Greene watched himself smile up on the screen. “Simon, I want to ask you about your mommy.”
“Oh.”
In court, Greene looked at Norville. She was glaring down at the defense table. Greene glanced over. Wyler was staring transfixed at her son.
“This morning, when I met you in your bedroom, we talked. Remember?” This had been the toughest part of the interview. If his questions were leading in the least bit, suggesting an answer to the child, the whole exercise could backfire.
Simon lay down and reached for a train. He rolled it back and forth on the carpet, not bothering with the wooden rails, intensely studying the movement of the wheels. One of his feet flopped across Greene’s leg. This was painful to watch. The poor child. Somehow aware his world had changed, he had an innate instinct to protect his mother.
“Arceli doesn’t have any trains at her apartment.” Simon’s eyes were glued to the engine’s little wheels, the sound of them going back and forth a constant backbeat.
“She doesn’t?”
“There’s no Thomas here either.”
“We’ll have to get one.”
“My mom came into my room last night.”
Even though he’d seen the video at least ten times, Greene’s heart was beating. He remembered how he’d had to resist the urge to nod.
“What did your mommy do?” he asked, his voice almost cold.
“She kissed me and said she wouldn’t see me for a long time.” Simon rubbed his foot along Greene’s leg. “Can I go home now and get my trains?”
Greene saw himself glance at the mirror. Looking toward Kennicott.
“I heard you’re going to have a sleepover at your uncle’s house for a few days.”
Simon looked at Greene. “But there’re no trains there.”
“We can bring yours from home,” Greene said.
Simon considered this. He shook his head. “My mommy was crying. Why won’t she see me for a long time?”
“Maybe she has to go visit some people,” Greene said.
There was a sniffling sound in the courtroom. Samantha Wyler was holding a tissue to her nose.
“My daddy always wakes me up before he goes away on trips.”
“Perhaps he was in a hurry.”
On the screen Simon sat up, lifted a train, and rolled it in his hand. “This is Percy. I like him second best after Thomas. How long will mommy be away?”
This was the question Greene had dreaded. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Can I go now?” Simon asked.
“Sure.” Greene pulled him up from the floor in one motion.
Simon stared at Greene, confused. “First I have to put my toys away,” he said. “My dad always makes me tidy up.”
A sigh of affection went up from the audience behind Greene.
Raglan stood. “Your Honor, the tape goes on for a few more minutes.” She spoke over the bang-bang sound of Simon and Greene tossing trains into the bin. “We’ve seen the relevant portion.” She turned the machine off and the courtroom felt unnaturally quiet.
Greene sneaked another look at the defense table. Wyler’s face was buried in her hands. DiPaulo had a smile pasted on his face. Greene was sure the tape had taken him by surprise. DiPaulo would be glad he hadn’t put his client on the stand and have her come up with some desperate, false alibi, claiming she hadn’t been in the house the night of the murder.
DiPaulo must have sensed Greene’s eyes on him. He looked over at the prosecution table. They locked eyes. DiPaulo nodded slowly.
Both men were experienced enough to understand what had just happened. With this evidence, there’d been a seismic change in the case. The question of Samantha Wyler’s guilt or innocence was all but settled. The only real issues left were: Which charge would she plead guilty to and how many years would she spend in jail?
32
Something as simple as a primary school report card could reveal an extraordinary amount about a person. Daniel Kennicott first learned this lesson in his rookie year as a cop. He was working on the case of a forty-nine-year-old pedophile named Herman Marchmount, who targeted girls between the ages of five and nine. A detective at the division suggested that Kennicott swear out a search warrant to get his report card. Sure enough, it described in vivid detail how at recess Marchmount dragged a girl from his grade-two class into the bushes and pulled her skirt up over her head.
And what am I going to learn about you, Samantha Wyler? Kennicott thought as he took his seat across from Corinne Tressider, head of guidance for Cobalt High School.
