The Guilty (9 page)

“We studied several of his rulings back in Criminal Procedure. He was quite a respected judge, of course. You must have been very proud
of him.”

Bratt grimaced inwardly, regretting that he had mentioned his father. He had once been proud of the man, of course, until the newly-minted judge left Bratt’s mother for his much younger secretary. All these years later talking about him was
still difficult.

“With a dad like that, no wonder you became a lawyer too.”

“How about your dad?” Bratt asked, turning the topic away from his relationship with his own father. “Was he in law?”

“Oh, no. He was just a tailor in Damascus. I’m the first university graduate in the family.”

Their small talk was interrupted by the opening of the cell door on the other side of the glass partition. They looked up as Marlon Small sauntered in.

He wore a red bandana tied over his shaved head. He had a gold loop in his left ear and a toothpick in his mouth, which he sucked on noisily. The top of his baggy jeans barely reached the bottom edge of his buttocks, and his torn, sleeveless basketball jersey exposed a series of explicit tattoos on hi
s wiry arms.

Bratt thought that as much as Jennifer Campbell could have been the poster child for decent, hard-working people, her son had chosen to play the role of a bum, copping a hard-case attitude to cover up for his own
probable lack of character. His clothes, his walk, everything about him seemed to be ripped off from some stereotypical depiction of what a street gang member should look like. Small sat down across from them, eyeing his new lawyers with a look of suspicious hostility.

“Mr. Small,” Bratt began, smiling his smoothest, silkiest smile, “I’m Robert Bratt, and this is Peter K
ouri. We’re your new lawyers.”

Small just kept on eyeing them and sucking on his toothpick. Finally, he deigne
d to speak. “Is she dead yet?”

“Uh, is
who dead yet?” Bratt responded.

“Lady lawyer;
Seven-yee
. She dead yet?”

“Oh, Miss Sévigny. No, she’s not. As a matter of fact, the doctors are pretty optimistic tha
t she’ll make a full recovery.”

“No shit? She look pretty lousy l
ast time I seen her.”

“Well, she’s better now. I’m sure she’
ll be touched by your concern-”

“My concern,” Small said, his tone getting louder as he brought his face closer to the glass partition, “is that my ass is in jail, an’ I was depending on her to get me out. Now I get you two jokers showing up, saying you’re my new lawyers, an’ my
trial’s in less than a month.”

“And I’d be pretty worried if I were in your shoes too, Marlon. But we’re not he
re to waste your time or ours-”

“Your time’s paid, man, so you’re
not the one wasting time here.”

“What I meant to say is that we’re working hard to be ready for your trial in time, so I don’t think you have to be worried about new lawyers getting into the file at the last minute, and all that. I explained to your mother that the time constraints would not make our job any easier, but
that it was certainly doable.”

“Doable don’t cut no ice with me. It’s winnable I wanna hear about. My momma said you’re the best fuckin’ lawyer in the world. If you’re really that good I wanna hea
r what you’re gonna do for me.”

“Your mothe
r actually said that, did she?”

“Those exact words.”

“Okay then, let’s talk about how we’re going to defend you. You told the cops you were in LaSalle the night of the shooting, playing basketball with some friends at Wilfort Park. Now I have some of the names of these friends of yours, but there’s only a couple of pager numbers in the file. We’ve tried them without success so far.”

“Yeah, they won’t call you back if you don’t put the code. They’ll think it’s just the cops tryi
ng to catch them selling weed.”

“Your friends
traffic in marijuana, do they?”

“Just helping out some friends and
neighbors, you know. Everybody smokes pot, nowadays. No big thing.”

“No big thing? Okay, we’ll worry about that later. What’s this code we’re su
pposed to put on their pagers?”

“First time you call you put 007. Then you call
again an’ put your own number.”

“Doubl
e-oh seven, eh? That’s clever.”

“Hey, James Bond, man. That’s as cool as y
ou can get an’ still be white.”

“Ok, we’ll use your code. Now, the pager numbers were next to only two names, Ashley Parker and Bernard Clayton, and it seems that Sévigny never got a chance to get their statem
ents.”

“Yeah, they weren’t always availab
le when she wanted to meet them; but I put the word out that if my lawyer calls they better show up, ’cause time is short. Ash’s my little cousin, an’ I drove him home about midnight the night those dudes got shot. Bernard was with us in the car too. But when you call him, don’t say Bernard. He doesn’t like that name. Call him Shoot.”

“Shoot?”

“Yeah, short for Shoot to Kill. That’s his street name.”

“Well, isn’t that lovely,” Bratt said. He was tempted to ask if Bernard had earned that nickname honestly, but decided to let it pass for now. “Do you have
a street name too, by the way?”

“Yeah, they call me Brando,
’cause my name’s Marlon. On the outside, I’m just Brando.”

“Brando’s a bit…uh, old-fashioned, isn’t it? For a street-name, I mean.”

“Nah. We like doin’ things old school, is all.”

“Fine. Whatever. If you don’t mind we’ll stick to real names in court. I wouldn’t feel too optimistic if our main alibi witness was sworn in as Shoot to Kill. We’ll page them both today and see i
f we can’t meet them tomorrow.”

“Ooh, you’re working on Sunday. Don’t let my mother find out,” Sm
all said with a sarcastic grin.

“Well, I’m sure she’d understand that we’ve got very little time to waste, especially consid
ering what’s at stake for you.”

“Yea
h. She does love me, though, don’t she?”

Bratt looked at Small, who was sporting a self-satisfied smirk around the toothpick, and thought to himself,
a face that only a mother could love
. But then, such was the fate of all parents.  

