Quid Pro Quo Read online

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  Vicki Grant

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2005 Vicki Grant

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Grant, Vicki

  Quid pro quo / Vicki Grant.

  ISBN 1-55143-394-X (bound).--ISBN 1-55143-370-2 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8613.R367Q52 2005 jC813’.6 C2005-900093-7

  First published in the United States 2005

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2004118007

  Summary: When Cyril MacIntyre’s mother disappears, Cyril must use every skill at his disposal to find and rescue her.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage’s Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

  Cover design and typesetting by Lynn O’Rourke

  Cover image: Susan Reilly

  In Canada:

  Orca Book Publishers

  Box 5626, Stn. B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4

  In the United States:

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  08 07 06 05 • 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed and bound in Canada

  For my father—Robert B. Grant, DFC—

  because he would have got a kick out of this.

  And for my children—Augustus, Teddy and Roo—

  because he would have got a kick out of them too.

  Amor vincit omnia.

  —V.G.

  table of

  contents

  One Disclosure

  Two “Fillius nullius”

  Three LLB

  Four “Non compos mentis”

  Five Cruelty

  Six “Accusare nemo se debet”

  Seven Malpractice

  Eight Tampering with the mail

  Nine “Alias”

  Ten Intimidation

  Eleven Harassment

  Twelve Interception

  Thirteen Truancy

  Fourteen “In camera”

  Fifteen Fraud

  Sixteen Dismissal

  Seventeen Abandonment

  Eighteen Client-solicitor privilege

  Nineteen Real evidence

  Twenty Statutory rape

  Twenty-One Arson

  Twenty-Two Conspiracy

  Twenty-Three Hearsay

  Twenty-Four Restitution

  Twenty-Five Title

  Twenty-Six Misrepresentation

  Twenty-Seven Suspect

  Twenty-Eight Zoning by-laws

  Twenty-Nine Trespass

  Thirty “Mens rea”

  Thirty-One Sue

  Thirty-Two Harboring a Fugitive

  Thirty-Three Menaces

  Thirty-Four Ward of court

  Thirty-Five “Vi et armis”

  Thirty-Six Trespass II

  Thirty-Seven Kidnapping

  Thirty-Eight False imprisonment

  Thirty-Nine Confession

  Forty Confession II

  Forty-One Confession III

  Forty-Two Confession IV

  Forty-Three Bribery and corruption

  Forty-Four Arraignment

  “Quid pro quo” (kwid pro kwo)

  (Latin) “What for what”

  A legal term meaning an even

  exchange between two people

  Something that is given

  in exchange for something else

  chapter

  one

  Disclosure

  The act of fully revealing the facts of a case

  I started going to law school when I was ten years old.

  I love saying that. I love how people look at me like, this guy must be some kind of genius.

  It’s true, too.

  Well, like, sort of true anyway.

  I did start going when I was ten. But that’s only because we didn’t have any money for babysitters, so I got dragged to all my mother’s late classes.

  I hated it. You think math class is bad. Law school was unbelievably boring. I wasn’t allowed to move or MAKE ONE SINGLE SOUND, SO HELP ME GOD, CYRIL. I had to just sit there while the professors yakked on and on about torts and fiduciary rights and the “Crumbling Skull Doctrine,” which sounds good but is just as boring as all the other legal garbage.

  The only thing worse than class was helping my mother study for exams. She’d get so stressed out I’d have to read her the study questions over and over again. She actually made me pull a couple of all-nighters with her just to make sure she was prepared.

  And then there were the term papers. She treated me like I was her own personal little library slave. I had to run around, getting her the ten-pound books she needed or photocopying six thousand pages of statutes, while she two-finger-typed her essay or—get this—went outside for a smoke.

  If I ever complained, she’d completely flip out. She’d start screaming how I was so ungrateful! How she was doing this for me! So I could have a better life—not her!

  BLAH. BLAH. BLAH.

  I used to argue with her. If you ask me, a better life for a kid is playing Zombie Komando or hanging with his friends, not sitting in a smoky kitchen until three in the morning, helping his mother study for her civil procedures exam. (Hadn’t she ever heard what secondhand smoke does to children’s delicate lungs?)

  I wouldn’t argue with her now, though. I hated law school, but if I hadn’t spent three years of my life there, I wouldn’t have known anything about fraud, blackmail or the principle of equity.

  In other words, I wouldn’t have known what I needed to know to save my mother’s life.

  chapter

  two

  “Fillius nullius” (Latin)

  “Son of nobody”

  An illegitimate child

  Y ou need some background info.

  My name is Cyril Floyd MacIntyre. I’m fourteen.

  My mother’s legal name is Andrea Ruth MacIntyre, but everyone calls her Andy. She’s twenty-nine.

  You do the math.

  Pretty nasty, eh?

