The Guilty (3 page)

He thought that people hadn’t changed much, twenty-first century or not. It was still too easy to believe that the woman was a slut and the man had simply done what any normal man in his position would have done.

Bratt knew that, especially with Claire and Nate, these propositions were as far from the truth as black is from white. But when it came to getting that message across in the courtroom there was nothing that he could do about it, and Jeannie should have known that.

He knew it was trite, but he didn’t make the rules, he just played by them. Perron, whatever she thought of him, had merely done the same. It was pointless for her to blame the lawyers. But, blame them she did.

When the afternoon session had finally ended, the jury had been left with a dozen questions that Claire could not answer. The questions had ranged from why she wore what she wore, to why she had waited two days before going to the police to lay charges against Morris. Despite his sudden dislike for Perron, Bratt knew these were perfectly fair questions, the kind every lawyer would ask. Last night, with Jeannie and Bratt in her apartment, Claire had been able to provide acceptable answers for all these questions and others too. But her apartment was a million miles away from the courtroom, and was but a distant memory to her that afternoon.

Judge Dion had barely left the courtroom at the end of the day when Claire had rushed out and headed for the nearest bathroom. Bratt tried to put his arm around Jeannie’s shoulders to comfort her as they walked out the courtroom’s double doors, and that was when she had turned and yelled at him.

“YOU’RE A HEARTLESS BASTARD, JUST LIKE HIM! YOU DON’T GIVE
A SHIT WHO’S TELLING THE TRUTH AS LONG AS YOU COME OUT ON TOP!”

Then she turned and ran down the hallway after her best friend.

Bratt was stunned at being blamed, although he knew all too well what Jeannie had meant. He’d had nothing to do with Claire’s mistreatment, yet he couldn’t shake the sense that he was as responsible as Perron.

He realized, with some embarrassment, that her loud voice had drawn some amused looks from several people who had been leaving the courtroom behind them. He was relieved that the one reporter covering the case had continued to follow Claire as she ran down the hallway, and so wasn’t able to record Jeannie’s words for posterity. Perron, of all people, had been nearby and had heard her, though, and he placed a hand in sympathy on Bratt’s back.

“That’s the problem with young girls, Bob,” he said. “They can’t control their emotions.”

Bratt glowered angrily, not particularly welcoming Perron’s commiseration just then. He had a strong urge to rip into him, but stopped short when he noticed the crowd that was gathering around the smiling lawyer, and the reporter rushing back to get some pithy comments from Perron for the next day’s papers. He suddenly didn’t have anything devastatingly clever to say.

“I gotta go, Tony,” was all he could mumble, and he pushed his way through Perron’s gathering admirers and strode quickly toward the nearest exit.

All that was left of the trial was Morris’s testimony, which would start the next morning. Having heard Morris testify with calm and false sincerity four years earlier, Bratt knew that he’d have no trouble getting the jurors on his side.

They would surely waste little time in acquitting him, Bratt thought, all the while clucking to themselves over the naïve young girl who had gotten in over her head and now was trying to hold the older man responsible.

He was as confident of the outcome as if he had pleaded the case himself.

Sometime during the night Bratt finally drifted off to sleep. When he woke up, after hitting the snooze button on his clock radio three times, it was nearly eight o’clock. A small, vengeful part of him hoped that Jeannie had slept as badly as he had, but he regretted the thought right away. It had been hard enough on both of them to witness Claire being cross-examined. He would try to be a little more understanding about why she blamed him along with Perron for how it had gone. The little voice in his head, which had been quite insistent the night before, woke up just in time to ask him if Jeannie wasn’t right to do so. 

“Shut up, already,” Bratt said out loud.

Great, now I’m talking to myself
, he thought as he headed for the shower.
From now on I mind my own business
.

He showered and shaved, and ate breakfast while reading the sports section of his morning paper. He assiduously avoided the city beat where, no doubt, a detailed account of the previous day’s courthouse activities could be found. The trials and tribulations of Montreal’s once-mighty hockey team were sufficiently aggravating morning fare.

By the time he left for work he had stopped hearing that irritating little voice, or, at least, had stopped listening to it.

Bratt et Leblanc, Avocats
. The brass sign in the lobby at 511
Place d’Armes
in Old Montreal was big enough to be seen from the street. Bratt pushed the heavy steel and glass door open and entered the stately brownstone. It was built in 1888 and, at nine stories, was the first skyscraper in Montreal.  He stamped the snow from his feet on the rubber mat at the entrance and headed for the elevators, their doors also plated in shiny brass.

He and J.P. Leblanc had started out together sixteen years earlier, in a much less elegant building not too far from where their offices were now. Leblanc had been spinning his wheels for three years at Legal Aid when he decided to propose partnership to his old law school buddy Robert Bratt.

Bratt had begun his own legal career at the provincial prosecutor’s office, but too much internal politics and not enough money were incentives enough for him to jump to the other side of the judicial divide. 

