Children in the Morning (31 page)

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“Yes, regrettably, I did.”

“You now expect us to believe that you are telling the truth today.

That you didn’t kill your wife, even though you were right there, and the two of you were engaged in a heated argument, and you grabbed her arm. Why should we believe you stopped there? Why should we believe you when we know you lied?”

“I hope I will be believed, because it’s the truth. My actions were stupid and cowardly but, despite appearances, they were the actions of an innocent man.”

“If you were innocent, Mr. Delaney, why set up an elaborate ruse by leaving the house and staging a second coming? You are well known in this city. You’re a long-standing member of the bar. Surely, you would have thought, if you were innocent, people would believe you, or at least give you the benefit of the doubt pending the out-come of the investigation. Don’t you agree?”

“We never know how we’re going to react when we’re tested in a situation of incalculable stress. I failed the test. Miserably.”

“You weren’t going to tell us the difference, were you, Mr. Delaney?”

Silence.

“You fully intended to maintain that lie, didn’t you? You had no intention of coming clean with the court and the jury, until . . . what, Mr. Delaney?”

Silence again.

“Until certain events in this courtroom made it impossible for you to keep up the fiction any longer, starting with your daughter’s revelation about the Hells Angels conversation — of course that was a conversation, not a woman talking to herself! And, well, it just became impossible to keep the lie going, didn’t it, Mr. Delaney?”

“All I can say, Ms. Kirk, is that I loved Peggy, I didn’t kill her, I panicked when she died, and I have lived ever since with the terror of being wrongfully convicted of her death, and being sent away from my children, and seeing my family torn apart and dispersed.”

“What did you do when you went down the stairs immediately after Peggy fell?”

No reply.

“Mr. Delaney? Did you bend down, take her in your arms, say something to her?”

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He hesitated, then replied: “I knew she was dead.”

“You made that decision instantly? She’s dead? No cradling her in your arms? No crying out her name? Nothing?”

“Objection, My Lord,” I said. “My learned friend is badgering the witness, and not letting him answer the questions.”

“Overruled. Carry on, Ms. Kirk.”

“Well? Mr. Delaney? What did you do in those first seconds after your wife’s fall?”

“I just stood there, in shock.”

“Did you touch her?”

Another long hesitation. Then: “No. I panicked and left.”

“You tell us you panicked, and yet you were calm enough to refrain from calling out ‘Peggy!’ or shaking her, or even checking her pulse.

You made an apparently calm and collected decision, within seconds of her fall, that she was dead and nothing could be done for her.”

Beau said nothing.

“You’re a highly trained, very experienced criminal lawyer, aren’t you, Mr. Delaney?”

“I am a defence lawyer, yes.”

“Were you concerned about contaminating a crime scene, leaving traces of yourself —”

“No. I simply did not know what to do.”

It went on like that for two hours. Kirk proceeded to take Delaney through the events of that night, minute by minute, chipping away at his story, leaving no doubt in the jury’s mind that she considered his version of events — his Plan B version of events — unworthy of belief.

I got up on redirect, not that I had anything I wanted to do aside from give him another chance to proclaim his innocence to the court.

We adjourned in the middle of the afternoon, and would return the next day for our summations and the judge’s charge to the jury.

The media were all over us when we left the courtroom, firing questions at Delaney and at me about his dramatic reversal on the stand. I tried to put a good face on it, but I was beyond caring at that point. I had no intention of watching, hearing, or reading any news about the day’s events. Beau did a better job. By turns humble and defiant, he pleaded his case as a wrong-headed but innocent man 197

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blown completely off course by the sudden death of his beloved wife.

I stayed away from my client that evening. Instead I went to the Midtown Tavern with Father Burke to lift a few pints and confess to the sins of anger and thinking ill of my fellow man. “I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment, and whoever says ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hellfire.” That sort of thing.

†

I gave an impassioned summation on my client’s behalf the next morning. I stressed all the glowing references given by our character witnesses. I emphasized that there was no reason Mr. Delaney wanted his wife dead, and every reason for him to want her alive, to be with him and their ten children. True, they had an argument. But that argument had not ended in violence. If it had, there would have been signs of it. Such as blood at the top of the stairs if he had struck her on the back of the head. Significantly, there were no signs of a struggle apart from the pressure wound on Peggy’s arm. There was no skin or other material of any kind under her fingernails. And if Mr.

Delaney had done this, how, in such a state of rage, did he manage to carry her body down the stairs and arrange it with absolute perfec-tion on the rock at precisely the angle that would have caused the wound as it was measured in the autopsy?

Instead, Mr. Delaney panicked. And what did he do in his panic?

Something he himself described as stupid and cowardly. He fled the scene, and then tried to cover up for himself later. He did not, calmly and precisely, arrange his wife’s body at the foot of the stairs. The Crown had presented no evidence that Mr. Delaney was, ever, a violent man. In fact, when attacked late at night by a client who was drunk and on drugs, Mr. Delaney defused the situation and did not react with violence, as Mr. Theriault so forthrightly testified. I mentioned the ten children as often as I decently could, to drive home the fact that he would not have wanted Peggy dead, and to remind the jury what was at stake if he were convicted. I did the best I could.

Unfortunately, when the defence calls witnesses, the Crown has the advantage of speaking last. Gail Kirk spoke with considerable 198

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eloquence, and barely restrained sarcasm, about the unlikely story Delaney was relying on to avoid conviction for murder. That was followed by Justice Palmer’s charge to the jury. The instructions were even-handed and fair; it would not be easy to find in them grounds of appeal. Then it was up to the jury. They retired at three thirty in the afternoon that Wednesday to begin their deliberations.

