Old City Hall (31 page)

He wrote again.

Don’t look at me like I’m crazy. I was right about the goalie.

Parish took the notebook back. It was true. The thirty-eight-year-old journeyman goaltender had taken over on the Leafs’ West Coast trip. Much to the amazement of all the sports pundits, he caught fire. He recorded two shutouts in a row, and the team’s fortunes turned on a dime. Suddenly they just couldn’t lose. Now they were one game away from winning the Stanley Cup. By tomorrow night they could be world champions.

Still, what did that have to do with his case? Parish threw the notebook down. The spiral wire binding made a hard, clicking sound on the metal table. “You’ll talk some gibberish with your cell mate, but
you won’t talk to me? What the hell’s going on? Enough is enough. Will you talk to me or not?”

Brace shook his head. Parish tried to read his look. He wasn’t defiant or angry or defensive, like most of her clients became when she challenged them like this.

Brace picked his notebook up and wrote:

I can’t talk to you.

Parish ran her hand across her face. She was bone-tired. It was only Monday night. She had four more grueling days ahead of her before the weekend. And right now she had no idea what to do.

“Look, Mr. Brace,” she said at last. “Summers will totally freak out, but tomorrow I’m going to have to go into court and tell him that I’m unable to communicate with my client or take instructions from him, and I’m going to resign from the case.” This was a bluff. Parish knew there was no way that Summers would let her off the case now, short of her saying that Brace had tried to strangle her. And knowing Summers, maybe not even then. The only way off the case was for Brace to fire her.

Brace was no fool. He picked up his book and wrote:

But I
am
communicating with you.

Parish closed her eyes. “Why the hell did you hire me? You could have had any lawyer in the city. Why me?”

Brace looked genuinely taken aback by this. He wrote again.

I thought you were brilliant today. Proved I made the right choice picking you.

It was, Parish realized, the first compliment she’d ever received from him. Although she hated to admit it, it felt good. Her anger began to melt away.

“Okay, Mr. Brace, help me. I’m missing something here, and I know it. You’ve got to stop holding out on me.”

Brace looked at her long and hard, like a man weighing his options. At last he picked up his notebook and turned his pen upside down, so the rounded side touched the page, not the ink. He pointed to a word he’d written.

Parish read the word. She furrowed her brow. What did he mean by that?

To emphasize whatever point he was making, he underlined it with the back of the pen, indenting the page. For once, he was staring right at her, his smoky brown eyes alert, knowing. He looked down at the page and underlined the word again.

She read the word again. It seemed innocuous enough. She read it a third time. Then it hit her. So hard that her breath rushed out of her lungs as if she’d been bashed in the chest full force.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, leaning forward across the table toward Brace. “That never, ever occurred to me,” she said.

Brace closed his notebook, looked at her, and shrugged his shoulders.

“That changes everything,” Parish said. She felt a sense of vertigo, as if her feet weren’t really touching the concrete floor. And for the first time since she’d taken the case, she saw the thing she needed more than anything else to keep going. More than pats on the back from her client, more than sleep, more than food itself. At last she saw the one thing that every defense lawyer lives for: hope.

F
or Albert Fernandez, the advantage of having Detective Ho as his main witness the next day was that he didn’t have to do any preparation. Sure, the forensic officer would bore the hell out of everyone in the courtroom and he’d drive Summers nuts, but all Fernandez would have to do was ask, “What did you do next?” every few minutes, and Ho would fill in the narrative. So tonight Fernandez could take a bit of a breather.

Not that it was easy to do. Being involved in a big trial made a lawyer suspicious of downtime. Fear it. Fernandez knew that if he let himself lift his head and look around, he’d realize that three billion people in the world didn’t care about the length of the knife that pierced Katherine Torn’s abdomen or the statement Kevin Brace made to Mr. Singh. Earlier this week the Chilean soccer team had won a crucial game in the World Cup qualifying round, and Fernandez had made a point of not reading anything about it.

He was tired. He sat back in his office chair and let his eyes drift closed. Just for five minutes, he told himself, it would be nice if he could think of something other than the case. It was almost eight o’clock. Thankfully, Marissa would be here soon. He’d left a stack of papers for her to photocopy.

