The Guilty Read Online Free Page A

sports section of his morning paper. He assiduously avoided the city beat where, no doubt, a detailed account of the previous day’s courthouse activities could be found. The trials and tribulations of Montreal’s once-mighty hockey team were sufficiently aggravating morning fare.
    By the time he left for work he had stopped hearing that irritating little voice, or, at least, had stopped listening to it.
     
    Bratt et Leblanc, Avocats . The brass sign in the lobby at 511 Place d’Armes in Old Montreal was big enough to be seen from the street. Bratt pushed the heavy steel and glass door open and entered the stately brownstone. It was built in 1888 and, at nine stories, was the first skyscraper in Montreal.  He stamped the snow from his feet on the rubber mat at the entrance and headed for the elevators, their doors also plated in shiny brass.
    He and J.P. Leblanc had started out together sixteen years earlier, in a much less elegant building not too far from where their offices were now. Leblanc had been spinning his wheels for three years at Legal Aid when he decided to propose partnership to his old law school buddy Robert Bratt.
    Bratt had begun his own legal career at the provincial prosecutor’s office, but too much internal politics and not enough money were incentives enough for him to jump to the other side of the judicial divide. 
    At the time his immediate superior was Francis Parent, a Jesuit-educated prosecutor with a nearly religious devotion to ridding his city’s hallowed streets of criminals and sinners. He cleaved to the virtuous path of his career as if he was following the Via Dolorosa.
    Parent, who was an average trial lawyer of uncommon self-righteousness, looked upon Bratt’s departure from the Crown as an act of betrayal to his cause. He was certain that the young lawyer was selling his soul and jumping into a moral cesspool by joining the defense.
    But Bratt had seen enough in his three years working with prosecutors and policemen to know that few of them had an exclusive claim to the moral high ground. In law, he learned, it was all a man could do to remain true to his own ethical code.  
    Heading up to his office in the elevator, Bratt felt the worries of the past twenty-four hours start to melt away. Even more than his expensive apartment with a view of Mount Royal, or his lakeside cottage in the Eastern Townships, this office was his true home.
    Here he was among his own kind. Nobody would question his values or try to burden him with guilt. Nobody would criticize him for how he made his living. He was the unquestioned top dog in the firm, and that simple thought put the spring back into his step and brought a wide grin to his face. When he walked through the firm’s ornate wooden doors nobody would have suspected the inner turmoil that had kept him up half the night.
    Sylvie, the receptionist, looked up at the sound of his voice as he greeted her. She handed him his mail and smiled back a hello while talking into her ever-present headset. Bratt noticed that the door to his office was closed and threw a questioning look in her direction. She covered the mouthpiece with one hand and said, “John’s there. I think he had another bad night.”
    “ John” was John Kalouderis, an associate in the firm who, in recent years, had become close friends with Bratt. He had a brilliant legal mind, when it wasn’t totally fogged by alcohol, and that was a rare enough occurrence these days. Kalouderis might not have lasted at the firm, even with Bratt’s friendship, if he didn’t have a particularly large, and largely dishonest, extended family, whose members regularly hired the firm’s high-priced lawyers to get them out of their scrapes with the law.
    Bratt opened his office door and was immediately greeted by the licorice smell of ouzo emanating from the carcass sprawled across his leather sofa. Kalouderis’s snores were the only signs that the inert form held a grip on life. Bratt stood