Stranglehold (25 page)

“And you know that Detective Greene has no criminal record.”

“Of course.”

“That he has never been arrested before.”

“True.”

“That he’s never been investigated by the police for any crime.”

“That’s right.”

“And putting aside the question of whether or not he committed this horrible act, you don’t believe for one moment that, if he were released on bail, he’d be a threat to anyone, do you?”

Kennicott lifted his eyes and looked at the back wall. The place Amankwah noticed he had looked at earlier, when Kreitinger was examining him. “No, I don’t,” he said after a long pause.

“Nor do you have any doubt that Detective Greene would come to court if he were released on bail, do you?”

Kennicott bit down hard on his lower lip. “He’d come to court.”

“And if one of the conditions of the bail was that he live under house arrest with his father, you believe he’d follow it to the letter of the law, don’t you?”

Kennicott’s gaze drifted to the defence table. “Ari loves his father,” he said. Then looked away.

It was such a simple statement.
Ari loves his father.
It didn’t answer the question, but that didn’t matter. Kennicott’s words had been sincere. And he had used his mentor’s first name. Amankwah had covered hundreds of bail hearings, and knew they almost always hinged on one key piece of testimony that could turn a judge either way. This was it. Even the arresting officer, when pressed, knew that Greene would obey his bail.

“You made this arrest because you had reasonable grounds to believe that Detective Greene committed this crime, didn’t you?” DiPaulo asked.

“That’s the only reason I arrested him.”

“But you don’t know, for certain, that he is guilty.”

“That’s not for me to decide. He has the right to a fair trial,” Kennicott said.

“But deep in your heart” – DiPaulo paused until Kennicott made eye contact with him – “you hope that Greene has an explanation for why he misled you. You hope you are wrong about this arrest, don’t you? And you hope that he’s innocent.”

“Objection, Your Honour.”

Angela Kreitinger was on her feet. She was a little firebrand, and she was hot. “My friend very well knows that the personal opinion of this witness is irrelevant,” she shouted. “We all wish that people were innocent, but wishing is not evidence.”

Norville peered over her glasses at DiPaulo, frown lines creasing her otherwise smooth skin. “Mr. DiPaulo?”

Amankwah saw what DiPaulo was doing. It was an improper question, but Kennicott looked frozen in thought. DiPaulo had hit his mark and planted a seed of doubt in the competing camp.

DiPaulo ducked his head a notch, as a gesture of faint apology to the judge. “Let me try this question instead. Detective, it’s occurred to you that there might have been another reason why Detective Greene misled you in the early stages of this investigation, hasn’t it?”

“Objection,” Kreitinger said again. “Same thing, Kennicott’s personal opinion.”

“No.” DiPaulo raised his powerful voice and it reverberated off the courtroom’s wood-panelled walls.

Every lawyer had a different tool they used in court, and Amankwah had seen most of them. Some had charm. Others humour, their good looks, or their down-home demeanour. With DiPaulo it was all about his voice.

“Just a few minutes ago, Ms. Kreitinger spent a considerable amount of time with this witness establishing that, in her words, my client
deceived
him.”

This was the Ted DiPaulo Amankwah was used to seeing. He was in full command of the courtroom.

“It was the cornerstone of her examination-in-chief. She is the one who opened this door. I’m entitled to walk right in and see what’s inside.”

Amankwah kept his eyes on Norville as she started to nod.

“Your Honour, the Crown is leaving you with the impression that Detective Greene’s actions were deceptive for all the wrong reasons,” DiPaulo said. “Surely I should have the chance to see if there’s another explanation.”

Norville stopped nodding. “Objection overruled,” she said. “Keep going, Mr. DiPaulo.”

He turned back to Kennicott. “Let’s cut to the chase,” he said. “Imagine that, in the early hours of this investigation, Detective Greene had told you that when he arrived at room 8 at the Maple Leaf Motel he found Jennifer Raglan strangled to death. If he’d told you that then, he would have been a key witness for the prosecution, correct?”

“Witness or suspect,” Kennicott said.

“And if he was a witness,” DiPaulo said, ignoring Kennicott’s jab at Greene, “he couldn’t take part in the investigative team, could he?”

