The Guilty (26 page)

“Thanks for the insight.”

Kouri still stood in the doorway, clearly debating whether to enter or not.

“You can come in, Pete. I won’t break.”

Kouri came in and sat on the sofa, trying to look comfortable. Something was bothering him and it occurred to Bratt that as surviving partner it now fell to him to take on the role of a paternal figure that Leblanc had played so well. Fortunately, the pounding in his head had for the most part subsided, and he was confident that a short talk wouldn’t be fatal.

“What’s on your mind?”

Kouri paused before answering, as if trying to make up his mind whether to go on or not.

“Is it always like this?” he finally asked.

“Ah, good question…What’re you talking about?”

“Law. The practice. Are things always so
, I don’t know, ambiguous?”

Bratt thought the choice of words was interesting, and quite appropriate.

“It depends on how much time you spend thinking about things. For some guys, it’s all black and white. They don’t think too much about what they’re doing, and there are few gray areas in their approach to the job. It’s always us against them. Maybe that’s the best way to be: just do your job and leave the bigger questions to priests and philosophers.”

Bratt contemplated his own words, feeling the need to somehow explain, if not defend, his own doubts of late.

“But let me tell you something,” he continued. “When you’re in court, you really can’t have any doubt that that’s exactly what it is: us against them.”

“And when we’re not in court?”

“It’s still us against them, only the ‘them’ includes a lot more people.”

“Like who?”

Bratt knew what Kouri was looking for from him and he thought it was a good idea the young lawyer found it out early in his career.

“Like our own clients.”

Kouri nodded his head, as if he had expected this answer from Bratt.

“That’s the part I’ve been wondering about.”

“Why now?”

“It’s not just now. I’ve been wondering about it for a while. Especially since I’ve seen you talk to Small, or talking about him when he’s not around. You really don’t believe him, do you?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“Yeah, I know. What I don’t know is, why not? I mean, am I so naïve?”

“You are naïve. Not about Marlon Small so much as about the nature of our profession. So, here’s rule number one, and if you only remember this rule you’ll be ahead of most new lawyers. When you take on a criminal case, every single person you deal with, every cop, every opposing lawyer, every witness, and absolutely every client you ever take on, will lie to you without hesitation when they think it’s in their best interests to do so. In the game of law you can’t depend on anyone to help you and you can’t trust anyone, especially your client.”

Bratt stopped to catch his breath and squeezed his eyes shut briefly.

Shit, that took a lot out of me
, he realized, opening his eyes again and blinking rapidly.

Kouri asked, “Isn’t that pretty cynical?”

“If cynical is the opposite of naïve, then it certainly is.”

“How do you live your life not knowing who to trust?”

“No, no. That’s not what I said. You do know exactly whom you can trust, and that’s yourself. As long as you don’t lose that, you’ll be OK. When you stop trusting yourself, that’s when you’re in trouble, because then you have to rely on your client instead. And that’s never a good sign for a lawyer.”

“Maybe I’m slow, but why would a client lie to his own lawyer? How would he expect the lawyer to properly defend him?”

“Most clients are too dumb to know what’s in their own best interests. If they weren’t so dumb they wouldn’t need a lawyer in the first place, because they wouldn’t get caught.”

“Or maybe they just wouldn’t commit the crime.”

“My point exactly.”

He sipped at his tea, closing his tired eyes again, and both lawyers quietly contemplated what had been said and where the conversation still might go.

Kouri leaned forward. His hands clasped together made him look like he was begging for the truth, although he didn’t look Bratt in the eye when he spoke.

“If you knew, really knew, that a client was innocent, would you do anything at all to save him?”

Bratt lay his head on the back of his chair, eyes still closed, and asked himself, 
Is he interviewing me for a newspaper exposé, or is he investigating me on behalf of the Bar? What a question! I never expected to be the one having to add salve to his conscience.
 

“Look, Pete. Every lawyer starts out trying to obey the law to the letter. Nobody graduates law school thinking I’m going to be dishonest, or lie in court. I’m sure that’s exactly how you are, too. Then comes the first day you’re pleading and you realize that you can say the exact same thing in two different ways. The first way sounds bad for your client. The other way, which is still pretty close to the truth, just makes him look a little better. Let’s call it a euphemism.

