Blood in the Water Read online

  “I didn’t do nothing,” says James.

  “We know that’s not true,” says Richardson. “We’re way beyond that.” And he goes through his litany again: you’re a good family man, not a criminal. A criminal would have prepared the situation, planned how to get rid of the evidence. But in this case there was no planning, and “you’ve left all kinds of physical evidence behind.”

  And James, he says, “you were really the skipper out there, the guy with the experience, the guy who’s really calling the shots out there.” James denies this, but admits he “showed them the ropes.” Exactly, says Richardson, “so in my mind you’re probably the skipper out there.” And it’s the skipper’s duty to accept responsibility so that other people don’t suffer for his mistakes. The police know there was an ongoing conflict between James and Phillip. They know there was a conversation with Phillip’s brother Gerard the previous night. They know that while James at sixty-five is working hard, Phillip at forty-three is drawing welfare and stealing.

  “He’s been doing that for fifteen years,” says James. “Stealing bikes, doing everything.”

  “But what I’m trying to understand is what was going through your mind,” says Richardson. He describes some of the physical evidence, like pieces of fiberglass from Midnight Slider embedded in the keel of the Twin Maggies, proving that the fishing boat went right over the speedboat. James reverts to the Cockamamie Story: yes, we had a collision the previous day; Phillip ran into us. No, says Richardson, we can establish without a doubt that your vessel drove right over top of his vessel. The fragments of the speedboat are embedded in your keel, at the very bottom of the boat.

  He wants to know whether James has been truthful with Carla, because Carla has said she’s between a rock and a hard place. She doesn’t want to be involved, and she wants to believe her husband and her father, but what they’re telling her is not the same as what the police are saying, and the police seem to have evidence. She wasn’t out there that morning, but, says Richardson, James and Dwayne have brought her into the mess because she’s the owner of the vessel.

  James says nothing.

  Richardson circles back to Phillip, who really is “the author of his own misfortune. He put himself there. He generated the situation that caused his death because he’s out there fucking around with fishermen’s livelihoods.” James still says nothing, and Richardson goes on.

  The story that Richardson is developing has James as its central figure—the authentic skipper, the real leader, bearing a long-standing grudge against Phillip. On June 1, the conflict boils over. Seeing James’s fury, the younger men “found themselves in a situation that they had to do something to help you out, they had to support you in what you were doing. For God’s sake, man, you gotta dig inside yourself, into your heart, and find the courage to tell the truth, because your actions brought them into the situation and now they’re paying the consequences for it.”

  James still doesn’t bite. Richardson goes on. And on. He is as relentless as a dripping tap, and he’s sniffing his way through James’s conscience and emotions like a tracking dog with a scent. The chink in James’s armour is the well-being of Carla and the two younger men. Richardson closes in on those feelings, backs off, circles through other issues—Phillip’s activities, physical evidence—and comes back to the younger people.

  Finally he starts to play a clip from Carla’s police interview—but in the courtroom it’s 12:10 and Justice Kennedy doesn’t want the jury to hear that clip. He excuses the jury and instructs the prosecution not to play the clip; when the trial resumes in the afternoon they are to restart the video just after the clip. Carla’s comments are, he says, “manifest hearsay,” and despite the fact that neither the prosecution nor the defence sees a problem, he wants to avoid any complications that might later arise.

  And with that, he halts the proceedings for lunch.

  * * *

  —

  Before the jury enters after the lunch break, Justice Kennedy tells the defence and the Crown that he expects evidence to be finished today, Wednesday, and that he will discuss with counsel the elements of his charge to the jury at the end of the afternoon. He’ll hear closing arguments tomorrow. Then, on Friday, he’ll charge the jury in the morning. After lunch on Friday, the jury will be deliberating.

  The jury returns, and Justice Kennedy tells them the schedule he’s proposing. When they come to hear the charge on Friday, he says, they should bring an overnight bag and leave their electronic devices at home. If they don’t reach a verdict by around 6:00 p.m., they’ll be sequestered in a hotel for the night and will continue deliberating on Saturday morning.

  The video continues, picking up after the excerpt from Carla’s interrogation. Richardson’s comments, however, do give us a notion of what she said. She started to say that her father was a—but she doesn’t finish the sentence because, Richardson says, “she respects her father. And she expects her father to do the right thing in this difficult situation. She doesn’t want to be involved in this; you hear her say that herself. Have they done something out there that’s wrong? Well, they’re going to have to bear the consequences. Well, right now she’s bearing the consequences too, because her livelihood has been taken away, the ship’s been seized. She doesn’t want to be part of this. Don’t make her part of something she doesn’t want to be involved in. You guys have done that. She needs an explanation as to why this happened.”

  Richardson goes on about how James must love Carla, and how regrettable it is that even though she wasn’t directly involved, “when you folks come in after this very unfortunate set of circumstances that took place off Petit de Grat—and the ship that’s registered to her, that she runs that company, is involved in the death of another person—you brought her into the fold. You made her involved. Regardless if she wants to be here or not, she’s there.”

  “Oh, I know she’s there, right,” James says thoughtfully.