  She ran away from home and was living on the streets when she had me. That was enough to horrify her parents. Most teenagers would have been happy to leave it at that. But Andy really wanted to humiliate them, so she named her little fatherless love child “Cyril,” then threw in “Floyd,” just to make them crazy. Those are poor-people names. Names for people who didn’t go to school long enough to know that Thomas or Adam or Douglas would be more appropriate. Not names for a “good family” like the MacIntyres.

  That’s all I know about my grandparents. Maybe they were horrible. I don’t know. But I think they had a point about the name.

  I’m five foot one and, after a major feed, ninety-two pounds. If you can’t picture what that looks like, here’s a hint: pathetic.

  Boney Maroney.

  Mr. Puniverse.

  Stick Man.

  I’ve heard them all. I’m hopeful puberty will improve my stats, but I can’t count on it. Andy seems to be about a normal height for a woman, so that’s not giving me any clues, and she either won’t tell me or doesn’t know who my father is. He might be so
me scrawny guy that she just felt sorry for one night, and this is as tall as I’m going to get. Or he could be some six foot three hunk that she fell for, and there’s hope. I guess I’ll know one way or the other in a couple of years.

  I only know three things about my father. That he was white. That he was male. (Hey, I’m no fool. I aced sex ed.) And that he probably had blue eyes. I’m just guessing on the last one. Andy’s got brown eyes and I have blue. When we did genetics in science, the teacher said two brown-eyed people couldn’t have a blue-eyed kid. She didn’t say anything about hair. It wouldn’t have helped anyway. I have this kind of fuzzy memory of Andy’s hair being purple and spiked, but now it’s, I don’t know, brown, I guess. Reddy brown. Like mine. We have the same dimples, the same freckles and, apparently, the same hands. As far as I can figure out, I didn’t get much from my father.

  Not any money, that’s for sure. Andy got us this far all by herself.

  Okay, not one hundred percent all by herself. Community Services kept us off the street, but she turned herself around.

  You got to give her credit for that. She doesn’t do drugs anymore. She doesn’t drink, unless you call a beer now and then drinking. And she hasn’t shoplifted since the time she ran out of diapers a week before the next social assistance check was due. (That wasn’t Andy’s fault though—at least according to her. It was mine. Any other kid would have been toilet trained by then, and she never would have had to resort to stealing. Only two and a half, but already I was accessory to a crime.)

  Andy does smoke like a chimney, swear like a sailor and eat a lot of crap. Nobody can believe that anyone who lives on burgers and extra-sauce donairs could stay that skinny. I figure she burns up a lot of calories being so pissed off all the time. As far as she’s concerned, most people are imbeciles. (That’s not the exact word she uses, of course. She usually goes for something a little more— ah, let’s just say “colorful.”) She’s always shooting her mouth off at somebody—and I’m always the one apologizing for it.

  That’s her bad side, and she knows it. She’s trying “to deal with her anger” and has been as long as I can remember. She’s not a bad person, though. She’s actually a pretty good person, once you get past all the irritating stuff. She’s generous, kind and forgiving—way more than most people who do the big generous, kind and forgiving thing. She’ll call a person an “imbecile” one minute and give them the last of her French fries the next.

  I love her.

  I guess all kids love their mothers. Most kids just don’t have as many reasons not to.

  chapter

  three

  LLB

  The abbreviation of the Latin term

  for the bachelor of law degree

  Law school was a drag, so I was really happy when Andy finally graduated.

  I was sitting there watching that big fancy graduation ceremony, waiting for the “M” people to be called, and my heart was pounding like I was the one who was going to have to get up on stage.

  I mean, I was so happy.

  Not because there wouldn’t be any more stupid exams. Not because there wouldn’t be any more stupid tuition payments. Just because she did it. A high school dropout with a big mouth and a kid to look after made it through law school. There were guys from rich families and private schools that couldn’t hack it—but Andy did. You’ve got to admit, that’s something.

  She was smiling her face off when her name got called, and (I’m not kidding) I thought I was going to cry when the dean of the law school handed her the diploma and gave her a hug. That was amazing. She’d driven him nuts for three years, always ranting on about something or other.

  “There are too many white, male professors!”

  “The cafeteria is anti-dog-owner!”

  “The soap in the women’s washroom is environmentally unfriendly … and the wrong color pink … and not soft enough on my delicate hands!”

  Whatever.

  Andy was always standing up for what’s “right.” Can you imagine anything more irritating? I’d just sink down in my chair and pretend it wasn’t happening. I don’t think the dean could do that. He had to read her petitions, meet with her protest groups— you know, act like he cared. So it was really nice that he hugged her at the graduation ceremony. It showed he knew that her heart was in the right place at least.

  It was kind of sad at the party afterward, though. Craig Benvie, this really straight guy in her legal ethics class, had the hots for Andy, so he hung around as usual. Jeannie Richardson was talking to her again, but not like she used to. Most of the older students, who had families too, were still nice to her, but everyone else had had enough of Andy by then. They shook her hand and said “good luck,” but you knew they were really thinking “good riddance.”

