The Brutal Heart Page 4

  “So you’re home free.”

  “No one’s ever home free, Jo. That’s why the cops keep burrowing in. Tonight after Debbie was finished making nice, her buddies showed me their crime scene photos.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Just in a sharing mood, I guess. Truthfully, I imagine they wanted to watch my reaction to seeing Cristal.”

  “I hope you kept Sean with you.”

  “I did. Over the years, I’ve probably instructed at least two thousand clients not to say anything to the cops, but there’s something about staring at pictures of a dead body that loosens the tongue. Anyway, I didn’t screw up, but there were some shots of Cristal that are going to stay with me for a while.” Zack’s body tensed and I dug my fingers more deeply into the spaces along his spine. “She was young and she’s dead,” he said. “That’s bad enough, but there was one thing that really got me. Whoever killed Cristal went to the trouble of placing a book on her chest. It was that novel you and Ned talked about the last time we had dinner.”

  “Portrait of a Lady,” I said.

  “Right,” Zack said. “Debbie’s tough, but even she was taken aback at the cruelty of that gesture.”

  My heart lurched. “The night we had dinner, Ned told me he’d given a copy of the book to a young friend who was determined to make something of her life. He said his friend was like the character Isabel Archer – too good for her world.”

  I squeezed some more oil into my hand and began to rub the scarred area at the base of Zack’s spine. His upper body was powerful, but his lower spine was criss-crossed with scarring from botched surgeries that failed to fix what a drunk’s car had done to him forty-three years ago when he was coming home from baseball practice.

  I smoothed oil on the raised tissue of his scars. “What was Cristal like?”

  “To be honest,” he said. “I don’t know. When I saw the tape of her with Ned, I was really surprised. Not at the sex, but at the way she was with him: affectionate, attentive, the kind of young wife he must have remembered. With me, there was none of that.”

  “What was she like with you?”

  “She was exactly what I wanted. All business,” he said wryly. “Your turn now.” Zack pushed himself to a sitting position, then used his arms to inch himself back so the pillows piled against the headboard supported him. It was an awkward process, and once at the beginning of our marriage, I’d offered to help. He’d been curt, and I hadn’t offered again.

  When Zack was settled, he took a deep breath. “I’m ready. Move on in.” He picked up the massage oil I’d given him for his birthday. “Okay if I use this stuff or do you want something else?”

  I sniffed my fingers. “Rosemary, jasmine, and a hint of wood and ocean breeze. At least that’s what the website promised. Can’t ask for more than that.” I removed my pyjama top. Zack kissed my shoulder. “Wood and ocean breezes aren’t as sexy as the perfume you’re wearing.”

  “I’m not wearing perfume,” I said.

  Zack kissed the hollow of my neck. “I hope you know I feel like shit about that relationship with Cristal.”

  I reached over and turned out the light. “It was another time,” I said. “Everything’s different now.” I kissed him and slid down in the bed.

  Zack moved beside me and caressed my breast. “You’re going to miss out on your massage.”

  I slid my hand over his nipples. “A massage is only a massage,” I said. “But a good cigar is a smoke.”

  Our lovemaking that night was urgent, as if we thought the heat of physical passion could burn away the ugliness of the last two hours. Usually, when the sex was that good, we both fell asleep afterwards, but that night, sleep did not come easily to me. I lay watching Zack’s chest rise and fall and thought about our life together. We had both embarked on middle age when we met, but perhaps because it had been the right time for us both, we had negotiated the tricky labours of day-to-day life together with surprising ease. My first husband had been a politician, whose star was still rising when he was killed on a snowy Saskatchewan highway. We had a young family, and before his death, I was the woman behind the man. Suddenly, there was no man for me to stand behind. Initially, I was devastated, then I was terrified, but ultimately, I’d learned to stand alone. Zack had always been a lone wolf. Abandoned by his father, dismissed by his mother, until we met, his emotional life began and ended with his work and with the legal partners he’d known since their first year together at the College of Law. No one had been more surprised than we were when we fell in love.