Kennicott’s expression brightened, and he sneaked a look at Greene. Clearly this had never occurred to him, Amankwah thought.

“That’s right,” Kennicott said. “If he was a witness to the crime, he couldn’t investigate it.”

“Imagine that he is an innocent man who wants, more than anything, to find the killer. Knowing Detective Greene as well as you do, can you see how he’d be prepared to do something so extreme as deceiving you because he was desperate to work on the case?”

“Objection again.” Kreitinger was back on her feet. “Really, Your Honour, this is a bail hearing, not a jury address.”

“She’s got a point,” Judge Norwell said. “Move on.”

“Thank you, Your Honour,” DiPaulo said, with a short bow. All politeness and contrition.

He looked back at the witness stand. “This is my last set of questions, Detective Kennicott. Take us back to the time you spoke to Detective Greene, minutes after you arrived on the scene. When you called him on his cell, he said he was about to call you, didn’t he?”

“He did, but –”

“Yes or no, sir. Is that what Detective Greene said to you? ‘I was about to call you’? Yes or no?”

“Yes. That’s what he said.”

“In fact he answered the phone on the first ring, didn’t he?”

“I . . . I think so.”

“And he told you that he was going to come right over to join you, didn’t he?”

“He said he was close by.”

“Answer the question.” DiPaulo’s voice was cranked another notch louder. He was looking straight at Norville. “Homicide detective Ari Greene offered to come over to the scene of the crime, didn’t he?”

Kennicott’s lips were tight. “Yes, he did.”

Amankwah could feel the mood in the courtroom shift again, like a big ship listing from one side to the other. The portrait of Greene as a lying, deceptive murderer was being displaced by one of a man willing to risk all to find the true killer.

“Officer Kennicott, according to your notes, this call was made at 11:12
A.M.
Please tell the court why Detective Greene didn’t come right over to the crime scene, as he’d told you he wanted to.”

Kennicott nodded.

“Do you want to see your notes?” DiPaulo asked. His voice was mellow now.

“No. I remember it very well. He didn’t come over because of me. I told him to stay away. This was my first murder investigation, and I didn’t want it to look like I needed my mentor to be there, to hold my hand.”

That was the “aha” moment, Amankwah thought. DiPaulo had set this up
right from the beginning of his cross-examination when he had congratulated Kennicott for his recent promotion to Homicide. He’d goaded the young officer into being defensive about the fact that this was his first murder investigation. And he’d used it to explain what minutes ago seemed unexplainable – why an experienced police officer such as Ari Greene had not rushed back to the scene of the crime.

“Thank you, Detective,” DiPaulo said. “Those are my questions. Your Honour, I believe it is time for lunch.”

“Good idea,” Norville said, getting up from her chair.

The registrar jumped to his feet. “All rise,” he shouted,

Everyone stood. As soon as Norville was out of the courtroom, a guard came forward and handcuffed Greene. Instead of looking upset, Greene turned to DiPaulo and smiled.

DiPaulo smiled back. Amankwah knew they had both felt it. The sweetness of the first step toward freedom.

ANGELA KREITINGER’S BACK WAS KILLING HER. HALFWAY THROUGH THE MORNING SESSION,
the pain had started in the right base of her spine then radiated down her leg. She didn’t want anyone to know about it, and she sure didn’t need the distraction with the defence now calling evidence and Detective Greene’s father about to take the stand.

She opened her binder and turned to a fresh page. On the top she wrote,
Yitzhak Greene, Father
, and underneath:
Key questions: 1. Have you ever been charged with a criminal offence? 2. What did your son tell you about his relationship with Jennifer Raglan and her murder?

Ted DiPaulo stood.

Until today, she’d never seen him work as a defence lawyer. He’d done a good job this morning in his cross-examination of Kennicott, using the young cop to create some doubt about Greene’s guilt. He’d also fixed in Judge Norville’s mind the notion that, whether or not Ari Greene was guilty, there was little question that he’d obey any bail conditions. Kreitinger could see now that Greene was going to be released. And she didn’t really care. Her focus was on the trial.

She knew DiPaulo had no choice but to put Greene’s father on the stand. It was impossible for his client to get bail unless the judge heard from his surety. And this was going to give Kreitinger a golden opportunity to get key evidence down under oath.

