Stray Bullets (30 page)

“Umm. I’m not sure. I … I don’t know much about guns.”

“Was it real big”—he held his hands far apart at an exaggerated distance—“or teeny and small?” He moved his hands back so they were almost together.

“I didn’t really see it.”

“You didn’t really see it? Or you didn’t see it at all?”

“Just kind of saw it, you know. Like, I mean it was dark.”

She was a bad liar. And he wanted to leave no doubt about that with the jury.

Back at the counsel table he retrieved a thick black binder. “When you were picked up and questioned by Detective Greene, he told you the police had recorded all your phone calls, monitored your e-mails and text messages.”

“Yeah, they did.” Her eyes were riveted on the binder. She would have read it all before testifying today.

“But you had no idea at the time, did you, that the police were listening in?”

“No, like I said, I don’t really know about courts and stuff.”

Perfect answer. He took the binder and strolled back up to her. “Every one of your conversations with your boyfriend Jet, texts and e-mails to him as well, and to your best friend, Cindy, who even came over to spend the night with you. They are all in here. And you’ve seen all this. Right?”

“Right.”

“And in the three days between the shooting and Detective Greene picking you up and questioning you, in all your calls and messages, you never once mention anything to Jet or Cynthia about a gun. Correct?”

She stared at the black binder. Then at Armitage. She looked pathetic. “I guess I never talked about it. Wasn’t important.”

He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “Do you expect this jury to believe that you, a twenty-two-year-old woman with no criminal record, never been arrested before, hear that a four-year-old boy was murdered inches from you, your boyfriend had a gun, and you didn’t think it was important? Never talked about it?”

“I … I don’t know.”

He padded back to the counsel table. Put the binder down in front of him. Let the time and the tension accumulate. “Ms. Howett.” His voice now was soft as silk. Sometimes soft was better than hard. “You haven’t told us yet. Did Jet fire this gun you say he had? The one you never saw?”

Her eyes looked terrified. Clearly this was the one question she didn’t want to be asked. She looked incapable of answering it.

He picked back up her sworn statement with one hand. The other he placed on Greene’s shoulder. “You told Detective Greene the shots came from behind you. Didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“That’s a yes?”

“Yes, I said that.”

“Because it was true, wasn’t it?”

She was still nodding.

“Suzanne,” he said, coming all the way back to using her first name. He was speaking gently, like a comforting adult talking to a disturbed child. “The shots came from behind you, didn’t they?”

“Yes. Yes they did.”

“And Jet never fired a gun, did he?”

She took a deep breath. “No. I mean I didn’t see him shoot.”

He put the statement down and touched the binder in front of him. “And you and Jet didn’t say a word about him having a gun, because he didn’t have one, did he?”

She started to cry. “I didn’t know that little boy was shot,” she blurted out. “And if I hadn’t been there …”

He took a look over at the jurors. One of them caught his eye, then looked back at the witness stand. He had to watch out. If they felt he was yet another man pushing this weak young woman around, they’d start to feel sorry for her. Stuck as she clearly was between these two low-life men, Dewey and Jet.

On the witness stand, Howett started to shudder. Her breathing was halting. She was hyperventilating

Rothbart looked at Armitage. “Maybe we should give this witness five minutes,” he said.

“That’s okay, Your Honor,” he said.

He wanted to leave it at this point. If she composed herself he had no way of knowing what she’d say. She might stick to her story that there was a gun. But this way, everyone knew she was at best completely unreliable, and at worst simply a liar.

“I’ll just enter the binder as an exhibit. It says it all. No further questions.”

This is a great way to end a lousy week in court, he thought as he walked up to the court clerk and delivered the binder, then returned to his counsel table. Cedric Wilkinson was sitting behind it and looked straight at him. For the first time since they’d met, Armitage saw something that he hadn’t seen before from the grieving father.

Respect.

Her mother would not have approved of the language, but right now Nancy Parish felt like shit. No nicer way to describe it. Fourteen straight hours of working on the case. Her head was pounding. And she looked like hell too. Great way to spend Saturday night. Why oh why had she agreed to meet Ted DiPaulo for dinner tonight? And even worse, at Jump, one of the swish downtown restaurants he loved to frequent.