“OK, there’s something else I wanted to ask you about. The Crown’s going to file into evidence a video of your police interrogation. Somehow, in getting the file from Sévigny, it’s been misplaced, and I won’t get to see anot
her copy for a couple of days.”

“So, what’s the problem? It’s not
like I confessed or anything.”

“That’s exactly what has me worried. Prosecutors don’t usually put anything into evidence unless they think it’s going to help them. Since you didn’t admit your guilt to the cops I can’t help but wonder just exactly what there is on it that can hurt you.”

“Like I said, I didn’t admit anything. I just told them I was in the park. That fat detective kept asking me over an’ over why I shot those guys, an’ I just kept on denying it. There’s nothing else on the tape, so don’t worry about it.”

“Like
I
said, the prosecutor knows what he’s doing. So, we’ll wait and see before deciding what we should worry about.”

“Suit yo
urself. You’re the lawyer.”

“I’d also like you to tell me about Marcus Paris. He use
d to be a good buddy of yours.”

Small jumped up, suddenly enraged, and slammed the glass partition w
ith the palm of his right hand.

“That bitch! He’s lucky I’m locked up in here or I really
would
be guilty of murder.”

K
ouri jumped back in surprise at this unexpected display of anger, but Bratt managed to keep a poker face.

“So, I gather you’re not bud
dies any more,” he noted dryly.

“Damn right! He’s selling
me out just to save his own ass. You know that. Once the cops got that fool Dorrell to pick out my picture, Marcus just went along with ’em. He’d say his mother shot ’em if it got him out of jail early.”

“I don’t blame you for being angry, Marlon, but we have to take his testimony seriously. You’ve got to understand that someone who’s been friends with you since he was a little kid is going to be carefully listened to by the jury. Especially since he’s admitting he was in on the shooting.
”

“Well, that’s why my mother’s paying you, isn’t it? So that the da
mn jury doesn’t listen to him.”

“Listen, I’m a pretty good lawyer, but I don’t have time to investigate Paris’s whole life. It would be very helpful if you could tell me a bit about him, and especially what issues
there may be between you two.”

“
Issues
!” Small’s mouth opened into a big grin, revealing a large gap between his crooked lower teeth. “The only
issues
we got is that his kid sister, Karen, is my baby-mother, an’ he hasn’t learned to accept that.” 

“His
kid
sister? How old would that make Karen now?”

“Just turned
sixteen. Saundra, that’s my baby, is gonna be a year old on Valentine’s Day. An’ Marcus just couldn’t get around the fact that I made his little sister my woman. If you wanna know why he’s so ready to fuck me over, you got a reason right there. That enough of an issue for you?”

Bratt had to admit that this was a pretty fair reason for Paris to hold a grudge against Small, although it meant telling the jury that his client had gotten a f
ifeen year-old pregnant. But if it was presented the right way, along with the fact that Paris was saving himself at least fifteen years in a penitentiary, the jury could be made to see that the accomplice had all the necessary motivation to lie under oath.

As he sat and looked at Small, though, Bratt couldn’t muster up an ounce of sympathy for his new client. He had to admit that between Small’s sarcasm and his badass attitude, he simply didn’t like the young man. Maybe his not liking him was
coloring Bratt’s thinking, but he also doubted that Paris was lying about Small’s involvement in the murders.

He shook his head. He knew that this kind of thinking would lead him nowhere. It wasn’t his job to like, or to judge, Marlon Small. Objectively speaking, he knew there was ample room for a doubt about his guilt, and his job was to lead the jury to that doubt. They wouldn’t be able to convict Small if they only got as far as deciding that he
probably
killed those men. People weren’t sent to jail just on probabilities.

He did his best to wrap up the discussion with Small as fast as possible, explaining what had to be done over the next few days and promising a return visit to update his client later in the week. Small seemed to have lost most of his interest in the conversation after venting his feelings about Marcus Paris, and hardly paid attention to what Bratt was saying, so getting out of there and ba
ck on the road was easily done.

Once in the car and heading for the highway, Bratt turne
d to ask Kouri his impression.

“Well, it was really something,” Kouri opined. “It’s amazing how the cards seem to be stacked against this poor guy, but it just goes to show you how far the cops are willing to
go to get a conviction.”

Bratt kept his eyes fixed on the road in order to avoid staring at Kouri, who seemed to be talking about a very different client. There was little doubt in Bratt’s mind that he wasn’t going to be fighting for some pathetic, unjustly accused soul. He had developed some fairly reliable instincts over the years, and they told him that the cops didn’t have to go far out of their way to gather evidence of Marlon Small’s guilt.

The Buffet Dolce Vita was in a quiet, middle-class and mostly Italian neighborhood in the eastern suburb of St. Leonard. Bratt looked up at the long white columns fronting the building and the marble lions standing at attention alongside the entrance. He thought this was one of the few neighborhoods on the Island of Montreal where this building wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb.    

He drove his Jaguar up the long circular driveway and stopped, waiting his turn while a tuxedoed valet took the keys of a 1983 Cadillac Eldorado that was as shiny as the day it had rolled off the lot. The car’s driver, a short, hugely fat man in a long suede coat with a fur collar, slipped the valet some cash for extra care, then escorted an equally fat woman, with blue hair curled high over her head, through the large glass doors of the building.     

Bratt turned his eyes away from the woman to look at Nancy in the passenger seat next to him. She would definitely look better than most of the women they would see that evening, and this gave him a sense of security and triumph.

He was glad that for this evening they had agreed to be just a normal couple and put their respective professions aside. Bratt had admitted to previously defending the groom, although he didn’t tell Nancy the charges, but tonight this was supposed to make no difference. There would be no cops and robber talk at the table.