By the Time You Read This

24

ROGER FELT WAS BOOKED and, after being allowed to call his lawyer, was placed in a holding cell. Cardinal alerted the Crown attorney and the parole office. He wrote up his notes, finished the rest of the paperwork and carried the boxes of material he had removed from Felt’s apartment into the boardroom.

The boardroom was the quietest and most respectable-looking place in the station. The long oak table and handsome chairs gave it the feel of the headquarters of a small but prosperous corporation. Cardinal opened the first box and lifted out the adding machine, the laptop, the printer. He opened the second box and removed stacks of files and stationery.

Staff Sergeant Mary Flower came in. Mary was the kind of woman for whom the harsh word broad must have been originally coined. No more than five foot three, but big of chest and voice. She was protective of her uniformed brood, but if she suspected a street cop of slacking, she could deliver a reprimand so fierce that the place reeked of brimstone for weeks. Over the years she had nursed a crush on John Cardinal, a fact he had occasionally used to shameless advantage in prying favours out of the uniformed division.

“Listen, John.” They had been colleagues long enough to be on a first-name basis when out of earshot of her troops. “You’re gonna tell me it’s none of my business, but—”

“It’s none of your business, Mary …”

“But it is, sorta. Because it goes to proper conduct of business in the shop, and that goes very much to my bailiwick of training the juniors. But that’s not why I’m bringing it up. I’m bringing it up because you’re a friend and I respect you enough to tell you when I think you’re making a mistake.”

“I make lots of mistakes. Which one did you have in mind?”

“First of all, honey, you shouldn’t be back here yet. You’re still hurting, and you’re gonna be hurting for a long time. The cop shop is no place for a broken heart.”

“She didn’t dump me. She, uh …” Died. He would never be able to say that word. Not in connection to Catherine.

“I know that, John. So allow yourself to admit that you’re human. Allow yourself to admit that your judgment might be off, that you might be prone to mistakes at a time like this. I’m not a detective, I’m not gonna second-guess your investigative work.”

“He’s been breaching parole. Conditions either mean something or they don’t. You can’t have it both ways.”

“See, right there, that doesn’t sound like you. You’re not usually an all-or-nothing, black-or-white kind of guy.

I’m just asking you to take some time off. You’re not running on all cylinders here.”

“You done?”

“Momma Mary is done, honey.”

“Good. Because I have some actual work to do.”

It turned out that Wes Beattie was Roger Felt’s parole officer. Although they talked on the phone quite often, Cardinal had not actually seen Beattie face to face for more than a year. He had grown a big bushy beard since then, and was uncharacteristically formal in dark suit and tie.

“Gee, Wes,” Cardinal said. “Did you arrive here in a limo?”

“You’ve interrupted me in a night at the opera,” Beattie purred. “Thus ruining my yearly attempt at culture.”

“Algonquin Bay doesn’t have an opera.”

“This evening it does. The Manhattan Light Opera Company is at the Capital Centre for exactly one night, and you yanked me out of it.”

“Felt’s lawyer’s on the way, and we’re also waiting for the crown.”

“No point holding your breath,” Beattie said. “I’ve spoken to the crown, and he doesn’t want to pursue this unless I do, and I have to tell you, John, I really, really don’t.”

“Roger Felt is in breach of parole, Wes. He’s running a financial operation under false pretences. He’s been sending me threatening and harassing letters—which you might want to see before you make up your mind, let alone the Crown attorney’s mind.”

Beattie was one of those large men who seem to give off a kind of calm that is hard to resist. He stood before Cardinal, rocking gently back and forth on his heels as he listened. The whole time, he was nodding sympathetically. A parole officer—besieged by judges, criminals, victims, lawyers, not to mention highly aggrieved cops—learns to be a good listener or he goes insane.

“Can we sit down somewhere and talk?” he said quietly. His understanding tone suddenly made Cardinal feel like a ranter.

“Yeah, sure.”

Cardinal took him back to the boardroom, where Felt’s accounting equipment was spread out.

Cardinal held up a sheet of letterhead. “You realize Beckwith and Beaulne is a fictitious organization?”

“Strictly speaking, John, it isn’t. It’s a bookkeeping operation run by Roger Felt, essentially a home business. Beckwith and Beaulne is just a name—it doesn’t matter that they’re not real entities. Merrill and Lynch have been dead a long time too.”

“Merrill and Lynch were real people who founded a company.”