“For its first and only witness, the defence calls Mr. Yitzhak Greene,” DiPaulo said in that powerful voice of his.

Before coming into court after the lunch break, Kreitinger had caught a glimpse of Mr. Greene in the hallway. He was shorter than she’d pictured, but also stronger-looking. As a witness set to testify, he’d been excluded from court this morning. She had his police file on her desk, hidden under a pile of papers. She was ready.

He walked up to the witness box with surprising speed for someone in his eighties. He wore a well-tailored blue suit and a muted red tie. His shoes gleamed as if they’d been shined by a professional, which made sense since he’d run his own shoe repair shop for decades.

Judge Norville gave him a kindly smile. “Sir,” she said, “I imagine you have never been in court before.”

“I was once, in 1962. Two kids tried to steal from my shop and I stabbed one in the hand with my chisel.”

Damn it, Kreitinger thought. She’d hoped he would try to bury this, because she’d planned to embarrass him with it on cross-examination. Forget that. She crossed out number one on her sheet of paper.

Norville looked taken aback by his frankness. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir . . . ”

“Nothing to be sorry about. I stabbed the one who had the knife.” He held up his own hand and pointed to the back of it with his finger. “Right here, when his hand was on the counter. He lied about it on the witness stand. Said he was unarmed. But then his partner told the truth, so they threw the case out. I wouldn’t have stabbed him if he didn’t have a knife.”

“I’m sure not, sir.”

“I would have punched him.”

Kreitinger heard laughter behind her and couldn’t resist smiling herself.

He’s charming the skirt off Norville, she thought, and he hasn’t even started to testify.

“I’m going to let the lawyers ask the rest of the questions,” Norville said. “Would you like some water?”

“Water? Why not?” he said.

Kreitinger kept her eyes on him as DiPaulo led him through his evidence: Yitzhak Greene was born in a small town in Poland two hundred kilometres south of Warsaw. Four thousand residents. There were two thousand Jews and two thousand Catholics who’d lived there in peace for hundreds of years. On September 24, 1942, the Nazis came at night and rounded up all the Jews. He and his brother and one other man were the only ones who survived. After the war, he made his way to Canada with his new wife, whom he’d met in a displaced persons camp in southern Germany.

“I saw her at the meal station. She was beautiful. Neither of us had family left, and we got married three days later,” he said.

A few people behind Kreitinger sighed.

“In 1948, finally, we came to Canada,” he went on. “It was hard for my wife to get pregnant. Ari is our only child.”

Norville looked transfixed by him. This little man with his polished shoes had the judge, and everyone else in the courtroom, eating out of his hand. Probably best not to even bother cross-examining him, Kreitinger thought.

Next, DiPaulo had him talk about opening his shoe repair shop downtown, working six days a week with his wife, Ari growing up above the store until they moved north to the little bungalow where he still lived. How his son had gone to the nearby high school, then the University of Toronto, then was a law student, but dropped out to become a cop, and now was in Homicide.

“The chief, Hap Charlton, he guided Ari through everything. They called him Ari’s rabbi,” he said. “We used to laugh at that. Then my wife got sick.”

“Sick?” DiPaulo asked, as if he’d never heard a word of this before. He was the master at this – only asking questions to which he knew the answers, and playing them for all they were worth.

“Alzheimer’s. She died two years ago.”

Kreitinger hadn’t made one note. Why bother? The man was going to be the best surety imaginable. Norville was going to let Ari Greene go live with his father. She circled her note number two. All she could do now was to try to tie him to a strict house arrest on his bail.

“If Her Honour chooses to release your son on bail, can he live with you?” DiPaulo asked.

“Of course. His mother wouldn’t let me touch his room when he moved out.”

This set off another chorus of laughter.

Norville smiled.

“Thank you, sir,” DiPaulo said. “Those are my questions.”

Kreitinger was surprised. DiPaulo was such a careful lawyer, why hadn’t he covered off any conversations between father and son concerning Raglan’s murder? He must be hiding something. Good.

Mr. Greene shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and moved to step down.

“Oh, sorry, wait a moment,” DiPaulo said. “The other lawyer here, Ms. Kreitinger, the Crown attorney, might have a few questions for you.”