Leave Me by Dying Read online

  Other Novels by Rosemary Aubert

  In the Ellis Portal Mystery Series

  Free Reign

  The Feast of Stephen

  The Ferryman Will Be There

  Leave Me By Dying

  Leave Me By Dying

  AN ELLIS PORTAL MYSTERY

  Rosemary Aubert

  BRIDGE WORKS PUBLISHING COMPANY

  Bridgehampton, New York

  Copyright © 2003 by Rosemary Aubert

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published by Bridge Works Publishing Company, Bridgehampton, New York, an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

  Distributed in the United States by National Book Network, Lanham, Maryland. For descriptions of this and other Bridge Works books, visit the National Book Network website at www.nbnbooks.com.

  FIRST EDITION

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Aubert, Rosemary.

  Leave me by dying : an Ellis Portal mystery / Rosemary Aubert.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-882593-73-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1 Portal, Ellis (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Toronto (Ont.)—Fiction. 3. Law students—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.A9L43 2003

  811'.54--dc21

  2003001905

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  This book is dedicated to my brother, Joseph Proe, and to Susan, Katie, and Colden

  I would like to offer thanks to the following for sharing their remarkable knowledge, often firsthand, of the modern history of Toronto:

  Don Cullen

  Maureen FitzGerald

  Doug Newman

  Doug Purdon

  Fred Sheward

  David Skene-Melvin

  And the men of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archive

  I would also like to thank Justice Eugene Ewaschuk for sharing his knowledge of the legal world of the city of Toronto during the 1960s, knowledge that greatly aided me in the research and conception of this story.

  Leave Me By Dying

  “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

  —EMMA LAZARUS, THE NEW COLOSSUS

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Prologue

  Magistrate B. Sheldrake Tuppin, who knew more about the administration of justice than any man I’d ever met, once told me, “You can give up the practice of law, but you’ll be a lawyer until the day you die.”

  Which was, apparently, a view shared by the Fellowship of Barristers and Solicitors of Upper Canada. I studied the letter that had arrived by courier moments before. “You are invited,” it informed me, “to regularize your situation before the bar.”

  My eyes strayed from the letter, with its rich seal printed in deep blue ink, to the window. I could see my son Jeffrey. Despite leaning toward a tripod on which was perched some sort of surveying tool, he was not, by profession, a surveyor, nor was he about to go on a wilderness adventure, which the khaki safari suit, hiking boots and Tilley Endurables hat might lead one to believe. Beside him with her hands on her hips stood a young woman dressed totally in black, also wearing substantial boots. She leaned forward and planted a kiss on Jeffrey’s cheek. These two were my partners in the restoration of a 1960sera apartment building on the rim of a ravine in the valley of the Don River, which runs south through the city of Toronto and spills into Lake Ontario. Jeffrey was in charge of the outside. Tootie Beets was in charge of the inside, and I was in charge of Jeffrey and Tootie. An architect turned conservationist, a street girl turned building superintendent and a disgraced judge turned real estate investor. We were an unlikely but highly workable confederation of misfits. I returned my gaze to the letter.

  “Payment to the Fellowship of outstanding arrears will qualify you for reentry training, which can culminate in readmission to the bar.”

  I tried to count the years since I’d been a practicing lawyer. A decade as a judge in the criminal courts. The better part of an additional decade living as a vagrant in the same ravine Jeffrey now surveyed, followed by a slow recovery that finally saw me physically and financially restored. My life in the law had followed a bumpy and circuitous path, a rise to greatness and a fall from grace. In general it could be said that the law had served me no better than I had served the law.

  So why would I want to be a lawyer again?

  Why had I wanted to become one in the first place, nearly forty years earlier . . . ?

  Chapter 1

  My brother Michele’s gaze was riveted to the TV screen as the camera scanned the rows of senators and congressmen, then settled on the lined face of President Lyndon B. Johnson. “I am taking the step of addressing this unusual evening joint session of Congress in order to urge immediate passage of legislation to remove all illegal barriers to the voting rights of Negro Americans.”

  “Selma,” Michele muttered under his breath. “Remind the people about Selma.”

  “I’m missing my program,” our mother complained. “I waited all day and now you’ve got this on. Turn the channel.”

  “This is on every channel,” Michele said, not taking his eyes from the screen. “And so it should be. The whole world is watching Selma.”

  “The whole world would rather be watching I’ve Got a Secret,” my mother retorted. I tried to ignore the TV and the argument, too. I didn’t have time for panel shows or addresses to Congress, either. In the kitchen, I grabbed a glass of milk, gulped it down and headed for the back door. “Angelo!” My mother was beside me before I could step out into the cold, wet March night in 1965. “You eat. You gotta eat before you go someplace.” She shoved a plate of breaded cod toward me. She was capable of producing such food out of the air. I shook my head, smiled, brushed past her and out onto Clinton Street. Fat flakes of snow danced in the light from windows behind which other immigrant families played out their own mundane dramas. The snow hit the sidewalk as rain and I hit the college streetcar and rode it to Yonge Street, transferring to the subway. I exited at Queen and walked through the slick streets until I got to Lombard and the Toronto city morgue.

