Stray Bullets (18 page)

Her mother was there, the remains of an egg salad sandwich crumpled up beside her. Parish yanked the door open. Their eyes met. Neither said a word. Parish reached into the pocket of her parka, pulled out a white envelope, and threw it in her mother’s lap.

“I didn’t do it,” she said, stating the obvious. “There’s the money. Save it for my tuition. I’m going to be a lawyer.”

The water in the kitchen sink began to gurgle as it went down the drain. A sound Parish had grown up with. She took her mother’s hand from her face and held it. There was a smell of soap suds. “No one can cook lamb like you do,” she said.

“I miss the boys,” her mother said. “And I can’t stop thinking about how that poor woman must feel, losing her son that way.”

Parish put her arms around her mother. And, for perhaps the thousandth time in her life, with her middle finger traced the bump on her nose. I took the bump less traveled by, she thought. And that has made all the difference.

His first day back from the Christmas break, and Ralph Armitage hadn’t had a moment to himself. December twenty-seventh, he’d been warned when he took the job last year, was a perfect-storm day for the head Crown. The huge jail cell in the basement of old city hall court was packed with new arrests and people who’d been waiting for bail hearings for days. There were never enough Crowns around. Half of them were on holiday; those who showed up didn’t want to be there. They were either hungover, or dying to sneak out and go sale shopping at the nearby Eaton Centre, or both.

He finally got back to his office at noon and was able to shut the door behind him. Somehow in the chaos of the day, he’d managed to find five minutes to sneak out to a newsstand and buy three copies of the new issue of the
Toronto Star
, with his picture on the front page. He’d slipped them into his briefcase but hadn’t had time to read the story.

He sat behind his clean desk and pulled out the top copy. Admired it. The photograph of him was very good. And very large. On his way home, he planned to stop at the twenty-four-hour courier drop and overnight two copies down to Barbados, where his parents, sisters, and their broods were together for the annual gathering at the family compound.

This was the first time since he was a child that he hadn’t spent Christmas on the island. It was impossible to get away with the new job and this big case. He’d never been in Toronto over the holidays and to his surprise found he liked how quiet the city was with just about everyone out of town. Still, he’d have loved to be there to see his father’s face when he saw the newspaper.

The Armitage family was a family of rituals. In the summer they all gathered for the last week of July at their sprawling cottage on their own private lake in Northern Ontario. The fall was an apple-cider-making Thanksgiving weekend at Ralph’s parents’ rambling home. Christmas holidays and the New Year were spent in Barbados. Mid-February they went skiing at the family chalet in the Laurentians. And
Easter Sunday was an all-day event, starting with a massive egg hunt, followed by a round of golf at the club. But the climax was the Victoria Day weekend charity ball held in the estate’s vast backyard, Ralph’s favorite place in the world. Organizing the big event was an annual task that for more than a decade had rotated among his four older sisters

All this familial togetherness had seemed natural to him. When he was old enough to start dating, it amazed him to discover that most families didn’t work this way. That parents and their grown children rarely got together, and when they did, instead of being fun and joyous, the occasions were often tense and difficult.

For his wife, Penny Wolchester, this ongoing “Armitage group hug,” as she called it, was foreign territory. She was raised in what she laughingly referred to as the world’s most boring family—her dad was a school librarian whose only hobby was refinishing furniture; Mom was a chemist who spent her spare time quilting and clipping coupons. Their home was in the cookie-cutter suburb of Don Mills, which she referred to as Don Nothing-Doing Mills. They never went on family trips. Didn’t own a cottage. Didn’t do any sports together. She moved out of the house when she was nineteen and after that saw her folks, and her younger sister, Lindsay, only two or three times a year.

When Penny was twenty-five, the year she dropped out of architecture school and started teaching spin classes full-time, her parents announced with great excitement that they’d sold the family home and bought a condo in Arizona, where they planned to spend six months every winter, and a mobile home they would travel around in for the other half of the year. A few months later, Lindsay got a nursing job in Saskatoon and within a year was married with her first child on the way.