At the time his immediate superior was Francis Parent, a Jesuit-educated prosecutor with a nearly religious devotion to ridding his city’s hallowed streets of criminals and sinners. He cleaved to the virtuous path of his career as if he was following the Via Dolorosa.

Parent, who was an average trial lawyer of uncommon self-righteousness, looked upon Bratt’s departure from the Crown as an act of betrayal to his cause. He was certain that the young lawyer was selling his soul and jumping into a moral cesspool by joining the defense.

But Bratt had seen enough in his three years working with prosecutors and policemen to know that few of them had an exclusive claim to the moral high ground. In law, he learned, it was all a man could do to remain true to his own ethical code.  

Heading up to his office in the elevator, Bratt felt the worries of the past twenty-four hours start to melt away. Even more than his expensive apartment with a view of Mount Royal, or his lakeside cottage in the Eastern Townships, this office was his true home.

Here he was among his own kind. Nobody would question his values or try to burden him with guilt. Nobody would criticize him for how he made his living. He was the unquestioned top dog in the firm, and that simple thought put the spring back into his step and brought a wide grin to his face. When he walked through the firm’s ornate wooden doors nobody would have suspected the inner turmoil that had kept him up half the night.

Sylvie, the receptionist, looked up at the sound of his voice as he greeted her. She handed him his mail and smiled back a hello while talking into her ever-present headset. Bratt noticed that the door to his office was closed and threw a questioning look in her direction. She covered the mouthpiece with one hand and said, “John’s there. I think he had another bad night.”

“
John” was John Kalouderis, an associate in the firm who, in recent years, had become close friends with Bratt. He had a brilliant legal mind, when it wasn’t totally fogged by alcohol, and that was a rare enough occurrence these days. Kalouderis might not have lasted at the firm, even with Bratt’s friendship, if he didn’t have a particularly large, and largely dishonest, extended family, whose members regularly hired the firm’s high-priced lawyers to get them out of their scrapes with the law.

Bratt opened his office door and was immediately greeted by the licorice smell of ouzo emanating from the carcass sprawled across his leather sofa. Kalouderis’s snores were the only signs that the inert form held a grip on life. Bratt stood over the prone, slack-mouthed figure and shook it none too gently.

“Hey, Yanni, wake up! You’re drooling all over my sofa.”

Kalouderis snorted, opened his eyes and looked up blearily at his disturber, rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth. His expression was one of vague recognition, like he was searching his memory to put a name to a face that he hadn’t seen in a long time. He quickly gave up trying to remember and turned back onto his stomach, burying his face into the sofa.

“Fuck off,
malaka
! Get your own bed,” he mumbled.

Bratt threw his mail onto the pile of sweaty hair that was stuck to the back of his friend’s head, but got no reaction. Exasperated, he dropped into the chair behind his desk. Kalouderis’s vulgarity, as well as his indifference to Bratt’s arrival, irked him.

“I mean it, John. It’s well after nine and I’ve got work to do.”

“Go right ahead,” replied Kalouderis, “you won’t bother me.”

“Look, John, I’m damn tired myself and I don’t find this the least bit amusing, so MOVE IT!”     

That last exhortation finally led to some movement on Kalouderis’s part. He began getting up slowly, gingerly putting his stockinged feet onto the floor as if he expected to find shards of broken glass there.

Bratt asked, “Did you spend the night here or did you crawl in drunk this morning?”

Kalouderis scratched his head at the question and tried to keep his gaze level at Bratt while answering. “Both, I guess. I got in
about five o’clock, and I’ve been stretched-out here ever since.”

Bratt rested his head on the back of his chair and sighed. Every now and then Kalouderis and a group of his favorite cousins would hit the town and attempt to commit collective suicide by alcohol. This time he looked like he had almost succeeded. Bratt was concerned that his friend was going to embarrass himself publicly one day, which would, of course, embarrass the firm. Still, there was a part of Bratt that felt envy, wishing he could be as irresponsible with his own health and career. But he had too much to lose, in his personal and professional lives, to risk it for a night of uncontrolled drinking.

Kalouderis began awkwardly fishing around with his hands under the sofa, looking for his shoes. Finally retrieving them, he burped and struggled to his feet, a loafer in each hand. Bratt watched the proceedings with a sense of irritation, tapping his fingers on his desk in barely repressed impatience. 

Kalouderis swayed slightly where he stood and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Geez, I reek. Mind if I use your shower?”

“As a matter of fact, I insist on it,” Bratt replied, thinking of the staff and clientele who would come into contact with Kalouderis during the day.

Once his friend had shuffled off to the partners’ private shower area, Bratt turned his attention to his day’s work. He had a number of phone calls to make before drafting his final arguments for the Hall trial. Brenton would probably spend all of tomorrow pleading, so Bratt wouldn’t have to plead until Thursday morning. 

