Children in the Morning (30 page)

“Peggy and I were made for each other. We loved each other, we loved our children. Life was complicated at times, but life was sweet.”

I was vaguely aware of the courtroom door opening behind me, as someone made a noisy entrance and apparently clambered over other 189

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spectators to secure a seat. Delaney didn’t notice the commotion, so intent was he on telling the jury about his wife.

“Peggy was a social worker by profession and, not surprisingly, she did most of her work with children. By the time we had three kids in our own house, she quit her job to stay home with the family, but she still volunteered with kids, and became an advocate for children in trouble with the law. Understandably, given what had happened in her own life, and what she saw every day in her work, she tended to be a worrier! She knew about the mishaps and misfortunes and tragedies that could befall children at any minute, but she also knew enough to back off and not be overprotective even when she desperately wanted to. She had a finely tuned sense of humour, and could laugh at her own inclinations in this respect.”

“He didn’t kill, and I can prove it!” The strained, reedy voice of Corbett Reeves had everyone’s attention.

I whirled around and looked at him, sitting forward in his seat and peering intently at his sometime foster father on the stand. I turned back to Delaney, who gave me a quick half shake of his head. Get the kid out of here, was the unmistakeable message. We were of one mind on that; I had no idea what the pale, strange young boy intended to say. But if Beau didn’t want it said in the courtroom, neither did I.

“My Lord,” I said, getting to my feet. “This is not a defence witness, and I respectfully ask either that he be escorted from the courtroom or that the jury be excused while we discuss the matter.”

Kenneth Palmer wasn’t about to take any chances of the trial tank-ing at this late stage. He turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would ask that you retire to the jury room for a few minutes. You’ll be called back shortly.”

But Corbett did not want to lose his few minutes of fame. He got up and shouted: “You don’t want them to —”

The sheriff had reached him by then, and told him not to say another word. The judge had the same instruction, backed up by the threat of contempt of court. That kept him quiet until the jurors were out of earshot.

But then he started again. “I want to be part of this trial. I want to get on the witness stand, and —”

Justice Palmer interrupted him in a booming voice: “I do not 190

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intend to hear another word from you! Understand? Now, Mr.

Collins, what do you have to say about this?”

“My Lord, this person is not a witness. He is not a part of our case. And I would ask that, rather than risk any more outbursts and disruptions of the trial, he be removed from the courtroom, and in fact removed from the premises altogether.”

The judge gave a signal to the sheriff, who quickly hustled Corbett out of the courtroom. His final words were: “Nobody wants to hear the truth!”

Gail Kirk glared daggers at me, as if she thought I would stoop to engineering such a spectacle, or as if she might be able to plant that belief in the judge. But Ken Palmer knew otherwise, which was clear from the sympathetic look he gave me, and that was all that mattered.

If I were going to engineer anything, it would have been a lot more clear on the subject of my client’s innocence. Corbett’s demeanour did not inspire any confidence in me that he was truly on Delaney’s side.

Beau’s reaction said it all: the kid was bad news.

Beau was trying to tell me something else. I stared at him, and he tapped his left wrist with the index finger of his right hand. His eyes darted to the courtroom door. He was directing me to ask for an adjournment. There was a bad moon rising over our case.

“My Lord, I wonder if I could have a few minutes with my client.

I respectfully request an adjournment. . . .”

“We’ll adjourn for half an hour. Mr. Delaney, I hope there is no need to remind you that you are still under oath, and that you are not to speak to or communicate with anyone other than Mr. Collins.”

“Of course not, My Lord. I understand.”

Delaney and I fled to a meeting room and shut ourselves inside. I couldn’t hold back. “What the hell is wrong, Beau? Why do I have the feeling that a pale stranger by the name of Corbett Reeves has just attached himself to our case like a limpet mine? I thought the case was going to tank after that Hells Angels testimony. Now it’s this guy.

What do you have to tell me, Beau?”

“I was there.”

Of course. He was there when Peggy died. I don’t think I ever really believed otherwise.

My client looked as if he was facing his own death now.

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“But I didn’t kill her! It was an accident.”

“What was an accident, Beau?” I realized I was shouting, and I lowered my voice. “You shoving her down the stairs? Accidental because you didn’t realize you were going to do it until it happened?”

“I didn’t push her down the stairs, Monty! We had an argument, and she fell.”

“Can you possibly imagine how this is going to sound to the jury?

How it’s going to sound on the evening news?”

“Yeah, Monty, I can. I’m a trial lawyer, remember? But I panicked and reacted like a brainless lowlife. I know how lethal this is for me.

I made the biggest mistake of my life when I saw her lying there. I must have been in shock. I made the decision to leave the house and come back and ‘find’ her, and call the ambulance then. Once my story was on tape with emergency services, I was stuck with it.”

“That was bad. Changing it makes it exponentially worse.”

“I know that,” he said between clenched teeth. “Now we have to make the best of it.”

Not for the first or last time, I wondered why I did this for a living. I had to undo my entire case, and fly through uncharted territory by the seat of my pants, on a wing and a prayer, with one engine in flames, and a flock of shit-hawks flying in formation just above my head, ready any minute to drop a load. . . . I took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

“All right, let’s go over it.”

†

Fifteen minutes later, he was back on the stand. The judge cautioned the jury to disregard the outburst they had heard before they were excused from the room. Does a jury ever really disregard anything it has seen and heard? But I had my client to deal with.

“Now, Mr. Delaney, before we broke, you were telling us about Peggy and her tendency to be a worrier, particularly about her children. Could you tell us what kind of things she worried about?”

