Old City Hall (6 page)

After four and a half years, Kennicott didn’t know much about Greene. The man was quiet about his personal life. Kennicott had no idea that the detective spoke French. Interesting. Checking the radio
stations on someone’s car was like looking through his desk drawers—it gave a peek into his private self. The third channel was 102.1, the Edge, an up-to-date station that teenagers listened to. The next was Q107, the main competitor of the Edge. Greene must have a teenage kid, Kennicott thought. Funny that he’d never mentioned having a family.

Kennicott pushed the final button and heard the voice of Donald Dundas, the younger broadcaster who was the usual Monday-morning replacement host for Kevin Brace. Dundas was doing a promo for two stories in the upcoming show. He played some native drum music from a band in northern Ontario that was going to Rome to visit the pope, and a clip of a group of women from some town in Alberta trying to get into the
Guinness Book of Records
for building the world’s largest ice sculpture. It was of a giant beaver.

“The news is next,”
Dundas said just before the top of the hour.
“I’m going to be sitting in as host for the rest of the week.”
His usually confident radio voice sounded unsure. As though he couldn’t wait to get off the air.
“See you at eight.”
The syrupy theme music came up. Dundas hadn’t mentioned a word about Brace.

The hourly news said nothing about Kevin Brace being under arrest, his wife dead in their bathroom. Good. Maybe the family didn’t know. Kennicott pushed the Q107 button.

“Here’s a shocker,” the young announcer said. “Kevin Brace, the host of
The Dawn Treader
, the nationally syndicated morning show, is under arrest for first-degree murder.”

“Hoo-wee,” his sarcastic sidekick said. “That should help us cut down on the competition for the overeducated market.”

“Yeah, man,” the first voice said, “but who really cares? The Leafs won last night, so all is well with the Leaf Nation.” They both started to crack up, as if it were one of the funniest jokes they’d ever heard.

Kennicott flicked off the radio. He had left the highway and was driving down into King City, which wasn’t a city at all. It was an affluent small town perched north of Toronto, populated by wealthy hobby farmers who had managed to preserve some measure of quaintness among the surrounding urban sprawl.

Unlike in Toronto, where fresh snow quickly turned into horrible brown slush, here the sidewalks were piled high with it. Kennicott felt as if he’d just arrived in winter. In the middle of town he turned north and headed up a small country road. Immaculately plowed driveways led to garish mansions.

He drove for a mile or so until he came to a house that, unlike its well-fenced-in neighbors, was bordered by a haphazard wood railing. The long driveway had been erratically cleared of snow. A simple, hand-painted piece of plywood read:
TORN
.

Pulling up in front of a large garage, Kennicott got out. The air was cool, and there was a pungent smell of horse manure. The house was a rambling bungalow, with the original farmhouse in the center and helter-skelter additions that seemed to have been built on a whim. The front steps hadn’t been shoveled, so Kennicott tromped through the snow up to the painted front door. He looked at his watch. It was 7:10. Let’s hope they haven’t heard the news, he thought. He knocked.

A torrent of barking erupted inside the house. He heard footsteps charging up the hallway, then the smack of bodies hitting the front door, howling away. Just what I need, Kennicott thought. He took a step down, away from the door. A male voice inside called out, “Place, Show, get over here.” As suddenly as it had started, the barking stopped. Kennicott waited, expecting the door to open. But there was nothing.

He waited a little longer and knocked again.

No sound.

To his right he heard a large door open. A tall, white-haired man in an unbuttoned sheepskin coat emerged from the garage and walked toward him. Two big dogs were behind him, docile as sheep.

“Morning,” the man said, taking long strides toward Kennicott.

“Hello,” Kennicott said, coming back down the steps. “Dr. Torn?”

“Call me Arden. No one ever uses the front door.” He extended a large arm to shake hands. “We always come through the garage.”

“Sorry to disturb you so early in the morning,” Kennicott said.

Torn smiled. His aqua-blue eyes popped out against his ruddy skin
and white hair. “Been up since five. Took the tractor to the driveway. We’re trailering the horses down to West Virginia for a show.”

Kennicott kept his eyes fixed on Torn. “I’m Officer Daniel Kennicott from the Toronto Police.”

