The Guilty (27 page)

“Thank God for that. I was so worried that you might find that they weren’t any better than the first two boys.”

“No, I was very impressed with them. I’m sure the jury will find them to be very believable witnesses.”

“Thank God for that,” she repeated. “That’s what matters most, I suppose. I must say I was quite disappointed when the other two didn’t work out. But that’s why we’re putting our trust in you, to guide us through this court system, which sometimes makes no sense to us at all.”

Bratt nodded politely, saying nothing and wondering where she was going with all this. He was sure they had already had this conversation not so long ago. Then she suddenly switched topics, taking him a bit by surprise.

“Mr. Bratt, are you a religious man?”

“I have been in my life.”

“Don’t answer like a lawyer when you’re talking about God,” she snapped.

“I’m sorry. I just wasn’t sure what to make of your question.”

“Only the devil asks trick questions, Mr. Bratt. And lawyers, of course. When I ask a question it only means what the words say.”

Now there’s a novel idea,
Bratt thought, remaining quiet.

“I’m sorry if I sound a bit harsh,” she relented, “especially during this time of mourning. But, then, we are all suffering a loss right now, aren’t we?”

Bratt nodded, still saying nothing but admiring how quickly her temper could flare and then be calmed again.

“My loss is only part-way complete, as you know. There’s still time to prevent it from being finalized. There’s only a few days left until the trial, and I’ve been very unsettled in my soul.
I’m sorry to come to you now, but you have so much experience in these matters. I thought if we could talk a bit, it would reassure me that justice will be done to my son.”

Bratt thought that she had probably meant “justice
for
her son,” but he found the grammatical slip ironically appropriate.

“That’s fine, Mrs. Campbell. Maybe we can comfort each other.”

She smiled gratefully and went to sit down on the sofa. Bratt swung a chair over and sat facing her.

“Can I offer you something to drink?”

“No, that’s kind. I’d rather keep a sober mind and a sober tongue right now.”

“Don’t worry,” he tried to smile reassuringly, “I’m not going to ask you any trick questions.”

She smiled back and took a moment to compose herself.

“What did he die of?”

It took Bratt a second or two to realize that she was talking about Leblanc.

“Uh, his heart. I’m afraid he wasn’t in the best of health.”

“Nonsense, he was a fine specimen of a man. But, when God says it’s your time, then it doesn’t matter what the doctors say.”

Bratt shrugged noncommittally. He didn’t like the idea that his friend could have been taken so arbitrarily, but he wasn’t about to debate the issue.

“In a way, that’s what I want to talk to you about, Mr. Bratt. As much as I pray for enlightenment, I just don’t know God’s will in this case. I don’t know why He’s testing Marlon, or if maybe He’s testing me with this terrible trial. I worry that maybe in His greater plan, we may not be meant to win.”

Bratt was unsure how to answer her. The first time they had spoken she had called him God’s answer to her prayers. Now, she was wondering if God was going to pull this trial right out from under him. He didn’t want to offend her, but he wasn’t ready to accept that the outcome of this case depended solely on divine intervention.

“Mrs. Campbell, please don’t take this the wrong way. Since you don’t know what God wants, all you can do is what you think is the best thing for Marlon. That’s why you came to me in the first place, remember?”

She nodded fervently, and Bratt suddenly had an image of her at Sunday prayers, nodding and clapping her hands to her preacher’s exhortations.

“I guess, if I were a truly religious person,” he continued, “I’d say that you can’t worry, you can’t even wonder, about what God wants. You just have to have…faith, I guess, that what He wants is what’s best for your son. So, you do your best and I do my best, and we hope that in the end it all works out.”

“You are a wise man, Mr. Bratt.”

If only,
he told himself, but to her he replied, “Like you said, I do have experience in these matters.”

“Do you ever think that you might be doing God’s work?”

“Oh, I really wouldn’t go that far,” he said, almost offended by the idea. “I doubt that my clients would even think so, and they’re-”

“But you are,” she cut him off. “You see, you don’t seek the truth of man. You fight against the very judgment and condemnation of man, because in your heart you know that here on Earth, we’re all just biding our time. In God’s great plan, what does it matter what a court’s verdict is? In the end, it’s only God’s own judgment that every man has to face and to fear. Man is so vain, thinking he can replace His judgment with courts and jails.

“A guilty man may walk away, or an innocent may be convicted, and we’ll say that justice was done. But only God knows the truth, and no amount of lawyering can stand in the way of His final judgment. So, whatever reprieve we might get here on Earth, we had better enjoy it while it lasts, because in eternity it might just be another story altogether.”

Amen,
thought Bratt, wondering what exactly she was trying to get at.
I can’t figure out if she’s depending on me to save Marlon or telling me that whatever I do for him is pointless in the end. And how exactly am I doing God’s work, anyway? I still don’t get that part.

“Would you pray with me, Mr. Bratt?”

“Well…um, yes, of course, Mrs. Campbell.”

She knelt down in front of the sofa and took Bratt’s hand, pulling him down next to her. He looked at the door, wishing he had thought to lock it when she had come in. From the deep recesses of his memory he remembered reading somewhere that Nixon had asked Kissinger to kneel and pray with him during the Watergate crisis. And look what that got him!

“We can recite the Lord’s Prayer together, if you like,” she suggested.

Bratt nodded, fairly sure that he remembered all the words.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven,” she began.

“Hallowed be Thy name,” he joined in, keeping his voice low for fear that anybody might be
listening at the door.

They prayed solemnly and when they had reached the end, Bratt gave a quick “amen” and began to get to his feet, only to have her squeeze his hand and keep him down on his knees.

