Читать книгу Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - Jack Batten - Страница 13

TEN HOURS LATER, I walked out the front door wearing my lightweight grey suit. It was James Turkin’s sentencing day, the kid who’d done the number on the cab driver in the underground garage. The sentencing would be held in one of the courtrooms in Old City Hall, and I didn’t need to wear my counsel’s gown for the occasion. As Toronto buildings go, Old City Hall is dowdy and lovable. It’s made of red sandstone and sits in its old maid’s pride on Queen Street at Bay. It made do very nicely as Toronto’s city hall from 1890 till 1966 when a new civic building, spectacular but a trifle short on humanity, went up on the other side of Bay and the politicians and bureaucrats moved in. Since the move, Old City Hall has been given over to the Provincial Courts. They’re the lowest on the rung of courts and the busiest in criminal cases. Provincial Court judges hear all the messy low-life stuff, and the lawyers who appear before them don’t require gowns. I had on a shirt with fine vertical grey stripes and a plain maroon tie. I set my face in an expression to match my wardrobe. Sincere.

I walked the fifteen minutes it took to get from my front door to Old City Hall. A breeze was blowing up from the lake and there was a hint of fish in the air. I knew James Turkin would be in the holding cells in the basement on the northeast corner of Old City Hall. He would have been brought in in a yellow police van that morning from the West End Detention Centre with a bunch of other guys who couldn’t make bail and were waiting out the time until their day in court in the gracious custody of the Province of Ontario. I rapped on the thick wooden door to the holding cells, and it was opened almost immediately by a policeman who was holding a plastic cup of steaming coffee in his right hand.

“You got a villain in here, Crang?” the cop asked.

He knew me from many villains past. His name was Moriarty, and he was built like a linebacker who’d gone to seed, six four and close to three hundred pounds. There were dark sweat stains radiating from the armpits of his blue policeman’s shirt and grumpiness radiating from his flushed policeman’s face.

“Warm enough for you, Moriarty?” I asked.

“Which is yours?” Moriarty turned to pick up a clipboard on a chair inside the door. He spilled a small stream of coffee on his shirt.

“Shit,” he said without much expression.

“Kid named Turkin,” I said.

“Black or white?” Moriarty asked. “Got most of the niggers in number one cell. Rest of them are in two.”

“A whiter shade of pale,” I said.

A young cop with a moustache standing behind Moriarty laughed.

“What’s with you?” Moriarty asked him.

“The man made a funny,” the young cop said. “See, there used to be a rock group—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Moriarty cut him off. He looked at me. “Fucking heat.”

“Turkin,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah.” Moriarty put his coffee on the flattened green cushion that covered his chair. Drops ran down the edges of the cup and made a wet ring on the cushion. Moriarty would be delighted when he noticed. He flipped through the pages on the clipboard.

“Turkin, Turkin,” he said. “Over there, number two cell, and don’t mess around. I already had five of you lawyers in here this morning.”

I stepped through the door and Moriarty slammed it behind me. Inside, the air was ripe.

“Like a rose garden this morning.”

“One of those assholes threw up,” Moriarty said.

I crossed the ten or twelve feet to number two cell. It was a space no larger than twenty feet square, all bars on the side facing into the room. Twenty or twenty-five men leaned against the back wall or sat on benches on the other side of the bars. Nobody talked. James Turkin was easy to spot. He had the looks of an earlier James: sulky and white-faced, with light brown wavy hair and a wiry body, he was a throwback to James Dean.

He saw me and stepped close to the bars. I said hello. He stared at me. It wasn’t the stare of some of the wackos I get for clients. There was a flavour of the cool to James Turkin rather than a suggestion of the catatonic.

“Your parents aren’t coming down,” I said.

“Figures.”

“When you go upstairs, I want to say something to the judge that will make him look kindly on you.”

The kid shrugged.

“Otherwise it’s the reformatory.”

“I thought about it already,” he said in his flat voice.

“Maybe you thought the wrong things. I know you’ve got some brains. The pre-sentence report says you passed grade twelve.”

“Big deal.”

“Says you were brilliant in maths.”

“So?”

Behind me, I could hear Moriarty cursing the spilled coffee on his green cushion.

