Her brow furrowed in confusion.
“He was in the literature section.”
“Oh.” Her brow cleared. “He read constantly, yes, and he did enjoy mysteries as an escape.”
Mysteries were hardly Shakespeare, Green observed privately, but he left the topic to probe her views closer to the case, unearthing little of interest. She could think of no one else with the remotest reason for wanting him dead and no situation that might put him in danger.
“He studied the brains of cats, for heaven’s sake!” she exclaimed. “Most of his days were spent in the animal room, the EEG lab, or at his computer. He didn’t even help to teach a course. So there isn’t even the motive of a student driven berserk by a poor mark.”
“What did he do with the cats?”
“You don’t really want to know.” She eyed him balefully. “He drilled holes in their heads and inserted probes to stimulate electrical activity in the hippocampal region. Which is part of the limbic system and crucial for new memory.” Seeing his blank look, she waved an impatient hand. “He trains his cats on different listening tasks and measures brain responses.”
Green winced. “I get the picture. What about the anti-vivisectionists? That’s a pretty fanatical bunch. Did he receive any threats or complaints from them?”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s clutching at straws, I’d say. He never mentioned complaints.”
“Well, I am clutching at straws,” he replied, allowing a plaintive edge in his voice. Appeal to her maternal side; he’d often found that worked with women. “I don’t have any real motives for murder here, and everyone I talk to describes him as Mr. Perfect.”
“Well, if I were you, I’d check into the dark-haired bitch he’s had on his arm for the past two months. Raquel’s Arabic, and you know how protective those guys can be about their women.”
As a Jew, Green had a finely tuned radar for prejudice and was no longer surprised when it cropped up in the most unexpected places. In some ways, the subtle bigotry of the educated white elite was more deadly than the crude ignorance of the streets. Vanessa Weeks probably didn’t even think of her remark as racist, merely factual. But prejudice aside, in this case she had a point, he realized, particularly when he considered the murder weapon MacPhail had described. An eight-inch, smooth-bladed knife. If folklore was to be believed, the weapon of choice among Arab desert tribes.
He excused himself and slipped into the hall to call the station. He reached Sullivan at his own phone.
“Any breaks yet?” “The guys are collecting a lot of stuff, Mike, but we don’t have a clear-cut motive or an obvious suspect yet. No sign of our mystery student in the plaid shirt. Paquette has come up empty on the fingerprint analysis so far. MacPhail says the body has no defensive wounds on it, so Blair didn’t try to block the blow. Looks like he was taken by surprise. “
“That suggests somebody smooth and quick with a knife.”
“Ruthless, too. The guy couldn’t afford to hesitate.”
“Did MacPhail speculate on how much strength it would take? Could it have been a woman?”
“It was a hell of a sharp knife. Double edge and pointed tip. A woman could slip it in without trouble.”
“Have the guys got anything on the dark-haired girlfriend yet? Her name’s Raquel Haddad.”
“Yup. Jackson’s already heading out to her home as we speak.”
*
The University of Ottawa was scattered through the aging downtown district of Sandy Hill, once the elegant home of the lumber barons, entrepreneurs and founding politicians of the fledgling town. Some of the stately mansions of a hundred years ago were now embassies, but many had been subdivided into cheap tenements filled with immigrants and the transient poor. Green dodged swaddled Somali women pushing strollers as well as the usual throngs of scruffy students as he raced to the university administration building to track down Raquel Haddad before Jackson did. He was fuming. Jackson was supposed to contact him, not blunder off after sensitive witnesses on his own.
Green was glad he knew every pothole and stop sign in the neighbourhood, for he had been born in a dilapidated little house a mere mile away in Lowertown, on the working class side of Rideau Street. After his first brief, but expensive foray into marriage and home-ownership, which had scared him off both for years, he had moved back to the inner city to a rundown brick low-rise in Sandy Hill. He had always referred to it, rather proudly, as “the dump”. With each promotion and pay raise, he kept intending to move into larger, sleeker, more modern quarters but always found himself reluctant to part with it. It was in the heart of his daily life, a short drive from the police station, Nate’s Delicatessen and his father, who now lived in a seniors’ apartment just off Rideau Street.
Green’s apartment was cramped and drafty; it had no balcony, only one bedroom, creaky floors, balky plumbing and a shower that never stopped dripping. There was no room large enough for the spectacular, four-speaker sound system he wanted to buy so that he could blast the great rock classics from the four corners of the room. His mother had come from a musical family in Warsaw, before they all perished in Treblinka, and while he was growing up, she had supplemented his father’s assistant shipper’s salary by giving piano lessons. The children had been excruciating, but his mother’s fingers could make the dullest Bach étude come alive. His taste ran to a more raucous sound than hers, but even now, fifteen years after her death, music still brought her back to him.
But musical yearnings aside, a single man could live in the “dump” quite nicely, as long as he wasn’t picky. Three, however, was a definite crowd. When Sharon had given up her modern high-rise apartment to move in with him, both had understood the accommodations would be temporary. She had grown up in a sprawling suburban bungalow, and she did not share his attachment to noise, car fumes and crumbling corner stores. She had been a good sport, but the arrival of the baby, which had ousted his favourite green lazee-boy from the living room corner to accommodate the crib, had given the matter a new urgency.
Under the guidance of Mary, Brian Sullivan’s wife, they had looked at half a dozen houses in the price range they could afford, which wasn’t high, because in addition to child support for a daughter he barely knew, Green paid almost all his father’s expenses at the seniors’ home. But the houses Mary had found had been soulless chunks of vinyl and particle board; none had felt like homes to him.
This was home, he thought, as his car wove in and out between parked cars and potholes on the back streets of Sandy Hill. He covered the six blocks to the administration building with his accelerator foot to the floor. For once he appreciated the spritely little blue Corolla Sharon had insisted he buy last winter. At the time he’d considered it an alien yuppie affectation, but his rusty yellow Pony had been twelve years old by the time Tony was born, and Sharon had refused to allow the baby anywhere near it.
His first impulse had been to buy a Suzuki Swift, which was one step above a moped and the cheapest, most anti-inspectorish vehicle he could find, or, as a concession to his incipient midlife crisis, a used Mustang convertible. But Sharon was pushing for a mini-van. The Corolla was her bottom line, and given that choice, Green considered himself lucky. He’d parted with his Pony reluctantly because, like his apartment, it had sentimental value, but as the Corolla leaped in response to the gas, he realized how loathe he’d been to admit that everything, including himself, was growing old.
His old Pony would have been smoking by the time he pulled into the parking lot of the University of Ottawa administration building. He parked the Corolla in a spot marked “Dean of Arts”, slapped a police sticker in his window and headed for the records department. The mention of murder and Professor Myles Halton sent the chief records clerk scurrying for the confidential file on Raquel Haddad.
Raquel was twenty-two, born in Beirut to a Lebanese physician, but she was listed as living with her uncle Pierre Haddad, a Canadian citizen with a local Loretta Street Address.