Stray Bullets (27 page)

“And the charges?” the waiter asked.

“Charges? For what?” The guy was hard to understand. “A cover charge?”

“No, my charges, Mr. Armitage.” The waiter’s voice had lost all its accent. Armitage took a second look. It was Ozera.

“You work here now?” he asked.

“I work wherever I can get paid cash, until I get a new identity. Or until you take care of things.”

“I did. Both charges have been withdrawn.”

“Where’s the paperwork?”

Armitage pulled out a folded sheet from his coat pocket. “Here’s what you need to do to get it. Go to the clerk’s office, room 246 at
old city hall. Ask for a certified copy of the court documents. It will cost you four or five dollars, takes a few weeks. I’ve written it all down here.”

Ozera slipped it into his back pocket. “Why didn’t you get it?”

Armitage laughed. “Thanks to you, I went through a few years’ worth of old files for minor charges and withdrew more than a hundred dead cases. No one would see the connection. But it would be suspicious as hell if the head Crown were go to the clerk’s office and order the documentation on one case. No reason for me to do it.”

Ozera pondered this.

“It’s no big deal. Just wait a few weeks before you go over there.”

“What about the outstanding warrant for my arrest?”

Shit, this guy was smart. Armitage had been hoping he wouldn’t ask. “I can’t do anything about that. The cops are in charge of warrants. It will take a while to input everything into the computer, and then they’ll toss it.”

“How long?”

It would take eighteen months if not more, but Armitage wasn’t going to tell him that. “I won’t make a promise I can’t keep. It’s bureaucrats.”

“Until then, if I get stopped by the cops I’ll get arrested.”

“If you were, they’d soon drop the charges.”

“Thanks, that’s a real help. What about immigration? You must have contacts there.”

Armitage had wondered if this was going to be the next demand. He had lots of contacts at immigration, but it was too risky. Especially right now. Besides, he wasn’t going to let this little guy with all his accents push him around anymore. He jumped to his feet, taking Ozera by surprise. Armitage had been in enough negotiations to know when to call someone’s bluff.

“You know what? I’m done. You want to testify, come in and make a statement. I’ll tell the folks at immigration you helped out.” He shrugged, the biggest shrug in his repertoire for probably the biggest bluff of his life. “But I can’t guarantee anything.”

Just as he’d hoped, Ozera looked stunned. Time to push him.

“Besides, I should warn you. Detective Greene found out your real name.”

“You told him?”

“No.”

“Then how …”

“They interviewed some girl who worked with you at Tim Hortons. From that they figured out you were probably Romanian and traced you back that way.”

“Suzanne,” Ozera muttered.

“What about Suzanne?”

“She would have told them. When did you hear this?”

“A few hours ago.”

It had been a close call. Greene came by the office this afternoon after court and asked him if he’d ever heard the name Dragomir Ozera. Armitage played dumb. “Sounds familiar,” he’d said.

“I heard you went on blitz over the holiday and cleaned out a bunch of old charges,” Greene had said.

“One hundred and forty-one to be exact.” Armitage had laughed, trying to sound relaxed.

“Well, Ozera was one of those cases.”

“Oh. That’s why the name sounds familiar. So what?”

“We found the cop who arrested him for the original theft. Showed him the composite and he recognized him. He even had an old cigarette butt from the guy and we’re doing a DNA test, ultra-high priority, with a strand of hair from a hairnet we found in the bushes beside the Tim Hortons. We’ll know in twenty-four hours.”

Armitage had said all the right things to Greene.
Great work. We have to tell the defense right away. What can we do to find this guy?
But now, looking at Ozera in the noisy restaurant, he could see the young guy was shaken.

“If my name and a picture of me gets in the newspaper, Dewey will know who I am,” Ozera said.

That was Ozera’s core fear: Dewey Booth. He’d terrorized this guy enough to guarantee he’d keep his trap shut. Probably, Armitage hoped, forever.

Outside Nancy Parish’s office the wind was howling, pelting snow against the window in a repetitive
knock, knock, knock
. Like a raven with a broken wing, she thought. Friday night and here she was again, alone in the office, going through the seemingly endless e-mails from her other, increasingly irate clients. Then there was the deep pile of Legal Aid forms she’d tossed on the floor weeks ago and had steadfastly ignored.

