Stray Bullets (23 page)

The wind shifted, coming from the north. Greene moved ahead again to shield his dad. “I think he’s smart. I think he cares. He ran back outside to find the girl who he worked with and tried to warn her that her old boyfriend was out front.”

His dad nodded. Taking it all in. He always had a surprising perspective on Greene’s cases. “When the Americans came,” he said, “some were afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

Greene’s father swept his hand in front of him. “All this. Everything. Some people just ran away, and we never saw them again.”

“He’s got reason to be afraid. I think at least one of the shooters saw him. Maybe took a shot at him too.”

Greene’s father remained silent until they were almost at the front door.

“Even when I was in the deepest hiding,” he said, “I always tried to find out the news. What was going on. You’re looking for him. But maybe he’s watching you.”

Even Ralph Armitage was having trouble smiling. He and Albert Fernandez had been stuck all morning in the too-small Crown office boardroom, interviewing the three remaining eyewitnesses, and each one seemed more difficult than the last. Great way to spend a Sunday afternoon, especially when your wife wanted you to join her to go look at different florists for the party.

First there’d been the South African banker. He was the only one who spoke English, but he was a real blabbermouth. Next came the Tamil man, who was so frightened he had to go to the bathroom every ten minutes. They were nothing compared to Vikram Dalmar Abdul Mohammed, the Bangladeshi grandfather, their last interview of the day.

“Please, sir, listen carefully.” Armitage tried to keep his voice calm. “We know that you understand a good deal of English, and you’ve explained to us twice already that you were a mathematics professor in Bangladesh. But when I ask a question, you must wait for the translator, and you must answer him in Bengali, not in English.”

“Yes, sir, my most sincere apologies,” Mohammed said. He was a tiny man, five feet tall if he was lucky.

“Or we can have no translator,” Armitage said. “Then in court you will have to speak in English.”

“No, no, must have translator.”

“Then you must
use
translator,” Armitage said. “Let’s try this again. You told us that you and your grandson were at the Tim Hortons, sitting at a table near the door.”

“Yes,” Mohammed said in English, “we were having hot chocolate—”

Armitage thrust his hand at Mohammed, practically stuffing it in the little man’s face. He pointed to the translator.

Mohammed cowered in his seat and, startled, spoke in Bengali to the translator for at least a minute.

Armitage rolled his eyes at Fernandez.

At last the translator turned to Armitage. “He says, ‘Yes, we were having hot chocolate.’”

Armitage could feel the anger crawling up his skin. “I need to know every word Mr. Mohammed says,” he said to the translator, who was short as well. Maybe five-two. “Understood?”

“Yes. But at first he was discussing the quality of the tea at the Tim Hortons. He does not like it. And he finds this Canadian habit of putting cream in hot drinks very peculiar. I didn’t think it was relevant.”

Armitage tapped his fingers on the table. “Mr. Mohammed. You told the police that you saw two young men at the table next to you. Please describe them for me.”

“One had very long hair, like a Sikh man without a turban,” Mohammed said through the translator. “The other had red hair, his skin extremely white, like a sari a bride might wear on her wedding day.”

Armitage let out a sigh. This guy sure had colorful language for a math professor. He beamed his best smile at Mohammed, hoping to encourage him to stay on track. “Did you hear them speaking at all?”

“My grandson said the hot chocolate was too hot. I was in discussion with him at the time,” Mohammed said through the translator. “The boy’s name is Ramesh, and unfortunately his marks in geometry are not adequate.”

“Sir. Did you hear anything?”

“I heard many things.”

“Did you hear the two men, the one with long hair and the other one with the very white skin, say anything to each other or anyone else?”

“The gentleman with the long hair was speaking to some young women. They were black people. Am I allowed to say that?” Mohammed now had no problems using the translator.

“Of course you are allowed. What did he say to them?”

“I only heard him say that he could do fifty push-ups at one time. They seemed most impressed.”

“Did he say anything to the other man, the one with the white skin?”

“No, sir, he did not.”

“Did the one with the white skin say anything to the one with the long hair?”

“Yes, sir, he did.”