He remembered that Nate Morris was testifying in his rape trial that morning. The jury would probably start deliberating some time tomorrow, and Bratt’s experience told him they probably wouldn’t have to deliberate very long. If, or when, they acquitted Morris, Bratt suspected that he would be having another heated discussion with Jeannie. He would get as much work as he could done now while his mind was still free from the aggravation that awaited him.

Bratt was less than an hour into reviewing his trial notes when J.P. Leblanc opened his office door without knocking. He walked in and, with an audible grunt, sat down heavily on the sofa that had so recently served as Kalouderis’s bed. Leblanc was more than eighty pounds overweight and a heavy smoker. Whenever he sat, it was always heavily. Grunting was optional.

“Who the hell made a mess in the shower?”

“Probably John,” Bratt answered, without looking up from his papers. “I found him asleep and drooling all over that sofa when I came in this morning.”

“Aw, crap,” Leblanc said, trying to jump up from any wet spot he may have sat on, but only managing to shift his position to the middle of the sofa before the exertion made him give up. “That pig,” he said, red-faced. “I should fire him, you know.”

“Yes, you should. If you go do it now maybe I can get some work done.”

Bratt looked up to see if his partner had gotten his point, but Leblanc hadn’t moved. Watching him slowly ruminate over whatever it was he wanted to talk about, Bratt wondered, and not for the first time, how such an eclectic group of people had ended up working, and working so well, together. About the only thing the eleven lawyers in the firm had in common was a highly competitive nature and a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win. Over the years this had kept a harmony of sorts in place between them.

Leblanc sat without speaking, although he clearly had something on his mind.  

“So, how’d the interviews go?” Bratt asked. “Find any diamonds in the rough?”

“Hm. Oh, yes. I did, actually,” Leblanc answered, sounding distracted.

Bratt put down his note pad, folded his arms across his chest, and cleared his throat impatiently.

“Anything else?”

“Oh, yeah. You hear about Lynn Sévigny?”

Bratt was surprised at the topic his partner had chosen to broach. Sévigny was a struggling, but fiercely independent, sole practitioner who rented a small office down the hall from them. Bratt had always admired her fighting spirit and, on occasion, had discreetly sent some business her way. He had been among the first people she had confided in when a cancerous lump had been found in her left breast. 

“I heard they operated on her,” Bratt said.

“Yeah.
She…you know-”

“Don’t say it,” Bratt interrupted. “I know what they did.”   

“Yeah, anyway, she’s not going back to work for a while, you know, what with the chemo she’ll probably have to get and stuff. You know it makes them go bald.”

“I’m aware that can happen,” Bratt said, uncomfortable about discussing Sévigny’s medical problems with his less than sensitive partner.   

Leblanc scratched his head, trying to look concerned and thoughtful. “This is gonna be tough on her, financially-speaking. You know if she’s off work for a long time she’s gonna lose a lot of clients.”

“I know. I think she has some insurance.”

“Yeah, I guess so, although she probably couldn’t afford enough.” There was another thoughtful pause from Leblanc. “Thing is, maybe we can help her out a bit.”

Bratt had never expected altruism from Leblanc. He had been partners with the man long enough to know that he didn’t spend too much of his time worrying about lawyers outside the firm.

“Help her how?”

“She was scheduled to do a murder trial this term. You know, that Small kid who’s been in the papers. It’s supposed to start in three weeks or so, and now that her guy’s going to need a new lawyer I thought we should look into taking over the case from her.”

Bratt knew he should have seen this coming. “The woman’s just been operated on and the vultures are already circling! Some help you’re offering.”

“Come on, Bobby. I’m really thinking of her. At least we can take care of her a bit from whatever we get, which a lot of other guys wouldn’t do, you know. Besides, this kid’s been inside for I don’t know how many months. We can’t let him wait until she’s back on her feet to have his trial. That would be unconscionable. She knows that, I’m sure. Anyway, I’m going to see her in a couple of days in the hospital, so I thought I’d speak to her about the case then.”

“Don’t forget to bring her flowers while you’re at it,” Bratt snapped.

Leblanc waved Bratt’s remark away. He slid his bulk back over to the side of the sofa,
pushed with all his strength on its padded arm, and slowly levered himself up to his feet with another grunt.

“Look, why should the file end up with Chartrand or Gold? At least we’ve always been friendly, and I’m sure she’d prefer that it was us who took over for her than one of those other guys.”

Bratt didn’t answer, so Leblanc just shrugged and walked back out, his message delivered. He closed the door softly behind him, leaving Bratt to try to get his thoughts back on his trial notes.

He didn’t relish being one of the sharks getting ready to pounce on the remains of Lynn Sévigny’s practice, but maybe Leblanc was right. She probably would prefer the Small murder file going to their office rather than to certain other lawyers.