Chapter One

I've been a sinner and a saint, a criminal and a judge, an altar boy and a blasphemer. And now, at the age of fifty-eight, I'm an old man, or at least an aging man obsessed about growing old, about wasting my life, about time passing, about setting things straight. The life I've led tells me that a man is as apt to get what he doesn't want as to get what his heart is set on. I wanted things to be right between me and my son. I did not want the terror of facing Jeffrey again after not laying eyes on him for eight years.

    Waiting for the light to change at the intersection of Bloor and Yonge, I caught a glimpse of myself in the side window of a BMW stuck in morning rush-hour traffic. My salt-and-pepper hair had turned completely gray since I'd seen Jeffrey last. My once well-muscled slightly overweight body had turned gaunt, then nearly skeletal, then back to muscled again. My clothes had gone from Armani to Goodwill, then settled somewhere in between.

    I stepped off the curb but jumped back when a turning taxi screamed its horn at me. I almost welcomed the rush of fear that set the blood pounding through my chest. Some things are easier to be afraid of than others.

    A sweet, soft, sunny September morning, definitely the kind of morning for the remembrance of things past. The last time I'd crossed the threshold of Blane Tower, the office high-rise John Stoughton-Melville had named for his father-in-law, Stow had dismantled his legal practice to become a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and move to the capital in Ottawa. I had no idea what he was using Blane Tower for these days, but I was about to find out.

    The elevator sped through twenty-nine floors without stopping. I was alone, alone enough to contemplate that it, like everything else in Stow's life, was elegant. Oak panelled, carpeted in red, mirrored on the ceiling and softly lighted. Stow, it seemed to me, had appropriated all good things to himself: wealth, intelligence, a stellar law career, a stunning wife and now--I was beginning to understand--Jeffrey, my own son. As the elevator door slid noiselessly open, I realized that all the careful words I rehearsed to say to the boy--not boy, Jeffrey was now twenty-nine--had fled.

    "Good morning, Mr. Portal. It is Mr. Portal?" I nodded. A gray-haired woman about my own age extended her well-manicured hand the moment I stepped into a reception area decorated in dark cool tones that obliterated the autumnal warmth of the morning, replacing it with seasonless sterility. The last time I'd been here, I had sneaked glances at treasures from Stow's personal collection: a madonna from the Italian Renaissance, a golden goblet encrusted with rubies, a portrait of the mother of Harpur Blane Stoughton-Melville, Stow's dead wife, another person whose love I always felt Stow had robbed me of.

    "Mr. Portal, I mean the other Mr. Portal," the woman said with an awkward smile, "has had to take an unexpected conference call. He's asked me to inquire as to whether you'd like breakfast while you wait for him. He regrets the delay."

    At the thought of placing anything into the gurgling cauldron of acid that was my stomach, I felt bile rise at the back of my throat. "No thank you," I managed. "I'll just wait."

    She smiled again and motioned me toward the smoothly upholstered curve of a dark blue chair. It looked as inviting as a wave of the sea. I gingerly lowered my posterior into its unwelcoming embrace.

    I don't know how long I sat there. Time, as Mr. Einstein could probably have explained, expands and contracts and twists itself to its own purpose. There was no dock visible and no hint of the passage of time in the silent motions of the woman as she worked behind another dark curve of furniture that served both as her desk and a protective barrier between Jeffrey and all intruders. I stared at the sea-blue carpet and wondered how Jeffrey had ended up here.

    If he had ever told me what he intended to do with his life, I couldn't remember. He was twenty-one when I left the family and I had not been exactly a homebody during his adolescence. There was an ocean of regret between me and my son but we had always bridged it with silence and denial. Even now as I struggled to think of what to say to him, I found my thoughts veering away from Jeffrey and this morning.

    "Ellis, I've called to congratulate you," Stow had said last week instead of hello. Justice J. Stoughton-Melville never wasted a word on preliminaries.

    "Congratulate me, Stow? What for?" Stow always seemed to know more about what was happening in my life than I did. I no longer questioned how he managed that. He had to know, for example, that when he called me at home, he was calling from the chambers of a Supreme Court Justice to the chambers of a rooming house boarder.

