The Guilty Read online

  That was also how he had always thought of himself, at least until his recent bout with sensitivity. But the sensitive male, who knew how to cry and was in touch with his inner child, was definitely not his style. He was quite sure that that wasn’t what had caught Nancy’s attention either. That guy had snuck out from whatever closet Bratt kept him hidden in over the years and took him by surprise. Now he was going back into the deepest, darkest hole that Bratt could find to bury him in, hopefully for good.

  Chapter 4

  At 7:15 a.m. the ringing phone woke Bratt up with a start. Peter Kouri was calling to see if his hero was ready to embark on their latest quest.

  “Morning, Mr. Bratt. Hope I’m not calling too early.”

  Bratt thought it would always be too early when Kouri called, but kept his comment to himself.

  “Not at all, Pete. It’s always a pleasure,” he lied, stretching and yawning loudly. “I hear you’re going up to R.D.P. today.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Mr. Leblanc said you’d want to come up too, especially if you got your verdict last night. And there’s the great news, right in this morning’s paper.”

  “I’ll be sure to read all about it.”

  “So, I was just going to say…um, about going up to see Small today…I’m going to need a lift.”

  A lift? It was bad enough he was expected to nursemaid the kid, but he didn’t think he had to play chauffeur for him too.

  Perhaps sensing Bratt’s hesitation, Kouri continued, explaining himself. “Um, I really don’t know the way up there very well. But, you won’t have to go out of your way much. I live in Rosemont, just off the highway. Besides, I think it would be a good chance for us to talk…about the case, I mean. Sort of compare ideas.”

  Bratt winced at the thought. He knew that Kouri meant well enough, but there was something about the young lawyer’s over-enthusiasm that had grated on his nerves from their first meeting and continued to do so.

  There was no way to avoid the drive up with Kouri, it seemed, but he wasn’t going to be rushed into it. If Kouri meant to compare ideas about the Small case, then Bratt was going to have to take his time this morning and try to develop some of his own, or risk looking unprepared in front of his assistant. And that would never do.

  But, first, there was the more pressing matter of a long-delayed phone call that he’d been waiting all night to make.

  Nancy Morin answered the phone on the first ring and, in her bright, quick voice, said, “Allô, Robert.”

  Bratt hoped that she had call-display on her phone, and not that he was that predictable.

  “Good morning, Nancy. Did I wake you?”

  “No, I just came in from my jog. It helped to clear my mind after that long trial.”

  “I hope you weren’t trying to forget everything about the past two months.”

  “Not everything, as I’m sure you gathered from my message.”

  “Oh, that. Well, it was a bit ambiguous.”

  Morin laughed, that light, knowing laugh he’d gotten so used to. “OK, so maybe I was pretty straight-forward. No crime in that, is there?”

  “Not in the least. Actually, since you don’t like wasting time on small-talk, I’d like to discuss some plans for tonight with you.”

  “Great. Discuss away.”

  “As it so happens, I have to go to a wedding reception, one of those big Italian events. And, believe it or not, I don’t have a date for the event.”

  “No-o,” she answered, in mock disbelief. “How did that happen?”

  “Actually, I wasn’t planning on doing more than making a brief appearance there. These are old, uh, friends, of mine. I don’t usually like big parties, but I felt I had to go. So, my original plan was just to pop in, stay for half a dozen courses or so, then take off. It’s not exactly an intimate little evening, but it certainly could end up that way.”

  “This normally wouldn’t be my choice for a first date, but I actually like big Italian weddings. I mean, pizza at midnight, and a band in tuxedoes playing old disco tunes. What else could a girl ask for? What time will you pick me up?”

  Bratt hated taking his car out in the winter. It was a 1961 Jaguar XKE sports coupe, one of the first sold in North America, and it was in mint condition. He’d had it since the late 80’s and he babied it like he had babied Jeannie in the first few years of her life. But the Rivière des Prairies Detention Center wasn’t exactly a short taxi ride away from his downtown apartment building, and he felt like showing it off today anyway.

