Читать книгу Winston Patrick Mystery 2-Book Bundle - David Russell W. - Страница 21

Carl looked like hell. Incarceration, even for the very short term, does not agree with most people. This is especially true for first timers and the wrongfully accused who have no real business being in a jail cell. An old television documentary called Scared Straight placed young people into the prison system for a period of time in order to show them what they could expect from a life of crime. Though the pre-trial jail certainly was much more humane and safer all around than the maximum security prison in which Carl could expect to do time if convicted, spending the night behind bars had made a lasting impression on him.

He was brought to a small room much like the one we had spoken in last night, although a bit bigger, including a longish conference-style table designed to permit lawyers to spread out the reams of paperwork in front of their clients, to show them the product for which they were being ridiculously overcharged. While I knew he would have been safe and free from harassment from some of the rougher criminal elements—at least in the short term—Carl looked as though he’d sat all night with his back to the wall, terrified of what might befall him, while he awaited my return.

“How are you holding up?” I asked him as he sat down.

“I’m okay,” he tried to assure me unconvincingly. “I’m fine.”

I sat down next to him at the table and laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure this has been the absolutely shittiest night of your life. It’s okay to have been scared by it. It’s totally normal.”

He looked around the room, as though checking to make sure we were alone. “Yeah. It wasn’t so bad. What happens now?”

I sat back and explained to him our current situation, what would happen when he appeared in court on Monday, and that I had the services of Derek Cuffling, one of the best defence lawyers in the city on our side. At that he perked up a little, until he found out I wouldn’t be next to him in the courtroom for his first appearance.

“What are you talking about?” he pleaded. “You’re not going to be there?”

“I can’t.”

“Winston, you’re my lawyer. I want you to be there.”

“You’ll be in good hands with Derek. I’m telling you, you’ll be in even better hands.”

Carl had a panicked, pleading look in his eyes. “Winston,” he continued. “I know this guy is good. He may be the best even, but I don’t know him. I know you.”

Gently laying one hand against his shoulder again, I took his hand in my other. “Listen to me. I told you this was going to be difficult. It is particularly difficult for me, not just because of the fact that it involves you having an affair with a student. It is difficult because I do not practice law full time any more. I’m a teacher. There are times when I need to call in some help. This is one of those times. If we’re lucky, we may not need to worry about court time after this, but if we do, I’m not sure how we’re going to work around it. That’s why I need Derek to work with me. If anyone can find a way to clear this before it even gets to trial, it’s him.”

He sighed and settled back down in his chair. “Okay. Whatever you think is best.”

“Trust me. This is the only way it can work.”

A moment passed during which neither of us quite knew where to go next. Finally, he turned to me and asked “How much is going to be, you know, out there, about me and Trish?”

“What do you mean?”

He hesitated a moment. “I mean, will people have to know about our relationship? Do we have to reveal that?”

“Carl, the police pretty much are locking up the physical evidence that the sexual relationship took place.” Again he flinched at my description of their relationship as “sexual”. Clearly, in his head it was something beyond just the physical. I was defending a hopelessly romantic biology teacher. “At this point, I have no plans to contest that point in our defence. I think it would be best simply to admit to that part of the relationship and move on. If we try to hide it or get that information quashed and it comes out, we’ll just look worse. I’m sorry. There’s just no way we can get around that.”

The defeated look returned to his face. “I guess I can pretty much forget about teaching again when this is over.” He looked so forlorn it was painful to look at. Carl may have loved Tricia Bellamy, but it was clear he loved teaching. He would soon be grieving the loss of both loves. I wondered where love of his wife and grief at what was surely the demise of that relationship fit into his emotions.

“I won’t sugar coat this in any way. You had a sexual relationship with a student. Yeah. You won’t be teaching again when the trial is over. Right now, I need to concentrate on keeping you out of prison for Tricia’s murder.”

“I didn’t kill her,” he protested.

“I know, but the reality of the presumption of innocence isn’t as cut and dried as it sounds. Yes, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you’re guilty, but the single best defence we can give is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you’re not.”

“How are we gonna do that?” he asked. Hmm. Legitimate question. I reached into the battered leather attaché case I had carried since I was an undergraduate student and pulled out a yellow legal pad.

“Let’s start with Wednesday. Three nights ago, when Tricia was murdered. Where were you?”

