Stray Bullets (31 page)

“He’s here in Canada illegally. Crown wants to find him as badly as I do. They have his name but aren’t going to release it to the press. Figure it will drive him farther underground.”

“How about your jury address?”

“Work in progress.” She took her dessert fork and twirled it on the white tablecloth, making a small indentation in the linen.

“How’s the rest of your life?” he asked after the waitress cleared away the dessert dishes.

“Horrible, pathetic, nonexistent. Take your pick.” Her fling with Brett the waiter from the Pravda Vodka Bar had lasted about a month. Until he heard about the trial she was doing. In a nanosecond he lost all interest in going out with someone defending the child killer in the Timmy’s shooting.

“Then let’s get a drink at the bar. It’s packed with smart, attractive, eligible young bankers and bond traders and lawyers at big firms who know how to make real money.”

She shook her head. “After the trial. Right now this is my life.”

He smiled. DiPaulo had one of those smiles that radiated happiness. She needed a few rays of his sunshine right now.

“There is no after this trial, Nancy,” he said. “Don’t you see that?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that you have the curse of true talent. It’s easy to be a good lawyer. It’s not that hard to be a very good lawyer. But there are no shortcuts to being great at this.”

“Thanks, but—”

“You know, when I came out of the Crown’s office, I could have gotten a job anywhere. Everyone was surprised when I picked you to be my partner. A young lawyer still establishing her practice. You have talent and drive. Not many people have both. And you see things other people don’t. It’s a blessing and a curse.”

She stopped twirling the fork. The indentation was deeper than she thought it would be. She started to knead the tablecloth, hoping to restore the smooth surface. She didn’t know what to say.

“Thanks for letting me drag you out for dinner,” he said. “You’re going back to the office, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got to put in a few more hours.”

“I know,” he said. “You have to.”

Despite all her confidence, independence, and considerable charm, planning this May Two-Four party had really taxed Ralph Armitage’s wife, Penny. He hadn’t helped by being so distracted with the new job and the St. Clair murder trial. And today, for the first time ever, he saw her lose it. Of all the times and all the places. She’d just dragged him into the downstairs washroom at his parents’ estate, twenty minutes before she was set to do her big presentation to the family about the party plans she’d been working on the whole darn year. He was shocked by what he saw.

“I can’t do it,” she said. Her eyes bulged with tears. “They are going to hate this whole concept.”

She’d spent weeks putting everything on a large piece of white Bristol board—this was another Armitage tradition. At the party all the adult guests signed the boards, which were then framed and put on the wall in the downstairs rec room. Penny’s board was now ripped in half and tossed on the ground.

“No, they won’t,” he said, reaching out to her.

She batted his hand away. “Don’t fucking patronize me.”

“I’ve told you for months. I think bringing families from the shelter is an amazing idea.”

“Amazingly dumb. I didn’t know they’d need all these consent forms. Criminal record checks on all the employees. Fuck.” She grabbed one of the two pieces of the presentation and went to rip it in half again.

He reached for it and stilled her hand. She didn’t resist, instead crumpled into the corner of the floor. “The band canceled,” she said.

“What? When?”

“Two days ago. I didn’t want to bother you with this during the trial. They got a gig on some tour with a grunge group and left me high and dry. I called your sister Emma in a panic, and she said, ‘But didn’t you hire a backup?’ How was I supposed to know about that?”

After Penny had dragged him to five different auditions, she’d decided to try a hip young group named the Bloor Baby Brats instead of
one of the older bands that had been doing weddings, bar mitzvahs, and special events for decades. He’d worried something like this might happen. But he hadn’t wanted to dampen her enthusiasm.

Penny’s nose was running all over her sleeve. He grabbed a box of Kleenex and passed her some tissues. She blew hard with a big snort. “And the food, I didn’t tell you about that either?”

“What’s the problem?” After picking the band, there’d been another round of visits to caterers in every part of the city. Penny found all the traditional ones boring and had opted for a couple who ran a company called Local Locos. They served only organic produce grown within a fifty-mile radius of Toronto.