“So, you tell yourself, ‘hey, quick thinking.’ You’re all happy with yourself for coming up with a way to show your client in a better light. But the fact is there’s a world of difference between the truth and ‘pretty close to the truth.’ You may well be on your way to being a good lawyer. But you’re also on your way to learning how easy it is to bend the truth when it suits you. And each time you plead, you’ll bend it a bit more, and you’ll be amazed how far you can bend it and still think it isn’t broken. The truth, in the right hands, can be a very flexible tool.

“So, if you want to know how far I’d go to defend a client,
guilty or not
,
I don’t have the answer. I’m not sure I’ve reached my limit yet. I’m a little worried about that, to be honest with you. Not knowing how far I’d go, I mean. Does that answer your question?”

Kouri said nothing, but just gazed solemnly at the floor. He took a deep breath, looking like he had just come to an important decision, then he wiped his palms on his pants and stood up.

“Even if we never trust any of our clients, the odds are that some of them are going to tell us the truth.”

“You’re right. Just don’t spend too much time worrying about which one it is. It’ll get in the way of defending
them.”

“I think Marlon Small is telling the truth,” Kouri said firmly. He paused, looked briefly at Bratt’s face, then quickly away again before continuing. “I don’t have any problems defending him.”

He turned and walked slowly out of the office. Bratt sipped his tea as he watched him leave, wondering what had brought that on.

That Thursday morning was the funeral for Jean-Paul Leblanc. Bratt stood at the entrance of Ste. Marie des Anges Church in Outremont, and read his partner’s name, written with white plastic letters on a grooved blackboard behind a pane of glass.

He entered through the heavy double-doors, and saw that the church was full. Over his twenty years in practice, Leblanc had made many friends and near-friends, and the legal community was always ready to come out to remember one of its own.

In the front row of pews instead of Leblanc’s family, who may have been as dead as he was for all anyone knew, the lawyers from his firm sat. Bratt walked down a side aisle, past row upon row of ornate, hand-carved wooden benches, and looked over the assembled mourners, checking who had come, who sat where, who spoke to whom.

It occurred to him that there was a certain hierarchy at funerals. The closer to the front you
sat, the closer you could claim to have been to the deceased. He wondered if people showed up at funerals to show not how much the deceased had mattered to them, but rather to display their own importance. By their presence they put themselves among the privileged few that were allowed to claim a special place in the life of the dearly departed. They displayed their grief like a medal of honor, as if to say, “
I
was his close friend,
my
feelings matter.” Others could look at them and say, “Look how sad they are. Their loss is so heavy.”

Bratt’s rambling thoughts stopped abruptly as he spotted Jeannie standing next to Kalouderis in the front pew. He suppressed an inappropriately happy smile and walked solemnly toward her. Kalouderis saw him approach and made room for him on the bench.

Bratt briefly worried that she may not want him to sit close by. His moment of fear turned out to have been for naught. Jeannie turned her sad eyes to her father as he approached and gave him a welcoming look. Once he was next to her, she stretched up and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He allowed himself a small smile of gratitude, feeling a little less forlorn than he had been since the day Leblanc entered the hospital.

As the priest stepped away from the altar and began reciting the funeral prayers in French, Bratt’s thoughts lingered on his daughter. All his troubles with Small and all the doubts he’d been having about his vocation were linked to the things that Jeannie had said to him and had been aggravated by her absence from his life. He hadn’t been conscious of how much her leaving home had affected him until he saw her again. For all intents and purposes, she was the only family he had left.

He did have an older brother who was a social worker, or something equally altruistic, in Toronto. And a sister who taught English to spoiled, rich children in the South of France. There were cards on birthdays and phone calls at Christmas, but they both had their own careers and families to worry about.

In Montreal, it had been only him and Jeannie for the past eight years. How ironic that he should see her again at a funeral where not a single relative of the deceased was present. He imagined himself lying where Leblanc lay, and thought that he didn’t need a church full of colleagues and acquaintances to see him off, just his daughter.

