Greene had known Julian Keswick, the supervisor of the parking lot below City Hall, for decades. Keswick was in charge of the secured section where judges who sat at the nearby Old City Hall courthouse parked, as well as a second secured lot reserved for city politicians.
Greene tapped on the perpetually dirty glass door of Keswick’s little office, located deep in the bowels of the parking lot, and walked in. The place hadn’t changed from the day Greene had first come here decades ago. Same steel desk. Same classic old Farrah Fawcett poster behind Keswick on the otherwise bare wall. Same seemingly endless stacks of paperwork on the desk. Same plaque on the desk: “Honk If You Need Service… Then Wait Until I’m Damn Good And Ready.”
Keswick looked up from behind a fat old computer monitor that must have been there for at least fifteen years.
“Ari.” He leaned back in his old wooden chair, then, like a boy on a swing, he used the momentum of his chair to propel his enormous body back toward the desk so he could stand up. He gave Greene an exaggerated mock bow.
“Hail to the Chief,” he said. “I heard about your new gig. Couldn’t keep away, could you? Once a copper always a copper.”
“It’s a job,” Greene said, reaching out to grasp Keswick’s extended, meaty paw.
Keswick shook his hand. “A job? Excuse me, you’re the head of homicide. And to think, I remember when you were a little pisher division detective doing purse snatchings and house break-ins. To what do I owe the honour, sir?”
He sat back down, relieved to be off his feet.
Greene took a seat across from him in the old stack chair that also had been there forever. He pointed to the poster. “I see Farrah’s still keeping you company.”
“It’s an ideal marriage. We’ve been together for forty-five years, and to me she’s as beautiful as the day we met.”
Greene laughed, even though he’d heard the joke many times over the years. “I need to take a look at a vehicle,” he said.
Keswick turned his head back toward the restricted judges’ parking lot. “One where our ‘vulnerable’ judges park?”
Greene shook his head.
Keswick turned his head in the other direction.
“Oh. You want to look where our ‘hard-working’ politicians leave their cars.”
Greene nodded.
“And I assume, Chief, that we don’t want anyone to know about this, do we?”
Greene shrugged.
Keswick leaned back again. His chair groaned. “Ari, I haven’t laid eyes on you since you beat that murder rap. I hated seeing you charged.”
“I wasn’t too fond of it, either.”
“I knew you were innocent all along. When I heard you went to England after, I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”
“Neither did I.”
“Maybe you should have stayed away. Look at what’s happening to this town. All these murders. Kids. One of them looks at another the wrong way and out come the guns. It’s ridiculous.”
“Standards have slipped,” Greene said.
“Now what? We have a serial killer murdering homeless people?”
This was the way Keswick worked. First, he wanted some conversation, some gossip, before he’d agree to let Greene do whatever he wanted to do.
“We’re working it,” Greene said. Which he knew Keswick would understand to mean, I can’t tell you anything more right now.
“It’s not right. This isn’t the Toronto the Good that it used to be.”
“Big-city progress, big-city problems.”
Keswick chuckled. “When I started this job, what were my lunchtime options? Burgers and fries. Fish and chips. Fried chicken. Now? Within two blocks of here there’s Japanese, Thai, Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern. Back then who’d ever even heard of pad thai or sushi or jerk chicken? Now I can eat delicious food from anywhere in the world, so long as I don’t get hit by a stray bullet.”
The two men had a long history. Keswick and his wife, Beulah, had a daughter named Daphne who was a bad crack addict. When she had a daughter, Francine, Children’s Aid swept in and scooped up the baby. The upshot was that Keswick and his wife had raised their granddaughter since a month after she was born.
“How old is Francine now? Three?” Greene asked.
“You never forget, do you?”
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s a handful for old folks like us. Never stops moving. She calls me Papa. You know, Ari, we’re blessed.”
Keswick pulled out the top drawer of his steel desk, extracted a fob key on a thin metal ring, and pointed it toward the politicians’ parking lot.
“The vehicle you’re looking for is the black Ford SUV. Spot fourteen, on the left wall.”
Keswick had already figured out that Greene wanted to check out Hodgson’s vehicle on the QT. He slipped the key ring onto one of his fat fingers and twirled it around.
“Bastard killed that homeless guy with a golf club,” Keswick said. “Now he struts around here as if he owns the city.”
Greene had an idea. “When’s the last time you heard from Daphne?” he asked.
Keswick twirled the fob faster. “You won’t tell Beulah?”
“Of course not.”
“She thinks I go out for a beer with my pals after my Monday Night Bowling League, but I see my daughter at the Coffee Time at Sherbourne and Jarvis. The twenty-four-hour one.”
“How’s Daphne doing?”
He shook his head. “She won’t go to a shelter and I won’t give her money. Instead I buy her coffee cards.”
“Still won’t go back into treatment?”
“You mean follow-up treatment after Beulah and me drained our savings to get her into rehab? You know, Ari, she had one relapse.”
He stuck his forefinger in the air.
“One damn relapse. Oh no, no, no. The government can’t afford to pay for follow-up treatment for an addict who relapses. Ask the fucking bureaucrats. And the politicians, why should they care? The homeless don’t vote. All they want to do is balance their budget. That’s a joke. Did you know they spent three quarters of a million dollars retrofitting this garage to make our precious judges ‘feel safe’ when they park their Lexuses and Teslas here? No one gives a damn about the poor anymore.”
Greene sat still and waited for Keswick to catch his breath.
“Where’s Daphne living?” he asked.
“She won’t tell me. I’m worried sick she’s in the Humber Valley where all the homeless are getting killed. Sometimes she stays under the Danforth Bridge. She’s told me there’s all sorts of hidden encampments down there that nobody even knows about.”
He puckered his lips, stopped twirling the fob, and pulled it off his finger.
“Last winter almost killed her. And now it’s getting cold again. Thank goodness for the lost and found here. I got her scarves and gloves and toques. Someone even left a Canada Goose coat. Worth about a thousand bucks. Amazing what some of these rich people buy and don’t even care about.”
He looked Greene square in the eye and handed the fob over to him.
“Is there really a serial killer on the loose murdering the homeless?”
Greene met his eyes. “It’s Monday. You seeing Daphne tonight?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
“Really, Ari, you don’t have to—”
Greene put up his hand to stop him from talking.
“Thanks,” Keswick said. “Daphne was such a beautiful child. Now she looks older than her mom.”