Two

Green locked up the bikes and piled Sharon, Tony and the vegetables into a cab. Although her eyes were glum, Sharon hadn’t uttered a peep of reproach, but Tony had to be cajoled into the back seat, squirming and protesting that he wanted to see the fire trucks. He was slightly mollified by the promise of lunch with Zaydie later on, but Green could still see his face pressed against the rear window as the cab pulled away. Trying to push guilt out of his mind, he called for a cruiser to take him to the crime scene.

There was a well-established protocol for homicide investigations, and Green knew it would be some time before he’d learn many details about the victim and the crime scene itself. But from the distraught patrolman who was first on the scene, Brian Sullivan had learned enough to make the call to Green. “It’s a homicide all right,” he’d said, “and not your usual homicide around here. An old man beaten beyond recognition. I thought under the circumstances, in this neighbourhood …”

Sullivan hadn’t needed to say more. While Green waited for the cruiser, he phoned his father. When he heard the familiar, singsong Yiddish voice, he felt a wash of relief.

“You okay, Dad?”

“I shouldn’t be?”

“You been outside today?”

“I’m watching a Black preacher cure a blind boy. Maybe when that’s over.”

“Okay.” Green paused. No point in alarming his father, who lived with enough fears of his own making. Fears planted long ago, by jack boots and train whistles and the barking of guard dogs along the barb wire of the death camp. “I’m in town. How about we go to Nate’s for some cheese blintzes?”

“Why?”

Green kept his tone light. “I need a reason?”

“No. Why are you in town? It’s Sunday.”

“Business, Dad.”

“Oy, Mishka. Always business.”

The cruiser pulled up, leaving Green no time to counter the rebuke. By now, Rideau Street was in gridlock, and even the cruiser’s roof lights did little to speed them up. Curious pedestrians clogged the sidewalk as they tried to get a closer look. Cars jockeyed for space amid the rumbling trucks and buses that inched through the lights. Only the cyclists wove in and out, gleefully dodging potholes and cars on their way to the tree-lined bike paths along Ottawa’s river system. The eclectic jumble of shops that brought Rideau Street to life — the tattoo parlours and African restaurants next to dance clubs, bakeries and body piercing salons — were all wide open, their displays spilling onto the sidewalk before them.

Some were new, catering to the tougher elements that had taken over the neighbourhood in recent decades, but others, like Nate’s Deli, clung stubbornly to their immigrant, working class glory days. When Green was a little boy growing up in one of the dilapidated Victorian redbrick townhouses just to the north, his mother had sent him to the Rideau Bakery for challah and to Nate’s for varenikes and white fish. Many of the tenements had been bulldozed to make room for the subsidized slums that masqueraded as urban renewal, but the shops were still there, familiar landmarks on the evolving street.

Also familiar, unfortunately, was the scene that greeted him just a block from King Edward Avenue. Three police cruisers were flashing blue and red in the sunlight, and parked next to them was a white Forensic Identification van. Assaults, muggings, burglaries, drug disputes and booze-fuelled brawls were all common on the volatile bar strips of the Byward Market.

This time, however, a black coroner’s van had joined the line of official vehicles.

Green directed the cruiser to the curb behind the coroner’s van and scanned the officials gathered in the corner behind the yellow police tape. In their zeal to prevent scene contamination, the first responders had secured not only the alleyway but half a city block, and two uniforms had been deployed to conduct traffic in a vain attempt to ease the snarl. Green could see Brian Sullivan standing just outside the secured area, conferring with an Ident officer. Behind them, Green could see more officials in white Tyvek suits bent over something in the alley. At the mouth of the alley, abandoned except for a numbered forensic marker, lay an old-fashioned wooden cane like the one Green’s father used. In spite of himself, his gut tightened.

His father’s gentle rebuke came back to him now as he stood at the edge of the crime scene. He’d been investigating major crimes for nearly twenty years and had stood at the edge of countless crime scenes, waiting for the coroner’s report. The crime scene both repulsed and fascinated him, each one a new challenge, each one a clash with villainy. Now, as an inspector, he no longer attended crime scenes; Brian Sullivan and his major crimes detectives took the calls and worked the cases, while Green sat around committee tables, overseeing the broader picture, allocating resources and planning future initiatives. Even the catchwords irked him. Yet he also knew that after twenty soul-battering years on the front lines of rape and murder, he’d had no choice but to retreat.

