Evidence for the Prosecution P-21
Invoice no. 10079
Rotisserie Baby Barbecue
Address: 3056 boulevard Taschereau, Longueuil
Date: 10/10/70
Order: three club sandwiches (3 x $1.60 = $4.80)
six Pepsis (6 x $0.15 = $0.90)
tax ($0.46)
= $6.16
“Do you recognize this exhibit?” asked the prosecutor.
Rénald looked briefly at the piece of paper held out to him by the bailiff.
“Yes.”
“You recognize it as what?”
He hesitated for a moment.
“I don’t like your question.”
“You … I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t like your question.”
As a prodigiously interested spectator, Chevalier made a note of this response in his notebook, then raised his head and met the gaze of Maître Brien who, from his seat, met his in return. The lawyer recognized him and allowed himself a faint smile, followed by a wink.
Chevalier turned his attention to the witness, who was rocking back and forth with his hands in his pockets. He saw in the man a certain resemblance to Gaston Lagaffe: the green pullover with its rolled collar, the toupée falling over his eyes. But his was greying. “A salt-and-pepper Lagaffe,” he wrote.
“Tell me how the delivery went.”
“I parked in front of the house. And then I saw someone come out and come down to the street to get the order.”
“Did this someone speak to you?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“And what house did this person come out of?”
“From that house — 140 Collins. The address that was written on the bill. I went back there later and there it was: 140 Collins.”
“You say you went back to the place … later?”
“Uh-huh. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
“But you went back there when, exactly?”
“It’s a personal matter.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s my private life. It doesn’t have anything to do with the trial.”
Maître Brien stood up.
“Your Honour, if you’ll permit me, very respectfully … I believe that what the witness is trying to tell the court is that he went back to see the famous house later, as a simple tourist, like a great many people in Quebec at the time. You know, a short drive-past, on a weekend, a pleasant little outing …”
The judge thought for a moment, then turned from the defence counsel and addressed the witness.
“This private life of yours, when was it, exactly? In the days immediately following the delivery?”
“Uh, well. Am I obliged to answer that?”
“You are under oath,” rumbled Maître Grosleau.
“Yeah, but I don’t see where all this is going.”
“You say that you returned to the house after delivering the chicken on the tenth of October. When? A week later?”
“No, later than that.”
“All right, we’ll leave it at that,” concluded the Crown prosecutor.
Chevalier continued to scribble in his notebook, then looked up and saw that everyone was peering in the same direction: toward the jury box, specifically at jury member 10, a frizzy-haired youth with an Afro haircut and enough hair poking up between his chest and his Adam’s apple to stuff a La-Z-Boy, and an open magenta silk shirt revealing a medallion as big as a Frisbee.
He had raised his hand.
Jury member 10: “Excuse me for interrupting, but … isn’t someone going to ask him if he would be able to recognize the guy who came out of the house to get the order?”
Finally, sighed Chevalier, someone who’s doing his job.
The judge turned to the witness.
“Can you reply to the question?”
“Um …”
“What does that mean, um?”
“It means um. Um, as in um. I could still say something … What I do is between me and my conscience.”
“You are under oath.”
“Maybe so. But I’m the only one who knows if I’m telling the truth or not. And what my conscience is telling me is that I don’t remember the person who came out to take the order.”
“Does your conscience tell you anything else?”
“Yes. I’m afraid of the FLQ and I’m afraid of the mob, but I’m not afraid of the police.”
“Excuse me, would you repeat what you just said, please?”
“I’m afraid of the FLQ and I’m afraid of the mob, but I’m not afraid of the police.”
The Domaine des Salicaires was a modest-looking subdivision, designed for the ambitious working poor, otherwise known as the lower-middle class, the same people who had moved to the South Shore at the end of the Second World War to escape the slums of East Montreal, a human flotilla,the perpetuation of space and their laborious aptitude for happiness sublimated to the production of children.
