s murder my gray matter had rehearsed them all. Over and over and over again. Pete would still be alive, our shared lives still be on track … If he’d left our apartment an hour sooner, he’d have arrived at Laura’s before the killer did. Knowing another man was there, Shortt surely would have postponed Laura’s appointment with her maker. If Pete had arrived just sixty minutes later, he’d have happened on the scene from hell, her tortured body splayed and displayed in a manner that no human eyes should ever have to bear witness to. Eventually, though, Pete would have recovered and our lives could have resumed.
“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Those were the words of one of the two cops who’d arrived at my door to break the news shortly after their bodies were discovered. I guess Detective Sergeant Roy Urquhart figured they offered some kind of explanation where none was possible. The other cop, Detective Hunter, just offered his sympathy, looked as if he meant it and kindly hovered in the background.
Urquhart went on: “Our initial assessment of the crime scene is pointing to the same guy who’s killed three other women this summer. Laura Payne was his intended target. It looks like Peter may have broken into her apartment when she didn’t answer the door. He may have heard something violent going down or have had reason to believe that she might be in danger. Whatever. Your boyfriend got himself in the way of a man ruthless enough to kill a witness with no more conscience than he’d swat a fly. If it’s any consolation, Ms. Yeats, there are indications that Peter didn’t go down without putting up a damn good fight.”
If it’s any consolation … Consolation? I’d just been told the love of my life had been slaughtered and somebody’s talking con-so-la-tion? There could be no consolation. Not then, not even now, six years down that desolate road. Not ever. With more persistence than I’d previously applied to any task, I had banished all memories of that first night without him and avoided all references to his murder. Refusing to follow the case in the media, to discuss it with Etta or friends, I’d wrapped myself in a mantle of ignorance. Everyone soon learned that even to approach the subject was to step on a land mine. During the trial, which raised another media blizzard, I lost myself on a small island off the coast of Cuba. Only one fact was of any consequence: Pete was gone.
Within three weeks of Pete’s funeral, William Shortt confessed to all five murders while undergoing psychiatric assessment for his capacity to stand trial. He had pleaded guilty and been sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. Even had I been together enough to avenge Pete’s death, the opportunity never presented itself.
Today I learned that the bastard who destroyed our lives was still out there uncaught and unpunished. And I hadn’t even finished celebrating William Shortt’s death.
Someone knocked at the door just as my crushed beer can hit the wall and B. B. King launched full tilt into “Since I Met You, Baby.” In no mood to face the guy who wanted to read my water meter, sell me a miraculous new energy-efficient shower head or convert me to the Church of Whosever Latter-Day Saints, I cracked another beer. Unfortunately, my blinds and screen window were open.
Sam’s face materialized amid a fan of hollyhock leaves. Oh, yeah, Sam said he was coming over. Whatever. His voice easily penetrated the screen. “If you don’t open the door, my foot will be obliged to.”
“Door’s open, Sam.”
Sam always makes me feel well dressed, notwithstanding the Goodwill rags and tatty jeans that comprise my normal attire. Today was no exception. A halo of messy curls circled his Blue Jays cap, peak pointed unfashionably forward. Faded black T-shirt from a long-cherished Grateful Dead tour, unevenly cut off jeans and sandals so worn that they might have been handed down through a line of succession that began with Jesus. Under any other circumstances I would have been happy to see his silly face.
He sat opposite me, glancing at the discarded beer can resting against the wall. “Hard to find good help these days, eh, Jane?” I did penance for my housekeeping transgressions by turning down the volume on my CD player.
Not wanting to make him any more uncomfortable than he already appeared, I still couldn’t come up with a witty riposte. Taking in the four Smithwick’s lined up in front of me, he helped himself to one. Probably a charitable gesture: one less for me to drown in.
“I want to apologize for breaking the news on the phone, Jane. That was stupid of me. I should have known to come over.”
I lit a cigarette and snorkeled the smoke deep into my lungs. “Yeah, well, in this case the medium is not the message, Sam. The message is the same bad news no matter how it arrives.”