Standing outside the Rideau Street crime scene, however, he felt not exhilarated but slightly sick. In his mind was the image of an elderly man walking down the street, perhaps on his way home to some modest seniors’ residence in Sandy Hill, much like the one Sid Green lived in only a few blocks away. With his cane, he had probably walked slowly and stiffly, his head bent to watch his footing. He might even have been a little deaf, easy prey for the punk who’d crept up behind him. Not just knocked him down, which would have been appalling enough, but beat him to death. Green felt a tremor of rage at the affront.

Brian Sullivan turned and glanced around the street thoughtfully, no doubt trying to judge where the killer had come from. Had he been lying in wait in the alleyway and somehow lured the victim into an ambush? The killer had chosen a particularly disreputable corner populated by street people, drug dealers and low-end hookers working the fringe of the club district. A corner decrepit by day, dangerous by night. Both a beer and a liquor store were within a couple of blocks, and desperation sometimes drove alcoholics to extreme actions. But no sooner had the thought crossed Green’s mind than he dismissed it. This was no simple mugging; from Sullivan’s description, it had been a rage out of control.

Other than the all-night grocery store and a pawn shop, there was nothing in the immediate vicinity that would have attracted the killer to that corner. Possibly a drug or sex deal in the alleyway, which the old man had the misfortune to witness. But again, that hardly justified the violence of the beating. More likely, the killer had spotted the old man a few blocks earlier, trailed him and used the cover of the alley to strike.

Movement at the crime scene caught Green’s eye, and he glanced back to see Sullivan striding towards him. The big Irish farm boy still moved with a footballer’s grace, but twenty-five years of fast food, hasty snacks and beer had added a substantial gut to his mammoth frame. It strained the buttons of his white dress shirt beneath his open sports jacket. High blood pressure had mottled his freckled face, and for the first time Green saw glints of silver in his tufted, straw-coloured hair. Sullivan shook his head grimly as he ducked under the yellow tape.

“It’s not my father,” Green said.

“I didn’t think so. This man looks much larger. I estimate five-ten, one hundred and seventy pounds. He has white hair, but he doesn’t seem as …” Sullivan paused as if looking for a neutral word.

“Withered?” Green supplied. His father was in his late eighties, and years of chronic illness and depression had whittled his body to a wraith. “Any ID on him?”

Sullivan shook his head. “Pockets are empty, watch gone — you can still see the indents of the links on his wrist. The bastard even took the rings off his fingers.”

“Wedding finger?” Not that it would mean anything. Green’s father still wore his wedding band twenty years after his mother’s death.

Sullivan nodded. “And on the pinky finger of his right hand. On the surface, it looks like a mugging turned ugly.”

“How long has he been dead?”

Sullivan turned to nod towards the white-suited officials clustered over the body. Two Ident officers, two morgue assistants, and in the middle, looming larger than any of them, the flamboyant, white-maned figure of Dr. Alexander MacPhail. Green could hear his booming Scottish brogue from a hundred feet away, admonishing Lyle Cunningham’s junior Ident assistant not to vomit on the hands.

“Bag them, laddie! That’s all I asked!”

Sullivan even managed a chuckle. “Lyle’s breaking in a new lad, but I don’t think he’ll last a week. He’s already puked in the corner twice.”

“So they’re a bit behind schedule.”

Sullivan shrugged. “MacPhail’s not giving us a thing yet, till he gets all his calculations in, but I did our usual simple test —”

“The toe test?”

Sullivan nodded. “He’s stiffened up nicely. Rigor’s pretty complete. With the cold last night, I’d guess he’s been dead eight to twelve hours.”

Green considered the implications. Eight hours made it four o’clock in the morning, an unlikely time to be out for a stroll. It made more sense that the old man had been assaulted a couple of hours earlier than that, when innocent passersby were safely tucked into bed and the streets were overrun with punks. The question was — why hadn’t the old man been tucked into bed too?

“What does he look like? Homeless?”

Sullivan’s brows shot up. “Oh, no! He was wearing a three-piece suit, a tie and a nice camelhair overcoat. All about twenty years out of date, according to MacPhail, but in perfect shape. Expensive, MacPhail says, and he should know. Probably didn’t get stolen because it was covered in blood. His shoes are gone.”

“Pricey Italian leather, I bet. A lowlife with taste?”

“Well, they could have been stolen after the fact, by some street bum in need.”

“For that matter,” Green said, “all the stuff could have been stolen after the fact by someone who stumbled upon the body.”

“But then we don’t have a motive for the attack, do we?”