“Dear Lord,” she continued, “this is your dutiful handmaiden, Jennifer Campbell. I beseech you, take good care of my boy Marlon. Give strength to his lawyer, Mr. Bratt here. He likes to talk like a non-believer, but I know his heart is true. Speak to the jury through him, oh Lord, and guide his every action in this terrible trial that You have inflicted on us in Your wisdom.

“Bless us and forgive us all, Lord. We are all sinners, and I am chief among them. Help me to do Your will, and let Your will be to see my boy home and free at last. Amen.”

With that she let go of Bratt’s hand and raised herself up, straightening her skirt as she did so. Bratt whispered a small thank you to God for not having allowed anybody to walk in on them while they were praying. He brushed off the knees of his pants, trying to look casual, but he found that her words had rendered him more nervous, rather than reassuring him.

She shook his hand formally and gave him an appreciative smile without saying another word, then walked slowly out of his office, her head held proudly erect
.

What was behind all that? Is it just her religious devotion, or is there something deeper
worrying her? The hell with it. I know what I’m doing, at least, and I know what I’m going to have to do. If she feels better for having prayed with me, then more power to her. But I have the defense that I want to present and I’m not going to worry about whose side God might be on.

The last few days leading up to Marlon Small’s trial were spent putting the final touches to the pre-trial preparations, with little in the way of the ups and downs that had marked the previous weeks of Robert Bratt’s life. He and Kouri spent some time with Small at R.D.P., reviewing the testimony he would give.

Their client was filled with nervous excitement about the upcoming trial, raring to go to battle, yet constantly asking Bratt if he felt good about their chances. Bratt’s answers always seemed to be tinged by a mild pessimism. There was a stubbornly petty part of him that refused to give his client any of the hope that might have eased his mind before the trial.

Kouri, on the other hand, was positively brimming with confidence. When he spoke with Small, Bratt almost felt left out, as they both refused to share his negative views about the trial. They had decided they were going to win it, and he could go along with them for the ride if he wanted to. Bratt felt a twinge of jealousy at the ease with which the two younger men communicated, but knew that his feelings about Small, obvious and unchangeable, would always act as a wall between them.

As for his witnesses, Jordan and Sims, Bratt ignored the nagging feelings that arose whenever he thought of their too-perfect alibi. He had too many other things to do to spend time honing their testimony, so he asked Kouri to meet with them again on his own. He was relying on Kouri more and more for the preparation of the defense, preferring to concentrate his own time on finding holes in the Crown’s case.

Bratt
read and reread Paris’s and Phillips’s preliminary inquiry testimony and compared it with the written statements they had given to the detectives in the early stages of the investigation, looking for inconsistencies and contradictions between the various accounts.

Bratt thoroughly cross-referenced every change in the fact-patterns, no matter how small or banal it may have seemed to an outsider, whether it was how many seconds Phillips had to observe his assailants, or how many inches the gun was from his head. He knew that the weight of these numerous differences, piled one on top of the other, as well as the inability of Phillips or Paris to satisfactorily explain them away, could be the witnesses’ eventual undoing. 

All these natural human errors were like nuggets of gold for the experienced lawyer to dig up and wave under the noses of the duly impressed jurors. The witnesses rarely realized there were any inconsistencies in their testimony, until Bratt began pointing out these little glitches in their memories and holding them up for everyone to gaze at and wonder over. Then the witnesses would look like they were getting caught in their own lies. 

He had tried to teach Kouri that a good cross-examination did not simply mean asking questions in the hope of finding out some unknown information. A lawyer had to have a clear idea of all the useful information a witness could give before he asked a single question. And he certainly had to know the answer to every question he asked, or risk the kind of embarrassing surprises that were the staple of TV shows and second-rate movies. If there was ever one thing that had turned him off from watching the spate of legal dramas on television, it was the sight of lawyers constantly getting ambushed by answers they didn’t expect.

No, cross-examination meant letting the jury in on what the lawyer and the witness already knew. It meant inducing that witness to reveal facts he may have preferred keeping hidden, or the relevance of which he was often unaware. The jurors might think they were witnessing some dramatic courtroom revelations, but if he had done his job right, then Bratt would have scripted the whole scene for them ahead of time. That was how he liked to think of what he did: he was writing a play, scene by scene. If everybody played their parts well and read their lines like they were supposed to, then it was sure to be a big hit.

The weekend passed quickly for him and then it was Monday morning: time for jury selection.

“
Unfortunately, jury selection,” Bratt told Kouri as they got ready to head for court, “isn’t half as interesting in real life as it is on TV. At least not in Canada. We don’t use jury consultants; we don’t do mock trials or market testing.”

Kouri
only half-listened to his mentor’s rambling exposition as he put on his coat. Bratt could hardly contain the excitement he always felt on the first day of a trial, and all his nervous energy seemed to have been concentrated in his mouth that morning. He had put aside all thought of Leblanc’s death. He had forgotten about Claire’s humiliation on the stand. He was singularly focused now on the task at hand.

“We don’t even get to ask them any questions as a general rule,” he continued. “Just peremptory challenges, take ’em or leave ’em, and that’s all just a guessing game anyway. All you get is a quick first impression and about two seconds to decide.

“For our case, though, we’re
real
lucky. Since there was some newspaper coverage of the shootings last summer, Green is going to let me ask the jury candidates two whole questions: did you read about the shootings, and did you form an opinion as to who did it? That’s it. If they answer no to either question, that’s the end of my challenge for cause.”