So that’s where she was going, not for the throat, no, a high-minded approach, offering a comfortable middle way, tempting the jury with easy compromise. But the jury would not be told that the judge held free rein in sentencing, with life imprisonment the max. Juries aren’t allowed to consider such things.
She ended on a strong note, about how the jury should be proud of themselves for taking part in this great, hallowed, democratic process of the common law.
Eight and a half out of ten.
The boss seemed in no hurry to leave court during the break, instead hung about the prosecutors’ table, offering Abigail a bouquet of compliments, earning a little hug. As Wentworth headed morosely for the door, Haley joined him. “He’s so courteous, even in defeat.” He merely nodded. “Oh, stop being such a grump, Wentworth.”
“Sorry, it’s the tension.”
“I know how to relieve that.”
He was totally uninterested. Find happiness once, and the next time is always better. April hadn’t written him off. That was the one bright spot of his day.
Cud and Felicity joined him on the terrace. “Okay, that’s the crucifixion; I’m ready for the resurrection.” He hugged Felicity. “Rhymes with erection, baby. The jury don’t know the real me, Woodward, that’s what Arthur’s got to work on.”
The boss opened casually, with his standard courtroom jokes, tested over the decades, jury relaxants, he calls them. Then some banter about how, with farm chores stacking up, his wife campaigning, he’d felt bound to take this trial on short notice, and now knew why the first lawyer had a breakdown. Laughter.
He schooled them on the basics, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, the presumption of innocence that remains with the accused through every moment of the trial. A great baritone tremolo as he concluded with a quote from Canada’s highest court: “‘If the presumption of innocence is the golden thread of criminal justice, then proof beyond a reasonable doubt is the silver, and these two threads are forever intertwined in the fabric of criminal law.’”
Then he made a show of abandoning a folio of notes on the table–I don’t need these, was the message–and strolled toward the jury to talk from the heart. It was the old Beauchamp, the master, one of his best, maybe just a step below the McHugh case, the rogue chiropractor.
He made what hay he could over the scandal–Whynet-Moir and the justice minister–telling the jury they must be mindful that someone may have desperately wished to stop Whynet-Moir’s mouth, to hush up “what we now know has become an explosive political scandal.”
That got Kroop into it. “You’re in danger of transgressing, Mr. Beauchamp.”
The judge remained obsessive about refusing to hear the word bribe, stubbornly holding onto his early, ill-thought-out ruling. That didn’t deter Arthur, who hammered away at the possibilities: a hired assassin, or someone with a grudge against Whynet-Moir, or someone whose freedom or reputation was at stake, someone who brokered the multi-million-dollar payout–this with a fierce look at Shawn Hamilton, who remained poker-faced under the jury’s gaze.
Arthur deftly handled Astrid Leich, reminding the jury of her confident fingering of Brian Pomeroy. This is the man. Said twice, emphatically. Having made a completely wrong identification of Brian Pomeroy– “Mr. Brown’s former lawyer, for goodness sake”–how could her second choice be relied on even in the remotest degree? “Especially after, during a break, my flustered friends for the Crown persuaded her to attempt a last-minute patch job as a means of saving face.”
Blaming it not on the sweet soul who erred but on the prosecutors, implying they leaned on her hard. Pretty crafty. Nudged the line, but you do what you have to in a tight case.
“Let us dispel any notion that the issue of manslaughter is of any consequence whatsoever. You can’t get there, my friends, without being satisfied to a moral certainty and beyond any reasonable doubt–that, as His Lordship will tell you, is the unswerving rule that must guide you–that my client was the assailant.”
He moved down the aisle, a fatherly hand on Cud’s shoulder. “Cudworth Brown, who runs the recycling depot on Garibaldi Island, a blunt-talking working man with a bad back, raised in a hardrock mining town, a former steelworker, active in his union, who gave every cent he earned to support his impoverished parents, a poet who writes of love and truth and beauty–often intemperate in manner, yes, as poets often are, lustful, yes, and easily led. But where’s the crime in that? Cudworth Brown had done harm to no man or woman. And then one day–” striding back to the jury, voice rising, “–he was chosen to be a victim of a diabolical scheme, seduced into a spiderweb of deceit and trickery. A web woven by the black widow of 2 Lighthouse Lane.”