Green shrugged. He wasn’t sure Italian shoes, some rings and a dress watch were motive enough to obliterate a man’s head. “Not till we find out who this guy was and what he was doing out that late.” He broke off as he watched a tall, slender woman stroll languidly towards them, flicking her cellphone shut. She was nicely packaged in a navy jacket and beige pants — or as Sharon would have scolded him, taupe — and a simple gold scarf at her neck. She wore no make-up that Green could detect, but her skin was like flawless cream. She had long legs, a straight back, and everything about her flowed, including her blonde hair, which was loosely clipped in a long ponytail down her back.

Green shot Sullivan a look to see if he too was watching. Sullivan grinned. “Our new sergeant wanted to take the lead on this herself, so I figured why not? This will hit the media — are the elderly safe on their own streets? — and they’ll lap her up.”

“Not to mention our new police chief. The Force’s ‘diversity in hiring’ program visible for all to see, and she’s fluently bilingual to boot.”

Sergeant Marie Claire Levesque frowned fleetingly at the sight of Green before pasting a determined smile on her face. Green had met her only once, at her transfer interview the month before, but he’d analyzed her file and sought the opinion of colleagues. Determined was the word most frequently mentioned. Along with smart.

“Good morning, Inspector,” Levesque said with a hint of French lilt. She extended her hand. “Nice to see you again.”

Ambitious too, the file had said. Nothing wrong with ambition, as long as it was tempered by competence. At five-foot-ten, she matched him in height, yet with her high cheekbones and long, patrician nose, he almost felt as if she were looking down on him. Conscious of his sweaty T-shirt and bike-helmet hair, he drew himself up.

“Your first case is a sad one.”

She nodded. “And messy. Forensics says there is a lot of physical evidence, and they were able to lift some tissue from under the nails. It seems the victim fought back. His cane has a crack in it, and what looks like blood on the tip.”

“Any leads from Missing Persons?” Sullivan asked her, nodding towards the cellphone in her hand.

She shook her head. Her pony tail swished distractingly. “I just checked with them again. No one called in a missing senior.”

Green wasn’t surprised. How long would it take before his own father was reported missing? Sid Green lived alone and rarely went outside anymore. The circle of cronies he used to meet for card games had dwindled through illness and death. Green tried to phone him every day, but some days there weren’t enough hours in the day. If this old man had a wife or lived with someone, he would probably have been reported by Sunday morning, but if he lived alone, it might take days.

“Do we have anything to go on?” he asked. “A monogram on a handkerchief, an ATM slip in a pocket?”

Levesque nodded. “They may find more when they examine the clothes and the body, but we found one item in his coat pocket — a receipt from the Rideau Pharmacy from last April. I asked Detective Charbonneau to follow up with them. And …” She paused, then slipped her hand into her handbag and withdrew a plastic evidence bag. Inside, Green could make out an object on a gold chain.

“We found this beside the body. It looks like gold.” She held out the bag. “It’s a Jewish star, right? What’s it called?”

Sullivan cast Green a sharp look, but Green barely noticed as he took the bag and held it up to the sunlight. He twisted the piece this way and that. It was hammered gold, exquisitely delicate and old. Dread crawled down his spine.

“A Magen David,” he said, then grimaced at the irony.

“Literally, Shield of David. It’s meant to protect.”

***

Mort Fine, the owner of Fine Antiques, was just flipping the sign in his shop window to “Open” when Green pushed through the door. He scowled as if a customer were an inconvenience, but then his pig-like eyes lit up at the sight of Green.

“Mr. Yiddish Policeman!” he exclaimed, trundling his squat body along the narrow aisle of his shop. “More mysteries for me?”

“You remember me?” A few years earlier Green had enlisted his help in identifying some old keys found at a crime, and since then Fine had provided the occasional tip about the fencing activities of his more dubious competitors.

“How could I forget? I get so many customers here?”

Green glanced around the shop. The place was a fire trap. Curios, figurines, tarnished silver and old lamps were still jumbled without apparent order on the shelving that crammed the aisles. Antique chandeliers covered the ceiling like stalactites in a cave. It didn’t look as if a dust mop had passed over anything since Green’s last visit. He could feel his bronchial tubes closing up at the mould and dust.

“Business good?” he asked, trying to keep the irony out of his voice.

“Oy …” Fine scrunched up his rubbery face. “So what can I do for you? We’d better talk fast before the crowds come through the door.”

Green laughed. “You know anything about jewellery?”

Fine’s eyes danced. “You want to buy your wife a special something? I could give you a very good price on a sapphire ring that just came in.”

Green laid the evidence bag on the counter at the cash so that the small gold Star of David was visible. “What can you tell me about this piece?”