  Richardson continues implacably. Is it fair that Craig, who was only an employee, should bear the consequences of James’s emotions and actions? Because “the beef wasn’t with him and Phillip, the beef was with you and Phillip.” But the person who really caused the confrontation was Phillip. “It’s not your fault. He’s the one that generated that animosity by doing what he did. He’s not a nice person. He’s a leech.” James is a good person. Richardson is “sure this event has gone through your mind time and time again.”

  “You think,” says James.

  Yes, says Richardson, because that’s the way it would affect a good person. You’re not a cold, calculating person. A cold, calculating person “wouldn’t give this a second thought, and next lobster season, if somebody else is fucking around with your traps they would do it to them too, ’cause they wouldn’t care about the consequences. I hope that’s not you.”

  James slowly shakes his head. Richardson keeps on about the difference between James—a good person who made a mistake—and a real criminal. He thinks James has regrets. Finally he asks him outright.

  “Do you regret what happened?”

  And finally James breaks.

  “Yeah, I regret it.”

  “It wasn’t something you set out to do, was it?”

  James shakes his head.

  “This is something that spiralled out of control that morning.”

  James nods.

  “Was he out there fucking up your traps again when you guys approached him that morning?”

  “Yes.”

  And slowly, short questions followed by short answers, Richardson elicits the story. Yes, James fired four shots at Phillip. He thinks he may have clipped Phillip with the second shot. He used a .30-30 rifle, and he “put it in the water. Where I throw it, you’ll never get it. In thirty, forty fathoms of water. Can I call my daughter and tell her that I told you the truth?”

  Sure, says Richardson, but not just yet. Whe
re is Phillip?

  “Don’t mention him,” says James. “They should have done that ten years ago.”

  “Well, perhaps that’s the case. But we need to know what happened to his body.”

  “Ah, gee, I can’t tell you that.”

  Was the body tied to the boat when it was going out?

  “Oh, no, we didn’t have the body. We passed over the boat, we never see him after.”

  And about the ramming—?

  “We ran over it, and that’s it. The boat tipped, and that’s it.”

  “How many times did you run over it?”

  “A couple of times, maybe.”

  And who was operating the boat at that time?

  “I was. I jumped at the wheel. I told Dwayne to get out. I was mad after him and that was it. I regret to do it, but somebody had to do it. You asked me for the truth, so I told you the truth. I was trying to help my son-in-law and the other fella.”

  And when he fired at Phillip, what were his intentions?

  “Killing him. He’s no good. If I could go back, back in time, maybe I wouldn’t a done it. But I was so mad, madness into me, that I didn’t care. I had bad emotions. I was pushed to the limit. There had been ten or fifteen years he’d been doing that—stealing bikes, I’m telling you, doing everything. ‘I’m gonna burn your house, I’m gonna burn your shed.’ You know, half of the night you weren’t sleeping.”

  Had he had any conversation with Phillip that day?

  “No. I was looking to destroy him, not looking to talk to him, mad like I was.”

  Richardson goes back to the original sighting. How far away was James when he fired at Phillip?

  “He was way in front of us, he was hauling our pots, and he was waving the knife and making fun, ’cause he had a boat that was faster than ours,” James says. “He never thought I had the gun aboard. I thought I might have hit the motor, ’cause the boat stalled right away. That’s the only way we could get him, ’cause he was faster than us. Making fun. I said, ‘Your fun is getting short.’ I regret it now, but it’s gone. I’ll have to take my punishment.”

  Richardson wants to know more about the ramming. James reiterates that he “pushed Dwayne, the skipper, aside. I said, ‘Give me the wheel.’ ”

  “And tell me what you did then.”

  “I ran her right over him.”

  “What were your intentions in doing that?”

  “Because I wanted to destroy him. You know, the only thing I could see was black. I was seeing black, I was so mad.”

  Richardson still wants to know what they were towing.

  “His body wasn’t around the boat at all,” James says. “If we were towing something, it must have been something caught in the basket [around the propeller]. I never looked behind. Then we turned back and we went to the rest of our pots. He had cut ten more—that was thirty in two days.”

  “How were you feeling once you started to settle down?”

  “I told the boys, I said, ‘We made a mistake. I made a mistake.’ ”

  Richardson takes James back to the telephone conversation when Phillip’s brother Gerard told James, “There’s only one thing you can do. Get rid of him.” What had James been thinking?

  “Well, not too much. I figured maybe he had cut some traps, and what can you do?” But then he passed the Corner Bridge store, where Phillip was waving his knife at James, and “making fun of me.” And that enraged James so that he wanted to “jump out of the truck and cripple him.”

  Richardson returns to the question of the gun. When had they taken the rifle aboard? Oh, a long time, says James. What make was it? A Winchester, he thinks. Now, says Richardson, the investigators have discovered that nobody on the boat had a seal licence, a permit to have a gun aboard.

  “Well, I didn’t know that,” says James.

  How long had James owned the gun? Maybe twenty years. And how long had it been aboard the Twin Maggies?

  “Oh, geez, only a couple of weeks.”

