The Guilty (37 page)

Bratt had barely gotten into the corridor when he stopped and turned to Kouri.

“Come here,” he said, directing Kouri into an empty interview room. There was no way he could wait out the weekend before clearing the air of the fog Campbell had filled it with. If speaking to Kouri was supposed to somehow change things in his life, then so be it.

Besides,
he told himself,
I still know the first rule of cross-examination. I never ask a question unless I already know the answer.

“What’s going on, Pete?”

“What? Did I screw something up?”

“No, no. You did great. But she’s right, something’s going on and we really need to get it out in the open.”

“Who’s right? Did I really do great?”

“Forget how you did, this is important. Jennifer Campbell told me you’d remove the scales
from my eyes, so that I could see what I should have known all along.”

“Are you pulling my leg, Mr. Bratt? Because I can take a joke now.”

Bratt shook his head impatiently, but he saw traces of surprise and fear in Kouri’s eyes.

“This is serious, Pete. Campbell’s all twisted up on the inside instead of being happy with how well her son’s trial is going. She’s an odd bird, but not that odd.”

“So why’re you asking me about her?”

“Because you’re my Syrian disciple, aren’t you? You know whatever it is that I’m supposed to know. You know what’s eating away at her insides.”

It’s been eating away at me too,
Bratt admitted to himself, feeling a sense of inevitability about what he was about to find out.
I just need to hear him say it out loud.

“OK, enough of this beating around the bush,” Bratt’s voice suddenly got loud in the face of Kouri’s continued silence. “You and her have been holding out on me and I think you better tell me what’s going on.”

Kouri’s face showed the fear openly now, and his eyes looked around the small room in search of an escape route. Finding no way to avoid a confrontation his shoulders sagged slightly in resignation.

Head down, he mumbled, “Don’t you think Small is guilty?”

“Look,” Bratt said, getting exasperated, “I’m asking
you
the questions.”

Kouri’s voice sounded petulant as he answered. “I’m trying to answer you, al
l right? I just want to explain what I did and it’s not that easy. So, please let me do it my way.”

“Fine, go on. Just make it quick.”

“OK, OK. From the first day we met Small you thought he was guilty, right? The more time we spent on his file, the more certain you became that he was guilty. And that’s not just my opinion. She knew it, too.”

Kouri hesitantly looked Bratt in the eyes now, and Bratt saw that the young man was still half-expecting him to jump down his throat. He simply nodded, encouraging him to go on with his explanation, yet already having a good idea of what it was.

“So, what did it matter who his witnesses were?” Kouri said. “You had already decided that they were going to be lying, no matter who they were or what they said. The only thing you cared about was that they look good in front of a jury.

“Remember that day in R.D.P. when you all but told him that you didn’t care if his witnesses were liars, as long as they were good?”

Bratt wanted to answer that he had never told Small anything of the kind, but he kept silent. Kouri had obviously been listening between the lines that day.

“I was so shocked at the time,” Kouri went on, “but then I realized that you were right. It didn’t matter if the witnesses were going to lie or not. Because if Small was innocent then we had to do whatever we could to get him off, even if it meant getting people to perjure themselves. Better than seeing an innocent man
convicted of first degree murder, right? That’s how I saw it, at least. But since you always thought he was guilty it didn’t matter to you where we got the witnesses. Because you had to think that they were all going to be liars anyway.”

Kouri paused to catch his breath, and rubbed his suddenly cold hands together. He shrugged his shoulders, in response to an internal argument.

“And so Mrs. Campbell and I got you what you wanted,” he continued. “Marlon had given Sévigny a bunch of names, and there were a couple he thought could pull it off. You got your good witnesses that would help you win the case. And he got the witnesses who’d save him from going to jail for a crime he didn’t commit.”

Bratt stared at him, unable to believe that Kouri was confirming the suspicion that had lingered in the back of his mind from the day of Leblanc’s heart attack.

What kind of twisted logic is this? Pete went out and found a couple of guys whom he could make into witnesses? Whether Small is guilty or not, does he really think he can actually justify what he did? Christ, that better not be his defense at his disbarment hearing. Make that
our
disbarment hearing!

“Oh boy, Pete. What the hell did you do? Did you ever stop and think that maybe if there were no
real
witnesses it’s because Small was never in that damn park? Don’t you see this guy killed those people and he got you to help him get away with it?”

“You don’t know that he killed anyone.”

“YES, I DO KNOW, DAMMIT!” Bratt shouted now, heedless of who might hear them in the hallway. “I know it with every bone in my body. That’s probably what’s making his mother nuts. She must have realized it too and now she hates herself for helping him. But I understand why she did it. She couldn’t
not
help her own son. Now you’re the only one who still believes him, even if it’s so obvious to everyone else. He killed those guys.” 

“Well, I’m sorry if I don’t just blindly accept your say-so. But, even if he did do it, what does that change?” Kouri was almost in tears now. “That’s our job, isn’t it? We’re paid to get the murderers off.”

“Not this way we’re not,” Bratt said, reacting angrily to how close to the truth Kouri had come with his answer. “We give them the best defense that we can, that’s all they’re entitled to. But you didn’t just do that. You went out and suborned perjury.”

“No, I didn’t,” Kouri said, looking unexpectedly defiant even though his lower lip still trembled. “
You
did.”

“What? Are you nuts?”

“You did. You called two alibi witnesses for what you always thought was a false alibi. You couldn’t have believed they were telling the truth if you thought Marlon was guilty, but you let them testify anyway because you knew they could help you win. As far as you were concerned they had to be lying if they claimed he was in the park with them, but that didn’t stop you from putting them on the stand. Well, you were right, so why the hell are you so mad at me now?” 