  He drove up to the address that Kouri had given him at a bit before 11 a.m. It was a street lined with tall leafless trees, in front of block after block of pink and white duplexes. Kouri was standing in the street, carrying the accordion folder that was stuffed with the Small file, when Bratt pulled up with a dramatic roar of his engine.

  The drive up to the Detention Center, hidden away on the northeast edge of the island of Montreal, was ugly and monotonous, a long stretch of highway, past oil refineries and industrial parks, taking them to the middle of nowhere. They passed the occasional evergreen tree struggling to survive in the poison-aired environment. Bratt’s good mood, however, was not in any way affected by the bleak surroundings.

  Speaking to Nancy that morning had left him feeling positively chipper, so much so that he was even willing to make small talk with Kouri, who had seemed somewhat ill at ease upon entering his car and not in such a hurry to compare ideas after all.

  As they rolled smoothly down the near-empty road, the bright sunshine feeling warm on their faces, he broke the ice by asking Kouri what had gotten him interested in criminal law.

  “More than any other influence, I’d have to say it was the movies,” said Kouri. “The lawyers’ lives always seemed so exciting. At the same time they always managed to help out people in trouble.”

  “Yeah, movies and TV can make our jobs out to be pretty glamourous, but what they show you isn’t always reality,” Bratt said, never having cared much for Hollywood’s portrayals of lawyers.

  “Yes, but I still enjoyed them. And the lawyers in them were the kinds of lawyers I always wanted to be like. And, to tell you the truth, Mr. Bratt, you are too.”

  Bratt blushed at the compliment, but said nothing. Once again he felt embarrassed at Kouri’s open admiration for him. It was one thing to go around telling everybody how great you were. It was another thing to find somebody who actually believed you.

  They drove on silently and soon they saw on their left the large estate that held Pinel, the Institute for the Criminally Insane, letting them know that their own destination was only a few blocks further on. They reached the entrance of the detention center and Bratt turned his car into the long driveway, slowing down as he spotted a police cruiser parked in front of the visitors’ parking lot.

  “You got your Bar card with you, Peter?”

  “Yes, sure. Why?”

  “’Cause this guy doesn’t know you, and he won’t even let us park if he has any doubts about who you are.”

  Bratt pulled up next to the police car on the driver’s side and lowered his window, pulling back from the draft of cold air. The Sureté de Québec agent lowered his own window. He wore his standard issue fur hat, with its flaps down over his ears. Bratt recognized him as being the lucky stiff who seemed to always get this patrol, and waved his own Bar card casually past the window, fully expecting the policeman to recognize him instantly. The agent, though, was staring straight past him and at Kouri, who was holding his card out toward him, in front of Bratt’s face. The agent reached his gloved hand out and Bratt took Kouri’s card and handed it to him. Glove, hand and card disappeared back through the window, which was quickly closed while the policeman punched Kouri’s name onto his computer.

  “Why’d he take mine?” Kouri asked, his voice betraying his concern.

  “You’re a new face. They’ve been pretty jittery up here since that transport bus got shot up, and now they’re extra careful if they don’t know y
ou.”

  Kouri leaned forward in his seat to see what the SQ officer was doing, and received a suspicious glare over the walkie-talkie the cop was talking into in reply.

  “Geez. He’s looking at me like he’s ready to throw me in jail.”

  Sensing some nervousness in the younger lawyer’s voice, Bratt couldn’t resist having some fun at his expense. Noting Kouri’s Mediterranean features, he smiled sarcastically.

  “It’s not his fault you look like a terrorist.”

  “Hey! What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Kouri’s angry tone surprised Bratt, who never would have expected his young idolizer to take exception to anything he said. With the ethnic and linguistic mix in his office, Bratt was used to all sorts of slurs and epithets being flung around at will, with nobody ever feeling aggrieved. He looked at Kouri’s firmly set chin and pursed lips and burst out laughing.

