by Gail Bowen
The morning after Kathryn’s chapter about the Parker family was excerpted in one of our national newspapers, Glenda’s lacquered mother, Beverly, appeared at the entrance of her Calgary home and confronted the media who had assembled to record her reaction. Beverly’s announcement was to the point. “I no longer have a child,” she said, and then she turned on her heel, marched back inside, and slammed the door. Reeling from her mother’s rejection and her own public humiliation, Glenda called her father and told him she’d found a way out for all of them. She had a gun, and she wasn’t afraid of death. Sam Parker convinced his only child to wait until they talked; then he boarded his private plane and flew to Regina. Later that day, Kathryn Morrissey was sitting on the deck behind her condo having a celebratory glass of wine when Sam approached her and pleaded with her to have the publication of her book postponed. When she refused and laughed in his face, he fired a bullet that grazed her left shoulder.
The bullet came from the gun that Glenda Parker had planned to use to kill herself. Whether the firing was deliberate or accidental would be decided by a jury, but for Kathryn, it was the luckiest of shots. The pre-publication drumbeat for Too Much Hope had evoked answering drumbeats, and they were not friendly. Most of Kathryn’s subjects were in their twenties – old enough to talk without a chaperone present, but young enough to be foolishly voluble when an ostensibly sympathetic listener was salving their wounds and stroking their egos. Some of Kathryn’s more principled colleagues had wondered publicly about the moral code of a journalist who would insinuate herself into people’s lives then betray them. There had been critical commentaries and columns so relentlessly negative that even the most diligent publicist couldn’t mine them for a blurb.
But the bullet that scratched Kathryn’s shoulder silenced the naysayers. It turned out that Kathryn had a flair for the dramatic, and she morphed seamlessly into the role of martyr for a higher cause. Eyes moist with unshed tears, Kathryn admitted that she had left a few bodies in her wake, but lower lip trembling, she explained that she had been searching for truth, and truth had a price. Given her obvious suffering, only the most heartless cur would have pressed the point. Suddenly, Too Much Hope rocketed to the top of the best-seller list, where it stayed throughout the long and languid summer. The week before Sam Parker’s trial on charges of attempted murder began, Too Much Hope was still number one – proof positive that there was no slaking the appetite of readers who hungered for reassurance that the children of the powerful were as fallible, flawed, and fucked up as their own.
Rapti’s research was both thorough and depressing. As I closed my laptop, I knew I was in need of fresh air and diversion. Luckily, I had a legitimate excuse for heading out. My copy of Too Much Hope was in my office at the university. It had been six months since I’d read the book. One of the gifts of late middle age is the ability to forget what you don’t choose to remember. I was going to have to revisit Too Much Hope. But there was a more pressing reason for driving out to the university. The Faculty Club made the best picnic lunches in town.
By 11:30, I had picked up the book, cleared out my mailbox, and was at the Faculty Club. The dining room was already filling up. Friday was the Thanksgiving buffet. The air was redolent with the smell of roast turkey, and the chef’s pumpkin cheesecake was famous. My friend Ed Mariani, who was head of the school of journalism, was sitting in the lounge. When he spotted me, he leapt to his feet. “Perfect timing,” he said. “My colleagues and I have reserved a table in the window room and there’s a place for you right by me.”
“I’d love to, but –”
Ed raised his hand. “Don’t let the prospect of breaking bread with Kathryn Morrissey keep you away. She’s not speaking to any of us.”
“That must make for harmonious department meetings.”
Ed winced. “I’ve made some boneheaded decisions in my life, but hiring Kathryn was the worst.”
“Stop beating yourself up. On paper, she was a catch – an experienced journalist who’d written two successful books and was willing to move to Regina.”
Ed smoothed the front of the shirt he had specially made to hide his ample girth. He owned at least two dozen of these shirts in fabrics of varying weights and colours. Today’s was cranberry cotton. “I’m supposed to pick up on subtext,” he said. “That media mogul who sued Kathryn for libel was such a preening turd that everybody I knew was glad to see him humiliated, but the truth is that what Kathryn did to him was a disgrace. She wormed her way into his trust, promised him one book, and wrote another.”
