Street Legal

by William Deverell

  He seemed quite at ease, puffing contentedly on a hand-rolled cigarette, showing none of the tension one might expect from a man accused of a bloodbath. He was not looking at Carrie, although he must have observed her there, but at Costello, examining him as one might an interesting bug.

  Cristal hadn’t taken the lawyer’s card.

  “Who sent you?” A Québécois accent — the newspaper said he was from Montreal.

  Costello winked. The boys, he was intimating.

  “I am suddenly very popular,” said Cristal, deadpan. “You are the t’ird one.”

  “Why don’t you go chase an ambulance, Al,” Carrie said.

  Costello turned quickly, and flushed. “Listen, a friend of his sent me.” He opened his briefcase, dropped his card back into it. “Hey, you’re in good hands, Mr. Cristal.” As he retreated he pretended to be absorbed in some papers.

  “Thank you for coming, Miss Barr.” Cristal’s eyes seemed to drive right into her. Suddenly, his face was creased by a smile that was oddly boyish, lopsided. Cute.

  The interview area was too open, too many ears. “I’ll arrange for some privacy, Mr. Cristal.”

  She found a small, empty room and sent for him. She tried to remember what she had read in the morning paper. Cristal had been arrested leaving a stairwell from a second-floor loft, a back-end operation, a mixing room. Blood and bodies galore, men with criminal records: gangland slayings, that was the speculation. Billy Sweet was probably mixed up in it.

  The officer who escorted Cristal to the interview room said, “I’ll stand outside.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort.”

  “He’s charged with three murders, ma’am.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  Cristal came in and took a chair. She closed the door and held out her hand. “Carrington Barr.”

  A curious thing then happened, a spark as their palms met, a click of static. But after that, his hand felt firm and dry, comfortable.

  The smile again. “We ’ave different polarity.”

  She smiled, too. “I’m positive.”

  “I am very ‘appy to hear, Miss Barr. Maybe you will turn me positive.”

  Oddly nervous, Carrie busied herself with pen and notepad, then glanced up at him. The white line of an old scar ran over the bridge of his nose, otherwise his features were unsullied. A bit of wrinkling near the eyes, either from laughing or squinting. About mid-thirties, she guessed.

  “You’re not to talk to anyone, you understand that.”

  Cristal nodded. “They say in here you are a very good lawyer, Miss Barr. Someone here call you one of the best t’roats in Toronto.

  “T’roats?”

  Cristal worked on his phonemes. “Throats. They mean lawyers.” He brought out a packet of Drum tobacco and some papers, and began rolling. “I t’ink you ’ave done a very big murder trial a few days ago, for the Midnight Strangler, yes? He was accuse of killing six nice women and I only t’ree bad men. So with you I ’ave hope.”

  “He was innocent, Monsieur Cristal.”

  “And so am I.”

  She wasn’t quite ready to accept that. The roll-your-own told her this gentleman had done time. She was fascinated by his fingers, nimble, practised, one, two, zip, a perfect cigarette.

  He offered it to her. “Une rouleuse?”

  “Thanks, but no. I’ve managed without for three months now.”

  He started to place it in his shirt pocket.

  “No,” she said quickly, her hand reaching out, touching his wrist — why did she do that? She jerked her hand back, afraid of another shock. “People smoke around me all the time. I want you to be relaxed.”

  He shrugged, and put the cigarette in his pocket anyway.

  “You are from Montreal?”

  “I should ’ave stayed.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “Manage a dry-cleaning business.”

  It was an answer she didn’t expect. Usually, one got evasion, professional bad guys claiming they were between jobs.

  “Do you have a record?”

  “None. Okay, one, assault, a guy was bod’ering a woman in a bar.” He shrugged. “Well, who cares? Of these murders I am innocent.”

  The last was said with emphasis. She wanted to believe him. “Let’s not talk about the evidence right now.” One never, ever does that right off the bat. One first collects the facts from the prosecutor, and builds defences into them.

  “I want you to believe in me, Miss Barr, I am innocent. If you are my lawyer, I want you to know that.”