“This may not interest you, Jimmy,” I said, “but for the hell of it, I’ll tell you I’ve acted for a thousand guys in the same situation as yours and I think I know how to help you in front of the judge this morning.” “James.”

“Never Jimmy?”

“James,” the kid said. “And I don’t give a shit who you acted for.”

His eyes looked into mine without a blink.

I said, “You got any suggestions about what you’d like me to tell the judge?”

“Such as?”

“Ambitions,” I said. “What do you have in mind as a sequel to your splendid career hitting on cab drivers?”

“I want to be a real good break-and-enter man.”

I contemplated smacking the kid’s chalky kisser.

“Why?” I asked instead.

“Computers suck.”

Maybe we’d established a basis for communication.

I said, “I’m not keen on the age of electronics myself.”

James Turkin leaned closer to the bars and his voice dropped to the confidential level. Lower volume, same monotone, more voluble.

“Any creep can screw money out of a computer if they know how to punch into it,” he said. “All these fourteen-year-old kids at school, the ones with the glasses, those wimps, they got their systems worked out. I did it myself. So what’s the deal? But, like, one night this spring, I figured my way into the Canadian Tire store up Yonge Street, right past the alarm, no noise, no tipoff, nothing. I walked around in there a couple hours. Nobody knew. It was a total high.”

“What did you take out when you left?” I asked.

“VCR for my sister.”

“That’s all?”

“All I could think she needed.”

What was I dealing with? The Pale Pimpernel?

“I felt real raced up,” Turkin said. “Getting in that store, not anybody could do it. It’s what I’m meant for, break and enter.”

“If you’re such a smarty,” I said, “how come you mixed in this little contretemps in the underground garage that’s going to send you to the slammer, barring an act of God?”

“It was the girl’s idea, the one who brought the cab down the garage,” the kid said. His voice had lost the zest it displayed during his celebration of the art of breaking and entering. “Not my idea,” he said. “I helped her out because we were—involved.”

“You were what?”

“I was banging her.”

The kid wasn’t a hopeless cause, just had a slightly twisted sense of chivalry.

“Upstairs,” I said, “call the judge ‘sir’ when he speaks to you and stand up straight in the prisoners’ box. Small details help.”

“I got excellent posture.”

It was true. “See you in court,” I said and turned away.

Moriarty had vacated his post at the door.

“He’s gone to wipe off his shirt,” the young cop said.

“My guy’s coming up in Twenty-one Court,” I said. “You mind taking a look who’s sitting there today?”

The cop lifted the clipboard from Moriarty’s chair and leafed slowly through the sheets of paper, one sheet for each courtroom in the building.

“Twenty-two’s got Robertson,” he recited. “Twenty-one’s got— hey, you hit it lucky.”

“Not Bert?”

“His Honour the old softie.”

I knew James Turkin wasn’t going to jail.

The young cop unlocked the door to the corridor. I walked up the stairs to the first floor whistling a happy tune. From The King and I. Bert Ormsby was a judge who led his own version of the Children’s Crusade. Confronted by a teenage accused, his heart bled, his eyes watered, his brain turned mushy. If Jack the Ripper were an adolescent, Ormsby would give him probation. He wouldn’t put eighteen-year-old James Turkin inside, not even if I told him Turkin had the nerve of a fifty-year-old second-storey man and the morals of a slug.

It was twenty minutes to court time. I wandered down the hall to the front of the building. Two scrawny, animated men in their early twenties came through the big wooden doors and up the steps into the high, airy lobby. One had a package of Camels rolled in the sleeve of his wrinkled orange T-shirt. The other had Rambo tattooed on his right biceps. The guy was the size of Sylvester Stallone’s thigh. He and his buddy looked like they subsisted on a diet of hot dogs and white bread. They found a place on one of the benches that line the corridor outside the courtrooms along the east side of the building. A black man with his hair in greasy dreadlocks sat at the other end of the bench talking to an overweight girl in a halter top and tight pink jeans that squeezed the fat out over her waistband. A Canadian Indian stood motionless by the wall, not touching it. He had a long scar on his right cheek and a hangover that made him squint his eyes against the light. In my line of work, you run into a lot of interesting folks.

