The Guilty

by Gabriel Boutros

  “Christ we’re two adults here. I can’t believe you’re letting Parent decide how you should live your life.”

  “Don’t be so sure it’s all him, Robert,” she said, her eyes flashing now with indignation. “I’m a big girl and nobody’s forcing this on me. Sorry if I suddenly seem like a stick-in-the-mud. Maybe being close to you for so long made me take risks that I normally wouldn’t have before. But that has to change now. I don’t have the same control over my life that you do. I’m perfectly willing to accept that fact and I’ve learned to lead my life accordingly. Maybe you should learn to accept it too.”

  With that she turned and made her way through the crowd and left the café, leaving Bratt feeling stunned, unsure what he was supposed to do next. It had been many years since he had allowed anybody to pull the strings on his emotions the way she did. He had been willing to allow her that privilege, but now she didn’t seem to want it.

  He found it ironic that she seemed to think his career allowed him some sort of freedom that she lacked, and that she was holding this against him now. Maybe he could come and go as he liked, but that was about the only real advantage there was to being his own boss. Otherwise, as anyone who watched him get totally wrapped up in his work could have told her, he was a slave to his cases.

  He wanted to blame Parent for this turn of events, but he knew he also had to respect Nancy’s independence. He shouldn’t have implied that Parent was dictating her life. Although that probably wasn’t far from the truth, there was no point waving it in her face. It was clearly important for her that he accept the choices she made. This had never posed a problem before, when her decisions had meshed quite nicely with his.

  No, he thought, lunch sure wasn’t what I had hoped for.

  The next morning Bratt was in the office early, waiting for Leblanc to come in. He needed to discuss the future, both his and the firm’s, with his partner, and he yawned sleepily as he waited.

  He had spent another largely sleepless night, unable to drive the thoughts of Nancy, Jeannie, and Madsen from his head. Now it was time to tell Leblanc about the opening on the Superior Court, yet he was finding it hard to muster up a great deal of enthusiasm for the fulfillment of his life’s ambition.

  Leblanc finally showed up about quarter after nine. He came rushing in, as he so often did, his face flushed. He carried his heavy briefcase in one hand, and a paper bag carrying his breakfast from the McDonald’s around the corner in the other. He expressed surprise at seeing Bratt sitting in front of his desk, reading a newspaper.

  “Bobby-boy, what’s up?” he huffed, dropping his large frame into his chair.

  Before Bratt had a chance to answer Leblanc opened the bag and pulled out his meal. Bratt winced at the sight of the three egg and bacon sandwiches, with hash browns, that came out of the bag. He almost forgot to speak as he watched Leblanc slurp his scalding-hot coffee and then pull out and light a cigarette.

  Leblanc took a deep drag on the cigarette, dropped it into an ashtray full of butts from the day before, and then bit off half the first sandwich. He looked up at Bratt as he chewed and raised his eyebrows, still not having received an answer. Bratt dragged his attention away from Leblanc’s stuffed face, remembering what he had come to talk about.

  “J.P, I need to talk to you. I’ve got some news, some big news.”

  “Mm-hm,” Leblanc responded, managing to get equal amounts of food, coffee, and cigarette into his mouth without missing a beat.

  “They’re going to make me a judge. Maybe. Probably, I guess,” Bratt laughed at his own equivocation.

  He was glad to see that Leblanc stopped chewing and was now looking at him, openly surprised. He cleared his throat, then continued.

  “I have a friend who’s very close to the committee that nominates people for the bench. Superior Court. They still haven’t replaced Mike Dickson. And it looks like they’re going to choose between me and Allen Schneider. You know him?”

  Leblanc nodded and then slowly began to alternate once more between the sip of coffee, the drag on his cigarette, and the mouthful of food. He did all this without taking his eyes off his partner’s face.

  “Anyway,” Bratt continued, “they’re going to be making their decision in the next few weeks. It seems I gotta get through the Small trial looking good and I’ll be a shoo-in.”