“John, you’re not going to make the fraudulent part stick. Roger does in fact provide the bookkeeping service that he promises. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“He’s doing people’s taxes for them. That involves tax advice, which is financial advice, which his conditions of release strictly prohibit.”

“I disagree and so will the court, John. He’s not doing accounting, he’s doing bookkeeping. That’s simple record keeping and arithmetic. He has no access to accounts, no fiduciary duties. It’s a worthwhile service and an effective use of his skills.”

“The court may see it differently.”

“John, I ran it by a judge before I gave Roger the go-ahead. He didn’t have a problem with it. And the crown doesn’t either, which is why he isn’t here.”

“You were out of bounds heading him off, Wes.”

“I’m trying to do you a favour. Believe me, you don’t want this to get to court. Roger is a changed man. His crime cost him everything he had, and I mean everything. Not just his money. You saw where he’s living. His wife left him shortly after he went to jail. Two of his kids want nothing to do with him. He lost his friends, you name it.”

“And you think he’s a changed man.”

“I know it, the parole board knew it. He rediscovered his faith in prison—he’s a Catholic—and while I usually don’t pay the slightest attention to claims of that sort, in Roger’s case it seems to be true. He’s very involved in the Church now.”

Cardinal pulled out several blank sympathy cards from the box.

“I found these next to his laptop.” He opened his briefcase and pulled out the cards he had received in the mail. “And he sent me these. Go on. Take a look at them, Wes. Take a look at them, and then tell me what a changed man he is.”

Beattie went over the cards carefully. They were open, sheathed in plastic. He held each one for a few seconds, turned it over and let it drop to the table.

“You think he sent you these cards?”

“He used a computer so I wouldn’t see his handwriting, but there’s a printer flaw in the capital letters. You can see it with this.”

He handed Beattie a magnifying glass. Beattie looked at one of the cards, then looked at the invoice Cardinal had received from the funeral home. He compared it with the other two cards. Beattie tapped a finger on the cards.

“John, I’m sorry you received these. It must have been very upsetting.”

“Upsetting is not the word. My wife is—you know what happened to my wife. The coroner may think she killed herself, but I don’t. Suppose you killed someone and made it look like suicide. That might give you the idea to write a note like this, don’t you think?”

I’m losing it, Cardinal thought. I know I’m losing it. It was a mistake to mention his suspicions about murder, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“Six years ago I arrest Felt for stealing people’s savings. Like you say, it destroys his reputation, costs him his friends, his kids, his wife. Life as he knew it is over, and he has five years in jail to work up a hatred for me for nailing him. He figures if I hadn’t stopped him, he would’ve been able to make that killer investment that would have made him rich and would have covered all he stole—borrowed, as he liked to put it.

“How does he get even? By killing me? No, it’s too simple, too direct, and it doesn’t really make it as revenge, either, because I wouldn’t suffer the way he’s suffered, knowing his wife left him. So he kills my wife to get even, then writes those cards to rub my face in it. He’s scum, Wes. He always has been.”

Even to Cardinal’s own ears, it sounded like the shriek of a wounded animal. And now he had to suffer the awful look of compassion on Wes Beattie’s bearded face. Beattie actually put a hand out and gripped Cardinal’s shoulder.

“John, what are you even doing here? You should not be back at work yet.”

“Why are you trying to make a case for the guy, Wes? He’s already got Scofield working for him. You think it’s impossible he wrote these notes?”

“No, I can see the flaws match on the cards and the invoice. I know Felt handles the billing for Desmond’s Funeral Home. I can put two and two together. I can even see him writing the notes, sick as they are. The man has devious tendencies, no question. But he’s the least violent guy you’re ever likely to meet, so any suspicion that he hurt anyone is way out in left field. John, you don’t even have a finding of murder. Take some time off. See a grief counsellor.”

“Even putting this in its best light, we have a parolee who’s sending threatening, harassing letters through the mail. That’s enough to put him back inside.”

“The notes are nasty. The notes are unpleasant. The notes are mean. But do they constitute ‘harassment’? I don’t know. It’s debatable. But ‘threatening’ is a stretch. You’ll never get a judge to buy ‘threatening.’ Answer me this, John: if you accepted that the finding of suicide was correct, if you had no suspicion of murder, would you even be bothering chasing down these cards?”

