Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  And to one of his best clients, a real estate developer whose buying and selling Uhuru had been handling for at least ten years. He wanted Uhuru to handle the legal work for a new apartment complex he was buying. It would have meant a substantial fee at a time when there were far more bills than cheques in his inbox. Still, he’d said no. What was he thinking?

  He replaced the handset in its cradle, turned his attention back to the folder in front of him:

  Interview with James Joseph Howe

  Det. Fred Hopkins

  02/05/06

  13:15 – 15:45

  Interrogation Room 3

  As confessions go, it was full and complete and, based on the policeman’s numerous cautions and warnings—spoken, written, signed and witnessed—about as defence bulletproofed as the Crown could have hoped. During his interrogation, J. J. had not only happily, eagerly confessed to taking the money, he’d also explained—without being asked—exactly how he did it, all of which forensic auditors had since confirmed, thanks in no small measure to the road map to his crime J. J. had voluntarily provided them.

  What J. J. had not turned over to the police—though they quickly got a court order to seize them, too—were his bank records, which showed all the inflows and outflows. Those he’d turned over to his lawyer.

  Which only served to confirm that J. J. had no hidden ill-gotten gains to pay for his defence. Worse, J. J.’s modest salary as a bookkeeper for the City was not modest enough to qualify him for legal aid. Worst, J. J. had used most of his salary to top up his contributions to various African-Nova Scotian charities, programs and good works, meaning he had no valuable assets at all to contribute.

  He lived in a rented room on Agricola Street smaller than his cell at the Correctional Centre. With the exception of a used radio and a cheap microwave, the furniture all belonged to the landlord. With the exception of the suit he wore to his arraignment, the clothes in his closet were so worn and threadbare they would not have passed inspection by the buyers at Value Village.

  Uhuru had discovered all of this the day after J. J.’s arraignment. “I need you to get something out of my room,” J. J. had whispered to Uhuru just before the sheriff’s deputies led him away. Uhuru imagined J. J. was about to tell him where to find a secret stash of cash. He’d hoped so, partly, of course, because that would mean J. J. could afford his fees, and partly because the idea that J. J. might really be as selfless as he seemed scared the hell out of Uhuru. His hope was in vain.

  “I have some library books that are due back tomorrow,” J. J. confided, handing Uhuru a key. “Could you take them back for me?”

  The library books, it turned out, were the only items in the room offering even a hint about its occupant: Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), by Stokely Carmichael and Ekwueme Thelwell, Revolutionary Suicide and To Die for the People by Huey Newton, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  Uhuru had returned them, then checked them out using his own card. Reading them—some for a second time—had taken Uhuru back to the New Word Order bookstore in Toronto, to his own political awakenings. Had J. J. felt the same connection, the same surging power coursing through his veins when he read the words of all those righteously angry black men for the first time?

  Whatever happened to that Raymond Carter, anyway?

  Uhuru looked around at his own sparsely furnished office. If he’d sold out, it had been for too little. The furniture was a mishmash: mismatched desk, dark wood veneer; and chairs, one oak rolling, one metal folding: one plastic stackable. Along the wall between his office and the reception area there were cardboard bankers boxes instead of filing cabinets stacked floor to ceiling. On the opposite wall behind his desk there was a haphazard bookshelf made of cinder blocks and unfinished planks, filled with unread legal tomes Uhuru kept for decorative purposes. The office itself, on the fourth floor of an unrenovated old building downtown, was in desperate need of a paint job, or at least a good cleaning. But the landlord—whose application to tear down the structure and replace it with condos was slowly working its way through the labyrinthian approval processes of the City’s Development Department—wasn’t about to waste his money on such frivolities.

  Not that that mattered to Uhuru. He had alienated most of his best clients in order to devote all his time to the lost cause of J. J. Howe, who, of course, was still languishing in jail and unable to drop in for tea, so Uhuru had no need to impress visitors. Or visitors to impress.