  Leblanc was picking up all of Bratt’s signals despite the concentration needed for his display of hand-to-mouth agility.

  “This has got you worried,” he stated what was an obvious fact.

  Bratt nodded, saying nothing.

  “Tell me about it,” Leblanc said, pushing his food away.

  “Winning the Small trial…it’s far from a lock.” Bratt paused, choosing his words carefully. “And, frankly I’m not sure if I’m going into it at my best.”

  “Still worn down by that Hall case?”

  “No, not that. I’ve just been kind of, well, questioning things the past couple of weeks.”

  “Questioning what things?”

  Bratt had intended to discuss only his possible appointment to the bench and not the existential mini-crisis that he had been in of late. But, they went hand-in-hand it seemed, so he decided to get his inner conflict out in the open, even if it made him feel like a naïve law student.

  “I’ve been asking questions about what we do for a living. What I do.”

  “You’ve been asking who these questions?”

  “Me,” Bratt nearly shouted, his irritation suddenly rising as he feared that he was going to have to spell every embarrassing detail out for Leblanc.

  “Sorry,” Leblanc raised his hands in a sign of surrender. “I’ll try to keep up.”

  “Anyway, just before you dropped this murder trial in my lap I was thinking about taking some time off, to think things over. I also needed to patch things up with Jeannie. She left home, you know.”

  “No. You never told me.”

  “Yeah. She’s been pretty angry with me since the Nate Morris trial. It was her best friend who was raped.”

  “I heard the girl got worked over by Perron in court.”

  “Oh yeah. He did quite the job on her. Somehow, Jeannie managed to pin the blame for that on me. I guess it wasn’t entirely unfair of her. All this crap’s been weighing on my mind since then, and I can’t seem to shake it.”

  “OK, let me get this straight. You’re feeling guilty about what happened to Jeannie’s friend. Would that be the rape or the cross-examination?”

  “Both, really.”

  “Both? Oh, because you defended Morris a few years back, right?”

  “Right. I got him off then too.”

  “And because Perron did what you taught him to do in court, which is what any lawyer worth a damn would do for his client?”

  Bratt nodded, relieved at how fast his partner had understood his situation.

  “What a load of self-indulgent horseshit,” Leblanc spat out. “I thought you had some sort of serious problem.”

  “This isn’t a joke,” Bratt protested.

  “No? Well it oughta be. You know why we never take on cases that involve our friends or our family? Because we lose our objectivity, and that’s what’s happened here. Even if you weren’t directly involved in that trial, you’ve lost whatever objectivity you’re supposed to have as a lawyer.”

  “I don’t need lessons-”

  “Yes, you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be getting in the way of this unhealthy breakfast I’m trying to have. Listen, Bobby, I know all about the Morris trial. I actually had a long talk with Johanne Dulude a couple of days ago, and, by the way, she wasn’t Claire Brockway’s biggest booster.”

  “You’re kidding,” Bratt said. He had been certain that the prosecutor had been very supportive of Claire.

  “No, I’m not. If you hadn’t been so close to the girl you might not have thought that what Perron did was such a terrible thing either. She wasn’t exactly an angel, you know. Even Dulude told me she went to that j
ob interview dressed like a tramp. OK, now she says she got raped, but she didn’t lose a button off her skin-tight skirt when it happened, and she didn’t even break a fingernail fighting Morris off. Then she only calls the cops two days later, after she finds out that she didn’t get the job.

  “I have no doubt that Nate Morris is one manipulative son of a bitch, and for all I know he did rape her. But are you telling me that twelve reasonable people, who probably don’t like defense lawyers any more than the next guy, should have been convinced beyond a doubt just on her say-so? Are you willing to throw a guy in jail just because he might have committed a crime? Believing everything the Brockway girl says is your privilege, but don’t expect the rest of the world to join her fan club.”

  Bratt bowed his head, acknowledging the soundness of Leblanc’s reasoning. In his heart he was still sure that Claire had been telling the truth, but maybe he had lost his objectivity, and that’s something he should have been aware of from the start.