She met Ralph at the gym a year later, and he was thrilled at the way she embraced his family. His four older sisters, who like Penny were all super-athletic, loved having another female around both as a play partner and to enjoy mocking “Little Ralphie.” They’d grown close, and this year for the first time his sisters had passed the mantle of planning the May Two-Four charity event to Penny. This was the final step of her complete acceptance into the family fold. Penny was excited and terrified.

She’d been good about missing their holiday down south. Most of her rich clients were away, and she was glad to have the time to work on the party. In the newspaper article, the reporter asked him how, being so busy, they kept their marriage together, and he’d talked about
their special Thursday night dates. Which reminded him. Penny was on to the menu planning now, and tomorrow night she’d arranged visits to three different caterers.

Armitage had just finished the article when he heard a knock on his door. He checked the time. Exactly four o’clock. He slipped the newspaper back in his briefcase.

“Hi, Albert,” he said to Albert Fernandez, greeting him at the door. “Right on time.”

Fernandez’s arms were filled with two large black binders, and he had a pad of paper on top. There were five key witnesses to the shooting, and the plan was to interview them all this afternoon. Armitage wanted to meet beforehand to go over their evidence.

“I’ve put all the disclosure to date into both of these,” Fernandez said, lifting the binders. “Officers’ notes, forensic reports, photos of the scene, background and criminal records of all witnesses, CDs with all their statements on tape, and transcripts so you can just read them.”

He wore a trim gray-green suit with the jacket buttoned up. Unlike most of the other Crowns, who wore pretty cheap, casual clothes, the guy dressed so formally, Armitage thought. I bet he doesn’t even own a pair of jeans. And boy was he ever Mr. Organization.

“Good work,” Armitage said. “We better get a copy over to the defense right away.”

“Already done. I couriered a complete set to Nancy Parish’s office and phoned to tell her. She was driving back into town from her parents’ place. Appreciated the call.”

Armitage closed the door behind them, clapped Fernandez on the back, and guided him to one of the two client chairs in front of his big desk.

“I read the article about you in the paper this morning,” Fernandez said as he sat down. “I didn’t know everyone calls you ‘Ralphie.’” Fernandez sounded chipper for the first time.

Armitage sat beside him and laughed. “Call me Ralphie any time you want. All my old school buddies and camp friends do. But can I call you Albie?”

Fernandez cracked a smile. That’s progress, Armitage thought.

“If you must,” Fernandez said.

“Okay, Albie, but only behind closed doors.” Armitage rubbed his hands together. “Witnesses all here and ready to go?”

Fernandez looked down at the pad of paper he had on top of the files and frowned.

“Adela Dobos. She’s the one who bought a coffee and a maple-glazed doughnut and had just walked out the door when the shots started. From Serbia and hardly speaks a word of English. The translator is here, but we’ve only got him for an hour.”

“I thought the Serbian woman was the one across the street.”

“No, that was the Albanian. Edone Kutishi. We couldn’t get a translator here today, but her English isn’t too bad.”

Armitage grinned. “Can’t tell apart the witnesses without a program. I’ve got a headache already. Where was the Bangladeshi guy again?”

“Vikram Dalmar Abdul Mohammed. He was having hot chocolate with his grandson by the front window. His car got stuck in a snowbank, and he can’t make it. Gandharvan Sundrilingham is the Tamil fellow. He’s the one who’d just walked in the door. He was ahead of the Wilkinsons when the boy got shot. He’s not coming also because his wife is sick.”

“Neither of them speak English, do they?”

“No, but Nigel Jameson does. He’s the South African who was the first to call 911.”

“Great. Please tell me he’s here.”

“Stuck in New York because of the storm. He’s a banker and travels a lot.”

Armitage stood. “Let’s start with these two,” he said.

Fernandez remained seated. He looked up awkwardly at Armitage. “There’s something I want to discuss with you.”

“No problem, Albie,” Armitage said, laughing as he sat back down. “Let’s talk.”

“You told me we had to keep this deal we made with Dewey Booth secret. But it’s in the article.” Fernandez pointed at the newspaper on Armitage’s desk. “You told them all about it.”

Armitage shrugged. “I had to wait until Greene moved in on Suzanne Howett and her boyfriend Jet.”

Fernandez nodded reluctantly.