    "Ellis, surely you've seen the papers. Jeffrey's firm has won the competition for the renaturalization of Nathan Phillips Square in front of City Hall." Not only had I been unaware of this good news, I had not even known Jeffrey had a firm, though Stow had told me my son was an architect, had warned me that it was to my own detriment that I refused to mend the breach with Jeffrey. Being devoid of shame himself, Stow could not comprehend how shame hampered others. A major failing in a judge, it seemed to me.

    "I thought Jeffrey was an architect," I said weakly. "Doesn't renaturalization involve tearing structures down? Why would an architect want to do that?" For all I knew, Jeffrey hated Nathan Phillips Square. I used to take him there to skate on the public ice rink when he was a child. He would go around and around always seeming to stare at the buildings surrounding the square. I wondered why he didn't get dizzy but I'd never asked him how he avoided it.

    "Really, Ellis, you appal me. Jeffrey had the whole front page of the urban affairs section of yesterday's Daily World . His proposal will make a senseless expanse of concrete into a living urban forest. It's a courageous and highly innovative design." There was a breath, but only a breath, of silence. "I would be immensely proud if he were my son," Stow said in his deep, level, confident voice.

    Well, he's not your son.

    "He's expecting you to meet with him," Stow had announced.

    I felt the fury rise in me before I was even sure I'd heard correctly. "What do you mean `expecting'?"

    "Monday morning at 9:15. I told him you'd be there."

    "You're a liar!" I gasped at my own insolence.

    But Stow had laughed. "Only if you make me one, Ellis. Be there and keep me honest." He laughed again and hung up. And made me spend the whole weekend wondering what to say to my son. After forty-eight hours the only words I'd definitely decided on were, "I'm sorry."

    I was brought abruptly back to the present at the sudden sound of a door opening in a place in the blue-gray paneled wall that I hadn't realized contained a door. As if in slow motion, a man stepped from behind it and began to make his way toward me across the expanse of dark carpet.

    I rose, not surprised to discover my knees were shaking. I extended my hand, steadying it. The man's fingers were grasping mine before I looked up and saw that this stranger could not be Jeffrey. He was the right age but too stocky, too dark, too warm. He shook my hand with genuine enthusiasm. "It's an honor to meet you, Judge Portal," he said. "I'm Jeffrey's attorney."

    All at once I realized what this meeting was about. It had nothing to do with Jeffrey's award or Stow's interest in my son's career. Above all, it had nothing to do with reconciliation. It had to do with money. "Look," I said, politely withdrawing my hand and stepping back. "I'm not in a position to discuss the financial settlement that Jeffrey's mother and I have finalized."

    The man looked startled, perhaps embarrassed. He shook his head. "No," he said. "No, of course not, Mr. Portal. I've only come out to apologize for the delay. Jeff was really looking forward to speaking to you this morning but you know how it is." He shrugged.

    "How is it?" I asked, no longer having the slightest idea what I was doing there.

    "Jeff wants to talk to you. He really does. But since he got that award the phone's been ringing off the hook. He's just up to here." He lifted his hand to his chin and I saw he wore a college ring, which meant he was probably American. Was "Jeff" so successful that he needed international legal advice?

    "Yes," I said. "Up to here. Good for him." I was being sarcastic but the young lawyer took me completely seriously.

    "Gee, thanks for understanding," he said, reaching, I thought, to slap me on the back, but thinking better of the idea in time to stop himself from touching me. "Jeff figured you'd be willing to set up another appointment and I said I'd come out here and take care of you myself because I've been a fan of yours for a while now."

    I could not imagine how this young man could know one good thing about me. No doubt because, I realized later, I could not imagine how Jeffrey could know one good thing to tell him. "I'm a little up to here myself at the moment," I said ridiculously. "So why don't I give Jeff a buzz and we'll rebook. I'll run my eye over my daybook."