“Where was I?”

“My first line of defence for you would be to place you definitively in a location where you could not have killed Trish. What did you do on Wednesday night?”

He thought for a moment. I couldn’t expect and didn’t want his response to come too easily. If it did, it would appear he had given it a lot of thought, as though planning his alibi. Having him stop to try to remember helped to cover over those still lingering doubts I might have about his involvement.

“Well,” he began, “I worked fairly late at school.”

“Until what time?” I pushed him, jotting down his ambiguous response, starting what would surely amount to many pages of notes. It occurred to me that with an arrest coming so quickly, I had not even been informed if an accurate time of death had been determined by the coroner. Note to self: better start finding out the facts of this case—quickly.

Carl stared momentarily into space, searching the recesses of his memory for what he felt was the appropriate response. “I guess it was around eight or eight thirty,” he finally offered tentatively.

“Are you sure about the time?”

“Well, no. But I know it was quite late. With all that had been happening with Tricia, the breakup and our fighting, our . . .” he paused momentarily. Finally he began again. “Our making up. I had just let work fall behind. I had labs to mark from the previous week that I hadn’t even gotten to yet, and there was a lab scheduled for Thursday morning that I had to set up. Frog dissection. It takes a lot of work to have everything ready.”

“I can imagine.” I reflected queasily on the image of Carl wandering his biology lab preparing a whole host of dead frogs for his kids to carve into. No wonder I had ailed nearly every science course I ever took.

From my own memory, I recalled that Ralph Bremner, the P.E. teacher had called me during Law and Order, which meant it was after ten p.m. How sad was my life that television was so important, I could figure out what I was doing and even schedule events around my favourite shows? Another note to self: get a social life.

But knowing the call had come in after ten o’clock also told me that probably a couple of hours had transpired between the discovery of Tricia’s body and Bremner’s phone call to me. Assuming Tricia was found relatively soon after her murder—another detail I needed to pin down post haste—that would place her time of death around eight o’clock, or sometime just before. If Carl’s timing was correct—and if we could find a way to verify it—he was working at the school while Tricia was being murdered. All of a sudden my first truly high profile murder case didn’t look quite so bad any more.

Jotting down the details of timelines running through my head, I turned back to Carl. “Did you talk to anyone while you were working at the school?”

He suddenly seemed to clue in to what I was attempting to do. His dour expression slowly began to lighten. “I guess I must have spoken to someone.”

“Who?” I demanded. With the scent of an alibi for my client, I was getting anxious. I admit I already had visions of tossing Carl’s alibi in Furlo’s face and watching him try to squirm out of it.

“Well,” he began, “I had a couple of students with me for a while. The school has a budget for lab assistants, and we’re given a certain amount of time to have them help us.”

“Who were they?” I asked, masking my disappointment. Given I was planning to stipulate that Carl had had a relationship with a student who regularly stayed after school with him, I would rather not have needed to rely on the testimony of other students alone in a science lab with Carl as his alibi. But given that they might prove to be credible witnesses, I jotted down their names just the same.

“Does that help?” Carl wondered.

“It may,” I offered noncommittally. “What time did these two students leave?”

Again he paused to think. “I don’t remember exactly. It wasn’t too late. One of them had a chemistry exam the next day, and I didn’t want to take away from her study time.”

“Think, Carl. Getting as close to the exact time is important.”

His face brightened suddenly. “Wait a minute,” he proclaimed. “The lab assistants carry time sheets. I would have signed them with the hours they put in. We can check the exact time with the office.”

“Good,” I told him, putting it on the side of my legal pad under the subheading “to do.”

“But I think it was about six o’clock when they left.” That didn’t please me immensely. If my suspicions about Tricia’s time of death were correct, that would still have provided Carl with plenty of time to meet with her and kill her. It was possible the police already knew that.

“What about other people in the building? Adults, preferably.” Carl peered off into space, no doubt conjuring up images of the night he lost Tricia. It was helpful for me to think of Carl as a grieving lover. The more sympathetic he appeared, the better. “Did you run into any other teachers working late that night?”

He chuckled. “No. I think a lot of my colleagues think I’m some kind of a workaholic because I’m often at school so late.” Actually, a lot of his colleagues now had their own ideas about Carl’s reasons for hanging around the school so late. I was certain I was going to hear from many of them at school come Monday.