  “Mr. Cristal, it may be that you were just visiting Toronto, and you like to bowl, and you went up those stairs looking for a washroom, and you just happened to be the wrong man in the wrong place, but if that is the case, I’d like to hear it later.”

  Kind of shady this, but all lawyers do it, lay out a possible line of defence. But it would be highly improper to hear one version of a client’s story, then urge him to give a different one in court.

  “Good. First I will listen to what they claim I ’ave done.” He seemed to understand the ethical nuances. “But I promise you, I am clean.”

  “If you manage a laundry, I’m sure you are clean.”

  Cristal flashed that big smile. “Can you get me bail?”

  “If the case is very weak, maybe. I doubt it.”

  “It is very important that I get bail.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged, gestured at the four cold walls. “C’est pas le paradis. So. How much will be your fees?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars assuming a preliminary hearing and a two-week trial. In advance.”

  Cristal slowly went for the cigarette.

  “No beating t’rough the bush. I am the same.” He lit it with a wooden match, blew the smoke away from her. “Will you write this down, please? There is a man I work for in Montreal. His name is Leonard Woznick, Lavanderie Woznick, on Boulevard Saint-Laurent. He is a friend, like a father. He will ’ave the money.”

  When she glanced up from her notepad, Cristal was looking at her with those coal-fire eyes, but with a slightly amused expression.

  “So . . . will you be my lawyer, Miss Barr?”

  “I . . . accept. Mrs. Barr, actually.”

  His eyes went to her hand, a ring of untanned skin where the wedding band had been. She got up quickly. She was embarrassed, she wasn’t being cool Carrie.

  “Yes, I’ll represent you.”

  Their hands didn’t spark this time, but she felt something feral in his touch.

  5

  Carrie walked quickly through the thinning throng in the central lobby, and headed down to the Crown Counsel offices to see if Oliver McAnthony was about. He’d been against her at the Moodie trial, and it very much looked as if they’d be facing off again. M. Cristal seemed to have utter confidence in her. M. Sang-Froid.

  What had he been doing here in Toronto? A man from that strange other nation of Canada, insecure Quebec. Carrie felt bad about knowing so little French — it was rather disloyal. There’d been bigots in the town where she grew up, franco-bashers, though New Brunswick was supposedly bilingual.

  By now, with her doubts about Ted somewhat quelled, she was feeling strong, good about herself. Another major client, a paying one this time, an important career break. Win it, and Toronto was at her feet.

  Was her interesting new client as innocent as he claimed? He seemed like a man with a dark past, but he professed to have had only one previous, a minor assault. That could be checked: McAnthony would have his record. No weapon found on him — it sounded like a pretty threadbare case. Were there witnesses? Merely a businessman from Montreal, m’lord, off to do a spot of bowling during a visit to our lovely city.

  Well, maybe she was defending another innocent man. It feels good to defe
nd the innocent. It happens so rarely. She knew that only a tenth of the acquitted are actually innocent. But any other system is wrong, her father had sermonized, in his booming — though often slurred — baritone. Better a hundred guilty souls go free than one who is innocent be jailed. In Canada, the state proves guilt, my pet. Until not a tittle of doubt remains. You can’t tell Charlie Connors the Napoleonic Code is better. France, Germany, Spain: they were uncivilized countries that lacked that greatest of British institutions, the common law.

  Charlie Connors had turned down offers to practise in Toronto, other cities. He preferred his country juries, he always knew half a dozen folks on each of them. He was happy being the big bullfrog in the little swamp, the Terror of Temigouche, the Great Orator. When she was a girl she’d suffered — and now missed — his long, soaring, whisky-voiced soliloquies from Hamlet, from King Lear, the sonnets, the verse of Keats and Yeats and Blake.

  He’d pretended disappointment when she said she’d chosen law. Always claimed he wanted her to be a poet. Or a concert cellist — music was his third love: law first, then Shakespeare, then the great Ludwig.