    A look of surprise flashed across the young man's friendly, open features but he was too much of a lawyer to let me know what was on his mind. He probably understood that my careless tone was completely fake. There was no way in the world I would call my son. I had spent forty-eight hours wringing my hands. Now I was reprieved.

    It didn't occur to me until I was back out being honked at on Yonge and Bloor that the other Mr. Portal was probably behind his blue wall feeling exactly the same way.

Later that day in the canyon of buildings further south on Yonge Street, the afternoon sun didn't make it all the way down to the sidewalk, but the breeze was still soft when I arrived at Police Headquarters in the hope I'd find Matt West.

    Nobody bothered to ask me to sign for a visitor's pass. The assistance I'd rendered in my two so-called murder cases had made me known to the police in ways more congenial than in my earlier roles as assault perpetrator and vagrant. The duty sergeant at the front desk nodded in recognition when I began ascending the wide marble staircase from the lobby to the offices on the upper floors. This Gargantua in the heart of town was the newest in a long line of Toronto Police Headquarters and it looked more like an intercontinental hotel than a cop shop. I supposed that was appropriate for a sophisticated city of more than four million people, nearly half from other countries. The Toronto police offered emergency services in one hundred and forty languages. I appreciated the present cosmopolitan nature of the city, even though I could still remember when Headquarters had been a run-down hulk on grungy Jarvis Street and the language of service had been English.

    "You wanted to see me, Matt," I asked a little sheepishly. Detective Sergeant Mattheson West glanced up at me from behind his unusual desk, an old enamel-topped kitchen table. His eyes are a shade of dark green I've only seen in a person whose blood is a mixture of Negroid and Caucasian. In New Orleans they call coffee-colored skin like his "Creole". His black hair, marked now by a few strands of gray; is curly, thick and short-looking even when he tells me he hasn't had a haircut in four months.

    In one of those rare moments in which a civilian is granted a peek at what goes on behind closed doors at Headquarters, I heard Matt's male colleagues tease him that Detective West was promoted to Sergeant solely because he has a double "handicap". He's black and he has only his left hand. Females say his success is because he is so good-looking, and I suppose he is. Nobody mentions that he's gay.

    "What's your hurry, Portal? It's only been four days since I called the first time. Don't tell me you've been busy. I hate to see a man of the law tell a lie."

    "Since when?" I retorted.

    Matt didn't smile but that did not mean he didn't enjoy our bantering or appreciate the rapport we share. Because of a brush with homelessness in my own past, he often calls on me for what he terms "participatory consultation". I feel right at home in his office. Matt heads up the task force for Reduction thorough Early Action of Crimes against the Homeless, which the police call REACH and everybody on the street refers to as "the homeless bureau". Though it had been a long time since I decorated my own home--unless you counted a packing crate--I served as Matt's interior design consultant in addition to my other contributions. He liked to encourage visits from the down-and-outs of the city, so we kept his office looking as sloppy as the shelters, flophouses and community centers frequented by most of his clients. Photos of street people were tacked to his wall in a careless disarray that nevertheless managed to convey his dedication to those he served.

    He rose and offered me a cream-filled chocolate doughnut and a coffee from a supply he always kept nearby. He understood that some of the homeless who visited him would have nothing else to eat that day. I took them and sat in the battered chair in front of his desk. "Thanks, Matt. Are you sure you can spare this? You wouldn't want to run out. What would a cop be without a doughnut?"

    "What would you be without a wise mouth?"

    I took a sip of coffee. It wasn't latte or cappuccino. It tasted like the institutional glop of jails and mental hospitals. Fine by me. "Do you need me for something?"

    "I needed you last week, Ellis. Where have you been?" Matt's green eyes shot me a speculative glance tinged with concern or suspicion. I couldn't tell which. Either way I didn't feel like telling him the truth, which was that between my anxiety over Stow's interference and my confusion over my financial situation, I felt gripped by immobility. Matt wanted me to work for him, but I didn't think I was ready. When I was a judge, I was known for being sensitive to the problems of the disadvantaged. I got even more sensitive when I became a bum. Still, it's one thing to befriend a cop and quite another to work for the police.