  That wasn’t quite true. Shondelle Adams had become such a regular the last few months that he’d given her his secretary’s desk in the front office. There was no secretary; there never had been, though Uhuru did keep a vase with plastic flowers on the otherwise empty desktop to make the room look more lived in. A woman used to come in every two weeks to invoice clients and update his accounts, but he’d replaced her last year with a computer program he was sure he could master. He hadn’t. Luckily, there wasn’t much billing to do.

  Shondelle had become more than just a visitor in Uhuru’s office. Because she was there and because neither of them had anyone to go home to, they began having dinner together. At first just once in a while, then more often, now every weekday evening. Uhuru couldn’t remember who had initially suggested dinner. In the beginning, the plan was to discuss some aspect of the case they were working on—even though, in the end, they often didn’t even get around to talking about that. After a while, they stopped needing a reason. That didn’t mean there was anything more to it than convenience. Was there?

  Shondelle, of course, had an office at the law school, but she claimed she couldn’t get any work done there because students were always interrupting her. She’d even moved her files for ADA’s civil suit to Uhuru’s office, “in case we need to look at them.”

  We had become the operative word. Shondelle had become his unofficial partner in defending J. J. Howe. They had never discussed collaborating; it had just happened. Uhuru wasn’t sure what he thought of that.

  On the one hand, she was annoyingly self-confident. On the other, she was smart, smarter than he was. She could weave together disparate legal threads and transform them into the whole cloth of what seemed, to Uhuru at least, to be compelling arguments explaining why J. J. was justified in doing what he’d done.

  Recently, for example, she’d begun studying cases involving battered wife syndrome, searching in the language of those decisions for some elastic to stretch the legal justification from the right of an abused woman to shoot her abuser in the back in his sleep to the right of a black man abused by a racist legal process to take the law into his own hands.

  That was the first hurdle: convincing a judge to let them present a defence based on what amounted to justification. And not just any judge; they had to convince Ward Justice. Uhuru had been surprised that Justice still wanted to preside over the trial after the controversy at the arraignment. But, for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate, he resisted Shondelle’s suggestion that they file a motion asking him to recuse himself. Perhaps it was because he couldn’t square the Ward Justice of that day in the courtroom with the Ward Justice he’d played with as a kid. Or perhaps it was more calculating; having come under fire for his actions in the courtroom, maybe Justice might actually be inclined to respond favourably to such an unusual defence to demonstrate he wasn’t a racist.

  Even if Justice did allow them to argue justification, of course, they would still have to figure out how to pick a suitably compassionate jury. Would it be possible to get a majority of blacks? Would that even be helpful? Would blacks be more sympathetic, or less patient with an argument that assumed they were helpless victims of a racist society? Whether the jury was black or white, could he convince it to pull what amounted to a Henry Morgentaler and acquit J. J. in spite of the fact he’d admitted doing what the Crown accused him of doing, which the law clea
rly said was a crime?

  A knock on the door interrupted his reverie. It was a perfunctory knock; Shondelle Adams didn’t wait for him to respond.

  “I think I found something very interesting,” she announced breathlessly. She was holding his father’s diary.

  Uhuru had been afraid to read it, afraid of what he might learn about what his father thought of the choices he’d made. Still, he’d given his okay when Shondelle asked a few months ago to read it, “to see if there’s anything we can use.” She hadn’t said anything more about it, except one evening at dinner last week when she’d said, without preamble, “I find it hard to think of you as Raymond. Did your father always call you Raymond?”

  “Only when he was angry,” he replied.

  “He doesn’t seem to be angry in the diary,” Shondelle said. “The opposite, in fact. It’s ‘Raymond did this,’ and ‘Raymond did that,’ especially after your mother died and it was just the two of you. He was very proud of you.”

  And now here she was back in his office, holding the diary in her hands. “You never told me you were friends with Ward Justice!”

