The Poisoned Pawn (25 page)

“Look, let me get us some coffee,” said Britton. “It’s going to take us some time to think this through. What do you take in it? Milk or cream?”

Rum, Ramirez thought, but he doubted the Canadian police had any to spare from their exhibit room. “Cream if you have it.”

“I’ll go with you, Andrew,” said Jones.

She returned a few minutes later with three orange-and-white paper cups in a cardboard holder. Ramirez looked at the lid on the tiny container of coffee creamer she handed him. “Edible oil substitute,” it said. Ramirez wondered what he’d be ingesting,
what substance had been substituted for edible oil. He pulled off the lid and poured it in his coffee.

Andrew Britton swung the door closed behind him. He threw some sandwiches covered in plastic wrap on the table.

“I have a list of things I need to ask you, questions we can anticipate the defence raising at Ellis’s bail hearing. Here, have a sandwich. They’re chicken, from the vending machine downstairs. Air Ontario doesn’t serve food on its flights anymore. You won’t have time for dinner.”

“That’s very kind of you. Thank you. Yes, my flight leaves this evening. But I have yet to hear from Corporal Tremblay of the RCMP whether I will be bringing Rey Callendes with me.” Ramirez looked at his watch. It was almost five, and Tremblay hadn’t called.

“Inspector Ramirez is supposed to be escorting a prisoner back to Cuba,” explained Jones. “That priest in the newspaper. The one who was arrested at the airport last week with a laptop full of child porn. Do you have Corporal Tremblay’s phone number? I’ll call him for you, Ricardo, while you and Andrew talk.”

Ramirez handed her Tremblay’s business card and she walked into the hall. A few minutes later she returned.

“Good news, Inspector. Corporal Tremblay says it’s no problem. He was waiting to hear from Justice. The Minister has agreed to return Rey Callendes to Cuba for prosecution. Tremblay will bring him here and turn him over to you within the hour. He said to tell you he’ll bring the laptop with him. He also says he has an affidavit for you to swear. I can do that for you; I’m a commissioner of oaths.”

“If he needs it notarized, I have my seal in my briefcase,” said Britton. “I’m assuming a squad car can take you and the prisoner to the airport from here?”

“Shouldn’t be an issue,” Jones assured him. “Worse comes to worst, Charlie Pike’s around.”

Ramirez was relieved to know he had accomplished at least one of his objectives. He was still trying to figure out how to ask Celia Jones to swear a false statement before he left. The more he got to know her, the less likely it seemed she would agree.

Ramirez removed the plastic wrap from his sandwich, thinking how casually Canadians dealt with meat. He had eaten chicken only twice the entire year before. At home, a chicken sandwich would be cause for celebration. But there were no smiles on the faces around the table. Including his.

“Did you give Ellis his right to legal counsel?” Britton asked, his pen poised over his lined notebook, his own sandwich untouched.

“He had no right to counsel in Cuba, Señor Britton,” Ramirez responded. He took a small bite. It didn’t taste like chicken, and the substance around it didn’t quite taste like bread. He wasn’t exactly sure what it was.

“None?”

“Only at trial,” Ramirez said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and took a sip of the lukewarm bitter coffee.

“Did he ever ask for a lawyer?”

“In that interview, no.”

“What does
that
mean? Was there another interview that I don’t know about?”

Jones explained. “Mike was initially arrested for sexually assaulting and murdering a young boy, Andrew. Arturo Montenegro. That’s why I was sent down there by O’Malley. Inspector Ramirez was investigating the crime. But it turned out that Mike was framed by one of the detectives in the Major Crimes Unit. A man named Rodriguez Sanchez.”

“A detective in your own section? And this interview that you referred to, Inspector Ramirez, was it in relation to those charges?”

“Yes,” Ramirez conceded. “Señor Ellis asked for a lawyer when he was being questioned by Sanchez and myself about the boy’s death. But he had no right under our laws to have one. He was informed of that at the time.”

Jones nodded. “I heard the tape of that first interview with Mike.” She glanced at Ramirez uneasily. “But there were times when the tape recorder was shut off.”

“Is that correct?” Britton asked, clicking the top of his pen even more rapidly.

“Yes,” Ramirez nodded. He had shut off the tape because he had brought a bottle of
añejo
from the exhibit room into the interview so he could add some to his coffee. He needed it to control the trembling in his fingers.