    With his strong left hand, Matt pushed away from his desk and swivelled toward a beat-up paint-stained cabinet that, with the flick of single button, swung open to reveal a computer. He positioned the mouse and clicked a few times. I had to get up and stand behind him to see what was on the screen. It looked like a simplified map of Toronto with a number of black dots randomly scattered across it.

    I hated to display my ignorance but I had to ask, "What is this, Matt? What do the dots represent?"

    "Catacombs," was his terse reply.

    I've been to Rome like any good Catholic--or lapsed one. "Catacombs? In Toronto?"

    Matt indulged me with a faint smile. "These are underground squats, places where street kids live."

    I studied the map over Matt's broad shoulder. Most detectives are proud not to wear a uniform. Matt in this, as in all things, was different. He had on the regulation light-blue, short-sleeved shirt the street constables wear in warm weather. I didn't want to follow the line of his muscled arm where it ended in the brown stump of his wrist. I kept my eyes on the screen. "Why do you want me to see this?"

    Without answering, he clicked a few more times. The map changed into a grid and then the grid changed into some sort of three-dimensional graph that I couldn't understand. "This," Matt said obligingly, "is something brand new we're working on."

    "It looks like calculus, those equations I had to do when they put me in the wrong class at the university." If Matt wanted me to do something that involved math, he had to count me out. I was having enough math problems with money.

    "Take it easy, Portal, we don't need you to do math." He fiddled with the mouse again and the graph changed shape and color, from a green mound to what looked like a rugged blue mountain range with sharp red peaks. "This is geographical criminal profiling," Matt explained. "We plot known vacant buildings in the city on one axis and petty crime statistics on another axis, along with some sort of third variable, usually a time factor, on the remaining axis. Then we ..."

    "Matt, I can't work with stuff like this, I ..."

    With one motion of his powerful left index finger, Matt clicked it all away. The screen went blank. "Forget this part of it, then," he said.

    "Part of what?" I asked, going back to the seat I'd vacated.

    "This part of what Deputy Chief Corelli has asked me to talk to you about."

    I tried to hide my surprise but I've always found it hard to keep my thoughts from a police officer. Even when I was a judge, police witnesses for the prosecution often anticipated my questions. "You may be wondering, Your Honor," they would say, and then they'd answer the very question I was about to ask. I used to have to remind myself not to take this trick into consideration when rendering a verdict on the accused, whose witnesses were not mind readers. If top brass were interested in my work, the force must be quite impressed with me, unless ...

    "She's kind of desperate for good publicity because of proposed budget cuts," Matt broke into my thoughts and he laughed, a deep, rich laugh. "She's sent down a directive instructing us to enlist the services of `valuable members of the community'. That would be you, my man."

    "I don't think Corelli would be thrilled to have a disgraced judge and former tenant of a large cardboard box working for her."

    "As a matter of fact, Portal, she would." Matt rolled his chair back to his desk and with swift movements of the practiced fingers of his remaining hand, flipped open a manila folder and pulled a document, then a photograph. But he didn't say anything. He was baiting me. I tried to resist but was tempted.

    "Did you have a particular situation in mind?"

    "Situation?" He didn't look up.

    "I mean did Corelli have something definite she wanted you to ask me about?"

    "Yes." He turned over another piece of paper. He was exceptionally deft with his single hand. I admired that, especially since he'd lost the other hand guarding the late object of my unrequited love, Harpur Stoughton-Melville ... I also admired his cop-like trickery. The longer he made me wait, the more eager I was to hear what he had to say.

    "Do you mind giving me a hint?" I edged forward on the rickety old chair, which creaked under my weight.

    Matt wrinkled his wide shapely nose at the paper as though it held deep clues. "Last week," he began, "as I'm sure you're aware, there was a fatal shooting at the fall film festival."

    The Toronto Film Festival was one of the biggest in the world. With a nickname like "Hollywood North", Toronto could not help but be proud of its film industry. It was hard to walk down the street without tripping over some clown in a director's chair with a crowd of clipboard holders hovering around him. Early-morning newscasts included the location of traffic-snarling film shoots along with those of accidents and water main ruptures. All in a day's work.

