for his weary colleague. There was no one he respected more. The two had been friends since they started together on the streets twenty years earlier, and although Green had risen further through the ranks, placing strain on the friendship in sensitive moments, he secretly considered Sullivan the better cop. The Deputy Chief was right. He, Green, was only good at detective work. Sullivan was good at everything, paperwork and organization as well as handling people and crises. And in the middle of a case, you couldn’t ask for a more careful, thorough investigator.
“How did you finally identify him, by the way? You didn’t get that far in your depressing tale of professional incompetence.”
“His mother called in, finally. Actually, her personal assistant called in, guy by the name of Peter Weiss. Apparently the victim was the quiet type, no wild parties, no late nights, a bookworm. Never stayed out all night. Maybe he’d have one drink with friends after the library closed, but he was usually home by midnight. Certainly by two. So when his mother woke up at five in the morning—she’s some kind of early morning freak—and saw he never came home, she heard on the early morning radio about a stabbing in the library, and she got worried. So Weiss called the station. By then Blair was dead. He died at three fifty-six a.m. without regaining consciousness. When the assistant called I was just trying to wake MacPhail and get him down to the hospital to take over the body. I let him have all the beauty sleep I could spare, but I didn’t want the ordinary doctors screwing up the evidence any more than it already had been.”
Sullivan took a sip of coffee and cradled his chin in his massive hand. Some life suffused his reddened eyes as he grinned. “That old Scot is a bugger to wake up. I always have to hold the phone two feet from my ear when I call at night. But he came through for us. He got to the hospital in half an hour, reeking of whiskey but at full steam. He ranted up and down about the suturing, but after he’d examined the body and looked at the medical records, he came out with his theory. Sharp, smooth-edged knife, at least six-inch blade, he guessed about an inch to an inch and a half wide. He’ll know more after the autopsy. One smooth horizontal stroke in and out.”
Green whistled. “Neat job.”
“Yup. And into the middle of all this, without any warning, just as MacPhail is loading the body bag into the elevator to go down to the morgue, along comes the little rookie again wanting us to unbag the body so mummy’s assistant can have a look.”
“In the middle of the hospital hallway?”
Sullivan laughed. “That was my reaction. I was tired and I was mad about all the mistakes people had made, especially him. So I told him to follow proper procedure and take the assistant down to meet us at the morgue.”
“Nothing wrong with that, Brian. Rigid, maybe, but by the book. No one can fault you for that.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, the Deputy Chief did. Showed up twenty minutes later with this Weiss guy in tow, ripping a strip off me for caring more about procedure than about the decent citizens of Ottawa. I saw my whole career flashing before my eyes. My mortgage, my three kids, tuition for college—all bye-bye.”
“Ach! Political grandstanding to impress the Chief, that’s all. You’ve done the right things, Brian. You were the first person to act like a professional in this whole mess.”
“Yeah. We’ll know soon, won’t we? When I’ve been assigned to permanent traffic detail.”
Green grinned. “You’ve been assigned to me. So let’s get on it. Did you have time to find witnesses or interview anyone?”
Sullivan rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Besides the young woman who found him? Are you kidding? I was so busy chasing the body and mopping up everyone else’s mess, I had no time to investigate! We don’t have one lead, we don’t have shit, but every ‘t’ has been crossed.”
Green felt the caffeine from his second cup beginning to spread through his system, bringing with it a return of optimism. He glanced at his watch. Nine oh-five. “Right now I’m heading over to interview the mother. That’s going to be a tough one, so I’ll be turning off my radio, but you can reach me by cell if you have to. Arrange a briefing for ten-thirty with all the men Jules gave me.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “We’ll find a trail, Brian, once we start talking to Jonathan Blair’s friends and family. A nice kid who studies Shakespeare and lives with Mummy can’t have too many enemies.”
Two
The Village of Rockcliffe Park was not a village in any normal sense of the word, except perhaps in exclusivity. It was a tree-lined enclave perched on a bluff above the Ottawa river, surrounded by the bustling city and boasting the highest per capita income of any municipality in Canada. Mercedes and Volvos sat discreetly on shaded drives, and massive beds of peonies and irises framed the old stone mansions. Even the heat was tempered.
The living room of Marianne Blair’s Rockcliffe mansion was painted Wedgwood blue, perfectly offsetting the rose floral love seats which framed the Persian rug. A discreet, oldmonied room, perfect for a rich benefactress, Green thought, except that the designer had neglected to take a good look at the owner. Marianne Blair contrasted harshly with her surroundings, at least in her current raw state. She hunched on the edge of a love seat, dressed in a shapeless brown sweat suit, her gray hair askew and large jowls quivering.
Her personal assistant stationed himself at her side, glaring at Green. Weiss had met the detective at the front door, wrinkling his nose visibly at Green’s suit and inspecting his ID for a conspicuously long time. Green knew that at five feet, ten inches, with mousey brown hair and hazel eyes, he was remarkable only for his nose. It was the only visible trace of his Semitic heritage, which was generally honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
His parents were both Holocaust survivors who had lost their first families to the ovens, and they had an almost paranoid fear of public exposure. They had met in a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after the war, but it had taken them nearly fifteen years to risk having a child, and even then the Jewish festivals had been muted, secretive affairs. Green had grown up with Hasidic folktales and Klezmer clarinets ringing in his ears, but outside the family walls, his parents cautioned their sandy-haired, hazel-eyed boy to keep his Jewishness to himself.
In the modern, urban world into which he moved, that proved seductively easy. He belonged to no synagogue or Jewish groups, worked in an entirely non-Jewish environment, had almost no Jewish friends and none of the previous women in his life, including his first wife, had been Jewish. His recent marriage to Sharon Levy had been as much of a surprise to him as it had been to his father. Although Sharon had been trying to introduce some Jewish traditions into their family life since the birth of their son, Green’s identity still found its main outlet in his commitment to smoked meat, bagels and Nate’s Delicatessen.
But for some, the nose was enough to fire up old myths and prejudices, and whether Weiss had reacted to the nose or the odour of his suit, Green couldn’t be sure. Weiss had swivelled on his heel without a word and led the way across the vast marble foyer into the mercifully air-conditioned interior. He moved with impeccable grace, but his blue linen suit was buttoned wrong, and his toupee dipped over one ear. Not quite recovered from this morning’s excursion after all, Green thought with some satisfaction.
On the drive over, he had tried to plan his interview strategy. Marianne Blair, he had learned from Jules’ briefing file, was the only child of a wealthy British Columbia shipping magnate who had made his fortune as a young man shipping timber from the virgin forests of the young province. He had diversified into oil and real estate later in life and had established the Lindmar Foundation as a means of purchasing immortality, as well as tax relief. To groom