Rodriguez Sanchez had made a second, complete recording from the other side of the mirrored glass while he watched Ramirez question Ellis. But Ramirez wasn’t sure where that tape was anymore. Unless it was the tape that Sanchez had recorded over in the mountains when he kidnapped Celia Jones. The one still sitting on Ramirez’s desk.

Sanchez had turned the recorder on while he described his own abuse at the hands of Rey Callendes, as if he was recording evidence, thought Ramirez. Sanchez had even asked Celia Jones if the statement of a dead man was admissible as evidence in a Canadian court, the way it was in Cuba.

For the first time since Sanchez’s death, Ramirez wondered why.

“What’s bothering you, Andrew?” asked Celia Jones, interrupting Ramirez’s thoughts.

“I don’t like this, Celia,” said Britton. “Was Inspector Ramirez a person in authority? If he was, that confession is inadmissible. Ellis wasn’t given his right to counsel. Quite apart from the fact that the tape is incomplete, which is a whole other problem in itself.”

“Come on, Andrew,” said Jones. “Mike was in a foreign country at the time. The Charter of Rights isn’t carried around the world with each Canadian citizen as part of their baggage. The court sees incomplete transcripts all the time. That’s not an admissibility issue. It only goes to weight.”

“Courts are a crapshoot,” Britton replied. “You know that as well as I do. I’d be a lot more comfortable if Inspector Ramirez had asked Ellis if he wanted a lawyer before he spoke to him.”

“That’s setting the bar too high,” Jones protested. “We can’t ask foreign law enforcement agents to apply Canadian laws. The most we can ask is that they apply their own properly.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you, Celia,” Britton said, “but there is a difference here. We want to charge Ellis with a crime he committed in
this
country. Irv Birenbaum is going to say that if Mike Ellis had been given an opportunity to speak to a lawyer earlier, this statement would never have happened. Correct?”

“If I had told him he had a right to a lawyer,” Ramirez acknowledged, “he would not have confessed to me, that’s true. I told him the truth. We don’t rely on confessions in Cuba as evidence. We consider them unreliable.”

“Exactly my point, Inspector. That’s why he agreed to talk to you. And now we want to use his statement, which you told him was inadmissible, and which you agree is unreliable, as evidence against him. That’s a big problem under Canadian laws.”

“But we weren’t
in
Canada.”

Ramirez was confused. He wondered how Canadian police could ever get confessions if they told all suspects they had a right not to talk to them.

“If I had told him that he had a right to counsel, Señor Britton, I would have been lying to him. Even Cuban nationals are not entitled to legal counsel before an indictment is filed.”

“But Celia had come to Cuba to represent him before you questioned him about Sloan,” Britton said. “She could have advised him.”

“Not really, Andrew,” Jones said, her voice rising. Ramirez could hear her mounting frustration. “I would have been in a gross conflict of interest. I’m the departmental lawyer, for Christ’s sake. O’Malley had told me to go after Mike if I found out he’d done anything wrong. I couldn’t have given Mike advice if I even suspected he’d murdered Steve Sloan.”

“Were you Mike’s lawyer when you went down there or not?”

“I suppose, technically, I was acting for the department.”

“Great.” Britton threw his pen up in the air. “If we do arrest him, Ellis will be on the streets the moment Irv gets disclosure.”

FORTY - SIX

Mike Ellis stood in the kitchen and watched the snow fall. The trees in the backyard were covered with a thick layer already. He shook his head, his eyes wet.

June 2, 2006. He had tried so hard to forget that night, it had become all he could think about. Most nights, he’d attempted to drink himself into oblivion. He’d failed at that. He’d sworn to quit drinking when he’d come home from Havana. And now he’d failed at that, too.

He had told Inspector Ramirez everything in Havana. He had waited for retribution—for lightning to strike him dead. Or for heavily armed officers to carry him back to the same cramped cell where he had spent four long days locked up with Cuban dissidents.

Absolutely nothing happened. No one arrested him. No one stopped him from catching his flight back to Canada. No police cars waited on the tarmac.

Inspector Ramirez had given Ellis what he’d never expected. Not exactly absolution, but something close to it. Ramirez had listened, sympathized, and let him go.

He gave me a second chance, thought Ellis. Maybe I owe it to Steve to take it, now that Hillary’s gone and I’m alone.