Pain in the ass. Taking on a murder trial for a poor client such as St. Clair meant she’d be paid about a quarter of her usual rate, and she got to flirt with financial ruin while the rest of her practice dried up. As a bonus the best-case scenario with this trial? She wins, and forevermore the name “Nancy Parish” is synonymous with “the child-killer who beat the system.”

Ignoring it all, she picked up a pad of paper. And to think I could have gone to art school, she thought. She began to draw a female lawyer meeting her male client in a prison cell. He was flipping a coin. “Heads I did it,” the caption read. “Tails I didn’t.”

The office suite had an annoying bell that rang when the front door opened. Parish heard it and put down her pencil. Hadn’t she locked the door? Ted constantly bugged her to do it when she stayed late and worked alone. Half the time she was so busy she forgot. Hopefully it was him.

DiPaulo had been out of town over the holidays and she was dying to talk to Ted about how Larkin wouldn’t tell her what had happened. Refused to let her call him to testify.

One of the ironies about being a criminal lawyer was that, despite dealing with so-called hardened criminals, she never felt fearful of or threatened by her clients. Much to the consternation of her mother, she told everyone who asked if she was afraid of her clients, “No. They’re the most polite people in the whole system. It’s the cops and Crowns who scare me.”

But now, alone in her office late at night, the silence was eerie. She
felt nervous for the first time in years. Should she call out? That wasn’t smart. Instead she clicked off her desk light, grabbed an old hockey trophy that doubled as a paperweight from her desk, and tiptoed behind her door. Thankfully it was open only a crack. She listened hard.

Steps started down the hallway. It sounded like more than one set of feet. Her office was the second door, one up from DiPaulo’s. The footfalls were almost outside her door. She squeezed the trophy in her hand. It felt cold, even though her fingers were sweaty.

She heard a loud bang, just outside. Something fell hard against the wall.

She tensed.

“
Mon dieu
,” a woman’s voice said. She had a heavy French accent. “I have the jet lag.”

“And too much champagne,” a man said.

Parish loosened her grip. Boy, did she feel like an idiot. It was Ted, with his French girlfriend Isabel. She’d never met the woman, and sure didn’t want to start now.

“I’ll carry you over the threshold,” DiPaulo said on the other side of the wall.

She heard the sound of much fumbling.

“Very sexy,” Isabel said. “I want to be seeing this office where you are spending so much of your lifetime.”

Not as much time as he used to, Parish thought. His heavy footsteps stumbled past her door. She slipped off her shoes, tiptoed to her desk, and grabbed her coat, boots, scarf, mittens, cell phone, and keys.

“Is very comfortable,” Isabel said.

Parish could hear they were inside his office, but the door was open. She slid out into the hallway. Behind her came the rustling sound of clothes being removed. “
Mon dieu, mon dieu
.” Isabel was moaning.

In the reception area, Parish stopped and collected herself. If she didn’t open the door too wide, and was real fast, sometimes the stupid bell didn’t ring. She grabbed the handle and threw her stuff outside, then squeezed through the gap. The bell stayed silent.

What a loser you are, she thought as she put on her shoes and coat in the deserted hallway. Just as she picked up her cell phone, it started to vibrate. She turned it over to look at the display. A text message from Zelda.

Cant make 2nite. Amanda the wman I met @ that confrnce in Bston jst flew in. Think Im in luuuuuuv

Z

Great, Parish thought. Looks like an exciting evening home alone watching
Law & Order
reruns.

Her phone buzzed again with another text.

PS. jst left Pravda w Amanda. The cute waitr asked whr r u??? hmmmmm. Luuuuuuv?

“No, Zelda, it’s not love,” Parish said as she pushed the Down button on the elevator. “But it’s Friday night and any port in a storm.”

“The first witness for the Crown will be Mr. Cedric Wilkinson,” Ralph Armitage said. His long arms emerged from his freshly ironed black robes like a pair of muscular wings as he spread them to his sides and flashed his lightning smile at the jury seated directly to his right. It had taken all day Monday and Tuesday to pick six men and six women with backgrounds about as diverse as you could imagine. All had one thing in common. They wore wedding bands. That had been the only criterion Armitage had cared about. He wanted jurors who most likely had children.

