Desperate Acts

by Don Gutteridge

  Tobias Budge drew on his vast experience as friendly tapster when he took the stand, smiling most cooperatively and nodding knowingly at the prosecutor’s questions, as if they were part of the natural order and begged answers that were obvious and incontrovertible. Thornton led him smoothly through the tale he had spun for Cobb: he had gone down to the wine-cellar about a quarter to ten to look for a case of French wine, happened to peer out the tiny window looking onto the alley, and noticed two pair of legs involved in a scuffle.

  “And there were bodies attached to these legs?” Thornton said with a nice smile for the jury.

  “I assumed there had to be,” Budge said, “though the window wasn’t high enough fer me to see ‘em.”

  Budge happily went on to say that he had heard loud voices coming from one or both combatants, assumed he was witnessing yet another drunken punch-up out there, and so went back to his task.

  “And then?”

  “Maybe four or five minutes later, no more, I’m back in that part of the cellar again, and I peek out to see if the fight’s over.”

  “But it wasn’t merely a punch-up?”

  The plaster grin on Budge’s face dissolved. “No, sir. I seen a big stick or cane bein’ swung real hard, an’ slammin’ down inta the head of the fella lyin’ face-down on the ground. It was awful.”

  A shudder ran through the galleries and the jury-box.

  “Was the victim trying to escape these dastardly, murderous blows?”

  Budge actually hesitated for the first time, as if he had temporarily lost his place in the script. “I don’t know . . . I can’t remember. I guess I was just lookin’ at that cane slammin’ down.”

  “And you say that no more than four or five minutes passed between the two events – that is, your seeing two men grappling and then, later, one of them striking the other with a stick?”

  “That’s right, sir.” The grin was back.

  Thornton was now pleased to turn Budge over to the defense. In his opinion, Budge with his first sighting had confirmed for the jury Fullarton’s description of the grappling and shouting, conveniently provided four or five minutes in which Crenshaw’s account of a fallen man and a crouching one seemed plausible, and then returned to become horrified witness to a deliberate homicide. Sir Peregrine would be brought on last to tell about someone dashing wildly away up the alley.

  Budge looked warily over at Marc. His wife would have told him about her being cross-examined over the incident with Duggan in the taproom, and he no doubt feared a direct attack.

  Thornton, of course, had skipped over a good deal of what Budge had told Cobb during his interview. The veteran barrister, however, was not surprised that his neophyte adversary went straight to it.

  “You have described for us, Mr. Budge, what appeared to be a cold-blooded and vicious assault. Did you go immediately to the alley to try and prevent further blows being struck or to determine whether the victim was in fact dead?”

  Budge was quick to respond. “’Course I did. Whaddya take me for? I didn’t say nothin’ about it because Mr. Thornton never asked me.”

  “Just answer the counsel’s questions, Mr. Budge.”

  “Tell us, then, what you did in that regard,” Marc said.

  “I run to the cellar doors that open up into the alley, but I couldn’t push ‘em open. They often jam from the inside, and I usually haveta go outside to open ‘em.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not right away. I looked around fer a crowbar. My heart was beatin’ a mile a minute. I couldn’t find it. I run back to the window. There’s only the fella lyin’ there on the ground. Where the moonlight hit his head, I could see blood an’ brains leakin’ out.”

  This seemed like a self-serving embellishment of what he had told Cobb, but it was, possibly, the truth. Cobb had admitted being somewhat hostile in his interrogation of the burly barkeep, and may have cut him off before he got his whole story out. It was also possible that Budge did get himself out through those horizontal double-doors and administered the beating himself. But Marc was not ready to go there yet, nor give the prosecution any sign that he intended to.

  “So you assumed he was dead?”

  “Alas, sir, I did. And I was plannin’ to go upstairs and out to the alley, but I hadn’t got to the wine, and I found myself tryin’ to calm down a crew of rowdy sailors in the taproom, an’ by the time I did, I seen the constable comin’ in the door an’ callin’ fer somebody to come back into the alley with him.”

  “So you knew then that the police had discovered the body?”