A corrupt, or simply busy, developer, maybe both, had profited from the elastic nature of his contacts in city hall to wrangle a building permit, then dumped a few loads of gravel into a swamp that had been the home of reeds, bullfrogs, and red-winged blackbirds until then. He sketched out a few roads and divided it into building lots. Even when it didn’t rain, the Branlequeues’ basement filled with water, and the first time Éléonore saw a rat crossing the tiny rectangle of grass growing on the swamp that was their backyard, Chevalier had turned away and let the crisis pass. Then he had asked the neighbours about it.
“Is it the Norway rat that we have here?”
“No, it’s the water rat. You should do what I do: I catch them in a leg-hold trap and by the end of spring I have a fur coat for my wife. And cooked in a stew you’d swear it was rabbit …”
“It isn’t the common sewer rat, Lonore,” Chevalier announced triumphantly to his wife, “it’s the ondatra!” He used the native word for muskrat. But Lonore was not the kind of person one could win over with a classic fur coat, especially when it was still running around in her backyard.
“You have to place the trap a certain way, so your rat drowns when it’s caught,” the neighbour had specified. “Otherwise it’ll chew its leg off.”
“I don’t blame it,” Chevalier Branlequeue had replied.
In these isolated suburban outposts, where maisonettes, enclosed courtyards, sandlots, swimming pools, and garden sheds edge out woods, fields, and wetlands with impunity, the arrival of a Harley-Davidson on a Saturday morning is the sort of thing that causes no more commotion than an ondatra crossing the end of the yard.
“My Sweet Lord, now it’s the Hells Angels …” whined Éléonore.
“More like a respectable lawyer,” replied Chevalier, his nose at the window.
Chevalier Branlequeue was forty years old. His two sons, Martial and Pacifique, abandoned the skeleton of the scooter they were taking apart in the yard to surround the fire-and-chrome charger belonging to Maître Brien. They found the chopper’s fork, installed by the lawyer shortly after the release of Easy Rider, particularly interesting.
Maître Mario, dressed in leather on this brisk spring day — the sun was as hard to catch as a flea, and a cold wind was blowing in off the lake — was greeted at the door by Chevalier.
“You’re very lucky, Chevalier: two tall lads to carry on the family name, already practically grown …”
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” replied Chevalier, busying himself with the coffee maker. “For you, I’m nothing but a poor guy worried about barbecuing and the continuation of the race. When you see a child’s bicycle in the lane, you allow yourself a brief moment of tenderness, but not enough to make you regret the interchangeable young hippie chicks you hang around with in the Gaspésie on your machine. With the exhaust fumes drowning out the smell of drying cod, it’s a perfect life.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Chevalier. In the world’s eye, you’re a father second and the immortal author of
Elucubrations first, the pride of our national literature!”
“Yes, well, the author of a single book who’s a little frazzled around the edges and too well known not to be a little suspect …”
Brien shrugged and looked at the Saturday newspapers scattered on the kitchen table. The mistress of the house was raising dust and making noise in the next room.
“I read your diatribe in the letters-to-the-editor column,” he said.
“No need to say anything,” the poet–publisher said amiably, and smiled. “I was expecting your visit. Let’s go into my office.”
Maître Brien took a flask from the pocket of his leather jacket and liberally baptized his coffee.
“A drop of brandy, Chevalier? And by the way, is it all right, my calling you Chevalier?”
Branlequeue agreed to both propositions.
The house plan was six rooms; one bedroom for Vénus, another shared by the two boys, even though Martial already had one foot out the door. The father had been spending most of his nights on the mattress in his office for some time. When one looked toward the end of the street, one could see, in the distance, boats passing on the St. Lawrence.
From another pocket of his leather jacket, the lawyer produced a newspaper clipping dated that same day: Chevalier Branlequeue’s contribution occupied three-quarters of the page devoted to the vox populi. Maître Brien had simply torn it out, folded it in eight, and stuck it in his pocket.