  He laughed so loud that the SQ agent looked suspiciously in their direction through the frost-covered window, and seeing this only made Bratt laugh harder still. Kouri must have begun to feel silly, looking and feeling furious while Bratt was so obviously enjoying himself, because his angry expression faded away until he looked merely confused and somewhat embarrassed.

  Bratt’s laughter finally died down, and he wiped the tears from his eyes with his sleeve, then looked over sympathetically at Kouri. He shook his head in wonderment and patted Kouri’s face with the palm of his right hand.

  “God, you’re cute when you’re angry,” he said. At that point the police car window was lowered and Kouri’s ID card was wordlessly handed back, the cop looking at them as if they were more crazy than dangerous. “Merci beaucoup,” Bratt called out to him, with a big smile and a wave, then drove toward the nearest parking spot.

  Kouri took his card back from him without a word, looking as if he knew that there was a joke somewhere that he had just missed.

  Once the car was parked they disembarked and set out on foot across the snow-covered parking lot. They had to wait for a sliding gate to open, allowing them passage through the barbed wire fence that surrounded the compound, then waited again to be buzzed through a door into the main building. Overhead, cameras were aimed unmoving at the spot where they stood and waited.

  Since this facility had opened half a dozen years earlier, security had always been strict. But once the biker gang wars of recent years began including police officers and prison guards among their victims, security had been tightened even further.

  Bratt explained all this to Kouri just before they passed through the steel and glass door to the reception area. Inside, they would have to empty their pockets and open their briefcases before passing through a metal detector. Bratt recalled a time when lawyers were not searched at all, and were allowed to pass ahead of other visitors. But the violence brought on by the motorcycle gang wars had brought such casual practices to a screeching halt.

  After going through all the required security procedures, they finally found themselves ensconced in an four by twelve foot interview room that had been divided in two by a low cement wall, topped by a glass partition. Attorneys and clients had to sit on each side of the partition and speak through a thick web of metal wires and bars running along the bottom of the glass. The web muffled and distorted their voices to the point that the contents of all conversations were easily kept confidential, not only from any prying ears, but from the participants themselves.

  They sat and waited. Bratt knew that the guards often took as long as they could to bring prisoners down to speak to their lawyers, so he sat back and tried to get comfortable on his thinly padded chair. Kouri stood, squeezed in behind him and looking nervous. He would have paced had there been room enough for it.

  “What’s up, kid? You’re not still mad at me, are you?”

  “What? Oh, no. I guess I overreacted before. It’s just that this is the first murderer I’ve ever met.”

  “Let’s not go hanging him just yet.”

  “You know what I mean. The first guy accused of anything so serious. This is the real thing. With the Federal Crown I spent six months working on black market cigarettes, for crying out loud. That’s why I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I wanted to be a real criminal lawyer, and now that it’s really happening I feel a little lost.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Pete,” Bratt said, trying to sound paternal. “A very wise man once told me that it would take me two or three years before I really felt like a lawyer. Until then, I’d always feel like I was just faking it and hoping nobody would find out.”

  “Yeah, that sounds about how I feel right now. Who was that wise man?”

  “He was my dad.”

  “The late Judge Joseph Bratt?”

  “Geez, you really do know my life,” Bratt laughed.

  “We studied several of his rulings back in Criminal Procedure. He was quite a respected judge, of course. You must have been very proud of him.”

  Bratt grimaced inwardly, regretting that he had mentioned his father. He had once been proud of the man, of course, until the newly-minted judge left Bratt’s mother for his much younger secretary. All these years later talking about him was still difficult.

  “With a dad like that, no wonder you became a lawyer too.”

  “How about your dad?” Bratt asked, turning the topic away from his relationship with his own father. “Was he in law?”

  “Oh, no. He was just a tailor in Damascus. I’m the first university graduate in the family.”

  Their small talk was interrupted by the opening of the cell door on the other side of the glass partition. They looked up as Marlon Small sauntered in.