  “Yes. An’ the wife an’ Nestor Peck went with him, leavin’ me to tend the bar an’ deal with that ungrateful mob of sailors. I did try to do the right thing.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” Marc nodded sympathetically, though he wished he could stride across the space between them and give the fellow a good thrashing on Etta’s behalf. “Nothing more, Milord, though I may need to recall this witness later on.”

  Budge grimaced through his smile. No doubt he thought that Marc would be recalling him to go after the implications of his altercation with Duggan, and he must have been wondering why Marc didn’t ask him whether, in that bright shaft of moonlight, he had not recognized what he could see of Duggan’s face. Well, let him stew a little, Marc thought.

  The pompous baronet was next. Thornton’s attempt to lead him through his testimony with the affable efficiency he had used on the previous witness soon foundered, for Sir Peregrine Shuttleworth’s responses were long-winded, tedious and rambling. He too claimed he had packed up and left the clubroom a mere four or five minutes after Crenshaw had done so, but he felt obliged to add that it would have been sooner if he had not had to bear the crushing responsibilities of club chairman and orchestrater of amateur theatricals. When Thornton finally got him cloaked and ready to depart, Sir Peregrine was pleased to report that he had indeed looked out the cloakroom window (“There was a moon out there that could have shone upon the lovers in Act Five of The Merchant!”). What he observed in its glow was a man running away north up the alley, with a hat in his hand. No, he did not see a body lying in a pool of blood on the ground, as his “eyes were on the stars.”

  “You say, sir, that the fellow was slim and agile – and hatless?”

  “The hat was flapping in his hand – must’ve been hard to keep it on, running away that fast.”

  “Did you get any impression of the colour of his hair – in the Shakespearean moonlight you so eloquently described for us?”

  “By Jove, I did, come to think of it. It was a very pale colour, very pale.”

  “A gentleman with a slim build and very pale hair,” Thornton murmured just loud enough for the jury to hear. “Not unlike the gentleman up there in the dock?” he added more forcefully and swung his head up and around to indicate Brodie on the far side of the room. Sir Peregrine’s gaze followed, of course, as did that of the jury.

  Thornton sat down, well pleased with himself, for he had put in place the final detail of his elaborately spun tale. Over a fifteen-to-twenty-minute period, someone very like Brodie had been observed arguing with Duggan (Fullarton), grappling with Duggan (Fullarton and Budge), crouching over a prostrate Duggan (Crenshaw), clubbing Duggan (Budge again), and hightailing it up the alley and away from the scene of the crime (Shuttleworth). With much of this admitted in Brodie’s own statement!

  Marc went through the motions of confusing the baronet about the time of his departure, asked him why he hadn’t mentioned the “hatless” business to Cobb when interviewed by the constable, and pressed him moderately on the corpse being “invisible” in the Bard’s moonlight. That was all he could do – for the moment. But in his own mind he knew that Shuttleworth could be lying about not following Crenshaw out immediately and, if so, could not only have seen Brodie fleeing but noticed the unconscious body as well, after which he could have gone out to have a look, discovered Duggan just coming to (Brodie had left him on his back, but he
had been found face-down), somehow engaged him in a brief dialogue, figured out who he was, and killed him. And while Budge’s testimony seemed to pin down the time of the actual clubbing, Budge’s grasp of what he saw and when was the least reliable of the five “possibles,” as he had staggered around in a dark wine-cellar muttering to himself about imperious wives and their suspicions. And, of course, he himself could be the murderer.

  Kingsley Thornton announced that the Crown now rested its case, and the judge adjourned proceedings until ten o’clock Monday morning. Thornton smiled at Marc in a way that suggested a certain amount of sympathy for his rival’s unenviable position (and just a touch of apprehension?). Apparently he had not concluded that Marc’s ineffective cross-examination was entirely the result of inexperience. Permission to recall the Crown’s key witnesses was either a sign of desperation or a cunning stratagem not yet fathomable.