I was not at all confident of my client’s chances. Nor was I confident that I had heard everything I should have heard about him, Peggy, and the unwelcome new boy in town, Corbett Reeves.

(Normie)

“He’s going to bleed me of every cent I have! We’re going to wind up in the poorhouse! What do you mean, calm myself down? He wants to take my son out of the country, and he obviously hopes to bank-rupt me so I’ll have to give up the fight. Money is no object in Giacomo’s family. The lawyer has come up with all these Charter of Rights challenges. They’re bogus, but they’ll drag things out and require endless court appearances and filings, and — Brennan, have you heard a word I’ve been saying?”

The poorhouse? What was that? Was it like an asylum? Were we going to have to live there? I was really scared when I came into the house Thursday after school, and heard Mum on the phone in the kitchen. I usually yell “Hi Mum!” when I get in, but I just tiptoed into the living room and sat down.

“His lawyer is here from Italy, and I met with them. I certainly wasn’t going to call Beau Delaney while he’s waiting for the jury’s verdict! He’s probably curled up in the fetal position on his bed. So I left the baby with my friend Fanny, and went by myself. The lawyer, Pacchini, was very cordial in the beginning, and is very knowledge-able about Canadian law.” (I had his name down in my diary as

“Pakeenee,” but the real spelling is “Pacchini.” Anyway, Mum was still talking.) “You just have to spend two minutes in this guy’s presence and you know he’s brilliant. So the pressure is on: settle this now, give us the six months in Italy, or face months — years! — of soul-destroying, family-savings-draining litigation. I’ve seen this kind 199

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of thing, Brennan; it takes over your life, it —”

This was horrible! Mum was really, really upset. Father Burke must have been trying to make her feel better, but how could she?

How could any of us ever feel better again? I went out to the porch and made a big noise with the front door, so she’d know I was home.

I heard her say: “Here’s Normie. Last thing I want is her hearing this. I have to go.” Click. “Hi, sweetie! How are you doing?”

“Fine, thanks, Mum. How about you?”

“Good, dear, good,” she said in this funny Cape Breton accent, which usually makes me laugh. “We’re going over to Fanny’s. She’s looking after Dominic today, because I had some errands to run.

With any luck, she’s made some of her famous chocolate and almond cookies. If she hasn’t, we’ll plead with her to make them and we’ll hang around in the kitchen till she does. Sound like a plan?”

“Yep. Let’s go get Dominic and the cookies. Mum?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Do you think he’s there?”

“Who?”

“Dominic. At Fanny’s.”

“Of course he is! He’s too young to run away with the circus.

Let’s go.”

(Monty)

We heard nothing from the jury on Thursday. On Friday I got the call at two o’clock in the afternoon. The jury was coming in. The tension while waiting for the verdict in a murder trial is almost unbearable. With any client. Here, we had a highly accomplished, well-respected lawyer with a family of ten motherless children, a family that would be ripped apart if their father was found guilty and sent to prison. I called him. He answered and then dropped the phone. I could hear footsteps pounding away in the opposite direction. I waited. A few minutes later, Beau spoke in a voice I barely recognized. “I’ll meet you there.”

Beau Delaney was grey and trembling when we met at the law courts. Everyone filed into the courtroom and waited for the jurors.

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They came in and took their seats. Had they reached a verdict? Yes, they had. The foreman stood, was asked for the verdict, and gave it: not guilty.

Beau slumped in his seat as if every bone in his body had turned to jelly. His family and supporters behind us loudly expressed their relief. I stood there, stunned. I had hardly dared hope for an acquittal. A wishy-washy manslaughter result, maybe. But, no. My client was a free man. He pulled himself together, rose from his seat, and put out his hand. I shook it. “Monty, thank you for a superb defence.

Justice has been done. I’m overcome right now, and I can’t begin to express my thanks appropriately. But you can be sure I will, and I’ll be forever grateful.”

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PART II

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.

Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

— Bob Dylan, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”

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Chapter 15

(Normie)

Mr. Delaney didn’t do it. They said in court he wasn’t guilty. That was great. But now somebody else was guilty. Me! And I didn’t want anyone in my family to know about it. Dr. Burke said it’s good to talk if something is wrong. And he gave me his card with his address and phone number on it. I dug it out of my drawer, and reminded myself I meant to ask Mum and Dad for a special wallet for cards, but I hadn’t done it yet. Anyway, there was the card. There was no picture on it. It just said “Patrick J. Burke, MD,” and then some other stuff, and his phone numbers. It was pretty late, so I called his house. But there was no answer, so I tried the office.

“Dr. Burke’s office.”

“Hi, can I speak to Dr. Burke, please?”

“He’s with a patient right now. Would you like to leave your number?” She had the kind of accent they have in New York. Dr.

Burke doesn’t. He sounds Irish, not like a New Yorker. But anyway, I didn’t know what to do. What if he called back and somebody else answered the phone? But it would be rude not to leave my number, 205

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so I gave it to her and told her my name. She said she would be sure he got the message.

I went and got my Latin book. We don’t have to learn the whole language, but we have to know the words to certain prayers and songs, what they mean and how to pronounce them. I brought the book over to the phone and sat there staring at the words
lacrimosa,
malo, morietur
. It wasn’t very long before the phone rang, and I grabbed it.

I whispered into the receiver. “Hello.”

“Hello, is that you, Normie?”

“Yes, it is.”

“This is Dr. Burke.” I already knew that, of course.