Pulling teeth or what, Armitage thought. If Mohammed was this reluctant a witness in court, the jury would want to strangle him. They wouldn’t remember a word of what he had to say. “And what did the white-skinned one say to the one with the long hair?”

“A bad word. I was concerned for my grandson.”

“I can understand that.”

“It was a short sentence.”

Relax, Armitage told himself. After all, diversity is what makes Toronto such a special place to work and live and prosecute. “What was the short sentence the man with the white skin said to the man with the long hair? Including the bad word you didn’t want your grandson to hear?”

“Must I tell you?”

“It is very important. Would you prefer to write it out?”

Mohammed started whispering into the translator’s ear.

“No, no, no,” Armitage shouted.

The two little men looked at him, shocked.

“No whispering,” Armitage said. “Mr. Mohammed. Believe me, in this job there’s nothing you could say that would surprise me.”

Mohammed jutted his diminutive jaw out. His eyes flashed in anger. “I need a fucking cigarette,” he muttered in English, his voice angry.

“I’m sorry.” Armitage was taken aback by the man’s abrupt change in mood. “There is no smoking allowed in these offices. If you want, we can take a break—”

“No, no.” Mohammed slammed his small hand on the desk. It made a loud thwacking sound. “The man said that. The short one with the white skin. He was angry and spoke the way I just did. He said, ‘I need a fucking cigarette.’ Then the two of them walked outside. I didn’t see them after that.’”

Nancy Parish stared at the stacks and stacks of paper that made up the case of
R. v. Larkin St. Clair
, charge: first-degree murder. The firm’s boardroom, which she’d taken over a month ago, looked like it had been hit by a tornado.

It was only Monday and already she was exhausted. Today she’d run around to three different courts to deal with a bail hearing and a guilty plea and to receive judgment on a case that finished a month ago. She’d lost.

The upshot was she hadn’t even got back to the office until six o’clock, and by the time she’d unpacked her files and cleared out her voice mails and e-mails, it was seven. Her other clients were feeling increasingly neglected.

Usually her partner, Ted DiPaulo, would jump in to pick up the slack. But these days he was constantly jetting off to some exotic locale to spend a night or two with Isabel, an Air France air hostess he’d met on a trip to Paris last spring. Suddenly, after being a widower for five years, and after a lifetime as a workaholic lawyer, now he spent every moment he could flying to France, or wherever his Parisian sweetheart was headed.

Even when he was in the office, he was spending hours online looking for cheap flights. All this from a guy who a year ago didn’t even know how to use a computer and who hadn’t been on holiday out of Canada for a decade. She didn’t blame Ted. Was happy for him. And she’d gotten used to being in the office alone. Had started to like it.

The judicial pretrial, a meeting to discuss St. Clair’s case with a high-court judge, was set for this coming Friday morning, and she needed to be ready.

Years ago, disclosure of the facts of a case was a cat-and-mouse game between prosecution and the defense counsel. The Crown Attorneys knew everything, and the defense lawyer had to guess what the evidence at trial would be. But as more and more unjust convictions of innocent people were uncovered, often due to the Crown Attorney’s holding back exculpatory evidence, the courts imposed upon
prosecutors an ironclad obligation to disclose every bit of information to the other side.

At first, defense lawyers were elated and the Crowns disheartened. But soon the prosecutors found, especially in a big case such as a first-degree murder trial, it was easier to pile everything into a stack of cardboard boxes and ship it out to the defense. Let them catalogue it. Figure the case out for themselves. Make them drown in the details.

On her way back to the office, Parish had stopped at an art-supply store and bought a few poster-size sheets of paper, some colored marking pens, and thumbtacks. She stuck one of the sheets on the back wall of the boardroom and drew an outline of the Tim Hortons parking lot on it.

“Let’s see now,” she said.

With Ted almost never around, she’d lost all inhibitions about speaking out loud when she was alone. Her plan was to select the five key prosecution eyewitnesses and, using a different color for each one, draw the key points of their evidence: where they were located when the shots rang out, how many shots they heard, who they saw run and in which direction, bits of overheard conversation.