Wentworth felt a shiver wiggle up his spine, the room silent but for an errant cough.
“And who was her aide-de-camp? Her true lover, her only true lover, handsome, dashing Carlos Espinoza. You’ve seen his photo–compare him with this rough-hewn fellow in the third row, with his slightly off-kilter nose: an honest, plain mug to be sure, but it hasn’t won him any beauty pageants.”
This drew smiles from the jury, particularly from the Steelworkers guy, who obviously liked the way Arthur was portraying Cud as a good old-fashioned union guy with human faults.
“But, you say, Carlos was caught on police video two thousand miles away from the intended murder. Of course he was! Because this was his carefully crafted alibi. Florenza’s real lover is no fool–no, Carlos took pains to be seen in a most public place, a popular Hollywood restaurant, on the night he knew Judge Whynet-Moir would die.”
He smiled upon the prosecution table. “Come now, Ms. Hitchins, surely you don’t expect the jury to believe that Carlos, with all his criminal connections, would do the deed himself. Nervous Carlos, who fled from his mistress’s side when a lawyer came sniffing about–no, he doesn’t dirty his hands with the foul business of murder, not when there’s a wealthy heiress to pay the shot. What’s a few hundred thousand dollars when it can buy the services of the finest assassin the Colombian mafia can offer? Thus saving her from the complications of an ugly, contested divorce and a costly award that would deplete her fortune.
“Who was this hired hit man? We may never know. Why would the police care to put in a lot of extra work when they had an easier target, someone so handy, so nearby? Tunnel vision, ladies and gentlemen, a known occupational hazard that besets our otherwise dedicated constabulary.”
Hank Chekoff was taking it okay, he was basically onside. The boss was getting away with murder, building a compelling structure with zero evidence, strands pulled from the air. And the jury was listening.
“When was the scheme hatched? We can’t be sure, but its details must have clicked together a few days before the fundraising dinner, when Florenza learned Cud Brown had been sent in as a late substitute. The same self-taught poet she’d heard on the radio, with his backwoods philosophies. A loquacious rebel, but a man of no great complication, unsophisticated in the ways of high society. Yes, the perfect dupe had just become available, a sap to take the rap.”
It made sense to set up the client as more dull-witted than he actually was, but Wentworth worried Arthur was putting the blocks to Cud too hard, relishing it too much. He feared to look behind him, hoped Cud was masking his reaction to these slurs.
Arthur spent the next while picking apart and scoffing at Flo’s testimony. The charade that she was infatuated with Cud. “She would have you believe the love carried on even while she sought to nail his hide to the wall of this courtroom. She could have said she saw nothing, that’s what a woman in love might say, but not such an honourable woman as Florenza LeGrand.”
She knew Raffy would be jealous, that he’d be unable to sleep, might wander about in despair, might even spy on his faithless wife–even as the lurking killer waited his chance. And just in case a witness–a neighbour, say–heard something, maybe the slamming of the door to the maid’s bedroom, wouldn’t it be clever to dress the assassin in the gear the stooge
usually wore– “Like this,” Arthur said, displaying the cover of Cud’s CD, open-necked shirt, medallion, red suspenders.
Nice spin on troubling eyewitness evidence. Wentworth wished he’d come up with it.
A peroration about the risk of convicting the innocent, a softly worded plea that they deliver a verdict that would not haunt their dreams, an evocation of a sombre scene of clanging prison doors and freedom’s loss, a verse from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”: “The vilest deeds like poison weeds bloom well in prison-air; It is only what is good in man that wastes and withers there.”
Finally, the golden thread again, burden of proof, reasonable doubt. “Ubi dubium ibi libertas!” he concluded. “Where there is doubt, there is freedom.”
Professor Glass, the forewoman, nodded with approval.
CRUCIFICTION
Under a benign noonday sun, Arthur sat with a pizza slice by the Robson Square waterfall, thankful to be alone for a while, a chance to clear his head, relax his weary lungs, his weary soul. An hour of solace from a trial whose difficulties had accelerated exponentially day by day. Never had he known a case turn so inexorably, so unforgivingly, so quickly, from a walk in the park to a stumble at the edge of a cliff.
