Street Legal

by William Deverell

  Street Legal

  William Deverell

  BOOKS BY WILLIAM DEVERELL

  Fiction

  Needles

  High Crimes

  Mecca

  The Dance of Shiva

  Platinum Blues

  Mindfield

  Street Legal: The Betrayal

  Trial of Passion

  Slander

  Kill All the Lawyers

  The Laughing Falcon

  Non-Fiction

  A Life on Trial: The Case of Robert Frisbee

  Prologue

  January 14, 1980. Temperature outside minus thirty Celsius. From a window in the Chelsea Hotel, Tommy Chu looked down at columns of smoke from the chimneys, vertical plumes on a windless day. Tommy Chu thought of Hong Kong, where he was born, where the air was damp and hot. He thought of Vancouver, where he now lived, where the grass was green all winter. Here nothing was green; the trees were skeletons, branches like bones and claws. Toronto the Good, they called this city. Toronto the Dead.

  From the direction of the bed came a pop like a cap pistol firing, and Tommy Chu felt, again, a tremor within.

  Chu turned, and gazed solemnly at Speeder Cacciati, who was sitting on the bed chewing bubble gum, blowing little pink balloons until they popped. Was he doped up on something? Some drug that made all his parts move incessantly? Cacciati’s hands fussed with his hair; now he was cracking his knuckles, now picking sores. Of which there were many. A scrawny body, a face that looked to have been stepped on at some unlucky moment with a heavy boot; almost concave.

  Tommy Chu and Speeder Cacciati each had an armed guard in the hotel room. Chu’s man, Sherman Lott, had a .38 revolver strapped to his checkered sports shirt. He was being watched by Jerszy Schlizik, who was called the Undertaker, and whose gun was hidden behind the drapes of his long black suit jacket.

  Cacciati cracked a big one, and grinned, and peeled the gum from his lips. “Let’s do business,” he said.

  Tommy Chu picked up his briefcase, and placed it carefully on the bed. Cacciati leaned over and snapped it open. He pulled out a kilo of white powder, triple-wrapped in thick plastic.

  “Ever do this stuff yourself?” Cacciati asked.

  Tommy Chu shook his head.

  “You’re a smart Chinaman. You use the expression over in Hong Kong there, get the Chinaman off your back? That’s when you’re hooked. You gotta get the Chinaman off your back. It’s like the monkey.”

  “No, we don’t have that expression.”

  Speeder nodded, blew a bubble, held out one of the bags to the light from the window. “This as pure as the sampler?”

  “Do you want to test it?”

  “Naw, Billy says to trust you.”

  “I can offer this much again in two weeks. Also more in a month.”

  “Billy’s interested, he says to talk about it. How do you bring it in?”

  “That’s not for the world to know. I might tell Mr. Sweet.” The notoriously shy Billy Sweet, their boss.

  “As I already once explained, Billy don’t talk to strangers.”

  “It is necessary to make arrangements at the top.”

  “Not with some flunky, eh?” Speeder gestured to Jerszy Schlizik. “Pay these boys off.”

  As Schlizik bent to an attaché case, Tommy Chu felt an odd sensation of distress — he didn’t know where it came from; it was just a momentary flutter. Pay these boys off.

  Schlizik, the man who looked like a mortician, retrieved from the case a stack of bills banded with elastic. He tossed the money to Sherman Lott, who licked his fingers and began his count, fingers flipping through the bills soft and easy and quick.

  Tommy Chu then saw Schlizik, still bending, pull a silencer-equipped revolver from the attaché case.

  Schlizik shot Sherman Lott twice in the chest and stopped Tommy Chu with a third bullet as he was running for the door.

  As Cacciati snapped bubbles, and picked up the money and the heroin, Schlizik made absolutely sure. He fired bullets into the back of their skulls.

  “Two stiff dicks,” said Speeder Cacciati.

  1

  July 25, 1980. Temperature outside plus thirty Celsius. Carrie wasn’t sure how hot that was. Multiply something by five and divide it by nine? She had not mastered metric conversion; she wasn’t good at numbers. Which is one of the reasons Carrington Barr became a barrister instead of an economist or an engineer. Not that she’d ever dreamed of being anything but a lawyer.