My God, Bratt,
he told himself.
You are becoming one maudlin old man. Good thing nobody can read your weepy thoughts.

Despite this self-reproach, he couldn’t deny his feelings. He turned to look at Jeannie, who was paying more attention to the priest’s words tha
n he was, and slid his hand along the back of the pew in front of them until it was touching hers. Her hand moved almost imperceptibly away, then, after a moment’s hesitation, moved back until it was touching his. As he tentatively took her hand in his, he realized he was acting more like a shy schoolboy on a first date than a father.

How come I can’t just grab her and tell her she better get her butt home right now, before I take her out to the woodshed or something? What a generation of wimpy parents we are, afraid of hurting our children’s feelings and desperate to have them like us.

He thought back to his own father, who had never in his life mistaken himself for his son’s best friend. Joseph Bratt had not been one to spend a lot of time worrying about whether he was liked or not, not at home, and certainly not at court.
Just as well,
his son thought.
That way he was never disappointed.

Bratt knew that if he wanted a closer relationship with his daughter than he had had with his father, especially in those final years, these worries and self-doubts were the price he had to pay. It was too late now to question how he had raised her. Besides, that she was stubborn and had a mind of her own was part of what he loved most about her.

The funeral seemed to end soon after it had started. Bratt had hardly noticed the passage of time, almost forgetting the friend he was there to mourn, preoccupied as he was with thoughts of reconciling with Jeannie.

As the coffin was wheeled slowly out by a group of attendants from the funeral home and the small choir began singing a rather plaintive “Ave Maria,” he waved Kalouderis on to join the others, signaling that he would join them later at the cemetery. Jeannie stayed behind with him, clearly willing to talk to him again.

Once the mourners had drifted out into the street and the singers began putting away their hymnals, Bratt took her hand again and pulled her down next to him on the pew.

“How’ve you been?” he asked almost casually, afraid to scare her off by a too obvious display of emotion.

“Good,” she nodded. Her eyes flitted around the empty church, and now she looked unsure that she wanted to be there. Finally, hesitantly, she said, “I’ve missed you.”

Bratt was relieved that she had said it first, freeing him of any lingering uncertainty about her feelings.

“Christ, Jeannie. You’ve got no idea how empty our place is without you.”

She smiled now, a warm, almost maternal smile that reminded him of how Deirdre used to look at him in the early days of their marriage, when he had been struggling to get his practice up and running and got by only with her loving support.

Crap
, he thought.
My practice. I still don’t know how she feels about that.

He asked her, “Jeannie, what are your plans?”

He wanted to kick himself for asking such a feeble question, but he couldn’t think of a better way to approach her. This had been his basic concern for days, so he had no choice but to ask it as directly as possible.

“Are you planning to stay away a lot longer?”

“I don’t know,” she said somberly. Then, as his smile faltered at her words, she added with a mischievous smile, “Well, probably not. Although being independent’s not so bad.”

She shifted in her seat to face him squarely.

“You know I love you, Daddy,” she said not too warmly.

Bratt said nothing in reply, waiting for a “but.” She had that look he had learned to recognize, the one that told him she was putting her arguments together in her head, trying to be logical. He waited patiently to see where they would take her.

“I realize that I can’t hate you for the job you do,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I like your work any more than I did before. Since Claire’s trial.”

Bratt realized that he had also begun to think of it as “Claire’s trial,” rather than Nate Morris’s.

“I just can’t pretend to like it,” she continued. “I can’t even be indifferent to it. I guess that’s my biggest problem right now: reconciling how I feel about you with how I feel about your work. But I’m at least going to try to distinguish the man from the lawyer. That’s not such a bad deal, is it?”

God,
he thought, somewhat disheartened.
The wording she uses to express her affection: I’m afraid there’s a bit of a lawyer in her, too.
    

“What if I didn’t do this job anymore?” he blurted out, seeing a solution to both their problems. The news that Madsen had given him now seemed like a godsend.

“What’re you talking about?”

“Listen, honey,” he said, feeling a growing excitement about what this news would mean to both of them. “Not a lot of people know this, but I might be named a judge.”