  “Unfortunately, I’ll never get Jeannie to see things that way,” he thought out loud. “She blames all lawyers, and I’m front and center.”

  “So what,” Leblanc answered. “Imagine that: a teenager is pissed off at her father and runs away from home. Like it’s never happened before.”

  “She’s not just pissed at me. She rejects my profession, my whole career.”

  “Let me tell you something, Mr. Perfect Parent. The meanest judge I ever met, someone who would’ve been a hanging judge if we still had the death penalty, was your old man. He wouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt to the pope on a Sunday. His son, and that’s you by the way, ended up spending his life defending the undesirables that his father-”

  “Please let’s not bring up my dad now,” Bratt interrupted.

  “OK. Whatever. It just looks to me like Jeannie’s just following in the family tradition of going against whatever her father stood for.”

  Of all things, Bratt didn’t want to think about his father right then. But he knew that Leblanc had a good point, although he was afraid that if he conceded too easily his concerns would seem superficial. Besides, his recent worries went beyond Claire and Jeannie.

  “OK, smart guy,” he said. “That’s all well and good for this specific case. What about on a broader scale?”

  “Broader scale,” Leblanc moaned, putting back the slice of hash brown he had been about to swallow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, other than just me and Jeannie and Claire. I mean, what we, me and you, do in court all the time. Do we go too far, really twist around the truth so that nobody can tell it from the lies? Isn’t that what we do to get criminals out of jail?”

  “Holy shit, I’m back in first year law school! ‘Please sir, how can you defend a man when you know he’s guilty?’” Leblanc mocked, waving his hand like a student in class. “I can’t believe you’d even worry about such an infantile point of view with your years of experience.”

  Bratt felt the heat rise in his face at Leblanc’s sarcastic words.

  “OK, so I’m supposed to know better, right? Yet Morris may have committed not one, but two rapes, and he still walks the streets. Cooper Hall definitely defrauded dozens of innocent people of their life savings, and he walks the streets. Shall I go on?”

  “Sure, and don’t forget to mention Chantal Boucher while you’re at it.”

  “Who?”

  “Chantal Boucher. Remember her, back in eighty-five? She was a young hooker, had a couple of kids to support. A real sob story.”

  “The name’s vaguely familiar. What about her?”

  “I guess my memory is better than yours, or maybe you’ve tried to forget her. They charged her with robbing one of her johns at knifepoint, but you were sure she was innocent. So sure you took her case even if she was on Legal Aid.”

  “I think I do remember her now.”

  “Of course you do. I don’t remember the prosecutor’s name, but he made her look like a worthless slut on the stand.”

  “Pierre Caron.”

  “Ah, your memory’s not so bad, after-all, Bobby-boy. She got two less a day, and her kids cried their little hearts out as they took their innocent mom away in handcuffs. That’s exactly how you described it to me, way back when.”

  “OK,” said Bratt, bothered by having to relive this unhappy memory, “what’s your point?”

  “My point is it doesn’t matter what side you’re on. You think Crown prosecutors lose any sleep about sending people to jail? They do their job, the system works more often than not, and the results are usually just. We’re human, so the system isn’t any more perfect than we are. Sometimes the guilty walk, but believe me, most crooks out there can’t afford Robert Bratt or Antoine Perron, and they do their time.

  “And every now and then even Robert Bratt loses a case, and, who knows, maybe his client was innocent anyway. But, believe me, he didn’t lose Chantal Boucher’s case because he was too hesitant to do whatever he had to do to win. And no lawyer should ever lose a case just because he chickened out or was afraid to hurt somebody’s feelings, or ruffle some feathers. We can only give it everything we got. No quarter asked and none given, right? After that it’s up to the judges and juries to screw it up or get it right.”

  Bratt sat quietly for a few seconds. He felt like a boy who’d just been lectured by his father. After all these years he shouldn’t have needed this kind of speech. Then again, maybe Leblanc’s pep talk would get him out of his doldrums. Even star players needed an occasional kick in the pants.

