Do or Die

Barbara Fradkin

Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Fradkin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

Cover and title page art: Christopher Chuckry

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
for our publishing program.

RendezVous Crime
an imprint of Napoleon & Company
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
www.napoleonandcompany.com

3rd printing
Printed in Canada

12 11 10 09 08       5 4 3

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Fradkin, Barbara Fraser, date—

Do or die

An Inspector Green Mystery
ebook digital ISBN: 978-1-894917-94-0

I. Title.

PS8561.R226D6 2000                              C813'.6                                C00-931968-9
PR9199.3.F65D6 2000

I am grateful to the many people who provided support and assistance to me in this endeavour over the years. I'd particularly like to thank the members of the Ladies' Killing Circle, my critiquing group, Madona Skaff, Jane Tun and Marguerite McDonald and
Storyteller Magazine
for their support of my work, as well as my publisher, Sylvia McConnell, and my editor, Allister Thompson, for their belief in me. A special thanks to Constable Mark Cartwright of the Ottawa Regional Police and Professor Claude Messier of the University of Ottawa for their advice and expertise.

To my family and my children, Leslie, Dana and Jeremy, thank you for your patience, your enthusiasm and most of all, your love.

Later, Carrie MacDonald
wondered why she had heard nothing, but in the bustle just before closing, she had been too busy to pay much attention. Photocopiers whirred, pages crackled and students hustled past. She heard the hollow ping of the elevator bell and the rattle as the door slid closed, but she did not look up from her stacking. The library closed in ten minutes and she knew that unless she got all the books back onto the shelves, she would face Margot's wrath in the morning. The wizened prune wielded her puny power with the zeal of an SS officer, always after Carrie for sketching when she should be working. As if that were all she was good for.

A big lout in a studded leather jacket and cowboy boots shoved past her and lumbered to the elevator without so much as a glance in her direction. He jingled change in his pocket, wheezing as he waited for the next elevator. I'm invisible, she thought. Just hired help, only useful when you have no quarters, or the photocopier has run out of paper. She wanted to shout “I'm a student too, you know. I'm one of you. I sit in classes and take copious notes and think great thoughts, just as lofty as yours. But unlike you, I don't get an allowance from Daddy, and I have a ten-year old to support.”

When the elevator door slid open, the fat man barrelled in and punched the button. At the last minute, a girl shoved past Carrie, frizzy hair flying. She paused at the entrance to the
elevator for one last anxious look behind her, then flung herself through the closing doors.

Everyone was gone abruptly in a final flurry of excitement before the late-night hush settled in. Carrie went back to her books, placing the last of them on the cart in proper sequence by call number. Wheeling the cart, she set off down the nearest aisle.

She knew the entire library by heart—the busy sections with the well-worn titles in English literature and social science as well as the remote corners whose riches hadn't been explored in years. The blonde had come from the education section, the lout probably from the literature section. Although he didn't exactly look the sonnet-spouting type.

The first four books on her cart were from the law section. After disposing of them, she wheeled the cart past obscure shelves bearing esoteric titles she barely understood, all long undisturbed and thick with dust. She was scanning the titles as she walked, relishing the impossibly long words, when a misplaced book leaped out at her well-trained eye. It was stuffed into a gap, askew and half hidden in the dark. She stopped, grumbling to herself. This was how books were lost, misplaced by some careless student and not found again for months. This book was on the wrong floor miles from home, a book on neuropsychology in a section on Victorian novels.

She placed it in her cart and was about to move on when she heard a moan. On second hearing, more a gasp than a moan. Abandoning her cart, she followed the sound around the corner to the next aisle. The sight stopped her short.

A young man lay curled on the floor, his arms clutching his stomach. His sleeves, his chest, the once-grey carpet were all soaked in blood. She recognized his face immediately. Just the week before, she had sneaked a sketch of him hunched over a
stack of books, staring into space. She was always on the lookout for special faces, and his look of bewildered sadness had captured her. He had looked like a young man with a burden far too great for his years.

Now his face was drawn tight in a grimace, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth gaping in a silent scream. He was deathly pale, and this, even more than the blood, galvanized her to action.

Shouting for help, she dashed across the library to the emergency phone to call security. As she returned, she caught sight of a red plaid jacket, dark hair and widened eyes by the elevator.

“There's a man hurt up here! Go meet the ambulance guys downstairs. Fast!”

Barely had she turned in the aisle when the fire alarm began to clamour.

“No! Not the fire—” She spun around just in time to see the red plaid shirt disappearing into the elevator. Cursing, she ran on.

