I said.
A young cop with a moustache standing behind Moriarty laughed.
“What’s with you?” Moriarty asked him.
“The man made a funny,” the young cop said. “See, there used to be a rock group—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Moriarty cut him off. He looked at me. “Fucking heat.”
“Turkin,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah.” Moriarty put his coffee on the flattened green cushion that covered his chair. Drops ran down the edges of the cup and made a wet ring on the cushion. Moriarty would be delighted when he noticed. He flipped through the pages on the clipboard.
“Turkin, Turkin,” he said. “Over there, number two cell, and don’t mess around. I already had five of you lawyers in here this morning.”
I stepped through the door and Moriarty slammed it behind me. Inside, the air was ripe.
“Like a rose garden this morning.”
“One of those assholes threw up,” Moriarty said.
I crossed the ten or twelve feet to number two cell. It was a space no larger than twenty feet square, all bars on the side facing into the room. Twenty or twenty-five men leaned against the back wall or sat on benches on the other side of the bars. Nobody talked. James Turkin was easy to spot. He had the looks of an earlier James: sulky and white-faced, with light brown wavy hair and a wiry body, he was a throwback to James Dean.
He saw me and stepped close to the bars. I said hello. He stared at me. It wasn’t the stare of some of the wackos I get for clients. There was a flavour of the cool to James Turkin rather than a suggestion of the catatonic.
“Your parents aren’t coming down,” I said.
“Figures.”
“When you go upstairs, I want to say something to the judge that will make him look kindly on you.”
The kid shrugged.
“Otherwise it’s the reformatory.”
“I thought about it already,” he said in his flat voice.
“Maybe you thought the wrong things. I know you’ve got some brains. The pre-sentence report says you passed grade twelve.”
“Big deal.”
“Says you were brilliant in maths.”
“So?”
Behind me, I could hear Moriarty cursing the spilled coffee on his green cushion.
“This may not interest you, Jimmy,” I said, “but for the hell of it, I’ll tell you I’ve acted for a thousand guys in the same situation as yours and I think I know how to help you in front of the judge this morning.” “James.”
“Never Jimmy?”
“James,” the kid said. “And I don’t give a shit who you acted for.”
His eyes looked into mine without a blink.
I said, “You got any suggestions about what you’d like me to tell the judge?”
“Such as?”
“Ambitions,” I said. “What do you have in mind as a sequel to your splendid career hitting on cab drivers?”
“I want to be a real good break-and-enter man.”
I contemplated smacking the kid’s chalky kisser.
“Why?” I asked instead.
“Computers suck.”
Maybe we’d established a basis for communication.
I said, “I’m not keen on the age of electronics myself.”
James Turkin leaned closer to the bars and his voice dropped to the confidential level. Lower volume, same monotone, more voluble.
“Any creep can screw money out of a computer if they know how to punch into it,” he said. “All these fourteen-year-old kids at school, the ones with the glasses, those wimps, they got their systems worked out. I did it myself. So what’s the deal? But, like, one night this spring, I figured my way into the Canadian Tire store up Yonge Street, right past the alarm, no noise, no tipoff, nothing. I walked around in there a couple hours. Nobody knew. It was a total high.”
“What did you take out when you left?” I asked.
“VCR for my sister.”
“That’s all?”
“All I could think she needed.”
What was I dealing with? The Pale Pimpernel?
“I felt real raced up,” Turkin said. “Getting in that store, not anybody could do it. It’s what I’m meant for, break and enter.”
“If you’re such a smarty,” I said, “how come you mixed in this little contretemps in the underground garage that’s going to send you to the slammer, barring an act of God?”
“It was the girl’s idea, the one who brought the cab down the garage,” the kid said. His voice had lost the zest it displayed during his celebration of the art of breaking and entering. “Not my idea,” he said. “I helped her out because we were—involved.”
“You were what?”
“I was banging her.”
The kid wasn’t a hopeless cause, just had a slightly twisted sense of chivalry.
“Upstairs,” I said, “call the judge ‘sir’ when he speaks to you and stand up straight in the prisoners’ box. Small details help.”
“I got excellent posture.”
It was true. “See you in court,” I said and turned away.
Moriarty had vacated his post at the door.
“He’s gone to wipe off his shirt,” the young cop said.
“My guy’s coming up in Twenty-one Court,” I said. “You mind taking a look who’s sitting there today?”
The cop lifted the clipboard from Moriarty’s chair and leafed slowly through the sheets of paper, one sheet for each courtroom in the building.
“Twenty-two’s got Robertson,” he recited. “Twenty-one’s got— hey, you hit it lucky.”
“Not Bert?”
“His Honour the old softie.”
I knew James Turkin wasn’t going to jail.
The young cop unlocked the door to the corridor.