Ever since she’d come back from Chile, Marissa had been a different person. She’d put a big push on to learn English, insisting that they speak no Spanish when they were together, and she’d started coming
down at night to help him with his work. It turned out that she was very organized, and they made a good pair. She’d even encouraged him to contact his parents, something that to date he’d resisted.

There was a light knock. His eyes flew open, and he rushed to the door. Marissa was wearing a very short black skirt and a low-cut blouse. She slipped inside, and he gave her a kiss.

“I have a lot of papers for you to photocopy,” he said, turning back to his desk.

She reached out, grabbed his hand, and pulled him toward her.

“Don’t be such a stick in the earth,” she said, giggling as she shut the door.

He smiled. “Stick in the mud.”

“Shhh,” she said. “I brought you something.”

“What?” he asked.

“Sit on your chair and I’ll show you . . .”

“Really, we can’t do it now. I’ve got a lot of work to do . . .”

“Sit,” she purred. “And take your mind out of the ditch.”

“The gutter,” he said, sitting down.

Marissa sat astride him and hitched her skirt up high.

“Really, Marissa . . .”

“This is something you really desire,” she said. “Here, feel.”

She took his hand and placed it on her inner thigh. Instead of feeling warm flesh, Fernandez felt something cold and hard, covered in plastic.

“What the heck?” he said as he pulled the thing out.

“A refund,” Marissa declared as he stared at the bag of gumballs in his hand.

“A refill,” he said. They both started to laugh.

“I’ll refill the machine, and you do the photocopying,” he said as they got up. It felt good to laugh with his wife.

She went down the hall. He was still filling the gum machine when she came back. Not nearly enough time to do all the copying.

“Marissa,” he said without looking up, “this work is important.”

“This is more important,” she said in a surprisingly solemn voice.

He turned and saw that she was holding a sheet of paper. Her hands were shaking a bit. “I found this on the machine.”

“What is it?” he said, reaching for the paper.

“I don’t think it is supposed to be there.”

Fernandez took one look, and he understood as he read the handwritten heading:

Confidential Solicitor-Client Communication Between Mr. Kevin Brace and His Lawyer, Ms. Nancy Parish

Below the heading were notes clearly written by Brace.

“Albert, this is not proper, is it? For your office to have the notes from the other team?”

“No, it’s not proper,” Fernandez said. He didn’t bother to correct her use of the word “team.” She’d gotten the important word right. He looked in her dark eyes and saw a depth there he’d never noticed before.

“You said it perfectly,” he said, his mind reeling. “This is not proper at all.”

G
ood morning, Mr. Singh. I hope I didn’t scare you,” Daniel Kennicott said as the elevator opened and Mr. Singh walked out onto the twelfth floor of the Market Place Tower, holding just one newspaper under his arm. “With Mr. Brace gone, I imagine you’re not accustomed to seeing anyone up here.”

Singh smiled. “Most mornings there is no one.”

“Would you mind if I spoke with you for a minute?” Kennicott asked.

“Of course not, once I make my final delivery,” Singh said. Kennicott waited at the elevator as Singh walked around the corner and down the hallway toward Suite 12B. Kennicott heard his steady steps, the sound of the newspaper being quietly deposited at the door, and the footsteps’ return. The only other sound was the whir of the air-conditioning fans. He remembered how quiet this hallway was that first morning he was here.

“I’d like to take you back to 12A, Mr. Singh,” Kennicott said when he reappeared.

“That would be fine,” Singh said. “I am three minutes ahead on my delivery schedule.”

Without another word Singh walked ahead toward 12A. Kennicott followed. He unsealed the front door and then said, “Sir, in your initial statement you said that when you first came to this spot, the front door was halfway open.”

“That is correct.”

“Please, open the door to the exact position it was in that morning.”

“It was like this,” Singh said. Without hesitation he opened the large door. “I stood in this spot, in the center of the doorway.”

Kennicott nodded. “If you’ll excuse me, could I stand there?”

Singh moved out of the way, and Kennicott took his place. From this angle, the view down the wide front hallway was obstructed. You could see only a sliver of the kitchen and the windows beyond. The kitchen table was out of sight, off to the right.

