I’m asking is that you paraphrase what you said an hour ago. Surely you can remember what you told us an hour ago?”
Howard stared fixedly at the knees of his pants, as if he hoped that somehow the answer would appear there. It didn’t. After an agonizing wait, he finally responded, “No, I can’t.”
Zack was looking intently at the jury. Aristotle understood the mix of pity and terror an audience feels at the fall of a good man. Zack might or might not have read Aristotle, but he could read a jury and he knew this one had had enough. When he spoke again, his voice was kind.
“Mr. Dowhanuik, no one here today wants to humiliate you. As my friend pointed out repeatedly, you are an expremier. Why don’t I just take a stab at relating what was said, and if anything I say differs substantially from what you swore to an hour ago, you sing out. Fair enough?”
“Yes,” Howard said.
“Good,” Zack said. “Now, I’m an ordinary guy. I don’t have total recall. A lot of time, I have problems remembering where I parked my car, but I think I can convey the gist of your testimony about the conversation between Ms. Morrissey and my client. According to you, when Ms. Morrissey spotted my client, she said ‘What are you doing here?’ He replied, ‘This is destroying my family. I thought perhaps if we talked …’ At that point, Ms. Morrissey cut him off, saying, ‘Your lawyer has already been in touch with my publishers. You have no grounds for a lawsuit. The book is in the stores. It’s too late …’ Am I in the ballpark so far, Mr. Dowhanuik?”
“Yes,” Howard whispered.
“You told us that, at that point, Mr. Parker took out a pistol, aimed it at Ms. Morrissey, and said, ‘How does it feel to know this might be the last day of your life?’ And then you remember a gunshot. Surely, you can fill us in on the circumstances of
“I don’t remember. It was all so fast. One minute she was sitting in her chair drinking wine, the next she was on the ground bleeding.”
Zack exhaled as if relieved at the completion of a distasteful task. “Thank you, Mr. Dowhanuik, the people appreciate your co-operation.”
Like a felon, Howard bolted from the witness box. Zack wheeled into his exit path, blocking him. “You were a lawyer, Mr. Dowhanuik. You must remember that you’re supposed to wait for Mr. Justice Harney to tell you that you may step down.”
For a brief and heartbreaking moment, the two men at the centre of my life faced each other. Whether it was the booze or the disgrace, Howard was unsteady on his feet; in his wheelchair, Zack was a coiled spring. “You didn’t let me finish,” he said. “Ms. Morrissey was not found bleeding on the ground. She had gone inside her home, and was putting pressure on her wound. She, too, called 911. When the EMS arrived, she opened her front door and admitted them herself.
“Mr. Dowhanuik, I hope you know that our encounter today has brought me no pleasure. My friend is right in saying that most of us know you as a fine, upstanding citizen, the clear-eyed leader of our province, but liquor and drugs have a way of distorting vision, of making a person see things, not as they are but as he wishes they might have been.” Zack wheeled over to the jury box. “Members of the jury, judges of facts, when you deliberate over Mr. Dowhanuik’s testimony, remember what you saw today – a man stitched and bruised from a drunken fall, his eyes bloodshot, his hands trembling, who, despite what I’m certain was diligent coaching from the Crown, was unable to get his story straight. Ask yourself if you would want your fate determined by the testimony of this man. Ask yourself if the testimony he delivered and then couldn’t remember an hour later was the truth or some drunken, drug-addled fantasy he spun out of his desperation and guilt.” Zack wheeled back to the defence table. As if as an afterthought, he threw Howard the sentence that liberated him. “Oh, no more questions.”
As he left the courtroom, Howard was a broken man. I remembered Zack’s hesitancy about having me cover the trial for NationTV. He’d said he wanted me to keep believing he was a nice guy. He hadn’t been a nice guy with Howard. He’d been mocking, diminishing, intimidating, and menacing. On our first date, Zack and I had eaten at a restaurant that looked over the Qu’Appelle Valley. It had been a spectacular summer night and after we ate, we gazed across the hills and Zack said that the still waters and green pastures beneath us made him understand the Twenty-third Psalm. In that instant, I felt a sense of communion with him that had never left me. Now it was gone. I was dazed. What Zack did to Howard was primal: bone hitting bone until the weakest of the combatants was destroyed.
Brette had been crouched over, writing frantically; when Howard finally left the witness box, she slumped back in her chair and exhaled theatrically. “Wow. At J school, they told us that cross-examination is the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth, but that was brutal. And how about Charlie D’s dramatic last-minute appearance on the witness list? I kept waiting for Shreve to object, but why would he? Charlie D turned out to be a great witness for the defence.”
“Too great?” I said.
Brette rubbed her hands together. “You mean his obvious rapport with Zack Shreve? Are you suggesting collusion? It’s a possibility, but Shreve’s too smart for that. He’s playing it close to the line though – ‘cusp collusion’ – almost illegal but not quite. That’s Shreve’s specialty – the whiff of sharp practice but nothing blatant enough for the Law Society.” Brette twirled her pearls. “So far, Shreve’s doing a good job of salvaging his case. In my opinion, the verdict in this trial is now officially up for grabs.”
More unanswered questions, but despite everything, when court was adjourned for the day, the tension I’d been holding in my body drained. Howard had been chewed up and spit out, but he was alive and as the old adage has it, “while there’s life, there’s hope.” I’d told Rapti that Zack and I were flying to Saskatoon, so when I stepped out of the courthouse she and the cameraman were already set up and waiting. She shuddered when she examined my face. “You have definitely lost your glow,” she said.
“You have a kit full of blush and bronzer,” I said. “Work a miracle.” Rapti dabbed away dutifully, then stepped back to examine her handiwork. “Not great,” she said. “But definitely better.” I snapped on my microphone. Just as I was about to start, Zack came out of the courtroom.
He came over to me. “Mind if I watch?”
“No.”
Rapti raised her hand. “I’m counting down, Jo.” I watched her fingers. “Five, four, three, two …”
The last finger fell and I began, “It was a good day for the defence in the Sam Parker case …”
When I was through, Zack said, “Let’s get out of here. Sean’s bringing the car around.”