He was kicking himself for having got into this with such shallow preparation. Three months wouldn’t have been adequate. He’d been egged into it, seduced into it, tricked into it. To defend whom? Cudworth Brown, to whom he owed nothing, who made a pass at his wife, who played charades with his lawyers. A monkey with a buzz saw, too much to answer for had he taken the stand, he’d have been ripped apart by Abigail. But was Arthur just making excuses for keeping Cud from testifying?
Arthur hadn’t read acquittal on the jurors’ faces. Only uncertainty. They’d been responsive enough, it was clear they liked him, but did they like his client? Arthur shouldn’t have mocked and demeaned him, that was a mistake, he’d let his antipathy show.
Otherwise a good speech, though not worth the nine point six Wentworth awarded. Arthur wished his gushing junior would stop stargazing and come into his own–he had the right stuff deep down. God knows Arthur would have blown this trial ten ways to Sunday had Wentworth not been around to back and fill.
He played with his cellphone but was hesitant to call Margaret. She’d be visiting polling stations, pumping up her scrutineers. Tragically, he saw no chance he’d be at her side when the results came in. Polls close at 8:00 p.m. Kroop will take two hours with his charge. The jury will be deliberating this evening.
Here was Wentworth jogging toward him, breathless. “I won’t bug you, I know you want to be alone, but you got away before I could tell you about Brian. I hadn’t wanted to burden you earlier.”
Arthur listened with concern to the story of Brian’s attempted foray into the afterlife.
“A poorly planned job, you think?”
“Yeah, a custodian was just outside his door.”
“Then maybe it was well planned. How did Brian sound to you?”
“I don’t know. Crazy but sly. Oblique, you know the way he gets. Still talking about the trial as if it’s a book.”
“The view is always the same,” Arthur muttered. “See if you can reach Caroline; it would be useful to hear her observations. And make sure Dr. Epstein knows about this.” Wentworth made a note.
“I don’t want you spacing out when Kroop gives jury directions. We are at the point in this sorry trial where we have to anticipate grounds of appeal.”
Much of the effect that Arthur’s speech had on the jury was buried in the rubble of Kroop’s rambling charge, a mind-deadening recital of seven days of evidence embellished with legal lectures. But not weighted, surprisingly, toward the prosecution. A fair and ample direction on reasonable doubt, a slightly incredulous inflection in his voice when he recounted Florenza’s evidence.
Kroop sent the jury out and asked, “Do counsel have any exceptions?”
Arthur suggested His Lordship might wish to devote a few more words to the cover-up in the high councils of the Conservative government. The latter was for the press, an aid to Margaret’s campaign if it made the supper news.
Kroop demurred with a smile. Nothing was getting to him today. Arthur had wearied from the battle, and he supposed Kroop had too, and they’d settled into a grudging truce that suggested Arthur had been forgiven for the worst of his sins and insults.
Word was sent to the jury to begin deliberations. To satisfy Arthur’s morbid curiosity, he’d asked April to run off a copy of Pomeroy’s manuscript, his true-crime fantasy or whatever he called it. He took it to the barristers’ lounge to kill time until dinner.
“Didn’t happen in my day, these school shootings.”
“There used to be discipline.”
“Too much TV.”
“Kids today, they’re lazy. Manfred, old boy, can you switch to the local news?”
Arthur was hiding behind the codgers, in his little cove, working his way through a chef’s salad, determined to get his strength up for his reception on Garibaldi, a chilly one if he returned ignobly from his quest: the averted eyes, the throat clearings, the commiserative mumbles. “Well, you tried.”
Here was Margaret in high definition, poking her ballot in the slot. Cut to a quickie interview outside the polling place. “I’m exhausted. I’m hopeful. The choice is in the people’s hands.”
The same routine for the other main candidates, followed by an unfunny sidebar, a costumed independent running for the Clown Party. Arthur dialed Margaret’s cell, left a message. “‘The choice is in the people’s hands.’ A splendid example of iambic pentameter. As in, ‘Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain.’ As mine remains for you.”
