Kill All the Judges

by William Deverell

  At some point, booze and exertion had got to Cud, and he either passed out or fell asleep. Flo disentangled from him to go to the washroom. From her second-floor window she saw the eerie sight, a hundred feet away, of her husband’s head and torso sticking out just above the eaves of the living room. She jumped up, made out that he was on a chair. “I was spooked, I kind of freaked.”

  “And what did you do?”

  A silence, Flo musing. “I don’t want to answer that question.”

  Kroop scowled. “Miss LeGrand, we are not playing a parlour game, which you can withdraw from at your leisure. This is a court!”

  “I was told I could object.”

  “And you have done so, and what you say cannot be used against you. But you must say it. I will not hesitate to hold you in contempt.”

  “I don’t want to implicate anyone.”

  “Very well, Miss LeGrand, I call upon you to show cause why you should not be cited for contempt.”

  Another long moment, as her face kind of puffed up, tears coming. “I said…I awoke Cudworth, I said, ‘That bastard! He’s spying!’ Oh, God, I’m sorry, Cudworth, I’m so sorry. Forgive me.”

  A rush of tears, real or make-believe Wentworth couldn’t tell, but she talked through them. “He pulled on his clothes and rushed out, I pleaded with him, I grabbed him, tried to stop him, but he pushed past me. He was drunk, I can’t imagine he knew what he was doing, it was like a nightmare, maybe he was having a nightmare, and then he was out on the deck, and I saw…I saw him push Rafael off balance, down over the railing.”

  She got all this out loud and clear somehow, despite the liberal use of tissues from a handy packet in her bag. She blew into one, wiped, bowed her head till it was just above her knees, and continued crying. “I’m so sorry, Cudworth.”

  Arthur shifted about to face her and with huge audacity, and with a voice reaching into every corner of the room, said, “Nobody’s buying it, Ms. LeGrand.”

  Kroop went livid. “Counsel will hold his tongue!” He simmered awhile, got under control, then turned to Flo, a different face, solicitous. “Madam, it would not be fair to add to your distress by continuing now. We’ll take the lunch break early, so you can repair yourself, and resume at one-thirty.”

  The court emptied fast, but Wentworth was stuck to his seat, waiting for some pronouncement from beside him, a word of assurance, a snort of derision, anything. But Arthur was staring at the wall clock, running his thumbs up and down under his braces.

  Finally, he said, “I’ll want you to phone my wife. I can’t handle it.”

  “No problem.” Wentworth was anxious for him, he looked tired. He wasn’t sure nobody was buying Florenza’s story; some of those jurors looked like they were ready to write her a cheque.

  “Are we going to put Cud on the stand?”

  “I’d rather cut off my left arm.” A drawn-out groan. “You have two days to prepare him.” He rose. “I need time alone to think.” As he walked off, he sighed and said, “There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.”

  Sinking into a soft chair in the barristers’ lounge, Wentworth fiddled with his phone as he worked through what to say to Margaret Blake. He didn’t want to tell her the trial had taken a nasty turn, that Arthur had suddenly turned old in front of him. The case was taking a toll, her campaign compounding it.

  “I should never have encouraged him to defend that arrogant clown,” Margaret said. “What was I thinking?”

  “Not to worry, Ms. Blake, he’s rounding into top form.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Well, he went out for a walk.”

  “I hope he’s bundled up, it’s very cold.”

  “He needed time to plan his cross-examination.”

  “Florenza LeGrand? How is she coming across?”

  He may as well tell her, she’ll hear anyway. “She set up Cud as the fall guy. We kind of anticipated it, so we’re ready. Yep, totally under control. Oh, and Mr. Beauchamp told me to wish you well, he knows you’ll do great this afternoon. That goes for me too.”

  “Give him a hug for me.”

  On his way to Taco Takeout, his preferred inexpensive eatery, Wentworth tried and failed to conceive of himself hugging the boss. He wished there was some way to buoy him up; he felt sad for the great man, the pressure he was under. It would be tragic to end his career with a loss, a black blot on the archives.