  Even in the courtroom it was stifling: the air-conditioning didn’t seem to have much poop. Thirty above, add to that the hot human sweat from the packed gallery, from the jury box, the press table, the counsel bench. In a heavy black gown, Carrie felt sticky, damp at the armpits, and her own smell offended her.

  The courtroom was silent, breathless. The witness, Julia Yates, a brave and spunky woman of nineteen, had been invited to leave the witness box, and now was strolling beside the gallery railing, studying all these good burghers of Toronto, who were sitting still and calm upon their benches, like observant churchgoers in their pews.

  Julia Yates was looking for the Midnight Strangler.

  She had picked out Edwin Moodie five months ago, in a police lineup. She had written on a slip of paper Moodie’s number: six. But she had put a tiny question mark after that number. And that lineup, Carrie felt, had been so unfair: Moodie standing there with five men all slightly smaller than him. Though it would be hard to find someone larger — Carrie’s client weighed in at something like two hundred and sixty pounds.

  “He was big,” said Julia Yates, still patrolling the fence line. “Real big. And sort of bald.”

  The Midnight Strangler had left this young woman for dead after choking and raping her, but she had been conscious all the time, feigning death. The jury loved her, they would do anything. They would convict for her, Carrie feared, on the slightest evidence.

  The judge, too, seemed eager to put away poor Edwin Moodie. Someone had to pay for these terrible crimes; someone had to be sacrificed upon the altar of justice. But at least His Lordship had allowed Carrie to place Moodie in this packed gallery.

  Julia Yates stood for a moment before a beef-chested, balding, fiftyish man in the third row. A yellow bow tie hid one of his chins. His face was deadpan and his eyes stared blankly past her, at the wall.

  Now, silent and intent, Julia Yates focused on the man beside him, also balding and about the same age, but he was even bigger, thick neck and massive chest, his face a full moon decorated with a tiny, groomed moustache in the French style, two smiling curls. This man was not staring off into space like his seat-mate, but looking directly at her, bemused, contemplative.

  Carrie watched as Julia cocked her head at him, bird-like, then moved on, walking along the railing, stopping in front of yet another large man near the end of the row. He was younger, in his forties. He wore a poorly fitted hairpiece — like a golf-course divot. Carrie had fitted him out in the toupee, hoping it would be obvious. She had also placed several other big men in the audience, as many as she dared: ex-footballers, weightlifters, a couple of reluctant conscripts from the police force.

  One of these was Sergeant Horse Kronos, in charge of the lockup at the Queen Street Provincial Court. He was shorter than Carrie’s client, but otherwise fit the bill. He had been in the original lineup, too, at police headquarters, and Carrie had prevailed upon him to come to court today. For a moment, Carrie thought Julia Yates was going to finger Horse, but she gave up on him.

  “I’m sorry, I . . . It was so dark.”

  “Take your time,” said Mr. Justice Truel
etter.

  “She must be absolutely sure,” said Carrie.

  “She simply has to do her best,” said Oliver McAnthony, the prosecutor.

  “That’s right,” said the judge. “This is just a form of lineup.”

  “My client is accused of six murders,” Carrie said. “If she isn’t sure, how can the jury be sure?”

  “Mrs. Barr, you are out of order. I’ve given you a lot of leeway so far.”

  Oh, sure, Carrie thought. A lot of rope, he might have said. But Carrie had got her two cents in, that’s what mattered. Her father would have approved, Charlie Connors, the Terror of Temigouche, New Brunswick.

  Julia Yates shook her head, and finally returned her concentration to the man in the third row, the man with the yellow bow tie who was so carefully studying the wall behind her.

  “I think . . .”

  Carrie held her breath.

  “I think that’s him. The man in the bow tie.”

  The man’s mouth went slack, and one of his chins bobbled, the bow tie moving in lock-step with it.

  “Are you sure?” Carrie said.

  Her voice carried a scold, and Julia Yates’s back seemed to stiffen.

  “Yes, I am sure.”

  “The witness,” Carrie said, “has just identified Detective-Sergeant Jock Strachan of homicide.”

