Deadly Lessons. David Russell W.
it bother you, Patrick, that your client’s prints could be found on the body at all?” Furlo demanded angrily.
“What bothers me is that you’ve failed to even consider the myriad means by which a teacher’s prints could be found on a student. Classrooms are not big places. People make inadvertent contact all the time. A caring hand laid on a student’s arm to offer encouragement. A touch on the elbow as you say ‘excuse me’ in the stairway.”
“And on her hands,” Smythe reminded me, suddenly rejoining the conversation.
“Mr. Turbot told you during your earlier questioning that Tricia Bellamy had expressed some difficulty with the subject matter and had come in for tutoring. They were in a biology lab conducting science experiments. That a ‘partial’ print could be left on her hands is hardly grounds for detaining my client.” I was bluffing.
“It is when you consider the fact they were sleeping together,” Furlo sneered.
“And that, Detective, is the last I want to hear of those unfounded allegations. This was a troubled student who for reasons unknown alleged an inappropriate relationship. Until such times as you have some kind of corroborating evidence of such a relationship, you would be well advised to refrain from making any statements in that regard, or you may find yourself and your department staring down the business end of a civil defamation suit.”
Furlo, for once, was quieted by my threat. Smythe did not come to his aid.
“And furthermore,” I continued, “just how in hell did you get my client’s fingerprints for comparison?”
“He offered them when we brought him in,” Smythe explained calmly.
I looked at Carl in disbelief. His eyes turned pleadingly to me. “I didn’t know what to do. They said they wanted my fingerprints, so I gave them to them.”
“You brought my client in here because you found ‘some’ prints on the body?”
“Prints that turned out to be his,” Furlo demanded.
“Talk to Crown Counsel. Even assuming you can gather enough evidence to build a credible charge, I’ll have those prints thrown out as being collected improperly, without the advice of counsel, without an arrest warrant being sworn out.” I practically pulled Carl from his chair. “Carl, it’s time to go home.” Smythe and Furlo made no effort to stop me. “Goodnight, Detectives.”
“Good night, Mr. Patrick,” Smythe offered. Despite my staged hostility and indignity, she still had class enough to offer polite, closing niceties.
“Hey, Patrick!” Furlo sneered. “Why doesn’t your client give us a DNA sample, and we’ll speed things up immensely?”
“Not going to happen. Not now. Not ever,” I replied, though I knew if any more damning evidence came our way, obtaining a court order for Carl’s DNA would be relatively routine.
Outside the room, I hurried Carl down the hallway, past the detectives’ work area to the elevator. While we waited for the car to take us down and into Vancouver’s drizzling night air, I turned to face him. “Let’s get this clear. Do not offer anything—anything—to the police unless I’m with you. Not fingerprints, not answers to questions, not DNA samples, nothing. They know you have defence counsel. They know better.”
“I’m sorry,” he responded. “I panicked. I don’t get picked up by the police very often.”
“And you won’t again. If they come to see you, if they phone you, if they so much as send you an invitation to the police ball, you call me first, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “Is that true, what you said about getting my fingerprints thrown out?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I was making it up,” I confessed.
“Well, you sounded convincing to me.” He forced a smile.
“Terrific,” I said. “I should have been an actor.”
Eleven
By the time I had taken Carl to his home and me to my mine, it was well past midnight. And still I had not completed my marking.
I had managed to convince Carl it would be a good idea not to come to work on Thursday morning. In fact, I had called our “teacher-on-call” service even prior to going to the police station to ensure Carl’s classes would at least be looked after. Somewhere down the line since I had been a high school student, substitute teachers had changed their moniker to teachers-on-call in a bid to get more respect from students and colleagues alike. As far as I know, students still figured it was holiday time whenever their regular teacher was away. The only time I had ever been thrown out of high school during my own adolescent years was over the grief I had caused a “sub” during a Social Studies class. Back in the eighties, schools had no sense of humour. You told one substitute teacher to fuck off and you were outta there.
Fortunately, Carl was meticulously organized, and his lesson plans were prepared for someone to take over for him. It would have been hard for him to be prepared for the circus at the front of the school when I arrived on Friday morning. If news of Tricia’s death had brought out the best of Vancouver’s media machine, news of Carl’s questioning by the police had brought out the rest of them. How they even knew he had been picked up for further questioning was a mystery that wasn’t too difficult to solve. Detective Furlo would be going out of his way to make sure I had a difficult job defending the man he had already decided was guilty. He had even let it slip that a certain former lawyer turned teacher was acting in Carl’s defence. The moment I stepped out of my car, Cameron Dhillon, a local television reporter, was headed my way. I’d never met him, but he knew just who he was looking for.
“Mr. Patrick?” he began, cameraman in tow. “Are you defending Carl Turbot?”
“Yes, I am,” I replied lamely. I felt as ill-prepared as I had been during my first trial—which I had lost. Working with legal aid clients, it had been rare that the media took interest in any of my defendants.
“Has Mr. Turbot pleaded not guilty?” he pressed on. By now, a handful of other reporters had noticed the activity near the staff parking lot and were hurrying over to get in their two bits before I could make it to the doorway.
“Mr. Turbot has not and will not be pleading guilty or not guilty because he has not been arrested or charged with any crime. A plea would be premature at this time.” I used my snotty lawyer tone.
“Sir, why has Carl Turbot hired a lawyer if he isn’t guilty?” came a question from a print reporter. You could always tell. They still carried notebooks.
“I have no comment on Mr. Turbot’s decision to retain counsel. That is information that is privileged between solicitor and client.”
“Aren’t you a teacher at Sir John A. Macdonald high school?” Cameron Dhillon continued.
“I am, and I have classes to teach, so if you’ll excuse me.” I pressed forward through the gathering throng of media hounds and did my best not to hear the questions they shouted at me as I went by. It’s a curious phenomenon, the media scrum. What we often see on television is the tail end where reporters figure that the subject of their scrum leaving is a cue to start shouting as loudly as possible. How they figure that would help to hear their questions and respond to them any better is an enigma. I suppose when their bosses see the tape back at the studio, reporters want to be seen at least trying to get the all-important quote from their source.
Once I reached the doorway of the school, the press backed off. It is an unwritten rule—it may even be written for all I know—that schools are somehow sacred ground onto which reporters shall not tread without an engraved invitation. As a general rule, school administrators are all about avoiding negative publicity, so I was fairly confident Don would not be inviting the press in to ask questions. But of course, Don was waiting for me inside the doorway, just past the line of sight of the press. I pretended