by Gail Bowen
He grinned. “And this time of year they come early. Lots of time to fool around before I have to go back to the city. Hey, I got you an electric toothbrush today at lunch. It’s in the car. I’ll plug it in as soon as I get home. Like me, the toothbrush will be ready when you are.”
The members of Clare Mackey’s Moot Team arrived on the dot of seven o’clock. Anne Millar had come with them, and it was clear from the outset that she had meshed easily with the other women. They were an appealing group. All were blond, all were fit, all were dressed smartly and informally – young professionals on casual Friday. Despite their smiles of greeting, they were sombre. When the introductions were over, I started to show them into the living room, but Linda Thauberger, who appeared to have been designated group leader, asked if we could use a room with a table. I led them into the kitchen. As generations of women had done before us, we took our places and began to talk, but our topic was not men, children, or the vagaries of our own flesh, it was Clare Mackey, and her story was murky and troubling.
“As far as we can tell,” Linda Thauberger said, opening her smart red briefcase and taking out a file, “this is where it all begins.” She placed the file at the centre of the table.
The name on the label made me blink. “Patsy Choi,” I said. “That case was three years ago. What does it have to do with Clare?”
“Stay tuned,” Linda said coolly. “I’ve had more than a few sleepless nights since we discovered the connection.”
“We all have,” Maggie Niewinski said. She still had the mop of blond curls she had in her law-school grad photo, but the shadows under her eyes were like bruises. It was clear she’d had her share of insomnia.
“And we know this is just the beginning,” Sandra Mikalonis, a graceful woman with a ponytail, added.
“You’re going to have to fill me in,” I said.
“Since I’m the one who dropped the ball on this, I’ll do it,” Linda said.
Maggie shook her curls vehemently. “No hair shirts,” she said. “We’ve agreed we all would have done exactly as you did.”
“Which was nothing,” Linda said quietly.
“Because no one asked you to do anything,” Maggie said.
“You’re still a terrier with a bone when you get an idea, aren’t you?” Linda said. “Maybe we should let the facts speak for themselves. Last year, just after the August long weekend, Clare called me. She’d stayed in Regina for the holiday. At that point, she’d been at Falconer Shreve about four months, and she thought the long weekend might be a good opportunity to stay at the office and do some homework.”
“Getting caught up on her files?” I asked.
Linda shook her head. “No. More just getting to understand the dynamics of the firm she was working for. Juniors are famously overworked. When you’re slaving away twelve hours a day, it’s hard to see where the snakes and ladders are, but if you’re going to get ahead you have to be able to tell an opportunity from a dead end. Anyway, most ambitious young lawyers, and Clare was … is … ambitious, would have used the time to read through the files of their principals’ more brilliant cases so they could drop a few fawning references to them later. But Clare’s background is in accounting, so she went straight to the trust ledgers. They, of course, have their own tale to tell.”
“Remind me about the trust ledgers,” I said.
“That’s where law firms keep records of their clients’ trust funds,” Anne Millar explained. “Monies paid in, monies taken out. Typically, monies taken out would be paid into general accounts to cover services from the firm. Any other withdrawal would require a written permission. In either case, there would be some sort of record in the file that the money had been transferred. At the end of every day, there’s a trust reconciliation – that’s just like balancing your chequebook. Everything has to be accounted for and justified.”
“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 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 file 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.