The door banged open and Leonard Scofield was standing before them, with a calfskin briefcase in one hand and a letter-size document in the other. Scofield’s suits always looked as if he had just come back from an appointment in Savile Row, and his shoes as if they had never been worn before. Here it was ten-thirty at night and he shows up in a dark pinstripe and a snow white shirt and a deep burgundy tie.

Scofield also had a sonorous voice—a newscaster’s tonal authority that made even his weakest arguments sound reasonable. Cardinal had managed to put two or three of Scofield’s clients in jail, but never for as long as they deserved.

As if all this were not irritating enough, Scofield was also a decent human being. Cardinal, like most cops, had an innate suspicion of lawyers, even though he was smart enough to know it was unfounded. But Scofield was a guy you had to respect, even when he was tearing your case to shreds in court. He was always amenable to pretrial discussion, always receptive to rational argument, and, even while defending his client ferociously, managed to convey a sense of absolute decency. Cardinal had often wished he would run for office.

In short, Cardinal was always dismayed to see Scofield on the other side of a case.

“Gentlemen,” Scofield said, “I can’t tell you how upsetting it is to be summoned at this unconscionable hour.”

“If you’re representing Felt,” Cardinal said, “you’re going to wish you weren’t summoned at any hour.”

Scofield had dark eyebrows—very expressive, and very useful in court for conveying silent but eloquent scepticism and a wide array of other, more subtle, emotions, such as, in this instance, friendly concern.

“Detective Cardinal,” he said, “let me say how sorry I was to hear about your wife.”

“Thank you.” Scofield was either a man who was bullshit-free or able to fake sincerity with Hollywood’s finest.

“And let me give you this.” Scofield handed over several documents, and then proffered copies to Wes Beattie. “This is why I was late. I stopped off at the cathedral and talked to Father Mkembe. I know he’s a priest and you probably wouldn’t require a sworn affidavit, but here it is anyway. Father Mkembe swears that Roger Felt was at the cathedral’s fundraiser the night of Tuesday the seventh, from eight p.m. until eleven p.m. The other affidavits are from a deacon and from Sister Catherine Wellesley, also swearing that Roger Felt was in their presence at that time. It seems he was keeping track of the takings from their annual flea market and auction—a service, I note for the record, for which he did not charge.”

Cardinal was not a self-righteous man. Having been born and raised a Catholic, he had entered adult life fully equipped with an oversize sense of guilt. He knew that he was capable of doing things of which he was ashamed, even of breaking the law, so he was not a policeman who arrived at a crime scene on a high horse, ready to smite the evil who walk among us. Furthermore, the older he got—and the more distance he put between himself and his religion of birth—the less he trusted people who were given to righteousness: the righteous gang members who beat rivals to a pulp for trespassing on their turf, the righteous husbands who kicked and stabbed and sometimes murdered the wives who had “disrespected” them, the righteous cops who got in an extra knee or elbow when arresting those they saw as slipping through the cogs of the justice system. Cardinal spent his life in the cause of justice and had come to realize that much injustice was accompanied by just such righteousness.

And so he was appalled to find himself unmasked before his own eyes as a self-righteous cop, intent on railroading the innocent. Shame was burning its way up his neck, and a hot sweat prickled on his brow.

Wes Beattie was slow to catch on. “I don’t understand. What the hell has Tuesday the seventh got to do with Roger sending cards through the mail?”

“That’s the night Detective Cardinal’s wife died,” Scofield said. “Again, Detective, my condolences. I only raise the matter because circumstances force me to.”

Beattie had been slouched in his chair but now shifted his weight forward and perched his enormous chest over the table. “You mean to tell me you stopped off on the way here and got three affidavits—in the defence of a client who has yet to be charged? Nobody even mentioned the possibility of murder—at least not to you. At least not yet.”

“Exactly, Mr. Beattie. It occurred to me the moment I got your call that there could be only one reason for this unfortunate state of affairs. I’ve known Detective Cardinal too long, and indeed tilted ineffectively at his testimony far too many times, not to have enormous respect for him.

“For Detective Cardinal to go to such lengths to haul my imperfectly re-habilitated client off to jail, there must be something more at work than an unfortunate use of the mails. I have been in criminal court on a multitude of cases in the past week, and the rumours I have heard have been suggestive.”

“Rumours?” Cardinal said. “Rumours that I’m off my rocker? That I’m crazy with grief and can’t accept reality?”

