The Guilty (21 page)

“Good morning, Mr. Bratt,” Sims said, stepping forward and reaching out to shake his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Bratt stood and shook Sims hand, and then did the same with Jordan.

“The pleasure is mine,” he said wholeheartedly. “Please, sit down, gentlemen.”

The two sat down in the chairs across the desk from him. They sat straight and looked at him with pleasant but serious faces.

“We’ll dispense with the preliminaries,” Bratt began. “Marlon Small informed me that you two were with a group of people, including him, at a park in LaSalle last June, the night of a shooting you may have heard of in Little Burgundy.”

“Yes, the double-murder on Carrier Street,” Sims answered. “Everybody was talking about it the next day.”

“And at the time of the shooting you were…”

“We were all at Wilfort Park, in LaSalle. We were there pretty much every night last summer.”

“Is there anything special about that particular day, Vernon, which would let me be sure we’re talking about the same date?”

“Oh, sure. I had spent most of the day at McGill. I wanted to change two of my electives, and that was the cut-off date.”

“McGill? As in McGill University?” Bratt asked, surprised to learn that this witness was attending his alma mater.

“Yes. I’m in second year engineering.”

Sims reached into his sweater and pulled out an envelope with the McGill crest on it. From inside he pulled out some sheets of paper that he handed over to Bratt. Looking at them Bratt saw they were authorizations to change two physics courses. The date stamped on each sheet was June 14, 1999, the date of the shooting.

Bratt began getting a warm feeling about Sims. Everything Clayton and Parker had not been, he seemed to be.

“Then what happened?” he asked, beginning to feel optimistic.

“Ev picked me up at the LaSalle Metro and we drove to the park together.”

Jordan looked over at Sims and raised a finger as if to remind him of something.

“No, wait,” Sims said. “First we stopped for a hamburger, because it was almost six o’clock by the time he picked me up. We got to the park at nearly seven.”

Jordan smiled and nodded his agreement.

“OK, so far so good,” Bratt said. “Did anything special happen at the park itself? Something that makes that day stand out.”

Jordan, who had not said a word until then, spoke up.

“I vomited on the basketball court.”

Bratt was so surprised at this reply, and the casual way in which Jordan stated it, that he burst out laughing. The two witnesses laughed along with him. Bratt saw that even Kouri was smiling, looking on almost proudly at the two men.

So far so good
, Bratt thought.
Still, there’s always the chance that…

“Do either one of you have criminal records?” he asked abruptly, turning the jovial meeting deadly serious again.

Both young men looked at each other, then turned back to Bratt.

“No sir,” they answered in unison.

“Have you ever been arrested, even as juveniles? Even things they never convicted you for?”

“No sir,” they said again.

“And you, Everton,” Bratt was tempted to call him Mr. Jordan, “Neither I nor Marlon’s first lawyer had your name on a list of possible alibi witnesses Marlon had given us. Why is that?”

“I’m studying at the U of T and I was only in Montreal for the summer. I left town on the sixteenth, before Marlon was arrested, so nobody ever asked me about who was in the park. I hardly knew Marlon, and he probably never thought about me when he had to find alibi witnesses. Recently, when I learned what was happening from Vernon, I called Mrs. Campbell and told her that I was definitely willing to testify on his behalf. So, here I am.”

Bratt’s earlier smile returned to his face as quickly as it had disappeared. There would be no surprises from left field with these two fine, young men. He could go on listening to their story with his mind at ease.

“OK, Everton. You were saying you threw up.”

Looking a bit embarrassed, Jordan explained what happened.

“I shouldn’t have had those hamburgers, I guess. They weren’t very well cooked. Then I was running all over the court for a couple of hours, and it was still pretty hot, even at that hour. Next thing I knew…well, they had to stop playing for a while, to hose the court off.”

“I drove him home in his car,” Sims said, still chuckling at the recollection. “His mom lives a couple of blocks away. I stayed with him and figured that was it for that day, but around 11 p.m. he said he felt better and wanted to get some fresh air. So we went back to the park to see who was still there.”

“Are you sure it was around 11:00?”

“Sure. I wanted to watch the sports at eleven-”

“But I convinced him to go to the park, instead,” Jordan cut in.

“How long did it take you to get back to the park?” Bratt felt the nervous excitement beginning to build in his stomach, like he was watching the horse he had bet on take the final turn with a growing lead.

“Not even five minutes.”

“And who was at the park?”

“Oh, pretty much everyone was still there,” Sims answered.

“Including Marlon, of course,” Jordan added. “And his cousin, Ashley.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes sir. We stayed there until midnight, and then Ev and I left.”

“Why do you say you left at midnight?”

“There’s a curfew at that park, because lots of kids used to go hang out there all night, and get in trouble. So, there was always a security car that comes by a bit after midnight to make sure the place is clear. We left just before that. Most of the others had already gone. Only Marlon, his cousin and Bernie Clayton stayed behind after we left.”

“Why did those three stay longer?”

Sims smiled apologetically.

“Well, sir, Marlon was always a little brash when it came to dealing with the security people.
He was never one to back down from an authority figure.”

I’ll bet,
Bratt thought.
Brash, indeed.