  Oliver McAnthony sat for a while and seemed to be studying his hands. Then he stood. “That, I regret to say, is the prosecution’s case.”

  “I move for a dismissal,” said Carrington Barr.

  ***

  Outside the courtroom, Carrie tried to beat her way through the blockade of reporters. “I have nothing to say right now.”

  They then descended on Oliver McAnthony, the Crown’s senior prosecutor for Toronto, as he emerged set-faced from the courtroom. “No comment, ladies and gentlemen, thank you.” He stopped in front of Carrie, and brushed aside some microphones.

  “You have arrived, Carrington. Your first murder trial — a serial killer, and you got him off.”

  “Don’t be a poor loser, Oliver.”

  “I may be appealing.”

  “You’d be more appealing if you smiled.”

  “What happened in there, Mr. McAnthony?” a reporter asked.

  “What happened?” He turned on his jury voice, mellifluous and forceful. “Let us just say that six of the Midnight Strangler’s victims could not enjoy the pleasure of giving their evidence. That was unavoidable because they are all dead. The only woman who lived to tell her tale could not identify him. And the Strangler is now a free man.”

  Carrie was shocked by the innuendo. “The Strangler always has been a free man,” she said angrily. “Go out and find him, Oliver.” She turned to the press, furious. “They think they can go out onto the street and pick up any poor old oddball . . .”

  She hesitated, seeing her client Edwin Moodie at the open courtroom door, still handcuffed to Detective Jock Strachan. Moodie blinked and looked around, as if not comprehending. The media parted, like the Red Sea, as the two men walked out.

  “They think they can pick up any poor old fellow,” Carrie continued, her voice rising again, “and charge him with a series of murders they’ve been incompetent to solve.”

  Which is exactly what they’d done, of course, grabbed a street person, a man slow of thought, bereft of alibis, and shoved him in a lineup. He just happened to be living in a building behind the lot where Julia Yates had been attacked — some inconclusive hair and fibre matches, that was all.

  “I want you to know that Mr. Moodie has been the subject of the proverbial railroad.”

  Carrie heard her own shrill voice. She never does that, never shouts. Cool, collected Carrington Barr. She turned and walked briskly toward her client, while the reporters pursued McAnthony as he marched down the hall.

  Moodie was still blinking, his wispy moustache twitching. He was a mountain of a man — there was rock in him as well as fatty fill — but his features were gentle, his blue eyes small and sad and liquid.

  As Detective Strachan unlocked the cuffs, he said to Moodie, sotto voce, in his Scots burr: “If ye kill one more poor girl, I’ll blow your diseased brain away.”

  “Jock!” She was furious. “You apologize!”

  “I’ll apologize, lassie, when you prove he didn’t do it.” He pocketed his handcuffs, adjusted his bow tie, and stalked away.

  Watching him go, Moodie looked puzzled. The world had always been a strange place, Carrie believed, for this lonely fellow. He’d been one of her first clients — a vagrancy charge three years ago, then a street begging offence. She’d won those. When arrested for six recent murders, he’d come back to her.

  His eyes turned to her, a pulling, needy look.

  “Now, Mr. Moodie, I want you to see Major Andrews at the Salvation Army.”

  She always called him Mr. Moodie. The first time they’d met, Carrie had asked him, “What do they call you? Ed? Edwin?” “They call me Mr. Moodie,” he had answered in his absurdly thin voice. It seemed comical, a kind of tough-guy response, but she was sure he hadn’t meant it that way.

  “Major Andrews will fix you up with a place to stay.”

  Moodie blinked and nodded. “Okay.”

  “And if he can’t find you a place, I will.”

  He nodded again, seemed to struggle to find words. “I’m not the Midnight Strangler.”

  “I know that. You couldn’t hurt a bug.”

  She wondered if he would shake her hand with the strange, soft grip he had, as if holding a wounded bird. But he was rubbing his wrist, where the cuffs had chafed, and then his eyes left hers and he looked down at the floor, shy. She patted his arm, his hammy biceps, and he started like a nervous horse.

