Poison (51 page)

One young woman who did land in Canada, and did not leave—at least not back to India—was Nirmaljit, known as Pinky, the friend who had comforted Sarabjit on the day of her arranged marriage to Dhillon. Pinky had been called by the Crown at the first murder trial in Kitchener for her evidence as a witness to Sarabjit’s wedding. After the trial, she applied for refugee status. By the fall of 2002 she had married an illegal immigrant from California and disappeared from the scene.

Then there was a man named Jaspal Singh. He came to Hamilton for the obstruction of justice trial of Rai Singh Toor. Jaspal was a Ludhiana police officer who inadvertently helped Rai Singh obtain false passports for the impostor witnesses. In September 2002 Jaspal arrived in Hamilton, along with Inspector Subhash Kundu of the Central Bureau of Investigation. Kundu testified, and so did Jaspal Singh. Jaspal was due to fly back to India with Kundu. Instead, he claimed refugee status. As was the case for Kundu, his visit to Hamilton in September 2002 was his second to testify in matters relating to the Dhillon case.

The night after his testimony, Subhash Kundu sat with a couple of Canadian friends on a restaurant patio on King Street, not far from the Royal Connaught where he was staying, the night air cool, nursing a Corona beer. He figured he’d stay in India. That was where he had status, respect, as an inspector with the CBI.
And in Canada? Who knows where he’d end up? But now that he was in Canada a second time, giving him another taste of the country, his English getting better all the time, even he, Subhash Kundu, felt himself dreaming, just a bit. After finishing the beer, he strolled back to the hotel with his friends. They all went up to his room, talked some more. He presented the Canadians with a gift, a bottle of Old Monk rum. What did his friends think? What should Kundu do? Should he try to immigrate? Could he find work here? He had his wife back in Chandigarh, the kids. The refugee route was not for him. Kundu decided he would return to India and think about it. Ice cubes clinked in glasses, then Kundu poured two fingers of rum in each.

“Cheers. To Canada.”

Dhillon hated Warren Korol and Kevin Dhinsa, and he despised Ranjit Khela’s widow for fingering him to police. But if not for one man, the chain of events might never have begun, and Dhillon might never have ended up behind bars. In that sense he was brought down by a human lie detector, an unassuming man who ultimately sealed the killer’s fate. The Velvet Hammer.

It was a morning in the late fall. Four men teed off on the eighth hole at Pineland Greens public golf club, in rural north Hamilton. The weather had been damp and gray but mild, and the ground was still in good enough shape to let them play. Pineland is a forgiving course, a nine-hole affair. They took the sand traps out a while back. It’s a bit deceptive, though. You still have to get the ball in the hole, as the duffers put it. Most of all, it’s a scenic place, a relaxing one. The four retirees played their weekly game there every Friday morning, 10 a.m. sharp.

That morning, it started as they hit on the second-last hole. A few flakes at first, then flurries, snow gathering on the ground. They should have packed it in there, on No. 8, walked in to the club-house. But Cliff Elliot and the other three couldn’t do it, couldn’t let it go. They squinted through the blowing snow, trying to locate their white golf balls flying through the air. When a ball rolled on the green, it gathered snow as it went, like a snow ball. Their pull-carts left zigzag tracks in their wake. They laughed, searching for their golf balls, then deciding, hell, leave ’em there until the spring thaw.

Cliff Elliot was no longer semi-retired. He had retired for good, finally, not long after he made the crucial call that started the ball rolling toward the conviction of Sukhwinder Dhillon. If Elliot had not taken extra steps in his investigation of the life insurance claims, drawn the connection between Parvesh, Ranjit, and Dhillon, the killer may well have remained free, perhaps murdered again.

A few days after the golf game in the snow, the temperatures plummeted. Cliff Elliot sat in the living room waiting for his wife, Amelia, to bring some coffee from the kitchen. Cold out
there today, not even golf weather. There was always the seniors’ center, other activities. Except it was hard to see Elliot as a senior. He looked as if he should still be pounding the pavement, working the phones, unearthing another insurance cheat. But no, that was all over with now, the thick black book of contacts didn’t get opened much any more. And the Dhillon affair was finally over, or at least he thought it was.

Elliot had heard about all the refugee claimants, the witnesses who came to Canada to testify and wouldn’t go home. All of them had been caught in Dhillon’s storm, too. Ah, but was it Dhillon’s storm, or Clifton Elliot’s? The Velvet Hammer shook his head and smiled at it all, feeling the coffee mug warm his hands. Amelia brought in a plate of homemade chocolate-chip cookies, fresh from the oven. Elliot was a modest man. But he was Amelia’s hero. Inside he knew, surely, that if not for him, Dhillon would have gotten away with it. And, if not for Cliff Elliot, the Punjabis who came to testify and then said they were refugees would have had to find another way to live the golden dream in Canada.