“Well, of course, she worried about sickness, given that her first child died in his crib. But she tried not to flutter around the kids all day with a thermometer and a bottle of pills.”

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“But she had her concerns.”

“Things bothered her, no question. Crime and violence were up there at the top of things she worried about.” Beau got shakier as he got closer to Peggy’s death. Little wonder, given that he was there on the scene when it happened. “The day she died, there was some horror story in the paper, a brutal crime that had been committed against a perfectly innocent bystander. She was going on and on about it, and that’s when the argument broke out.”

“You and Peggy had an argument . . .”

“Right. She was convinced that the world was getting more violent, more dangerous. People always think that, especially after hearing about a particularly gruesome crime.

“I said to her: ‘When has it not been violent and dangerous? Look at the bloodbaths of the twentieth century. World War One, the Russian Civil War, Stalin, World War Two, the Holocaust, China, Cambodia, over a hundred million people killed.’

“She replied: ‘That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it, so save me your party piece on the warlike impulse in mankind! I’m talking about criminal violence on this continent, in this country, in this city.’

“So I said: ‘In the metropolitan area of Halifax, in the run of a year, we get an average of eight homicides. Eight! Compare that to some of the U.S. cities where they have hundreds of murders every year.’ This is the way we used to argue, on the few occasions we argued at all. It was never ‘You promised you wouldn’t do that, and you did!’ Or ‘You never loved me!’ Or ‘You seem to be working late a lot these days, ever since you hired that new blond secretary!’ It was never stuff like that, because we got along so well on a personal level.”

At that point, my client was close to tears and, from my perspec-tive, his distress appeared to be genuine. Obviously, it was out of the question to ask whether he wanted another break; that would have looked contrived even if we hadn’t had our time out. So I waited for a bit and then continued.

“So this was the kind of thing you argued about.”

“Right. How the world was going. Who was ultimately to blame for the disparity between rich and poor in such and such a country.

Crime, of course, was a recurring theme, given what I did for a living.

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The point I was making was that this is a comparatively safe area of the world.

“But Peg said: ‘People are getting blown away in small-town Nova Scotia! That was your own client, in case you’ve forgotten.’ She was talking about a murder in Truro. The victim was Travis Bullard, who had been my client.

“‘That was an execution,’ I told her. ‘A guy known to police, as the expression goes. Not a random incident. Far from it. The guy was tied to a tree, propped up and shot, no doubt to keep him quiet or to retaliate for offending the Hells Angels or somebody.’

“Then she said: ‘The Hells Angels! They’re after your clients now.

What if they think that guy told you something and they come after you to keep
you
quiet?!’

“I accused her of not listening to reason and said I’d had enough of the argument. I reached out to calm her down, and she yanked her hand out of reach. I grasped her arm, and she pulled back to get away from me, and that’s how she fell. Backwards down the stairs.”

I could hear the muttering and whispering of voices and the scratching of pens on notebooks behind me, as the news sunk in. The two prosecutors were on the edge of their seats, as if ready to attack.

Delaney had been home after all.

He continued his story: “She barely made a sound when she landed on the rocks. She didn’t scream or cry out. I just kind of heard the breath go out of her. I stood stock still for a couple of seconds, then leapt down the stairs. She was not breathing. It was obvious that she was dead. That’s when . . . that’s when I left the house and got into the car and drove away.”

I stood there without speaking for a few seconds, then plunged in.

“Mr. Delaney, everyone in this courtroom wants to know why you told the police in your statement that you were not home at the time leading up to Peggy’s death. Please clear that up for us.”

“It was a lie told for self-preservation. I’m sorry. I wish I could take it back. I wish I had told the whole truth right from the beginning. But I panicked. I knew how bad it would look for me if I said I was there.

I was afraid that fact alone — after all, I’ve been doing criminal law my whole adult life — I was afraid that fact alone would convict me. I’m standing there, a head taller and eighty pounds heavier; she ends up at 194

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the bottom of the stairs; there’s a pressure mark on her arm.”

He turned to face the jury, and spoke to them urgently. “I knew I was innocent, that I hadn’t killed Peggy, but I was afraid I looked guilty. I was terrified that I would be sent away for a murder I didn’t commit, and that my children would be all split up, some of them in foster homes, in group homes, back with violent and dysfunctional families, after all Peggy and I had done to forge a strong family life for them. For all of us. I couldn’t bear the thought of that, so I did what I could to try to avoid it. I have spent my entire career defending people who do illegal, evil, or stupid things and then lie about them. I always thought I would be more honest than that, or at least more clever. But no.

“It was stupid of me,” he said, “stupid and unprofessional. Morally and legally wrong. You can perhaps imagine how deeply I regret my actions in that respect. I am truly sorry.”

I waited a couple of seconds, then asked him: “What did you do then?”

“I took off in the car, went out driving on the highway, trying to come to grips with what had happened, and what I should do.”

“How long were you out driving?”

“An hour and a half, two hours, something like that.”

Long enough and far enough to burn off some fuel, and make a credible stop to top up his gas tank. I was thankful that we had not got to the point where I was going to submit the cherished midnight gas receipt as evidence. Nobody else need ever know about it, especially the Crown, the judge, and the jury!

“What time did you get home again?”

“Twelve thirty-five. That is probably when Mr. Gorman saw me.

The second time he saw me, I should say. After the snow had started.”

“What happened then?”

“I went in and called for the ambulance.”

“Thank you, Mr. Delaney.”

Now it was time to hand him over for vivisection by the Crown.

Gail Kirk rose to her feet. Delaney steeled himself for what was to come.

“Mr. Delaney, you lied to the police, did you not?” Gail wasn’t going to waste time on chit-chat.