Old City Hall (3 page)

“Leafs lose again?” his father called from the kitchen. “I fell asleep at the end of the second period. It was two–nothing for Detroit.”

“You’ll be amazed,” Greene said. “They scored three goals in the last ten minutes, beat the Wings three–two.”

“Unbelievable,” his father said. “Maybe one game they won. Still they are terrible.”

Greene maneuvered his back, trying to get comfortable. He grimaced as he heard the plastic crack and squeak under his weight. As the only Jewish guy in Homicide, he scored lots of points by taking shifts this time of year. He didn’t mind.

For a rising star on the squad, with just one unsolved case, this time of year was a bonanza. The last three Decembers he’d had three homicides, but this year had been quiet.

The smell of instant coffee wafted into the living room. It was a smell Greene had disliked since he was a child. He shifted a bit on the couch. The beeper attached to the back of his belt was caught on the plastic.

“Dad, try the cream cheese I got for you on Friday.”

“I’m looking for it. Maybe I didn’t wrap it right. After three days it’s stale,” his father called from the kitchen. “You want some raspberry jam?”

“Sure, Dad,” Greene said. His eyelids felt heavy. As much as he despised the sofa, right now it felt comfortable.

He reached back, unclipped the pager from his belt, and held it. That felt better. He was so tired. His eyes began to shut.

Suddenly he sat bolt upright, crinkling the hard plastic underneath him, and squeezed the pager. It was buzzing wildly.

A
-l-i-m-o-n-y

A-l-l-t-h-e-m-o-n-e-y

A-l-l-f-r-o-m-A-w-o-t-w-e

A-l-l-m-y-m-o-n-e-y

That’s it: All my money, Awotwe Amankwah thought as he doodled letters onto the back of his green reporter’s pad. Thanks to you, Madam Honorable Justice Heather Hillgate, you and your final divorce decree, I get access to Fatima and Abdul Wednesdays from five-thirty to nine, and Saturday afternoons from two to five, one phone call per night, between seven thirty and eight. That’s it. The price of admission? Eight hundred dollars a month in support payments.

“If you want your children overnight, get a place of your own,” Justice Heather the Leather, as he liked to think of her, had lectured him the last time they were in court. Claire was there. Dressed all prim and proper, like the wife on
The Bill Cosby Show
, backed up by her high-priced lawyers, who filed motions against him quicker than his ex changed lovers. Amankwah couldn’t afford his lawyers anymore, so he was unrepresented.

His next move—to get the kids overnight—was going to take months, and money he didn’t have, to go back to court yet again.

To keep up with the court order, Amankwah had to do this graveyard shift in the Radio Room at the
Toronto Star
, the country’s largest paper, where he’d worked for almost a decade.

The Radio Room—also known as the Box, the Rubber Room, and the Panic Room—was parked at the north end of the
Star
’s enormous newsroom.

It wasn’t really a room, but a small glassed-in booth filled with a staggering array of equipment. There were five scanners, but only two worked—police and ambulance. They were on constantly, as was the twenty-four-hour TV news station that, in the middle of the night, went to mind-dulling infomercials about exercise or kitchen equipment. The twenty-four-hour radio news station ran at low level, to complete the constant cacophony of sound.

He had to check all of them, plus two different news services rolling through the fat old computer screen in the corner. And there was a long list of calls to be made hourly: police headquarters not just in Toronto, but in the far-reaching suburbs and surrounding cities—Durham, Peel, Halton, Milton, York, Oakville, Aurora, Burlington.

This whole area was known as the Golden Horseshoe, the fifth-biggest urban center in North America, so there was a lot of ground to cover. All the fire, transit, ambulance, and hospital authorities also had to be contacted. As well as the Ontario Provincial Police and, never forget, the lottery people. When things slowed down, you were expected to read through the daily paid obituaries to see if a story lurked there.

At first it might look confusing, but the job was strictly entry-level, intern-journalism-student stuff. Not something a veteran reporter like Amankwah should be doing.