Fine picked the bag up with pudgy but surprisingly nimble fingers. He turned it over and over, frowning. “Besides that it’s old, not much unless you let me take it out of the bag.”

Green had him sign the evidence log, then followed as the man carried the bag into the workshop at the rear and turned on a powerful light. He slid the contents out onto a white enamel tray. The chain tumbled out along with the star. Fine weighed first the whole pendant then the star alone. He held it up to his jeweller’s loupe and peered at each square millimetre of it. In the small, stifling confines of the workshop, the silence was broken only by his asthmatic breathing and the occasional grunt.

Green sneaked a peek at his watch. Tony and Sharon were expecting him at Nate’s Deli at one o’clock, and he had tried their patience enough for one day.

“You in some kind of hurry?” Fine demanded, without taking his eyes off the star.

“How long will you be?”

“Can you leave it with me? I can research in my spare time.”

Green shook his head. “It can’t be out of my custody.”

“I don’t work miracles. It’s good quality. Twenty-two carat gold maybe, not the dreck they make nowadays. Hand shaped and hammered by a goldsmith, not off the assembly line in China.”

“China makes Magen Davids?”

“China makes everything. Mezzuzahs, yarmulkes … You go to Israel today, half the Judaica in Old Jerusalem is from China. But this …” he smiled enigmatically, “this is from Russia.”

“You can tell that? Something different about the gold?”

“Probably, but who knows?” His smile broadened, showing a row of unnaturally straight, white teeth. In his lumpy, pockmarked face, their perfection was jarring. He stepped back, removed his loupe and held it out to Green. “Have a look. There’s a jeweller’s monogram on the back. Cyrillic letters. ASM, I think. There’s an inscription as well.”

Dutifully Green peered through the magnifying glass, astonished that he could see every scratch and speck of dust on the gold. At first he could make out nothing beyond a few faint etchings, well worn by the passage of time. Then slowly a pattern emerged. He couldn’t read Russian, couldn’t recognize anything but a few loops, but he took Fine’s word for it.

“Can you photograph this?” he asked. “Would that help you research it?”

Fine scowled, but Green could see the glint of intrigue in his eye. Objects told a tale, and the older and more widely-travelled they were the more fascinating the tale. Without another word, he had his state-of-the-art digital camera out and was fiddling with lenses.

Ten minutes later, Green left the shop deep in thought about the elderly victim. Having an old piece of jewellery from Russia meant very little, of course. The old man could have purchased it in an antique store here or in any one of the hundreds of Judaica shops in North America. He could even have purchased it online. Fine might be able to pinpoint who the goldsmith ASM was, and when and where he had lived, but that would tell the police nothing about where the victim was from. Green himself had bought a pair of antique silver Shabbas candlesticks from Fine, who claimed they had come from the Ukraine. Green had never been near the Ukraine.

Reluctantly, he forced the mystery of the dead man from his mind. The routine homicide investigation was being capably managed by Sergeant Levesque and overseen by Staff Sergeant Sullivan, who had fifteen years in major crimes under his belt. The body had been removed to the morgue, and before heading off to the Britannia Yacht Club for his Sunday afternoon sail, Dr. MacPhail had scheduled the autopsy for Monday morning.

The Ident Unit was still at the scene, painstakingly collecting cigarette butts and trying to lift footprints from the tiny patch of dirt between the sidewalk and the building. The killer might have hidden there, pressed up against the wall in the shadows, waiting to ambush the old man. A team of uniformed officers under Levesque’s direction was conducting a street canvass, searching for anyone who might know the old man or might have witnessed the assault. In the middle of a weekend market day, a near-futile task.

Against Levesque’s obvious but unvoiced objection, Green had taken over the tracing of the Star of David, arguing that he had the connections and knew more about the significance and possible origins of the religious piece than either she or Sullivan, both lapsed Catholics. But the truth was, he couldn’t resist the lure of the case. It wasn’t simply the desire to be back in the trenches, following up leads and tracking down killers instead of sitting behind his desk. This victim felt special to him. The death of a courtly old Jewish gentleman out for his evening stroll hit a little too close to home for him. Who knew what this man had accomplished and endured over his life? To meet such a brutal and pointless end was an affront to all that Green believed just and fair.

His resolve hardened as he helped his father through the glass doors of his seniors’ residence and into the staff car parked illegally at the curb. Nate’s Deli was a mere five blocks away, but at his father’s creeping pace, too far for him to walk now. The deterioration had been slow, almost imperceptible, but every spring, Sid Green seemed never to bounce back to the form he’d had the autumn before. The snow, ice and bone-chilling cold of winter sapped his strength more each year.

