Stray Bullets (7 page)

With his sunny disposition, to say nothing of his six-foot-four
athletic frame, impeccable pedigree, and overall savoir faire, he had risen seamlessly through the prosecutorial ranks. Picked to be the youngest head Crown ever, to the outside world it seemed to be the logical next rung on Ralphie’s ladder of success.

But this last step hadn’t been easy. He’d taken over from Jennifer Raglan, an experienced, hands-on Crown who was immensely popular with the lawyers in the office. Last June, Jennie, as he called her even though she found it annoying, gave up the job for personal reasons: burnout, marriage on the rocks, never getting to see her kids. Blah, blah, blah. He was thrown into the fray during what came to be known in Toronto as “the Summer of the Gun,” when the murder rate spiked and he had had to scramble to cover the flood of serious new homicides.

Even worse, he was viewed with suspicion by the other Crowns, in part because he’d never cut his teeth on a long, tough murder trial, a rite of passage he’d managed to avoid. Even when assigned the hardest cases, Ralphie found a compromise, brokered a deal to get a guilty plea, and charmed the toughest defense lawyers with his smiling persona. The upshot was that he’d developed a reputation for being a back-room, not a courtroom, lawyer.

He won the job in part because the government bureaucrats wanted someone who could keep things in line, smooth out the paperwork, stick to a budget. For all of his predecessor’s skill in the court and her pizzazz with the staff, Jennie Raglan wasn’t a great organizer. Ralph was. This was not surprising given that his father had been taking him to the office to review the balance sheets and employee flowcharts of various Armitage companies and charities since he was thirteen years old.

He kissed Penny on the side of her neck and started to get off the bed. Her fingers caressed the underside of his arm.

“Honey,” she said, her voice still sleepy, “you haven’t looked at the guest list yet. You keep promising.”

He reached for her hand. For the last forty years, the Armitage family had held a massive outdoor charity ball on the Victoria Day holiday, always the third Monday in May. Every Canadian child had pleasant memories of staying up late to watch the big fireworks displays held across the country. Queen Victoria, the English monarch for whom the holiday was named, was born on the twenty-fourth of May, and the three-day weekend was also referred to as the “May Two-Four” long weekend. A “two-four” being slang for the most popular way to buy beer in Canada, in a case holding twenty-four bottles.

“I’m bad,” he said.

“Your sisters keep warning me that we must get the invitations out before everyone goes south for the winter. I need to get them designed and printed.”

“Today, I promise.” He took her hand and gave each finger a kiss.

In the kitchen he poured out his morning glass of fresh-squeezed Whole Foods orange juice, then went to the front door of their downtown condominium to pick up the four local newspapers. His regular routine was to read all the Toronto crime news, and this morning one story had knocked all other news off the front page.

A
RMED AND
D
ANGEROUS
. F
ULL
P
OLICE
M
ANHUNT FOR
S
USPECT IN
T
IM
H
ORTONS
B
OY
S
HOOTING
, said the usually staid
Globe and Mail
. P
OLICE
H
UNT FOR
T
IMMY’S
S
HOOTING
S
USPECT
, shouted the populist
Toronto Star
. H
AVE
Y
OU
S
EEN
T
HIS
M
AN
? demanded the aggressive
National Post
. The best was the
Toronto Sun
, the only tabloid in the bunch, most famous perhaps for its front page after the 9/11 attacks, which featured a picture of the burning Twin Towers and one word in huge type: BASTARDS!

Today the
Sun
had outdone itself: LARKIN: WE SEE YOU, its headline blared. The whole front page was dominated by a mug shot of the suspect, Larkin St. Clair, distinctive with his long hair parted down the middle.

Armitage gulped his juice as he stared at the photo. Larkin St. Clair. He remembered those eyes. Years ago he’d worked in youth court—kiddie court as the Crowns all called it—at the 311 Jarvis Street courthouse. He believed that most youth crime was a function of broken homes and a failed education system, and aggressively cut deals that allowed kids to avoid prosecution if they provided heartfelt apologies and did substantial community service.

His strategy worked. The long trial list shrank, and most of the young offenders disappeared from the system. But every once in a while he would come across someone like St. Clair who played him for a fool.