  He worried Arthur might falter in cross, wouldn’t be able to crack that snake–she’d really pulled the rug out from them, and this had suddenly become a very sticky case. Her evidence accorded pretty much with Cud’s, so there wasn’t that much working space for cross-examination, no room to contradict her. The boss was handcuffed, didn’t dare accuse her of egging on Cud to help her escape a life with boring Whynet-Moir.

  I don’t want to implicate anyone. Said with a straight face just before she caved in and tearfully grassed on her lustful savage. Silent Shawn had probably come up with that one, it was brilliant. And she’d been good. She, not Leich, wins the drama critics’ prize.

  He’d expected Cud to come bounding up to the counsel table at the break, demanding the lying slut be charged with perjury, ordering Arthur to carve her to pieces. But he’d wandered out in a daze, abandoning Felicity, abandoning his followers, looking like a man in need of strong drink. What rhymes with disaster?

  Tomorrow he’ll spend some quality time with Cud, who had better come up with a straight story this time. Wentworth should check to see how Pomeroy has written it.

  He wondered where Arthur’s walk was taking him. Somewhere in the West End, or English Bay, the deserted beaches of winter. Maybe he was taking one of those paths to the top of the mountain.

  He slipped onto a stool, ordered the meatless taco and a side of refries, $7.35 plus tip. Taco Takeout discouraged dining in, but they had counter seating, a polyglot place, skins of many colours but mostly Latino. That cool dude in a suit kind of looked like Carlos. Drawn back to the scene of the crime, to claim his mistress and her fortune.

  The Mexican lunged, but Wentworth caught his wrist, twisting until the knife dropped, piercing the taco with a twang. “Who paid you? Silent Shawn?” Carlos winced with pain. Wentworth twisted harder.

  “I tell you, amigo, I tell you. Some hombre from Ottawa, I don know hees name.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Beard, round face like back of ass.”

  When court resumed, Cud and Felicity were back together, seated in the third row. Cud must have been to a tavern, he smelled beery. He continued to avoid his lawyers, which was abnormal. Arthur wasn’t any more communicative, he’d returned to court sombre and thoughtful.

  Flo looked composed enough, but she’d repaired the damage with too much mascara and eye shadow, like a punk rocker. Wentworth found it odd that her parents weren’t here to support her.

  “Witness, you’re still under oath,” Kroop said.

  “As if that mattered,” Arthur murmured. Good, the boss was getting himself pumped, booting up for his cross.

  Abigail had a few more questions, she wanted to nail down Flo’s evidence. Were the windows of the maid’s room curtained? No. Were they open? No. How well could she see the action? Well enough, she had a good view from higher up, it happened near one of the night lamps. How did the accused make his approach? From behind. Show us Cud’s pushing motion. Palms out, arms extended, contact made with Whynet-Moir’s buttocks. Describe how he fell. A leg got caught on the railing and he went down headfirst.

  Abigail brought out these specifics methodically, Flo unemotional in her responses, detached. As if she was resigned to the disagreeable task of putting Cud behind bars.

  “What did you do next?”

  “I don’t know, I was in a total fugue state. Scared, confused.” She picked up the pace, in a hurry to get to the end. “I was gathering up my clothes. I heard the garage doors open, and I looked out and the Aston Martin was roaring out of there. I d
idn’t see the crash, but I heard it. I ran to the house. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. I went up to the bedroom, half-convinced I’d been hallucinating, but he wasn’t there, Rafael wasn’t there.”

  She was starting to blink tears again. Abigail must have decided not to push her any more, she had what she needed. “Your witness.”

  Wentworth was displeased when Arthur didn’t snap his suspenders like usual when about to pitch into a lying witness. You could see it on his face, he wasn’t confident, he was distracted. Wentworth didn’t want to see a repeat of the bingo hall massacre in 1984, a limp cross, a rare loser.

  Arthur liked to stand near the jury when he worked, to fraternize, but he took his time getting there, pausing to throw his first question: “So you didn’t know about the four-million-dollar gift to the groom from your father?”