  Now he was looking at her hand, the gold wedding band, her only decoration. She’d often found him staring at it, as if checking to see if she was still in a state of wedlock. You’d like Ted, Mr. Moodie, she thought. He’s sort of like you, uncommunicative. Becoming more so every day, secretive, like a man who — don’t even think about it.

  Moodie glanced up at her again, and looked quickly away, as if embarrassed. She wondered if he saw the sadness in her eyes. Sadness — what sadness? She had just won the trial of the decade. She was the queen of all she surveyed. She was happy, damn it.

  Moodie mumbled something she couldn’t make out.

  “When you’re settled, we’ll look for a job for you. I have some contacts. Well . . .” She shrugged. “Good luck.”

  Moodie seemed unable to say anything more and just stared after her with his small, liquid eyes. Finally, as she turned to go, he spoke in a soft voice.

  “Thank you.”

  ***

  In the female barristers’ robing room, Carrie hung her gown in a locker and shed her white blouse and black skirt. She thought of showering before changing back into her beige cotton suit, but she settled for an underarm wash and some Mitchum roll-on.

  She studied herself in the mirror. Her wine-red tresses sat like a damp mop on her head. Tall and angular, long of neck and flat of chest. The bra held up nothing, but she always wore one, a properly raised young lady. She had Golly Miss Molly eyes that seemed constantly wide and alarmed. She was striking, people said. As opposed to, for instance, incredibly attractive. Always so tastefully attired.

  Would the Star use that terrible shot they’d taken earlier? Looking like she’d just been goosed. Or today’s confident smiling one?

  How vain, the victor.

  How she wished her dad had been here to see her. It’s the big time here, Charlie, in the media capital of Canada. Here’s where you should have tried your talent, here, under the big top, not some pokey country carnival — although your renditions of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” might not milk as many tears in the cynical city as it used to among the jurors of the
gentle hills of New Brunswick.

  She should have kept her own name, Connors. But she’d been brought up in the old-fashioned way, a late-blooming feminist.

  Was Ted seeing someone? Such a furtive phrase, seeing someone. Seeing someone, involved with, sleeping with, she couldn’t utter even to herself the impossible four-letter word. His secretary, Heather? Impossible. Though she was smitten by him, available, and cute.

  Get with it, Carrie. So he’s been strange. Men have moods. Men are human.

  Carrie thought a walk would freshen her, and she departed the Armoury Street entrance of the courthouse and headed up to Bloor, toward her offices. But the afternoon heat of the mid-summer Toronto swelter quickly caused her energy, her clothing, her entire body to wilt. She took a route past the Parliament Buildings, through Queen’s Park, seeking shade under trees.

  Ted would kiss her, praise her, be all sincere. Marvellous work, Carrie. She would be sincere back to him. Thank you, Ted, it feels great. And Leon and Chuck would emerge from their offices, wanting to hear all about it, how the witness fingered Jock Strachan (whom she must have seen numerous times — how could she make such a mistake?). And poor Edwin Moodie, she would say, he still doesn’t know what happened. And Oliver McAnthony — well, the old smoothie almost had a cat fit.

  She stepped with relief into the air-conditioned lobby of the General and Commercial Trust Building, a three-year-old tower on Bloor. A formidable rent had to be paid each month for their tenth-storey suite, and her firm had outrageously overspent on furnishings and equipment and decor. They had been too optimistic when they signed that lease three years ago — they hadn’t counted on recession and reflation. She and her partners had borrowed for these expenses, and a cruelly high rate on the floating loan — 16 per cent, 19 per cent, and rising into the stratosphere — now nearly had them on the rims. Well, maybe all this publicity over her win would send the clients flocking.

  ROBINOVITCH, BARR, BARR, TCHOBANIAN, said the raised heavy brass lettering on the wall outside their suite of offices.

  Ted was the first Barr. He was thirty-two and had been called eight years ago. Carrie was twenty-eight, had been practising for five years, as had Chuck Tchobanian, a pal from law-school days. Leon Robinovitch, who at thirty-nine was already into his second midlife crisis, was a nine-year man. He had founded the firm with Ted, a former fellow university activist. They first had been called Robinovitch, Barr, Connors, and Tchobanian. Three years ago it became Robinovitch, Barr, Barr, and Tchobanian. No more Carrie Connors.