By the time she reached the young man again, he was unconscious and lay inert in his pool of blood. As she flung her sweater over him in a vain attempt to combat the shock, he stopped breathing.

“No!” she cried and flipped him onto his back to begin CPR. It was only then, as she applied her fists to his chest, that she saw the wound.

*     *      *

At six-twenty the next morning, Inspector Michael Green lay sprawled across his bed with his pillow over his head. Heat glued the sodden sheet to his back. The baby was crying, and
his wife clattered irritably around the kitchen preparing a bottle. In between howls, the baby kicked his overhead toy with his feet, causing the bell to clang and the crib to thump against the wall. In their tiny apartment, it sounded like World War III.

Oh God, Green thought, the start of another day. A day in the life of middle management in the new bigger, better, amalgamated police force, a day now spent sitting in boring committee meetings, drafting service models and pushing papers around his desk. Murders were up in Ottawa, thanks to government cutbacks to social services and health, which drove people to increasingly desperate solutions. But it was all routine stuff, easily handled by the regular field detectives of the Major Crimes Squad. Not a serial killer or a mystery assassin in sight. Nothing that required his deductive powers or intuitive ingenuity, only his woefully inadequate supervisory skills. Not that he wished for a real murder to sink his teeth into, exactly, merely some new spark in his life. What the hell had possessed him to become an inspector anyway?

Clamping his pillow more firmly over his ears, he burrowed further under the sheets until the baby was reduced to a distant whine. He did not even hear the phone ring; Sharon yanked the pillow off and shoved the cordless phone in his face.

“Sounds like Jules.”

Shaking sleep from his head, Green took the phone. The Chief of Detectives' dry voice crackled through the wires, unusually urgent.

“Michael, something important has come up. Be in my office for a briefing in half an hour. Oh—and Michael, wear a decent suit.”

Green stared at the phone. Jules had hung up before he
could even rally a protest. Decent! In the old days, Jules had never told him what to wear. Hinted, sometimes, when the media were going to be around, but never ordered.

“I don't even have a decent suit,” he muttered to Sharon when he emerged from the shower five minutes later. “Both my court suits are at the cleaners.”

“Three nice suits wouldn't exactly kill you,” she retorted without looking up. She was slumped on the bed, dark eyes haggard, giving Tony his bottle. “By forty most men own a few decent suits.”

No support from that end, he thought with more sympathy than annoyance. She's all tapped out. In their early years, she'd found his fashion ineptitude endearing and would have been ready with a wise-crack retort, but now she couldn't even muster a smile. A good jolt of Starbucks French Roast might help, but he didn't have time to make it for either of them.

Instead he appeased her with a brief kiss on the head before turning his attention to his cramped corner of the closet. He did in fact have a few proper suits, the most promising being a mud-brown, double-breasted tweed that had served him well at funerals and weddings over the years. The cuffs were faded and the pants seat shone, but it still fit, if he could survive tweed in a June heat wave. He didn't notice the odour of sweat until he had climbed into his car and headed across the canal to the station. Serves Jules right, expecting a decent suit on half an hour's notice.

Jules' clerk leaped to her feet as Green burst into the office. Despite the obvious gravity of the summons, she couldn't suppress a smile but quickly wrestled it under control as she ushered him into Jules' office.

To Green's surprise, the Chief of Detectives was not alone. Seated with him at the small round conference table was a
familiar, bull-necked figure in a too-tight suit. Jules rose to greet him, but Deputy Police Chief Doug Lynch did not.

Adam Jules was a tall, reed-thin, silver-haired man in a crisp cotton suit. His eyes flickered briefly, and his nostrils flared, but otherwise he betrayed no hint of reaction to his subordinate's attire. He extended a manicured hand.

“Michael, thank you for joining us.”

Playing along with the formality, Green returned the handshake and then took the only remaining chair at the table. His pulse quickened. Something big was in the air. Maybe the answer to his prayers…

Belatedly Lynch shoved out a broad, callused hand. “Mike, good to see you.”

I'll bet, Green thought to himself. I'm about as welcome a sight as a cockroach in the vichyssoise. Unless you want something from me.

And sure enough… “We're hoping you'll be able to help us with a very difficult case.”

Us? Green thought ironically. As in the force, or you and your buddy the Police Chief, who's wily enough to let you play frontman for him? If you think that will get you into his shoes someday, you're deluding yourself. There are no letters after your name, no useful friends in the wings. You're his pit bull, nothing more.