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| "We're in the discoveries process..." |
Chapter Thirty-Four
They were in the discoveries process…
“We’re in the discoveries process.” Paul Watts explained rather superfluously to Gagnon.
The professional lawyer didn’t have any idea how far Gagnon had gotten in his studies. Locked up in a cell for seven years, court procedure might not have been a high point in his self-education. Reading books was no substitute for courtroom experience.
“How are you doing with Jason and Ashley?” Gagnon demanded without preamble.
“Let’s just concentrate on today.” The counselor gave his arm a quick pat.
Jean looked around at Janet for about the umpteenth time. Each time his guts wrenched at the look of calm, yet determined dignity on her face, chin set and eyes glittering coldly. To see her trying to smile encouragement was ghastly.
Once again, the courtroom was packed with spectators, and this time around the media had a heavy presence. The incessant dull murmur of the crowded benches, rows of unwashed humanity, all sitting cheek by jowl, acted to obscure and make their talk private.
“This is a preliminary hearing to determine if there’s sufficient evidence to bind you over for trial.”
Gagnon nodded his comprehension.
“In my opinion, there isn’t, but of course judges are aware of public feelings in the communities they serve.” Watts went on, unaware that he sounded a little like a community-college professor.
Angela Maginn was just winding up a previous case while they waited.
“Yes, sir.” Gagnon sat there.
“They’ll make a motion on the bail, but I’m pretty sure I can talk our way out of that. The fact that your house almost burned down, in an act of arson, may help us there. Anyway, I’ve got another little surprise up my sleeve.”
Gagnon was hardly listening.
“They’ll try to blame me.”
He had been re-arrested in his own garage. Jean was showing the auctioneer all through the house.
“Ten grand for the piano, and four grand for the hutch, but of course those are retail—I can’t give you anything like that.” Stuff like that—
Sooner or later they had made it out to the garage.
Reginald Schumann, a middle-aged balding man with a paunch, had simply shaken his head at the cars.
“Not my area of expertise, I’m afraid, although the big one’s definitely worth a few thousand.” There was the XJ-S, a kind of V-12 powered two-door coupe, very low and sleek-looking. “As for the other one. Some of these little English cars of the fifties and sixties could surprise you.”
But he couldn’t be certain of anything, and he didn’t take chances with stuff he didn’t know.
As for Jean, he knew next to nothing about cars. Most of the ones he had owned in his life were just half-decent looking vehicles picked up off a used-car lot. You kicked the tires, listened to it run, and you took a chance. But when the cops arrived at his house, and came walking up the driveway, he wasn’t particularly surprised.
Mister Watts explained further.
“You shouldn’t have slept at the Herbert woman’s place. You should have let Victim’s Services direct you to a homeless shelter for the night.”
Apparently if someone with the police department made him go, how could the Court argue with that?
“How the hell was I supposed to know? Yeah, it’s funny how no one bothered to tell me.”
He’d also been nailed for not carrying the bail agreement on him when out of his home. The wallet was on his dresser, and he had taken nothing with him to Janet’s, as he freely admitted to the cops. If only he had thought quicker on his feet, he never would have told the buggers anything. That was the trouble with having a clean conscience.
You tended to cooperate in your own destruction.
Jean considered himself extremely lucky to only do three weeks in jail this time around. The hearing had already been scheduled. Thank God it wasn’t three months away. Jean had lost about a pound a day while in the bleak and forbidding maximum-security county jail. It was a place not conceived as a minimum-risk country-club kind of facility. The men and women inside were to be held for a minimum length of time, pending trial or serving short sentences. Notions of recreation, or any redeeming sort of program for the prisoners, had been overlooked. The place was a ninety-year old, over-crowded shit-hole.
As for Jean, in the alleged hospital ward of cells, he was allowed outdoors into the tiny fenced-in walkway for a half an hour a day. The rest of the time he went quietly nuts.
The clerk of the court was giving Watts a nod. Maginn was rummaging through a stack of file folders, and the figure previously under examination by the Court was bent over the clerk’s desk, signing some documents, and looking relieved.
Then Maginn was speaking.
