The Guilty Page 6

  Several other boxes on the floor, as well as the empty walls and bookshelves, spoke volumes about what was happening. Still, Bratt couldn’t stop himself from asking a most obvious question.

  “What’re you doing?”

  Jeannie answered without any hesitation and without a hint of emotion in her voice.

  “I’m leaving, Daddy.”

  Hearing her speak the words he had feared the most shocked him into silence. It didn’t even occur to him to ask her where she was going. He couldn’t believe that she was taking things so far. This was all over an argument about his job, after all. Surely not enough to break up his family. Not enough to make her suddenly hate him.

  He had no idea how things had snowballed so quickly, and to such a melodramatic point. But his pride wouldn’t let him show her how her words had affected him. He felt he had to say something, no matter how banal, to hide how shaken he was.

  He pointed at the man still standing with her sweater in his hand.

  “Who’s he?”

  “André. He’s a friend.”

  As if the mention of his name had broken a spell, André returned to the packing he had been doing when Bratt showed up. Jeannie, though, continued to face her father. Her expression seemed to soften slightly.

  “I don’t hate you, you know,” she said, as if she had read his mind.

  Bratt let out a breath that he didn’t know he was holding. “Well, I’m glad to hear that, I guess. Sure had me fooled.”

  “I’m just seeing things differently right now. I know you don’t understand.”

  “Oh, no, I understand perfectly. I’ve been doing the same job for close to twenty years, a job that many people, including you once upon a time, considered honorable. A job that thousands of people do each day all over the world. And suddenly I’m a pariah that you can’t get away from fast enough. So, yes, it seems that I do understand.”

  “No, Daddy, that’s not it at all. I just need time to think about things and try to understand my own feelings. And maybe you should take a little time to step back and look at what you’ve done with your life too. A little introspection might actually do you some good.”

  His mouth opened and then shut again. The last thing he had expected or needed that day was to have his eighteen-year-old daughter suggest he try “a little introspection.” He was fed up with her youthful insolence.

  “Jesus Christ! Do you think you’re going to judge my life now?”

  She shook her head slowly and looked toward André for support. André clearly knew better than to return her look. He just kept on emptying a drawer full of underwear, not wanting any part of this family argument.

  She turned back to her father, and softly asked, “How did court go today?”

  “What?”

  “How did court go?” she repeated, her voice calm but sad.

  “If you really want to know, it went quite well…once I got over the little scene you made in the back room.”

  “Final arguments for Cooper Hall, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  She paused before speaking again, a pensive look on her face, and brought the tips of the index and middle fingers of her right hand up to her lips. Bratt knew that this was how she looked when she was trying to organize her thoughts, putting together her own final arguments.

  Softly, she asked him, “He never testified, right?”

  “No, I told you about that.”

  “Probably because he would have lied if he had.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Bratt said, enthusiastically, grasping at the opportunity to bring up his own honesty, while not even paying lip-service to client-attorney privilege. “I told him I wouldn’t let him lie on the stand. I could win this case without his lies.”

  “So what did you plead to the jury? That they shouldn’t believe the Crown’s witnesses? That they weren’t trustworthy?”

  “Yes, of course. Their testimony just didn’t stand up under cross-examination, so there was no way the jury could find them credible.”

  “You made sure of that, didn’t you?”

  “Damn right, I did. I know how to protect my client’s rights.”

  “Yes, your client’s rights,” she dryly repeated his words. “So you told the jury they shouldn’t believe a word these people said, even though you knew the witnesses were telling the truth. You wouldn’t let your client lie about what happened, so instead you lied for him.”

  “What’re you talking about? I’m supposed to challenge their testimony, dammit! Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

  “Because for you ‘challenging their testimony’ means tearing apart perfectly honest witnesses. You make them out to be liars, when you know they’re not. You make them look like fools on the stand and you humiliate them. Just like what your little lawyer buddy did to Claire.”

  The mention of what had happened to Claire Brockway was like a slap in Bratt’s face. How dare Jeannie compare how he did his job to what Claire had experienced? It wasn’t the same thing, wasn’t even close. For one thing, he didn’t give a shit about the witnesses who had testified against Hall. He hadn’t seen them grow up. They hadn’t been as much a part of his family as his own daughter. They didn’t matter a damn bit to him, but Claire did and that was all the difference in the world. If Jeannie couldn’t see that, he wouldn’t waste any more time arguing with her. There was nothing more for him to say.

  He turned on his heels and headed for his own bedroom, leaving her where she stood. He was angry at the thought of how his day had been full of high points that kept getting abruptly cut short by Jeannie’s misdirected attacks. Mostly, though, he was angry with himself for not being able to come up with answers to her accusations.

  What am I letting her get away with all this shit for? he asked himself. I haven’t felt at such a loss for words since first year Moot Court. She hits me with a bunch of feeble, adolescent arguments she probably got from one of her brain-dead humanities teachers, and I can’t even stand up for myself. Screw it! If she wants to go off and sulk then let her. But she better not come running back to Daddy anytime soon.