“We were all so shocked to hear about Sam—I mean Samantha.” Tressider sat comfortably behind a desk in her bright room. The school was on a hill above the town and the large windows on the east side looked out across the river beyond. “Everyone called her Sam.”
“You remember her?”
“Never had a student like Sam, and I’m in my thirty-second year of teaching. Take a look at these.” Tressider opened a folder labeled SAMANTHA FRANKLAND—REPORT CARDS.
They were on identical pages, their horizontal boxes filled in with precise handwriting. Funny they still call them report cards, Kennicott thought, since they weren’t on cards anymore, but on sheets of light blue paper. The letters in the boxes on the right-hand side jumped off the page: A−, A, and A+, for four straight years. Except for phys ed. In that she was a C student. According to the reports, she wasn’t a team player.
There was a cup filled with sharpened pencils on the corner of Tressider’s desk. She took one out and twirled it between her thumb and forefinger. “I went to school with Karl, her dad.”
“I understand he died in an accident.”
Tressider tapped the pencil on the edge of her desk, which was spotless. The whole room had a Windex-like smell of cleanliness about it. She gave the pencil one last, hard tap and swirled her chair around.
“In our last year of high school we were on a team together.” She turned back to Kennicott with a photo in her hand of four students in a television studio, two boys and two girls. “The show was called Reach for the Top. Everyone in the country watched it. Back then we had only two channels. It was what you’d call a trivia show today. Every topic you could imagine.”
She passed Kennicott a faded color picture in a black frame. It was obvious which of the boys was Samantha’s father. He had the same long neck, big eyes, good looks. Tressider had blond hair in a Doris Day bob and wore a flowery dress. They sat beside each other. A banner overhead read REACH FOR THE TOP: NORTHERN ONTARIO CHAMPIONS.
“Karl and I are on the right,” Tressider said without looking at the photo. “Harold, the other boy, went out to Alberta to work in the oil business. Hasn’t been back for years. Gwen was the smartest of all. She went to med school in the States but then got ovarian cancer.”
Kennicott put the photo back on the desk.
“We were finalists in the provincial championship. It was the biggest thing in this town ever. We did car washes, raffles, bake sales to raise money. Took the midnight train down to Toronto and stayed in the Royal York Hotel, across from Union Station.” Tressider’s eyes seemed to lose focus as she looked out the window.
“How’d you do?”
She snorted. Shook her head. “We were wiped out. This team from a Toronto school—Neil McNeil. They were so fast hitting the Answer button. Knew everything. Karl took it the hardest. Swore he’d go back to Toronto and make it big. He got into that bank program down there, but it didn’t work out.”
“What happened?”
“He’d never talk about it. The year he came back, I was away at teachers college. When I returned home, he was with Jacquelyn Cormier, and she was pregnant.”
Without warning, Tressider popped out of her chair and went over to the window that overlooked the town below and the train track running along the river. The sun was still low on the horizon and streaking in across the room. She brought the venetian blinds down almost halfway.
Kennic
ott looked around the office. Tressider had no other personal photos. No pictures of her and a man about her age. No snapshots of children. Often it was the things people didn’t say, or didn’t have, that told you the most about them.
“The first day Sam was in high school, Karl brought her in. She sat right in that chair you’re sitting in. He was so proud of her. The year before, he’d taken her out of school for a week and they’d gone down to Toronto. Stayed at the Royal York. Took her to see all the bank towers, the stock exchange, the museum, the art gallery, some musicals, a Blue Jays game.”
Tressider was speaking without looking back. She scraped the pencil across the mullion in the middle of the window. “Sam was a bright and fun kid. But when Karl died like that, she closed right up. Fourteen years old. A terrible time for a young girl to lose her father.”
Kennicott scanned the “comments” sections of the report cards. All said she was a dedicated student. “I’ve spoken to her college roommate. She said Samantha was a hard worker and a real loner.”