“Adela Dobos, you’re going to be red,” she said. “You bought a coffee and had just got out the door and heard someone nearby say, ‘Here, take this.’ A moment later you heard the first shot.”

She drew a red stick woman on her map. “You say there were ‘maybe as many as nine gunshots.’” She put a red number nine behind the figure. “You saw Mr. Wilkinson turn to his son, who was behind him.” To represent father and son, she used a big stick figure near the door and a smaller one a few steps away. “The little boy was on the ground. There was a big car in the corner of the lot and you heard it drive away real fast.” She drew in the car. “You don’t know where the gunshot sounds came from. You saw a guy with long hair and a much smaller man leave the doughnut shop but couldn’t remember if that was before or after the shooting. People were running everywhere.”

She assigned the Albanian, Edone Kutishi, the color green. For Vikram Mohammed she used yellow. Abdul Mohammed was blue. Nigel Jameson, black. She stood back to look at her handiwork. The whole paper was a mishmash of colors. It didn’t seem to say anything. “The jury will think I’m nuts if I do this in court,” she said.

Fortunately, she’d bought six sheets of paper. Each one was separately wrapped in a thin plastic that stuck as tight as CD packaging. It took her an hour to unwrap the other five, tack them on the wall, and
methodically draw out the evidence of the individual witnesses, one per piece of paper. By the time she’d finished, she was tired, hungry, and discouraged.

She had to get some food, but she sat back down and took a last look at the drawings. Going back and forth between each one was confusing. Not at all illuminating.

“So much for that idea. You’re supposed to be a criminal lawyer, not an artist,” she scolded herself. There were six sheets of plastic in front of her, squarely stacked. She might have been a slob about a lot of things in her life, but when it came to art supplies she was ultra-neat. In the right-hand corner of each piece of plastic she’d written the name of each witnesses in their own color.

She stood up and flipped through the plastic sheets one last time. Wait. She flipped through them again. That’s it, she thought. She grabbed two thumbtacks from the table, ran over to the wall of the original drawing she’d done, and stuck them through all five see-through sheets on top of it. Perfectly lined up.

“Yes,” she shouted. “Yes, yes. That’s it.”

She looked at her watch. Eight thirty. The art-supply store stayed open until nine. She started to giggle, tapped her pockets until she found her car keys, and threw on her jacket. Who cared if she was here all night? She wasn’t afraid of this trial anymore. Now she couldn’t wait to pull on her robes and get started.

Some clichés were true, Daniel Kennicott thought, such as the one about good police work being mostly paperwork. And he should have been accustomed to paperwork. After all, he’d been a lawyer before becoming a cop.

But nothing in his experience prepared him for the warrant office at old city hall. It was nine o’clock on Tuesday morning, and he was in a windowless closet of a room that was filled to the ceiling with stacks of boxes. Each one held a year’s worth of warrants for people who’d failed to come to court. Unless the file was a high-profile case, the only time these warrants were enforced was when one of the poor souls whose name was here got himself arrested. And then, only if his name had been entered into the police computer. The transfer of information from scratchy handwritten notes to digital police files was eighteen months behind schedule and falling farther back all the time as the onslaught of charges piled up and the police budget was cut. The cardboard boxes themselves were moist and soft and the whole place had the smell of molding paper.

He cleared off the only desk in the room and hauled out the box from six years ago. He was going to begin with that one and work his way forward in time. In her interview with Detective Greene, Suzanne Howett, the former server at the Tim Hortons, had estimated Jose’s age as late twenties. She said he was smart, spoke many languages, wanted to be a professor. Kennicott was guessing that Jose had gotten a university degree in whatever country he came from, before getting to Canada. Had to start somewhere.

The only other clue Greene had given him was that Jose might be from Romania. Kennicott had downloaded from Google a list of the most common Romanian first and last names and printed them out. He pulled up the only chair in the room, put the list down on the desk, and dug in to the box.

The names on the warrants were an ad hoc social history of Toronto, he thought as he worked his way through them. There were long Tamil names, such as Padamandaman; piles of Vietnamese names, almost
all with either Nguyen or Doan as the last name; Eastern European; North African; Caribbean; South American.