  “You’re already on thin ice, Mr. Beauchamp.” Kroop wasn’t wasting any time getting on him, which was good, would stoke the fires.

  “I have no intention of mentioning the bribe, milord.” Touché. Kroop deserved it. Wentworth will never forgive him for that mortifying dressing down. “Is that right, Ms. LeGrand? ‘I knew zero about that,’ you said.”

  “Until I read it in the newspaper a couple of days ago.”

  “So it was a deep, dark secret. You didn’t know how the money was spent.”

  “That’s right.” Looking right at him; Shawn had told her to do that, look confident, convinced.

  “And of course you didn’t know how this dowry, as you call it, came into being, or who helped engineer it.”

  “No.”

  “How long have you known your counsel, Mr. Hamilton?”

  She seemed taken aback by this shift. “Several years.” She looked for help from Shawn, but he only glowered at Arthur.

  “You’re looking at the tall gentleman in the blue suit on the counsel bench, Shawn Hamilton. He’d acted for your family on several matters?”

  “Solicitor-client privilege, Mr. Beauchamp. Beware.”

  Arthur ignored Kroop’s backseat driving. “And they’d retained him on your behalf over several scrapes you got into, yes?”

  “I had a hit-and-run a few years ago. There were no injuries.”

  “A two-thousand-dollar fine and six-month driving suspension.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And he acted for you on a charge of assaulting a sales clerk.”

  “I was acquitted of that.”

  “Mr. Beauchamp, I will not allow you to establish bad character by eliciting a record of acquittals.”

  “If her bad character hasn’t been established by now, it never will.”

  Kroop didn’t fire back, he was distracted by activity at the door, Judge Ebbe returning late, taking up his spot beside Shawn Hamilton.

  “Let us now talk about October 13, but please spare us more details of your intemperate romp with Mr. Brown.” Arthur was nestled in beside the jury now, next to the forewoman, Professor Glass. “We have the two of you in the maid’s bed. While rising to use the toilet, you claim to have seen your husband watching from outside.”

  “It was degrading. He was like a peeping tom.”

  “A peeping tom prefers to stay hidden. He was looking right at you as you stood upright in your nakedness.”

  “He wasn’t making any bones about it.”

  “And he didn’t withdraw, didn’t get off the chair, didn’t budge. He remained there, you’ll have us believe, as the clock ticked away, just watching. You claim you awoke Mr. Brown with shouts and expletives. Now surely in the stillness of the night, your cries carried to your husband.”

  Hesitation. “I didn’t say I was shouting. I was arguing with Cud, trying to push him back to bed.”

  “And what was he saying?”

  “Nothing. He just had this determined look.”

  “Your husband would have seen Mr. Brown rising and dressing and going outside, yes? And still he didn’t stir from his perch.”

  “Yes, but Cudworth would have disappeared from his view. The stairs go down the other side.”

  “Let’s time this. You have Mr. Brown dragging himself drunkenly from bed, drunkenly looking for his clothes, drunkenly pulling on his pants–that must have been a test–and all the time, you were protesting, pleading, pushing, pulling. Without hindrance, a sober man would have used up two or three minutes. Agreed?”

  “I have no experience dressing as a man.” She could counterpunch. Point for her. “He did this in an awful hurry.”

  “In a hurry, madam?”

  “He scrambled right out of there.”

  “Oh, no doubt he scrambled. First if all, he scrambled for his underwear, yes?”

  “His shorts? I guess so.”

  “Yes, he was wearing those shorts on his arrest. And where in the room did he find them?”

  “I can’t remember. I think they were under the bed.”

  “So he looked all over, then found them under the bed.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And his other clothes had been flung all over the room, yes?”

  “Okay.”

  “And he had to scramble around for them too. Then what–he scrambled out of there in his bare feet?”

  “Well, no, he puts his socks and boots on.”

  “Oh, I see, he was in such an awful hurry, he pulled on socks and boots?”

  “I don’t know what was in his mind.”

  “Surely madam, what was in his mind was to grab all his clothes and get the hell out of there.”

  No response. Kroop let the profanity pass, he seemed engrossed in this exchange. The boss was in a groove.

