Gail Bowen - The Endless Knot

“I guess I’m going to have to,” I said.

Shades of grey. Shades of grey.

CHAPTER

7

Every night during the trial, Rapti Lustig e-mailed me more background information. Early that first week she forwarded an article about criminal lawyer Eddie Greenspan in which the writer riffed on the idea that in a jury trial, everything but the basic script is choreography and improvisation.

During its first week, it seemed the Sam Parker trial was desperately in need of a script doctor. The job of the Crown was to establish the evidence, and for Linda Fritz that apparently meant taking police officers through every line of every note they had made on the case. Her dogged precision exasperated Zack, but since his job was to make sure the police and the Crown had done their jobs, she gave him a good base from which to work. And so we listened as the Crown called witness after witness to buttress its case and the defence picked away endlessly at the testimony of officers who were accustomed to testifying and were unlikely to risk their careers to falsify a detail like the angle of the sun on a late afternoon in May.

Throughout the period Brette Sinclair referred to as “the parade of the essential but boring as hell witnesses,” I found my attention drawn to the jurors. Like the members of any ensemble cast, they were beginning to declare themselves as individuals. The angry man with the aggressive combover turned out to have an odd mannerism. He responded to everything the lawyers or the witnesses said with a vigorous negative shake of the head. Until Zack figured out the shake was a tic not a comment, he was distinctly uneasy. The foreperson with the shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair had arranged her features in a mask of serenity that suggested she had withdrawn from the courtroom’s swirl of bad karma and negative thoughts. The young people made no attempt to disguise their boredom at the lacklustre performance they were forced to endure. Their faces were blank, as if they had detached themselves and were listening to invisible iPods. The Modigliani woman and the meaty man had become Zack’s partisans, smiling encouragement when he did well with a line of questioning and dropping their gaze when the judge (as he frequently did) chastised Zack for pushing too hard (as he frequently did). The notetaker grew more notetakey, barely glanced up at the proceedings, so intent was he on recording everything. The Lucille Ball wannabe seemed pathetically eager to lighten it up. On the trial’s third morning, an earnest young constable described in precise detail the size of a bullet hole; when he was through, she rewarded him with a rubbery grin. The men in the three-piece suits were clearly impatient, like senior managers forced to listen to the concerns of underlings. The ladies with the gentle perms drifted off from time to time as ladies with gentle perms will when the topic of conversation turns to the trajectory of a bullet.

The one real source of drama that week was Linda Fritz, who, it became increasingly clear, was suffering from the mother of all colds. On the first day it had attacked her voice, roughening it and reducing it to a painful croak. By the second day, Linda could barely whisper, and the judge gave her permission to use a lapel mike to question her witnesses. The cough that was plaguing Linda when we met had grown noticeably worse. To my ears, it sounded like bronchitis.

The ladies with the seasonal sweaters watched Linda with anxious eyes. From the outset, they had been sympathetic to her; now they looked as if they’d like to take her home and get her under a croup tent. The beefy guy was clearly pissed off that he was in the room with a walking petri dish of viral stew, and he and the Modigliani woman ostentatiously flattened themselves against the back of their chairs whenever Linda approached the jury box. The three-piece-suiters contented themselves with raising a handkerchief to cover their nose and mouth as if they were walking through the city of the plague. The I Love Lucy juror produced a bottle of hand sanitizer and passed it around. Interest in the testimony of “the essential but boring as hell witnesses” waned.

Zack was uneasy too, but his concern wasn’t hygiene. He was genuinely fond of Linda and he respected her as an adversary. When she failed to pick up on inconsistencies or points that she normally would have hammered home, he was at first baffled then concerned. She seemed to be having trouble hearing, and on the morning of the fourth day, she didn’t even bother trying to put on her game face. She soldiered on until the luncheon recess, but when court reconvened, she was not in her place and when the clerk announced that the Crown had asked for a continuance, and that court was adjourned until Monday morning, the relief in the courtroom was palpable.

I did my standup for NationTV and headed home to a long nap and some prophylactic echinacea and vitamin C. Zack was giving a speech at a dinner in Saskatoon on Monday night. We were planning to stay over and savour the pleasures of a first-class hotel, and I didn’t want to miss the pampering.

Saturday morning Zack came over for pancakes before he went back to the office. He had news of Linda Fritz, and it wasn’t promising. The virus that had begun as laryngitis moved to bronchitis and then an ear infection had turned her right ear deaf. Her eardrum was bulging due to the pressure of fluid behind it. She was on massive doses of antibiotics, but it would take up to three weeks for the fluid behind her eardrum to be absorbed. She was off the case.

“She must be disappointed,” I said.

“She’s furious,” Zack said. “I went over to her apartment this morning. She still feels like shit, but not being able to prosecute this case is making it a hundred times worse. She put in a lot of hours on this one, and she thought she could win.” He picked up the maple syrup and flooded his plate. “Can you think of anything we can send to cheer her up?”

“What does she like?”

Zack furrowed his brow in concentration. “Practising law. Beating me.”

“How about a dartboard and a picture of you.”

“Perfect,” he said. “So what are you up to this morning?”

“It’s moving day. Pete’s moving in with Charlie.”

“Big job?”

“No. Pete’s got his truck and he travels light. Charlie’s coming over to help. If you stick around, you can see him.”

Zack checked his watch. “I have a few minutes. Hey, I got our reservations for the Bessborough – the lieutenant-governor’s suite.”

“I’m impressed.”

“I was hoping you would be.”

“It’ll be fun to get away to Saskatoon for a night.”

“Even if it means spending the evening with a bunch of lawyers.”

“As long as I end up with the lawyer of my choice.” I kissed him on the head. “Now, I’d better find Taylor and get her to her art lesson. If you’re not here when I get back, give me a call.”

Zack was there when I got back, so was Charlie Dowhanuik. When I walked into the kitchen, they fell silent.

I joined them at the kitchen table. “So what were you guys talking about?”

Charlie’s eyes met mine. “My father.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t remember,” Charlie said tightly. “And, Jo, I don’t want to talk about him with you.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So how’s the big move progressing?”

“Haven’t done a thing, but I figure it should take us twenty minutes to load the truck. You know Pete – fourteen boxes of books, some sports equipment, and two garbage bags of clothes.”

“Don’t forget his collection of baseball cards. I’ve been trying to get them out of here since he went to vet school.”

Zack leaned forward in his chair. “I’ve got a foul ball from the sixth game of the Toronto/Atlanta World Series in 1993. I caught it myself.”