  “Boy, you’ve got all the answers today, don’t you?”

  Leblanc grinned and reached out for his breakfast, ice-cold by now. “That’s why you came to see me, Bobby-boy. You’re way too smart to waste your time barking up the wrong tree. Now, get the hell outta here and let me harden my arteries in peace. I gotta be in court in ten minutes.”

  Bratt got up and walked slowly back to his own office, all the while letting Leblanc’s arguments percolate in his head. There was no doubt that his partner had made his point well. Now it was up to him to get back into the game and lead his team to the winning touchdown.

  Rah-rah, he thought wryly.

  The first thing he had to do was get his mind back on the defense he was preparing for the upcoming murder trial. He joined Kouri in his office and waited for the arrival of the two new alibi witnesses. He didn’t know what to expect from them. One of them wasn’t even on the original list of witnesses he had gotten from Sévigny, and he wondered where Small had come up with him.

  He would have to put his doubts aside for now. As long as he didn’t know for sure that these two witnesses were lying, he would keep his opinion to himself and do his job. He crossed his fingers and hoped that Jennifer Campbell had been involved in the selection process.

  While he waited he mused about the recent changes in his life that had driven him to Leblanc’s door. There had been a time, an eternity ago, or perhaps it was only a week or two, when he had been able to do his job without second-guessing every decision he made, when he spent more time fighting in court than he spent fighting his own conscience. He longed to get back to that level of certainty.

  His thoughts were interrupted when Kouri stuck his head in through the door to announce that the witnesses had arrived. He told him to show them in and Kouri’s head disappeared from view again.

  Bratt picked up the notepad on which he had written notes of his interviews with Clayton and Parker, whom he mentally referred to as two out of the Three Stooges. He turned it face down on his desk in disgust. He recalled how nervous and unsettled they had been when he had questioned them. If the two new witnesses were anything like the first pair, they would need every bit of help he could give them. He decided to interview these two together. Of course that would let them listen to each other’s answers and maybe even change their stories accordingly, the most basic no-no for a lawyer meeting with potential witnesses. But if that helped them keep their stories straigh
t, then he was all for it. Time was running short, and if a lawyer wasn’t willing to bend the rules a bit, then who would?

  Kouri re-entered the office and Bratt was surprised to see two clean-cut young men follow him in. He couldn’t believe that either of them had anything to do with Marlon Small. They were dressed in casual slacks and sweaters that actually fit them. Their hair was cut short, without being shaved into any gang insignias or initials. They stood politely in front of his desk, waiting to be introduced, neither slouching nor fidgeting. Bratt thought they could be poster boys for some middle-American college.

  Kouri stepped forward to carry out the introductions.

  “Vernon Sims,” he said, pointing first to the taller of the pair, “and Everton Jordan. This is Robert Bratt.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Bratt,” Sims said, stepping forward and reaching out to shake his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Bratt stood and shook Sims hand, and then did the same with Jordan.

  “The pleasure is mine,” he said wholeheartedly. “Please, sit down, gentlemen.”

  The two sat down in the chairs across the desk from him. They sat straight and looked at him with pleasant but serious faces.

  “We’ll dispense with the preliminaries,” Bratt began. “Marlon Small informed me that you two were with a group of people, including him, at a park in LaSalle last June, the night of a shooting you may have heard of in Little Burgundy.”

  “Yes, the double-murder on Carrier Street,” Sims answered. “Everybody was talking about it the next day.”

  “And at the time of the shooting you were…”

  “We were all at Wilfort Park, in LaSalle. We were there pretty much every night last summer.”

  “Is there anything special about that particular day, Vernon, which would let me be sure we’re talking about the same date?”

  “Oh, sure. I had spent most of the day at McGill. I wanted to change two of my electives, and that was the cut-off date.”

  “McGill? As in McGill University?” Bratt asked, surprised to learn that this witness was attending his alma mater.