He kept his BlackBerry on at all times to get e-mails from reporters in the field and in case something happened with his kids. Out through the front window, looking over the sprawling near-empty newsroom, a row of clocks on the far wall displayed the current time in major cities around the world: Paris, Moscow, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Melbourne, Los Angeles. Amankwah looked at them with the dreamy eyes of a poor child watching a limousine drive past. He’d wanted to be a foreign correspondent, the first black reporter at the
Star
to be
sent overseas. But now that dream was in tatters. He looked at the clock labeled
LOCAL TIME
. It was 5:28. Another half hour to go. Then he’d have four hours to get back to his sister’s apartment in Thorn-cliffe, where he was living on a couch, grab a shower, and be here for his regular ten o’clock shift.

He turned his gaze to the window in front of him. It was plastered with aged instructional memos, funny news clippings, and multicolored sticky notes. The protocol was for reporters to write out humorous things they heard on the scanners in the middle of the night and post them on the window. Amankwah looked at some of the funnier ones:

Dec. 29, 2:12 a.m.: Dispatcher: “Did you say baklava?” Cop 21 Division: “Oooh . . . it’s been a long shift. He was wearing a balaclava.”

Cop 43 Division: “I’m not up on all the gangs in Scarborough but I’m pretty sure there isn’t one called the Nipples.” Dispatcher: “Regardless, they should be photographed anyway.”

The Radio Room was warm. Amankwah had his jacket off and his tie loosened. Every fifteen minutes he made a detailed notebook entry in his neat script. This might be a lousy job, but he was still a good reporter. He did the work well.

It had been a quiet night. The days before Christmas were a dead zone for news stories, and earlier in the night the desk had been hounding him to find something local for the front page.

Amankwah had no good news to offer. Out in the suburbs there was an Iranian cabdriver—a former history professor—who got robbed at knifepoint by a couple of young Asians. The kids weren’t too bright. A bit of snow had fallen in the suburbs last night, and the cops followed the tracks in the snow back to one of their houses. And a group of Pakistani college students downtown brought some cricket bats into a doughnut shop and took some whacks at one of their former
friends. A drunk driver in the Entertainment District ran over a cop’s foot. Typical stuff. None of it front-page material.

At about one in the morning it had looked like he had some action. A rich doctor in Forest Hill caught his wife in bed with his teenage son’s best friend. He’d sliced the kid with a kitchen knife. At first it sounded as if he’d cut the young stud’s cock off. Amankwah called the desk, and they got all excited. They were hoping the doctor was a surgeon. But an hour later it turned out the guy was just a dermatologist and he’d used a butter knife. All the teenager had was a scrape on the back of his hand.

A bloody butter knife, Amankwah thought. What a wimp.

He checked the wall clock for Toronto: 5:30. He checked the wire services for fresh news alerts. Nothing. He listened to the half-hour report on the all-news radio station. Not a thing. He turned on the cabbie dispatchers and listened for a full minute. Nada. Finally, he checked the police scanner.

There was the usual chatter. Then he heard “code red.” He turned up the dial. The cops changed their codes every week, but it wasn’t exactly hard to figure out that “code red” meant something urgent. Probably homicide.

He heard the address: the Market Place Tower. Number 85A Front Street, Suite 12A. Amankwah’s body jerked. Holy shit. He’d been in that penthouse suite. It was the home of Kevin Brace, the famous radio host. A few years before, Amankwah and Claire were on his show and they’d been invited to the Christmas party Brace and his younger second wife hosted every year in early December. Back when Amankwah and Claire were the city’s glamour couple—smart, black, and beautiful. Back when Amankwah, a hot young reporter on the city beat, was the token black face in all the newspaper promo ads.

Amankwah bit his lip. Brace’s building was a few blocks away. He turned down the volume on the scanner and moved his ear closer to the speaker. He could pick up the cops on the street. They were smart enough to keep Brace’s name off the airways.

Imagine. Kevin Brace. Mr. All-Canadian Good Guy, according to his adoring fans. The Voice of Canada, they called him. Recent
j-school grads in the radio rooms of the other three newspapers in town wouldn’t pick this up. Red-hot news—maybe even a murder in Kevin Brace’s condo—was flying under the radar, and he was the only one who had it.

Amankwah looked out at the near-deserted newsroom. There was only one editor manning the website and another babysitting some copy. He needed to alert them right away.