Sam Brewer and I were acquainted for a couple of years through our newspaper work before the deaths of our respective mates struck at roughly the same time. Dawn, to whom he’d been happily married since their university graduation, had succumbed to breast cancer a few weeks before Pete died. Suddenly we found ourselves close friends. Friday nights after work we drew together as naturally as filings to a magnet, boozing away in a grungy bar favored by none of our colleagues, usually in companionable silence, each of us numb and dumb with grief. We were comfortable with each other as with no one else, implicitly understanding the need for an escape from making conversation, from listening as if one cared while our decent colleagues rattled on about mortgage payments, new cars or Junior’s hockey performance, from networking to advance our careers. With the loss of the one dearest to us, we felt our lives had slipped the leash of conviviality and community. Those Friday-night vigils Sam and I observed marked a welcome reprieve from loneliness and solitary drinking.
As self-absorbed as I was today, I couldn’t pretend that Sam didn’t fathom my pain.
“Jane, all those months while I just had to stand back and watch Dawn die, the only thing that came even close to her pain was my rage at not being able to do a fucking thing about it. All I could do was be there. I couldn’t fix it, I couldn’t slow it down, I didn’t even have the power to alleviate her pain the way the nurses could. If all that torture she endured — the surgery, the chemo, the radiation — couldn’t do a goddamn thing to save her, what could I do? Just be there. And that wasn’t enough. I had such a rage in me that I was afraid I’d tear into tiny pieces the first person who looked at me the wrong way.”
Sam tilted a long swill of beer down his throat. He tried to meet my eyes, but I kept them fixed on a Theo Dimson poster. “You see, when Dawn passed away I wanted someone I could grab by the throat, curse forward and backward through seven generations, then kill as slowly and painfully as she had died. I desperately needed some son of a bitch I could exhaust all that rage on.”
I looked straight at him then. “That’s why people invented God. So we always had someone to blame — someone so safely out of reach that we were saved from murdering him. But why are you telling me this now, Sam? I had someone to blame, remember? I just found out I don’t.”
The shrill ringing of the phone punctuated my blasphemy. We listened to the message as my answering machine kicked in. “Hi, Jane. It’s Terry Richardson from the Star. I’m hoping to set up an interview to discuss your reaction to the Rosenberg autopsy results. You can reach me on my cell at 416–731–8998 … Oh yeah, I’m sorry for your loss and for how this news must be opening up old wounds.”
My current beer can I tossed in the direction of the phone. After it dinged off the wall onto a quarry tile, Sam made his point with brutal clarity. “If my wife’s killer had been a person and not a disease, I’d have found a way to get to him before the cops or the courts did.”
“Let me get this straight, Sam. You’re doing one of two things. Either you’re telling me it’s good that I no longer know for sure who killed Laura and Pete, and you’re encouraging me to hunt him down and kill him. Or you’re discouraging me from even thinking about it. Which is it?”
He drained his beer and helped us both to another. “I’m not sure. I guess I’m just trying to understand your frame of mind at the moment.”
“I can’t help you out much on that score because I don’t want to understand it myself. I’m planning to obliterate my frame of mind with booze.”
“And after that?” was all he asked. Sam met his current wife, Louise, when his first wife was dying in Princess Margaret Hospital. Louise showed up every day to attend to another patient — her younger sister. Within the same week, both were devastated and bonded by grief. Their tentative friendship eventually deepened into love. When the incredible notion struck him that there was, perhaps, renewed life beyond such devastation, Sam’s beer consumption plummeted. I’ve always appreciated his unwillingness to elect himself an evangelist for sobriety.
“And after that?” he repeated.
“I don’t know.”
“I won’t get in the way of your plan to get hammered. In your place, I’d sure as hell do the same.” He fidgeted with his beer can, his thumb fretting the smooth surface in search of a peelable label. “We’ve come to know each other pretty well, Jane. I know this has hit you hard. So I’d put some serious money on you doing something extreme. I just want to be sure that if you hurt anybody, it’ll be the piece of crap who deserves it and not yourself.”
He did know me well. The thought of violent revenge had occurred to me about two seconds after I heard that Pete’s killer might still be roaming the streets, free to eat, drink, screw, sleep, make merry and more mayhem. The man who confessed to his murder, I’d never had a chance to hurt: Shortt had never been out of police custody.
“If I was going to go after Pete’s killer, first I’d have to know who it was, Sam. Are the cops going to reopen their investigation?”
