Kill All the Judges

by William Deverell

  It was exactly two minutes to eight. He expected the chief would call time out around nine. Attendance was down, only diehards remained, just a handful of Cud loyalists. Only two reporters left. Silent Shawn had not returned from dinner break. Wentworth had gone off somewhere to pace and fret, having picked up that the boss didn’t want to be bothered right now.

  Here was Dalgleish Ebbe, giving up for the evening, leaving. The judge, who’d avoided Arthur all through the trial, seemed uncertain whether to respond to his beckoning finger. But then he joined him.

  “I’m curious, Dalgleish, at your devotion to this case.”

  “Ah, but I’m your devoted fan, Arthur. Always a treat to see you in action. Brilliant speech, by the way.”

  “Thank you. A couple of holes have been opened up on the superior court benches. I presume your name is being considered.”

  “Having been left at the altar multitudinous times, I’m beyond any reasonable expectation.”

  “Nonsense, an erudite fellow like you is wasted on the lower court.” Arthur dug into his briefcase. “Of course, you may not want this to fall into the wrong hands.” Passing him the fax from the Law Society’s Discipline Committee.

  Ebbe gaped at it, his critique of Raffy: “Someone would be doing a blow for justice if he’d drop him down a well.”

  “Fuck me,” said the erudite judge.

  “Good luck,” Arthur said, then sidled over to a headset-equipped radio reporter. It was eight o’clock. The polls had closed in Cowichan and the Islands.

  “Any results yet?”

  “I promise to let you know, Mr. Beauchamp.”

  Ten minutes later, she called him over. “One poll out of 160. Mosquito Flats. O’Malley thirteen, Blake eleven, the Clown two.”

  He retreated to his reserved space by the concrete railing. There hadn’t been a whisper from Kroop’s chambers. The old boy was probably taking a nap. Cud was walking in circles down below. The looks he’d been giving Arthur reflected felt insult and betrayal. His neighbour, his compadre, the famed barrister who was supposed to have walked away with this one, had slammed him, shamed him.

  He approached the newswoman again. “Coming in now,” she said. “Twelve polls heard from, Conservatives 1,008, Green 875, NDP 610, no one else close.” Arthur went off to fret. The NDP was holding, bad news. But these must be the mining and lumber camps, small polls quickly counted.

  He wondered whether the jury was stuck on something. Some point he might have made clearer. Some argument inadequately put. They weren’t buying Arthur’s bold assurances about driving a tank through the holes of the Crown’s case.

  His fingers curled around his phone. Don’t call her. Too early.

  “Blake 2,558, O’Malley 2,549,” the obliging reporter announced.

  “Splendid! Hurrah!”

  But by nine o’clock, she’d slipped behind. Conservatives 7,518, Green 7,498. Everyone else had fallen from the race.

  Before long, Kroop called the jurors in, explained with yawning unction that he didn’t want to overwork them after an already long day, and sent them off to a comfortable downtown hostelry.

  “What now?” Wentworth asked in the gowning room.

  “You go home and get a good night’s sleep.”

  Outside, he waited until Wentworth pedalled off, then hailed a cab.

  “West Vancouver, please. Hollyburn Hall.”

  They crawled, only one lane open to the bridge, Arthur restive, fidgety, finally digging out his phone. Margaret wasn’t picking up, and there seemed no hope of reaching campaign headquarters. He could imagine them, all wired on caffeine, Margaret trying to keep calm amid the tempest around her.

  On his tenth try, he finally connected, to a background of whoops and groans, cheers and lamentations. Margaret could barely be heard. “Vocal chords gone. Fingernails too.” He didn’t realize she’d passed the phone on until his undying expressions of love were interrupted by a male voice. “Oh, you’re just saying that.”

  Arthur asked the voice for the results of poll eighty-nine, Tumwat First Nations reserve. Green forty-one, Tories nine; Arthur had pulled it in. The amiable young volunteer stayed on the phone until the taxi pulled into the driveway of Hollyburn Hall. With three polls uncounted, at a quarter to ten, Margaret had a sixteen-vote edge.