She’d spent the bulk of the day preparing her cross-examinations for next week, and most of all, her address to the jury. In a case where her client didn’t testify—and Larkin St. Clair had not budged on that—it was the most important thing.

There was one advantage to St. Clair’s not taking the stand: if the defense didn’t call any evidence, she got to address the jury last. She had to make the most of the opportunity.

The jury address was the only thing Parish never typed out. Somehow the old-fashioned way of writing it by hand made her focus better. Problem was, every time she started to work on it, she found some way to get distracted. This was avoidance and she knew it. And having a pen and paper in hand made it too easy for her to start drawing cartoons instead.

She sighed, flipped over the pad to a fresh sheet, and sketched a picture of a courtroom. The judge was up on his dais. Twelve jurors were in the box. And the defense lawyer was standing in front of them. In one hand, she had a gun pointed at her head. With the other, she pulled a noose wrapped around her neck skyward. Parish smirked. She added a third arm, with a samurai sword pointed at her heart. A fourth with a lit bomb held to her chest. Fifth was an ice pick aimed at her ear. Sixth a razor blade about to slice one of the lawyer’s many wrists.

What caption to give this? She put the paper down, stood up, and stretched. This reminded her of those back-page contests in the
New Yorker
, where they put in smart cartoons and people wrote in funny captions. She hated reading the witty lines she wished she’d thought of.

It was seven fifteen. DiPaulo’s reservation was for eight. The last
thing in the world she wanted to do was to go out in public, but it would be good to see Ted. Get his wise counsel. He’d just come back from his latest excursion with his Air France girlfriend. They’d been to Rio or Buenos Aires, she couldn’t remember which one, only that it was someplace warm.

In the washroom she looked at herself in the mirror. The fucking fluorescent lights. Her skin, which had been among her best features, looked tired and splotchy. Her hair was a semi-disaster. In her haste to leave the house this morning, she’d forgotten her makeup. If she were like those smart and stylish career women who worked at one of those big law firms—the ones who’d be filling up the restaurant tonight—she’d have had an emergency makeup kit in the bottom drawer of her desk. Or at least some lipstick.

Thanks to Zelda, she had something decent to wear. One afternoon last year, she’d pried Parish out of the office and dragged her to some boutique down in the PATH—the underground walkway that snaked for miles under the downtown core. Zelda made her try on a “little black dress,” and, to her surprise, Parish liked it. Cap-sleeved. Light wool. Then they’d gotten her a pair of leather pumps. Zelda had tried to get her into one with stiletto-like heels, but she’d opted for something more sensible. This way, she could look half-decent and run for the streetcar if she needed to.

Ten minutes of scrubbing her face with institutional soap and drying it off with harsh brown paper towels put some color back into her skin. She’d found a crappy old brush with a bunch of bristles missing, and after ten more minutes of hacking away at her hair, which she still wore down to her shoulders, it didn’t look horrible. Thank goodness for the dress. All those years of playing hockey. She still had a good figure, and a woman could get away with a lot if her body was in shape and she had a dress that showed it off.

But wait. Parish couldn’t believe it. She looked more closely at the mirror. “Fuck,” she screamed, her voice echoing around the tiled bathroom. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” There it was. A gray hair. First one in her life. Off to the right, above her ear. Oh, no. She pictured a whole row in the pharmacy packed with women’s hair-coloring products, which she’d managed to avoid. Until now.

Her hair was so thick it was hard to isolate the renegade strand. Zelda, who changed her hair color even faster than her lovers, had told her that this day would come. And warned her in advance that if she plucked a gray hair out, it would come back thicker and more wiry.

To hell with that. “I hate you,” she screeched. She gave it a good hard yank. It took two pulls to get the thing out. What a way to spend a Saturday night, she thought.

“You look ravishing,” DiPaulo said twenty minutes later when he greeted her on the marble steps outside Jump. He rarely met anyone without giving them a compliment. The restaurant was on the underground path, so she hadn’t had to go outside in the storm.

“Yeah right,” she said. “Nothing like working on a jury address all day before going out on the town.”