“And when Mr. Brace came to the door, did it remain in the same position?”

Mr. Singh had to think about that. “No,” he said finally. “Mr. Brace opened it all the way to the wall.”

Kennicott nodded. Now he was seeing the apartment not through his own eyes, but through the cipher of the architectural drawing he’d seen in court. It was as if he were up in the air, looking down. “Show me where the door was after Mr. Brace moved it.”

“Like this.” Singh pushed the door gently. It came to rest on a rubber stopper on the floor, just in front of the wall. “Then he said, ‘I killed her, Mr. Singh, I killed her.’”

“And right then, what was the first thing that you did?”

“I said, ‘We must contact the authorities.’ As I said in my statement.”

“Yes. I know you said that. But what did you do? Here, stand back in the place where you were, and now I’ll go inside and face you. I’ll be Brace.”

Kennicott went over the threshold and turned back to Singh, standing right in front of him. “Is this where he was?”

“Precisely. Then Mr. Brace stepped aside, and I walked in,” Singh said.

“Which side did he step to?”

“The door side.”

Kennicott moved to his left. “He moves, this way, toward the door. How far does he go?”

“All the way over.”

Kennicott nodded. He covered the narrow gap between the door and the wall. “Here?”

“Yes.”

“And he lets you in along the wall side.”

“Exactly. I walked down the hallway to the kitchen, and Mr. Brace followed me. I believe I said all of this in my statement as well.”

Kennicott nodded. “I’d like you to walk through it exactly as it happened. Please come in, Mr. Singh, just like you did that morning.”

Singh did not hesitate. “I considered that the situation was most grave,” he said as he walked past Kennicott. “I proceeded directly down the hallway.” Saying that, Singh walked in at a steady pace.

“And Brace, what did he do?” Kennicott asked, not yet moving from his spot by the door.

“He followed behind,” Singh said. “I came directly into the kitchen. Mr. Brace came up behind me.” It had taken Singh only a few seconds to walk to the end of the hallway and enter the kitchen. Kennicott followed him, arriving a moment later.

“Did Brace walk behind you like this?”

“Yes, he followed me. I do walk quickly, and he joined me right at this spot a short time later.”

Kennicott took a deep breath. “Mr. Singh, think carefully. Did you actually see Mr. Brace walk down the hallway behind you?” He expected that the older man might have trouble reconstructing such a small detail. But he was wrong.

“No. I did not look back. I was most concerned to find Mr. Brace’s wife. So I walked directly here.”

“Did he say anything else while you two walked down the hallway?”

Singh seemed surprised by the question. “No. I do not like to indulge in chatter.”

Kennicott had watched Singh carefully a few minutes before at the elevator, when he’d asked the old man to come down to Suite 12A. Singh had just walked straight ahead, without saying a word or looking back at Kennicott.

“Mr. Singh, listen to this next question,” Kennicott said. Suddenly he felt like a defense lawyer again, trying to nail down a witness on a key point in cross-examination. “At any time from the moment you walked into the doorway until you came to this spot, did you look behind the front door?”

“No, I did not.”

“And now you and I are facing the kitchen, away from the front door. Did you look back down the hallway at this time?”

“No. As I said in my statement, I proceeded directly here, to the kitchen area. When I did not see Mr. Brace’s wife here, I proceeded to the bedrooms.” He pointed off to his right, where the master bedroom and the second bedroom were located, beyond the kitchen. “There was no one in the bedrooms or the bathroom back there. I returned to the kitchen. Mr. Brace remained right here, where we are standing now.”

“Let’s walk through your exact movements, Mr. Singh.” Kennicott took a quick glance at his watch, then followed Singh as he walked into Brace’s bedroom, the en suite bathroom, the second bedroom, which was Brace’s study, and then came back to the same spot in the kitchen.

“That took just over a minute, Mr. Singh,” he said. “Does that sound about right?”

“Certainly. But Mr. Brace did not follow. He remained right here, at this spot, in the kitchen.”

Kennicott nodded. He turned and looked back up the hallway, where he had a clear view of the opened front door.