“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, more importantly. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
We said our goodbyes, and I left him inside the interview room, indicating to the guard outside we were done and Carl could be returned to his cell.
Leaving the pre-trial centre, I turned left on Hastings Street and walked the two blocks to my parked car. It was late afternoon, but I wasn’t yet headed for home.
I had plenty of work to do.
Seventeen
When you try to explain Canada to Americans who haven’t been here, the comparison is often made between Seattle and Vancouver. Most Americans know that Seattle is legendary for its rain, a reputation Vancouver shares. Many Americans—particularly those who view Canada as a snow-covered, dog-mushing wilderness—are surprised to find out that Vancouver gets even less snow than Seattle.
The South Granville area, running the roughly seven or eight blocks from Broadway to 16th Avenue, is an upscale shopping area paling in price and variety to the trendier Robson Street downtown, but still pricey enough to be beyond the reach of average Vancouverites. The area includes designer clothing stores, salons and recently a garish big box bookstore chain, which, despite its monumental size and rather tacky appearance, has done much to bring needed foot traffic into the area.
Of course, one of the other key characteristics shared between Seattle and Vancouver is their passion and near obsession for coffee. Both cities are overrun with Starbucks and myriad other coffee houses, from the chain stores to the mom and pop operations. Despite the wealth of choices, one of my perennial favourites was none other than Seattle’s Best Coffee, a brand name sold in many private coffee houses, but also with its own café on Granville at 11th.
After meeting—or waking me—for breakfast that morning, Andrea and I had arranged to meet at Seattle’s Best at four thirty to figure out what we each had learned about Tricia’s death. Andrea was likely to have the most information, since her plan for the day included going to the office to find out surreptitiously as much as she could about the murder investigation from the perspective of the detectives assigned to the case. Of course, she also took the greatest risk, professionally anyway. Though police files were not officially locked away and kept secret from other detectives, it is considered bad form to poke around someone else’s investigation. Detectives are notoriously territorial, and the thought that another cop might take an unhealthy interest in one of their cases is enough to start a departmental feud. Furthermore, Andrea’s friendship with me was well known in her department; snooping through Furlo and Smythe’s