He looked around the dirty kitchen. It was littered with empty bottles: beer, whisky, rum. For days, he hadn’t eaten much except stale crackers and yoghurt, afraid to go out in case the media ambushed him. He ran his fingers over the scruff on his face. He grimaced when his fingers felt the raised scars.

Steve would have wanted him to live, to enjoy his remaining time on the planet. “Only comes around once, buddy,” he had said. “You can’t keep lying your whole life about what’s important to you. About who you are.”

“Fuck, Steve, what were you thinking? Why did you sleep with her?” Ellis had wept as he held Sloan’s head in his hands and watched the light in his eyes fade. “I can’t believe you did that.”

“I don’t know. Just to
know
, I guess. I couldn’t figure out why you couldn’t just up and leave her. But we’re even, buddy. I can’t believe you just shot me either.”

Sloan held up his fingers. They were covered with dark blood. Arterial blood. They both knew he was dying. “I guess I wanted to know why you wouldn’t leave her.”

“For me” was left unspoken, and then Steve Sloan died.

Ellis threw the empty bottles in the blue recycling bin. He gathered up the dishes and piled them in the dishwasher.

He ran upstairs to the bedroom and pulled Hillary’s clothes out of the cupboard. He rummaged through the pockets before he threw them in a heap on the floor. He’d call Goodwill to pick them up. Someone would want them. They were expensive dresses with Holt Renfrew labels, dry-cleaned skirts, silk blouses.

He found an empty condom package in the pocket of the navy blue dress Hillary wore each spring. He picked the dress up and recognized the smell of Steve’s aftershave.

He buried his face in the soft fabric, inhaling the faint perfume. He finally put the garment down. He looked at the floor and slowly picked up the torn package.

Tears spilled down his face as he realized that Steve would have used protection. Maybe Hillary never was pregnant, never miscarried at all. She could have said all that to get even with him once she suspected he’d had an affair of his own, to make him feel guilty. She could have lied.

FORTY - SEVEN

“Are you serious, Andrew?” said Celia Jones.

“Absolutely. There are too many things wrong with this confession for it to be the only evidence in a murder case.”

Andrew Britton began counting points on his fingers, the way he often did in court.

“Mike Ellis was questioned after he was misled as to the use to be made of his statement. He wasn’t told that the interview was being taped surreptitiously. He was interrogated only days after another detective in the same police station, in the same section, framed him for a crime he didn’t commit. Inspector Ramirez here, made up expert evidence with the precise intent of persuading Ellis to confess to him. And Irv Birenbaum will argue that God only knows what was on the missing parts of that first tape. Any one of those amounts to ‘oppression’ under
Oickle.
Put them together, we’re screwed.”

“That’s a Supreme Court of Canada decision,” Jones explained to Ramirez. “It says that evidence obtained by police trickery has to be excluded.”

“The Crown can’t do indirectly what it can’t do directly. I don’t care what Cuban laws are, we can’t use information here that was
gathered illegally there. We better hope we get more evidence than this. Maybe something proving that Ellis killed his wife.”

There was a rap on Jones’s office door. “Come in,” she called.

Miles O’Malley stood on the other side. He looked tired and disappointed.

Andrew Britton continued. “Because if we don’t, Mike Ellis is going to walk.”

“I’m afraid Michael won’t be walking anywhere, Andrew,” said O’Malley, shaking his head. “He’s in Emergency at the Civic. In critical condition. He may not make it through the night.”

“
What?
” exclaimed Jones.

“Tactical broke down the door when he didn’t respond to the doorbell. He was lying on the kitchen floor, unconscious. An overdose of that medication he was taking for his nerves. A suicide attempt, from the looks of it. Well, I guess that’s another sign of guilt, isn’t it? I’ll have to go over to the Kelly residence and tell Mrs. Kelly she was right. You know how much I’m looking forward to doing that.”

“Oh, shit,” Jones sighed. “She’ll just go running to the press. We’re still trying to figure all of this out. Let me deal with her.”

“You’d best talk to her soon, then. I sent a patrolman over to the General to pick up her daughter’s belongings in case we needed them for the investigation. He’s just brought them back. There’s nothing in them. There’s no point dropping them off at Michael’s residence, after what’s happened. And it’s the mother who’s acted as the next-of-kin anyway. Can you return them to her? If we don’t, you know she’ll be screaming about a cover-up on the evening news.”