The Last Good Day jk-9

by Gail Bowen

  “You haven’t lost your skills as a seminar leader,” I said.

  “A seminar leader!” Maggie gave Anne a mocking smile. “You didn’t tell us that on the drive out. I’ll bet you were a tough marker.”

  A frown creased Linda’s brow. “Let’s keep our focus here,” she said. “Anyway, Clare was leafing through the trust ledgers and she came upon something that set off the alarm bells. She noticed that a number of trust funds were suddenly making substantial payments into general accounts, and they were making them repeatedly.”

  “I’m guessing there were no permissions,” I said.

  “Bingo,” Linda said. “No written record of any kind. A clear case of defalcation – messing with trust money. Anyway, the rest of the story is quickly told. All the payments were made during a six-week period. With Clare’s background in forensic accounting, she knew how to follow the money trail. She went to the files and discovered that the major case Falconer Shreve was handling at the time was the Patsy Choi case. It was a civil case, tort of assault, wrongful touching.”

  “My God, the uncle deliberately broke the girl’s fingers,” I said.

  “In the law, ‘wrongful touching’ was still the charge. The plaintiff, Patsy Choi, had to prove her damages, and it was not a slam dunk for her lawyer. Clare made copies of the notes to the case. The defence got great mileage out of the uncle’s philanthropy, the fact that as soon as he’d heard about Patsy’s talent as a violinist, he spared no expense in bringing her to Canada, giving her a home, paying for her lessons.”

  “And then smashing her fingers with a hammer,” I said.

  “Actually, it was a wooden mallet, the kind you use to tenderize meat,” Sandra Mikalonis said mildly. “The uncle was tenderizing a piece of round steak when Patsy announced that she didn’t want to practise any more – that she didn’t want to be a freak, she wanted to be a normal girl. The defence scored some points on that little outburst too.”

  “But Patsy Choi ended up winning,” I said. “She got a huge settlement.”

  Maggie snorted derisively. “Well, huge for Canada, and the appeal dragged on for a long time. But you’re right. In the end, Patsy won.”

  Anne Millar gave a seminar leader’s summation. “The point is that Patsy Choi proved her damages because her lawyer hired an array of professional experts who he knew were plaintiff-friendly, and they did their job. An entertainment lawyer and an impresario put a dollar figure on Patsy’s loss of potential earnings. Three psychiatrists testified that she had suffered irreparable psychological damage when her fingers were broken. A partnership of psychologists who specialize in adolescents pointed out that no one would want to have their life determined by what they said during a tantrum when they were in their early teens. But expert testimony doesn’t come cheap.”

  “And Patsy’s lawyer paid the experts out of the trust funds of Falconer Shreve clients,” I said.

  “Bingo again,” Sandra said. “In the normal run of things, the partners could have covered the experts’ fees out of their personal funds, but Patsy Choi’s case took place during a serious slump in the stock market. Clare’s guess was that Patsy’s lawyer knew his partners’ circumstances and didn’t even approach them. You have to hand it to Chris Altieri: when it came to the people he cared about, he was a class act.”

  An image flashed into my mind – Chris on the night of the barbecue whispering that he had done something unforgivable. But it didn’t fit. In my mind at least, dipping into a trust fund didn’t qualify as a mortal sin.

  “What kind of disciplinary action did the Law Society decide on?” I said.

  “None,” Linda said. “Clare never went to the Law Society. She just made copies of all the documents and wrote up her notes. When she gave me the file, she told me to hang on to it until she’d made up her mind about what she was going to do. I told her that she had no choice. She said she wasn’t talking about the Law Society – she was wrestling with a personal matter. She seemed very distracted, very un-Clare. Anyway, she never came for the folder, and she left town in mid-November without doing anything. A shocker, at least to me.”

  “She was just beginning her career,” I said. “Chris Altieri had a lot of friends. Clare might not have wanted to be tagged as a troublemaker.”

  “She wouldn’t have cared about that,” Maggie Niewinski said. “Clare saw the world in terms of right and wrong. She had her own inner account book. It was like the trust ledgers Anne was talking about: at the end of the day, everything had be reconciled right down to the last word or deed. That’s why I can’t believe she left town with so many things unresolved – especially the defalcation. I mean, talk about black and white.”

  “Clare’s relationship with Chris Altieri may have drawn her into a grey area,” I said.

  The women turned to me, alert and wary.

  “Clare Mackey and Chris had an affair,” I said. “Apparently, she became pregnant and terminated the pregnancy.”

  Anne Millar’s grey eyes widened with disbelief. “How could you know that? You never met Clare. You’d never even heard her name until I told you about her at the funeral.”

  “But I met Chris,” I said. “The night he died he told me he was haunted by a relationship that ended in an abortion. He didn’t mention the woman’s name. I didn’t discover it was Clare until later.”

  Maggie was chewing her thumbnail. Sandra reached over absently and batted Maggie’s hand away from her mouth, then she turned to me.

  “Who told you the woman was Clare?” she asked.