  At 8 a.m. on Friday morning the bright winter sun was shining through Bratt’s un-shaded bedroom window. He had been awake for nearly two hours, but hadn’t yet left his room. He looked out the window while still seated on the edge of his bed, a sense of deja vu coming over him. Lately he seemed to be spending a lot of time staring out of windows, mentally replaying scenes of the confrontations he kept having with Jeannie.

  Down on the snow-covered trails of Mount Royal a lone jogger was braving the biting cold. The jogger’s breath appeared in regular puffs of condensation through the opening of a ski mask. It must be 20 below, Bratt thought. Health nut!

  He let out a soft sigh and his eyes turned to the framed picture on his night table: Jeannie at age three, sitting on her mother’s lap. Fifteen years later she was still as precious to him as ever, despite the feelings of anger and frustration she inspired in him, seemingly at will.

  He hadn’t gone out of his room yet because he didn’t want to pass her open bedroom door again. He couldn’t bear to see how empty her room had become. She had taken everything with her: old stuffed toys from her childhood, posters of rock stars and teen actors, her clothes, her books. Just her and this “friend” of hers, André.

  Who the hell is André, and how come I never heard of him before?

  His eyes moved to his wife’s face in the picture, but he looked away quickly, feeling ashamed. He peered back out at the mountain, then let his gaze move up, past the forest trails, to the cemetery where Deirdre was buried. What would she think of him now? Wasn’t doing much of a job looking after their daughter, was he?

  He had raised Jeannie alone for the past eight years, and had been better at it than many people had expected. Now, over something that was beyond his control, but which was bothering him more than he cared to admit, she had turned away from him.

  Last night, for the f
irst time since she was born, he had no idea where his daughter had slept. He had thought to call some of her friends, but then decided not to. He couldn’t face the possibility that they might lie to him, at her request, about her whereabouts. The most likely place for her to go, the place where she spent nearly as much time as her own home, was at Claire’s and he wasn’t about to call there. What in the world could he say to Claire now?

  Testifying in that trial had nearly destroyed her. But what was he supposed to do, start hating himself and his job because someone he was close to had gotten hurt? What good would that do now? He had refused to take on Nate Morris’s defense specifically because the case had involved Claire, and God knew Morris had paid him well in the past. So, why should he feel guilty about the job the other lawyer had done on her?

  Teenagers could allow themselves to be impetuous and to change the paths they had chosen at the drop of a hat. That kind of knee-jerk reaction to everything going on in the world was a luxury that he could not afford.

  He fell back in his bed, bare feet still on the floor, and stared up at the ceiling. He tried to clear his mind, concentrating on a small crack in the off-white paint above him, but to no avail.

  “Dammit, I gotta be in court in an hour,” he said aloud, but there was nobody in the apartment to answer him. There were only his thoughts, and these had become quite repetitive since 6 a.m.

  Strange thing about self-pity, he thought. It never seemed to get boring.

  The rest of the day seemed to go by in slow motion. As Bratt fretted about his daughter’s whereabouts, Judge Smythe wrapped up his instructions to the jurors, who then went off to deliberate on the fate of Cooper Hall. Bratt left Hall sitting on a bench outside the courtroom, and wandered the courthouse corridors alone while waiting for the verdict to come in.

  He never could stand being in his client’s presence for too long, and often had the urge to check if his wallet was still there when he and Hall would part company, such was the effect the shifty con artist had even on him.

  As for Nancy Morin, she waited for the verdict with Brenton and the others on his team in the Crown’s offices. That was just as well, Bratt decided, since he was in no mood for playing verbal footsy with her just then.

  As he slowly shuffled from floor to floor, a Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand, he did his best to avoid crossing paths with any of his colleagues or professional rivals who might have been at court. He dreaded the idea of idle chitchat with his fellow attorneys, or worse, having to talk about his family life. Today he preferred keeping his own company and observing everyone else from the distance that he felt separated him from the world.

  As time dragged itself forward he sat down and watched the constant movement of the volume lawyers, those whose careers were spent fast-tracking most of the thousands of cases that crowded the court’s dockets each year. They rushed with stacks of case-files under their arms, running from a hastily-prepared trial to an arraignment, to a preliminary inquiry or two, all in the same morning.

  He watched a pair of teen-age girls, hardly older than Jeannie, chasing down the corridor after their infants. They were probably waiting for word of whether their boyfriends had gotten bail, or had copped pleas to avoid jail time, or had somehow managed to get themselves acquitted, on those rare occasions when their Legal Aid lawyers had bothered to go through with trials.

  Watching these people, the lifeblood of the courthouse being pumped back and forth through its corridors, he felt nothing, neither common bond nor dislike. There was only an ever-growing wall going up around him.

  At 12:30 p.m. the jurors were brought their lunches in the jury room, and their deliberations were suspended until two. He was free to return to his office if he wanted to, maybe do some paper work or swap war stories with John or J.P. for a while.

  He sat on a bench at the end of a courthouse corridor and tried to muster up the will to go back to his office. But human contact held very little attraction for him just then. He sat alone in his corner and spoke to nobody until the lunch break was over.