Twenty-one Court is on the first floor directly over the holding cells. When I walked in, James Turkin was sitting behind the wire mesh of the prisoners’ box on the left side of the courtroom. He was in between a man with mussed hair and a stained white jacket and a kid in a ripped Blue Jays shirt. In his pressed khakis and clean white dress shirt, Turkin cut the nattiest figure in the box. The judge arrived promptly at ten o’clock and everyone in court rose while he settled on the bench. Bert Ormsby looks like the guy Central Casting would send over to play Gramps in a TV sitcom. He’s in his early sixties, apple-cheeked, kindly-faced, grey-haired, and rumply. Up close, his eyes probably twinkle. It took him fifteen minutes to process eight requests for adjournments, a bail application, and two other guilty pleas.

“I’ll hear number twelve on the list, James Turkin,” he said.

I stood up at the counsel’s table.

“Good morning, Mr. Crang,” the judge said.

“Your Honour.”

“Your client has pleaded guilty,” he said, “and I note from the pre-sentence report in front of me, Mr. Crang, that he’s eighteen years old.”

I said, “You might also note, Your Honour, that Mr. Turkin has a previous record, one conviction for possession of a small amount of marijuana and another for theft under two hundred dollars. I emphasize that neither offence involved violence, Your Honour, and though the matter presently before the court is an assault, I would suggest that Mr. Turkin made the error of allowing himself to be influenced by his companion in the crime. He acknowledges and regrets the incident, and he’d like to assure the court that he’ll never again permit himself to be drawn into such a misadventure.”

Where have you gone, Clarence Darrow? If Bert Ormsby ached for youngsters to be rescued, I’d give him James Turkin in self-recrimination and remorse.

“What does the crown attorney say?” Judge Ormsby asked.

The crown attorney was a pretty woman with streaked blonde hair and a frown.

“Your Honour, this was a heinous crime,” she said.

“I thought you crowns reserved heinous for the Supreme Court,” I said to her, not loud enough for the judge to catch.

The crown attorney’s frown lines tightened.

“The prisoner used force to rob the taxi driver,” she said to Judge Ormsby. “I submit the sentence should be commensurate with the violence of the act.”

“Your Honour,” I said, “there’s been restitution of the money by my client.”

The crown snapped, “A term in reformatory is called for.”

“May I suggest, with Your Honour’s indulgence,” I said, “that jail would work to the detriment of my client’s prospects. He has behind him an excellent scholastic record and I submit it promises a positive future.”

Judge Ormsby aimed a grandfatherly smile at Turkin in the prisoners’ box.

“Have you considered community college, young man?” he asked.

My kid turned his sullen face in my direction.

I said, “My understanding, Your Honour, is that the accused has ambitious career plans.”

Judge Ormsby beamed another smile and said reformatory seemed inappropriate in the circumstances. The crown attorney’s frown deepened into a scowl and she made a display of tossing her file on the counsel table. Judge Ormsby put Turkin on probation for two years. He told Turkin to report to his probation officer every month, find a job, avoid evil companions, and stay out of underground garages. Fifteen minutes later, after Turkin had signed some papers and arranged his first probation meeting, he and I sat on a bench on Old City Hall’s front lawn.

“Thanks,” the kid said. The word seemed to give him serious pain.

I said, “I trust I won’t see you in court again.”

“Fucking right.”

“Does this mean you’re going to tread the straight and narrow?”

“It means I’m not going to get caught.”

“That’s what Murph the Surf said.”

“Who’s he?”

“Infamous jewel thief and convict before your time.”

“So laugh at me,” Turkin said. Something earnest was struggling to break through his sullen expression. “I can already do any lock on the market. Shutting down alarm systems, shit, that’s a touch. And I met this old geezer when I was in the West End, guy about forty, he told me the real professional stuff about checking out a place before you go in.”

“What was this forty-year-old geezer doing in the West End?”

“He made a little mistake.”

“James, isn’t that a lesson?”

“Yeah, he told me his mistake. I won’t make it.”

The kid shook my hand and walked away until he disappeared into the crowd of shoppers crossing Queen Street to Simpsons. He was probably right. He wouldn’t make that mistake.