“Last week I had lunch with your sister Randy, and she just happened to mention that I shouldn’t forget that some of the guests would be kosher or halal. Fuck. The second I got home I called Local Loco and they said look at the contract, it specifically says they can’t do kosher, halal, lactose intolerant, peanut allergies, wheat allergies, and about fifty other fucking things I’ve never even heard of. I grew up in the boring burbs and ate meat and potatoes for the first eighteen years of my life. How am I supposed to know about all this crap?”

Her shoulders heaved, and her nose started running again. He’d never seen anyone cry so hard.

“And to top it all off, Lindsay’s pregnant again.”

Her younger sister, Lindsay, already had three kids. For the last year, Armitage and Penny had been “trying to get pregnant,” as the stupid phrase went, with no luck. Although lately, with all the tension between them, their “efforts” had been few and far between.

“We’re going through a rough time right now, that’s all.” He reached out to touch her hand again.

She smacked it away, harder this time. “Who is she, Ralph?”

“Who?”

“The woman you keep seeing on Thursday nights.”

He started to laugh.

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m laughing because you couldn’t be more wrong.”

“Well, who is it?”

“There’s no ‘she.’ ‘He’ is a witness. And he is very afraid. Won’t talk to anyone but me.” He longed to share this with her. The whole story. But how could he tell Penny he was burying the one true eyewitness to this horrific crime, to protect himself and the bad deal he’d made
with Cutter? “That’s all I can say, and even that’s more than I should tell you.”

She pulled herself up. What an agile body she has, he thought for maybe the thousandth time. He had an indecent urge to yank her clothes right now.

Before he could stop her, she ripped the two other pieces of the Bristol board in half again.

“What are you doing?”

“Give me that box of Kleenex,” she said. “And find some tape real fast. I’m making this the theme. Torn lives. A stripped-down party, no music, no fancy food. Broken people and how to start repairing them.”

He burst out of the bathroom and rushed down to his father’s basement workshop. He was filled with more admiration for his wife then he’d ever had. How would he live without her, if she ever found out that he’d turned himself into a liar?

“Ari.”

He heard a voice whispering. It seemed very close.

“Ari.”

Something soft was on his neck. Moist. Lips.

“Ari.”

He opened his eyes, but the room was dark. Greene could hear a whirling sound overhead, which for a moment was confusing because he didn’t have a fan in his bedroom at home. The lips moved to his cheek, then his forehead. He slipped his hand under Jennifer Raglan’s arm and around her bare back. She eased her body on top of his, and he felt the roundness of her breasts curl across his chest.

“It’s eight o’clock. I have to leave in forty-five minutes,” she said before she directed a playful bite at his ear. “I’m leading the Sunday brunch seminar.”

“Ah yes, I saw the topic: ‘Dealing with Difficult Police Officers.’”

They were in a room at the Northlands Inn, where every Crown Attorney in the province—except those involved in major trials—met annually for their weekend conference.

She laughed, that deep guttural laugh of hers that he couldn’t get enough of. It rang in his head at the most unexpected times.

“Wonder where I got the idea for the topic?” Raglan slipped her hips on top of him.

“You must have done a great deal of research,” he said.

“Extensive.” Her legs slid along the outsides of his, making a slithering sound on the thin sheet that covered them. “I told my colleagues at the bar last night I had to get to bed early to rest up for my presentation.”

He laughed too. “You did get to bed early.” He’d driven up in the evening, parked down the road, and, as prearranged, slipped up the back staircase into her room at ten o’clock.

“Mmmm.” She curled up her toes and scratched his skin. “But I didn’t get much sleep.”

“Well then, why’d you wake up so early?”

“For this.” She trailed her hands along both his arms and squeezed the insides of his elbows, hoisting herself up before she lowered herself down. Down. The whirl of the fan was the one constant sound in the room. The air on their skin.

By eight thirty she was getting dressed, and he was sitting up in bed watching her. Not staring, just watching.

“How’s the trial going?” she asked.

“Hard to say,” he said.

