“All Niagara labels, I see.” Lionel ran his eyes over the bottles on the bar. “Which would you recommend, Ted?”
“Karin’s the wine expert in our house. She’d steer you towards the Riesling, which seems to be dryer than the average in Europe. I find it refreshing—which is as technical as my wine vocabulary gets.”
“That Rosie the Riveter on your panel was some hothead. You did well to keep her from running away with the show.” Lionel put the glass of straw-coloured wine to his lips. “Yes, very pleasant.”
“She can run, but she can’t win,” said Ted. “Not in Etobicoke Southwest. The Liberals had a margin of victory of over twenty thousand votes there last time. And it would take a major cataclysm to make law and order the ballot question. The riding is divided between young families interested in affordable day care and aging baby boomers worried about the future of medicare.”
“You’re thoroughly informed,” Lionel chuckled. “Live there?”
“My father-in-law.”
Kerr wore a large wristwatch, on which Ted couldn’t help reading that it was five to ten. He ought to head for the subway soon if he wanted to catch the 22:43 commuter train westbound from Union Station. Departures were only once an hour at this time of night, and he’d have to be back on campus early tomorrow morning. Before excusing himself, Ted diplomatically—though not without genuine interest—gave Lionel an opportunity to report on the progress of the investigations he was conducting in partnership with a microbiologist. Looking not for a crime gene exactly, but possibly a virus, something treatable ultimately with pharmaceuticals. Kerr’s enthusiasm, once whipped up, was hard to rein in. In the end, Ted made his train only by hailing a taxi on Spadina Avenue.
Chapter 3
He was one of the last to board the westbound Lakeshore GO Train during its six-minute stop at Toronto’s Union Station. Fortunately, there were no crowds to fight. The Blue Jays baseball team were looking for some payback against the Red Sox in Boston that evening, while the Canadian National Exhibition had a station of its own.
On his way upstairs to the top level of the railcar, Ted took in the back of a lone woman in one of the aisle seats on the mezzanine or landing. These seating areas, one at either end of a car, could accommodate fifteen or seventeen passengers each. In a sparsely populated train, they could be a good place to be alone. Ted paused at first because there was something familiar about the woman’s pale grey suit jacket and blond-streaked brown hair. He stepped towards her when he saw her shoulders shake and heard from her a pair of gasping sobs.
“It’s Ted Boudreau, Ms. Cesario. Is there anything I can do?”
She looked up at the feel of his hand on her shoulder. Her dark eyes were brimming over, without making her eyeliner run. Ted later thought it must have been tattooed on. Her mouth was open and remarkably square, like a tragedy theatre mask. She nodded slightly and gestured to the seat beside her. Before he sat, Ted cleared from it the City Hall papers she had spread there. Meanwhile, Rose Cesario closed up the laptop she had been working on and drew an old-fashioned, lacy cloth handkerchief from her sleeve. A whiff of violet toilet water was released. Exposure of a side of her so at odds with her battleaxe image left Ted wanting to offer sympathy and not knowing what to say.
“Look, Professor Boudreau,” she said, hoarse, but recovering her poise. “I wouldn’t want you to think it was the panel discussion that upset me.” She paused to clear her throat. “I mean, it was, but only indirectly. I’ve had plenty of experience with the rough and tumble of debate—at the municipal level—and, believe me, I’m looking forward to plenty more in Ottawa if I’m elected to the House of Commons.”
“I understand.”
“It was that boy, Tom.”
“Yes?” Ted too had found the boy unsettling, though not to this degree.
“I know him,” Rose went on. “I used to be an emergency room nurse. His mother brought him in twice with a broken arm. Said he got them playing football. Did he look like a football player to you?”
“Not really,” said Ted, reflecting that boys often try sports they are physically unsuited for.
“No one investigated. Then one day, it was Tom’s younger sister who was brought in—by the father this time. And believe me, he is a bruiser. That child had multiple traumas, including a severe skull fracture. All supposedly caused by a bicycle accident. She just wouldn’t wear her helmet, dad said. We couldn’t save her.”
Neither passenger spoke. The only sound was the metal wheels clicking over the track. Black windows reflected the railcar’s relentlessly cheery fluorescent lights back inside.
“Were police notified?” Ted asked at last.
“The father served four years for manslaughter. Tom testified about the beatings both kids had received, but the assault charges added nothing to the sentence. The mother, Tom, and there was an even younger child—they all had to go into hiding when the father came out.”
“That’s rough,” said Ted. Now wasn’t the time to ask what counselling the father had received as part of his sentence and what assessments had been done of his likelihood to reoffend, even though these were precisely the questions Ted’s training had ensured would be top of his mind.
“Very rough,” Rose Cesario agreed. “Seeing Tom tonight in a public gathering made me wonder if he was safe even now. His father promised to get even with him for testifying. Also . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, seeing Tom awakened my feelings of guilt and regret that I didn’t blow the whistle before a young life was lost.”
Ted nodded. He realized he’d been wrong to think of Rose as seizing on the crime issue purely for political gain. But then she rather spoiled the effect by climbing back on her soapbox.
“And then what Tom said . . . It’s so true! You have no right to decide how much punishment is enough until you can really put yourself in the victim’s place. Who has the right to indulge their Christian feelings of forgiveness by going easy on the killer of nine-year-old Eva? Who should be allowed to put absolving words in the mouth of the dead?”
The train came to a stop now at Exhibition Station, and the car filled up with families and their stuffed-animal trophies from the Midway. On this last weekend of the fair, nearly everyone seemed to be a winner. The interruption gave needed time for the rhetorical temperature to drop. When the journey resumed, Ted made this remark:
“I wonder, Ms. Cesario, whether the living have any more right to punish in the name of the dead than to forgive.”
“Thank you for listening,” Rose Cesario said in a businesslike voice, taking her papers from Ted and stowing them in a pocket of her computer case. “I know my way is not the current academic way of thinking about crime. I don’t despair of bringing you around, but it will take something more than words. In panel discussions or in railcars.”
At Long Branch, the politician got out, and Ted was left to glance over his own papers. He didn’t take the time to reflect on what she meant by “something more”.
His Toyota was one of the last dozen cars in the south lot. He drove straight for the exit, diagonally over all the solid white lines. Five minutes more brought him home. He wasn’t exactly bursting with energy, but not tired either. A little lazy. The work of the evening was over, and it had gone well enough.
He left his car in the driveway rather than taking time to open the garage. A freshening wind was tossing Karin’s rose bushes around, but there was no rain in the forecast. He further rationalized that the beat-up Corolla out front made the house look