I put that on my list under the subheading of “ask Derek.”
“Wait a minute,” Carl blurted out. “We have one of those boxes!”
“What boxes?”
“You know, for the phone. It shows the numbers coming in so you can decide whether or not to answer the phone.”
“You mean call display?”
“Yeah. That’s it. We just got it, in fact.”
“When?”
He searched his memory again, then looked at me gloomily. “Sunday afternoon. We had gotten some hang-up phone calls during the past couple of weeks, so on Sunday we went to the phone store in the mall and picked up the call display. I had just hooked it up.”
“Did you find out who was making the calls?”
“No. The caller had blocked their number, but I had a pretty good idea.”
“Tricia.”
“Yeah. I think she was planning to tell Bonnie about us.”
I started doing the math in my head. “You told me you and Tricia had been broken up for over a week, right?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed sadly. “It was on a Thursday. She came to me on the Monday of this last week with her threats to go to the principal. So that makes it ten or eleven days since we had broken up.”
“Were the calls coming before you broke up?”
He thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Think carefully. This could be important. You started receiving hang-up calls before you and Tricia broke up?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He was nodding his head to his own inner dialogue now. “We did. It was definitely before Tricia and I broke up.”
“So why would Tricia have been calling to tell Bonnie about your relationship before you even broke up with her?”
That seemed to stymie him for a moment. Finally, he looked at me and said “I don’t know.”
“All right,” I said, making a few more notes. “But in the meantime, your call display unit should be able to tell us the date and time you called from the school. Have you erased it since Wednesday night?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay then. I will definitely look into that.” I closed my legal pad and plopped it into the battered attaché case. “Is there anything else I can do for you today? Is there someone you’d like me to call?”
Carl looked freshly dejected. Looking down at his hands, he shook his head slowly. “No. I think the fewer people who are involved the better.”
I stood up but put my hand on his shoulder one more time momentarily before leaving. “Okay. We’ll try to keep this as low-key as possible. But I’m going to have to start going out and beating the bushes a little for information.”
“All right,” he told me. “Do what you have to do.” It broke my heart to leave my friend sitting there, but there was nothing I could do about it until Derek got him through his bail hearing on Monday. For now, I was more useful to him outside the pre-trial centre, trying to gather information.
“Winston?” He looked up at me. “What’s going to happen to my classes?” I had to admire his dedication. With all he was going through, his mind was still on the wellbeing of his students.
“I arranged for a substitute for you for yesterday. For the time being, I imagine she’ll continue to teach your classes.”
“Is she good?” he asked.
I really didn’t know. I had given much less thought to Carl’s students than he obviously had. I thought I should probably try to find out a little about the students he taught on a daily basis. Some of them might prove to be helpful in his defence, though I knew I had to be very careful about that line between my role as Carl’s lawyer and my role as a teacher in the school. Carl was my first concern, but as a teacher I still needed to safeguard the wellbeing of any student in the building.
“I guess she’s good enough,” I told him.
I have found that people who truly are innocent of a crime tend to believe there is no possible way they can be convicted of it. “If I didn’t do it, I can’t go to jail” seems to be the logic. I have also found it to be a naïve view. The good news was that with many of the clients I had defended, if they weren’t responsible for the crime they were convicted of, they were likely responsible for some other act for which they had yet to be caught. It’s an entirely wrongheaded point of view for a defence lawyer, but it was how I managed to achieve some peace—if not sleep—when I lost a case that I knew I should have won.
An idea dawned on me. “Look,” I told Carl, “I know you have a lot on your mind, but there is not a whole lot you can do for your case right now until I find out some more of the facts. So why don’t you make yourself useful while you’re in here?”
“Okay,” he said.
“The school is going to assume you’re away for the long term. But this new teacher isn’t permanent yet. Why don’t you spend a few of your hours in here preparing some really detailed lesson plans for her? At least you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing your classes are well looked after.” I didn’t add that it would be something I could bring up later to demonstrate some of his redeeming character traits.
He seemed to brighten at the thought of doing some work for school. Strange. I had been teaching only three months, yet I didn’t feel that much enthusiasm about preparing lessons for class. Of course, I hadn’t been sitting in a jail cell all weekend either.
“That’s a great idea,” he said. “I could plan lessons for the next week at least. I could even prepare notes for labs.”
“Excellent.” I smiled at him. I would feel a little bit easier with Carl in jail until Monday knowing he was at least actively engaged in something. “What do you need?”
He thought for a moment. “Something to write on, for starters.” I reached into my attaché case and pulled out a separate yellow legal pad, plopping it down on the table in front of him. I also dropped a couple of pens on the table. “My textbooks would be useful, but I think I can basically go from memory.”
“Do you have copies of the textbooks at home?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to go by your house to look at a few things, especially your call display unit. If you can make do for today, I’ll make sure I drop them by tomorrow.”
Carl looked much more relaxed than when I had arrived. For some people, vacations are the most debilitating part of the year. Work is the relaxation they need. Carl seemed to be one of those. I already knew he’d taught summer school each year he’d been a teacher.
“Thanks, Winston. You’ve been such a good friend.”
“I’m here to be a good lawyer,
