An Ordinary Decent Criminal (8 page)

He mopped his brow with a red silk handkerchief that looked seriously out of place and continued. “We have two separate scenarios that describe how the confession wasn’t entered into voluntarily. We also have two scenarios that show either criminal behavior or stupidity on the part of the police.”

I spoke up again. “Pick one.”

She stared at me and I went on. “I can explain the gun, the paraffin test, and the bodies. The police cannot explain any of these things.”

Thompson shushed me with two fingers and handed over another file.“Ms. McMillan-Fowler, I’ll cut to the chase. Here’s a copy of our complaint to LERA about the fact my client was not given access to a lawyer immediately. That’s despite past advice he’s been given by his attorneys of record. Here’s a copy of the charge I’m going to be laying in civil court for mistreatment of my client by the city. Here’s a copy of my client’s real statement, given to me the morning after the incident. And . . . can we talk privately now?”

The Crown was looking tired. This wasn’t going to be simple and all of a sudden she couldn’t see the end of it. She nodded and the secretary folded up her equipment and left. When she was gone, the Crown gestured to Thompson. “Go on.”

Thompson spoke softly. “I’ve given my client written advice this morning. It’s on record, mine and his, and I state that I believe he should wait until after the criminal trial is resolved before proceeding with any charges against the police. I have given him this advice because I believe evidence will be manufactured by the police in order to discredit him, should he proceed at this time.”

She stuck out her lower lip and snorted, “That’s been tried before. It’s never worked before and won’t work this time.”

Thompson nodded, “It’s an indirect challenge to LERA’s constitutional viability. A lawyer has just advised his client that his federal civil rights might be violated if he goes forward with a complaint to a provincial board.”

He closed his briefcase and glanced at me.

“I’m also going to be leaking some of what I’ve told you to the mayor and the city council, so get ready. More will be going to the local MLAs, MPs, and so on. You should make up your mind very quickly on how you want to proceed because it’ll be going to the press. Amnesty International. Society for the Wrongly Convicted. Anyone else we can think of.”

The Crown was now looking angry and frustrated and I was feeling bone tired, so I tried to wrap it up. “You’ll notice that we’re giving you more than we have to. Think about that. Consider it a sign of good faith insofar as I want this to end quickly.”

We started to leave and she kept tapping her pencil against her teeth. I knew what she was feeling. She had thought she was playing poker when she had actually been playing fifty-two pickup.

In the hall Thompson’s confidence faded like steam. He asked, “Think she’ll buy it?”

“Sure. It just turned political. She’ll talk to her boss and her boss will talk to his boss. The buck will be passed. Each person will make it more complex and in the end I think they’ll take what we offer.”

Thompson pushed me towards the elevator and, after a minute, he reluctantly agreed. “It’s a weak case without the confession.”

“Right.”

He kept speaking as though he hadn’t heard me. “Lots of risks for them.”

“In this biziness there is much risiko.”

“What?”

“James Bond. Actually, some candy-assed villain speaking to Bond.”

“Right.”

He looked sick and preoccupied.

“How about faint heart never won fair maid?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. Ahead of us and down the marble hall, the cops were still keeping the reporters at bay.

“That’s poetry. There’s also the SAS motto, ‘Who Dares, Wins.’ ”

He was pushing me erratically down the hallway, weaving from side to side in preoccupation.

“Or ‘Carpe Diem,’ seize the fish. Never understood that one, though.”

Thompson stopped and came around to face me over the briefcases. He looked drained and exhausted.

“I have something I have to talk about.”

“Go ahead.”

Thompson wheeled us over to a bench, where he sat and accepted the briefcases off my lap. He stroked his chin for a moment and then pointed a finger right at my face. “Last night I got a phone call at home. It was Walsh. He had found my private phone number and all your records.”

“And . . .”

He leaned against the back of the bench. “He was pretty direct, pretty vivid. You wanna tell me your side?”

“Sure. I used to be bad. Now I’m not.”

“Bad?”

His bloodshot eyes shifted to the side and back again.

“When I was sixteen, I robbed a pharmacy for product and cash. When the owner wouldn’t open the poison box, where the narcotics are stored, I shattered his collarbone with the flat of a hatchet.”

Thompson nodded.

“A year later I was dealing ecstasy to an undercover cop out of a hotel room in Banff. She pulled her piece and tried to cuff me. By the time the other cops had broken the door down, I had stabbed her three times with a filed-down screwdriver I’d hidden in my sock.”

Thompson swallowed audibly.

“There’s more. Got caught with a duffle bag of sawed-down shotguns. Assault, goes without saying. Dangerous driving. Resisting arrest. Attempted murder. Smuggling. Fraud. Drugs. Shit like that.”

“I see.”

“Been addicted to cocaine, methamphetamines, crank, heroin, and
PCP. Alcohol too. Abused and used acid, grass, ether, peyote. You name it.”

“You making excuses?”

“Nope. Don’t care what you think of me.”

He thought about that and I tapped his knee to get his attention. “I’ve lied. Cheated. Stole. Killed. Dishonored my parents. Worshipped false idols. Coveted. Committed adultery.”

The cops were still keeping the reporters away and I smiled bitterly. “Now, I’ve got a wife. A son. Pets. A home. It’s a long way from everything I knew before. And I’d like to keep that distance.”

“I see. Was it really that bad? Being a crook, I mean?”

“Yes, it was that bad.” I opened up a little. “You do the math. If you’re a bad guy, you don’t have a job, no bank account, no apartment. You live in hotels, move around a lot, eat in restaurants. But not expensive hotels because you might be noticed in those and you’ll need ID.”

He was riveted on me.