  I had no idea why I’d been summoned here and felt considerable irritation at having my studies interrupted. Nevertheless, I checked my watch and hastened my steps, running past Maxie’s Smoke Shop, Ideal Printing, Nu-Style Chesterfield. In the mist, the Gothic hulk of Fire Station Number Five rose in silhouette against the dull city lights, but the nearby building that housed the morgue was low, solid and perfectly rectangular, like a large burial casket. At the top of the stone steps that led to the thick wooden door, Gleason Everett Adams was pacing. His expensive fedora sat low on his handso
me brow and his beige trench coat cinched his trim waist. I pulled my own shabby coat a little tighter around my ample body and negotiated the stairs.

  Seeing me, Gleason stopped pacing and jerked his gold wristwatch up toward the light over the door.

  “Sorry I’m late, Gleason.”

  He frowned, nodded. He glanced in the direction of a nearby street lamp, beneath which sat his new Jaguar, its wet, dark green finish as sleek as the rainy street. “If you have to take the subway,” he said, “you have to take the subway. I got us an appointment for seven-thirty and it’s now seven forty-five, but then, we’re not as late as most of the people in here, are we?”

  The grim joke had an awkwardness totally out of keeping with Gleason’s usual glib repartee. I was about to ask him what was wrong when the door opened and a uniformed man, a guard of some sort, cigarette dangling from his mouth, stepped out, closing the door behind him. Despite our appointment, the guard seemed startled to see us. I shot Gleason a look, and he took the cue. “I have an appointment to see Chief Coroner Rosen at seven-thirty. We’re from the Law Faculty at the University—law students—and we . . .”

  The guard seemed flustered by Gleason’s little speech. He took a series of sharp, rapid drags on his cigarette, tossed it down and ground it out with his shoe. He fumbled with a ring of keys as if determined to select the one most capable of keeping us out of the squat building. Without a word, he opened the door just enough to slip back in and pulled it behind him. We could hear him shoot the bolt.

  Under ordinary circumstances, Gleason would have had plenty to say about this strange treatment, but at the exact moment the guard disappeared, a silent procession of three cars turned off Lombard Street and entered the wide metal gates on the west side of the morgue. One car was a yellow police cruiser, one was a long black limousine. The last car bore the insignia of the chief coroner’s office.

  Gleason flew down the steps and I followed. But by the time we reached the gates, the last of the three vehicles was disappearing into the darkness behind the morgue. Gleason rattled the high iron gate, but it had locked automatically. “Oh, forget it,” he said to no one in particular.

  “That didn’t get us anywhere,” I commented.

  Gleason dropped his hands to his sides and turned to face me. “Thank you for that information, Ellis Portal,” he said, sarcastically using my legal name. When away from my Italian neighborhood, I also got away from my Italian name, which was the same as my father’s, Angelo Portalese. “Point out the obvious. Bill by the hour. You’ve got the makings of a fine solicitor.”

  “Shut up,” I said defensively, but he ignored me, turned and gave the gate a final, futile shake. I followed as he stomped back up the stone stairs and raised his fist at the bolted door. If it had been his intention to knock, this proved unnecessary. Before he touched it, the door sprang open, the guard stepped out, and we were unceremoniously shown in.

  “The chief says he don’t want nobody on the steps,” the guard explained.

  I wondered how people were supposed to keep an appointment if they had to avoid being “on the steps,” but I didn’t ask. “Why are we here, Gleason?” I whispered, instead. If he heard me, he didn’t show it. Silently we were led to a rather grand staircase carpeted in red that curved toward an upper floor. Immediately beneath the staircase and to our right was a door opened just wide enough to show a small anteroom with the same stiff formality as the “lounge” in a funeral parlor. I realized with discomfort that this was where the bereaved waited to identify the dead bodies of relatives and friends.

  The mystery was beginning to make me nervous. Gleason fancied himself a trickster and was fond of practical jokes, but his demeanor was so uncharacteristically edgy, angry even, that I was afraid to demand an explanation for our being treated simultaneously as outcasts and guests in the home of the dead. As the guard rushed us up the stairs, I thought I heard a hushed word and observed a slight shift in the quality of the little anteroom’s light, as though some unseen occupant who had been seated had suddenly stood up, changing the arrangement of shadows.

  Gleason, as usual, was too impatient to look behind or to the side. His eyes were trained on the figure who awaited us on the second-floor landing, a tall, lean man in a white coat of the sort worn by doctors and lab technicians.