Tressider returned to her desk. She put the Reach for the Top photo back in its place before she sat down. “Sam didn’t make friends. She’d come here if she needed to talk.”
“What would you two talk about?”
“Schools. Scholarships. Her latest research project. She loved to borrow my Newsweek magazines. Sometimes she’d talk about her dad. How he didn’t want her to get stuck in Cobalt.”
“Did she have any enemies? Ever get in a fight, get angry with anyone?”
“I knew you were going to ask me that.” Tressider flexed the pencil between her hands. It broke with a loud snap. “Sorry.” She looked flustered. “I’m not used to talking to police officers.”
“You’re doing fine.”
Tressider opened her middle desk drawer, tossed the two broken pencil pieces inside, and slammed it shut, as if she were hiding incriminating evidence. “Sam was smart, and impatient and I’ll admit it, she had a temper. People thought she was a snob, but she didn’t care.”
She reached for another pencil. “I don’t see how it’s relevant, but once in grade twelve this boy named Brett Barton was taunting her. He tried to pull her into the boys’ washroom.”
“What happened?”
“Sam was a strong girl. Cracked his nose in two places. Punched him so hard she broke a rib too. Then she threw him against a locker and he lost consciousness. It was a minor concussion, but we had to call an ambulance and run him up to the hospital in Haileybury.”
Kennicott pulled out the grade-twelve report card. “There’s nothing in here about it. Was she suspended?”
“It was a week before the scholarship applications went in. We had a big meeting. Brett was known for pushing himself on girls and no one blamed Sam for standing up for herself.”
“So you left it out.”
“She deserved that scholarship. But …” Tressider tapped her pencil and didn’t say anything.
“But you thought she overreacted.”
Tressider gripped the pencil tighter and kept tapping.
“Perhaps you weren’t entirely shocked when you heard about this murder.”
Tressider’s eyes looked tired. “I don’t know,” she said.
Kennicott left his seat and walked over to the wall opposite the window. There were two long rows of photos of students in caps and gowns under a sign that read top students of the year. The dated haircuts and the clothes made the series of photos look like a time capsule.
“Sam’s up on the top row, third from the left,” Tressider said.
Unlike most of the graduates, who were grinning at the camera, Samantha Frankland was serious. Kennicott turned back from the wall of pictures. “Was she close to any other teachers?”
Tressider pulled out a piece of paper and started writing. “No. Her only other friend was Lillian Funke, the town librarian up in New Liskeard. Lil brought in books for Sam from all over the province. This is her number. She’s in Toronto for the bail hearing, but you can call her anytime.”
Kennicott took the piece of paper. “Sam ever come back to visit?”
“Every time she’s home. Which isn’t very often. She’s never had a lot in common with her mom, or her brother for that matter. It was her dad who had the brains.”
“Ever bring her husband and son?”
“One time, when the boy was a baby. After that she came alone.”
“Ever talk to you about her marriage?”
“No. Only about university, then her jobs. She was real upset when those rich girls from Toronto got the internships at the big banks. But typical Sam, made her more determined to make it. Prove she was better than they were.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“About a year ago. She’d split up with her husband. It was all over the papers that he was dating that American actress.”
“How’d she seem?”
Tressider tossed the pencil onto her desk.
“Upset. Like you’d expect in a situation like that.”
“Angry?”
Tressider picked up the pencil and put it back in the cup. “Not angry like she was going to kill her husband or anything stupid like that. She was mad. At him. At herself. She said she should have been a better mother. You know, I think she felt like she’d never had a childhood, she was always working. I told her to enjoy having some time off for a change.”
“What did she say to that?”
“She smiled. Said it wasn’t a bad idea.”
It was 11:05 in the morning when Kennicott emerged from the school into the bright sunlight. Sitting at the top of a long set of granite steps and looking over the town, he heard the whistle of the southbound train before the engine chugged into view.
He could imagine young Samantha Frankland sitting in this very spot, watching this train make its daily run.
