by a teenage accused, his heart bled, his eyes watered, his brain turned mushy. If Jack the Ripper were an adolescent, Ormsby would give him probation. He wouldn’t put eighteen-year-old James Turkin inside, not even if I told him Turkin had the nerve of a fifty-year-old second-storey man and the morals of a slug.
It was twenty minutes to court time. I wandered down the hall to the front of the building. Two scrawny, animated men in their early twenties came through the big wooden doors and up the steps into the high, airy lobby. One had a package of Camels rolled in the sleeve of his wrinkled orange T-shirt. The other had Rambo tattooed on his right biceps. The guy was the size of Sylvester Stallone’s thigh. He and his buddy looked like they subsisted on a diet of hot dogs and white bread. They found a place on one of the benches that line the corridor outside the courtrooms along the east side of the building. A black man with his hair in greasy dreadlocks sat at the other end of the bench talking to an overweight girl in a halter top and tight pink jeans that squeezed the fat out over her waistband. A Canadian Indian stood motionless by the wall, not touching it. He had a long scar on his right cheek and a hangover that made him squint his eyes against the light. In my line of work, you run into a lot of interesting folks.
Twenty-one Court is on the first floor directly over the holding cells. When I walked in, James Turkin was sitting behind the wire mesh of the prisoners’ box on the left side of the courtroom. He was in between a man with mussed hair and a stained white jacket and a kid in a ripped Blue Jays shirt. In his pressed khakis and clean white dress shirt, Turkin cut the nattiest figure in the box. The judge arrived promptly at ten o’clock and everyone in court rose while he settled on the bench. Bert Ormsby looks like the guy Central Casting would send over to play Gramps in a TV sitcom. He’s in his early sixties, apple-cheeked, kindly-faced, grey-haired, and rumply. Up close, his eyes probably twinkle. It took him fifteen minutes to process eight requests for adjournments, a bail application, and two other guilty pleas.
“I’ll hear number twelve on the list, James Turkin,” he said.
I stood up at the counsel’s table.
“Good morning, Mr. Crang,” the judge said.
“Your Honour.”
“Your client has pleaded guilty,” he said, “and I note from the pre-sentence report in front of me, Mr. Crang, that he’s eighteen years old.”
I said, “You might also note, Your Honour, that Mr. Turkin has a previous record, one conviction for possession of a small amount of marijuana and another for theft under two hundred dollars. I emphasize that neither offence involved violence, Your Honour, and though the matter presently before the court is an assault, I would suggest that Mr. Turkin made the error of allowing himself to be influenced by his companion in the crime. He acknowledges and regrets the incident, and he’d like to assure the court that he’ll never again permit himself to be drawn into such a misadventure.”
Where have you gone, Clarence Darrow? If Bert Ormsby ached for youngsters to be rescued, I’d give him James Turkin in self-recrimination and remorse.
“What does the crown attorney say?” Judge Ormsby asked.
The crown attorney was a pretty woman with streaked blonde hair and a frown.
“Your Honour, this was a heinous crime,” she said.
“I thought you crowns reserved heinous for the Supreme Court,” I said to her, not loud enough for the judge to catch.
The crown attorney’s frown lines tightened.
“The prisoner used force to rob the taxi driver,” she said to Judge Ormsby. “I submit the sentence should be commensurate with the violence of the act.”
“Your Honour,” I said, “there’s been restitution of the money by my client.”
The crown snapped, “A term in reformatory is called for.”
“May I suggest, with Your Honour’s indulgence,” I said, “that jail would work to the detriment of my client’s prospects. He has behind him an excellent scholastic record and I submit it promises a positive future.”
Judge Ormsby aimed a grandfatherly smile at Turkin in the prisoners’ box.
“Have you considered community college, young man?” he asked.
My kid turned his sullen face in my direction.
I said, “My understanding, Your Honour, is that the accused has ambitious career plans.”
Judge Ormsby beamed another smile and said reformatory seemed inappropriate in the circumstances. The crown attorney’s frown deepened into a scowl and she made a display of tossing her file on the counsel table. Judge Ormsby put Turkin on probation for two years. He told Turkin to report to his probation officer every month, find a job, avoid evil companions, and stay out of underground garages. Fifteen minutes later, after Turkin had signed some papers and arranged his first probation meeting, he and I sat on a bench on Old City Hall’s front lawn.
“Thanks,” the kid said. The word seemed to give him serious pain.
I said, “I trust I won’t see you in court again.”
“Fucking right.”
“Does this mean you’re going to tread the straight and narrow?”
“It means I’m not going to get caught.”
“That’s what Murph the Surf said.”
“Who’s he?”
“Infamous jewel thief and convict before your time.”
“So laugh at me,” Turkin said. Something earnest was struggling to break through his sullen expression. “I can already do any lock on the market. Shutting down alarm systems, shit, that’s a touch. And I met this old geezer when I was in the West End, guy about forty, he told me the real professional stuff about checking out a place before you go in.”
“What was this forty-year-old geezer doing in the West End?”
“He made a little mistake.”
“James, isn’t that a lesson?”
“Yeah, he told me his mistake. I won’t make it.”
The kid shook my hand and walked away until he disappeared into the crowd of shoppers crossing Queen Street to Simpsons. He was probably right. He wouldn’t make that mistake.
12
I RODE UP AND DOWN the elevators in City Hall, the new skyscraper version, until I found an office that gave out the addresses of the Metro dump sites. Most were in the suburbs, and I drove around to four of them with my watch and notebook. At five-thirty, I knocked off the tour until next day, when I visited four more dumps. The story was the same at all eight. The guys inside the weigh offices took longer to do their operations with Ace trucks, between twenty and forty seconds longer per truck. That piece of information was confirmed and reconfirmed for whatever it was worth. At a dump in the east end, I came across the two men in the pink Cadillac: Solly the Snozz Nash and his boxer sidekick in the straw hat. I took my notebook back to the office and let it sit on the desk. Rereading my notes inspired unease but no deep thoughts.
Mrs.
