Stray Bullets (35 page)

“You’ve chosen a difficult path, Daniel,” Granwell said.

Kennicott knew he had to get back to work. But the Beethoven was still playing. And Granwell’s chair was comfortable. Just give yourself another minute, he thought, as his gaze was drawn back to the Monet. The tranquil lily pads. The color, so alive.

Ari Greene knew Nancy Parish the way cops get to know good lawyers in a big metropolis. The first case they’d had together was about a dozen years before. She had been a young lawyer, working at Grill & Partners. He was a detective on the Major Crime Unit.

Right from the beginning, she’d impressed him. Hardworking, tough but not stupid-tough, the way many lawyers tried to be. Knew when to pick her battles. Most of all she had that intangible thing you saw with very few courtroom lawyers, a certain presence. Made you want to listen to her. Made her arguments persuasive. She was like an athlete who had the same talent as all her teammates but possessed that little something extra—focus, charisma, ingenuity—hard to define, but it made her stand out.

Over the years, he’d occasionally had a case with her and he’d watched her mature as a lawyer. The cases she took on got tougher. She became more polished, without losing her enthusiasm for the job.

Last year, she’d taken on her first homicide. For defense lawyers, there are serious cases, then there are murder trials. The way with doctors there are surgeons and then brain surgeons, he imagined. It was Greene’s case, and she’d done a good job.

He watched her move the easel back out of the way from the jury box. The courtroom was silent. She walked over and stood behind her client, put both hands on his shoulders, as if to say to the jury, “See, I’m not afraid of him. You shouldn’t be either.”

“You might be wondering,” she said, not moving her hands, “why didn’t Larkin St. Clair testify? Well, as you probably know, and as Justice Rothbart will certainly tell you, he has absolutely no obligation to do so. The burden of proof lies squarely with the Crown. But I’m not afraid to tell you why he didn’t take the witness stand.”

Greene always tried to keep his head down during key points in a trial. Take notes, appear neutral, confident, authoritative in front of the jury. But what Parish was doing right now was something he hadn’t seen for a long time. He looked up. Neither the judge nor the Crown was permitted to comment on the failure of the accused to testify. It
was the proverbial elephant in the room. But until a few years ago, when the law was changed, defense counsel was allowed to mention it to the jury, although few did.

Parish knew that, but she was doing it anyway.

“I told him not to testify,” she said to the jury, pointing to herself. “There was no reason to.”

Greene caught Armitage’s eye. He could object right now. Even demand a mistrial. But he didn’t move.

Greene was sure Parish had calculated that Armitage wouldn’t want to have a whole new trial and have to do this case all over again. She’d decided to take the risk. Besides, Armitage had gone way over the top cross-examining his own witnesses. Now she was playing hardball back.

“If you’re angry at Mr. St. Clair because he didn’t take the stand, don’t blame him. Blame me.” She gave her client a comfortable tap on the shoulders and moved out to the space in front of the counsel table.

Everyone was watching her. All of a sudden, she threw her hands over her eyes. It was one of the most amazing things Greene had ever witnessed in a courtroom. Especially during a jury address. He couldn’t stop looking.

“You know those three monkeys you always see in a toy store?” she said, still blinding herself in front of the jury. “See no evil.” She took her hands away from her eyes and cupped them over her ears. “Hear no evil.” She raised her voice a notch as she said the words. “And my favorite.” She clapped her hands in front of her mouth, leaving a small space between her fingers that she could speak through. “Speak no evil,” she said, her voice now muffled and deep.

Greene cast a look at the jurors. A few of them smirked. One of them laughed into her hands.

She had them following her every word.

“Number one Crown witness. Suzanne Howett, the server at Tim Hortons,” she said, now standing erect, her hands at her sides. “Howett, let’s call her ‘See no evil.’ Because does anyone really know what she saw? First she tells Detective Greene she didn’t see a gun in Jet’s hand. Then she comes to court, the Crown’s star witness, and says, ‘Oh yes, Jet had a gun.’ He fired the first shot, at Dewey and my client Larkin. Was she telling the truth this time or the first time?”

A lot of lawyers paced when they addressed the jury. But Parish was absolutely still.