St. Clair’s father, Austin St. Clair, was a con artist and a swindler. His mother, a natural-born beauty who’d gone to seed, was a drug addict. Larkin started his life in crime when he was twelve, by stealing from newspaper boxes. Instead of fishing a magnet down the money slot and yanking out a few quarters, as most kids did, he devised a system of cracking open the cash box using a pair of specially modified pliers. Soon, he had ten teenagers working for him. When he was
arrested, he had more than a thousand dollars stashed under his pillow, all in loose change.

At fourteen, he started stealing lottery tickets from a series of corner stores and selling them through his team of teens at a 50 percent discount. Fifteen was his year of joyriding, hot-wiring cars, and barreling around the city late at night. That bought him his first stint in juvie, where he hooked up with a short kid named Dewey Booth and the two became an inseparable team. When Larkin was seventeen, his last year as a juvenile, they broke into a mansion in Rosedale, thinking the family was away on vacation. But the teenage daughter of the live-in nanny was in the basement studying. They tied her up and ransacked the place.

The trial had been set for three days, and, for once, Armitage wasn’t offering any deals. On the first day the girl didn’t show up. He sent out a squad of police cars to find her, but her mother had sent her back to Grenada to live with her grandparents.

He would never forget the smirk on St. Clair’s face the day the case collapsed. “Nice try, Mr. A,” the asshole muttered as he’d sauntered out of the stuffy second-floor courtroom, his jeans halfway down his thighs. By now, he was well over six feet, and he wore his hair far down his back.

“Larkin.” Armitage shook his head when they were in the hallway. “I gave you so many chances.”

St. Clair flicked his hair back over his shoulders. “Innocent until proven guilty, man.”

Armitage felt a dart of anger race across his skin, grabbed St. Clair, and rammed him against the wall. “There’ll be another case. And I won’t lose it,” he muttered. This was the first and only time in his legal career he lost his cool.

Sitting at his kitchen table, gripping the front page of the
Sun
, staring at Larkin St. Clair’s manipulative eyes, Armitage’s shoulders stiffened. He started to read the article.

A four-year-old boy walking with his father into a Tim Hortons was hit by a gunshot to the head as slugs flew through the parking lot on Elm Street west of University Avenue late yesterday afternoon. Police believe the child was an innocent victim caught in the middle of a deadly argument. They’ve issued a warrant for twenty-three-year-old Larkin St. Clair, pictured above, who they say was caught on video and is considered armed and dangerous
.

Chief of Police Hap Charlton stated he was “livid at the total disregard for human life.” A spokesperson for Mayor Scarlett, who is on holiday with his family in Nashville, echoed the same sentiments and sent his condolences to the little boy’s family
.

Police haven’t said if they are hunting for anyone else. A witness, who only described himself as Vikram, says he saw two young men, one tall with very long hair, one short with red hair, walk outside the doughnut shop together moments before gunfire erupted
.

Got you this time, Larkin, Armitage thought. And he was sure the other suspect would be St. Clair’s buddy, that little punk Dewey Booth.

Footsteps approached from down the hallway. “Honey, I’m getting in the shower,” Penny said.

He turned to see his wife leaning on the door frame. She wore his old tennis club T-shirt, which came to the top of her thighs. Six feet tall, she was a top fitness trainer, and those legs of hers went on forever.

“I’m meeting your sister Rachel at the club to talk about printers for the invitation, then I’ve got a late class,” she said. “I can’t wait for our cooking class tomorrow night.”

She was talking about their weekly Thursday night date. Right now they were learning to make sushi, or was it sashimi? He always got them mixed up. The first night of their honeymoon, they’d pledged to each other that no matter what was going on at work, they’d never miss one of their evenings together.

“Great,” he said.

She rubbed a bare foot up against her calf. “I bought some new herbal body wash,” she said.

He drank in her sleepy body. “You don’t know how much I wish I could join you,” he said.

“So?” She yawned and stretched her arms above her head, lifting the T-shirt higher.

He flicked the newspaper. “A little boy was killed last night during a shooting downtown.”