“What about janitors? Cleaning staff? Doesn’t our school have night school classes?”

“Tuesday and Thursday,” he replied. “They wouldn’t have been in on Wednesday night.” He thought a moment longer. “I’m sure at some point I talked to Jurgen. I always see him when I work late.”

“Who’s Jurgen?”

“He’s one of the night cleaning janitors. He cleans the science wing of the building. I’m sure you’ve met him at some point.” He was right. A large high school has so many staff, it’s hard to keep track. Thinking about it, although I had said hello on any number of occasions since joining the staff, I could not recall the name of the janitor who came and cleaned my classroom and wing of the building every day. I wondered if he thought I was a snob. I wondered if I was a snob.

“Do you know what time that would have been?”

“No. Not exactly. But he definitely came in to empty the waste baskets and sweep the floors. And I know it was after the kids left, because he had popped his head in a couple of times while they were still there and said he would come back later. The last time I saw him, he did come in, and I was there when he cleaned my room. We talked.”

“What about?”

“Oh, the usual. How his family was doing. The Canucks. That kind of thing.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to him too,” I told him, writing down Jurgen’s name on my growing list of things to look into. I wondered how much of this it might be possible to do on the weekend. It seemed to me the school had provided me with a list of all of the staff’s phone numbers. Of course, it also seemed to me that it was in my desk in my classroom. Wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good there.

“All right,” I continued, “I think this could be helpful. I’m going to talk to these people and anyone else who might have been there and can verify your whereabouts.”

“So they may be able to help?” he asked hopefully.

“Let’s keep our fingers crossed. A lot will depend on finding out Tricia’s time of death. Once we have something definitive, we can start asking people if they can confirm your presence away from the crime scene.” I decided to take one last stab at jogging his memory before leaving. “Are you sure there wasn’t anyone else you talked to?”

He looked at me hesitantly.

“What?” I demanded. “What is it? This is no time to hold out on me, Carl. If there’s someone you’re thinking of, you need to let me know.”

“Bonnie,” he said quietly. “My wife.”

“Oh,” I replied gently, “what about her? Was she at the school with you?”

“Well, no,” he began, “but I did call her at one point, I think just before I left the school.”

“Is it possible she would remember the time of your call, or for that matter, when you got home?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” he confirmed. “But, given what’s going to come out about me and Trish, I don’t know how helpful she’s going to be.”

“Surely she’ll tell the truth?” I asked hopefully, though I couldn’t necessarily believe she would either. It was one thing to defend your spouse against spurious allegations, but when the spouse you thought you knew and loved so well was sleeping with an eighteen-year-old high school student, it would surely turn your world upside down. I knew Bonnie Turbot could prove to be a very unreliable witness for Carl’s defence. Still, it had to be checked out.

“I guess she will,” Carl said. “But who knows how much she remembers? I don’t know if she’ll remember exactly what time I called home. Isn’t it possible to check the school’s phone records?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it,” I told him. Unlike what you see on television cop shows, even the good ones like Law and Order, getting a computerized printout of all of a phone line’s activities is no simple matter. I knew it could be done, but it would probably take a court order to get the phone company to comply. I put that on my list under the subheading of “ask Derek.”

“Wait a minute,” Carl blurted out. “We have one of those boxes!”

“What boxes?”

“You know, for the phone. It shows the numbers coming in so you can decide whether or not to answer the phone.”

“You mean call display?”

“Yeah. That’s it. We just got it, in fact.”

“When?”

He searched his memory again, then looked at me gloomily. “Sunday afternoon. We had gotten some hang-up phone calls during the past couple of weeks, so on Sunday we went to the phone store in the mall and picked up the call display. I had just hooked it up.”

“Did you find out who was making the calls?”

“No. The caller had blocked their number, but I had a pretty good idea.”

“Tricia.”

“Yeah. I think she was planning to tell Bonnie about us.”

I started doing the math in my head. “You told me you and Tricia had been broken up for over a week, right?”

“Yeah,” he confirmed sadly. “It was on a Thursday. She came to me on the Monday of this last week with her threats to go to the principal. So that makes it ten or eleven days since we had broken up.”

“Were the calls coming before you broke up?”

He thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Think carefully. This could be important. You started receiving hang-up calls before you and Tricia broke up?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” He was nodding his head to his own inner dialogue now. “We did. It was definitely before Tricia and I broke up.”