With a flip of his blond hair, he swiveled his large head and looked back into the body of the court. He had strategically positioned the Wilkinson family right behind him in the seats closest to the jury box. He nodded at them, his face now solemn.

Wilkinson lumbered to his feet. In every photo taken of him before his son was shot, the big man’s jowly face had fallen into a natural smile. But now, the stress of the last five months had stripped away the joy and replaced it with a ghostlike vacancy. He was much thinner, his skin stretched, as if pounds had fallen off him helter-skelter.

Armitage sat down to show his respect. The large courtroom was packed, but no one made a sound as Wilkinson plodded to the front and hoisted himself up into the witness stand.

Crown Attorneys had many different strategies for how to start a case. Some liked to call cops as their first witnesses, thinking this would give their evidence an official stamp of approval. Others preferred to begin with the civilian witnesses, to make the jury see what happened through the eyes of a stranger. The same way they would see the evidence.

He knew that every trial was a mixture of facts and emotions. To persuade the jury he had to find the right balance. With a highly charged case such as this one, he could either call the grieving father as his first witness, to hit the jury over the head with the tragedy, or save him for the end and send them out to deliberate on an emotional whirl.

“Good morning, Mr. Wilkinson,” Judge Rothbart said, sliding his chair over beside the witness box. “We all appreciate your being here to testify.”

During the previous two days of jury selection, Rothbart had kept his theatrical instincts in check, in keeping with the gravity of the case. But this little show of affection for the Crown’s first witness was, judicially speaking, over the top. Armitage glanced across at the defense counsel table. Nancy Parish was grinding her teeth. Rothbart was letting the jury know where his sympathies lay, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

Wilkinson looked at the judge and nodded. He was a quiet man.

The clerk swore him as a witness.

Armitage stood up. Everyone in the courtroom was watching him. He could feel it in his bones, that he’d made the right decision to call this witness first.

“I think we all understand how difficult this is for you, sir,” Armitage said.

Wilkinson stared at him. Didn’t say a word.

They’d met a number of times since the murder. The guy was pissed that he’d made the deal with Dewey Booth. And he wasn’t happy about all the publicity that had centered on Armitage. It was important that the jury didn’t get a whiff of this antagonism, but, by his stillness in the witness box, he could see Wilkinson didn’t intend to make this easy.

“Let’s keep it simple,” Armitage said. “Take your mind back to the night of November fourteenth.”

“Nothing simple about it,” Wilkinson said. “My son was murdered.”

Maybe it had been a bad idea to start with him, Armitage thought. Every victim went through a very angry stage, and it usually spilled out into their being mad at the whole legal process—all the technicalities, the objectification of their loved ones. Just as dying patients often lashed out at their doctors, witnesses like Wilkinson often took it out on the prosecutors.

He had to turn that anger to his advantage. Stop being charming, Ralphie, he told himself. Think of the TV show
Dragnet
—“just the facts, ma’am.”

“Where were you earlier that day, Mr. Wilkinson?”

“At work.”

Like pulling teeth. “And where do you work?”

“Lipton Industries.” Wilkinson folded his arms in front of him.

“What type of company is it?”

“We manufacture pigment. I love colors.”

To his side Armitage heard some jury members shuffle in their seats.

“What is pigment?”

Wilkinson unfolded his arms and glanced for the first time at the jury. “Pigment is a powdery material that changes the color of reflected or transmitted light. It’s the basic material in most of the paint, clothes dye, and colored foodstuffs that we use every day. Pigment is an invisible product to most people, but it’s crucial to our everyday life. The worldwide market in pigment is about twenty billion dollars.” He spoke like a guest lecturer at a Kiwanis Club meeting.

“And your connection to Lipton Industries?” Armitage asked.

“I’ve worked at Lipton for eighteen years. We’re based in California, where both my wife and I were born. Last August the company moved me up here to run the Canadian operation. We employ seventy-two people at our plant out in Scarborough.”