Under the Bridge (43 page)

“There was a shimmer from the moonlight,” he said. “Kelly asked me if I wanted to go see if Reena was all right, but the way she said it, I knew that was not what she meant. She had a smile on her face.

“I knew I was going to do more of what I did before. Beat on Reena. We caught up to her on the other side of the bridge, near the white schoolhouse. Kelly asked her if she was going to rat out. She said no. Kelly asked her to take off her shoes and jacket.”

He sighed, for here was where his telling would begin to change from all the tales he'd told before.

“Kelly started punching her, and I jumped in. We were both kicking and punching. She eventually hit the ground. We continued to beat on her.” He began to cry, and his voice was almost imperceptible, particularly as the microphone in the courtroom had been broken for days. It did not amplify the sound, so people had to lean forward and listen to the words of the boy they'd never listened to before.

“We were kicking and stomping on her. All over. All over her body. On her head. We both grabbed Reena by the legs. We took one leg each. Reena was unconscious. We dragged her to the Gorge waterway. She was face down. We took her to the water's edge.”

In the utterly quiet and transfixed courtroom, Kelly began to cry. She leaned forward as far as she could, her head hanging over her knees; she clasped her own ears. She cried as if something was lifted from her, something she'd held on to for so long.

“I saw a military police car go by. I stopped. Kelly took her into the Gorge waterway. She became semiconscious. She started mumbling words. She started struggling. Kelly was holding her head down. Kelly held her head under water. She struggled a bit. Kelly gave her a chop to the throat. Kelly stuck her head under water until red stuff floated to the top. Kelly started walking out of the water.” Here Warren stopped talking, but from the corner of his eye, he saw Kelly, her long hair set across her face, now pale and tear-stained.

“Reena was floating,” he said, and then he was silent.

“What did you think of Reena's state?” Catherine asked.

“That she was dead,” Warren said, with a kind of horror at his own words. He put his head down for the first time.

“Me and Kelly told each other not to talk about it. She asked me for a cigarette. I gave her one.”

“What was her emotional state?”

“I can't really describe it—she was….” He paused, thinking of the word while the sheriff handed Kelly a tissue.
Blank.
That was the word he finally chose. He said she was “blank.”

•   •   •

“It's beyond comprehension,” Manjit said to his wife. “How could a woman have so much ruthlessness?”

“It takes real guts for Warren to admit a mistake,” Mukand said to his wife. “Only a gentleman or a nice person will admit they made a mistake, but Kelly is not a nice person. She has been a brat all her life. I don't think she will change. She will stay that way all her life. I hope the judge puts her away for a long time. There's no doubt in my mind that she'll be found guilty.”

Warren made a single request of Catherine: don't make me ride in the sheriff's van. In this way, he found himself escorted to the courthouse by the very man who had once yelled at him, “You're going down big time!” It was a reunion with his interrogator, Sergeant John Bond.

“He was so meek and mild,” John Bond says. “I didn't even recognize him. I thought when I got to the prison, I'd have to go through all kinds of security and he'd be all locked up, but when I got there, he was just standing outside, waiting for me, by himself. I think he was surprised I handcuffed him. He's been so used to not being cuffed.”

The men drove away from the town of Mission, past the cattle farms and fields of gathered hay. Bond, now the head of the Strikeforce, a covert operations unit, also looked rather different than he had seven years ago. If Warren was more clean-cut, Bond was in his undercover mode; his hair was long and scraggly, his mustache was a mess, and he looked more the prisoner than Warren did.

“I've got a lot of respect for the guy,” Warren thought of Bond, though he wasn't sure why. There was just something about him he liked, and both men thought, on their own, that if they had met under different circumstances, they would have liked to grab a beer and just shoot the shit. In this way, it was an easy drive from Mission. They were forbidden to discuss the case, and so they talked of this and that.

“What do you think of restorative justice?” Warren asked Bond.

“I think it's a fad.”

“You think it's a fad?” Warren said disbelievingly, and they debated the merits of the program, which involved offenders meeting face to face with their victims.