“Ralph stopped calling me all the time. How’s he doing?”

“Good days and bad days.”

She was wearing more casual clothes than she wore at work. She zipped up her jeans and pulled on a sweater. “You’re pissed at him for making that stupid deal with Cutter. Aren’t you?”

“A four-year-old boy was murdered,” he said.

She sat at the end of the bed. “Do you have any idea how many nights I almost just drove over to your house, knowing you were dealing with this?”

“It’s not just another trial.”

She reached out and touched his face.

“I’ll let myself out after nine,” he said. “When everyone’s gone downstairs.”

“I know doing this was an absolutely crazy thing,” she said, “but I so needed to see you.”

It wasn’t just crazy. They’d slipped through a new, silent barrier in their relationship. This was the first time they’d been together since she’d gone back home to her husband.

“I started cleaning out Mom’s house last weekend,” she said. “It was overwhelming.”

“Did she have much stuff?” he asked.

“She was an unbelievable pack rat. You can’t even imagine all the old magazines and newspapers stacked in the basement. You ever heard of a singer named Bobby Vee?”

“‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.’”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“That was the name of his hit record.”

Raglan laughed. “Well, she has it. And tons more.
TV Guide
s going back to 1965.”

“What are you going to do with it all?”

“Kids want me to try to sell it on eBay. But I don’t know.” Her other hand was in a ball. She opened it up and showed Greene what was
inside. “I think this was her only piece of jewelry.” She started to cry, and he put his arms around her.

“My dad died such a long time ago, I’ve almost forgotten about him,” she said. “What’s up with your father?”

“He’s hiding something from me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something from the war. He’s always protected me in a way. Never wanted to me to know exactly what happened.”

“I can’t imagine what he had to live through to survive,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

He shrugged. “I’ve learned. With my father, I have to wait him out. He’ll tell me when he’s ready.”

She sat up.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. Closed her eyes. “I just don’t know.”

“Death changes us,” he said, “in ways we can’t predict.”

He took the brooch from her hand, held her at arm’s length, and pinned it on, making sure it was straight before she got up to leave the room.

The lawyers’ robing room was crowded, as it always was on Monday mornings. After the worst weekend of his life, Ralph Armitage was glad to be here, getting dressed for court.

He loved everything about wearing court robes, or silks, as they were called in Britain. The fine feel of the velvet carrying bag with his initials embossed in big letters on the front, slinging it over his shoulder walking to court. The twined ropes that held it together and opened so smoothly. The dark luxury of the robes themselves, worn over a freshly laundered white shirt, gold cuff links in his French cuffs, and starched white tabs.

Secretly, the robes reminded him of his favorite Batman suit, which he’d loved to wear as a child. They made him feel secure. Confident. In place. He needed that right now, because it seemed as if the rest of his life was falling apart.

Everything was riding on today. Phil Cutter had brought Dewey Booth back to Toronto last night and he’d be the first Crown witness. Armitage had spent hours this weekend preparing and he knew there was a very strong possibility that, like Suzanne Howett, Booth would try to change his story. If he did that, Armitage was ready.

The usual gaggle of journalists was waiting for him as he walked up to the courtroom. Zachery Stone, a short and particularly persistent reporter with the
Toronto Sun
, managed to sneak in right under his arm.

“We heard Dewey Booth is on the stand this morning,” he said.

“You’ll find out at ten o’clock,” Armitage said.

“Come on, Ralphie, give me a quote.”

He stopped dead in his tracks and looked Stone up and down. “You been going to the gym, Zach?”

Stone sucked in his belly. “Lost twenty pounds already. I’m becoming an online TV star. They got me doing these webcasts, forty-five-second hits every day. I gotta look good on camera.”

“Your wife must be happy.”

“She calls it a second honeymoon. Where’s my quote?”

“Sorry, it has to be off the record.”

“Come on,” Stone said.

“Here’s the quote, but it’s embargoed. You can’t publish it until I say so,” Armitage said.

“Okay, okay.” Stone had his pen and pad ready.