    "Charington Simm," I said, and Matt nodded. "I guess there isn't a person in town who hasn't been following that case. It isn't every day that the top director in Canada is shot dead in front of eight hundred witnesses."

    "Not one of whom saw a thing," Matt said with a sigh.

    "But the Simm case is a homicide. Why would you be working on that?" I popped the last bite of doughnut into my mouth and glanced over to the box to see if there was another.

    "Like just about everybody else in this sorry world," Matt said, "Simm wasn't what he appeared to be. A week is plenty of time to check into a man's business dealings, and Simm's were a little, shall we say, complicated."

    In my days as a judge, I'd considered investing in films. Who among my friends hadn't? I knew all about the rate of return on what we used to call "creative goods". "His films cost millions--tens of millions," I observed. "But they must have made that much, too."

    "I don't know how much they made," Matt replied. "But what I do know is that our forensic accounting experts are having a look at things and from what I hear, they're not exactly happy about what they see." I feared he might click on more graphs but mercifully I was spared.

    "What does this have to do with your department?" I asked. "Charington Simm was not the sort of man to find himself without a home."

    Matt gave me that world-weary glance that cops offer to people who aren't using their brains. "If there's one person in the city who should know that homelessness can strike anybody, it's you, Portal. But whatever the situation with the Simm investigation," he said, "it's not him I'm concerned about. It's his daughter, Carrie."

    The newspapers had been full of articles about the girl. I cringed to think that I'd probably bought the tabloids to read about Simm's child instead of the more respectable paper that had carried the article about my own child. "She's certainly a tragic figure," I offered. "She can't be older than about sixteen."

    "Fifteen." Matt said, his even voice beginning to show the slightest trace of excitement as his story unfolded. "The deceased makes a film in which his teenage daughter plays a starring role. The two of them attend the premiere of the movie together, almost as though she's his date. They get out of the limo. There's a scuffle. He's down and she's at his side screaming for help. And nobody sees the shooter or even hears a shot."

    I clicked my tongue in disgust. "That's impossible," I declared. "I've heard the `I didn't see a thing' line in court a thousand times."

    "No," Matt answered, leaning toward me. "Not impossible. Whoever killed Simm used a small-caliber handgun, a .25 ACP What some people on the street call a `raven', either because to them it's a bird in the hand or because it's easy to conceal at raves. A .25 ACP is the smallest center-fire semiautomatic available. Discharged in an empty hallway, it might sound like a cannon. But under most circumstances, it wouldn't make much noise. And in a crowd yelling its admiration for a couple of good-looking celebrities, plus reporters and photographers shouting for attention, the gun might not seem to make any sound at all."

    "I don't know much about guns," I demurred. Matt loved to talk about guns, knives, poison. He was what people call a "sensitive" police officer But he was a cop's cop when he wanted to be. I usually let him go on about weapons. "So if it's that small, could it have inflicted much damage?"

    He gave the question a moment's thought. "Shot in the head at close range," he said carefully, "a man is likely to be damaged. Even with a small gun. Even with a peashooter, for that matter."

    "But what about the shells? If it's a semiautomatic, wouldn't there be ejected cases at the scene?" I never liked to admit my interest in firearms. That would have been unseemly for a judge and dangerous for a bum. But sometimes I couldn't help myself. I'd seen plenty of weapons in my years of sitting on the bench and my years of sleeping on benches, too.

    "I thought you didn't know anything about guns?" Matt challenged.

    "I'm not totally ignorant. I was a judge. Still am, legally. I might still be a lawyer, too, if I paid my dues to the law society."

    Matt consulted his papers again, though I knew he didn't really need to. "The reports show that no ejected cases were found on the scene. There was one single shot fired and the shells for that gun are tiny. There were hundreds of people present. The case could have landed anywhere. Underfoot. In the street. Even in somebody's clothing or hair. If somebody in that crowd had found it, they might not even have known what it was. They might have thrown it in the garbage without thinking."