  He wore a red bandana tied over his shaved head. He had a gold loop in his left ear and a toothpick in his mouth, which he sucked on noisily. The top of his baggy jeans barely reached the bottom edge of his buttocks, and his torn, sleeveless basketball jersey exposed a series of explicit tattoos on his wiry arms.

  Bratt thought that as much as Jennifer Campbell could have been the poster child for decent, hard-working people, her son had chosen to play the role of a bum, copping a hard-case attitude to cover up for his own probable lack of character. His clothes, his walk, everything about him seemed to be ripped off from some stereotypical depiction of what a street gang member should look like. Small sat down across from them, eyeing his new lawyers with a look of suspicious hostility.

  “Mr. Small,” Bratt began, smiling his smoothest, silkiest smile, “I’m Robert Bratt, and this is Peter Kouri. We’re your new lawyers.”

  Small just kept on eyeing them and sucking on his toothpick. Finally, he deigned to speak. “Is she dead yet?”

  “Uh, is who dead yet?” Bratt responded.

  “Lady lawyer; Seven-yee. She dead yet?”

  “Oh, Miss Sévigny. No, she’s not. As a matter of fact, the doctors are pretty optimistic that she’ll make a full recovery.”

  “No shit? She look pretty lousy last time I seen her.”

  “Well, she’s better now. I’m sure she’ll be touched by your concern-”

  “My concern,” Small said, his tone getting louder as he brought his face closer to the glass partition, “is that my ass is in jail, an’ I was depending on her to get me out. Now I get you two jokers showing up, saying you’re my new lawyers, an’ my trial’s in less than a month.”

  “And I’d be pretty worried if I were in your shoes too, Marlon. But we’re not here to waste your time or ours-”

  “Your time’s paid, man, so you’re not the one wasting time here.”

  “What I meant to say is that we’re working hard to be ready for your trial in time, so I don’t think you have to be worried about new lawyers getting into the file at the last minute, and all that. I explained to your mother that the time constraints would not make our job any easier, but that it was certainly doable.”

  “Doable don’t cut no ice with me. It’s winnable I wanna hear about. My momma said you’re the best fuckin’ lawyer in the
world. If you’re really that good I wanna hear what you’re gonna do for me.”

  “Your mother actually said that, did she?”

  “Those exact words.”

  “Okay then, let’s talk about how we’re going to defend you. You told the cops you were in LaSalle the night of the shooting, playing basketball with some friends at Wilfort Park. Now I have some of the names of these friends of yours, but there’s only a couple of pager numbers in the file. We’ve tried them without success so far.”

  “Yeah, they won’t call you back if you don’t put the code. They’ll think it’s just the cops trying to catch them selling weed.”

  “Your friends traffic in marijuana, do they?”

  “Just helping out some friends and neighbors, you know. Everybody smokes pot, nowadays. No big thing.”

  “No big thing? Okay, we’ll worry about that later. What’s this code we’re supposed to put on their pagers?”

  “First time you call you put 007. Then you call again an’ put your own number.”

  “Double-oh seven, eh? That’s clever.”

  “Hey, James Bond, man. That’s as cool as you can get an’ still be white.”

  “Ok, we’ll use your code. Now, the pager numbers were next to only two names, Ashley Parker and Bernard Clayton, and it seems that Sévigny never got a chance to get their statements.”

  “Yeah, they weren’t always available when she wanted to meet them; but I put the word out that if my lawyer calls they better show up, ’cause time is short. Ash’s my little cousin, an’ I drove him home about midnight the night those dudes got shot. Bernard was with us in the car too. But when you call him, don’t say Bernard. He doesn’t like that name. Call him Shoot.”

  “Shoot?”

  “Yeah, short for Shoot to Kill. That’s his street name.”

  “Well, isn’t that lovely,” Bratt said. He was tempted to ask if Bernard had earned that nickname honestly, but decided to let it pass for now. “Do you have a street name too, by the way?”