“A comedy meticulously plotted,” he read. “Holy Crumb, Chevalier, since when have you been a theatre critic? We’re on the same team, you and I. And here you are, in the act of scoring in our own net. Because if you say that the trial is fixed, how does that make me look, eh?”
“Like the court jester,” Chevalier said, hiding a smile behind his cup of coffee.
At the window, the wind could be heard whistling through the clumps of reeds and shrubs at the edge of the yard. The red-winged blackbirds, perched on their bulrush stems, flashed their bright red wing patches like adolescents on motorbikes. Dissonant and imperious, their strident calls filled the air.
Chevalier folded his arms and leaned back in his chair.
“Massicotte, the chicken delivery man, is a Crown witness, so what rhyme or reason did he have to ham it up like that?”
“He’s one of ours, Chevalier. A patriot. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
“Some patriot. Two years ago, at another trial, he gave his age as forty-two. And now he’s down to thirty-six. Is it normal for a deliverer of chicken to lie like an actress when asked about his age? Or maybe Baby Barbecue’s famous recipe, with thirty-three spices, is the new fountain of youth?”
“He’s a strange one, I’ll give you that. But his testimony has been the most useful one yet, from my point of view.”
“But he was at the point of identifying his client. Did he perjure himself?”
The silence that followed was pierced by the sharp, disagreeable notes of the blackbirds and cowbirds defending their territories, black kamikaze jabberers dive-bombing invading crows.
“Don’t you find that bizarre? The guy’s a witness for the prosecution, and he clams up? So, who did he see?”
It was Brien’s turn to lean back in his chair.
“Sorry, old boy. Professional ethics.”
“You mean yours or his?”
“Very funny. But I’ve just had an idea, Chevalier. If I get René Lafleur acquitted, will you stop treating me publicly like a puppet of the system?”
“You’ll never get him acquitted.”
“How much do you want to bet?”
“I can’t afford to bet. But this is a circus, not a trial.”
Maître Brien tipped his head back and drank directly from his flask. Then he poured another drop into his coffee, replaced the cork, sighed with satisfaction, and returned the flask to his pocket.
“You’ll see. In the meantime, stop pissing people off with your damned conspiracy theories in the Saturday papers, okay?”
If Maître Brien, known as the Maestro to his friends, had been programmed to live for a thousand years, there’s no doubt he would still be talking about how the trial of René Lafleur was his finest hour in the year 2942. But he was destined to die peacefully, if that word can be applied to dying in his sleep at the age of sixty-six, to be discovered lifeless in his house on the shore of the Gaspé, on the living-room sofa, where his girlfriend of the moment, an ex-pole dancer and rodeo champion, had sent him to contemplate his sins for the night. He had exiled his practice to this county seat a few years previously and had almost been forgotten. Being away from the public eye had never been his desire, however, and he had resurfaced from time to time as an aging rebel who one fine morning would get back on his 750-cc bike with its extensions to the exhaust system, the better to blast away at political rectitude. In his later years, not having any terrorists to defend, he had made himself the champion of bands of motorcycle cops cheated by their Swiss bankers.
Dying on a sofa was appropriate. He had slept with 1,743 women, snorted four kilograms of cocaine up his nose, poured 430,000 ounces of beer down his throat, as well as 7,200 litres of gin, cognac, and brandy and, for the past several years, a good half a cubic metre of pills. A cerebral embolism took him.
At times, the cross-examinations and sword fights between the rival lawyers took on the aspect of a street brawl. In the end, Maître Brien trounced Maître Grosleau, gave him a vigorous public thrashing. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Years later, when he was watching a sports program and saw Mohammed Ali, in a ring in Kinshasa, allow himself to be taken to the ropes to absorb punches from his adversary, and then grapple with him bodily before suddenly ringing his opponent’s bell with a right hook that came out of nowhere, Chevalier thought of the defence lawyer for René Lafleur. Like Ali, Maître Brien was a master at the art of trash talk.