  But deep inside he’d been so proud when she entered law school at Dalhousie. And if events had not conspired against him he could have been prouder. You should see me now, Charlie — she had always called him that: it was Mom and Charlie — you should see your sole-begotten taking on the big ones in Toronto, the multi-murder cases, up against the top prosecutors, blunder-busses like McAnthony.

  Carrie saw the door to the inner offices was open and she just barged past the secretaries, and found Oliver McAnthony, Q.C., in deep conspiracy with two senior cops: Jock Strachan from homicide and Harold Mitchell from RCMP narcotics.

  “If either of you can make head or tail of this ring-dang-do . . . ,” McAnthony was saying, and he stopped in mid-sentence as she entered. “Ah, Carrington, how delightful, what business honours us with your lustrous presence?”

  “What can’t you make head or tail of, Oliver?”

  “The meaning of life, my dear. The nature of the universe.”

  “I’ve just been retained by André Cristal.”

  “Ah, yes,” said McAnthony. “Interesting chap. Good luck.”

  “Thought I’d drop by to seek some quick disclosure of your . . . ring-dang-do.”

  McAnthony looked at the two policemen. “She demands what is her right according to our fastidious traditions of justice. Disclosure of the evidence.”

  McAnthony seemed relaxed, well recovered from the petulant episode he’d suffered outside Moodie’s courtroom. He was nearing seventy, handsome, white-maned, in shirt sleeves and a vest, a fob and chain strung across it. He liked to fiddle with his gold watch when opposing counsel was addressing the jury.

  “He is a hit man, Carrie. I don’t know yet if we can prove it, but we will give it the old college try. We don’t know how many he killed, so to be on the safe side we’re charging him with all three.”

  “He had no gun.”

  “Too true, we cannot put a weapon in his hand just yet. But we do have him running out the stairwell into the arms of an off-duty constable.”

  “Running?” Carrie said.

  “We dinna have him running, Oliver,” Strachan said. His bow tie bobbled as he talked. Carrie liked him, he was abrupt, but honest.

  “We have the individual proceeding, to use the argot of our minions of the law, from a stairwell which accesses — another fine technocratic word — only one area, a loft in which motion-picture props were being stored, and which was being used for mixing up — what do you call the process, Harold?”

  “Cutting smack, Oliver, bundling,” Mitchell said. “A back-end operation.”

  “Cutting smack. Marvellous are the uses of the English language. We have a stolen vehicle outside, and its motor, unlike Mr. Cristal, was running.”

  “That’s all?”

  “An expert in the developing science of blood spatter examined the scene. His opinion is Schlizik’s body may have been moved after he was shot. A possible theory: Cristal rearranged some human furniture and placed his weapon in one of the dead men’s hands to make it appear as if a gunfight had ensued.”

  “He’s a soldier for Billy Sweet,” Mitchell said, as if that were the end of the matter.

  “Well, while you work on it, give him bail. Or maybe you should just drop all charges, and I’ll accept a letter of apology in lieu of damages.”

  “The background is this,” said Mitchell. “Perez and Hiltz were stealing a shipment of smack, the property of Mr. William Sweet.” The name was spoken with utter loathing. “Dope brought to Canada in film cans, grade-A Turkish heroin.”

  That’s why the RCMP was involved, Carrie surmised. They usually handled the trade in foreign commodities. Mitchell reputedly ran a secretive, mean crew in his narcotics section, hard-nosed men and women. They called him the Bullet not because he was gun-happy but because his head resembled one, coppery and bald on a thick neck. She remembered that before being posted to Toronto he’d been involved in some scandal, an entrapment sting in Newfoundland that went wrong.

  “Did you have them under surveillance? How do you know they were stealing it?”

  “Obvious,” said Mitchell. “You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes. The third body, Jerszy Schlizik, was Sweet’s number-one gunner. He did one thing for a living and he did it very well. He was a stone-cold psycho killer, a vicious fucking son of a . . .” His voice had suddenly raised alarmingly. “Sorry. We’re pretty sure he’s the guy who took out our two undercover men last winter. I don’t know how Billy narked them, but he did. Anyway, he and this Cristal went into that loft to ice Perez and Hiltz. There was a gun battle. Only Cristal survived.”

