Barrington Street Blues (3 page)

I would have to check the law on paternity tests, specifically, who could apply to the court to order one. Graham Scott's children would be the key to the damage award. His parents would be entitled to something, as would Corey Leaman's family. But it was Graham's kids who could claim to have lost a lifetime of support from a (hypothetically) high-earning father.

After the Scotts left, I made a pass by Ross Trevelyan's office, but he wasn't there. I saw the file on his side table, picked it up, and took it to my desk, where I dictated a memo on my conversation with the Scotts. I was just finishing up when Ross came in.

“Hi. Court just wound up. Were the parents in?”

“Just left. The long and the short of it is: Graham was going straight to a residency in cardiology.” Ross beamed. “He had never mentioned Corey Leaman, but he never talked about any of the other low-lifes he ran around with either. And he never told his parents about the existence of their grandchild. Or of the pregnancy, if he knew of it. The girlfriend was not included in any Sunday dinners with the vicar.”

“A respectable family like his, he kept his other life a secret. Having met the girlfriend, I can't say I'm surprised he hid her in the shadows. She's a bit, well, ‘not our sort, darling,'” he finished in a posh British accent much like that of Rowan Stratton. Ross looked at my desk. “You've got the file? Good. You may want to read through it before you meet Doctor Swail-Peddle.”

“Who?”

“A very favourable witness.”

“Oh?”

“Or he will be, if his telephone call is anything to go by.”

“You mean he called you?”

“Yes. He heard about the case, and gave me a call.”

“What's his interest?”

“He was a psychologist on staff at the Baird Addiction Treatment Centre.”

“Was.”

“Yeah. I don't know what the story is, except that he's willing to help us out. I've pencilled him in for tomorrow afternoon, late. You may want to sit in if you're still around at six or so.”

“Sure.”

He waved and went off.

I opened the file and began to read. The first thing that leapt out at me was that the police had initially regarded this not as a suicide, but as a double murder. There was no known connection between the two men, no known motive for Leaman to kill Scott. They each had a history of drug use and trafficking, but Leaman would hardly have executed Scott for a drug deal gone wrong, then killed himself immediately afterwards. Then again, Leaman had a psychiatric history and had occasionally been violent in the past. Who knew what might have provoked him to kill Scott and turn the gun on himself?

That was another thing, the gun. There had been no indication that Leaman had ever used or possessed a gun. The police had not been able to trace it. It was an unusual weapon in this day and age, a German Luger P-08, which was already being replaced by another weapon before the end of World War Two. This one was almost certainly stolen, but no collector had stepped forward to claim it. There were no complete fingerprints on the weapon apart from Leaman's. There were smeared prints, which could have belonged to Leaman or somebody else. This, to me, served to support the suicide theory. Typically, if someone wanted to commit murder and make it look like suicide, they wiped the gun free of prints, then placed it in the victim's hand. Guns used by people like Leaman tended to be passed around; if his had been the only prints on the gun, that would have struck me as suspicious. There was no detectable gunshot residue on Leaman, but there was a handwritten note in the file, probably scribbled by a detective after conversation with an expert: “Recoverable residues generally do not persist on skin for very long . . . residues may be absent for any number of reasons.” I knew there had been freezing rain the morning the bodies were found.

In the end, the police had left the file open. With no witnesses and no evidence of a third person at the scene, they could not establish a double murder. The medical examiner's and autopsy reports were
meticulous in describing the gunshot wounds; they did not come to a definitive conclusion as to whether or not Leaman's wound was self-inflicted, but the M.E. put it down as a probable suicide. That was good enough for me. And it would remain good enough, as long as we weren't faced with a witness popping up later to say there was somebody else at the Fore-And-Aft that morning.

†

“Collins. Have you forgotten?” It was the Undersigned, the most pompous partner in our firm, who never referred to himself as “I” or “me” but as “the Undersigned” in his correspondence. He had slicked-back fair hair and a perpetually irritated expression on his face. He was vibrating impatiently at my door in his imitation English suit of clothes. Our founding partner raised a condescending eyebrow at the Undersigned's back as he passed by in his real, and threadbare, English tweeds, which he had probably brought over with him when he immigrated in 1945.