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| Maginn. I don't see the relevance. |
“If it please the Court, in the case of the Crown versus Jean Gagnon, the Crown asks that Mister Gagnon be held in custody pending trial on the charge of homicide in the first degree. Mister Gagnon has demonstrated an inability to comply with Court-ordered bail conditions, within days of release. It is still the Crown’s position that Mister Gagnon represents a danger to the community, and as a life-long offender, he represents a strong risk of flight. He’s already done it once.”
She distributed copies of the motion to Watts and the clerk.
“Do you have any evidence, counselor?” Watts adopted his usual calm and urbane manner. “Permission to introduce evidence?”
Judge Jack Slymingham peered over his bifocals, while holding a sheet of paper in his hand. He nodded indecisively, as Maginn scowled at this unwelcome development. All she wanted to do was to keep Gagnon in jail while the police built a case against him.
“We would like to introduce this newspaper clipping, and these sworn affidavits.” Watts had an air of contempt. “These show that someone other than Jean Gagnon robbed a bank in Ottawa, and that Mister Gagnon must have been wrongfully convicted, and that the money he allegedly stole has been recovered.”
“What?” Jean gasped aloud, as the room erupted in a cacophony of disbelief.
A hundred voices all spoke at once. Watts stood there like a leopard poised to spring.
“Permission to approach?” The highly-confident lawyer called over the hubbub.
Watts slid a sheet of paper over to a stunned Jean Gagnon, and then made his way along with Maginn to the bench for a quiet consultation on procedures and such.
Whispers in the background, the people all excited and amazed by this turn of events, distracted Jean as he attempted to read the thing. While the light in here was okay, it was a rather murky photocopy and lately he was starting to think that a pair of reading glasses might be in order. He squinted at the tiny typeface, wishing it had been enlarged.
He was completely disoriented as he plowed his way through the story, the echoing murmur of the lawyers attenuating and distorting as it circled around the room.
The clipping was from the Saint-Marie Monde if he read it right, that meant the world. He had no idea where the place was. According to the story, police had found the money in a submerged vehicle. Recovered along with the money were the partially-decomposed bodies of Franco Di Fazzio, age thirty-nine, and Guiseppe Di Angelo, age forty-one. The money was in an alligator-skinned briefcase. And some of the numbers, several packets of which were sequential…some of the money had been identified and linked to the robbery that he was convicted of. With a rising sense of excitement, Jean blocked out all other distractions and focused on what the trio at the bench were saying.
Filtering out other voices over the din, he heard Paul Watts talking to the judge.
“And the Quebec police are still looking for a certain Carlo Di Rocca.”
Jean sat rigid, listening carefully. Holy crap.
“But I don’t get the relevance.” The Maginn woman was telling the judge.
Watts snorted.
“Don’t play stupid. The man’s so-called criminal record should be thrown out.”
“Has he been granted an appeal? A re-trial?” Maginn butted in with a snarl. “Surely this has nothing to do with the case at hand.”
Gagnon’s sentence would have to be set aside, and that took years. Slymingham couldn’t resist the urge to teach a young lawyer a little bit about their job that maybe didn’t get covered enough in law school.
“You brought the man’s previous record up yourself, counselor.” Jack the Judge told her with a snippet of a smile. “Surely the gentleman has the right to challenge it.”
He thought for a moment.
“I’ll tell you what.” He nodded. “I’m going to strike the record. Now, what else have you got for me?”
The glittering orbs that were his eyes looked upon Paul Watts in speculation, and a kind of anticipation. Looking back, he hadn’t had this much fun in years.
“I’ll strike it provisionally.” He smiled at the young Crown attorney.
“Mister Gagnon was abducted by a person or persons unknown, who attempted to acquire that five-hundred-thousand.” Watts laid it out. “It is Mister Gagnon that is at risk. In that single sense, we actually agree with the Crown.”
“When did we say anything like that? We don’t agree.”
“You said something remarkably like it at the last hearing.” Slymingham’s response betrayed just a hint of glee.