  “And then he must drunkenly tromp down the stairs in his boots, making all manner of noise, and find his way around the house in the near darkness. Two more minutes, maybe three. And somehow after this amazing journey he arrives unobserved behind your husband’s lookout. Is that what you’d have us believe?”

  “That’s what I believe.”

  “Madam, I don’t accept it, the jury doesn’t accept it, and I’m sure you don’t either.”

  This was boomed out, and Florenza sat back. Arthur was way off base with that last blast, but Kroop was being unusually patient.

  “During this entire interval, you claim to have been watching through the window?”

  “Yes.”

  “Watching your husband as he was staring at you naked at the window, is that what we are to believe?”

  “You have to understand, Mr. Beauchamp, I was in an absolute daze. I was in shock. I couldn’t move.” A shrug. “Maybe you had to be there.” Give her another half a point, but the boss was well ahead.

  “You made no attempt to warn him.”

  “Yes, because I didn’t think he was going to come to any harm. At the worst, I thought Cudworth would yell at him, maybe, or just talk to him. I wasn’t expecting him to do anything like this, even as drunk as he was. I wasn’t expecting anything. I was just frozen there.”

  “Frozen. And for the entire time apparently heedless of the call of nature that got you out of bed.”

  She had no good answer to that, no memory of going to the can. She was looking increasingly uncomfortable as Arthur continued to work at her in his gently mocking way, throwing in asides about his more logical theory that Cud was awakened not by her but by a scream outside. And that it prompted him to get dressed and hightail it out of there. Kroop admonished him from giving evidence, but mildly. Wentworth suspected the judge wasn’t exactly buying Florenza either.

  Arthur got out of her that she threw her dress in the wash that night. She couldn’t explain why. She was frozen, a mantra that by now verged on the foolish.

  Was there a telephone in the maid’s room? Yes. Arthur found it beyond comprehension that she didn’t immediately call the police, her parents, a friend, anyone. He greeted with head-scratching confusion her attempts to explain why she hid in the wine cellar while Hank Chekoff hammered on the door. She was frozen, she wasn’t th
inking, she just hoped they’d go away.

  When she did decide to call someone, it was Shawn Hamilton. “There were still policemen outside, I could hear them talking, and I took the phone into a little closed-off guest bedroom and called his home number.”

  “This was at what time?”

  “About five.”

  “Five a.m. Two hours after Rafael fell to his death. You seem to have been frozen for a peculiarly long time, Ms. LeGrand. Did you consume any alcohol during this hiatus?”

  “I’d quit hours ago. I was pretty sobered up.”

  “Any sedatives, pills, drugs, anything that might have aided this frozen state?”

  “I smoked a number. Marijuana.”

  “And what effect did this number have on you?”

  “Cooled me out a bit. That’s when I phoned Shawn.”

  “Not your father.”

  “He wouldn’t have answered.”

  “And you got your lawyer out of bed?”

  “Don’t answer that question. Mr. Beauchamp, I’ve warned you once. Solicitor-client privilege.”

  Arthur smiled up at Kroop like they were sharing a joke. The chief reddened a little when it dawned this was a silly issue. He harrumphed and said, “Carry on.”

  “And what did you do as a result of talking to Mr. Hamilton?”

  “He told me to stay put. I just lay down in the darkness and waited.”

  Shawn, Donat, and their entourage–an extra lawyer, a doctor, two nurses–showed up forty minutes later, and the sickbed scenario was set up, which sounded pretty fishy, like a cover-up. “So at about seven a.m., when Sergeant Chekoff and his team showed up, you were in bed suddenly very sick, is that it?”

  “I was sick. I was in very bad shape.”

  “You’d stopped drinking many hours ago. What were you sick with?”

  “I don’t know. Worry. I just did what I was told to. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t argue. It wasn’t my idea.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “Shawn’s.”

  Kroop threw up his hands. “Solicitor-client privilege!”

  “Privilege does not adhere to deceitful schemes, milord. This young lady has been dancing to tunes of her puppeteer for the last five months.”