“Don’t let the dogs bother you. They’re country bred, that’s all. We always have two dogs, figure it’s cruel to have just one on its own.”

“Is your wife at home, sir?”

Torn let go of Kennicott’s hand. “She’s back in the barn.”

“Perhaps . . .”

He nodded and turned his head. “Allie!” His voice boomed across the wide driveway. “You’d better get out here.”

A moment later an older woman dressed in a bulky country coat, a large scarf tied comfortably around her neck, emerged from behind the barn door. She wore a pair of knee-high rubber boots.

Torn turned back to Kennicott as he pulled the lapels of his jacket together and held them with one hand.

“Thanks,” Kennicott said.

“I was in the war,” Torn said quietly, reaching down to pat the dogs with his free hand, never taking his blue eyes off Kennicott. “I know what it looks like when someone comes to deliver bad news.”

A
lbert Fernandez hated listening to the radio when he was driving. It was a total waste of the half-hour commute downtown to the Crown Attorney’s office at Old City Hall. Instead, he listened to tapes. Self-improvement tapes, books on tape, and speeches by famous politicians and world leaders. This month he was listening to the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill.

Fernandez was eleven years old when his left-wing parents fled Chile and brought their family to Canada. None of them spoke English. His little sister Palmira had learned quickly, but for Albert the new language was a struggle. Why were there so many words for the same thing—pig and hog, street and road, dinner and supper? No one who spoke English appeared to be fazed by this. But for Fernandez it was torture. He always seemed to choose the wrong word.

His most painful memory of that first year in Canada was the day in November when his class went on a field trip to a conservation area north of the city. Just after lunch the weather suddenly turned wet and cold. Fernandez, wearing entirely inappropriate dress shoes, slid down a riverbank into a stream. When he turned to look up at the other boys on the bank, who were all wearing boots and running shoes, they were smiling.

“Aid me,” he called back to them, reaching out his hand.

The kids all burst out laughing. “Aid me?” they said. “Albert wants help and he says ‘Aid me.’”

For the next three years, everyone at school called him Aid Me Albert.

It wasn’t until he took a linguistics course at university that he solved the language riddle. At his very first class, the professor, a thin young man with stringy blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, strode into the crowded lecture hall, drew a line down the middle of the blackboard, and wrote the heading “Anglo-Saxon” on one side and “Norman” on the other.

He listed words with the exact same meaning on either side of the ledger: go in—enter; meet—rendezvous; help—aid. English, he explained, was not a language, but a car crash. All sorts of languages—Germanic, Latin, Nordic, even some Celtic—smashed together, but thanks to the French invasion of England in 1066, the two main ones, Anglo-Saxon and Norman, ran parallel throughout.

Fernandez sat up in class. All the confusion of this strange language suddenly became clear.

That’s where Churchill came in. A great student of English history and language, Churchill understood the power of the simple Anglo-Saxon words. He preferred them to the flowery, foreign Norman words.

His most famous speech, “We will fight them on the beaches . . . ,” was the greatest example. Every word was Anglo-Saxon, except for the very last one: “. . . and we will never
surrender
.” “Surrender,” the only three-syllable word in the whole speech, was a flowery French word instead of the simpler, Anglo-Saxon “give up.” In this way, Churchill underscored how the very idea of surrender was a foreign concept to his British audience.

Years later, Fernandez was sitting in court listening to a witness. At first the man seemed totally believable. But when he came to the tough part of his story, his whole tone changed. Fernandez knew immediately that the man was lying, but he wasn’t sure why. Until later, when he read the transcript and found himself circling the Norman words.

Sure enough, when the witness used simple, direct Anglo-Saxon words, he was telling the truth: “I walked into the kitchen. I saw
Tamara. She was cooking supper.” But when he switched to Norman words, he became evasive: “To the best of my recollection . . . she maneuvered the frying pan . . . to be perfectly honest . . . I thought she intended to hurl it toward me . . . I was considering contacting the police for assistance . . .” He was lying.

Fernandez smiled as he flipped the tape into the car radio and roared out of the underground garage. Over the years he was amazed how many times this simple analysis of witnesses’ statements had proved correct.