  It was the latter that Marc now felt he had no choice but to implement. He could see no way to shake the credibility of the Crown’s version of events. Convincing the jury that Brodie’s “confession” was an elaborate ruse would not be difficult for Thornton in his summation because its substantive details jibed flawlessly with the eye-witness accounts and because Brodie had been caught in a “lie” (omitting reference to the second note). Character-witnesses alone would not suffice. That left Marc with his alternative-theory defense. However distasteful it might be, he would have to grill and badger and accuse. Moreover, with Nestor Peck’s return, Marc now had a good chance of identifying some or all of Duggan’s blackmail victims for certain. If Nestor was not recovered enough today to be interrogated, then he would surely be well enough before Monday morning. That Nestor knew a fair amount about his cousin’s activities was not in doubt. If necessary, Marc could call Nestor to testify to what he did know, and thus would not have to rely upon the ambiguities of a target-list scrawled on the inside of an envelope. It was also possible that Nestor had more than hearsay evidence of the particular indiscretions of the victims, though Marc was not sure – even now – that he could bring himself to use such destructive evidence in open court. Being a barrister, as he had discovered about everything else of importance in life, was not as straightforward as it first seemed.

  ***

  As Marc had now taken the decision to use the alternative-theory defense, he felt it was time to run the details past Robert Baldwin. After saying goodbye to Beth and Diana Ramsay before they headed across to the jail to visit and comfort Brodie, Marc walked the two-and-a-half blocks over to Baldwin House, hoping that he might catch Robert there before he went off to the Legislature for the afternoon to witness the debate on the Tory amendments to the Union Bill. But he found only Clement Peachey in chambers. Peachey told him that Robert, Hincks and Dr. Baldwin were expected to go out to Spadina, the country residence, for the weekend, where a number of politicians would no doubt be invited for tea and manipulation. Robert had told Peachey, however, that he would be back in chambers briefly later in the day to pick up some papers and visit with his children for an hour. Marc decided to sketch out his defense in writing and leave it in a sealed envelope on Robert’s desk. Peachey said he would make sure that Robert got it.

  With that, Marc went up Bay Street to The Cock and Bull, where, it being lunch-time, he found Cobb taking a noon meal in his “office.” Marc ordered a meat-pie and a flagon of ale, and briefed Cobb on the morning’s events.

  “You ain’t asked me about Nestor,” Cobb said, polishing off his ale and drawing his sleeve across his lips.

  “How did you find him this morning?”

  “Out like a light, but snorin’ like a hog. I figure he’ll be ready to talk to us before the day’s out.”

  “Could you get off your shift by suppertime? Say, six o’clock?”

  Cobb looked amused. “Any time you say, major.”

  “I’ll be at your place at six, then.”

  “An’ won’t Nestor be pleased to see us!”

  ***

  Marc spent a half-hour with Brodie to bring him up to date on the defense he had decided to use and the hopes he had for Nestor’s contribution to it. Having seen and heard for himself the near-impervious case laid out against him by Kingsley Thornton in the courtroom, Brodie was resigned to accepting Marc’s strategy. Marc turned the talk towards happier topics, like Diana Ramsay and the unwavering support she had offered her lover.

  “When you get me acquitted,” Brodie said to Marc as he was leaving, “Diana wishes us to announce our engagement.” The look of boyish hope that Brodie gave him as he made this remark cut Marc to the quick.

  ***

  “He’s ready to talk alright,” Dora said to Marc and her husband as she led them towards the spare-room. “He ain’t stopped tellin’ me about the awful days he spent in some shack up in the bush, fendin’ off bedbugs an’ ants an’ eatin’ food unfit fer humans, even of the lowly variety.”

  “That’s good news, then,” Marc said. “You’ve done wonders for him – and us.”

  “An’ he’s startin’ to eat us outta house an’ home,” Dora carried on, as she usually did when she latched onto a topic of interest to her. “I give him a coupla cups of soup when he woke up, an’ by noon he was onto ham an’ eggs. If he keeps this up, we’ll haveta hire us another rooster to keep the hens happy.”

  Nestor now looked quite comical, sitting on the bed swathed in one of Cobb’s generous nightshirts. His facial features had returned to their customary shrivelled condition, and the tiny, shifty eyes were once again restless and wary in their bony sockets.

  “I know what you fellas want,” Nestor said as Marc and Cobb pulled up stools and sat opposite him.