Armitage knew that other Crowns in the office thought he’d made a terrible move with this deal. It was further undermining their confidence in him as their leader. He had to nip this in the bud. “Albert, you don’t think it’s a good deal, do you?” he asked. No more “Albie” talk. This was serious.

“I mean”—Fernandez fidgeted with the corners of his pad of paper—“all you have is an affidavit. You didn’t get Booth’s sworn statement on video. He wasn’t cross-examined. So—”

“So he might turn out to be a lousy witness for us at trial,” Armitage said.

Fernandez exhaled loudly, relieved that Armitage had said it. “The affidavit’s quite vague.”

“I made a big mistake. That what you’re saying?”

“Not really, but …”

Armitage turned to look Fernandez squarely in the eye. “Look. The key point is that Dewey Booth says in a sworn legal document that he wasn’t the shooter, and that Larkin St. Clair was. If he changes his story in court, the deal’s off. We charge him with perjury and first-degree murder.”

“Do you really think the jury will believe him?” Fernandez asked.

“They might, probably won’t,” Armitage said, “but who cares? Once Booth says Larkin was the shooter, Larkin’s got no choice but to take the stand. If he says he wasn’t the shooter, how does he explain the gun? That’s why I needed this deal. I needed that gun.”

“What if Larkin says Dewey did it? And he was just hiding the gun for him?”

Armitage laughed. A big loud chuckle. “Even better. It’s called a cutthroat defense. When two assholes like these punks get on the stand and point the finger of guilt at each other. Trust me, Albie, it never ever works. Jury would be out for less than an hour. But Cutter and Parish, they’re too smart for that. Our biggest problem would be if they were both charged together and kept their mouths shut. We can’t make an accused person talk or testify and how do we prove which one was the shooter?”

“Would it matter? Whoever shot the other one would be a party to the offense, equally guilty.”

“That’s the black-letter law. You’re going to give me the greatest legal memo ever on parties to an offense. And I’ll tell the jury that whichever one of those rats shot the gun, the other one is as guilty as sin. But you never know. First-degree murder, a jury wants certainty. And if they think Jet fired the first shots standing outside his Cadillac, that could be trouble for us.”

Fernandez wasn’t fiddling anymore. He was taking it all in.

“There’s one more very important detail you might have overlooked. Here. Give me that pad of paper,” Armitage said. “And your pen.”

Fernandez handed them over. For the next twenty minutes, Armitage sketched out the Tim Hortons parking lot, the location of all the players, the direction of the gunshots. “Look at the autopsy report,”
he said when he was almost done. “You’ll see the bullet hit the boy in the left side of the head, but Dewey and Larkin were standing to his right.”

Detective Greene didn’t think this was a big deal, but so what? He was just the cop. What was important was to get Fernandez on his side. He’d pass the word to the other Crowns.

Fernandez had the autopsy report perfectly tabbed in one of his binders. He inspected it. “I see your point,” he said.

“James Trapper, aka Jet, has got a bad criminal record, including illegal possession of an unregistered handgun.” Armitage tapped the Cadillac in the drawing. “Only one shell casing was found at the scene. Crushed. It’s useless for comparison with the gun we recovered. It was right here. If Jet was shooting, and remember the bullet mark on the wall behind where Dewey and Larkin were standing, this could be his shell.” He drew a curved line in front of the car that showed it driving out of the lot.

He explained how, without finding the gun, the wound to the left side of the boy’s head could have been used by Booth and St. Clair to claim that the fatal bullet wasn’t fired by them.

Fernandez was silent. Like a witness whom Armitage had browbeaten in court.

“Imagine what would have happened at trial if we couldn’t match the bullet that killed the boy to the gun in St. Clair’s hand. Sure, I hated having to make this deal, but without that gun we could easily have lost everything.”

Fernandez nodded. Convinced.

“We’re up against good defense lawyers in this case. I knew they’d put this together once they got the full disclosure. Cutter contacted me two days after the shooting. At that point all we had was that lousy video of St. Clair sticking some unknown thing down his pants and taking off.”

“I see,” Fernandez said.

Armitage ripped the page off the pad and crushed it into a ball. “We had to link St. Clair to the gun that was fired. Now Dewey’s going to rat out his pal. It will force Larkin into the box and I can’t wait to cross-examine him. And Cutter’s deal was a one-time offer.”