Old City Hall (9 page)

“You could swear you never, ever signed an unstapled affidavit,” Greene said, “the way Brace will be able to swear he never, ever spoke
to anyone in jail. Protects him in case someone says Brace talked to him behind bars.”

“Very good, Kennicott,” Raglan said.

Greene turned to Raglan, who stood close to him in the small room. “I think you want Brace to get bail, don’t you?”

She nodded. “He’ll talk if he’s out.”

All three of them looked at Fernandez.

“Put up a good show on this bail hearing so Parish and Brace think we want to keep him inside,” Raglan said, unfolding her arms. “But it’s much better if you lose.”

Raglan looked back at Greene. Clearly these two had worked together before.

“Just in case,” Greene said, “I’ll find Kevin Brace a cell mate. Someone who plays bridge.”

“Why bridge?” Fernandez asked.

Everyone looked back at Fernandez.

“He talks about it all the time on his radio show,” Raglan said.

“His study was filled with bridge books,” Kennicott added.

Fernandez nodded. I better stop listening to all my tapes, he thought, and start listening to the radio.

“By the way,” Raglan said as she and Greene headed out the door, “you’ve got Judge Summers. Should be interesting.”

Fernandez waited until the door clicked shut, then reached into the back of the lower desk drawer and fished out his box marked
JUDGES
. He flipped through the alphabetically labeled cards to “Summers.” He pretty much knew what it was going to say. There were three different entries. The first was from his early days in the Crown office:

Older judge, tough on new lawyers, loves ice hockey: won ice hockey scholarship to Cornell, played in a minor league. Triple A? Family has had Maple Leafs season tickets? for > 50 years, yells a lot, called me Mr. Fernando. Was in the Navy. Captain of a ship. Has bell ringer outside his court. Never be late.

Fernandez marveled at his own naïveté five years ago. The question marks denoted all the things he didn’t understand back then. He’d never call hockey “ice hockey” now.

The second card was from three years ago:

Made senior judge at the Hall . . . major case of judgitis . . . pushing the hell out of everyone to settle cases, shorten the trial lists . . . trades stock online . . . likes to listen to the BBC news at 9:00 . . . bad on domestics . . . always talks hockey at JPTs, even in the summer. Works into every conversation that he went to Cornell. Loves talking about his boat. Is Jo’s father.

“Judgitis” was the term both Crowns and defense lawyers used to describe judges who’d let the job go to their heads and become pompous and rude. Summers was a classic case. He was a big-time bully, if you let him be. The notation “bad on domestics” meant that Summers tended to acquit men charged with assaults on their spouses. Not a great sign for the Brace case. Jo was Jo Summers, a new Crown at the office who’d left a big job on Bay Street. She was hardworking and conscientious and, of course, never appeared in her father’s courtroom.

The third entry was from last year:

Jugged a black kid who committed suicide . . . Kid was N.G. . . . Suicide note blamed the judge. Rumor—he was rushing off to a hockey tournament for the weekend. Now he’s soft on bail. Crown was Cutter.

Fernandez well remembered making this entry. The case was horrible. Kalito Martin was a skinny black eighteen-year-old from a housing project in Scarborough. He was charged with a vicious rape. Cutter was the prosecutor and got Summers to deny the kid bail even though he had no record of any kind and was a top student. The first
night, Martin hung himself using some pillowcases he tied together. The DNA test the next week showed he was innocent.

Every Crown Attorney’s nightmare, Fernandez thought as he read through his cards again, his usually steady hands shaking ever so slightly. To convict someone who was innocent of a crime.

I
s there any bloody sadder place in the world than a jail just before Christmas? Nancy Parish wondered as she trudged up the long concrete ramp to the front door of the Don Jail. And is there a more pathetic way for a single woman to spend a night the week before Christmas, she thought, especially when everyone else in the world is out partying? Except, of course, the prisoners.

A heavyset woman was coming down the ramp holding the hand of a little girl who looked as if she’d gotten all dressed up to visit the jail. Her hair was braided in symmetrical cornrows, and her coat was nicely pressed. The girl held a children’s book in one hand, and with the other she was trailing a stick through the metal railing on the side of the ramp, making a
clickety-clack, clickety-clack
sound.