    "But none of this has anything to do with you, Detective. You're not investigating a homicide." Neither, of course, was I, but I was beginning to feel excitement rise.

    "Right. We're talking about Carrie Simm. Seconds after her father was shot, she was photographed kneeling beside him, begging for help. She was with him in the ambulance. She was with him at St. Mike's when he was pronounced dead twenty minutes after arriving. By the time the coroner left, though, everybody seemed to have forgotten about Carrie. There are no photos of her outside the morgue, though there were plenty of reporters present. Carrie Simm was last recorded beside her newly declared-dead father. She hasn't been seen since."

    What Matt was telling me was pretty much what had appeared in the papers. I began to feel annoyed. No matter how friendly cops sometimes are, the street wisdom holds that you should never forget they're the ones in charge. Did Deputy Corelli want me involved in this case as "window dressing", an empty gesture of community support, or was Matt going to tell me something I didn't already know?

    "Who reported her missing, Matt?"

    "Family," he answered, "Charington Simm and his one and only wife had been divorced for several years. Carrie lived with her father, more or less."

    "More or less?" I didn't like the sound of that. It rang a bell, reminding me of the times, whole years, when I'd put my legal ambitions far ahead of the needs of Jeffrey and Ellen, his sister.

    "Yeah. Off and on," Matt said. "Carrie and her mother never got along, seldom saw each other. But the mother knew how close Carrie was to Simm and how upset the girl would be at witnessing his violent death, so she went looking for Carrie to offer support. Only she couldn't find the girl. After two days, she came to me."

    "You knew this kid when you were on the Youth Bureau, didn't you?" I asked. "Was she one of the street kids you met when you were working undercover?"

    "Yes. Like her father, little Carrie Simm was not exactly what she seemed. She's fifteen now, but she ran away the first time when she was nine years old. I scraped her off Yonge Street and toted her home on a pretty regular basis before I got promoted to this job." He leaned back and gave me another typical police glance. This one was conspiratorial. "I guess when you were involved in that Second Chance matter you heard a few things about me and the kids."

    Second Chance was a halfway house for fugitive girls that had run a shady operation on the side. Only three years had gone by since I'd figured out what was going on there and who was behind it, but it seemed longer. Breaking up that operation had been my first "case". I'd sworn it would be my last, but I was wrong. "Yes, Matt," I answered. "Some of the girls you helped, the ones who got off the street and moved on to better things, said they'd run into a tough pimp with a heart of gold. 'Solomon', I think you called yourself. The girls never exactly said your name, but it was clear to me who they were talking about. Clearly, too, they trusted you, which is remarkable for that group."

    If he was pleased at this accolade, he didn't show it.

    "And the street people trust you, Portal. That's what this is all about."

    I tried to be cop-like and not show I was pleased at Matt's compliment. Then I remembered he had something up his sleeve, so to speak. "You think Carrie Simm might be back on the street? Is that what you're saying?"

    "Where else would she be?" Matt replied. "She and her father had bumpy times. But things were straightening out. Surprising as it seems for the daughter of a filmmaker, she actually deserved to be in his films. She was good. I'm not artsy-fartsy, but she had presence on the screen. You looked at her but you were never sure what you were seeing. Young, old. Boy, girl. She sort of shimmered. You couldn't take your eyes off her." As if he were suddenly embarrassed by this flight into film criticism, Matt caught himself. I think he blushed. I remembered that before he met a lawyer named William Sterling, Matt had been a married man. His voice flattened. "She's a kid," he said. "If her father got shot, I'm sure she'd flee back to the only people she really trusted."

    "And that wouldn't be her mother," I agreed. And it wouldn't be any social worker or family counselor, either, I didn't bother to add.

    "No. It would be other street kids she'd turn to." Matt hesitated as if he hated to say what came next. "Could be she'd go back to a gang."