  Carrie had a feeling Mitchell knew a lot more than he wanted to share. He had been targeting Billy Sweet for many years, obsessed with the man.

  “Do you gentlemen have a single witness?”

  “We wish,” said Mitchell.

  “No one saw Cristal with Schlizik.”

  Silence.

  “Or in the stolen vehicle. Can you put him in that loft? Did his clothes analyze for gunpowder? Were there prints? Do you have anything?”

  “We have some rather interesting antecedents,” McAnthony said. “Your gentleman apparently works in Montreal for an industrial dry-cleaning firm. I do not mind telling you — because it will be a part of our case — that this dry-cleaning business washes more money than clothes.”

  Here it comes finally, thought Carrie, the criminal connection. So much for the innocent client. She was disappointed — not all that much. She never totally believed in him. And these fellows still had to prove their case — they hadn’t much of one.

  “Take over,” said McAnthony to Mitchell.

  “The business is a front. It’s supposedly run by a guy named Big Leonard Woznick, a well-known rounder in west-end Montreal, but I think Sweet really owns it. The money washed there comes from narcotics.” He added: “So will your fee.”

  “Take him to the cleaners, Carrie,” McAnthony said. “Don’t undervalue yourself, charge a fair fee. You’re a fine counsel. But I’m afraid that’s all we have for you so far, my dear. Motive, association, opportunity. We have no secrets, do we, gentlemen?”

  “Aye, none,” said Strachan.

  Mitchell just smiled. A cagey guy, thought Carrie.

  “You don’t have a case.”

  “It is all rather weak, isn’t it?” McAnthony said.

  “You won’t get this past a preliminary hearing, Oliver. Please, end this silly charade, it’s almost embarrassing.”

  “Her Majesty has been embarrassed before.”

  “What’s on Cristal’s sheet?”

  “One common assault,” said McAnthony.

  “Reasonable bail at least, okay?”

  McAnthony looked at Mitchell, who shook
his head. Carrie got the impression he was running things here. Odd, it wasn’t really his department, this was murder.

  “I’ll agree to bail,” Mitchell said. “How does a million dollars sound? Be interesting to see just how it gets paid — and who pays it.”

  She turned to McAnthony. “Are you taking orders from him, Oliver?”

  “Harold is my trusted advisor.”

  “You opposed bail for Edwin Moodie.”

  “Ah, yes, the gentle giant, the alleged — I emphasize that word, of course — Midnight Strangler.”

  “And he spent a wasted six months in jail because of that.” She turned to Strachan. “I hope you’ve stopped harassing him, Jock — the day he got out he was followed all over town.”

  Strachan folded his arms, as if in a gesture of defiance. “The chief spoke to me about it.”

  “And?”

  “He is to be treated as innocent. I protested, but we are a wee short of manpower. If he kills again, let it be on your head, Carrie.”

  “I hope you’re still looking for the real murderer.”

  Strachan said simply, “The file isn’t closed.”

  Carrie sighed and went to the door. “I’ll see you in High Court, Oliver.” That was where bail was heard in murder cases, before a superior-court justice.

  “It will be a pleasure being up against you again.” McAnthony gave her a mock salacious leer, then a wink to let her know he was really over the hill. “As it were.”

  ***

  Horse was busy with the man in the rooster haircut again, so Carrie had to wait for permission to meet with Cristal. She wondered if she should call the office, cancel the day’s appointments.

  “I’m in here three days, and you tell me there’s a mix-up on my charges? Oh, man.”

  “We have you down here, section 220: did commit rape of a female person.”

  “Rape? Rape? Hey, man, where do they get rape? It’s a weed charge.” He seemed very rattled suddenly. “Jeez, what’s this, some kinda horror movie? I’m just charged for a little bit of smoke. They popped me with a couple of joints in my ass pocket. Look, the judge set bail at two hundred bucks. I got a buddy who’s gonna post it, I don’t know what happened to him, lost in the freakin’ bureaucratic maze in this freakin’ joint.”