  “That was a long time ago. Doesn’t have anything to do with now . . .”

  “Don’t be so sure, Raymond.” She’d begun to call him that. Usually when she was trying to make a point. He liked the sound of it in his ears, though he never told her so. “Did you know that Ward Justice was there the day Jack Eagleson tried to bribe your father with that cash?”

  “What!”

  “It’s in the diary. Your father wrote it all down—the meeting in the hotel room, the bottle of Scotch, the cash in the briefcase, and then this . . .” She opened the diary, began to read: “‘I wasn’t surprised by anything except for the presence of Raymond’s young friend, Ward, who accompanied Mr. Eagleson. From the look on his face, I could tell he was as surprised to see me as I was him. When I was leaving, I told him I’d tell Raymond I saw him, but I won’t. I don’t want to embarrass him. Unless Mr. Eagleson tries to claim he didn’t offer me a suitcase full of cash. If he does, then I guess I’ll have to tell the reporter there was a young man present too. What will the boy do then? Tell the truth? Or back up Mr. Eagleson? I hope I don’t have to find out.’”

  Shondelle looked up. “This is it!” she said excitedly.

  “What is?”

  “The bullet in the chamber, that’s what. All we have to do is pull the trigger to turn it into a smoking gun. I mean, we’re not just talking about some judge’s racist attitudes to black people any more. We’re talking about his part in a plot to deprive the people of Africville of their land. He’ll have to step aside—”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘No’? We can get this guy off the case and maybe get somebody more sympathetic—”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.” He couldn’t tell her the real reason, not without telling her other things he wasn’t ready to confess. Not yet. “Just because,” he said. He paused, then added, “You ready to eat?”

  “Because! Because? That’s your answer? That’s all you’re going to say?”

  “It’s complicated,” he said. “Stuff I don’t want to get into now. So you’ll just have to trust me.” He tried his best reassuring smile. “Besides, it isn’t going to disappear. Think of it as insurance. There if we need it later . . . How about Ethiopian? I read in High Tide there’s a new Ethiopian restaurant on Quinpool Road. I’ve never had Ethiopian food before, have you?”

  She shook her head, more in resignation than response.

  She could have been more grateful, David Astor thought as he watched the pregnant young woman in the audio booth beside him. She was listening through her oversized headphones, jotting the occasional note in her steno pad. He glanced at the counter on the Ampex tape deck. Less than a minute to go before—how would she react? Once he knew that, he would decide whether to tell her the rest.

  He’d been disappointed when he called earlier in the week to tell her he’d found the audio tape she was looking for. It was almost as if she resented him for having discovered the very tape she said she wanted. Women. He would never understand them. Like that Mrs. Justice, who’d seemed so pleased when he showed her the picture. Oh yes, David, I’ll give you a call next week . . . She never had.

  He wasn’t sure why he bothered. It had taken him hours, unpaid nights and weekends, to finally decipher this Lambie fellow’s indexing system. Some of the audio tapes were filed by the name of the speaker, some by the event, some according to no logic David Astor could determine. He’d almost given up then, but something—his own obsessiveness, probably—kept him rummaging through tapes until, finally, three weeks after he’d begun, he’d stumbled across the motherlode: the audio tapes of speeches from annual press gallery dinners.

  The first tape featured a droll, self-deprecating speech by Premier Robert Stanfield. David guessed, since Stanfield referred to Prime Minister Pearson and not to any national Tory leadership controversy, it must have been recorded sometime in the mid-sixties. The next speech, by someone whose name he didn’t recognize, made reference to the new Canadian flag—1965?—so he decided to take a chance and skip ahead nine reels. Since Justice was elected in 1974 and resigned in 1976, his press gallery speech, if there was one, would have had to be from one of those years.

