Flagged Victor (34 page)

He walked back to the table and sat down. He wanted to hang his head but didn’t. He established a neutral expression to meet Drury’s gaze. Inside, he was floored by the painstaking
nature of the case they’d built against him. How long they’d known. The amount of evidence they’d compiled. The accuracy was chilling and also impressive. He wouldn’t have guessed the local cops had it in them. And still they’d needed to catch him in the act. He wanted to lift the table and throw it across the room. He wanted to be in Susan’s arms.

There was nothing, he realized suddenly, about Susan on that wall. Nothing about me. He wondered if Susan and I were in another room, facing our own interrogators. He didn’t think so. It came to him that he was all alone, and he felt a strange comfort in our absence. The monster had missed us. We were safe to run out of the cave while he waved his torch and drew the attention of the beast. A moment passed. He shook his head, feeling less woozy, and stretched his jaw open. He hadn’t known how tensely he’d been clenching it.

Drury started in on the questions slowly, asking mundane details. Every two or three questions seemed to circle back to the same unimportant matters. Which car did he drive the night he robbed the movie theatre? Had it been a Tuesday or a Wednesday when he did the jewellery store? The questions were trivial and irritating, and sometimes, to stop the irritation and shore up some temporary mental space, he’d answer one and force Drury to write something down. Not enough to incriminate himself. Nothing that could be used against him. Then, Drury would circle back again, to some other mundane fact, and insist he’d said something he knew he hadn’t. It became increasingly difficult to think clearly. He drifted during one answer and forgot what he was about to say. Drury slammed the notepad down on the table, and Chris jerked up in surprise, heart racing,
as though he’d fallen asleep. The slam sounded more like a slap, a pathetic impersonation of force, and the attempt at being tough pissed Chris off. He narrowed his eyes and glared at Drury and dared him with his glare to try that shit again. The questions resumed. Mundane details. Repeated details. Issues and clarifications that were not incriminating. Then Chris forgot to put a brake on his words when Drury asked him what kind of gun he’d used at the CIBC, and he told him it was the .357 Magnum. Drury noted that, jotting it down with the same care that he’d noted all of the bullshit so far, but now Chris’s heart was thudding vigorously. He put his mind back on track. He willed himself to concentrate, to be completely present. Drury looked tired. Chris had more stamina, more mental strength. The nice officer delivered a cup of Tim Hortons coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich. Drury looked pissed off at the interruption. Chris took bites and chewed. The ham tasted peculiarly strong, and the bread was like wet newspaper, but the coffee actually settled his stomach, despite the lack of cream. Drury asked him about the motorcycle helmet, and why he’d used a ski mask sometimes, and he felt all the energy of the food leaving him. He stared numbly at the table and couldn’t remember what he had been saying.

It became pointless after a while, knowing what they knew. He kept glancing up and seeing the pictures and the map and the dates and amounts. He found it difficult to focus on more than one or two cautionary thoughts at a time. And then somehow, Drury spooled another detail out of Chris about a run across a parking lot, and it meant (he realized all of a sudden) that he’d now admitted to the first CIBC job. He
thought of that leap and how free it had felt at the time, flying through the air.

Four hours later, he’d signed a twenty-page confession. The way Drury carved the admissions onto paper amazed him. It was fine craftsmanship. Detail work. A chisel cut here, a light brush with sandpaper, a blow of air to clear away the obscuring dust. Even as the fight slipped away from him, Chris kept his remaining energy focused on one immovable dispute. No matter how many times Drury asked, no matter how righteous and angry Drury seemed to get in imminent victory, Chris insisted, with disdain and irritation in his voice, that he’d done every single job alone.

You think I needed anyone’s help?

He stared at Drury as if our friendly neighbourhood cop was the biggest idiot in the world.

Drury blew air out of his cheeks, cracked his neck, and grimaced, and inside, Chris thought, Fuck you. Fuck you.