“You need maybe sixty bucks a day for food and a little more than that for the hotel and maybe another thirty to fifty for incidentals. That’s every day.”

I tried to find a comfortable spot in the chair but my whole lower back ached where a band of red and blue bruises still circled my kidneys. The rainbow of pain filled every moment.

“That’s about one-eighty each day. Life gets stressful, though, so you start doing a little something to deal with the stress. If you drink or do grass to level you out, that’s another twenty or forty per day. But you can’t be level all the time, you might have to move fast so that means keeping cocaine or crank or meth handy, and that’s another fifty to one hundred a day and that’s if you don’t have friends. That’s a total of about three Cs per day. Every day. That means two grand one per week, or eight grand four per month, and that means one hundred and nine thousand, two hundred dollars per year. Period.”

Thompson’s eyes were staring into the middle distance.

“It’s fun to do for a week, a month, even a year. But do it for year after year after year and it gets stale. I’m not depressing you, am I?”

He had no answer, no comment.

“The lifestyle means nothing is permanent. You can’t even do laundry. You can’t bring anything with you. You can’t even follow a TV series you like. You’re too busy.”

I breathed deeply. “No friends and no love, either. You can buy tail, though, and that’ll add to your bill. And there’s always the chance that the drug dealer or the hooker or someone else is going to rat you out.”

Thompson was waiting for me to finish.

“Your other option is to build a fake life. That takes money and time. A few hundred hours and dollars for the driver’s licence, the same for a birth certificate, social insurance card, banking history, it can all be built but it takes weeks and months to do it right. Anyhow, you put in six months and maybe ten grand and then you can buy a car, rent an apartment, do whatever, just like a civilian.”

He brushed his hair from his eyes and a fine rain of dandruff came down.

“Of course, anyone, and I mean anyone, who knows just a little bit about you can crack the whole thing open and you’re back on the run again at twenty-one hundred per week.”

Thompson was only half listening to me. The rest of his attention was focused somewhere far away and I wished I knew where.

“To pay for your two choices of lifestyle, you steal, you hustle, you deal. The math there is rough too. An average bank by a solo operator nets between one and three grand, a good bank nets up to twelve. An armored car is worth thirty plus but it’s almost impossible to do it by yourself, which means partners, which means someone’s going to rat you out. You also have to split the take. Dealing drugs requires capital and the profit for a gram dealer is maybe only ten dollars per unit, and when you’re dealing in bulk, that brings its own problems like bodyguards and bribes and other shit. If you deal grass, it’s not
so bad and not so profitable but coke dealers deal with cokeheads and those guys are just shit. They also call you at all hours asking for a taste on credit.”

I was getting tired and yawned. “Pimping is fine but requires a fine touch and a fair number of women and they are hard to keep under control. Smuggling is okay too but you’ve got to develop routes, which means you become a stationary target. Professional killers exist only in books and it doesn’t pay that well, anyway. It goes on like that.”

Thompson finally snapped out of it and started to laugh. “So what you’re saying is that you stopped being a crook because it was too much work.”

I had closed my eyes but at that I opened one and grinned widely. “That and I fell in love with my wife.”

He was silent so I pointed straight ahead down the hall. “Home, James.”

Officially it took the Crown three days to decide. I knew it was coming; I could tell when the cops pulled the handcuffs off the day after the meeting with McMillan-Fowler. They left one guard on duty at the foot of my bed but that didn’t bother me as much, it certainly guaranteed me a private room.

Every eight hours a new cop came but I just focused on breathing through the pain without whimpering. If I made noise, the cops called the nurse and she brought the blessed-hated pill and that brought surcease. That I counted as a loss.

On the third day the new cop in the morning was the woman that Stiles had drugged. I hadn’t had a good night, maybe thirty minutes of shallow sleep, and when she came in, I spoke up. “Morning. How you feeling?”

She gave me a hard look and then came over right beside the bed. Her eyes were bright with caffeine and her skin was grayish and taut. She watched the corridor and spoke very quietly. “Hello, killer, I’ve been told I have you to thank for dealing with the asshole who drugged me.”

If she thought I was going to say anything, I disappointed her.

“So. Thanks.”

I still didn’t say anything so she stared some more and then sat down and opened a copy of the
Winnipeg Sun
newspaper. In the bed I squirmed and felt my bladder cut painfully loose. They’d put in a catheter and I was still pissing blood and it hurt but so did breathing, eating, sleeping, and being awake. My teeth caught my tongue and held it while a brilliant noise only I could hear started and peaked. When the noise was gone and I was emptied, I exhaled through my nose and trembled a bit as the shock cut out.

“What about you, killer, how you doing?”

The pain had preoccupied me and the cop was back, leaning over me with her crossed arms inches from my head. She looked pleased.

“Peachy.”

My voice cracked and Thompson came in. Apparently, the cops had been given orders about his presence so she just started past him to her chair without a word. When he raised a hand, though, she paused in mid-stride and looked at him incuriously with her right hand on her holstered pistol.

“Hold it. Officer, you can go. Sam, the Crown’s dropping the charges so you’re free.”

Free, I almost laughed. My kidneys were ground round, I had a fever of a hundred and change, and I had a plastic tube running into my dick, but I was free. Capitalize that sucker, FREE!

The cop sounded petulant, though. “Sorry. I have to be relieved by a superior. Until then your client is in my custody.”

He fumbled out his cell phone and handed it over. “Call your boss.”

She went to her chair and Thompson sat down. His overcoat flapped open as he yawned and I turned my head away from his breath.

“Did you call Claire?”

“First thing. Now, the shooting is still up in the air, but the Crown has dropped the murder charges and pitched the confession. You
might still do some time for discharging a firearm within the boundaries of the city, something like that. I’m not sure about that.”