He looked at the two surprisingly credible witnesses and told himself that Small had managed to find what he really needed. He couldn’t wait until St. Jean and Parent got a look at these two in court. He would have the pleasure of watching their visions of a conviction shatter like glass.

He asked them a few more questions, more as a formality than anything else. He was already sure he had the witnesses he’d been hoping for. They had probably been told ahead of time about all the different questions that they may face, but that was not a problem. They looked good, they spoke well, and their story was believable in its simplicity. He was sure they were telling the truth about never having been arrested before, so he was unconcerned that St. Jean might be able to dig up anything prejudicial about them. Bratt’s instincts told him they would be clean as a whistle. It was almost too good to be true.

Sims and Jordan spent less than an hour in his office. When they left, Bratt remained seated at his desk, watching Kouri putter around, straightening out files, with a big goofy grin on his face. As he watched, and thought about the two witnesses, a line from an old cartoon came to mind: “my spider-sense is tingling.”

“What aren’t you telling me, Peter?”

Kouri stopped his paper shuffling, but didn’t turn to look at him.

“I’m sorry?”

“I can feel it in my gut. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“What wouldn’t I tell you?”

“Those witnesses were perfect. Too perfect. There’s no such thing in my book.”

“Well, OK, I did tell Small, tell them actually, to dress nicer than the last pair.”

“So you met with them before today.”

Kouri nodded. “And I also went over some of the questions with them.”

“Did you go over the answers, too?”

“What do you mean?”

Bratt stood up and walked over to Kouri, then walked back again. The answers to his questions seemed to be staring him in the face, despite Kouri’s pretense at innocence, and he could only repeat to himself, “too good to be true, too good to be true.”

“They’re just too perfect, dammit. Too clean cut. Too polite. Too well-dressed. Their stories match too well. They were finishing each other’s sentences, for God’s sake.”

“Well, they were told what to expect. What’s wrong with that?”

“You told them?”

“Yes.”

“‘My man, Pete’,” Bratt quoted Small. Kouri said nothing, but his earlier blank expression was quickly turning to fear and guilt. “What have you been up to?”

“I was just trying to help.”

“Just trying to help,”
Bratt thought.
If that isn’t an admission of a fuck-up, I don’t know what is.

“Listen, Pete. You were the one who looked so shocked when I spoke to Small the last time we were up there. Like you couldn’t believe what I told him.”

“Why should I have been shocked? All you told him was that if you didn’t think the witnesses were any good then the jury wouldn’t either.”

“Is that what I said?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Is that what I meant?”

“How should I know what you meant? Am I supposed to read your mind now, too?”

Everything Kouri said made sense, but it still sounded like he was making excuses. He wondered if he was just being paranoid. Before he had a chance to question Kouri further, Sylvie burst into his office, her face constricted with fear and grief.

“It’s J.P! Something happened at the court.”

Bratt jumped to his feet.

“What? What happened?”

“I think it’s his heart,” she blurted out the words, the tears following instantly after. “There’s a constable on the phone. Oh God, he says it’s really bad.”

Bratt rushed to his desk and picked up the phone, having to try twice before he found the blinking button to get the line.

“Bratt here. What’s going on?”

“It’s Constable Lefebvre. Your partner is in bad shape. It looks like a heart attack. The ambulance is on its way.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s still at 3.07.”

“
I’m on my way.”

Bratt hung up and rushed out of his office, grabbing his coat as he passed Kouri. All thoughts about the Small trial and the too good to be true witnesses had disappeared.

He didn’t bother to stop to put on his shoe-rubbers and as he got out of the building and ran down the snow-covered sidewalk his feet constantly threatened to slip out from under him. He jumped over snow banks and jostled slower pedestrians, but eventually made it to the courthouse, panting heavily.

An
Urgences Santé
ambulance was already parked on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance. Ahead of Bratt, two technicians were wheeling a stretcher in as fast as they could, a large black medical bag teetering precariously on top of it.

Out of breath, Bratt struggled to catch up with them, but they crossed the main mezzanine quickly and disappeared around the corner. As he ran, he saw other people heading in the same direction, some looking concerned, others just curious.

He turned the corner in front of Room 3.07 and had to stop abruptly to not run right into the large crowd that had gathered. A constable, he presumed it was Lefebvre, spotted him and pulled him aside.

“You’ll have to wait here,” he said, speaking slowly to make sure that Bratt understood what he said. “The technicians cleared the room. I’m sure they’re doing all that can be done for him.”

Bratt nodded wordlessly, still breathing heavily from the run. His mouth was dry and he briefly wondered about his own physical condition. The constable may have had the same concern, because he led him to a nearby bench and sat him down.

“I’ll get you some water,” he said, before turning and disappearing into the crowd.

Struggling to catch his breath, Bratt tried to stop his mind from racing out of control so that he could think clearly about what was happening and what this all meant. He had long been concerned about Leblanc’s health, but there was no way he could have prepared himself for this. Now, it was a question of how serious the attack had been. To his knowledge this was the first time that Leblanc had had one. He only hoped that this lessened the chance that it would be fatal.

Shit, what the hell do you know about this? He could already be dead for all you know. And if he does die, after nearly two decades together, what then?

Bratt bowed his head, his face buried in the palms of his hands. He hated himself for being selfish, but he couldn’t chase away the thought that Leblanc’s heart attack had come at the worst
possible time.