Parish smiled. She remembered when she was about five years old and discovered the magic of putting her drawing pencils through the fence railing as she walked down the street holding her father’s hand, on her way to art class.

Suddenly the mother stopped halfway down the ramp. “Here, give me that, Clara.” She reached across and snatched the stick from the child’s hand. “Enough of that racket.”

Parish caught the girl’s eyes, and it was all she could do not to grab the stick from the mother. Welcome to the Don Jail, Clara, she thought as the little girl and her mother passed. You deserve better.

The Don Jail—known by everyone as the Don—was built in the early 1860s. It was a significant presence in the young city of Toronto. Perched on a hill overlooking the Don River and gazing down on the citizenry below, its fearsome stone entrance and heavy Gothic architecture cast a cold Victorian shadow on the growing port town. Subsequent attempts to clean it up and a utilitarian modern entrance added in the 1950s only deepened the sense of foreboding about the place.

At the top of the ramp, there was an intercom grid beside the metal front door. Parish pushed the small button.

“Yes,” a bored woman’s voice said, crackling over the bad connection.

“Counsel visit,” she said.

“And I thought you were Santa. Come on in.”

Parish heard a deep buzzing sound and yanked the heavy door. Inside, three green garbage bags sat in the corner of the tiny reception room, filling the small space with the stench of grease. She shoved her coat into a broken-down locker and turned to the thick glass window to speak to the guard on the other side.

“I’m here to see Kevin Brace,” she said, slipping her lawyer’s card under the small metal pass-through panel.

“Brace. Oh, the bathtub guy. He’s on the third floor,” the guard said, consulting her list. “You’ll have to sign in.”

Parish took out a fresh Bic pen. The sign-in sheet for lawyers was dated December 17, and even though it was seven at night, there wasn’t one signature on it.

“Looks like I’m going to be the only lawyer here tonight,” she said as she signed her name.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at some office party?” the guard asked.

If I’d become an entertainment lawyer, Nancy Parish thought, I’d be at a catered affair at a four-star restaurant, mingling with television producers and directors and actors. Smelling roses on the white linen tablecloths. Instead I’m here with the smell of garbage.

“I would be, but my boss won’t let me go,” she said.

“Why not?” the guard asked.

“When you work for yourself,” Parish said, picking up the pass the guard slid through to her, “your boss is an asshole.”

She heard the guard laugh behind her as she went to yet another large metal door and waited for the familiar buzzing sound. A creaky old elevator took her up to the third floor, and in a small room at the end of the hall she found a tall man with a John Glenn–style crew cut. He was squeezed into a short chair facing an oversize metal desk, his knees up near his shoulders, like a basketball player on an airplane. A gray metal dinner plate, the remains of a turkey meal, with mashed potatoes and gravy and green peas, sat to one side, a plastic knife and fork tossed on top. The man was reading his
Toronto Sun.
The headline, in big black text, read
LEAFS SCORE 3 IN THIRD—CLIP WINGS!

The guard was a fixture at the Don. Friendly to everyone. Always willing to bend the rules a little to help out. His haircut never varied an inch, earning him the nickname everyone used.

“Hi, Mr. Buzz,” Parish said.

“Evening, Counselor,” Mr. Buzz said, looking up from his newspaper and giving her jail pass card a cursory glance. He ran his hand over his brush cut as he spoke in a deep Slavic accent. “What’s that name?”

“Brace. Kevin Brace,” Parish said evenly.

“Oh, yeah. The radio guy.”

Congratulations, Mr. Brace, Parish thought. You’ve graduated from the bathtub guy to the radio guy. Some kind of a comeback.

“He won’t give you any trouble,” Parish said.

The guard stood up. “None of the old guys do. Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on him for you. Take a seat in room 301. I’ll bring him over.”

Room 301 was a small cubicle with a steel table bolted to the floor and two facing plastic chairs. They were bolted down too. Parish sat on the seat closest to the door. She’d been taught early in her career always to have an escape route when she was meeting her clients in jail.