“I’ve already talked to a couple of my old contacts in the force. Now that I’m retired, they seem willing to tell me more than they did in the old days, when I might have rushed into print with disclosures from ‘unidentified sources.’” He paused. “Guess they figure the sting’s been taken out of my tail.”
After his remarriage, Sam had quit the paper. Guilt-ridden by the knowledge that he’d spent more time with Dawn dying than with Dawn healthy, he swore that he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He soon discovered that what worked for his second marriage was working against his lust for crime writing. The publication of a well-received book on an investigation I’d been at the center of (but refused to write up) had temporarily alleviated his hunger to cover a story. Obviously he was at loose ends again.
“This morning Ernie told me that they are planning on reopening only one investigation — into Ruth Rosenberg’s murder. Apparently the brass have decided they don’t have the resources to open up the whole can of worms. Nor do they want to be seen admitting that the entire initial investigation might have been seriously flawed.”
“But doesn’t that amount to their having decided that Shortt did kill the other four?”
“That’s probably their line of reasoning — or at least their fervent hope.”
“But why cop to four murders you did commit and then credit yourself with one that belongs to somebody else?”
“Maybe to enhance your notoriety. Shortt loved the limelight — so much that more than one psychologist has suggested that’s what motivated him from the start, even more than a lunatic sex-and-violence drive.” Sam watched me closely while I opened the last beer. “You know, you’re doing something way out of character.”
I braked my grin just short of a sneer. “What’s that, Sam, drinking too much?” I realized that I had slurred my question in a manner characteristic of W. C. Fields sailing three sheets to the wind. I was quickly getting drunk. Good, things were going according to plan. Sam, bless him, ignored my shoddy enunciation.
“Apart from the homicide team that worked the case, I probably knew more about it than anybody. Yet you never once asked me a single question — not about the investigation, Shortt, his sentencing or my thoughts on the subject. For six years I expected you to break out of that mood, and you didn’t. Suddenly I’ve just fielded three questions. What’s that about? I mean, can we agree that you’ve just decided to pull your head out of the sand and take a hard look at the circumstances surrounding Pete’s death?”
“Yeah, we can agree to that much.”
“Then let me begin at the beginning of today’s breaking news.” Sam summarized the situation as proficiently as an accomplished lecturer obliged to pack Ulysses into a single class. “A year ago, Ruth Rosenberg’s family started pressing for an exhumation of her body. Her brother, Dr. Jonathan Rosenberg, was convinced that enough doubt persisted about whether Shortt was indeed her killer to warrant a second look. Jonathan’s reputation as a heavy-hitting fundraiser for the Tories added real clout to his request. When the attorney general agreed to permit the exhumation, an independent forensic specialist at the University of Toronto was asked to conduct the autopsy.
“An examination of semen recovered from the victim’s pubic hair — overlooked in the first autopsy conducted by the Institute of Forensic Science and in any case probably too small a trace to have been detected by then-current technology — has just been proved not to match Shortt’s DNA. This doesn’t exonerate him: Rosenberg might have had sex with another man prior to her murder. Her fiancé immediately consented to a police request for a saliva sample, and it wasn’t his semen either. Because there’s no reason to doubt her monogamy, the DNA finding appears strongly indicative of belonging to her rapist-killer. But without a match, it remains inconclusive. Shortt could have used a condom.
“A second finding points to a major discrepancy between Shortt’s confession and the manner in which she was killed. He claimed to have strangled Rosenberg with his hands using a great deal of force. However, her hyoid bone —”
“Sam, remind me about dem bones.”
“Sure: the hyoid’s the one supporting the tongue and tongue muscles. Anyway, it wasn’t fractured and there were no fractures or signs of trauma to her cervical vertebrae. Finding the hyoid uninjured doesn’t exclude manual strangulation, but there were no fingertip bruises and indentations. There were ligature marks on her throat.”
“So Shortt lied about the manner of killing, or forgot how he killed her — or falsely confessed to the crime. What’s your best guess about it all, Sam?”
Again the phone interrupted our conversation. This time it was a crime reporter from the Globe and Mail, with a repeat of the Star’s request, more genteelly worded. I shrugged. “Guess it’s true, Sam — you can run but you can’t hide.”