“Exactly what she did with her subjects in Too Much Hope.”
Ed shuddered. “Unspeakable. Every time I think about Glenda Parker I want to weep. His father, of course, is another matter.”
“Her father,” I corrected. “Glenda came to this university to start afresh as a woman.”
“Point taken,” Ed said. “But my point is that, as much as I empathize with Glenda, it’s hard to root for a champion of enlightenment like Samuel Parker, especially when he’s also a crack shot.”
“Kathryn’s a crack shot too,” I said. “But when she took aim at her targets, she knew exactly what she was doing.”
“You really believe Sam Parker fired that gun accidentally.”
“I imagine that will be the defence,” I said.
Ed raised an eyebrow. “Pillow talk?”
I shook my head. “Just a guess. Zack and I don’t talk about the case.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Zack puts in punishing hours. These days the only way we can manage time together is if I meet him at the fitness centre in his apartment building.”
“That sounds wholesome.”
“And necessary,” I said. “Zack’s in that wheelchair eighteen hours a day. There are times when he’s in a lot of pain. Exercise helps, so we work out and afterwards we wipe the sweat off one another and go for ice cream.”
“Very domestic.”
“We have a lot of fun together. I just wish everyone who draws breath didn’t feel compelled to warn me against him.”
“They’re trying to protect you, Jo. Zachary Shreve is the lawyer of choice for the rich and dodgy, and he’s got a sensational track record. Guilty or not, he gets them off. I guess your friends just thought you’d end up with someone a little more like …” Ed threw his hands up in frustration.
“A little more like the gent in the Werther’s ad,” I said. “Sitting in his sweater coat, chatting with his grandson about the tradition of candy?”
Ed chuckled. “Hard to imagine Zack doing that.”
“You know him?”
“We’ve met. He came to my senior journalism seminar once. He was riveting. He talked about criminal law as a prize fight.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. In his office, he has an autographed photo of Muhammad Ali in his moment of triumph over Sonny Liston.”
“May 25, 1965,” Ed said.
“Good Lord. How did you know that?”
Ed sniffed theatrically. “Being gay doesn’t cut me off from the manly arts. And the parallel Zack drew between the ring and the courtroom made sense. He said that in boxing, for every bout that ends with a knockout punch, there are ninety-nine decided on feints and small, well-placed blows. According to him, it’s the same in a courtroom.”
“ ‘Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee.’ ”
“Zack’s quote from Ali was less poetic. ‘It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.’ ”
“That’s succinct.”
“And menacing. Of course, the kids loved your boyfriend.”
“But you didn’t.”
“To be frank, I found him chilling. I had a sense that if he was in the middle of a trial and someone told him he had to swap cases with the Crown, he’d keep arguing without missing a beat.”
“That could be seen as the mark of the professional,” I said.
“It could,” Ed agreed. “It could als
o be seen as the mark of a hired gun. Jo, your new friend moves in dangerous circles.”
It was a rumour I’d heard before, and I didn’t attempt to hide the asperity in my voice. “Zack doesn’t ‘move in dangerous circles,’ Ed. He defends people who find themselves in dangerous circumstances. There’s a distinction.”
Ed sighed heavily. “Now I’ve hurt your feelings.” He placed a plump, perfectly tended hand on mine. “I know I’m like a mother hen with you. It’s just that, in my opinion, you deserve the best.”
I covered Ed’s hand with my own. “I’ve found it,” I said. “Now let’s talk about Thanksgiving.”
“Still adept at steering the conversation back into safe harbours, I see. So, are you having a houseful?”
“Actually, a couple of houses full,” I said. “The granddaughters will be there as will all the kids, except Angus and his girlfriend, Leah. Leah’s aunt, the famous Slava, is taking them to New York to see a performance of Nixon in China.”
Ed’s eyes widened. “The only thing more unlikely than Nixon in China is Angus at the opera. Anyway, good for Slava. Angus needs to learn that not all of life’s pleasures involve an athletic supporter.”
