This Thing of Darkness. Barbara Fradkin
your memory.
But then he saw Nadif ’s door open, and two cops came out. Plain clothes, not uniforms. Shit, what did that mean? He watched as they stood on the sidewalk looking up and down the street, before one of them pointed straight at Omar’s house, and they started this way.
The asshole had ratted him out after all.
Omar dropped the curtain and pressed himself against his bedroom wall, hoping to be invisible. Maybe he could hide and pretend he wasn’t there. But he had three stupid little brothers downstairs who’d be happy to show the cops the way, and a hardass father who always believed in paying the price for all the bad you’d done and then some. His father had seen the blood. Knew he’d come home at three a.m., drunk, wasted and puking his guts out. His father had barely said a word to him all weekend; the cold shoulder was his favourite father-son thing, and he’d forbidden Omar’s mother to talk to him either. Not that she did much anyway. But the old man would turn him in over a fucking marijuana joint, for chrissakes.
He was beginning to feel that slow burn that happened every time he thought about his father, and just then the doorbell rang. Squeals of excitement from his moron brothers, a yell for silence from his father, then nothing but voices in the hall, too quiet for him to hear. Footsteps scrambling on the stairs, the bedroom door bursting open, two brothers bouncing up and down, excited because the cops were here. They were asking for him. Dad was talking to them.
Omar clamped his hands over his brothers’ mouths. “Just wait!” he whispered. “Don’t make the cops’ job easier. Let’s see what Dad’s going to do.”
He signalled his brothers to stay put, and he sneaked out of the room onto the landing, then edged down the first few steps of the narrow staircase. He stopped just above the stair that creaked. The voices in the hall were clear. His father didn’t yell, but his voice could crack stone it was so cold.
“Sorry, gentlemen,” he was saying.“I wish I could help you. I’ve raised my boys to respect the police, although Lord knows that’s hard around here sometimes. Lots of temptations and problem kids to lead a boy astray. But Omar’s not here at the moment. I sent him on an errand to the store. Lentils. My wife’s making lunch, and suddenly there are no lentils.”
Omar heard the easy humour in his father’s voice, like one guy talking to another about the whims of women. But the cop that answered had no humour in his voice.“When will he be back?”
“Well, my wife likes a particular kind of lentils, so he may have to go all the way to Vanier. On his bicycle. I told him not to come back without the lentils, so it may be an hour. What’s this about?”
“Can you tell us where he was Saturday night?”
“Right here, in his room.”
“He didn’t go out any time between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.?”
“He was here doing homework, and I saw to it personally. Twenty years old and still in adult high school because he thought he’d take the scenic route through his education. I want to make sure he crosses the finish line. That’s the least a father should do.”
“So he was here all night? You’re sure of that?”
“Absolutely.”
Omar heard that dangerous little edge creeping into his father’s voice, but the cops wouldn’t recognize it. There was silence in the hall. Omar realized his heart was almost breaking his ribs. What the hell was this about? Dad, who hammered them on the head about honour and honesty— Dad was lying? Bold-faced, calm, friendly. Lying, like it was natural as day.
“We would still like to question him about an incident his friends were involved in,” the officer said. “Here’s my card. Have him give us a call as soon as he gets back.”
“Absolutely, officers. I’ll pass it on. What incident is this?”
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Adams. Have him give us a call.” The door squeaked open and closed again. Omar found he was holding his breath. Waiting for his father’s next move.
It wasn’t long in coming. Omar had barely made it back to his room when his father was on him, hauling him by the ear into the bathroom. “You little turd,” he hissed. “You’re going to scrub this room until every speck of dirt and whatever else you brought home Saturday night is gone. Then you’re going to scrub it again. You’re a disgrace, and if you bring trouble to your mother and brothers, I’ll cut you off like you never existed. Don’t think you’ll ever see us or a single dime of support ever again. You were here all Saturday night studying for that math credit you’ve been working on. And if your worthless gangsta friends say different, they’re lying. Got that? Lying. That’s your story, or you’ll wish you’d never been born.”
I already wish that, Omar thought through the pain ricocheting through his head. I’ve wished that ever since I was old enough to wish.
Sergeant Levesque was a good actress. She stood in the middle of Sam Rosenthal’s living room, surrounded by stacks of files and textbooks, her hands on her hips and her head cocked. Her lips smiled, but her eyes smouldered, midnight blue and threatening. Like a distant thunderstorm, Green thought, chuckling at the image that had leaped to his mind.
“Inspector Green,” she said. “Not much to report yet. We just got the search warrant, and we’ve been here only a half hour.”
“I know,” he replied blithely. “I’m just visiting on my lunch hour.” He looked around at the work already done—drawers opened, filing cabinets emptied and cushions overturned— and felt a twinge of frustration. He remembered when he searched a victim’s home, back in the days when he didn’t sit on committees or jump to fulfill every whim from the brass above, but instead spent his shift on the road, running his own cases and calling his own shots.
Back then he would have spent half an hour just studying the apartment, getting a sense of the occupant, sketching and absorbing impressions before he disturbed a single thing. Sullivan used to call it “communing with the dead”, and he wasn’t far off. The victim told him a lot in those thirty minutes, from what pictures he chose to hang where and what books he had on display to what kitchen utensils were near at hand.
In most homicide cases, the victim’s identity was key to his death. In this one, Sergeant Levesque thought it irrelevant. She might be right, but it disturbed Green’s sense of due respect. He began his own walkabout, trying to picture the room as Rosenthal would have left it. Everything had an old, slightly-scuffed appearance, but the man had clearly once had money as well as taste. A dining room set of mahogany and velvet was shoehorned into the small nook allotted to it off the living room. An antique roll-top desk with leaded glass bookshelves and cubbyholes for stationery and supplies sat beside the bay window, and matching wing chairs bracketed the cavernous Victorian fireplace. A Persian rug in faded blue and red tones covered the scuffed oak floor.
The man had chosen a soft blue paint throughout the apartment to complement the many paintings that hung in every space. Green was no expert in art but recognized an eclectic mix of styles and subjects. Some were from Israel— a soft watercolour of the Jerusalem skyline, a vibrant acrylic of Jews dancing at the Western Wall. Some were rugged Canadian landscapes of pine trees and lakes. But the most striking were the portraits. Not happy or posed but raw and real. People lost in thought, lonely, isolated and in pain.
Rosenthal had spent his whole career dealing with human pain, yet he had not created an oasis in his own home. His home reflected his experience with life. Raw, lost, lonely. None of the artists were recognizable names, at least to Green, but he suspected Rosenthal had not bought the paintings for their investment value but for the feelings they evoked. Love of his spiritual homeland, awe of the Canadian wilderness, and above all, compassion for human pain.
In contrast to the living area, which was stuffed with treasures, the bedroom was stark, as if it were not a place he enjoyed. Tiny and