“A judge?”

“Yes. Superior Court, just like granddad.”

“Daddy, that’s wonderful,” she said, seeming sincerely happy for him. “It’s what you’ve always wanted.”

“I know, but it’s more than that. It’s what you’ve wanted too, because it means I won’t be defending those…well, those
scumbags
anymore.”

He felt a pang of self-reproach at using the same word that she had once used to describe his clientele. But he wanted to show her that he was truly going to separate himself from his past life and from his clients, that he might even be ready to see things her way.
Besides,
he told himself,
isn’t that exactly how I feel about my most recent client?

“Daddy, you said you
might
be named a judge. You don’t know for sure?”

Aye, there’s the rub,
he told himself.
Do I tell her about the Small case or not? And do I tell her I almost have to win it at all costs?

“It’s all but in the bag,” he answered, looking away briefly as he fibbed. “I just have to finish some litigation I’m working on. They’ll probably announce it within the month.”

Jeannie reached out and squeezed his hand, then let him pull her closer and hug her. Again, there was that brief hesitation, then she hugged him back.

Bratt held her close, rocking her gently back and forth. He wanted this to be a new beginning for both their lives, yet he was worried that things seemed to have worked out too easily. Recently, nothing had come that easily and he only hoped she’d be this happy for him when the murder trial was over and Marlon Small was back out on the street.

That afternoon the office of
Leblanc et Bratt, Avocats
opened its doors to receive condolences from judges, lawyers, courthouse staff and the occasional client. Bratt had wanted to rent a large restaurant for a mercy-meal, but Ralston insisted in keeping things as simple and low-key as possible, in accordance with Leblanc’s final wishes. When Bratt complained that he seemed to have been totally left out of the loop when it came to executing Leblanc’s posthumous desires, Ralston calmly explained that this had been intentional.

Leblanc had made Ralston his executor and had left specific instructions about how much pomp and ceremony was to be bestowed upon him after his passing. He had fully expected Bratt to pay no attention to what he wanted and to just do whatever he felt was appropriate, probably going overboard in the process.

As the afternoon wore on, lawyers from both sides of the legal divide, a few judges, and even some court staff made the short trek from the
Palais de Justice
to their building. As they entered, Sylvie greeted them, acting almost widow-like as she received their condolences and allowed them to kiss her tear-stained cheeks.

Trays of party sandwiches and cheese-slices were strategically placed in the various rooms and along the wall in the main corridor, and the end of a long conference table had been converted into a modest bar. The mood occasionally teetered on the verge of breaking into a cocktail party, but Ralston, wandering amongst the guests with his dour face, made sure that no undue levity was allowed to uplift the gathering.

Bratt snuck off to his own office, and only came out when Kouri announced the arrival of a judge or some other eminent jurist. Jeannie had left him after their talk in the church with a promise to call him soon. So he sat alone now behind his desk, drinking only mineral water and vacillating between contentment over the recent turnaround in his personal fortunes and sadness over his partner’s demise. 

Kouri’s head popped in through the door again, but his announcement this time took Bratt by surprise.

“It’s Mrs. Campbell. She didn’t know about J.P. She wanted to talk to you.”

Bratt swore under his breath. “OK, ask her in here, would you?”

He forced the displeasure from his face as Jennifer Campbell stepped through the door, holding a handkerchief to her face. She wore a plastic rain bonnet to keep the snow from ruining her hair. She looked at him with a pained expression and came toward him as if she was going to hug him, but then caught herself and stopped.

“Mr. Bratt, I am so sorry to barge in on you at this sad, sad time. I had no idea that Mr. Leblanc had been called to the Lord. May He rest his soul.”

Bratt stood and took her hand in his. His face effected sadness combined with appreciation for her kind words, but in his heart her presence left him void of any true emotion.

“Mrs. Campbell, I’m sure if you came down here unannounced it was for a very important reason. Please sit down and tell me how I can help you.”

“I just wanted to be sure you met the Sims boy and Everton Jordan. Marlon and I feel their testimony is what you’ll need to get him out of this terrible mess.”

“Don’t worry. I met them and I think they’re going to be of great help.”