Sid leaned on his cane and eyed the alien car with dismay. “Where’s Sharon? And the baby?”

The baby was now nearly five years old and had just begun kindergarten, but in Sid’s eyes, he would always be the new arrival.

“They’re going to meet us at Nate’s.”

A smile spread across Sid’s face, momentarily erasing the pinched frown and the perpetual melancholy in his rheumy brown eyes. “And Hannah?”

Green didn’t know where his daughter was. She was not answering her cell, and in typical eighteen-year-old fashion, she had not come home Saturday night. She had called just after the eleven o’clock news to say she would be staying at a “friend’s.” Judging from the loud chatter and the booming bass music, it was “friends” in the very plural.

At least she had called. When she’d first arrived on their doorstep, fresh from a fight with her mother and spitting mad at the world, she had planned to stay only long enough to punish her mother, Green’s ex-wife, and put a face to her father. Two years later, she was almost finished high school, had found a part-time job as a special needs companion and had learned to meet them halfway on rules. Most of the time.

Green too had made progress as a father in the past two years, but he knew the main reason Hannah had slowly been won over was Sid Green. She adored her grandfather almost as much as he adored her. In looks, she was the incarnation of his dead wife, for whom she’d been named — small and delicate, with an elfin innocence that hid a steely spirit. In Hannah’s presence, Sid shed ten years and half a century of sorrow.

When Green had to tell his father she wasn’t coming, he could see the old man deflate. Sid lowered himself into the passenger seat with a sigh and barely spoke as they drove to Nate’s. Green knew the sight of Tony would reinvigorate his father, but he’d asked Sharon to come a little later, because he wanted a few minutes alone with his father before the energizer bunny burst in, full of bounce and chatter. He waited until Sid was settled with his customary weak tea before broaching the subject on his mind. He was still summoning the words that would not alarm his father when the elderly man raised his hands expressively.

“Nu, Mishka. You look worried.”

Green hesitated. Nodded. “Just wondering, Dad. There’s a case …”

“Voden,” his father said softly. “The old man killed on Rideau Street.”

Green suppressed his surprise. “You know?”

“I heard it on the morning news. You want to tell me not to walk alone on Rideau Street. Never mind I haven’t done it for five years.”

“I know. But just in case you should feel like it …” Green toyed with his spoon, avoiding his father’s skeptical eyes. “But also I wanted to ask if you know a well-dressed Jewish gentleman maybe ten years younger than you, who lives alone around here, walks with a cane and wears a beige camelhair coat.”

Sid looked thoughtful. “Well dressed. What — a tuxedo maybe?”

“A suit and tie. But expensive. Classy.”

“So, rich.”

“Well off, probably. His camelhair coat is a Harry Rosen.”

“That you can buy off the rack at Neighbourhood Services.”

Point taken, Green thought. MacPhail had thought the suit was twenty years out of date, so it was possible it had been given away to a charity shop and snapped up by an elderly man with tastes beyond his current means. But the Star of David had also been good quality gold, and the shoes had been nice enough to steal.

“I think he had — or used to have — some money, and whatever he’d done for a living, expensive clothes were important.” Green was grasping at straws, but he hoped some small detail might twig Sid’s memory. “It’s possible he was also from Russia.”

“Ach.” Sid waved a dismissive hand. “Russian Jews are everywhere.”

“He had an antique gold Magen David from Russia. Think, Dad. Well-off, well dressed, lived alone, might have had a Russian accent, used a cane.” Sid was still looking blank. “Could he have lived in your building?”

“Not in my building, no. But you could ask at the shul up on Chapel St. If he lived downtown around the old neighbourhood, they might know. The alter kakers go there for services, to say kaddish for their wives and parents who’ve died.” Sid said the word for old men with contempt. He had tossed his faith, and his trust in old men, on the funeral pyres of Auschwitz.

The suggestion of the Chapel Street synagogue was brilliant, and Green was just about to thank his father when the front door burst open, and a shriek filled the restaurant.

“Zaydie!” Tony came charging down the aisle, his dark curls bouncing and his chocolate brown eyes shining. Sharon scrambled to deflect him from waiters laden high with trays. A good ten seconds later, to Green’s surprise, Hannah slunk through the door, her orange hair plastered up one side of her head and last night’s mascara still smudged beneath her eyes.

Sid clapped his hands, all trace of irritation gone. His day was complete.