Thirty-five minutes later he pulled into a parking lot northwest of the Old City Hall courthouse. Thanks to the traffic, which was snarled because he’d left so late, it was just before eight. Even worse than missing the early-bird parking, he saw three cars that belonged to other Crown Attorneys parked on the south side right beside each other.

Darn. For months, Fernandez had been in the lot by 7:25, before everyone else in the office. The one day he stays home for a little extra fun, look what happens. He grabbed the nearest parking spot.

To get to Old City Hall, he first had to walk through the large square in front of the New City Hall. Even at this early hour it was busy with people crisscrossing the vast space, rushing to work. Down at the south part, on the big open-air rink, skaters were gliding across the ice, some of them dressed in business suits, others in figure-skating outfits.

When he was a kid, Fernandez’s parents scraped together enough money to buy him used skates, and on Sunday afternoons they’d dragged him down to this rink with all the other immigrant families. Try as he might, he could never get his ankles to stop from bending over, never understood the effortless way young Canadian kids could propel themselves across the big white surface.

He sprinted across Bay Street and into the back entrance of Old City Hall. Waving his credentials at the young cop on duty, he raced up an old metal staircase and ran his pass card over the pad for the backdoor entrance to the Crown’s office.

The Downtown Toronto Crown Attorney’s office was one enormous
room, stuffed full of warrenlike offices that ran crazy-quilt in all directions—the legacy of government planners who’d jammed thirty-five offices into a space built for twelve. Most offices were filled with stacks of paper and books, piles of white cardboard storage boxes with words like
R.V. SUNDRILINGHAM—MURDER II—VOIR DIRE—RIGHT TO COUNSEL
hand-printed in black Magic Marker on the side. Fernandez was the exception. He kept his little office tidy.

Most days, when he was the first lawyer to arrive, he would open the door to the pungent smell of cold pizza and stale microwave popcorn. But this morning the air was filled with the aroma of coffee brewing, bagels toasting, and fresh-peeled mandarin oranges.

Ignoring the murmuring of voices farther down the hall, he headed straight to his office. It wasn’t his style to mingle. Besides, this way his later-arriving colleagues would see him hard at work as they passed by.

Pulling a robbery file he was working on from the only filing cabinet in his office, he sat down at his desk. By eight o’clock, usually an hour when he was the only one there, the voices down the hall were building. Someone had a radio on, and the announcer’s voice mingled with the sound of many people talking.

Finally, Fernandez couldn’t take it. He repacked the robbery file, picked up a yellow legal-sized pad, and walked through the hallway, past the photocopy machine parked halfway down, to Jennifer Raglan’s corner office.

Raglan, the head Crown Attorney for the Toronto region, was behind her paper-strewn desk, half seated, half leaning forward. Across from her, to her left, pacing back and forth, was Phil Cutter, the most aggressive prosecutor on the whole downtown team. Bald, in his late forties, he wore an old suit and a pair of crepe-soled shoes, well worn on the outside heels. To Raglan’s right, sitting on a wooden chair, was Barb Gild, a willowy brunette who was the best legal researcher in the office. A typical absentminded genius type, she famously left her papers and files all over the office and on every photocopy machine. The three were involved in an intense conversation. Fernandez cleared his throat. No one heard him. He took a few steps inside. Still no one noticed
him. He was almost on top of her desk when Raglan finally looked up.

“Albert, I was wondering when you’d get in,” she said.

“I’ve been here for a while.” Damn it, he thought. “Working in my office.”

“We’re just mapping out our preliminary strategy—there’s no time to waste,” Raglan said, seeming to ignore his comment. “Looks like your number came up big. Hope you’ve done your Christmas shopping. You’ll be in bail court on this by Wednesday.”

What was going on? It was as if Fernandez had walked into a movie halfway through and everyone else knew what was happening.

“Just goes to show you never can tell,” Cutter said. His voice was so loud it was more of a bark than a normal speaking voice. Judges had been known to ask him to move to the back of the court before he addressed them. His bald head gleamed under the fluorescent light. “He’ll probably claim she fell on the knife. Kind of tough, though, with her dead in the bathtub.” Cutter started to laugh, a hard, choking cackle.