“It’s simple. The facts in the Crown’s case point to Jet shooting a gun. Remember he had a gun in his apartment when he was arrested.”

Greene was always amazed at how lawyers picked the facts that helped their case and ignored the ones that didn’t. Such as here. Parish made no mention that the gun was filled with cobwebs and obviously hadn’t been fired the day before it was found.

Now she moved back to her easel, which was at an angle where both the jury and the judge could see it. With her finger she traced a line as she spoke. “The bullet hole in the wall of the building is a straight arrow from where Jet got out of his car to above the head of where my client Larkin St. Clair was standing. And the clincher.” She pointed to the bottom part of the map, the spot where the Cadillac had been. “The only bullet shell found on the ground at the scene. Flattened. Right here, where Jet’s Cadillac was before he took off, tires screeching.”

Greene watched the jurors and was sure he saw more than one give little nods of their head.

“Next consider the Crown’s witness Mr. Trapper, aka Jet. The man with no memory.” This got more smirks and chuckles from the jury. Parish put her hands on her ears. “Let’s call him ‘Hear no evil.’ He seems to have heard nothing. Not even the sound of his own gun going off.”

Parish put her hands down and marched right back to the edge of the jury box. “Really.” She lowered her voice to just above a whisper, as if she were telling a secret to a close friend. “Do you think if he fired that gun, like the two other witnesses say he did, that he’d come here as a Crown witness and admit it?” She shook her head. Amazingly, two jurors did the same.

“Put it in reverse.” She was still whispering. Still shaking her head. “If he was firing, as you heard the other Crown witnesses say he was, do you really think he wouldn’t remember?”

She started walking up along in front of the jury box, one hand on the railing, comfortable, like a kid trailing her fingers on a fence walking to school.

“Mr. Dewey Booth,” Parish said when she got to the end of the rail. “I saved him for last.” She put her hands over her mouth but didn’t repeat her mumbling trick. Instead she removed them. “‘Speak no evil.’ The only witness who puts the gun in my client’s hand. You might believe that. Or you might believe Dewey had the gun. But there’s one thing about his testimony that is not in dispute. You’ve heard about it since the very first day of this trial. On the afternoon of November fourteenth the weather turned cold. It started to snow. And it was icy.
Mr. Wilkinson told us his son slipped on the sidewalk. And remember, Officer Kennicott tumbled running over. All five of the Crown’s eyewitnesses agree with me about this. And that it was slippery is the only explanation that makes sense for this horrific tragedy.”

She was brave and smart, Greene thought, not to shy away from what had happened here—the death of four-year-old Kyle Wilkinson. She’d handled it with sincerity and compassion and still made her argument. He promised himself he wouldn’t peek at the jury again.

“Because here’s the point that has not been mentioned in this trial. Not by any of the Crown’s witnesses. Not by Mr. Armitage in his address to you this morning. The one thing that will make you realize that you not only should acquit my client, but you must find him not guilty.”

Parish took in a few deep gulps of air. It looked like she’d gotten so caught up in what she was saying that she’d forgotten to breathe.

She walked back away from the jury to the court clerk, who handed her a pair of plastic gloves and then the gun. Greene had seen her arrange this before the jury came in. She pivoted back toward the jury, gun in gloved hands. You sure couldn’t say this address was boring, he thought.

“If my client, or Dewey Booth, were trying to shoot Jet, why were no bullets fired at him or his car? Think of the place where Larkin and Jet were standing as being twelve on a clock face. We have evidence of shots fired at the top of the clock, behind them; to the left, hitting the building at nine o’clock; and to the right, striking Kyle at three o’clock. Not one stick of evidence a shot was directed at six o’clock. Where Jet was. No bullet holes in his car. No bullet holes in the concrete or the trees there. Nothing.”

She was right. This was the part of the case that Greene knew had never fit. Always bothered him.

“Ask yourself,” she was saying. “How many shots were fired? As many as nine. You’ve heard evidence that the gun found in my client’s aunt’s backyard had a clip that only took six bullets and there was room for one in the chamber. Only seven bullets maximum.”