Finally, something to do with actual law that he could get his teeth into. He looked forward to digging out the old books and doing the research. Slymingham loved the law, in all of her majesty, in all of her grandeur. Human relationships needed regulation.
“Justice is blind, counselor.” Slymingham reminded her. “You said Gagnon was at risk for suicide. It’s probably a lot worse for him in a jail cell.”
The three of them noted in annoyance that a woman in the front row had forgotten to turn off her cellular phone. They could hear it, as could everyone in the room, when it went off in some kind of techno-hip-hop ring tone as Maginn sought for inspiration.
Embarrassed by the attention, Kiera Isaacs reached into her purse to shut it off, but first, simple curiosity made her touch the button and read the number on the display. With a shake of her head, she impulsively hit the screen and held it up to her ear, ready to push the button and shut it off instantly if it wasn’t anything really important.
Only the fact that the Court was in some interminable hiatus led her to do it in the first place. All of a sudden, Kiera Isaacs let out a blood-curdling scream, almost dropping the phone in shock.
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| "It's my baby!" |
“Oh my God.” She shrieked, holding the phone out at arm’s length, as if in some unspoken plea for the onlookers to verify it. “It’s my baby. It’s my baby.”
Pandemonium reigned in the courtroom as flashes and cameras went off, and everyone was asking questions at once. Poor old Jean Gagnon just sat there galvanized as Watts, Maginn and the judge stared at him, at her, each other, and the documents in front of them.
Ringing through all the din, one anonymous male voice spoke in disgust and resignation.
“Well, that’s fuckin’ torn it.”
Pandemonium reigned supreme in the courtroom, as the cops on special security duty made a beeline for Kiera, as she stared at it with tear-swept face, and tiny little noises came out of the thing.
***
Steve Isaacs was having a bad dream. He moaned softly, wondering in this hazy state just exactly what he was doing in this tiny car. Who was driving it? He should know this person. The dim impression he had was of two buddies, out for a cruise on a summer’s eve. But his friend’s face was just a blank. A hypnotic sense of dread kept dragging him along behind it. There was an inevitability at work here. Had this happened? In the past, perhaps? Was this one of those amphibious cars he kept seeing on TV? Steve’s subconscious mind kept driving the pictures forward. In fascination he watched himself as they pulled up in front of a building. The two of them got out and walked across the graveled parking lot. His dream-state wouldn’t let go, as the pair of them walked through what looked like a seafood restaurant. It was a dingy and dirty-looking bar, built out on a wharf overlooking a basin where luxury speedboats and commercial fishing boats tied up together right in front of the windows. But there was no place like this in Vancouver. It was too rustic looking, too isolated. Too run down for the town as he knew it. Someone would have bought it and thrown up a thirty-story high-rise executive condo.
Following the other man right, and down the hallway and into a separate room, he saw sturdy fisherman-types at a table, smoking pipes and sipping greenish liqueur.
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| A dream that just won't quit... |
His friend knew these people, but he was completely mystified. Looking under the table, Steve became uncomfortably aware that everyone else had boots on, big, black rubber boots with yellow strips around the tops. Rain boots, work boots, his buddy had shoes on. Why was he the only one with no shoes? Craning his head upwards, he saw the ceiling was really the underside of the roof. The nautical theme of the premises even extended to the rafters and roofing boards being painted, spray-painted by the looks of it, with a kind of sickly-green paint. Moldering old fishing nets were stapled to the underside of the roof beams, with brown, trailing ends of dusty spider-webs dangling down from them. And everywhere that penicillin-green paint.
The man to his left was big, and bluff, and hearty, to the extent that Steve felt somehow inadequate, if not outright effeminate. The other’s blue eyes, grey spade-like beard, and white roll-neck fisherman’s sweater, exuded a highly individualized smell of tobacco and sweat. The man’s ruddy face was split in a wide grin, and manfully Steve tried to guffaw along with the joke, which he hadn’t actually heard. The huge guy was slapping him on the arm, talking to Steve, but he couldn’t comprehend what the man was saying as he gazed in fascination at a real-live captain’s hat, replete with gold braid.
