of you.”
Howard picked up his fork obediently and took a bite. He could barely swallow.
“Okay,” I said. “Save the manly meal for another time. Just try to get a piece of toast down.”
It was a silent and miserable breakfast. When I was finished eating, I left some bills on the table. Howard, who was normally the most generous of men, didn’t fight me for the cheque. “I’ll see you at the courthouse,” I said. “Do me a favour. Don’t have anything to drink before you take the stand.”
As I was going up the courthouse stairs, Zack was coming up the ramp. There had been a warming trend over the weekend. The snow had melted; the sidewalks were dry; the sun was bright and the air was mellow. Zack was wearing a lightweight mochaccino suit and a red tie.
“I like your tie,” I said.
“I like everything about you,” he said.
We stopped in the lobby under the mural celebrating our majestic legal heritage.
“How bad is it going to be?” I asked.
Zack shrugged. “It depends on how prepared Howard is. Have you seen him?”
“We had breakfast together – at Humpty’s.”
Zack’s smile was faint. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s a little under the weather. He’ll be all right. Howard is a good man, Zack.”
“That may be true,” Zack said. “But he’s not my client.”
“Still …”
“There is no ‘still,’ ” Zack said. “Howard is the Crown’s chief witness against my client. His testimony can send Sam Parker to jail.”
“So you’re going to tear Howard apart.”
“I’m going to do what I have to do for my client.”
“No matter what,” I said.
Zack’s gaze didn’t waver. “No matter what. There’s a saying among criminal lawyers: ‘If you don’t have blood on your hands, you’re not doing your job.’ ” He turned his chair. “I do my job,” he said, then he wheeled over to the doors, hit the accessibility button, and disappeared inside.
After Zack left, I went to the courtroom in search of Howard. He wasn’t there. It was entirely possible Garth Severight and the Crown were keeping Howard hydrated and calmed, but somehow I doubted it, and when I went back to the lobby and saw a young lawyer from the Crown’s office frantically scrutinizing the lobby and the street, I knew I’d been right to worry. So far, Howard was a no-show.
I took a place on the bench beneath the mural and waited. I knew that, as he always had, Howard would come. The lobby emptied of press, interested parties, and spectators, and I was suddenly alone with that hollow-pit-in- the-stomach feeling I’d had as a child when I was late coming over from the dorms and I’d arrived to find the school halls empty and silent.
I had just about given up hope when Howard appeared. He no longer looked defeated or hungover. He just looked drunk. He was fumbling with a small metal tin of breath-mints, and he’d obviously given himself a fresh shellacking of Crown Royal. I took the tin from him, popped the corner, and handed it back to him. He threw a handful of mints into his mouth.
“Feeling better?” I asked.
“Like the bottom of a latrine,” he said. “But I’ll get through.”
I sniffed his breath. “You do realize that those things aren’t working,” I said.
Howard studied the label on the tin with a drunk’s care. “Freshens the breath,” he read. His eyes were sorrowful. “Seems like you can’t believe in anything any more, doesn’t it?”
His words were prescient. The first witness that morning was not Howard Dowhanuik, but his son, Charlie. When the court clerk called Charlie’s name, my heart lurched, but I wasn’t surprised. As promised, Zack had dropped by Charlie’s house with the baseball on Saturday afternoon. When I’d gone upstairs to help Pete unpack, Charlie had stayed behind with Zack. Now Charlie was in the witness box.
I stared at Zack, but he didn’t return my gaze. As Garth Severight took Charlie through his testimony, Zack never once looked my way. Charlie’s story was simple. He had approached Garth over the weekend and offered to substantiate Howard’s story. Garth had jumped at the offer.
Severight’s eagerness made sense. Howard was not an ideal witness. According to Zack, Linda Fritz knew Howard had a drinking problem and that he was hostile. She would willingly have left him off the Crown’s witness list except for one fact. Howard was prepared to testify that he had heard Sam Parker threaten Kathryn Morrissey and that he had seen Sam raise and aim the gun. Without Howard’s testimony, there would be a gaping hole in the Crown’s case. Howard might have been a compromised witness, but the Crown needed him. Charlie’s testimony could plug up the holes.
When Charlie took the stand, Brette Sinclair put her mouth to my ear. “Finally – something interesting.”
Hair neatly brushed back, shoes shined, suit pressed, Charlie was the epitome of the responsible citizen. He was also a very effective witness who told his story well. According to Charlie, his father had called him the evening of the shooting and asked him to come to the condominium. Although he and his father were estranged, Charlie had agreed. His father had been agitated on the telephone, and Charlie had been concerned that something had happened to a family member. As soon as Charlie arrived, his father described an incident that had happened twenty minutes earlier. According to Howard, he had been out in his yard when he heard a man shouting. In May, the trees between Howard’s condo and Kathryn’s were leafing, but he had a clear view of what had happened. The man, whom Howard recognized as Sam Parker, raised a gun, pointed it at Kathryn Morrissey, and pulled the trigger.