I had indeed forgotten. It was Thursday, April 18, the day my firm was taking me to lunch to celebrate what they considered to be my finest achievement. I had just been named a Queen's Counsel. I hadn't even applied for the honour; the Undersigned had. He — his real name was Vance Blake — had taken it upon himself to cobble together my curriculum vitae, and some kind words from references, and submit an application on my behalf after shoving the forms on my desk and having me sign them when I was distracted. I had promptly forgotten all about it. But Blake had not. In his view, the more Queen's Counsels the firm had on its letterhead, the better.

So we all trooped down the hill to the waterfront, to Wiggin-staff's, a self-consciously upmarket bar and dining room favoured by certain members of the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society. We took up all the tables overlooking the harbour and ordered drinks. I watched through the window as a sailboat bobbed along like a toy on the choppy water; it was dwarfed by a massive container ship heading up the harbour to the Ceres terminal. Once the pre-luncheon drinks were in our hands, a toast was raised to me.

“To Montague M. Collins, Q.C.”

This was met by the insufferable “hear, hear,” which I always associated with mutton-chopped Victorian pomposity. “Speech, speech,” they chanted.

I rose to respond: “Our clients come to us because they need a voice. We speak for them in places where they otherwise might fail to be heard or understood. I stand in that proud tradition and I am humbled by the opportunity to do so.” I hoped to be even more full of shit when I got wound up. “When the taxman cometh to take his pound of flesh,” I declaimed to another round of “hear, hears” from the solicitors in our tax department, “our clients want to be assured —”

“— that they won't have to pay one red cent!” a partner called out.

I continued: “— that their tax dollars are not being squandered on yet more ill-advised attempts by the state to come down on the backs of the citizens and to further grind down —”

“Risk-takers and entrepreneurs who are the engine of the economy in this country, and who are fettered at every turn by —”

I ignored Vance Blake's corporate passion and soldiered on: “— further grind down the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginal and the crazed, those who come before the criminal justice system, propelled there by the misfortune of their birth and their assigned place at the bottom of the heap in our society. Guilty they may be, in the eyes of the law, yet it falls to us, Stratton Sommers, Barristers and Solicitors, to implore the courts for understanding and mercy. Can any one of us, in his or her most private moments, honestly say he has not, at some anguished moment of his life, shared the murderous fury of my recent client who took an axe to the pale and trembling flesh of —”

“We don't want to hear it!”

“Sit down, Collins!”

“I cannot possibly say how much it means to me to have the might and prestige of Stratton Sommers behind me as I go to the wall for these hapless denizens of the criminal courts. To be honoured by you as I am today —”

Rowan Stratton had turned a deaf ear to the protests of certain members of the firm when I was hired to set up a criminal law practice. It was still, evidently, a sore point for some.

“You're an asshole, Collins,” Blake hissed as I passed his table at the end of my speech.

“It's an honour and a privilege to be on your enemies list, Vance,” I replied, sending a wink in the direction of Monique LeBlanc, who shared my view of the Undersigned.

I sat down beside Monique and picked up my beer. She leaned over and asked: “Who's going to defend you, Monty, the day we find Vance slumped over in the boardroom with a knife in his back?”

“I bear him no ill will.”

“I cannot believe the way you let all this run off your back.”

“You have distinguished yourself,” my very British senior partner muttered from my other side, “as a cad and a blackguard among your partners. For that I salute you.”

We finished our celebratory lunch and walked up Salter Street to our office, just around the corner on Barrington. We occupied the seventh floor of a ten-storey glass box recently erected between two old ornate buildings that I much preferred to ours. The firm used to be in one of them, a four-storey Italianate building that I admired; unfortunately the firm had moved to its more modern quarters just before I joined up. The new building struck a jarring note in this block of nineteenth-century structures.