They talked about mortgages and motorcycles, and when Warren grew suddenly quiet, Bond realized it was because they were driving by the cliffs, and Warren was smelling the ocean for the first time.

“His whole face just changed,” Bond saw, and he said nothing, but unrolled the window, silently.

•   •   •

Catherine finished with Warren in the morning, asking him only about Kelly's jacket. “Calvin Klein, black,” Warren recalled.

“You refused to give evidence before. Why are you now?”

“I feel I have an obligation to the Virk family—to tell the truth. I've had time to think of what they were going through. Before, I didn't care at that time.”

“And now?”

“I care a hell of a lot,” he said, and several of the jurors were crying.

Bob Claus, when he started with Warren, seemed suddenly charged with a new energy.

He began with Warren's jacket, the jacket he'd worn to court yesterday.

“You were wearing that jacket yesterday as part of your little theater? To make you look small?”

“No,” Warren said, surprised by the misinterpretation. He did not volunteer that it was hard to get a respectable jacket while you were in prison and so he'd borrowed one from a larger friend.

“Now, you're eligible for parole next year, and
of course,
to get parole, you have to admit participation, and you have to show that you have some caring for the Virk family. So your testimony here is all about your parole opportunities. You want out of prison. It's about getting Warren out of jail.”

“It has nothing to do with that, sir.”

“Well, to get parole, you have to say you have remorse for your crime?”

“I think you have to be genuine.”

“Well, speaking of genuine, when Sergeant Bond and Sergeant Bruce Brown first interviewed you about this missing girl, you swore on your grandfather's grave that you had nothing to do with it. You swore on your grandmother's grave.”

“I was messed up. I was quite the sleazeball then.”

“Yes, you said you were really into violence yesterday. It gave you a rush.”

Warren nodded while Bob Claus leaned back slightly, folded his arms across his chest, and sighed, as if the boy before him was an irascible student and he was a very disappointed teacher.

“You testified at your trial that you told Kelly to stop. And that was a lie?”

“Yes,” Warren admitted.

“Your whole testimony was a pack of lies, just like your statement to the police. And you're still saying you're not really guilty of murder. Kelly did it all.”

“By not stopping her, that's how I'm guilty of murder,” Warren said.

“You did the drowning! That's why your pants were wet.”

“No, I wasn't wet, sir.”

Warren hung his head while Claus appeared to search for more questions on his pad.

“I'll suggest to you that you saw Kelly on the other side of the bridge, and you showed Kelly where Josephine and Dusty were drowning Reena.”

“Wrong, sir. That's absolutely untrue.”

Claus went on for a while, doing his best to provoke Warren into revealing himself to be belligerent, to scream, to swear, to show himself to have the nature of a killer. But this did not happen, and at 4:00
P.M.,
Warren returned with Bond to prison where he noticed that he had broken out in hives and his body felt suddenly heavy, as if a concrete weight was placed on his heart. “I know what hell feels like,” he thought, and he could hear all the accusations in his head for a long time and he thought of the cell under the courtroom. There were yellow lights in that little cell, and he thought the lights were far more ugly than any other lights he'd seen.

Mr. Glowatski, you got teary in here. You were crying. Did you cry when you were kicking Reena? Did you cry when you killed her? Did you cry when you were telling Syreeta? Did you cry when you bleached blood off your pants? You never cried for Reena Virk. You want out of jail.
You drowned her. You drowned her. You drowned her. You.

•   •   •

Kelly's mother did not understand the media or the Virks. “Why do they say they respect Warren?” she wondered. She wanted to smile at Mrs. Virk, to say hello, but she would always lose the nerve and look down at the floor instead. It was just terrible walking by her, day after day, never having the nerve to say hello. And then one day, Mrs. Virk smiled at her, and she just wanted to rush over and hug her. It had meant so much to her, the mother's smile.