As for René’s fingerprints on the box of chicken, the Maestro threw them in the face of the experts during cross-examination. He had noticed a slight difference between the chicken box given as evidence in the courtroom and that shown in the official photographs.
“What happened to the flap?” he asked a specialist who’d come to testify.
“I don’t know. I must have torn it off. Maybe it was dirty …”
“Good thinking. Except that in the photograph, this one, it isn’t dirty at all, and the shadow has disappeared.”
“It’s because the flap was covered in powder.”
“Powder?” murmured the defence counsel, his nostril twitching despite himself.
“Yeah, the powder we used to take fingerprints. The carton was greasy and the powder stuck to it.”
“Don’t give me any bullshit about fingerprint powder! In the photograph, we see two flaps on the Baby Barbecue box, but one of those flaps is missing on the box in evidence. Why?”
“You’re being very technical today,” Maître Grosleau said, casting a sly glance at his rival’s notoriously active member above the American Standard stall in the row of urinals during the break.
“In that regard, I belong to the old school,” agreed Mario, reining in his engine. “A photo is not reality. To seem is not to be, that is the question these days, my dear sir.”
“But we’re talking about one and the same goddamned chicken box, and you know it,” fumed Maître Grosleau.
“Fine. Then prove it,” Maître Brien said carelessly, turning his back on the lawyer to pat his curly locks in the mirror above the sinks.
“The defence’s only strategy,” Maître Raymond Grosleau intoned, addressing the jury, “has been to try to cast doubt on the fact that the accused was actually in the premises at 140 rue Collins, in Saint-Hubert, between the tenth and seventeenth of October 1970. My esteemed colleague for the defence has used all of his considerable talents to make you believe that there is a distinct possibility that someone other than the accused (and other than his two accomplices, who have already been found guilty of murder), for example, a member of
another cell, was called in as reinforcement at the last minute. Perhaps he did this when the affair had started to take a wrong turn, and the member of the other cell committed the fatal act in his stead. My eminent colleague has pushed this insinuation so far as to actually ask this court to send a commission of enquiry to Cuba, in order to, and I quote, ‘shed more light on the interpenetration [sic] of the Rebellion and Chevalier cells during the October Crisis.’
“But if it were someone else who, pardon the expression, did the deed … and if this person is now living outside the country, let us say in a totalitarian system, and is now therefore beyond the reach of our laws, not subject to Canadian justice, and without any hope of ever setting foot in this country again, then why not give us his or her name? Why refuse to denounce whoever it is if such an accusation can do no harm, someone to whom such an accusation cannot prevent him or her from continuing to warm themselves on the beaches of Cuba, in their socialist workers’ paradise and under the pleasant protection of a Soviet nuclear umbrella, when such an accusation could contribute in a very decisive manner here, today, in whitewashing the man who is before you of any accusation and helping him to avoid a sentence of life imprisonment?”
“Because we’re not informers,” growled René Lafleur from behind his month-old beard.
The judge called a return to order, and the prosecutor repeated that René Lafleur’s fingerprints had been taken from a jar of mustard, a can of Le Sieur number 3 peas, a can of tobacco, and a bag of candies that had been purchased in anticipation of Hallowe’en.
“It’s true that these objects may have been in the house before October 10, which was why he insisted to the end on the fact that the prints of the young man in question were also taken from one of the boxes from the Rotisserie Baby Barbecue delivered to the address in question during the fateful week.”
Maître Brien’s summation lasted two full days, and if the duel between him and Maître Grosleau could evoke the Ali–Foreman fight of 1974 in Zaire, this latest piece of the anthology, impossible to reproduce here, was like the famous fifth round, during which the aspirant, after having warded off the worst blows from his opponent, suddenly burst off the ropes to deliver a series of direct hits with both gloves that succeeded in making Foreman’s face look like half a battered watermelon floating like a cork on the surface of a tormented sea.
October 1970 Page 38