  Six months after we met, we were standing in front of the altar at St. Paul’s Cathedral exchanging vows and wedding bands. As the dean pronounced us husband and wife, the old wives’ warning crossed my mind: “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” For once, the old wives had been wrong. Until we met, Zack had travelled through life unencumbered, and I feared he would chafe at family life, but he gulped up domesticity like a starving man. Having kids, owning dogs, learning how to run a household were new adventures for Zack, but he wanted to be part of everything. Grateful for the sweetness of our new existence, we were careful never to let everyday contentment slip through our grasp. But that night, it wasn’t the sweetness of the day that I remembered, it was Zack’s bleak statement that we are hanged by the loose threads of our life. It was a truth I had seen played out too often, and despite the afterglow of lovemaking, I felt a thrill of existential terror. I moved closer to my husband, put my head on his chest, and listened to the rhythm of his heart until I, too, fell asleep.

  The next morning when the dogs and I got back from our run, the newspaper was in the mailbox. I picked it up and headed for the back lawn so Willie and Pantera could rub some of the mud off their feet. While they chased each other around the yard, I scanned the Leader-Post. As they would for more days than anyone could have anticipated, Ginny Monaghan and Cristal Avilia dominated the front page.

  The story about Ginny focused not surprisingly on her daughters. The paper had printed side-by-side photos of the girls with each of their warring parents. The picture of Ginny and her daughters had come from her campaign literature. The twins were immaculately groomed, but their smiles were tight, and I remembered the misery of getting our kids to pose for the requisite family campaign portrait. The photo of the girls with Jason Brodnitz was a candid shot of the three of them skiing, ruddy with cold and pleasure. In the battle of the photo op, Ginny had lost round one.

  There was no picture of Cristal Avilia, and the story was sketchy on details – a thirty-four-year-old woman had become the city’s sixth homicide victim of the year. Cristal Eden Avilia had been found dead outside her condo in the warehouse district shortly after 6:00 p.m. Wednesday. The police were not releasing the cause of death. Anyone with information about her death was asked to call police.

  I dropped the newspaper on the picnic table. No use starting the day with a reminder of the complexities of the outside world. I called the dogs. “Come on, you two, let’s go inside and say good morning to our big sparkly top banana.”

  When I walked into the kitchen, it seemed the universe was unfolding as it should. The coffee was brewed; the juice was poured; the porridge was made; and Zack was sitting at the breakfast table thumbing his BlackBerry, wholly absorbed. I never tired of my husband’s face. He was a handsome man: balding, thick-browed, and dark-eyed, with a generous, sensuous mouth and a vertical fold, like a bloodhound, in his right cheek. In court he could freeze an opponent with his barracuda smile, but at home his mouth softened and his smile was melting. The dogs loped over to him, and I kissed the top of his head. He flicked his BlackBerry off. “Breakfast is ready, our daughter is safe in her bed, and you and the dogs are here. Life is good.”

  “You bet,” I said. I filled the dog bowls.

  Zack watched with awe as Willie and Pantera inhaled their food. “Imagine loving any food as much as they love that stuff,” he said.

  “And it’s the same thing, day in, day out.�
�� I read the label on the sack. “Ground yellow corn, poultry by-product meal, animal fat preserved with mixed-tochopherols, animal digest…”

  Zack frowned. “What the hell is animal digest?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.” I brought our coffee over to the table and began ladling out the porridge. “Mmm,” I said. “Cashews – my lucky day. So what’s with all the messages? It’s only a little after seven.”

  Zack sipped his coffee. “It seems that Cristal had many clients. Judging from my messages, a lot of them are lawyers.”

  “If they’re lawyers, why don’t they talk to someone from their own firms?”

  “Because the lawyers in their own firms are respectable, and they’ve done something they’re ashamed of. Sometimes only the Prince of Darkness will do.”

  “Is that why Ned sought you out at the end?”