Disconnecting, he muttered, “How corny, Beauchamp,” then looked up to find himself staring into the penetrating silver eyes of Caroline Pomeroy.
“Corny? Not at all. Lovely, in fact, Arthur. How blessed Margaret is to have a partner who quotes from Venus and Adonis instead of Inspector Grodgins’s Last Case.” She pulled up a chair. “Are women actually allowed in here?” A mocking look about, a sardonic smile–how twinned she was with her ex-husband, her duelling counterpart.
“The bill of rights says so, but you wouldn’t know it. The ladies get frozen out.”
The habitués had checked her out with reproving looks, squirms of discomfort. Even Manfred looked haughty and displeased as he took her order for a whisky sour.
“The last bastion of male hegemony. I’m surprised at you, Arthur.”
“Ah, well, old habitats die hard. They leave you alone here. If it helps, I put eight women on the jury.”
“How magnanimous of you.”
The trial, the by-election, the travails of a divorced mother of three–these topics canvassed, she said, “Shall we move on to the main topic of this evening’s symposium? The headless horseman of Hollyburn. What would cause him to fake a stab at suicide? Lord knows. We talked of the children, of course, and I told him–and I almost grieve to say it–that they deeply miss him.” A moment to muse. “As do I, in an aberrant way. ‘I, the Masochist,’ it’s the title of one of my stories.”
“I especially enjoyed your portraits from the barrens of academia. You got my note?”
“Yes, and thank you. I spoke to him about my taking Gabriela, Amelia, and Frank to Ireland. Not as a dig or taunt–I actually encouraged him to visit. Trinity College, Dublin. Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats. A shrine. Never mind. That didn’t set him off. He said, yes, he’d like to visit.”
“He sounds to have been unusually…together.”
“Oh, there was much of the same unintelligible gallimaufry I’d heard on the phone. Otherwise, he was desperately trying to be on his best behaviour. I suppose he feels there’s some…” She shrugged.
“Hope? Is there?”
“Hope? Not till he has a lobotomy.” She snapped back her drink. “Loneliness is easier, chicken soup for the fucking soul. Though I have to admit he does scintillate against the dullsville of the
professoriate.”
A glistening in her eyes caused Arthur discomfort. “Manfred, I think we have an empty glass here.”
Manfred did his duty with a snotty lack of enthusiasm. “I’ll bet you hate being called Man Friday,” Caroline said.
“A fake suicide, you said.”
“I did twenty years’ hard time with Bry; I used to know when he was lying or faking, but now maybe it’s all lies and fakery. Yes, he had a breakdown, yes, he got wired on toot, and yeah, his shrink probably nailed it with her acute substance-induced delusional whatever. As illustrated by that literary grotesquery he’s been potting about with.”
“A fair description. I’ve been reading it.”
“If he’s been off cocaine for nearly two weeks, why is he still crackers?”
“They say it takes time.”
“Maybe. Or it’s all a game.”
“He frequently mentioned you when I saw him. He said you got sucked in. Everything happened because of you.”
“He got junked up and went crazy because of me? Endearing. If you see him again, don’t let him show you his Cuban photos. I humoured him. Beaches, babes, 1960 Plymouths, Habana Vieja, boring, boring. When he went out for a smoke, I dug back further on his hard drive and saw pictures of his rat hole in the Ritz, with its seedy street views. He’d been taking snaps of his so-called followers, one of them the pizza delivery guy. Another was a bongo player. Portraits of the weird. Some cluck in a suit who looked like he’d just vomited off a dock.”
Arthur checked his watch. “I suspect my jury are returning from dinner. I should get back to the courts.”
“I’ll drive you.”
Looking down over the great hall, checking his watch obsessively, Arthur was having one of his rare addiction attacks. Caroline’s whisky sours had been the visual trigger, and memories had given it muscle, memories of tense hours, tense nights, waiting for juries, the antidote for nail-biting a mug of whisky or a tall gin. But tonight his only solace, if you could call it that, was Kill All the Judges, which he’d ploughed through to its confusing ending. Some flashes of wit. Bizarrely entertaining. Unpublishable.
Kill All the Judges Page 39