I laughed. “Couldn’t agree with you more. But he and Leah will be missed. We’re going out to the lake.”
“With the new beau?”
“He owns the cottage – or at least one of them. How about you?”
“Barry and I have been invited to dine with friends. For the first time in my adult life, I’m not cooking a turkey.”
“Freedom,” I said.
“But no leftovers.” Ed’s moon face registered genuine regret. “Kris Kristofferson was right. Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”
When I went into the Faculty Club kitchen to pick up my order, I asked Terry, the cook, to add two slices of pumpkin cheesecake. Then, bag lunches in hand, I headed off to meet my Prince of Darkness.
The offices of Falconer, Shreve, Altieri, and Wainberg occupied restored twin heritage houses in the city centre. Surrounded by numbingly generic apartment buildings and shops catering to those who yearned to learn the secrets of stained-glass making or Wicca or iridology, the Falconer Shreve offices had the starchy charm of genteel sisters growing old together in a world that had passed them by. Both buildings had well-tended lawns and round iron planters filled with jumbo gold and rust chrysanthemums. Both had discrete brass plates on their front doors bearing the firm’s name in letters that were neither too large nor too small, but just right. Both had ramps to accommodate Zack, who had been a paraplegic since a childhood accident.
In the months Zack and I had been seeing each other, I’d occasionally met him at his office. Like all high-powered law firms, Falconer Shreve was driven by the maxim that those who didn’t keep up got left behind. There was always a hum in the air, but that Friday afternoon the hum had reached fever pitch. Denise-Dee Kaiswatum, the receptionist, was involved in a heated dispute with a courier, but she came up for air long enough to roll her eyes and point a manicured nail towards the office of Norine MacDonald, Zack’s executive assistant, who with Cerberus-like zeal guarded the door to the clients’ room. Norine told me she’d let me know when Zack was free and to make myself comfortable.
There are few agreeable reasons to be in a lawyer’s office, but Zack’s clients’ room was designed to reassure the anxious. The walls were painted a comforting forest green and the furnishings were timeless antiques whose burnished sheen suggested that whatever follies humans contrived, there would always be Windsor chairs to receive their sorry asses and glowing coffee tables on which they could leave their mark. Left to my own devices, I settled in with the morning paper. I had ploughed through the news and sports and reached the Review section when Glenda Parker came out of Zack’s office. In her ribbed turtleneck, jeans, and hiking boots, she appeared as androgynous as most university kids. Like many female students, Glenda eschewed makeup, and that year the style in which she wore her cornsilk hair – side-parted and cut short except for a long sleek bang, was favoured by half the young men and women on campus. There was nothing noteworthy about Glenda, except for the fact that every Canadian with access to a remote control had seen footage of her in her previous incarnation as an Olympic-calibre swimmer who competed as a male.
The footage had been shot at a swim meet two years before the publication of Too Much Hope. Intended only as a record of a few moments in an athlete’s life, the close-up was used as an illustration in Kathryn Morrissey’s book. After Sam Parker had been charged with attempted murder, the photo of Glenda, unmistakably male with shaved chest bare and genitals outlined by a Speedo brief, had appeared in every newspaper in Canada. The image was indelible, and as Norine introduced Glenda, I found myself searching for the boy in the swimsuit in the gentle young woman extending her hand to me.
We exchanged the usual pleasantries of people meeting for the first time. Glenda’s voice was an agreeable contralto, but she spoke with the care of someone learning a new language. In Too Much Hope, she had confided to Kathryn that one of the early tasks of transitioning genders was acquiring the voice of the other. Physical change, she explained, was only one stop on the transsexual road map. As I looked at Glenda, I was struck by how young she was – just twenty – but the pink-purple shadows beneath her eyes suggested that, for her, the path to self-realization had been riddled with land mines.
“When there’s something Zack doesn’t want me to have to testify to, he sends me out of the room,” she said.
I caught her eye. “Zack knows what he’s doing.”
Glenda’s expression was wry. “Let’s hope so,” she said. “Because he’s all we’ve got.”
