“Skip?”
She spun the file back toward Wingate. She’d idly flipped up two pages while she was thinking aloud, but now she creased them down and held her finger against a name on the third page. “What the hell is that?”
“Cameron’s arrest record.”
“No… that.”
He leaned in. “Oh shit.”
Her finger was on the name Constable D. Goodman. “What’s the likelihood that there was a Constable D. Goodman and a Detective D. Goodman working here pretty much at the same time?”
“Pretty low.”
“So constable in 2001, detective in 2002?”
“There’s nothing strange about making detective, Hazel.”
“But she’s a beat cop with a link to a future suicide and then she makes detective and catches the case? A case that-later- at least two people think was botched?”
He started reading the file again. Cameron had been arrested too many times to count between 1998 and 2002, all misdemeanour drug busts. The ones made in ’98 and ’99 and a couple final arrests in 2002 were by a series of different officers, but almost all of the many dozens that were made in 2000 and 2001 were by Goodman. James locked eyes with Hazel. “So what’s the connection, then? Are we looking for Goodman? You think Goodman murdered Cameron?”
“No, James. This Goodman arrested Brenda Cameron -” she craned her neck to look at the rap sheet “- like eighty times in a two-year period. Never charged her. Just kept her two hours, three hours, overnight once in a while. Why?”
“I don’t know!” He sounded exasperated.
“You can’t stop a dumb kid like this from destroying herself. But you can slow her down. Goodman was getting Cameron off the street. Giving her a cup of coffee and telling her there was help if she wanted it.”
“She was protecting her.”
Hazel could see it in his eyes. He was getting to the place she’d already got to.
“Oh Jesus…”
“Go on…”
“Dana’s a man’s name too, isn’t it?”
“There you go,” she said.
“Bellocque.”
She smiled at him tightly. “It’s not chocolate and roses, is it? Goodman’s working the Corridor and there’s a few of them out there that break his heart. Then he makes detective and next thing he knows, he finds one of them in the drink. Comes up a suicide, he’s not happy, and he’s still working the case. He must have pissed your boss off pretty bad to get turfed, too.”
“Why’d he try for detective if he had his hands full in the Corridor? If he was some kind of Mother Goose down there, why would he opt to leave the beat?”
“Maybe he wanted to go after the cause? Maybe he got kicked upstairs. I don’t know.”
Wingate had a far-off look. “And does he think it’s a murder because he can’t accept that someone he was protecting slipped past him? Or does he really have a case?”
“He’s convinced Joanne Cameron that he has a case.”
“Has he convinced you?”
She stared at him without blinking for a few moments. “No,” she said at last. “Not yet. And I don’t see the connection to Eldwin either. But I have to admit…”
“What?”
“He has my attention now.” She stood up. “I have to get back to that house.”
“But wait -”
“No. We’re there. We’ve got to the place they want us to get to. A man’s life depends on convincing them we’re working this.”
“But are we?” asked Wingate.
“Goodman doesn’t have to know our angle. Right now, I want to know if this really is a cold case, or if we’re just dealing with an obsessed cop. But either way, I have to get to them. I have to hear the rest of it from them.”
He was looking at all the paper on the table, his hands on either side of it like he was going to gather it into a ball. “What if you’re still doing exactly what they want you to do? What if it’s a trap?”
“What if it’s a trap? Of course it’s a trap, James. But I can’t get out of it until I’m in it.”
“Skip -”
“They’ve known our next move before we have ever since they sunk that mannequin in Gannon Lake. The rules aren’t going to change now simply because we’ve figured them out. You just keep a line open and be ready to move.”
25
Toles noticed her on her way out. “That’s it?” he asked.
“Not quite,” she said. “I need a break. The files are…”
“Hard to read,” he said. “I get you. You must not see a lot of that kind of stuff where you’re at.”
“Not much,” she said. “Listen, there a Tim’s anywhere near here?”
“Go out that door and turn right, left, or go straight. You’ll hit one in less than a block.”
“Thanks,” she said. She had her hand on the door when she turned back to him. “Detective Toles?”
“Yep?”
“You ever work the Corridor?”
“Oh yeah. Rite of passage for anyone in Nineteen or Twenty-one.”
“So you must have known a Constable Goodman at one point?”
“I knew him a little, more by reputation. I was over at Nineteen when he was working the Corridor down near Mercer and Peter streets. Why’re you interested in him?”
“Just his name was on a couple of arrest reports is all.”
“His name would be on a lot of arrest reports. He was an occupational hazard down there if you were dealing or buying.”
“Yeah,” she said, keeping her tone even, “I gather he had his favourites.”
“You do a lot of repeat business working a patch like that. A lot of sad, hard cases you just want to send home to their mothers, but they keep coming back. You learn to keep an eye out for the really hopeless ones.”
“So it’s not unusual to, like, adopt one or two of them?”
“You’re lucky if your heart bleeds for only two. Goodman made something of an art of it. I still see kids down there wearing his necklaces.” She was careful not to react. “Yeah,” said Toles, laughing lightly, “he gave them keepsakes, thought if he marked them in some way, it would send a message to the bad-asses to leave them alone.”
“Did it work?”
“Well, we weren’t bad-asses in Nineteen, but if we picked one of his stray lambs up we’d know to call him. But you learn no matter what you do, most of them end up where they end up, right?”
“Right,” said Hazel.
She went out the door and walked right to the Tim’s on the corner, trying to keep her pace slow and even, just in case someone was watching, but inside, she was bursting. She got herself a coffee with two creams and two sugars, then went to the corner of Richmond and John and flagged a cab. “Number thirty-two, Washington Avenue,” she said.
She changed her mind on the way and had the driver drop her on Huron Street and she walked in, the nearly empty coffee cup catching the wind in her hand. It was lunchtime and the street was quiet, the great chestnut trees making a cool, dark canopy to walk under. She kept to the even-numbered side of the street and drifted down to where she could stand across from number thirty-two. It stood on its patch of earth, looking very much like the houses on either side of it, pretty and unremarkable little Victorians, typical downtown Toronto houses, once grand, now rundown, chopped into “units” and inhabited by a rotating cast of characters of every description. But was number thirty-two different? Had it seen a murder? Did it have a truth to impart if the right person asked the right question? And was she the right person?
She crossed the street and walked up the path to the steps that led to number thirty-two’s door. There was no hint that anyone knew she was there. Caro’s window remained closed; there was no sound from inside the house. She checked the name list beside the door and confirmed that a J. Cameron did, in fact, live in that main-floor apartment to her right. She pressed her face to the window, as Hutchins had on Saturday morning. Yellowing venetians with no more than two millimetres of opening between them covered the windows. She pushed her right eye against the glass and tried to see into the space beyond, but all she could make out was an opening in the far wall, a passage into the room beyond. This could mean the front room of the apartment was empty or that she simply couldn’t see what was in that room. It seemed important right now to determine whether someone lived in that space beyond the venetians or not. If Cameron lived there, in a kind of ongoing memorial to her daughter, or if it was a staging point of some kind. The former made her feel safer, but she felt certain it was the latter. The place had been reserved for a form of theatre and she’d been invited to see the show.