  Zack sipped his coffee. “I guess, and isn’t that a hell of a note? He’d been partners with Doug Meinhart and Gerry Loftus for fifty years, but when he decided to end his life he couldn’t go to them because he’d indulged in a common sex act and some desperate fantasy.” Zack drained his juice. “Not nice stuff, according to the rigorous standards of Osler Meinhart and Loftus. Do you know that every Friday for fifty years the partners and staff there have gathered in their boardroom to have a glass of pale amontillado sherry. Ned told me once they look forward to it all week. Jesus, what a bunch of bloodless sticks.” Zack dug his spoon into his porridge. “Anyway, that explains why Ned came to me.”

  “Does it ever bother you that you’re not Atticus Finch?”

  Zack’s spoon stopped in mid-air. “No, because I don’t know who he is.”

  “The lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck played him in the movie.”

  “Whoa, Gregory Peck.” Zack’s tone was sardonic. “So I’m guessing that Atticus Finch was noble, and that he won his case.”

  “No, he lost his case, but he lost nobly.”

  Zack swallowed his porridge. “Maybe if he’d been willing to get his hands dirty, he would have won.”

  I didn’t respond, and Zack looked at me hard. “So does it bother you that I’m not Atticus Finch?”

  I met his gaze. “I’m getting used to living on the edge,” I said. “Want some toast?”

  “No time. I have to be in court this morning. And I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do.”

  “Is it a big case?”

  Zack shook his head. “Nope. Simple assault. Remember that woman who punched the mayor in the nose? It was in the news a couple of months ago.”

  “The homeless woman,” I said. “She was protesting the gentrification project in the warehouse district.”

  “Right,” Zack said. “Well, that’s my client. Her name is Francesca Pope, and she’s schizophrenic. The day of the incident, she was off her meds. She is quite literally not guilty by reason of insanity. She really didn’t understand what she was doing when she assaulted that officious prick.”

  “So you can get her off?”

  “Without breaking a sweat, but therein lies the problem. If I argue she’s unfit to stand trial, the Crown will go along with me, and she’ll be committed to the hospital in North Battleford.”

  “Wouldn’t that be the best thing for her? She’d be cared for, and she’d get treatment.”

  “And she’d be locked up, which is exactly what Francesca doesn’t want because she’s afraid they’ll take her bears away.”

  “Her bears?”

  “She has a backpack full of stuffed bears. She tells me they’re called Care Bears.”

  “Mieka used to collect those when she was little.”

  “I hope they were in better shape than these. The smell of them just about knocks me out. But gross as they are, they are Francesca’s treasure. Really, Jo, those Care Bears are like her kids. Try to think of it in those terms, and you can understand why she’s so frightened of being locked up.”

  “But, Zack, if she’s a danger…”

  “She isn’t. She’s no more a danger than you are, but the mayor was annoyed because the bears were ruining his picture, so he kicked them out of the way.”

  “So you’re going to try to get her off?”

  “That’s what she wants. The Crown will want to send her to North Battleford for treatment, but there aren’t many spaces. She’ll have to wait, and in the meantime she’ll go to Pine Grove and be thrown in with the general population. She’ll be housed and fed and her meds will be administered, but there’ll be no treatment. Pine Grove is a tense place, Jo, full of people who are quick to judge and quick to take advantage – just about the worst possible atmosphere you could imagine for a schizophrenic.”

  “And the alternative is the street.”

  “Right, where there’s no one to take care of her or make sure she has her medication, but where she will have her bears.” Zack swept a hand across his eyes. “So which door would you choose, Ms. Shreve?

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, luckily it’s not your problem,” he said. “Anything going on tonight?”

  “We have that meeting about the Farewell at Taylor’s school.”

  “Jeez, I almost forgot. But I’m prepared. Taylor told me exactly how to vote.”

  I smiled. “Did she now? So, are you going to fill me in?”

  “Let’s see.” Zack squeezed his eyes shut in concentration. “No on semi-formal dress because last year the boys kept pretending to hang themselves with their ties. No on a PowerPoint presentation of baby pictures, and no on having the principal read lame poems about the future. Yes on ham, yes on Nanaimo bars, and yes on getting the class picture taken at Waterfall Park.”