In his dream, Steve looked to his right. Doug Bernardi. His old elementary school buddy. How had they gotten hooked up again? And why hadn’t he recognized him, in that distinctive black leather jacket—yes, that was Doug all right—when they were in the car? The rickety old table, the chairs, had all been sprayed green by some amateur.
In his highly-subjective state of awareness, this seemed to be going on forever, and his will was being sub-ducted by some other form of control.
His dream state was an unusual type of consciousness, as Steve found himself to be wandering through the restaurant, opening up rooms to see the vague stares of customers blinking back at him in tolerant amusement. It was a horribly grubby little restaurant, like it had been converted from something else, a fishing shack or the residence of some old wino…wandering around barefoot.
He opened up a door, and a man he somehow knew to be the manager was in bed with some girl he took to be his waitress. He could hear the kitchen in the background.
“I’ll be with you in a minute.” She hurriedly threw back the covers and swung her bare legs out of bed.
No wonder the service around here was so bad. The rooms off to each side of the bleak hallway took on new significance. What was this place? Horrid, dirty, cramped little bedrooms with no one in them, just a sagging bed.
Steve heard low voices, a murmuring that tugged at the corners of his awareness. This was like the worst little whorehouse on the Gulf Coast or something…reality hit with a bang.
“Caitlynn? Caitlynn?” He was in a bed and with a start of understanding, he saw that the sunlight streaming across his bedspread was angled all funny.
The shaft of light went in the opposite direction from what it should be.
In stark fear, he tumbled out of bed in a rush, heading for the other room, noting in shock that the glowing red numbers on his clock-radio said it was three-thirty p.m.
He could hear his little girl’s voice talking to someone, his heart thumping like breakers on a stony beach as he rounded the corner into the living room. Adrenalin shot through him when he saw she had the cell phone up to her ear.
“Caitlynn.” He hissed. “No. Bad girl. No.”
Grabbing the phone, he heard a voice coming from it. The name and number on the screen was a familiar one. A fucking Ontario number. No. Caitlynn had called her mother.
“Sir? We’d just like to speak with you for a minute.” A strong male voice close inside his ear.
Steve rammed a finger at the switch, and fell backwards onto the couch, as Caitlynn stared up at him. Something about his posture, her childlike instincts told her that daddy wasn’t very happy right now. Steve grabbed a handful of hair, and began pulling it out, the pain the only link with reality to hang onto right about now. His daughter stared.
“Argh.” He groaned.
The cell-phone could be tracked, unlike the van, the apartment, et cetera. That one small detail overlooked, and it was coming back to haunt him.
“Oh, Caitlynn, what have you done?” He moaned, as she looked on wide-eyed, with the beginnings of a crying fit stealing over her little features.
All Steve could do was to sit there and try to think it through. How much time did he have? What kind of a trail had he left? How long would it take for them to trace the call?
There were so many questions he wished he had asked sooner. Steve had heard something about repeater stations. They could narrow it down. But how long did it take? How precise could they get? There were so many unknowns. He didn’t know what to do next, except panic and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. All his instincts were screaming at him to grab Caitlynn and go. Otherwise it would be too late. And now all of a sudden his phone rang. Someone had used caller ID or the call-back option. His heart felt like it was going to come ripping right out of his chest.
“Jesus help us now.”
***
Carlo Di Rocca didn’t believe a word of it as he lay in the exposed grass, where a snow-drift curled over and kept just a hint of sunshine captive, warming his guts a little.
The Gagnon character had been yanked out of the gaping maw of the furnace of hell, as if some mean and arbitrary Fate had him on a string. While the man had suffered, the owl said, he should be glad he wasn’t born in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s boys would have piled his skull on with the rest of the heap, or something like that. His thoughts raced.
The owl was going hunting, or so he said. Carlo Di Rocca didn’t trust that owl one bit, for all of his thousand or fifteen hundred years. He had grown up a lot, since the early dawn hours when he was invoked by the shaman. Poor fool. The silly bugger had bitten off a little more than he could chew, in the end. In the end, we all have it coming to us, and we all deserve our fate. Fate is the most democratic institution of all, the coyote part of Carlo Di Rocca submitted to his Wintke selves, for not only was he a shape-shifter, he was also a person with two human souls.