His
lawyer was baffled that he’d revealed so much information voluntarily. At some level, still exhausted and in shock, Chris was baffled too. His father was furious for the same reason, but there was also a desperate regret in his anger. I thought you would have known better, his father said. Even if they’d caught you with a smoking gun in your hand, I thought you would have known better than to say a goddamn word.

The lawyer considered appealing the twenty-page statement on the grounds that Chris hadn’t been offered a phone call. It seemed a trivial technicality to Chris, but any hope was worth chasing down.

There’s all kinds of stuff in this case that stinks, the lawyer said. I don’t completely understand it. There’s something they’re not telling us.

Privately, after his father left, the lawyer told him what to expect. In his favour, he was from a good family. His father was a cop, for God’s sake. He was a responsible young man and had been a productive student. He was not a drug addict and had never been convicted of anything before, not even a mis-demeanour. He did not fit any profile, and the justice system was built on profiles. On the other hand, the court might be tempted to go hard and make an example of him, to show justice being done. The media was all over the case. They loved every aspect of it. Chris had been big local news for two days running and would continue to be of interest during the course of a trial. A lot of attention would be on him and his family. The legal fees would be expensive, approximately $100,000 for starters, just to go to trial with a not-guilty plea, but that might be worth it considering that Chris was facing eighty-nine counts of armed robbery and a possible minimum of twenty-five years in prison.

Given that his life was at stake, Chris told the lawyer he wanted to go to trial. But at the bail hearing, he was denied. The announcement that he couldn’t go home, even for the weeks or months leading up to the trial, sucked all the life out of his body. They shackled him up, legs and wrists chained together, as though he were a rabid animal, and walked him out. No chance to even speak with his parents. He waited in the court cell while arrangements were being made, and sensed that something else had gone wrong. An hour went by. Another. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t going home. He’d counted on the reprieve of bail to catch his breath. Even if it was
just for days, he wanted to stand on grass again, sleep in his own bed, talk to Susan.

The court officer finally appeared at his cell and said that it was time to go back to remand. Because there was so much media waiting outside, he suggested that Chris pull his jacket up over his head to hide his face. Chris okayed the idea and regretted it almost immediately, the shame it represented, the cowardice. He shuffled out of the courthouse with his shoulders slouched and his head covered, seeing nothing but feet around him, jostled by the elbows, the shouted questions, until they loaded him in the caged van.

This is the way we saw him on TV.

It was impossible to see him in person. So Susan and I saw each other instead.

I
finished my summer job at the bank. I started school. I gave no thought to Thailand and Rivers. How could I abandon Chris now? It seemed possible, too, that I would be forbidden to leave the country. I lived in terror of being visited by the police. I went about my life as if nothing had changed, but I was numb with fear and haunted by the plight of my friend. I began an affair with Susan. It was initiated during one of our support sessions, those long evenings or nights we spent together talking and not talking, hugging when she needed to be held. Soon enough, the hugging became an expression of a different kind of need. I don’t know who needed what more. Guilt-ridden, I’ve wondered a thousand times where the balance was tipped and by whom. I’d like to say I wasn’t responsible, but there were things
I indisputably did and much evidence against any proclamations of innocence.

We
got addicted to that rhythm of solace and sex. It was a kind of mutual masturbation. Like masturbation, it helped relieve the stress, and passed the time, and also felt unhealthy and wrong. She visited my apartment three or four nights a week after work or school and we would fuck hard, cry hard, and hold each other. Once or twice, we talked about escaping together, fleeing to some faraway place like Europe or India, beginning a new life. It felt as though Chris were already dead and we were making plans with each other to console ourselves for his loss.