“In hindsight, my best guess is that William Shortt took credit for five murders he never committed.”
“So where do I begin?”
Sam jumped from his chair as hastily as I’d responded. “Let me go to my car. I brought along something I didn’t bring into the house because I wasn’t sure you’d be interested in looking at it.”
He returned with a $20 parking ticket and a slim file folder. “This will get you started. It contains printouts of all the articles I wrote on the case. Let me know after you’ve read them if you really want to pursue this thing. Then we can pull together all the print coverage, my notes and interview tapes …”
“Thanks, Sam.” I hugged him.
“You do that so you can watch me blush. Just one more thing, before I leave you with that. They say working the crime beat hardens you up. I covered the Bernardo trial and know it’s not true. And watching you recover from your last gig totally invalidated the idea. This case couldn’t be any more up close and personal. So don’t open that file unless you are very, very sure that you can deal with the contents.”
I promised. I lied.
ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of Pete’s death I honored a promise to my mother and made an appointment with a therapist. Etta does not frighten easily. But my prolonged near-catatonic retreat into a space where even she couldn’t reach me terrified her. So for three months I endured weekly fifty-minute sessions with Dr. Anna Hoffman, a sweet middle-aged Middle European woman whose only failing was to have overdosed on Freud. She had to do all the work. Freudians find such role reversals stressful. When I decided to terminate our relationship, the dear lady looked relieved.
Then and now, most of Dr. Hoffman’s suggestions struck me as sound. My rage at Pete’s death was consuming my life, dominating my waking and sleeping. Perhaps I felt guilty or somehow responsible for not saving him. By perpetuating the collateral harm the killer caused me I was extending his power. Etc.
She lost me the day she suggested that I consider the redemptive power of love. Love, I snapped back at her, was not in the cards. Love was not a folly I’d commit ever again. Old, established loves would abide. For Mom, for my best friend, Silver, and a very few cherished others. But even these had taken on a tentative aspect. Before Pete’s death, I’d never given more than a glancing thought to my mother’s age — my shortsightedness abetted, of course, by her camouflage as a youthful tart. Now, when I scour average-life-span charts in the newspapers, or when the Queen celebrates another birthday, I automatically subtract Etta’s age and mull over the difference. I do not attend Silver’s birthday parties, famous throughout the art community. And I ignore the white hairs sprouting around Max’s snout.
The only passing years I observe are my own, and those I hasten along with liberal applications of beer and nicotine.
Etta likes to quote Marlene Dietrich’s notion of broken-heart therapy: “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.” One drunken night I slept with a stranger. On more sober occasions, casually with two fine people (but never at the same time). It didn’t work. In my experience, sexual shenanigans only deepen your loneliness when you’re not sharing them with the one you love. I stopped indulging in lite sex.
The only person who knew and loved Pete as much as I did was his mother. And she was lucky enough to die when he was still young, strong — and alive.
Did I mention that my prescription for obliterating the hard facts of Pete’s death included booze and denial? They had the unfortunate side effect of raiding the happy side of my memory bank. Recently I’ve had trouble recalling Pete’s face without prompting from the photographs of us I’d buried in a drawer the day he’d been interred. My favorite I had tucked into his coffin. Vaya con Dios, my darling.
The damage to my psyche would not mend. But my lost-and-found fingers could. While I was healing from my latest battle wounds, I went into hibernation to finish writing Malign Neglect, my exposé of police malpractices and incompetence in the case of a serial killer. My agent, a woman so aggressive you’d swear she packs more testosterone than a Russian discus thrower, sold the book well before I delivered the first draft of the manuscript. My advance was startling.
The exercise of writing it all out was cathartic. During the climax of the real drama, I stood face-to-face with a serial killer, confronting him in a scene of murder interruptus. But somehow I had distanced myself from the woman I was then. Writing the book did nothing to erase the horror of his deeds, but I took great comfort in putting a human face to his victims. Women the media could not refrain from referring to as “drug-addicted prostitutes” — as though their addiction coupled with job description somehow mitigated his crimes and excused the shabby way the police had conducted their much-belated investigations. When a cop friend, Ernie Sivcoski, disingenuously complained about the bad rap I’d given the force, I suggested that he tell his buddies to regard Malign Neglect as a self-help manual. Maybe my book nudged a few readers toward a more sympathetic take on sex workers. Fat chance it could prompt the boys in power to change the punitive laws that complicate and further endanger their lives.