She turned toward the jury, brandishing the gun. “There are no bullets in this weapon. Believe me, I’ve triple-checked. Still, I’m going to point it well above your heads.”

She’s putting the jurors in the place of someone about to be shot at, Greene thought.

“Picture this scenario. It is the only one that fits with all the evidence. Dewey and Larkin are back against the wall. The Cadillac pulls up. A shot goes over their head. More shots. In a hasty effort at self-defense, this gun is fired.”

Greene had to smile. Parish had been cagey enough with her words to not say who fired the gun. Since her client hadn’t testified, she couldn’t point the finger directly at Dewey. But this way she left it an open question for the jury.

She paused again. Greene knew where she was going with this. “Why in the world does this stray bullet go on such an odd angle and strike poor Kyle? There’s only one explanation that makes sense. The ice.”

Parish pretended to slip. Her outstretched arm and the gun in it turned a quarter of a clock face and aimed right at Ralph Armitage.

“That, I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is what happened. Tragic and horrible. Yes. But murder? No.”

Parish brought the gun back to the registrar and pulled off the gloves with a snap.

For the thousandth time in the last few months Greene had played out in his head the different scenarios of what actually happened in the Tim Hortons parking lot. He didn’t believe Parish had it right. But he thought she was closer than he’d ever come to the truth.

And that was what was the most frustrating thing about this case. With the civilian eyewitnesses not seeing much, everyone else lying, and Larkin St. Clair not talking, it meant the only one who knew the whole story was this Dragomir Ozera character. And he was nowhere to be found.

Five long, lousy days, and counting. Ralph Armitage was beginning to feel like a prisoner himself in the courthouse, waiting for the jury to come back. While the jury was deliberating, the trial lawyers were required to be on call, available to come back into court with just fifteen minutes’ notice. They could leave the building only when the jurors weren’t deliberating, meaning he and Greene were stuck here from nine in the morning until nine at night, with two hour-and-a-half breaks for lunch and dinner.

And every time he stepped out of their little courthouse office, a whole contingent of bored reporters, who were staked out in the hallway, desperate for any kind of a story, descended upon him. They peppered him with a barrage of questions and grew frustrated when he wouldn’t give them a quote they could use.

Sitting in the room, staring at the wall outside his window, Armitage played over and over again in his mind every move that he’d made in the case: his deal with Cutter, the pretrial with Judge Rothbart, his cross-examination of all the witnesses, his addresses to the jury. And most of all Jose Sanchez, aka Dragomir Ozera, aka the guy who could totally and forever fuck up his life. This waiting was a strange and tortuous purgatory.

But now, just after the lunch break, his phone was ringing and he could see by the call display the court registrar was calling. Greene, who’d spent most of his time looking at another file, the murder of Officer Kennicott’s brother Michael and the detective’s only unsolved case, looked up at him.

“It’s the registrar,” he said, eyeing the phone display.

Greene closed his file.

Armitage swallowed hard and picked up the phone. “Ralph Armitage,” he said. “What can I do for you, Mr. Registrar?”

“His Honor wants you back in court immediately.”

“Does the jury have a question, are they deadlocked, or do we have a verdict?” he asked. His heart was fluttering.

“Sounds like they’re still deadlocked,” the registrar said, “but you didn’t hear that from me.”

Armitage chuckled. “Mum’s the word. Thanks.”

“Still deadlocked,” he told Greene after he hung up.

“Rothbart’s not going to be happy,” Greene said.

That was for sure. Judges hated indecisive jurors and deadlocked juries.

This would be the third time they’d been called back to court. On day two the jury came back with a question: “Your Honor, could you please reread to us the definition of Parties to an Offence.”

This question wasn’t great for the Crown. It seemed to indicate the jury was thinking that Dewey was the shooter, not Larkin. He could still be convicted of first-degree murder, but it was tougher. Rothbart read them the law and explained, as he had done before, that being a party made St. Clair equally culpable.

Armitage had made the same point in his jury address: “You don’t have to find that Larkin St. Clair pulled the trigger to convict him of first-degree murder.” He thought it was one of his best lines. That was five days ago. Felt like five weeks.

Yesterday, a very unhappy Judge Rothbart called the lawyers back into court. The jury wasn’t there.