  “Zack Shreve,” I said. “After Anne went to Falconer Shreve and put pressure on Chris to supply the name of the firm Clare had joined in Vancouver, there was a meeting. According to Zack, Chris told his partners that Clare left because she didn’t want to be near him.” I glanced around the table. “You all knew Clare. Is that behaviour consistent with the kind of woman she was?”

  “Is,” Linda Thauberger said angrily. “Let’s try to hold on to a little hope here. And let’s have a reality check. Clare would not have made the decision to have an abortion lightly.”

  “Because of her religion?”

  “I never heard her mention religion,” Linda said. “Just her own ethical sense. She would have lived with the consequences of what she had done.”

  “Not if she thought the father of her unborn child was immoral,” Sandra said thoughtfully.

  “Oh, come on,” Maggie said. “I’ll grant you that defalcation isn’t exactly admirable, but it isn’t as if Chris Altieri was diddling altar boys.”

  “I agree with you,” Sandra said. “I’m just not sure Clare would. Don’t you remember what she said about her father that night we celebrated passing our bar exams?”

  Maggie groaned. “I don’t remember anything about that night.”

  “I do,” Linda said. “It’s the only time I remember ever seeing Clare angry – actually, it’s the only time I ever remember her revealing anything personal at all.”

  “It’s coming back to me,” Maggie said, narrowing her eyes. “Her father embezzled funds from the company he worked for.”

  “Right,” said Sandra. “Then he skedaddled, leaving Clare’s mother alone to raise her daughter. They lived in a small town. Everybody knew what had happened, and Clare felt that people were always watching her, waiting for her to slip up. That night at our little celebration, she was still bitter. I remember her saying, ‘It took me twenty years, but I’ve finally proven to them that I’m not my father’s daughter.’ Maybe she was afraid history would repeat itself.”

  “But duplicity isn’t a hereditary disease,” Anne said.

  “You know that, and I know that,” Sandra said. “But when it came to questions of morality, Clare wasn’t rational. I think it’s more than possible that when she discovered she was carrying the child of a man who’d done exactly what her dear old dad had done, she just overreacted.”

  After that, there wasn’t much to say. When Linda replaced the Patsy Choi f
ile in her handsome red briefcase, it seemed to be a signal to us all that the meeting was over. We pushed our chairs back from the table and made our way to the front door. The evening we walked out into had the clarity of a Dutch painting: everything was bathed in the warm golden light of the setting sun.

  “I guess it’s time for us to take our stroll along the beach,” Linda Thauberger said. “Not exactly a sacrifice. It’s so beautiful here.”

  Anne Millar took a deep breath. “I think we could all use a little fresh air before we head back to the city.”

  Sandra Mikalonis kicked off her sandals and, ponytail flying, sprinted towards the lake. Maggie and Linda weren’t far behind. With every step, they seemed to leave the years and the tensions behind.

  Anne’s voice was rueful. “They make me feel ancient.”

  “Your advanced age aside, how are you feeling about the way things are moving?”

  “Rotten,” Anne said. “I’m sure Clare is dead.” The words, uttered baldly and without preamble, were a blow. Anne stared intently at my face. “You believe that too, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So do the police,” Anne said. “Of course, they’re not about to make an official statement, but Linda says the officers she talked to really grilled her about how the case was handled. She also said the phrase she heard from everybody at headquarters was ‘we needed to get to this sooner.’ ”

  “They could have,” I said. “You talked to Alex Kequahtooway at the end of November.”

  Anne laughed shortly. “The problem is Inspector Kequahtooway didn’t talk to anyone else about what I told him.”

  “He didn’t write up an official report of your conversation?”

  “Apparently not. I guess there’s some sort of internal investigation going on about what the inspector did or did not do. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. What matters to me is that the police finally want to get to the bottom of this. Like everyone else involved in this very cold case, it’s finally dawning on them that they failed Clare Mackey.”

  When Anne glanced towards the lake, something caught her eye.

  “Who’s that with our little group?”

  I followed the direction of her gaze. “Let’s see. The smallest of the girls in the navy bathing suits is my daughter, Taylor, the other two are her friends, and the man with them is Blake Falconer.”

  “Well, well, well,” Anne said. “They landed a big one.”

  Blake and the girls had just come from a swim. The girls clearly had plans other than spending the evening jawing with adults, and it wasn’t long before they hightailed it for the Wainbergs’ cottage. As they darted off, Blake watched them fondly. He was bare-chested and barefoot, and his towel was slung over one shoulder. In the red-gold light, he seemed to glow himself, ruddy and handsome. We strolled over to where he was talking to the rest of the Moot Team.

  “Hey,” he said when he saw me. “I was just introducing myself to your company. More lawyers, just what we need around here.” His smile was broad and genuine. Linda and Maggie and Sandra were smiling, too. It was a nice moment, and the part of me that longed for harmony wanted to ignore the ugly questions and ask if he’d had a good swim and if the water was still warm.

  But the woman I had never met deserved better. “These aren’t just lawyers, Blake,” I said. “They’re friends of Clare Mackey’s from law school.”

  The wattage of his smile didn’t diminish. “So how’s she doing?” he said.

  I pressed on. “No one seems to know.”

  “We haven’t heard from her in months,” Linda Thauberger said. “We were hoping someone from Falconer Shreve might be able to give us some contact information.”