“Nothing nearly so harsh, Detective. Rumours that the coroner was young and inexperienced, that an older man—or woman for that matter—might well have ordered an inquest.”

Cardinal was a little—not much—heartened to hear of the possibility of support, the possibility that he was not alone.

“And rumours,” Scofield went on, “that Detective Cardinal here was on a one-man crusade to find the person or persons unknown who might be behind said possible foul play. Under the circumstances, I can absolutely understand it. And that is why it seemed likely that my client was the victim of a misjudgment on the detective’s part—understandable, given the circumstances, but a misjudgment nevertheless.

“I’m hoping these affidavits will change your mind on the matter.”

“You haven’t seen what he sent me,” Cardinal said, and pushed the cards across the table.

Scofield perused them without touching them, as if they might be infected.

“That is easily the ugliest writing I have ever seen committed to paper,” the lawyer said.

Beattie spoke up. “Printer flaws on the cards match an invoice John received from the funeral home. Roger does their bookkeeping.”

“Marvellous,” Scofield said. “You have the ugly and the stupid combined, as they so often are. So stupid, in this case, that it seems the author of the notes wanted to get caught. Still, in light of these affidavits …”

Cardinal stood up. “Let me have a talk with him.”

“I can’t have you asking him questions at this point. Not without me present.”

“I don’t have any questions. You can sit outside and watch.”

Cardinal took them both to a small kitchen. There were Coke and candy machines, and a TV monitor that showed an image of the interview room.

Then he had Felt brought in from the cells and sat him down at the interview table.

“My lawyer’s here,” Felt said nervously. “You can’t ask me questions without my lawyer present.”

Cardinal laid out the cards in their plastic wrappers one by one, in order, open to their hostile messages. And then he laid out the funeral home invoice.

“I got your card,” he said quietly.

“Oh, God,” Felt said.

He looked at the cards, he looked at the invoice.

“Oh, God,” he said again. And then he surprised Cardinal by bursting into tears. At first he tried to hide his face, leaning forward and covering his eyes with both hands. But as he wept longer, he sat back and let the tears flow in sheets down his face, making no attempt to wipe them away. He was trying to speak, but his voice emerged in incomprehensible fragments.

Cardinal waited.

Felt eventually found the box of Kleenex on the table and wiped his face, blew his nose. He leaned forward, resting his forehead against his hand, and shook his head silently. His breath still came in shudders. He started to speak and then the tears took him over again, and once more Cardinal waited.

Eventually he subsided. Cardinal handed him a drink of water in a paper cup.

“I’m so sorry,” Felt said. “I don’t have words to say how sorry I am.”

“Funny how the prospect of prison brings out the apologies.”

“It’s true, the thought of going back to prison terrifies me. But that’s not why I’m sorry. It’s just …seeing the words, there. Seeing them as you must have seen them. Seeing them next to the invoice for your wife’s funeral service …”

Tears invaded his voice and he was forced to break off. Once more the Kleenex. Again the drink of water.

“I’m just so horrified by what I’ve done.” He looked at Cardinal, his eyes pleading. “Have you ever done something—something that totally shames you? Something you would not want anyone to know you did?” He pointed at the cards. “This is … this is … It’s disgusting. How could anyone do such a thing to another human being? I did it, and yet I can’t answer that question: how can anyone do such a thing to another human being?”

He sobbed a little and shook his head again. His shirt front was soaked, as if he had just stepped in from a thunderstorm.

“My wife left me after I’d been in jail for a year,” Felt said. “She took my daughters with her. They were all disgusted with me. I thought I had finally come to accept my own guilt. I thought I had stopped blaming everybody else for everything I lost. But then, last week, I was doing the books for Desmond’s and I came across your file. For your wife. And I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s called revenge,” Cardinal said.

“I guess it is.”

Felt’s red eyes looking at him, no longer pleading. No longer begging for understanding. Just exhausted.

Cardinal was exhausted himself. He wanted nothing more than to be at home, asleep, as far from the police station as possible. He got to his feet and held the door open.

“Back to the cell, I suppose,” Felt said.

Cardinal shook his head. “You’re free to go.”

“Really?” Felt looked around the room as if there might be others watching to see if he would fall for the prank. “You mean I can go home?”

Cardinal remembered the horrible little room with the hot plate and the lopsided walls, and the complete absence of anything like love. Some home.

“On one condition,” Cardinal said.

“Anything. Really. Name it.”

“Don’t keep in touch.”