“So why would Tricia have been calling to tell Bonnie about your relationship before you even broke up with her?”

That seemed to stymie him for a moment. Finally, he looked at me and said “I don’t know.”

“All right,” I said, making a few more notes. “But in the meantime, your call display unit should be able to tell us the date and time you called from the school. Have you erased it since Wednesday night?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay then. I will definitely look into that.” I closed my legal pad and plopped it into the battered attaché case. “Is there anything else I can do for you today? Is there someone you’d like me to call?”

Carl looked freshly dejected. Looking down at his hands, he shook his head slowly. “No. I think the fewer people who are involved the better.”

I stood up but put my hand on his shoulder one more time momentarily before leaving. “Okay. We’ll try to keep this as low-key as possible. But I’m going to have to start going out and beating the bushes a little for information.”

“All right,” he told me. “Do what you have to do.” It broke my heart to leave my friend sitting there, but there was nothing I could do about it until Derek got him through his bail hearing on Monday. For now, I was more useful to him outside the pre-trial centre, trying to gather information.

“Winston?” He looked up at me. “What’s going to happen to my classes?” I had to admire his dedication. With all he was going through, his mind was still on the wellbeing of his students.

“I arranged for a substitute for you for yesterday. For the time being, I imagine she’ll continue to teach your classes.”

“Is she good?” he asked.

I really didn’t know. I had given much less thought to Carl’s students than he obviously had. I thought I should probably try to find out a little about the students he taught on a daily basis. Some of them might prove to be helpful in his defence, though I knew I had to be very careful about that line between my role as Carl’s lawyer and my role as a teacher in the school. Carl was my first concern, but as a teacher I still needed to safeguard the wellbeing of any student in the building.

“I guess she’s good enough,” I told him.

I have found that people who truly are innocent of a crime tend to believe there is no possible way they can be convicted of it. “If I didn’t do it, I can’t go to jail” seems to be the logic. I have also found it to be a naïve view. The good news was that with many of the clients I had defended, if they weren’t responsible for the crime they were convicted of, they were likely responsible for some other act for which they had yet to be caught. It’s an entirely wrongheaded point of view for a defence lawyer, but it was how I managed to achieve some peace—if not sleep—when I lost a case that I knew I should have won.

An idea dawned on me. “Look,” I told Carl, “I know you have a lot on your mind, but there is not a whole lot you can do for your case right now until I find out some more of the facts. So why don’t you make yourself useful while you’re in here?”

“Okay,” he said.

“The school is going to assume you’re away for the long term. But this new teacher isn’t permanent yet. Why don’t you spend a few of your hours in here preparing some really detailed lesson plans for her? At least you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing your classes are well looked after.” I didn’t add that it would be something I could bring up later to demonstrate some of his redeeming character traits.

He seemed to brighten at the thought of doing some work for school. Strange. I had been teaching only three months, yet I didn’t feel that much enthusiasm about preparing lessons for class. Of course, I hadn’t been sitting in a jail cell all weekend either.

“That’s a great idea,” he said. “I could plan lessons for the next week at least. I could even prepare notes for labs.”

“Excellent.” I smiled at him. I would feel a little bit easier with Carl in jail until Monday knowing he was at least actively engaged in something. “What do you need?”

He thought for a moment. “Something to write on, for starters.” I reached into my attaché case and pulled out a separate yellow legal pad, plopping it down on the table in front of him. I also dropped a couple of pens on the table. “My textbooks would be useful, but I think I can basically go from memory.”

“Do you have copies of the textbooks at home?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to go by your house to look at a few things, especially your call display unit. If you can make do for today, I’ll make sure I drop them by tomorrow.”

Carl looked much more relaxed than when I had arrived. For some people, vacations are the most debilitating part of the year. Work is the relaxation they need. Carl seemed to be one of those. I already knew he’d taught summer school each year he’d been a teacher.

“Thanks, Winston. You’ve been such a good friend.”

“I’m here to be a good lawyer, more importantly. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

We said our goodbyes, and I left him inside the interview room, indicating to the guard outside we were done and Carl could be returned to his cell.

Leaving the pre-trial centre, I turned left on Hastings Street and walked the two blocks to my parked car. It was late afternoon, but I wasn’t yet headed for home.

I had plenty of work to do.