But he knew what would happen once they got hold of this. They’d hand the story to one of the overnight writers who were on call. If Amankwah was lucky, all he’d get would be a nice little pat on the back and then he’d be forgotten.

He started to pace. Any minute now an urgent alert would flash on the wires, and the news would be everywhere. Keep calm, he thought as he eased his wallet out of his jacket and slipped it into his back pocket. He palmed his digital camera, which was crammed with pictures of his children, and squeezed it in his hand. Trying to look casual, he walked out of the airless room and gave an exaggerated yawn.

“Just going down to grab a coffee,” he said as he sauntered past the editor closest to him, jiggling some coins in his pocket with his free hand.

The night cleaner, a large Portuguese woman, was at the bank of elevators outside the newsroom. Amankwah pushed the Down button and leaned against the wall, stifling another yawn. The cafeteria was one floor below. The Up button was already lit.

The up elevator opened with a loud ding, and the cleaner got in. Amankwah affected a look of utter disinterest. The moment the doors closed, he ran for the stairway against the glassed-in west wall. Watching the dark street, he flew down the concrete stairs two steps at a time, his footsteps echoing. Five floors down, he hit the ground and walked casually out the fire door. He waved to the man at the security desk and opened the front door onto Yonge Street. Then he raced north, bracing himself against the wind.

He had to pass through a tunnel under the Gardiner Expressway, the ugly highway built in the 1950s that cut the city off from the lake. Clearly, back then planners forgot that people knew how to walk. As
a meager concession to pedestrian traffic, on the side of the road there was a thin sidewalk hemmed in by a concrete railing. Every morning it was packed with people rushing to work, many of them residents of the islands south of the city who regularly commuted by ferry. A few hours later and he’d have been stuck.

Running now at full speed, squeezing the camera in his hand like a sprinter with a baton, he rushed out of the north side of the tunnel, got to Front Street, and cut east. He was breathing hard. The cold wind ripped down the back of his shirt.

Just one block to go. He could see the sign for the Market Place Tower.

“I need this story, I need this story, I need this story,” he chanted to himself, like the old train in
The Little Engine That Could
, the book he used to love to read every night to the kids. “I need this story, I need this story, I need this story.”

T
he early-morning streets were empty, and Detective Ari Greene was making great time. It always amazed him how quickly he could zip through the city when there was no traffic, and he’d put his magnetic police flasher on the roof of his car, giving him carte blanche to run every red light. One more hour, and the roads would be clogged with commuters.

He got to Front Street, turned east, and drove quickly past some of the city’s oldest redbrick buildings, four and five stories high, most lovingly restored. Storefronts with large, tasteful windows looked out onto unusually wide sidewalks on both sides of the street, giving Front a comfortable, almost European feel. The Market Place Tower stood tall at the end of a long, elegant block.

Greene turned south at the corner and found a parking spot on the side street behind an old truck that still had snow on its back cab. Must be a supplier coming down to the St. Lawrence Market, across the street. On winter mornings when the snow had melted on the city streets, commuters from the colder outlying suburbs and towns carried the white stuff in with them.

Greene got out of his car and headed quickly toward the condo. He passed a driveway on the side street, where a discreet sign read
PARKING FOR EXCLUSIVE USE OF MARKET PLACE RESIDENTS. VISITORS PLEASE SIGN IN WITH THE CONCIERGE.
He kept on walking
very fast, not running. There were certain unwritten protocols about being a homicide detective. You dressed well. You didn’t carry a gun. And most of all, unless it was a true emergency, you never ran.

The automatic double doors of the condo slid open. Behind a long rosewood desk, a Middle Eastern–looking man in a uniform was reading the
Toronto Sun.

“Detective Greene, Toronto Police Homicide,” he said.

“Good morning, Detective.”
RASHEED
was sewn on his jacket above his left breast, and he spoke with a lilting accent. Probably had a Ph.D. in physics back home, Greene thought.

Up ahead a uniformed female police officer stood perfectly positioned near a bank of two elevators and a doorway, which Greene assumed led to the stairs. Sensing his presence, she turned her head.

Greene saw who it was and grinned.

Officer Nora Bering nodded, gave the elevators one last look, and walked toward him, meeting him halfway.