  “An’ we’re gonna get it, ain’t we, Nestor?”

  “What’s in it fer me?” Nestor said.

  “Savin’ yer miserable, good-fer-nothin’ hide, that’s what’s in it, you ungrateful – ”

  “It’s okay, Cobb,” Marc said. “I believe that Nestor’s going to cooperate fully with us, in view of the fact that he himself might be liable to criminal prosecution unless he can convince us of his innocence by telling us the absolute truth.”

  Nestor tried defiance briefly, then said with a sigh of resignation, “I guess I ain’t got much choice, have I?”

  “Not really,” Marc said. “Tell us first of all why you ran away.”

  Nestor stifled a sob, reached up to touch a well-salved wasp-bite on his chin, and said, “It wasn’t ‘cause I was scared the police would think I killed Albert. I was really scared the killer would think I was Albert’s partner an’ come lookin’ fer me, too.”

  “That makes sense,” Marc said. “The question now is: were you in fact your cousin’s associate?”

  “No!” Nestor cried, now truly frightened. “I ain’t never been one to break the law! You know that, don’t ya, Cobb?”

  “We all give way to temptation sooner or later,” Cobb said sententiously.

  “What were you, then?” Marc said. “Did you know, for example, that Albert was a multiple blackmailer?”

  Nestor stared down at the inflamed wounds on the back of his hands, in a plea for sympathy perhaps, and without looking up, said, “I didn’t know at first. Honest, Cobb. You gotta believe me.”

  Cobb said nothing.

  “Albert give me money when he first come here to help us rent the stone-cottage, an’ told me it was an instalment on his legacy from some dead uncle in Montreal. Every once in a while he’d come up with some cash, an’ I figured it was from the dead uncle. But most of the time he said he was broke, an’ cadged money offa me.”

  “Poor you,” Cobb said. “You never figured this skunk was bang-boozlin’ you?”

  “When did you become suspicious of what he was really up to?” Marc said.

  “Well, he kept on pumpin’ me fer information on certain people in town he was interested in. He said he had big plans fer us to start a business with his legacy, an’ we needed to cultivate the right sorta folks. Albert, he could
talk the ears offa mule.”

  “Which folks, for example?”

  “Well, one night when we was well inta our cups, we got to gabbin’ about the rich bitches an’ how they was always pretendin’ to be so good an’ proper, an’ before I know it, I’m talkin’ about the English lord who just moved here an’ how I’d heard a story from Itchy Quick about the shenanigans his wife got up to. Itchy did some work fer the lord last summer, an’ spied the lady-lord in the petunia-patch doin’ what she shouldn’t, if ya know what I mean.”

  “We know what ya mean,” Cobb said.

  “I didn’t plan on tellin’ him who the gentleman with her was, I ain’t inta that kind of gossip – ”

  “Unless you can sell it to the police,” Cobb said.

  “But he got it out of you anyway?” Marc said.

  Nestor looked at Marc beseechingly. “God, but that man had a way of wormin’ secrets outta me.”

  “And this gentleman was Horace Fullarton, the banker?” Marc said.

  Nestor was startled, then wary. “You already know,” he said slowly.

  “From our own sources,” Marc said reassuringly. “Was there anyone else whose indiscretions you may have revealed to your cousin?”

  “Well, Albert kept goin’ on about this lord-fella, an’ he got me good an’ drunk one night an’ I told him – though I don’t remember doin’ so – that I’d been in the new whore-house in Irishtown deliverin’ some supplies fer the madam, an’ who should I spy there but his lordship.”

  “Dressed as a woman,” Marc said.

  “You got a crystal ball or somethin’?” Nestor said.

  “Get on with it,” Cobb said, “or I’ll have Dora cut off yer ham an’ eggs.”

  “Well, that is what I seen there. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was him alright. I’d seen him drivin’ down King Street in his fancy buggy lots of times. But he had on a lady’s dress and a wig an’ face-paint an’ slippers, an’ he was doin’ a jig an’ singin’ in a real high voice, like he’d been gelded.”

  “But if you seen him an’ recognized him,” Cobb said, “lots of other people in that place would’ve, too?”