“You know,” Elliot said in his British-flavored accent, “some of those people, they should consider giving me a gift of some kind.” Cliff Elliot winked and chuckled, sipped his coffee. Amelia beamed at him from across the room.

Cliff Elliot near his home

Warren Korol liked to think of his work in homicide as a sport. It was a healthy way to approach the job. Embrace the game, he believed, do your best, play it well. It’s all you can do. The Dhillon case was a different one, though, uniquely frustrating. Korol never could fathom how so many witnesses could change their stories and lie, even some who were victims in the path of Dhillon’s murderous greed. The lying, during interviews, in the witness box under oath—it was plain disheartening. He was used to people he encountered in his job lying to him. You show up at the doorstep and ask a guy where he was at the time his friend was bludgeoned with a hammer, the guy’s memory might suddenly fail. But most of the time, even the nasty pieces of work he confronted could be forthright. “You don’t have to talk to me” was Korol’s standard line to suspects. “So don’t say anything unless you tell the truth. I respect you if you tell the truth, and I respect you if you tell me to screw off. But don’t lie.”

Even the worst ones understood the ground rules. But not in the Dhillon case. Lies to police officers, perjury in front of judges. Even when confronted with evidence of an obvious untruth, some witnesses either denied the proof or merely reacted with a shrug.
Well, maybe that happened.
When the dust settled, though, Korol could look back on the Dhillon case with a competitive fondness, the entire mess bringing out the best in his game.

He wanted to teach some day. And with this case, there was so much he could pass on to other police officers, so much he had learned. Just before Dhillon was convicted of murder for the second time, Korol graduated with a bachelor of arts in anthropology from McMaster University. He would begin studies toward a master’s degree. In January 2003, Korol reached another rung on the police career ladder he had started climbing at age 18. He was named an inspector, meaning he was now second in command of vice, drugs, intelligence, major crimes, sexual assault, child abuse, fraud, and domestic violence.

Six years after he received the Dhillon assignment as an inexperienced homicide detective, Warren Korol looked no worse
for wear. He still walked with confidence, the playful smirk on his mouth, eyes with the metallic ring bordering a core of deep blue. There were scars, too, though they were hidden beneath his emotional armor where few ever saw them. As the Dhillon case wore on, Korol’s family life suffered. At first it was little things, like the longing in the voice of his little guy on the phone when he called home from India. The boy couldn’t understand why Dad was away for so long. Later Korol’s marriage suffered. It was a tough time; it brought a tired gray film to the usually animated face. But Korol emerged from that, too, still seeing his three kids nearly every day, working in partnership with his wife, moving on.

Korol had always wanted to work homicide. In hindsight he was happy, without question, that he was handed the Dhillon file in the fall of 1996. It was the ultimate challenge. It doesn’t get any better than that. It was Korol’s ambition and enthusiasm for challenge that drove him deep into Dhillon’s world and kept him there until that last day in court. All experiences connect in some way, completing the puzzle of a life. For the homicide detective, there is a cumulative price to pay for the constant exposure to human darkness, the bludgeoned skulls, rape victims, child autopsies, justice not done. Warren Korol perhaps spent little time wondering how it had shaped who he was. But it would always be there, all of it, a part of him. So would Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon.

The Dhillon case was the ultimate challenge for Warren Korol.

Korol had vowed to boycott the TV show. For a long time he stayed away from it. But here he was, relenting, sitting through an episode of
The Sopranos
, a series about the Mafia. He shouldn’t have. In that night’s show a few of the characters were on a golf course, casually talking about whacking people. Killing them. Korol smirked. Good for laughs, eh? Hollywood, he thought, makes heroes of these guys, warping the public’s sense of the pain that bastards such as these bring upon others in real life, fuelling the self-image of thugs. Korol knew guys like that in the real world. He crossed paths with them out on the street, just as his uncle Mike Pauloski had done in the 60s, when Pauloski chased down Johnny (Pops) Papalia in The Hammer. Korol knew the truth. The kingpins weren’t funny, or intriguing. They were nothing but pieces of shit—petty crooks and cowards. In the old days, those guys got their kicks making late-night crank calls to Uncle Mike’s wife, Sally, harassing her nearly to the point of a breakdown.