  Richardson, in a tone more of sorrow than of anger, tells James that he himself has been honest with James, but James hasn’t been entirely honest with him—because a witness has reported that he saw a firearm wrapped in a blanket being taken off the boat, and so Richardson believes “that when you come off the boat that day, that gun came with you.”

  “Yeah,” says James, without further argument. His original lie about dropping the gun overboard has obviously failed, but he instantly creates a new one.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I got it hid.”

  Where?

  “You’ll have to let me go and I’ll get it for you. You won’t find it. But I’ll be honest with you, I’ll get it for you.”

  Richardson keeps pushing, pointing out that James is under arrest and can’t go get the gun, so James suggests that he tell Carla where it is, and she can get it. But he absolutely won’t tell Richardson where to look for it. Richardson clearly finds this puzzling and frustrating, and he evidently doesn’t want James talking to the co-accused, who happens to be his daughter. He calls time out, in effect. They’re both hungry and thirsty—“my tongue is some thick,” James notes—so Richardson will arrange for some food. James wants a McDonald’s cheeseburger, onion rings, and a Pepsi.

  The two of them vacate the interview room for forty minutes. When they come back, waiting for the food to arrive, Richardson tells James that he’s talked to the other investigators, who have obtained warrants to search both James’s house and Carla’s. They were about to do the searches when Richardson told the others where he was with James’s interrogation.

  “I don’t want to see them go and start tearing homes apart needlessly,” he says. And he doesn’t want James to tell Carla where to find the gun. So he proposes an alternative plan.

  “How do you feel about it if we were to take you for a drive, for you to take us to the firearm? That way we’re keeping Carla out of this altogether. She’s involved enough now. There’s no point in getting her involved any more in this.”

  “Okay,” says James. “I’ll get you the firearm.”

  “And you can show me where it’s at.”

  “Right, so you don’t have to break no home or nothing.” But he’d like to talk to his daughter.

  Not just yet, says Richardson. “I’m not suggesting for one moment that you’re the type of person that would say something to Carla that would interfere with the investigation,” says Richardson, thereby suggesting exactly that.

  “No, no, no,” says James earnestly.

  “But some people have done that to us, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I wouldn’t do that,” says James. The conversation rambles on, and a few minutes later James says, “If I tell you the truth, it might help the other two boys, you know? I’d like to keep the other boys out of it.”

  Yes, says Richardson, but everyone has to take responsibility for their own actions. And then he circles back to James’s Friday night conversation with Phillip’s brother Gerard. That night, James says, he came home from fishing, cleaned up, and went to the Island Nest restaurant. He came back, fed his dog, and saw that he had a message on the phone. Gerard had called, and James called back.

  “He said, ‘My brother Phillip is gone with his speedboat again at the end of Cape Auget, messing in your traps.’ I said, ‘What are we gonna do with him?’ And Gerard said, ‘There’s only one thing to do, get rid of him.’ That’s what the man told me.” And, said James, “it made me feel, if I was gonna get a chance, I was gonna cream him.”

  Cream him?

  “Well, get rid of him.”

  Richardson tries repeatedly to get James to say that “get rid of him” meant “kill him.” But James won’t quite say that.

  Their hamburgers and onion rings arrive. While they eat, Richardson leads James through the events of the morning. When he ge
ts to the point where the Twin Maggies meets Phillip, James says that Phillip was “making fun, going with his boat. He was ahead of us. You may depend, you’re not gonna get a speedboat with a big boat.” Later he explains that Phillip was “skipping three or four, so we couldn’t get close to him. And he never thought I’d surprise him.”

  Surprise him?

  “When I fired at him. I didn’t wanna hit him, the first time—and then I got really mad, because the pot that we hauled, it was cut.”

  Piecing James’s comments together here and elsewhere, it appears that Phillip was not merely “fooling with their traps,” as Her Majesty’s Story seemed to say. It sounds as though he was doing exactly what Omer Boudreau described—poaching and vandalizing right in front of the Twin Maggies, robbing each trap in turn and cutting the buoys, waving his knife and taunting them, keeping out of reach by staying three or four traps ahead. Secure in the knowledge that his speedboat could easily outrun a bulky, plodding fishing boat, he was simply toying with their helpless fury. The immediate result, James indicates, was that he aimed the second, third, and fourth shots directly at Phillip, and one of them—James thinks—hit him. Then, filled with boiling rage, James pushed Dwayne aside and rammed Phillip’s boat.

  “The first time I only nicked the boat,” he says. “The second time I passed right over the boat, and then we never seen him.”

  Richardson clearly doesn’t believe that Phillip simply disappeared. He turns the conversation to the body. He has witness accounts, he says, that the Twin Maggies came up right beside Midnight Slider and there was some activity before the ramming began. Richardson thinks the activity had to do with disposing of Phillip’s body. James denies it. Richardson persists: divers have done a careful search of the area, and they’ve found Phillip’s outboard, his boots, and his cap—but not his body.

  “If he went out of the boat there,” Richardson concludes, “he should have been there.”

  James doesn’t budge. After the ramming, they didn’t tow him, they didn’t see him. There was a strong tide running out of the harbour. Maybe the tide took the body.