Coyote had learned that he had the soul of a man, and the soul of a woman, both trapped within him in some eternal struggle with a third self, a soul-less, animal self. The battle could never be won, and it could never be lost. But the fighting would continue. So be it, and if one had to have a fate, surely the fate of coyote, the fate of Di Rocca was the worst fate of all, for it lasted for all of eternity, timeless, without form, and existing before even that first memory. His internal struggle would eventually drive him mad. He just accepted it, and worried about it from time to time.
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| Carlo Di Rocca, a.k.a. the Coyote. |
The shaman had come to a bad end, though.
Having changed once too often, the coyote was saving energy for one last change…if he could do it. The magic had its limitations, its own immutable laws of conservation. It used up your life-stuff to make the change. Even that accidental amateur Gagnon, however he came by the skill originally, had enough self-preserving instincts not to try to change into a tit-mouse or anything that could be potentially irrevocable. He had discussed it once with the owl, (strange how you could be friends and enemies at one and the same time.) There was a case where a shaman had changed into a huge snapping turtle. While escaping from the main threat, an angry grey wolf, the shaman inadvertently went into hibernation, having forgotten to take into account his actual surroundings. Laying there all winter, he was quickly found and dispatched by other prowling spirits. Shamans were often very manipulative, and made enemies as fast as they tried to make friends with the powers of the land. No, Di Rocca didn’t believe a word of it. Someone had fucked it up. Someone was lying to him.
He hadn’t invested all of this time in this operation, not to see it come off.
No way. It wasn’t going to happen. One way or another Gagnon owed Di Rocca a half a million bucks. If he couldn’t get it, he’d take it out of his hide.
The cops must have put Gagnon in jail for some reason, and Di Rocca was convinced that he was somehow being betrayed by his very best friends. Everything else, all this stuff, it was just a blind. The bogus stories were planted by the cops and their buddies the news guys. The cops had had enough evidence to convict Gagnon. That told a story. If the owl wanted to chicken out at the last minute, that was fine. He could take care of him later. He would invite the owl down for dinner. He was always a sucker for a fresh-killed jackrabbit.
“Done like dinner. Tee-hee-hee. Yes, by this time I must be quite mad.”
A tired wind stirred the branches above him, rattling the thin scattered screen of dry, dead leaves against one another.
***
From Slick’s point of view, the world held a lot of very unpleasant uncertainties.
All he wanted to do was to get out of town. He found himself shitting razor blades, as the saying went, or to use another expression, on tenterhooks. Now Slick knew exactly what that meant. With no money in the bank, and no way to sell anything in any kind of a hurry, he was forced to sit there, day after day, unable to confront what might be his fate.
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| Slick: a lot of unpleasant uncertainties... |
Frenchie’s luck was holding good, or rather bad. Word coming back through the grapevine was that Gagnon’s insurance people had gotten real ugly while he was in jail, and, since he was in jail, now the insurance company’s investigator was suggesting that Gagnon himself had torched the place. It might take two years to pay off. They were like that.
Still, Frenchie would be damned glad to be out of the bucket. From Slick’s point of view, Gagnon would be looking out for certain individuals. He might want to have a word with them. The police in Vancouver were still looking for the Isaacs guy and the daughter, that Caitlynn kid. So far they hadn’t been located, and at some point the search would peter out. All they could do was to wait until he made another mistake. The cell-phone thing wasn’t likely to happen again. All the police had was a radius. In a case of parental abduction, a Canada-wide warrant was unlikely. There was too much likelihood of lawyers getting involved. The whole parental-rights thing was a nightmare to the cops.
It seemed hard on the Isaac’s lady, that’s for sure, but there was nothing Slick could do about that. Thank God he hadn’t been forced to choose, between Gagnon’s freedom and his own. Almost certainly, he would have failed that test. All Slick Wilson wanted to do was to sell his shitty little house, and move to Arizona, where he had some elderly female relatives down near Reno. How could he have ever been so stupid?
END
Images. Louis.
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