Kouri’s eyes brimmed with tears and his lower lip quivered uncontrollably. Bratt felt a touch of pity for the young lawyer, mixed with anger at what he had done. He had to find some way to show Kouri that he had totally twisted around what a lawyer’s job was, yet he was worried that he might not be able to find the words. 

“Jesus, Pete, you’re turning everything upside down. That’s not how it works. Just because I think he’s guilty it doesn’t mean I’m going to encourage him to perjure himself. Nor am I going to go get people to come and say they were witnesses to something they weren’t.

“If the client says he has an alibi then we present an alibi
defense. That’s what our job is, no matter what we may feel personally. But that’s all it is. Then it’s up to the jury to decide if they believe him or not. It’s not our place to decide for the jury what it should or shouldn’t believe. And we sure as hell don’t
knowingly
let anybody lie on the stand.”

“You hypocrite!” Kouri yelled out, his tears flowing freely now. “Maybe you wouldn’t have let them testify if I had told you they were going to lie. But as long as nobody told you anything you gladly put them on the stand, even though you were sure they
were
lying. What the hell’s the difference between the two?”

“Dammit, there is a difference,” Bratt said, still refusing to accept the blame that Kouri was trying to lay at his feet. “It’s the difference between being a lawyer and being an accomplice to perjury. It’s the difference between doing your sworn duty and
committing an indictable offense. It’s bad enough that his crazy mother tried pulling this off. You had no business getting involved.”

“But why is what I did so wrong? You never really believed Sims and Jordan. From the first day you said they were too good to be true. But you were still willing to close your eyes and hold your nose and ram through their testimony, all the while hoping that nobody would be the wiser. You didn’t give a shit about their honesty from the very beginning. So how come I’m the only one who’s at fault here?”

“Because I can defend everything I said and did when we get called up before the Bar for this and you can’t. Maybe I am a hypocrite, but I at least know how to cover my ass.”

Bratt hated himself for saying that. He was certain that the issue was much more than just covering their asses, but that was all he could think of just then.

“If Small was going to bring us witnesses,” he continued, his own voice starting to crack with emotion, “then we had to keep our own hands clean. Let him get them to lie if he wanted to, but we couldn’t have anything to do with it. That’s where you went wrong. You stopped acting like his lawyer and you began acting like his friend. I don’t know why you felt he needed a friend, dammit, but it wasn’t supposed to be you.”

They stood face-to-face, their tear-filled eyes locked on each other. Bratt thought that anybody who peeked through the window in the door would think they were two lovers having a quarrel. Then again, their voices had been loud enough that passersby in the corridor could have heard every word they had yelled at each other.

Kouri’s voice was so low when he spoke again that Bratt almost didn’t hear him ask, “Now what?”

“I don’t know. Thank God it’s the weekend. We at least get a couple of days to think about
it. We’ll see.”

“We could always just do nothing. Maybe you’re wrong about him and he is innocent. Nobody would know what we did.”

“I would know.”

“Yes…”

The way Kouri let his voice trail off suggested that Bratt might be ready to live with their little secret, especially if he received the reward he was expecting from Small’s acquittal. That suggestion hit Bratt in his very core, even while he recognized that it made a lot of sense. Kouri had begun to know him too well. He knew what motivated him almost as well as Bratt did himself.

“We’ll see,” he said gruffly, then opened the door and stepped out.

The stale air in the courthouse corridor tasted fresh compared to that in the interview room, and he gulped in a huge lungful as if he had been suffocating.

I
have
been suffocating
, he told himself.
Now I have to find a way to get out from under before it’s too late.

He threw his coat over his shoulders and walked out of the courthouse, passing by the taxi stand without giving the cabs a second thought. He turned north and headed in the direction of his home. It was about a half hour walk in the cold wind, and he would need every frozen minute of it to clear his mind.

Later that evening Bratt stood under a hot shower trying to rid his aching body of the numbing cold that seemed to have dug permanently into his bones. He lingered as long as possible behind the frosted glass door of the shower stall, allowing it to cut him off from the day’s events, finding in his temporary isolation a tenuous sense of security. But the steam rising around him was little
defense against the news that Kouri had dropped on him earlier in the day. 

He still couldn’t believe how his assistant had stood before him and tried to defend his actions, as if perjury were just a matter of opinion, or a question of degree. But the bottom line was that it was he, Robert Bratt, who had done everything to give Kouri just that impression. He had simply chosen to look the other way when the truth was there for any thinking lawyer to see.

After a lifetime of bending the truth it really hadn’t been that hard for me to do. Kouri seems to have known me better than I knew myself. So am I really going to change now?  When all it’ll take to get onto the bench is letting this one little lie stand?

It certainly wasn’t his first lie, he knew, and maybe if he just forgot about it he could make it his last.
The problem was that it had become too easy to lie to himself, to convince himself that he didn’t know the truth when he really did. Suddenly his own glib justifications about how he exercised his profession weren’t so easy to swallow.

He thought of Sims and Jordan. He was certain there had been a brief moment when he had honestly been against using them. But, that was when life, and then death, had gotten in the way. First, there had been the temptation of that seat on the Superior Court, just waiting for him to win this trial. Then Leblanc’s death had thrown him for an emotional loop, giving him an excuse to avoid making any hard decisions.

He rubbed his face hard under the harsh stream of water, trying to shake himself out of his wishful thinking. His feeble attempts at justifying what he had done just didn’t wash, no matter how many excuses he tried. He had willingly closed his eyes and let himself be manipulated, because the only thing he had cared about was the final result. Winning was the best drug he knew of, and ever since he had gotten hooked on it he couldn’t imagine living without it.