  Blake chewed his lip. “I’m not the best one to talk to about this,” he said. “You should get in touch with my wife, Lily. She and Clare were quite close there for a while. At least, they always seemed to be huddling.”

  “Could we talk to Lily now?” Anne asked.

  “No,” Blake said. “Lily’s not well tonight.”

  “Tomorrow then,” Anne said.

  Blake’s eyes met mine. “Maybe Joanne could call you when the time is right.” There was such sadness in his face that my heart went out to him.

  “Maybe that would be best,” I agreed.

  “Well, goodnight, then,” Blake said. And he walked up the path that took him to whatever awaited him at home. The five of us watched until he disappeared from sight.

  “For a guy who’s supposed to have the world by the short hairs, he’s not very happy, is he?” Maggie said.

  “No,” I said, “he’s not.”

  She gave her curls a toss. “Well,” she said, “you make a deal with the devil…”

  The idea of making a deal with the devil might have been a throwaway line for Maggie, but after she left, the words stuck to my consciousness, persistent as a burr. Blake wasn’t the only one who’d made a deal with the devil. Not many hours before he died, Chris Altieri told me he had committed an act that was unforgivable. By all accounts, Chris was a decent and principled human being, but he had also been involved in the rough-and-tumble world of the law for twenty years. He wouldn’t have minimized his culpability about what he had done to win the Patsy Choi case, but somehow I couldn’t imagine him characterizing the act as unforgivable.

  The fate of his mizuko was another matter. Haunted by the memory of this child flowing into being, Chris had travelled halfway around the world seeking absolution. Yet the night of the fireworks he had made a point of telling me he had forced his lover to choose an abortion. What he’d said that night had nagged at me. Nothing about Chris Altieri suggested that he was the kind of man who would compel a woman to undergo an abortion she didn’t want. And Clare Mackey certainly did not seem to be a woman who would cede control of her body to anyone. It simply didn’t add up.

  But there was another possible scenario, and it had its own cruel logic. Sandra Mikalonis had floated the possibility that Clare Mackey had chosen to abort her unborn child because she had decided Chris Altieri was morally unfit to be a father. If Chris had believed his unborn child had been denied its chance to come into being because of his own moral failure, he might not have been able to forgive himself. His responsibility for the abortion would have been the unforgivable act.

  I had always believed the axiom that a burden shared is a burden halved, and the burden of my insight into Chris’s state of mind was heavy. I wanted badly to talk to someone, and that someone was Zack.

  He had seemed so tired it was possible he was already sleeping, so when I arrived at his front door I knocked softly. He came to the door almost immediately. He was wearing the white terry-cloth robe he had worn the night before, and there was a stack of folders on his knees. When he motioned me in, I saw the living room was littered with law books and papers.

  “Homework?” I said.

  “You bet. I don’t like being humiliated, and to use a legal term with which you may not be familiar, I really stepped on my joint in court today.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  “You should have been there. Speaking of which, you’re ten hours early – not that I’m complaining. I’m just glad you’re here.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  He took my hand. “So do you want to go to bed or do you want to look at the sunset?”

  “I think we need to talk first,” I said.

  “Fair enough. Follow me.” Zack led me through his house to the deck. It was large and uncluttered and it faced west onto the spectacular light show of a Canadian sunset in cottage country.

  “How did things go with Clare’s friends?”

  As I gave my account of the women’s visit, Zack leaned forward in his chair. He didn’t interrupt or comment until I was finished. When he did speak, he was pithy.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Why didn’t he come to me? He didn’t have to go through this alone. If he’d let me help with the Patsy Choi case, none of this would have happened. I must have
offered to give him a hand a dozen times. I saw how he was throwing the money away. I just assumed we had it to throw.”

  “What would have happened to Chris if he’d been caught – I mean, after he’d put the money back?”

  Zack rubbed the back of his neck. “Probably not much,” he said. “The Law Society is the Law Society. No matter who’s involved, they have to investigate and decide on appropriate disciplinary action. But this is a small province, and Chris had a boy scout’s reputation. He was loyal, trustworthy, courteous, kind, clean, and obedient.”

  “Don’t forget reverent,” I said. “After Chris died, one of the gents at Coffee Row said Chris went to Mass every day.”

  “He did,” Zack said. “But the daily attendance started after the Patsy Choi case. Before that, although he never missed Mass, he went only once a week. Guilt, I guess.”

  “Why did he feel such guilt?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe something happened when he was a kid that convinced him he had to take on the sins of the world.”

  “Who was it who said, ‘Childhood lasts forever’?”

  “Probably someone at social services,” Zack said sardonically. “But whoever it was, they were right on the money.” He brightened. “I’ll bet you had a real Norman Rockwell childhood.”

  “Don’t bet anything you value,” I said. “Because you couldn’t be more wrong.”

  “You’re one of the walking wounded?”

  I nodded.

  Zack moved his chair so that our knees were touching. He leaned forward and placed his hands against my cheeks. “Then maybe you’ve had enough,” he said. “Falconer Shreve is in for some rough times, Joanne. If you want to walk away, now’s the time.”