  A few minutes before 8:00 that evening the jurors came back with a verdict acquitting Cooper Hall on all the fraud and forged document charges. Brenton’s face had fallen at the verdict, convinced as he always was that right had been on his side. Nancy looked toward Bratt and gave a little shrug, as if to say que sera, sera. They had other things on their minds, after all.

  As for Hall, he was nearly overwhelmed with relief, and he burst into tears of gratitude. He ran up to his lawyer and threw his arms around his neck, letting out little woo-hoos of joy between his sobs.

  Bratt stood unmoved while his client hugged him. He had no feelings of his own about what had just happened. He had won a complicated and torturously long trial, yet he felt no sense of accomplishment. Neither feelings of relief nor joy had washed over him at the verdict, which he had barely listened to.

  His thoughts had been on Jeannie, and now they were tinged with bitterness. With her simple act of rebellion she had managed to rob him of one of the purest pleasures of his profession: the feeling of anticipation before a verdict is read out, followed by the exultation of victory.

  Now the verdict held little meaning for him, and he had Jeannie to thank for that. This time she hadn’t even needed to be in the same room: she still managed to bring him down from what should have been the high point of his day.

  The taxi ride home seemed too short. His workweek was over, but he wasn’t ready to go back to his empty apartment. He had no place else to go, though, and for once, he regretted not having asked Kalouderis which bar he would be closing that night.

  He didn’t bother turning on the lights as he entered his home; he knew his way around well enough, and the dark certainly suited his mood. As he undressed in his bedroom he noticed a tiny red light flashing from the direction of his night table. He walked over, turned the table lamp on and saw that he had two messages showing on his answering machine.

  For a moment he considered ignoring them, but then thought that one might be from Jeannie. He sat on the edge of his bed and pressed play, only to be greeted by the sound of his partner’s wheezing voice.

  “Hey, Bobby-boy. Didja get the verdict yet? I hope you didn’t go and blow this case. Think of what that would do to office morale, eh. Anyway, I hope the verdict did come in, so you’d be free tomorrow. Pete-,” and for a moment Bratt couldn’t remember who Pete was, “-is going up to R.D.P. to meet Small. I gave him the OK on that, in case you’re wondering, because time is obviously of the essence, as they say.

  “So, maybe tomorrow would be a good opportunity for you to go up and meet the client too. I know you’re probably going to be out late celebrating this latest triumph of your glorious career, or whatever, but try to drag yourself out of bed in the morning and go up there with Kouri. Congrats again. You did win, didn’t you? Bye.”

  Bratt’s blood had begun boiling from the second he heard Leblanc’s voice and was turning to steam by the time the message had ended. He couldn’t believe that his partner had the gall to ask him to jump into the Small file without even taking a few days off to recover from the previous trial, as well as from the emotional roller coaster of the past week. He also had no interest in spending his Saturday morning with a rookie lawyer at the detention center. He considered phoning Leblanc and telling him off, when his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a woman’s voice that he had never heard on his machine before.

  “Allô, Maître Bratt. C’est sergent-détective Morin. Ah, merde. You know: Nancy. Your favorite cop. At least, I like to think so. Sorry I couldn’t speak to you after the verdict today, but I think Brenton would have had me kicked off the force if he saw me getting all chummy with you at that point. Besides, you don’t really need me to tell you what a great job you did in court, not that I think your client shouldn’t be in jail right now. But, hey, that’s showbiz.

  “Anyhow, you may not have realized this, what with this trial obviously preoccupying you so much,
but I’ve gotten used to seeing a lot of you recently. I hope I don’t sound too pushy or overconfident. See what happens when they put a big gun in a woman’s hands?”

  A light, disembodied laugh sounded from the speaker, and it occurred to Bratt that she might have taken a drink or two before calling him.

  “So, I hope you have no plans for tomorrow night because I thought we could get together for dinner or whatever. We were interrupted in our little chat the other day and I think we should finish what we began, don’t you?

  “I hope you didn’t lose my number. Bonne nuit, Robert.”

  So much for being angry with Leblanc. His earlier thoughts about his partner had disappeared at the first sound of Nancy’s voice. Bratt lay back on his bed and looked up at the ceiling, much as he had done that morning, but this time he was in a much better frame of mind. Nancy, he was happy to see, was not a woman who wasted time beating around the bush. She certainly wasn’t someone who would let him waste a lot of time on self-pity either.

  He decided it was time to forget about the little problems that had haunted him the previous week. He had, after all, just won another seemingly unwinnable case and tomorrow he’d be off to meet the client for his next one. As for Jeannie, she was still just a child and, like most children, she tended to over-react. She’d be back to her senses and home soon enough. And tomorrow night he would finally be able to do something about the courthouse flirtation he had carried on for the past two months.

  He reached over and slid out the top drawer of his night table. From inside it he pulled out Nancy’s business card, handed to him in a very open and professional manner some three weeks into the trial. Her home number had been hastily written in sharp, bold strokes on the back. That was Nancy all over: sharp and bold.