George, her husband, was getting fed up with the media, and he nicknamed one reporter, named Catherine Pope, “Catherine Dope.” He went right up to her: “You said on the news last night, the jacket Kelly was wearing on the night of the murder, well, it's the
alleged
jacket she was wearing.”

It bothered Kelly's mother when the media described Kelly as emotionless. They said she showed no remorse. How did they know? They couldn't even see her in the prisoner's box. She'd cried all through Warren's testimony. How was that emotionless? Sue just didn't understand. None of it made sense. Warren's story made no sense. It was Dusty who was mad at Reena because Reena was wearing Jack's jacket. She often thought of Mark Jetté saying:
There's something under the surface here.
Kelly had given her back a lipstick she'd bought and said she didn't like
the color, so Sue now rushed from her hotel, the Four Seasons, to a department store and tried to find a color Kelly would like. She would cry, remembering that Kelly once hoped to become a makeup artist on movie sets, and now, whatever happened, her daughter's life was basically ruined.

With the new lipstick for Kelly, Sue rushed back to the courtroom, as this afternoon her daughter was going to take the stand.

•   •   •

“Don't think you'll get her to just confess,” Stan Lowe advised Catherine over the phone. “She's not going to just say, ‘Okay. I did it. I killed Reena Virk.' You've got to chip, chip, chip at her. Chip away….”

•   •   •

There was a kind of frenetic energy in the courtroom, and, because all the seats were full, several Japanese schoolgirls sat cross-legged on the floor. The microphone was still broken (“What is this, Romania?” the journalists complained), and so as Kelly told her story, in a very soft voice, even those in the front row moved forward, and were almost falling out of their seats as they strained to hear.

Catherine was scribbling rapidly. There were Post-its and ripped pieces of paper and notes from yesterday, all forming a messy union on the table. It was Michelle, not Bob Claus, who stood to ask Kelly about the evening.

Kelly told her story of the evening and as she spoke, her voice took on a clipped, precise tone, both prim and concise, and occasionally it seemed she was using a British accent.

After the fight, Kelly saw Reena walk up to the top of the stairs. “Her hair was all messy,” she recalled. “She was walking really, really slow.”

“I was about to head to the parking lot with everyone else, and I saw Dusty and Josephine standing at the start of the bridge. Dusty told me to go away. I pretty much got impatient, and so I crossed the street. I went to the parking lot, and I saw some guys, and then I walked with Laila and her cousin to the bus stop. I then was just about to walk home but I decided to stop in the Mac's to use the washroom. I got to the intersection where the light is. There's a cement island there. I heard my name being called behind me. It was Warren. He told me to come across the street.”

“He told me it was important.” Then as she had said in her previous trial, Warren told her that “himself, Josephine, and Dusty had gone back after the girl, and him and Josephine beat her up some more. He told me he had sobered up and just stopped beating her up. He said he left, and the last time he looked, Dusty and Josephine were in the water with her. He pointed over to the schoolhouse area. I just took it as drunken babble. He asked me to walk home with him and then he just took off. He didn't even say good-bye.”

“And we've heard from Billy Schilling at this trial that you had a conversation with him. Can you tell us about that?”

“Actually,” Kelly said, “I asked him if he had a smoke and he reminded me that he did not smoke. He commented that I looked nervous and upset, and so I told him about the fight and what Warren had told me. I said, ‘We beat up a girl and I think she was put in the water,' or something to that effect. He just said, ‘Whatever,' quite rudely, and he walked ahead with his girlfriend.”

“You heard him tell the court that you were saying, ‘What do I do? What do I do?' Did you ask him that question?”

“Uh, no.”

“You've seen Exhibit 15 in this trial—the black nylon jacket with the Calvin Klein logo.”

“That's my stepsister's jacket.”

“Did you tell Jodene that you held Reena's head under water?”

“At no time did I ever say anything about drowning her. I didn't even know anything about her being dead or drowned. It was just she was put in the water, and that happens a lot at parties we go to—someone is thrown into the water as a way to humiliate them, so I just thought that was what Warren was talking about.”