As Chris’s closest friends, we actually received some sympathy for what we were going through, for a time. People treated us initially as though we were victims—not victims of what Chris had done, but victims of circumstance and of the police and of the confusion and shock that had fixated us all. Even my parents. They worried about how I was handling it. Perhaps they were too traumatized to put the pieces of the puzzle together. My father asked if Chris had been addicted to drugs, or whether he’d needed money to support some kind of gambling habit. In other words, why? Like others, and certainly like a banker, he couldn’t believe there was no money left over from all the jobs. How had Chris spent it? He was less angry at Chris than I would have expected, and this comforted me a little, made me wonder what compassion could overcome. My mother expressed astonishment that I didn’t know what Chris had been up to. After all, we spent so much time together. Then she quickly cut off
whatever doubts might have been penetrating by observing that Chris had clearly been a master of disguise, as though he were a caped villain. How could his parents not have known? In this question she implied something else. How could they have raised him so terribly? These conversations were rare. I didn’t visit home often, but when I did, my parents seemed to treat me more respectfully than before, as if they’d been kick-started into thinking of me as an adult by the adult nature of Chris’s predicament. In the newspapers, he was referred to as a twenty-one-year-old man. I always wondered who they were talking about when they used that description. Not my friend Chris. Not me. We were just kids. We were still cutting down tree forts and shooting frogs.

I saw Chris’s parents only a few times, and they were guarded around me but needy. Chris’s mother spoke about Chris’s innocence, as though he was the victim of a police conspiracy. She talked just as fervently about how important his closest friends were now, an implication in this about some kind of reckoning, a scrutiny over loyalty. Meeting her litmus test required subscribing to her beliefs without question. Her innocent child had been framed. Chris’s father only asked me to help Chris bear his time inside. Write him when I could. Visit him when I was allowed. I think he knew better than any of the parents what might have happened. He was the least likely to be naive.

Susan
and I geared up for the trial, telling each other that the light at the end of the tunnel was getting closer, that something good might even happen. But we both dreaded it, particularly
any scrutiny about our own roles, the questions about how much we’d known. We knew that Chris was going to fight the charges, fight the arrest, fight the twenty-page statement. His lawyer was publicly questioning the police tactics in the investigation and the Crown prosecutor’s ethics in sharing evidence. There was the matter of a gun that had been recorded into evidence but couldn’t be produced. There was noise about an inquiry into how and why the police had determined to stop Chris’s car on the highway. It all seemed very overwrought, and yet we could not help but hope.

My anxiety was like a paralysis slowly taking over my body and mind. I could not eat or move my bowels. I could not concentrate or finish a complex sentence. I could barely sleep. When I did sleep, I had terrible nightmares. I saw a courtroom filled with the curious and the bereaved. I saw Chris sitting in the witness stand and heard lawyers picking apart the flaws in his logic, the mistakes in his reasoning. What had been a debatable philosophical idea, and a somewhat thrilling adventure to conceive of before the consequences landed hard, now struck everyone, even me, as an unimaginable transgression.

Then,
without warning, two days before the trial was slated to begin, we learned that Chris had decided to plead guilty, forgoing the need for witnesses or the presentation and arguing of evidence beyond what the prosecution had already brought forth. There would be no inquiry, either. Chris’s lawyer came to an agreement with the prosecutor for Chris to serve twelve years in prison for fifty-two counts of armed robbery, assigned
concurrently. It was, according to the newspapers, a surprisingly good deal, and one that had the whiff of expediency about it.

Five days after sentencing, Chris was shipped to Dorchester Penitentiary, a decrepit and fortress-like maximum security prison in New Brunswick, three hours away. To us, it was as though he had been taken across the River Styx and into Hades.

We
couldn’t understand why he pleaded guilty. It puzzled us like a mystery. Susan thought it was her fault. Chris’s father had told her that Chris was worried about Susan having to testify.

His mother blames me, Susan said. She thinks I led him into it. She thinks I’m this evil witch who wanted all kinds of stuff Chris couldn’t afford to buy.

She burst into tears again. I held her, and yet, if I was to confess one more secret, I was getting tired of holding her while she cried.

Another bout of sex broke the monotony of strained emotion. We even laughed a little—I kept brushing back her hair and it kept falling over her eyes, which seemed funny at the time. Then we got sad again because we felt terrible for laughing. It seemed we should be in mourning forever.