motive for wanting Tricia dead, something about him kept bringing me back to a belief in his innocence. I don’t consider myself to be a gullible person by nature, and I admit to having been burned on occasion by trusting people I should not have, but for the most part my experience at determining whom I can and cannot trust has proven pretty successful. And however naïve I hoped I didn’t turn out to be, driving behind Furlo and Smythe as they delivered my client to lockup, I just couldn’t accept that the man who had held my hand through my introduction to high school teaching, the same man who worked tirelessly with students, the very same emotional wreck who broke down sobbing in grief at the death of someone he claimed to love, could have killed her in cold blood. No, I just couldn’t accept that.
It was clear that I had a considerable amount of work to do. Whether or not I believed wholly in Carl’s version of events was no longer relevant. If Carl was going to get a fair and aggressive defence, I had to believe in his claims, at least to the degree that I could give him the best defence money could buy. Which was the first point I put down on my legal to-do list. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer, I suppose, but Carl and I were going to have to sit down really quickly and start figuring out what kind of fee I was going to be paid. Call me shallow, call me uncaring, but I was not about to undertake the massive amount of work that preparing a murder defence entails completely free of charge, especially considering I had this other fulltime job that was extremely demanding of my time.
Item number two on my mental checklist was figuring out a way by which I could somehow do both of my jobs simultaneously. I don’t think it’s overstatement, especially to anyone who’s been a teacher, but by the end of a day of working with kids, I had barely enough energy to scrape together some kind of dinner, mark the work the kids did one day, plan something for the next day and get enough sleep to function. Fortunately for me, that last part is a task I have been avoiding for a number of years.
The larger problem was scheduling court appearances. Not to appear a complainer, but judges are not especially forgiving when it comes to trying to schedule around other commitments. Similarly, I’m pretty sure the school’s management would not be too keen on letting me postpone my classes until evening, when court lets out.
Being so new to the profession also made it quite unlikely the Vancouver School Board would grant me a temporary leave of absence to fight the case. Given the negative publicity and numerous phone calls from irate parents they were likely already receiving, the school board would not take kindly to another of their teachers seeking time off to defend the one charged with Tricia’s murder. Even once the trial was over, it was pretty much guaranteed that Carl would be fired from teaching and have his credentials removed, if not be prosecuted for having a sexual relationship with a minor in a position of trust, the original charge Carl had come to me about. That was a legal challenge that would have to wait.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized our best course of action was to make sure Carl never went to trial. It just seemed impossible that I could adequately defend him, and I didn’t really feel I was ready to bail out of the teaching profession just yet. One of the first things we would have to do was make every effort to nail down Tricia’s exact time of death, details of which had not yet been released to me as quickly as Carl’s DNA test results had been. Then Carl and I had to make sure he was able to come up with a very good alibi that proved he couldn’t have done it. On the face of it, it seemed like pretty sloppy police work that the detectives had apparently done very little to confirm Carl’s whereabouts during Tricia’s murder. Of course, that perception of sloppy detecting was based on my growing conviction that Carl had been wrongly arrested.
The Vancouver pre-trial detention centre is located at the poorest, most drug-addict ridden corner in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood. Hastings Street is considered an arterial route and becomes a highway a little further east, taking the driver who chooses its traffic light-congested lanes from close to Stanley Park in the west to the eastern edge of the suburban city of Burnaby, just east of Vancouver. The entire stretch of roadway from end to end is littered with all manner of pawn shops, rundown fast food joints, a sprinkling of car dealerships and the Pacific National Exhibition fair grounds, historically a major agricultural trading ground that evolved into an amusement park and now is slated for permanent destruction and restoration to park space. Some attempts have been made to gentrify the neighbourhoods that Hastings passes through, but somehow, those attempts never seem to take in a meaningful way. It doesn’t matter how much a city council spends on improvements, it’s as though Hastings refuses to allow new buildings, sidewalks and hanging baskets to penetrate its aura of washed out, rundown dowdiness. Some claim that’s its charm.
One block north of Hastings, Main Street meets Cordova at the outer edge of Vancouver’s renowned Chinatown. Strangely, small merchants, largely “mom and pop” Asian family operations, have not only survived, but thrived amidst the largest collection of homeless people and strung-out addicts the country has to offer. It’s no secret why so many homeless people and junkies end up in Vancouver: compared to other major Canadian cities like Montreal, Toronto or Winnipeg, Vancouver’s wet winters are practically tropical. It has long been a grievance of B.C. politicians that our province foots the bill for the derelicts, the neglected and the addicted of the other nine.
It’s at the intersection of Main and Cordova that the forbidding pre-trial detention centre sits kitty corner from the old Vancouver Police Department headquarters. Definitely an equality-based institution, the centre houses those awaiting their day in court for crimes as small as minor break and enter to capital offences like rape or homicide. Even Canada’s only real terrorists, charged with the bombing of an Air India flight that killed over three hundred passengers and crew, had spent their pre-trial months preparing with their counsel in the facility at which Carl was just now arriving.
The gaping garage door at the end of the driveway off of Cordova yawned open as Furlo and Smythe delivered their cargo for processing. Not being an official of the police or the courts, I was left to park my car on the dark, rain-soaked streets. Most people would not feel comfortable leaving their car, especially if it were an expensive one, parked outside in this neighbourhood. But the reality of the area surrounding the courts was that car theft was relatively uncommon. For most of the people for whom the streets of Vancouver’s downtown East side was home, a car really isn’t a prized theft item. Where would they go? The supply of drugs, food handouts and even temporary shelter for those trying to break their street existence is all located in this neighbourhood. Why would they want to leave?
I was buzzed through the front entrance doors by a night security guard who looked surprised to see me. “Winston Patrick,” he proclaimed boisterously. “I thought you’d given up this game.” Meinhard Werner was officially part of the Sheriff’s department, which is responsible only for the operation of our court system, including the transportation of criminals from prisons for court appearances. Meinhard, however, presented an image far from that which we equate with law enforcement. Nearing sixty, with a belly that protruded well beyond the capacity of his belt, Meinhard’s principal responsibilities were the signing in of visitors and the completion of the daily crossword puzzle in the Province newspaper. Oddly, though the Province is the “dummed down” tabloid paper in the city, its crossword puzzle is much more difficult than the one in the Vancouver Sun, its main competitor. One of life’s little mysteries.
“Hey Meinie,” I replied. “This is a temporary dalliance, I assure you.”
“You probably just missed me,” he joked jovially. How anyone working the evening shift on a Friday night in the worst part of town could consistently remain so happy is another of life’s little mysteries.
“That must be it.”
“So they bringing your boy in back now?” he asked, glancing down at video monitors showing the various entrances to the facility. It was hardly surprising Meinhard would know who my client was. If I flipped over his Province newspaper, I’m sure Tricia’s murder figured prominently on the