†

I wanted to devote my time to the Leaman case when I got back, but first I had to deal with my other clients. The first in line was Yvette, a hooker and crack addict who was charged with assaulting another woman in a fight over a boyfriend. She was an old client from my Nova Scotia Legal Aid days. She couldn't pay my regular fee, so my partners were never happy when her name came up at the office. We would meet in court the next morning. I went over the statements given by patrons of the Miller's Tale, the bar where the fight had occurred, looking for any indications I could find that Yvette was acting in self-defence when she hit Doris Pickard over the head with a chair.

At nine on Friday morning I was standing with my client outside the provincial courthouse on Spring Garden Road. It was muggy and warm. Grotesque stone faces, fanged and wild, looked out at us
from the facade of the Victorian court building. Yvette was wearing purple leggings that might have fit my eight-year-old daughter. A black tube top gave partial cover to her emaciated upper body. Her hair, a startling orangey blonde, was long in back and short in front, the bangs and sides curled away from her lined, olive-skinned face. She took a desperate drag of her cigarette as if, in the unhappy event of a conviction, she might not be able to score any drugs, including nicotine, in jail.

“So, Yvette, before we get in there —”

“Why-vette, not Eve-ette. How many times do I gotta say it for you, Monty?” she asked in a weary voice.

“All right, Why-vette.” Why, as in why had her mother chosen the name “Yvette” if she did not even know how to pronounce it? But we were far from Yvette's christening day now.

“Doris's statement says you came at her with the chair because Bo was going to stay with her instead of you when he was released from the Correctional Centre.”

“Bullshit! She said Bo got a tat on his arm with her name on it when he was inside. I said she was a lyin' slut, and she held up a bottle of Blue Typhoon and was gonna hit me.” She barely got through her story; she seemed ready to fall asleep on her feet. Caution: coming down from this medication may cause drowsiness.

“Don't fade on me, Why-vette. This bottle of — what did you say it was?”

“Blue Typhoon. She was gonna bash me in the head with it, so I hit her in self-defence.”

“Right. Let's go inside.”

When the trial got under way, one of our witnesses, another hooker named Wanda Pollard, switched loyalties and backed up Doris's allegations. Yvette glared daggers at Wanda and repeatedly gave her the finger. I tried to undo the damage with my next witness, but Yvette had her own ideas of where the case should go. When she took the stand, she told a story completely different from the one she had given me. She decided, on her own, that a defence of drunkenness was her best legal strategy. Yvette did not deny that she swung the chair and smashed Doris in the face with it. But now she claimed she herself had guzzled the bottle of Blue Typhoon. After that, in a drunken
rage, exacerbated by a rare medical condition that had not been disclosed until that moment, Yvette had lost it and attacked the other woman. On and on it went, a story I heard for the first time as I stood there poleaxed. Yvette was convicted and remanded into custody; sentencing would follow in a couple of months' time. I had to prepare for a bail hearing, so I clomped down the staircase to the basement cells, pressed the button, and waited for the sheriff to let me in.

I met with my client in a small room. But I didn't stay long. Her conviction, and her need for a hit of crack, had soured her mood. “You're no fuckin' good, Collins. You said you'd get me off. I want another lawyer. You're fired.”

“What I said, Eve-ette, was that if the judge believed you and not Doris, your chances were good, but if the other version was more believable, you'd have to pack your jammies. Speaking of your story, Eve-ette, imagine my surprise when I heard it for the first time.”

“You fuck off. You're fired. I want Saul Green.”

I waved her off and headed for the door. I had planned to get a bite of lunch on Spring Garden Road but I decided to return to my office, grab Yvette's file, and deliver it personally to Green's office before she had time to phone, weeping with remorse, and hire me back. This happened all the time: client changing story or otherwise screwing up case, blaming lawyer, firing lawyer, calling to beg lawyer to represent him or her again. I liked to ship the file out before that pleading phone call, one less thing to worry about. I was known in some circles as the fastest courier service in Halifax.