The whistle blew again. Kennicott wondered if it would slow down. Let someone off. Pick somebody up. But instead the train rumbled through the town, whistle echoing off the distant hills even after it disappeared behind the trees.
33
“Counsel, I’m prepared to give my ruling now,” Judge Norville said right after Ted DiPaulo and Jennifer Raglan had finished their submissions about whether or not Samantha Wyler should be granted bail.
DiPaulo glanced at Raglan. She was as surprised as he was. The time was twelve-thirty, and they’d both expected Norville to take an early lunch break and call her husband for advice.
The judge is tougher than people give her credit for, DiPaulo thought as he watched her reach for the book of cases he’d filed. He remembered something about Norville. She had one child, a girl who was developmentally delayed. When the baby was only two years old, her husband died, and she remarried nine months later. The woman was a survivor.
Raglan rose to her feet. “If Your Honor wants to proceed before lunch, that’s fine with me.”
DiPaulo stood. “I agree.” What did Norville’s sudden decisiveness mean?
“Will the defendant please rise.” Norville’s voice was laced with a stern confidence.
Samantha Wyler stood up, unsteady on her feet.
Hearing judges read out their decision was the most painful part of being a defense lawyer. Even when victory seemed a foregone conclusion, until you heard the magic words “not guilty,” or in this case “released on bail,” you never knew.
When they gave their rulings, judges didn’t worry about the poor defendants whose lives hung in the balance. Instead, to justify themselves every step of the way, they went into excruciating detail about their decision-making process. Judges lived in fear that the dreaded Court of Appeal would overturn their rulings. They never wanted to leave their posteriors exposed.
It was DiPaulo’s practice, as the judge spoke, to draw a vertical line down each page in his court binder, about a quarter of the way from the outer edge. On the left-hand side he wrote the judge’s words, while on the blank space to the right he noted the key poi
nts he’d need for an appeal, should he lose.
Standing beside him, Wyler raised her eyes to the judge. Usually when clients did this they looked rather pathetic, pleading. But not Samantha. She looked straight at Norville.
“This is one of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make since being appointed to the bench.” Norville furrowed her brow at Wyler. “On the one hand, ma’am, if you are innocent, you’re going through a hell that none of us in this courtroom could ever imagine. The father of your only child, dead. Your son, bereft. I’m cognizant of the fact that if I keep you in prison, you’ll be cut off from him for months, maybe years, at a formative stage in his life.”
Okay, DiPaulo thought. Now tell us about on the other hand.
“On the other hand, if you are guilty,” Norville said, “you are responsible for the death of a man with whom you shared this lovely son—his father—and all the grief that’s left in your wake.”
Wyler put her hands behind her back. As if she were waiting for the handcuffs to go on.
“It is not up to me today to determine guilt or innocence. The only issue is if you’re a good candidate for release on bail. There are three questions I must answer. First, will you come to court as required? As Mr. DiPaulo said in his excellent submissions, you’ll surrender your passport and live in Cobalt—a one-horse town with the only horse tied up, was how he put it. And, as he pointed out, you don’t even have a driver’s license.”
DiPaulo was writing furiously. Often it wasn’t a good sign when the judge told your client what a great job their lawyer had done for them. Prelude to bad news despite a valiant effort.
“The second ground. Will you commit further offenses? Again Mr. DiPaulo points out that you have no criminal record. And more important, I’m confident your mother will be an excellent surety. Once you go back to her house, I don’t think you’ll be a danger to anyone.”
Two out of three ain’t bad, DiPaulo thought, but not enough.
“The last and most vexing question is whether or not releasing you would undermine public confidence in the administration of justice.” Saying that, she lifted DiPaulo’s thick binder of cases and dropped it back on her desk with a thump. “It’s not unprecedented to grant bail to accused in murder trials, especially someone such as yourself, with no criminal antecedents.”
02 - The Guilty Plea Page 15