“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. I walked up the stairs to the first floor whistling a happy tune. From The King and I. Bert Ormsby was a judge who led his own version of the Children’s Crusade. Confronted 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