This Thing of Darkness. Barbara Fradkin
and frizzy. Picture Einstein.”
This time a faint glimmer of recognition shone in Tolner’s eyes, but still he shook his head. “Can’t you show me a picture? Even of the corpse?”
“Too much facial damage.”
Tolner winced. “Oy.”
“You have an idea, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. You blinked.”
“Nothing that I’m going to tell you based on ‘Einstein’s hair’. What makes you think he was even Jewish?”
Green extracted the evidence bag containing the Star of David from his pocket. “He had this in his possession.”
Tolner took the plastic bag and held it at arms’ length. He squinted, and Green saw another flicker of recognition. “Ahh.”
“What do you mean, ahh?”
“Just...” Tolner lifted his shoulders in a classic Yiddish shrug. “This I recognize.”
“Does it fit with the Einstein hair?”
“Yes. Damn it, yes. And with the out-of-date Harry Rosen suit.” Tolner handed back the evidence bag. “Sam Rosenthal. Been a member of the shul for years, although he doesn’t come very often. Busy man, back in the days when I knew him. Travelled a lot to medical conferences, lectures and stuff.”
“So he’s a doctor?”
“Psychiatrist. Very well-respected years ago, when he was at the height of his career. Got a little wonky near the end, but then half those guys are wonky to start with, so it wasn’t far to go.”
Green had been jotting notes. “Wonky how?”
Tolner hesitated, and Green suspected he was weighing the wisdom of discretion against his love of gossip. He brushed at some specks of dirt on his T-shirt. “This is from congregants, you understand. When his wife was dying, he got Eastern religion and started meditating and searching for the deeper meaning of life. I gather he started to question all the drugs his psychiatric colleagues were prescribing. Claimed we had to respect nature’s diversity and the patient’s right to be different. Became the darling of the new age types, I think, but his colleagues were less amused.”
“You said his wife is dead?”
“About ten years ago. Her death was a long ordeal— ” He broke off, as if remembering Green’s mother.
“We’re going to need DNA for a positive ID. Does he have any other family?”
“A son somewhere in the States.” Tolner nodded towards the west.“Sam used to live in one of those mansions on Range Road overlooking the Rideau River—it’s an embassy now— but he sold it and gave half the proceeds to some group researching meditation, and he bought a falling apart Victorian dump in Sandy Hill near the university. He lives in a cramped one-bedroom on the bottom floor and rents the rest of it out to students for bobkes. I often see him out walking along Rideau Street.”
“Was he still practising?”
Tolner shrugged. “He might have been, but I’d be surprised. He’d be up around seventy-five by now.”
“Do you know the son’s name?”
Tolner shook his head. “Like I said, he moved to the States to study right out of high school, and he never came back. That was maybe thirty years ago.”
“Study what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sam wasn’t very active in the synagogue and his son was even less so. I met the son exactly once, at his mother’s funeral. Didn’t even stick around for the Shiva.”
“Can you remember any details? A first name maybe?”
“David? John? Some common name.”
Green sighed. There were probably hundreds of John Rosenthals listed in the United States. He had to hope that a search of Sam Rosenthal’s apartment would yield a lead.
“One more question,” he said. “Did Sam Rosenthal have any enemies or recent disputes with anyone? Assuming it is Sam, can you think of anyone who might have done this?”
Tolner had leaned down to yank a weed from the edge of the walkway. He straightened slowly, squinting into the slanting afternoon sun for a few long seconds. Finally he shrugged. “He spent years dealing with the mentally ill. Maybe one of them? He could be a little... arrogant, you know how doctors can get. Maybe some punk accosted him on the street, and he didn’t give in quick enough. What a crying shame. It’s always the good guys, isn’t it? Like the coyote, nature’s bad guys are too wily ever to be victims.”
Green could have phoned the information in to the station. It was his day off and, as everyone kept reminding him, he was an inspector, whose job was to oversee and administer, not to scrabble around in the streets unearthing leads, but he was curious to see their new Sergeant Levesque in action to reassure himself that she hadn’t booked off early or settled in to conduct the investigation with her feet up on her desk.
The Major Crimes squad room was deserted except for the familiar sight of Bob Gibbs bent over his computer. The young detective’s head shot up in alarm at his superior officer’s arrival, but he looked relieved when Green asked for the sergeant.
“She’s out, sir. Checking s-security tape from the pawn shop on Rideau Street.”
“Has Staff Sergeant Sullivan been in this afternoon?”
Gibbs shook his head, and Green suppressed his frustration as he pondered his next move. He felt restless and dissatisfied. So many dangling unknowns. He should go home to spend the rest of Sunday with his family. He could simply phone Sergeant Levesque to pass on the information on the victim’s possible identity. Or he could check out just one more little piece of information to round out the story before he handed it off to her.
His little alcove office smelled stuffy as he squeezed inside and booted up his computer. Stacks of rumpled reports, files and official manuals overflowed the bookcase beside his desk and teetered on the guest chair just inside the door.
In the Canada 411 online directory, there were two listings for S Rosenthal in the Ottawa area, but neither were anywhere near Sandy Hill. Well, well, he thought. Dr. Samuel Rosenthal might have an unlisted phone number. Not so unusual for a psychiatrist, he supposed, since like cops, they would deal with the troubled and potentially unpredictable underbelly of society.
He tried a standard Google search—Samuel Rosenthal, psychiatrist—and received 442 hits. He added Ottawa to narrow the search down to 164 hits. A quick scan of these revealed that Dr. Rosenthal had been a prolific author of academic papers on depression, schizophrenia, the role of stress, and the efficacy of various unpronounceable drugs. He had given public lectures, sat on the boards of mental health and community agencies, and taught at the university medical school. Almost all the references were more than ten years old, but the most recent ones dealt with drug efficacy in the treatment of adjustment disorders in adolescence.
What the hell is an adolescent adjustment disorder, Green wondered in astonishment. Is it a label for kids like me, who’d run a little wild in rebellion against the obsessive overprotection of panicky parents? Out of curiosity, he clicked on the reference but couldn’t access the article without subscribing to the journal. The brief abstract that preceded the article, however, was illuminating.
Adjustment disorders are by definition short-lived reactions to stress, characterized by mood and anxiety symptoms or acting-out behaviour. Despite the well-documented stress of adolescence, the diagnosis of adjustment disorder in this population is generally overlooked by mental health practitioners in favor of old standbys like anxiety disorder, mood disorder and even the major psychoses, thus squandering