  In the main hall, some kind of break-into-groups session was underway, four clusters of patients nodding and murmuring. In one of the circles, a man was sobbing. Elsewhere, a wail. “Everyone hates me!”

  Not partaking was Brian Pomeroy, who was in the well of the conversation pit, in repartee with Dr. Schlegg. Arthur made his way toward them, around the crackling fireplace, past a vocalizing groupie: “Don’t give me that bullshit.”

  Brian was lecturing the balding, bearded Facilitator. “Damn right I was trying to send out a message. I was at the end of my rope. Save me, I was screaming, save me from group therapy. I did one, no more. Everyone had a story that would drive you to suicide. Stop ragging me, doc, I ain’t facilitatable. Bring me an exorcist.”

  Brian did a double take as he looked up and saw Arthur, on his haunches at the rim of the pit. “Jesus. Don’t scare me like that.”

  Schlegg rose. “No more smoking in the room, my friend, or the privilege may be denied altogether.”

  “Fank you, please delete yourself, I have an important guest.”

  “Always a pleasure, Mr. Beauchamp. Please remember the time, we rise early here.” He departed, clapped his hands, and the four circles broke up, though one of the group leaders remained clinched in a hug with a tearful male patient.

  “Crybaby,” Brian said. “If he was a man, he’d kill himself.”

  Arthur descended into the snake pit. “Everyone but me seems to dismiss your aborted suicide as a rather empty gesture. Given that you have spurned all medical aid around here, one could hardly call it an attention-seeking device. I see it as a scream of despair.”

  Reflections from the fire played on Brian’s face as he twisted away to listen to Schlegg, on a dais. “Good, excellent. So let’s have the group leaders up here for final feedback.”

  “Let’s have our own session, Brian.” He took Brian’s elbow, helped him up.

  “Right.” He shook himself vigorously, like a wet dog, as if to shed unwelcome feelings. “How’s your version of the trial working out, Arthur? Has it ended yet?”

  “The jury is out. How has yours ended?”

  They paused at the stoop of the stairs. “Widgeon shot Inspector Grodgins and Constable Marchmont, then he hanged himself out of guilt over having made a fool of me. The literary allusion is subtly entertaining–the death of Widgeon symbolizes the death of this novel. Even my disordered mind could tell, in the course of editing it, that no sane man could have written this. I have failed. Thus, the scream of despair.”

  Crazy but sly, said Wentworth. Cleverly oblique.

  His room was neat, the bed made, the only disarray a dirty ashtray and a spilled carton of Craven A on the desk. Brian slid open the sliding balcony door, took the ashtray outside. His trash can was full of manuscript. The DSM-V of the American Psychiatric Association was open beside the computer, a line in boldface, “Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.”

  Arthur joined him outside, drew out his Peterson bent. “‘I know too much.’” Arthur repeated the phrase, it was playful, had a double edge. “That’s not my line; it’s yours, as quoted to me by Dr. Alison Epstein. You told her you knew who did it. You said the clues were all in your manuscript. What I find interesting about that manuscript, other than its lack of such clues, is that however flawed, with all its jumps and starts, it seems not the output of an insane mind. You were able to express insanity more effectively off the page.”

  Brian made no response, pulled on a sweater. It was a cool night, but the rain was holding off. Arthur itched to turn on Brian’s radio, suppressed his election-result anxiety.

  “I have read enough mysteries to know that an implied contract exists betwe
en the writer and his reader. The writer provides clues as his part of the bargain; they may be clever but must be sufficient. What’s the point of a whodunit if even the cleverest puzzle-solver gives up because the author has broken the contract?”

  He thrust an index finger at Brian’s forehead. “The clues were in here, not in the book. You couldn’t avoid it, could you? The scattering of clues.”

  Brian chain-lit a second cigarette. “What clues?”