The place was packed. Every other woman had on shoes with killer heels. Impossibly high, narrowing to a teeny-tiny point, yet somehow these female creatures managed to float about the hardwood floor, as graceful as ballet dancers. Their dresses were as minuscule as their heels and hardly covered anything. Perfect hair, flawless makeup, nails that looked as if they’d never touched a keyboard—or a dirty dish—in their lives. Somehow they were able to snack away on pristine little hors d’oeuvres without touching their carefully applied lipstick. Crunching them with their perfect white teeth.

The place was so bright. What the hell was she doing here?

DiPaulo loved the spotlight. The action. He had a regular table right in the middle of the floor.

The two lawyers couldn’t have been more different, and that’s what made their partnership work. He was the rainmaker, always out and about, meeting and greeting, stirring up business. So many very rich lawyers had messed-up kids. And it was amazing how much they’d pay DiPaulo & Parish to get their young charges out of trouble. Made it possible to do killer Legal Aid cases such as this Larkin St. Clair file.

“Don’t fall over in shock,” DiPaulo said. “But I had Emanuel save us that round table around back where we can talk in private.”

“There is a God,” she said, punching him in the arm.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said.

Emanuel, the maître d’, who treated DiPaulo as if they had been best friends since childhood, appeared out of the crowd with impeccable timing and led them to their private spot in back. He drifted along the polished wood floor as effortlessly as a king’s courtier.

“How was the trip?” Parish asked after Emanuel seated them in the wonderfully high leather seats. She was hoping Ted would fill her in on the forgotten destination.

“Buenos is phenomenal. Eleven-hour direct flight, only one time zone east. No jet lag.”

“Sounds warm.”

He frowned. “I know I haven’t been around. I’m going to stop traveling so much. It’s been hard on Olivia too.”

DiPaulo was referring to his second child, a very bright kid in her last year of high school. His son was away at university.

“You deserve some time off after all these years of hard work.”

“Enough’s enough,” he said. “I’ve been a shitty partner for six months.”

It was true. He’d hardly been around at all, leaving her strapped with her practice, his files to cover, and now this murder trial. But she’d made a point of not complaining. Since he’d teamed up with her a few years ago, after he left the Crown’s office, he’d been extremely generous with his time, mentoring her.

“I’ve done fine on my own, but right now I need to talk through some things.”

“I knew you would. And I knew you’d never leave the office if I didn’t drag you out.”

He insisted on ordering a very expensive meal—seared sea scallops for her, cedar-planked maple-glazed salmon for him, with a box of their delicious “Jump Fries” to start—as Parish talked him through the case.

“The worst thing,” she said, crunching on one too many of the delicious fries after she’d got him up to speed on everything, “is that Larkin’s not going to let me call him to testify.”

“Hard to win a case where a little boy is killed if your guy doesn’t testify. Juries like to hear an accused tell them he didn’t do it.”

“I know.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?” she asked.

“In the end it’s your client’s case, not yours. Besides, if he testifies what’s he going to say? That Dewey was the shooter? Then you’ve got a crossed-swords defense and the jury will convict him for sure. After that the Crown would probably say Dewey lied, the deal’s off, and get him convicted too. How long do think your client would last in jail after that?”

She nodded. “Larkin told me the very first day that Dewey was connected inside.”

“That’s no surprise.”

“So I’m stuck.”

He pointed to the main courses that had just come. “Eat your scallops,” he said. “I know they’re your favorite.”

She ate. Ted wasn’t often very quiet, but he ate his salmon in silence.

“How did the boy’s father do when he testified?” he asked when the dishes were cleared.

“Could have been worse. In ways he actually helped us. Still the jury was touched. Everyone was. He was the first witness. I keep hoping maybe they will forget about him. Stupid.”

“They won’t. No matter what you do, they’re going to be thinking about that little boy and his dad.”

“I know,” she said again.

“Tell me about this missing witness, the baker,” DiPaulo said when they started on dessert. White chocolate cheesecake for him, banana cream pie for her, and, at Ted’s insistence, an assortment of orange, blackberry, and mango ices. This whole meal was a thousand miles away from the food-court sushi and pasta dishes she’d been living on for weeks.