After six months of editing, proofing, design and printing, the book materialized and assumed the status of a commodity. Suddenly I was a hot property. The mere hint of impending celebrity drove me further into seclusion. I have only one life, and I prefer to keep it private.
On a very few occasions I caved in to pressure from my publicist and did a reading and signing, but I refused a book tour. My publisher, knowing that stress drives me to drink and surliness unbecoming a Canadian, relented. When some rave reviews appeared in top American newspapers, my publisher invested its resources in promotion and distribution. For a few weeks, my agent peppered me with sales triumphs — international rights, foreign-language rights, a book-club selection, a made-for-TV movie … it was horrible.
Although I’d done everything I could to inject into my book the vestigial scholarly bacteria still infecting my intelligence, my subject remained sensational. Truth be told, it would not have been much less successful had I fired off an instant book to feed the Jerry Springer crowd. Take a serial-killer plot and add the writer’s firsthand involvement in tracking down the perp and you have a best-seller recipe.
Instant celebrity and a serious income. Both would be fleeting. Still, it was all too much to cope with. Leaving Max in the care of Silver, I fled back to Cuba. There I was recognized only as a woman who enjoyed a daiquiri, danced well and aced her dive test.
For a full fifteen minutes after Sam’s departure I sat and stared at the file folder he’d left on my coffee table. Then I did the stupidest thing I’ve ever packed into a folly-ridden life.
Compulsion. Without a thought about the wisdom of what I was about to do, I opened Sam’s file. It was slim. So are letter bombs. My friend had saved his articles in two formats, text-only and PDF. I extracted the two PDFs.
The banner headline of Sam’s first article screamed, “Police investigating double homicide.” Immediately below were two photographs, set side by side. Of Pete. Of Laura.
It was one of my favorite photos of Pete, one I’d taken when we were camping the previous summer in Killarney Provincial Park. Here it had been cropped to a head-and-shoulders shot of a tanned, handsome, carefree young man grinning as if he’d just won the lottery. That’s exactly what I’d said to him as I viewed his goofy grin through the lens.
“I have, love, I have,” he said, laughing. “I won you.”
And I remembered what Photoshop had cropped: Pete’s body. A swimmer’s physique, broad shouldered and stout chested, tapering to a slim waist, taut butt and powerful long legs. As I sat today on the living-room floor, flesh memories crowded my consciousness until I could feel him against me. First pressing, urgent, his lust matching mine. The memory so intense that he was inside me. Always Pete was inside me as no other lover ever, before or since. Then his body was soft, yielding, protectively snuggling his length against the back of me as we fell asleep, sated as sinners, innocent as infants.
I shuddered myself back into reality and examined Laura’s face for the first time. It was a good, strong face, framed by short-cropped, wavy black hair: a face attractive without being airbrush-beautiful, it was open, expectant, curious. The expression made me think that her photo might also have been taken by a lover. Laura was ready to step out of the frame and into another adventure. She reminded me of a young Sigourney Weaver.
I popped open another Smithwick’s. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn …
“FUCK, FUCK, DOUBLE AND TRIPLE FUCK,” I screamed into the tight dead air of my shrinking house. “Better they should grow weary, even condemned: that’s the goddamn price we pay for getting to live beyond thirty. And who wouldn’t choose to pay it? But before some of us even get to vote, some homicidal SOB comes along and forecloses on every option — but YOU GET TO DIE YOUNG.”
Something in my genetic programming must have short-circuited. Or maybe it’s that somewhere along the rocky road I lost the talent for recovery. When kind folks console me with “Ah, but you’ve got your good memories,” I just don’t get it. It’s the good and precious memories that draw blood, that have sucked the life out of me since Pete’s death. Memories are only and ever this much: heart-wrenching daily memos of what once was fine and beautiful in a life now bereft of what drenched with sweet wonder the very drawing of breath.
Rallying what resources I could, diminished though they were by semi-inebriation, I focused on the text of Sam’s article.
TORONTO — Toronto police are investigating the 36th and 37th homicides of the year after two people were found slain in an apartment in Toronto’s east end Thursday night.