Parish opened her briefcase and took out a pad of paper and her pen. Then she waited.

This was the part she hated most about prison visits. She wasn’t bothered by the fetid air, the institutional paint, or the loud slam of
metal doors closing. Even the lascivious looks she got from the men—guards as well as inmates—rolled off her back. It was the waiting. The feeling of helplessness. That was the thing that got to her.

“Here you go, my lady,” Mr. Buzz said as he opened the door to 301. Parish quickly flipped her pad over as Kevin Brace walked in slowly. He wore a standard one-piece, prison-orange jumpsuit. It looked about two sizes too large, coming up over his neck and covering half his beard. He didn’t make eye contact.

“Closing time is eight thirty,” Mr. Buzz said, “but I can probably get you an extra fifteen if you need it. It’s not exactly busy tonight.”

“Thanks,” Parish said, keeping her eyes on Brace.

He sat down across from her and waited patiently. When the guard was out of sight, he reached inside his jumpsuit and pulled out the piece of paper she’d given him at police headquarters. He had written something on the back.

He flattened it out on the cold table and turned it toward her. She leaned and read:

Ms. Parish, I wish to retain you as my lawyer on the following conditions:

1. I do not wish to speak with you;

2. All of my instructions to you will be in writing; and,

3. You must never mention my silence to anyone.

She looked up at Brace, and for a moment he made eye contact.

“Solicitor-client privilege covers all forms of communication between a lawyer and her client,” she said quietly. “Even noncommunication. I’m happy to take instructions from you in any form. None of what you communicate to me, or how you communicate with me, will ever be revealed.”

Brace reached for Parish’s pen. She gave it to him. He turned the paper back his way and wrote:

What will happen tomorrow morning?

She took back her pen and wrote at the top of the page:

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

“Please remember, Mr. Brace,” she said as she handed the pen back to him, “if you’re going to write to me, you must put this heading about solicitor-client communication at the top of each page.”

Brace pointed to his handwritten question.

“Not much happens tomorrow. The law says you must be brought to court within twenty-four hours. Habeas corpus. Bring forward the body. But because you’re charged with murder, you also need a special hearing before a judge. I’ve already called the court. We are set for the day after tomorrow. I’ll try to get you out before Christmas.

Brace folded his hands in front of him and nodded. He stared off into space.

Parish swallowed hard. None of this was what she’d expected. The only two times she’d met Brace, at the radio station and then a few weeks later, when he’d had a year-ender party at his condo, he’d been so warm, affable, wonderful to talk to. Ever since the phone call from Detective Greene early this morning, she’d been trying to figure out why Kevin Brace, a man who could have his choice of any lawyer in the country, had given the police her name.

The only reason she could think of was that he had her card at hand. She’d been asked to bring her business card to his party. Everyone’s card had been put into one of Brace’s many Toronto Maple Leafs beer mugs, and at the end of the night he had picked one out. The winner got to cohost the show with him the following year, and everyone threw in ten dollars toward an education fund he sponsored.

That was the funny thing. Brace had pulled out her card, and she’d been looking forward to doing the show with him. Instead here she was as his defense lawyer.

“I’ve called your daughters, and they’ve started to put together a list of witnesses we can call to support your bail.”

Brace barely nodded his head.

“A lot of people want to come to court for you. I interviewed a few of them this afternoon, and tonight I’ll draft some affidavits and work on your bail application.”

None of this appeared to move Brace. He kept looking away, totally uninterested. Parish was shocked. The man sitting across from her seemed a million miles away from the gregarious radio-show host who’d interviewed her, and who was beloved by so many people.

What did you expect, Nancy? she scolded herself. The man’s in shock. He doesn’t even want to talk out loud yet. Secretly she’d thought that they might have a laugh about all the men who called to offer their sexual services after she’d appeared on his show, or that they’d talk about her cohosting with him once this nightmare was over.

She felt ridiculous. Never forget, she told herself, Kevin Brace is a client like any other client. Full stop.

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning in the cells in the basement of Old City Hall before court. Okay?”