  Lots of guys from her class were going to Toronto or Vancouver or one of the fancy law firms down on the Halifax waterfront. Andy went on and on about how that grossed her out, about how she wouldn’t stoop to work for “a bunch of corporate ‘imbeciles’ whose only interest in the law is to see how much money they can squeeze out of their sleazy clients,” but I didn’t really believe her. I think she was pissed off she didn’t even get a job interview with any of the big firms. She hates it when people think they’re better than she is.

  Me, I was just glad she got any job. Her marks were okay, but I bet she stank in the interviews. I know what she’s like with “people in authority,” especially people in authority she needs something from. She gets all snotty, like they’re the ones asking for the favor.

  I guess that didn’t bother Atula Varma. She hired Andy as her articling student. That’s sort of an apprentice. Everyone has to work in a law firm for, like, a year before they can become a real lawyer. You don’t get paid very much to article—especially if you’re articling for Atula.

  I’m not saying it’s Atula’s fault. It’s just the way things are. Those giant law firms make tons of money, so it’s no big deal for them to pay their articling students a living wage. Atula had this one-woman law firm in this really cheesy part of town. Her clients were poor. They couldn’t pay her much, so she couldn’t pay Andy much. But who cared? It was a lot more than Andy was making babysitting the upstairs neighbor’s kid.

  Atula’s kind of like Andy actually. She’s one of those people who say what they’re thinking even if other people aren’t going to like it, one of those people who seem a lot worse than they are. She doesn’t smile much, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t nice.

  She was always giving me clothes her son had grown out of. She even gave me this Hilfiger sweatshirt that I really liked until Andy made me cover the brand name with hockey tape because no kid of hers was going to be “a walking advertisement for some huge multinational corporation.”

  Typical Andy.

  It’s not okay to wear a brand-name sweatshirt, but it is okay to eat at McDonald’s every night. Like McDonald’s isn’t a huge multinational. Andy just likes their fries better than the ones Camille Dubaie makes at his fish-and-chip shop downstairs.

  Atula has this big social conscience too, but at least she’s reasonable about it. Like I said, she let her kid wear brand-name clothes. She does mostly immigration law—you know, helping new people get into the country—but she’ll pretty much take on any legal problems her clients have.

  And they’ve got a lot. You wouldn’t believe how screwed up their lives are. These aren’t the kind of people who are suing each other for big bucks because their real estate deal went bad. They’re fighting with their ex-boyfriend over who gets to keep the VCR.

  Or they’re fighting with their landlord over the stain on the hall carpet.

  Or they’re fighting with the government to get thirteen more dollars on their welfare check.

  Or they’re trying to get somebody to help them cover the cost of drugs for their kid with the kidney problem.

  That wouldn’t amount to a lot of money to most people, but it does to them. These guys have got nothing.

>   I mean, nothing.

  You’re probably wondering how I know so much about Atula’s clients.

  Simple.

  My mother’s insane.

  chapter

  four

  “Non compos mentis” (Latin)

  A legal term meaning “not of sound mind”

  I mean it. Andy’s insane.

  Nuts. Wacko. Certifiable. I’m amazed nobody’s locked her up yet.

  Okay, well, they have. But that’s different. I’ll get to that later. Anyway, last summer I thought was going to be the sweetest summer ever.

  Now that we were “rich”—ha ha—Andy wanted to get a babysitter for me, but I managed to convince her that twelve-going-on-thirteen was too old to be babysat. And no matter what she said, I was not going to go to that stinking day camp again for like the tenth year in a row.

  It wasn’t easy, believe me. She’s so paranoid. Normally, the only thing she lets me do by myself is go to the bathroom, and even then half the time she hovers around outside the door. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. It’s like she thinks if I’m out of her sight for one minute, I’m going to start smoking crack or get a girl pregnant (like that could ever happen.)

  Anyway, she must have been really happy about starting her new job, or maybe she just wanted to try something different and be reasonable for a change, but this time it worked. I whined and sulked and wouldn’t play cribbage with her for about two weeks straight, and she finally caved. She gave me, like, 147 rules of appropriate behavior—but who cares? In the end, she actually agreed to let me look after myself for a while.

  I had the two best weeks of my life, hanging out at the skateboard bowl with Kendall Rankin. It was great. I finally learned how to do an ollie, and my pop-shove-it was getting excellent. This one girl even said “wow” when I did it. Runts like me don’t usually get that kind of reaction from girls like Mary MacIsaac.

  Then Andy found out Kendall wasn’t spending the summer with his father in Moncton like I sort of suggested he was, and that was the end of that. I don’t know what she had against Kendall. She decided he was a bad influence on me. So what if all he wants to do is skateboard? Like that’s so criminal? At least he’s good at it. At least he’s not taking drugs and hanging out with losers, like she was at his age (unless of course she considers me a loser.)