  “You’re amazing,” I said.

  “Especially since when I was in Grade Eight, there weren’t any ceremonies when we made it to high school. The teachers just booted us out the door.”

  “And look how well you turned out,” I said.

  “Any complaints?”

  “Just the same old lament. I wish you didn’t work so hard.”

  “I’m cutting back. I’ve turned down a couple of big cases lately.”

  “Alleluia,” I said. “So are you finally going to start handing off some of your files to Sean?”

  Zack shook his head. “No, not to Sean. I have somebody else in mind, but we haven’t had a chance to talk, so nothing’s official.”

  “That’s a surprise,” I said. “Have you told Sean?”

  “Yeah. I told him last night when we were driving back from the cop shop.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “Not great. He didn’t throw me out of the car or anything, but he was disappointed.”

  “Understandably,” I said. “I’m sure he thought he was the heir apparent. He’s been working with you for a long time.”

  “True, and while he was working with me, I was able to get a pretty good idea of his capabilities.”

  “Good enough for an associate but not for a partner?”

  “Yup. Sean is competent, but he’s not partner material.”

  “That’s sad,” I said. “He’s devoted to you.”

  “I’m not having him euthanized, Jo. As I reminded Sean last night, he has options. He can go to another firm or he can stay on as a senior associate at Falconer Shreve and eat what he kills.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Right now, Sean gets a percentage of his billables and if his billables are high, he gets a bonus. As a senior associate, he’d get to keep pretty much everything he brought in.” Zack raised his hands, palms up. “He eats what he kills.”

  I shuddered. “That terminology’s a little brutal, isn’t it?”

  Zack pushed his chair back from the table. “Life is brutal. Madeleine could tell you that. On the five occasions she and I watched March of the Penguins, she alerted me to the line, ‘Not all penguins survive.’ ”

  After we’d cleared away our breakfast things, Zack went to shower and dress
and I went to Taylor’s room to get her moving. She was a girl who loved creature comforts, and her bedroom caught the morning sun. Nested in her sheets with the sunshine warm on her face and her cats, Bruce and Benny, at her feet, Taylor had many reasons for staying in bed, but even more reasons for getting up. I kissed her hair. “Time to get up,” I said.

  She threw back her sheets and bolted upright. The hormones were kicking in. “Tonight’s the meeting about the Farewell. I am soooooo excited.”

  “I guess we should start thinking about what you’re going to wear,” I said.

  “I know what I’m not going to wear,” Taylor said.

  “That’s a start,” I said. “So what are you not going to wear?”

  “The same thing everybody else is wearing: sparkly T-shirt, short ruffly skirt, and sandals with plastic flowers.”

  I sat on the bed beside her. “You sound like your mum. When we were in high school, we were both invited to the Battalion Ball at Upper Canada College. Your mother knew that all the girls would be wearing little pearl earrings, pearl necklaces, strapless pastel dresses with tulle skirts, and shoes with illusion heels so they wouldn’t be taller than their dates.

  Taylor moved closer. “So what did she wear?”

  “A slinky black silk dress with a high neck and long sleeves. She also wore spike-heeled shoes that made her about six inches taller than the boy she was with. He didn’t care. Every time he looked at her, he just about fainted because he couldn’t believe he was with such a knockout.”

  It had been a long time since Taylor curled up on my knee, but that morning she put her arms around my neck and moved in close. “I guess you don’t have a picture of her at that dance.”

  “No, Taylor, I don’t. I’ve kept a lot of other pictures of your mum. Whenever you’re ready to look at them, you let me know.”

  Taylor nodded. “I’ve always just liked looking at the art she made.” She drew closer. “That’s been enough.”

  For once, Taylor and I didn’t hurry our time together. We each had our own thoughts, and we both realized moments like this had become finite. Taylor was the one who broke our reverie. “I’d better get ready for school,” she said. “At the Farewell, I’m actually getting some dorky prize for attendance.”