At that moment, the door to Zack’s office opened, and Samuel Parker joined us, upping the wattage in the room as he had been upping the wattage in rooms for the past forty years. In the early 1960s, Sam and his wife, Bev, had been a folk-singing duo who wrote songs celebrating peace, justice, and the common man. When the Zeitgeist shifted from concern for Mother Earth to real estate lust, the Parkers’ careers faded, but the lyric beauty of their songs continued to charm. There were cover recordings and a small but steady flow of royalty payments. Sam and Bev left the business end of things to Bev’s brother, then a strange, weedy youth with a fascination for speculative fiction and the innovative use of technology. He had, as Sam pointed out in later interviews, invested the Parker money in one half-assed scheme after another, until 1971 when IBM got interested in a patent Sam had apparently acquired.
The money poured in with the profusion of the tears of the poor, and the Parkers were forced to re-evaluate their priorities and their friends. Luckily, both proved easy to change. For the past thirty-five years, Samuel and Beverly Parker had been pillars of the political right, big donors to conservative causes, and articulate spokespeople for groups that shared their ideology.
Even with charges for attempted murder hanging over his head, Sam Parker moved with the confidence of a man in charge. Tanned and immaculate, he extended his hand to me and introduced himself. When I explained that I was there to take his lawyer to lunch, he smiled.
“Zack’s been working too hard. He deserves a good meal with an attractive woman.” He turned to Glenda. “We deserve a good meal too. Any suggestions about a restaurant?”
“Sure,” Glenda said. “There’s this terrific new vegan place. You’ll love it, Dad. They don’t even use honey because it’s a product of the labour of bees.”
The Parkers exchanged glances, then they tilted their heads back at identical angles and laughed at their private joke. “Let’s go,” Samuel said. “Tofu waits for no one.”
Focused on his computer screen, Zack didn’t notice me, but I noticed him: his broad, high forehead, his heavy brows, his full lips; his power; his self-possession. I walked over and bent to kiss the curve of his forehead. He looked pleased. “What was that for?”
“Couldn’t resist such a good-looking guy,” I said. He tu
rned his chair towards me, reached out, and drew me to him. “We have an hour and forty-five minutes till my next appointment,” he said.
“Not nearly enough,” I said. “But these days I take what I can get.”
“It’s not always going to be like this,” Zack said. “After the trial’s over, I’m going to cut back.”
I squeezed his shoulder. “Maybe. And maybe, as Dorothy Parker said, the Statue of Liberty is in Lake Ontario. Come on. The meter’s ticking. Let’s take your car, but I want to drive. I’ve spent my whole life behind the wheel of something sensible. It’s a rush knowing I can open up and leave everybody else in the dust.”
Zack grinned and tossed me the keys. “Go to town.”
For the first few minutes of our drive, the sheer pleasure of being together in a convertible on a dazzling fall day kept us silent, but when I stopped for a light, Zack turned to me. “So what did you think of Sam?”
“He surprised me,” I said. “And he impressed me. I was only with Glenda and him for a few minutes, but it’s obvious they love each other. More surprising, given Sam’s public persona – they seem genuinely to like each other.”
“They’re in a lousy situation,” Zack said, “but they try to keep it light – make each other laugh.”
“I noticed that,” I said. “And I noticed something else. When Glenda was alone with me, her mannerisms and her voice were decidedly female, but when her father came into the room, there was a subtle shift back: the voice was lower and the stance was more masculine – trying to make the situation easier for her father, I guess.”
“And Sam tries to make the situation easier for Glenda,” Zack said. “Even in private, he corrects himself if he refers to Glenda in the masculine. They’re good people. A lot of my clients are scum-buckets, but Sam Parker isn’t. I wish I could get him off.”
“But you’re not going to.”
“No, we’re pretty well fucked. Criminal lawyers learn how to make the most of what they have, but I haven’t got anything. The Crown, on the other hand, has motive, opportunity, your friend the ex-premier as eyewitness, and the proverbial smoking gun.”