    Tourist boosters aren't going to include the fact in any brochure, but for all its genteel loveliness and clean, lively urban charm, Toronto also has gangs, including violent girl gangs. "The Spiders?" I ventured. The Spider gang was the first and the worst of the girl gangs. Its members came from every ethnic group: WASP, Asian, Black. And as many middle-class girls as poorer ones joined up. There were some girls who joined the Spiders instead of going to college. Girls wore the gang's Black Widow tattoo in obvious places. One was rumored to sport it in the middle of her forehead. But the more devious were tattooed in secret places on their bodies and only revealed the spider in moments of intimacy or intimate danger for their victims. The majority of Spiders contented themselves with shoplifting, picking pockets and the occasional mugging. Those capable of multitasking robbed tricks, while the truly talented robbed banks.

    "The Spider gang strikes me as a good guess," Matt replied. He swiveled his chair so that he was no longer facing me.

    Here it comes.

    "You knew a couple of girls from the Spiders," he said, as though talking to the air. We were moving closer to the point. Closer to the real reason he wanted my help.

    "You mean poor little Moonstar, Queenie Johnson's daughter?"

    Queenie is Cree and the widow of a Cree, but she bears the last name of an English Canadian missionary. Queenie was my best friend on the street, though she was living out of town at the moment. Her daughter, a victim of life on the skids, had died violently before she reached legal adulthood.

    "There's another Spider among your close associates." Matt hesitated. "Tootie Beets," he finally said.

    "Are you serious?" Though she was probably not yet twenty-one, Tootie was one of the oldest and wisest people I'd ever met. She was an ex-street kid turned landlady. My landlady, though daily I told myself that had to change. She ran her rooming house the way others ran multinational corporations.

    "Yes."

    "I've never seen her tattoo," I said. Then it was my turn to go red in the face.

    "I don't know how current her gang involvement is," Matt said, turning back to face me. "And like you, I hope it's not current at all. But she knew the Spiders. So did Moonstar. So did Carrie. It's possible that Carrie, stricken with fear and grief over the murder of her father, perhaps feeling that her own life is in danger, is with that gang fight now."

    I was still trying to figure out how the police thought I could be of assistance. "You want me to grill my landlady?"

    Matt coughed into his hand. "I think a simple conversation might suffice," he said. "Adolescent girls are reported missing all the time. They usually turn up in a few hours or the next day, having given the parents a good scare. But sometimes there's a lot more involved than a teenage temper tantrum. Missing girls who join the Spiders are serious trouble. The really tough ones, girls who were born on the street, are quick to teach crime to the more innocent ones, ones who come downtown from the suburbs, from Scarborough, Etobicoke and North York. But those suburban kids know a few tricks of their own. And sometimes they're the ones with the weapons, guns stolen from Daddy's collection or even, sorry to say, Mommy's purse."

    I could have feigned outrage at this, but why bother? I had lived on the street and in the ravines of the city for five years. I knew the score. "What am I looking for, Matt?"

    "For now, just watch and listen. Any mention of Carrie or the Spiders would help us out. Any indication of a change in girl-gang activity might also be useful."

    "Change?"

    "Yeah. Names. Locations. Report back whatever you get."

    I smiled. "That's all it will take for you to gain a few extra brownie points with the brass?"

    Matt didn't answer that question. "If you agree to work with me on this, Portal, I can put you on the payroll. And who knows, helping us out again, you might make `Citizen of the Year'."

    I decided to give the matter some thought. I didn't want to be "Citizen of the Year" and I was starting to feel the hot breath of the taxman on the back of my neck over the money I already had, but I needed to find something to do with my time before I began to behave like a bum again, or worse, gave into the temptation to write a book about my life.

    "I've got to sleep on it, Matt. I might talk to Tootie. But I don't need to be on the payroll and I don't need to get awards."

    "So now you're rich and you've already been `Citizen of the Year'?" He said it as if both ideas were the greatest joke. And they should have been. Except they were true. I couldn't expect Matt to remember the contribution to society I'd made when I was a judge but I was beginning to understand I'd best remember it myself.

Copyright © 2001 Rosemary Aubert. All rights reserved.