“I just heard about it on the news.” She ran both her hands through her cascading hair. “It’s horrible.”

“It is horrible,” he said. “And it’s going to be my case.”

There was an all-night grocery store near police headquarters and Ari Greene took Daniel Kennicott there for a little shopping expedition. He bought two Cokes, a bag of chips and a bag of popcorn, and two blister packs of gum, and at the cash register asked for a plastic bag.

Something was bothering Kennicott about what Greene had done when the phone call came in about St. Clair surrendering himself, but he wasn’t sure if he should mention it.

“You’re wondering why I didn’t have St. Clair’s hands bagged right away, aren’t you,” Greene said when they were back outside in the cold.

“Well, yes.” Kennicott felt like he’d read his mind. “Isn’t it standard procedure with a suspect in a shooting case to wrap their hands up immediately?”

“Sure is,” Greene said.

“So?”

“Instead we’re going to give him all this junk food.” Greene had a grin on his face for the first time all night.

Up on the third floor in the homicide bureau they found the officer on duty.

“I want you to bring this in to Larkin St. Clair and his lawyer.” Greene gave him the bag of goodies. “Make sure the video camera’s turned off.”

“But, detective, we can tell them it’s off and still keep it on,” the officer said.

“The camera is off. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Greene took Kennicott into a quiet back room. “You’re going to be my scribe,” he said. “Everything will be recorded on video, but I also want you to take notes.”

“No problem.”

“Do not, I repeat
not
, shake hands with St. Clair.”

“Got it.”

“When I give you the signal, pick up all the food wrappers and pop
cans around his chair. Get a pair of latex gloves and a brown paper bag from the evidence room, and stick them in your back pocket. Tell the camera operator to turn the video on the moment we walk in the room, and I want it off the second we leave.” Greene stood up. “I’m going to clean up.”

In the men’s room, he rolled his sleeves up past his elbows and washed and dried his arms twice. The same with his face. He looked at himself in the mirror, he wasn’t sure for how long.

He checked to make sure the washroom was empty before he pulled out his cell phone. “Officer Darvesh, it’s Detective Greene,” he said when the officer who’d been standing guard at Ms. Wilkinson’s hospital room answered the phone.

“Hello, sir.”

“You off shift yet?”

“Yes, sir. I’m back at the division.”

“Where do you live?”

“Not far. On Gerrard Street. Near Coxwell.”

The intersection was right in the heart of Little India, four or five city blocks packed end to end with East Indian restaurants and shops. He wondered if Darvesh lived with his parents. “Go home and put on the most beat-up clothes you have. Old jeans, a sweater with holes in it, a T-shirt, running shoes. The dirtier the better. And get over to headquarters fast. I’ve got an assignment for you. Undercover.”

“Yes, sir. And I’ll change out of my police turban. But one small problem.” Darvesh’s voice had a sarcastic lilt to it. “All my clothes will probably be very clean, and I have no sweaters with holes in them.”

The guy’s mother must be doing his laundry, Greene thought. “Tell your mom not to worry, she might not hear from you for a while.”

“There’s no point in saying that,” Darvesh said.

“Why not?”

“No matter what I say, she always worries.”

Greene laughed. “Just like mine used to.”

Beneath his stoic exterior, Darvesh had a good sense of humor, Greene thought. Good. He was going to need it.

Kennicott was waiting for him outside the room where they’d put St. Clair and his lawyer. He opened the door and they went in together.

“Ms. Parish, haven’t seen you for a while,” Greene said.

Nancy Parish was slouched in one of the two wooden chairs. She popped up and shook his hand. “Morning, detective,” she said. Parish
had been on a murder trial Greene did last year and was a real pro to deal with.

“Mr. St. Clair.” Greene didn’t extend a hand to Larkin, who looked as if he’d fallen asleep on his seat.

St. Clair raised his eyes to look at Greene. Instead of his hair coming all the way down his back, as it did in all his recent photos and video from the Tim Hortons parking lot, his long locks had been hacked off at about the shoulder. This was a very stupid move. Now the Crown Attorney would tell the jury that this obvious attempt to change his appearance displayed Larkin St. Clair’s consciousness of guilt.