  “This way,” the man said to us with a nod. “I’m Dr. Slater, the night pathologist.” He appeared to dismiss the guard, who passed us and made his way down the second-floor hallway, pausing, it seemed to me, to sneer at us before he disappeared. We followed the white coat and ended up outside another wooden door, this one bearing a brass plaque that read, “Levi M. Rosen, Chief Coroner.” The name alone was enough to make me quail. Rosen was a controversial figure, an inquisitive, outspoken man whose disregard for the staid traditions of his office had wreaked havoc among his conservative colleagues.

  I suppose Gleason assumed we’d be announced, since he’d said that we were expected. Instead, we were instructed to remain outside the closed door while Dr. Slater went into Dr. Rosen’s office.

  It wasn’t hard to hear the rhythm of two voices coming from behind the door, though only a few words were comprehensible. Clearly, the easily inflamed Rosen was irritated. Clearly, the night pathologist was calming and conciliatory. The conversation paused for a moment. With jittery impatience, Gleason leaned closer to the door and put his ear to the wood. Reluctant at first, I eventually did the same. I distinctly heard five words. “As long as it’s B.” I had no idea what this meant and no opportunity to listen further. The door unexpectedly burst open, nearly knocking us off our feet. We sprang back and tried to act nonchalant.

  The pathologist didn’t seem to notice anything unusual in our behavior. He asked us to follow him and once again we did. We descended the carpeted stair and I hesitated a moment on the last step. From this angle I could see a raincoat folded on a red-upholstered chair in the formal parlor, but I saw no one, heard no voices. At the bottom of the stairs, we turned sharply right and paused before yet another wooden door guarded by our friend with the massive key ring. He selected a key, unlocked the door and led us into the netherworld.

  There was no rich carpet here. Directly in front of us a floor-to-ceiling wire-mesh gate about twenty feet high separated us from a long, narrow hallway lit at intervals by dim bulbs in wire protectors. Absurdly I wondered whether the dead were so rambunctious that they threatened the light fixtures.

  Our steps echoed on worn linoleum. Somewhere in the distance, something slammed. Metal on metal, a door or a drawer. A low constant hum like that of a refrigerator permeated the quiet.

  Off the dim central hall to the right, the gray expanse of wall with its enamel sheen was broken by a single wide door, which was open. When we passed it and I glanced in, I saw row upon row of shiny metal doors each about two feet square, the width, I suddenly realized, of the shoulders of a man. A rush of cold air escaped the room. The air smelled like raw meat, metallic and gamey.

  On the other side of the hall, to our left, were three more wide doors, all closed. I could see painted on them, in large black letters, A, B and C. Beyond the doors, at the end of the hall and facing us as we walked, loomed a final door, this one of corrugated metal on pulleys. I understood immediately that beyond this door lay the loading dock where corpses were brought in day and night.

  In front of this door stood two men. It was hard to see them clearly, but they seemed to be studying our approach. One had the characteristic slouch of a teenager who has suddenly attained unaccustomed height. He was wearing the same uniform as the key-bearing guard, though the jacket was too wide in the shoulders and the trousers too short. The other man wore a suit. When Gleason saw this man, he seemed to start, taking a step forward as if to greet him. But the pathologist put out his hand and stopped my friend from moving. The two figures at the end of the hall shifted, disappeared into the shadows.

  Of course, I expected our guide to show us into room B, but that is not what
happened. He walked past B and pushed open the door marked C. Gleason was walking slightly ahead of me and I could see him open his mouth as if to comment on the error, but the words stuck in his throat as he stopped in the doorway, silently gaping at the sight before us. I gave him a little push to get him to cross the threshold.

  It was a large room, maybe forty feet long and twenty feet wide, brightly lit and, at first glance, a repository of brilliant white: a white tile floor with drains, like a shower. White walls along which ranged long rows of glass-fronted white cabinets. White enamel tables. White racks lining one wall. And all along the sides of the room, empty gurneys covered in white sheets.

  Because of all this whiteness, the red sweater on the cadaver in the middle of the room was like a splash of blood on snow.

  With the emotionless precision of a man who is used to such things, the pathologist strode to the examination table and stood beside the corpse. Stumbling a little, Gleason followed and again I followed him. I was so curious I had almost forgotten that I had no idea what I was doing here. As I moved closer, I observed an oval rack that circled above the table, the way a shower curtain rod circles an old-fashioned bathtub. From the rack were suspended stainless-steel gadgets gleaming in the bright white light of the room: pressure gauges, forceps, tongs, various sizes and shapes of scissors, a saw. Lengths of rubber hose led from the table to steel cylinders beneath. Beside one of the cylinders sat a tape recorder, the two large circular reels still but waiting. The first tool Slater grabbed from above was a microphone. He attached the mike to a clip on his lapel and I marveled that the mike could move with him as he circled the body on the table.

  Both Gleason and I stood several feet away from the table, but close enough to see that this had been no ordinary death. I knew enough about autopsies to realize that the pathologist would begin by describing the body. Even though I was looking directly at it, I felt curiosity about how the doctor would put this startling sight into words.