Police spokesperson Landsay Tom said that police were responding to a missing person report when they discovered the two bodies. A woman, identified as Laura Payne, 28, the occupant of the apartment, and a man, identified as Peter Findley, 29, were pronounced dead at the scene.
The bodies were sent to the Centre for Forensic Sciences where full forensic autopsies will be performed.
Tom said that officers have yet to determine either the motive for the crime or the identity of the killer.
Although he refused to disclose how Payne and Findley were murdered, speculation is growing that the serial killer responsible for the deaths earlier this year of Linda Bailey, Ruth Rosenberg and Sandra Priest may be the perpetrator.
Tom urged that the media refrain from speculation about this possibility until further evidence is forthcoming.
Relatives of the deceased could not be contacted by phone. “Family members don’t want to speak with the media at the present time,” Tom said.
It is known that Laura Payne, a clinical psychologist, was the only child of Dr. Rodney Payne, a University of Toronto philosophy professor. Peter Findley, award-winning independent documentary filmmaker, was the partner of well-known crime writer Jane Yeats, with whom he resided.
Anyone with information about this incident is asked to contact Detective Sergeant Carl Dewey of the Major Crime Unit at (416) 678-3429.
The second article was shorter, but more brutal:
Police chief cautions against speculations about double homicide
TORONTO — Amid rumors that a serial killer may have struck again, Toronto police are continuing their investigation into a double murder last Thursday. Preliminary autopsy reports have revealed that Laura Payne had been strangled and Peter Findley bludgeoned to death.
Police Chief Raymond Underhill sought to reassure Torontonians that their city is safe, releasing a statement yesterday that called the five murders an “aberration.”
“The city’s homicide rate remains very low and serial killers are very uncommon. While there is evidence suggesting a link between the killings of Linda Bailey, Ruth Rosenberg and Sandra Priest, we still have no evidence whatsoever linking this double murder to the same perpetrator,” said Chief Underhill.
“We are working as hard as we can at the present time and remain confident that arrests will be made in these cases.”
Bludgeoned to death. I couldn’t take this. My chest tightened until my breathing was reduced to quick, shallow gasps. I couldn’t stay in this house another minute. This house, which I had worked so hard to convert into a sanctuary, had been compromised, polluted by the intrusion of these particulars. My house was a toxic waste dump.
Grabbing my wallet and cigarettes, I stumbled out the door. Whatever it took, I needed to obliterate the picture my tormented brain kept flashing across my sight line: Pete’s sweet face smashed and broken — along with my sanity.
WET, BLOODIED AND SHIVERING, I came to consciousness. A manic percussionist was beating on the walls of my skull. I seemed to be lying facedown on a concrete bed. Only one eye would open. The other was crusted shut. I made another concerted effort to get my chin off the pavement. My right hand, the one with the normal fingers, managed to check out the recalcitrant eye and came away bloody.
Someone must have followed me from the bar and attacked me in a dark laneway. I could just make out the blurred outline of a garbage pail. I touched it. It was real.
What bar? And why had I ventured down a laneway? I had to get home. As I pushed myself to my knees, a black wave flung me back into oblivion …
I recovered consciousness. Now I was lying on a real bed. The walls of the room were a hue of lime not found on the color wheel that includes hospital green. And the nurse hulking at the end of the bed looked meaner than Nurse Ratchet of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Only someone wanting to drive a rich, elderly aunt into a terminal stroke would hire her.
I pushed the words past my furred tongue and cracked lips. “I want to report a murder. Last night.”
This got the attention of She-Who-Is-Not Florence Nightingale. “Who was murdered?”
“I was.”
My surly caregiver snapped, “I’ve seen that fucking movie. D.O.A.,1949. Shitty 1988 remake with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. So don’t think I’m about to tell you that you drank a luminous toxic matter that will kill you within two weeks.” She paused. “You probably don’t have that long.”
My best friend loomed even larger than her normal six-foot three-hundred-pound frame. As if her personality isn’t enough of an imposition already.
Time to rally my thespian resources before she killed me on the spot. “Hi, Silver. I was just about to make some breakfast. Care to join me?” I chirped.
“I ate breakfast nine hours ago. Care to tell me what happened?”