  It wasn’t the 1974 dinner. That one featured a very drunk Seamus O’Sullivan announcing the date of the next election—six months in the future—and then taunting the reporters that everything said at the dinner was off the record. Despite himself, David had stopped listening then and looked it up in the Canadian Parliamentary Guide. O’Sullivan had indeed given away the actual date of the election that night; was it really possible that not one single reporter had broken the ban on publishing what the Premier said?

  The 1975 dinner apparently didn’t have a politician as guest speaker; the audio featured a very bad rock band performing covers of Beatles songs. The group, David discovered when he skipped past the music, was called Press Runs and it featured five members of the press gallery.

  The next year, the emcee began by announcing “the good news first. Press Runs has run its course. So tonight, we’re gonna do what we usually do. Listen to some political palaver from some electoral cadaver.” Whoops, shouts, cheers. “No, no, not Seamus O’Sullivan. We still haven’t forgiven him for his cunning linguist’s routine with the election date two years ago!” More cheers, laughter. Why did drunks always think they were funny? David wondered. “Instead, tonight, we have a very big shoo for you,” he said, in his best Ed Sullivan voice, which was not that good. “On our stage, we present for your listening enjoyment the man who will be Seamus O’Sullivan . . . just as soon as his good friend, Jack Eagleson—is Jack here tonight? There he is. Down there in the corner. Just back from the backroom, Jack? Or was that the bathroom? Just as soon as his friend Jack Eagleson can organize the coup that will keep Jack himself in power for another four years . . . Ladies—who let them in tonight, anyway?—and harsh men—I said harsh men, not hard men, Allen, not yet, anyway—I give you our guest speaker, the Honourable Ward Heeler . . . er, Ward Injustice . . .”

  He’d found it! The speech.

  “Moira? It’s David . . . David Astor.” Who? She rummaged through her mental Rolodex. A defence lawyer?

  “From the Archives?” Why did he sound like he was asking her a question? “You were looking for some audio tape?” Oh, right. The tape. The Archives. “Well, I found it!” His tone was triumphant. Found what? Was it pregnancy, or had she always been so forgetful, so scattered? Audio tape? Oh yes. The “nigger joke” story.

  That was months ago. She’d long since given up chasing that. She’d tried to find Danny Thompson, the Canadian Press reporter her father thought had taken early retirement and bought a farm. The problem was he’d
“bought the farm” a year later. A heart attack. He was beyond confirming her father’s story.

  Moira could have asked Allen Morton, but she feared Morton might be too keen on the story. She wasn’t, in part because she found the idea of dredging up a twenty-five-year-old joke for a reporting point vaguely distasteful, and, in much larger part, because she had resolved to do no more work than absolutely necessary for the rest of her pregnancy.

  She was past the morning sickness and overwhelming exhaustion of the first trimester. But now she’d become fixated on preparing for the baby’s arrival. She filled up every waking hour—and a few sleeping ones, too—sifting through the results of consumer safety tests on baby car seats; selecting stimulating but not too stimulating, soothing but not too soothing wallpaper for the baby’s room; choosing a crib rated number one by Consumer’s Own; ordering the one-hundred-and-fifty-coil spring mattress recommended in Baby’s Best, then cancelling and returning it after discovering that chiropractors in a new study had decided foam mattresses were healthier for baby’s delicate backs; ordering one of those and then worrying whether she’d made the wrong decision; auditioning animal mobiles to hang from the ceiling above the crib . . .

  Todd was no help. He said she was being stupid.

  “Are you saying you think I’m stupid?”

  “No. Just that getting all balled up about something as trivial as which animal figure you want hanging over the crib seems . . . well, stupid.”

  “So you are saying I’m stupid.”

  Todd hadn’t said much after that. Most nights, he managed to find things to do at his office until Moira was asleep. She wondered if he was having an affair. Not that he had time for an affair. His business was collapsing. One of the big oil companies—Moira couldn’t remember which one—had announced late in the summer that it was scaling back its offshore exploration program. It was no longer interested in buying condos in Todd’s development.