  Arthur gestured at the psychiatric texts, the thick pile of Reginav. Gilbert transcripts. “The bulk of those dozen volumes consist of eight shrinks testifying for Crown and defence. Research material for your book, I first thought. But then I realized the transcripts might be an excellent aid to constructing an airtight insanity defence. Just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “A glitch, a witness. Anything that might lead them to you.” Arthur blew two perfect smoke rings. “The twist that comes out of nowhere.”

  Brian’s face was undergoing a metamorphosis, caving in, the crooked smile fading, the spark of combat dulling in his eyes. Arthur set down his pipe. “You showed Caroline some photos from Cuba. May I see your photo library?”

  Brian took a deep drag, looked up in sad contemplation at the black slopes of Hollyburn, the black sky. Then he butted out and led Arthur to his computer.

  The photos were grouped four to a frame. A street salsa band in Havana, old-timers playing dominoes, Hemingway’s hotel room. “Let’s go back to the start,” Arthur said.

  Brian slid a bar to the top of the screen. Summertime. The three adopted children, raven-haired and beautiful, playing on a beach. “Pre-divorce,” Brian said. “I used to get them weekends.”

  There were three dozen more such shots, all date-marked July 21, 2007. Brian was showing emotion as the photos rolled up the screen, phlegm in his throat. “I forgot about these. God. Look at Amelia. She’ll be a ballet dancer.”

  The next grouping showed several lawyers in a Karaoke bar, a Friday night near the end of the marathon Morgan trial. Brian’s defence cronies, a duet miming on a stage, Brovak with an air guitar. Then nothing until a series of shots from an open car window, out of focus, possibly of Brian’s former house. Yes, there was Caroline sitting on the steps with one of the girls.

  Brian caught him glancing at the radio. “You want to hear the results? Last time I turned it on they were head to head.”

  “Scroll down to August 18.”

  “What’s August 18?”

  “The day Morgan and Twenty-one Others went down. Stop there, please, Brian.”

  The same picture Caroline had spotted. The cluck in the suit did indeed look as if he’d just vomited off a dock. He was startled by the flash, a dribble coming from his chin. It was not one of Mr. Justice Darrel Naught’s more noble portraits, though there was little in the jurist’s bland, pasty, oysterlike face worth memorializing.

  After a few moments of absorbing this picture: “Are you my lawyer, Arthur?”

  “No, Brian, I am your disappointed and lamenting friend.”

  “It’s not anywhere close to cut and dried.”

  “Perhaps. I know he pushed at you first. There was a witness, though from a distance too far to make you out, except for the suit and suspenders.”

  Brian retreated outside, lit another cigarette, still staring at the monitor, the ghoulish, soon-to-die Darrel Naught.

  “I can’t believe you simply forgot taking the picture. The writer within remembered the rules, the genre’s demand for the final telling clue.”

  “I need to explain. Not friend to friend, Arthur. Client to lawyer.”

  Proof of a mind well repaired. For Arthur’s part, he didn’t wish to carry the burden of being a compellable witness. “On this condition. You will accept my advice. Advice only. I don’t do trials any more.”

  “Like what advice? To give myself up?”

  “I will simply ask you to make the decision that justice and honour require. And give me no more garbage.”

  Arthur zipped his jacket, retrieved his pipe from the balcony ashtray, and sat down on a padded plastic chair to listen to a halting history of a soul-devouring effort to save a broken marriage, tearful episodes with Caroline, with the children, bouts with booze and drugs as Brian buckled under the stress of the interminable Morgan trial. A final post-sentencing carousal with fellow counsel, a wake for jailed clients.

  He’d found himself driving alone, hungry, his preferred restaurants booked on a Friday night, finally finding a table at Moishe’s Steak and Chops, and there, across the room, smiling to himself but otherwise absorbed in his lamb tenderloin, sat Justice Darrel Naught.

  For no pressing reason–curiosity, a lark–Brian followed him from Moishe’s, saw him enter a parking lot, got in his own car, pursued him over Granville Bridge to Creekside Drive, the False Creek docks. Brian parked on Creekside, hurried to the wharves in time to see Naught making his way to a boathouse known to his firm, Ms. Lefleur its faithful client. Here was food for vengeance, and Brian raced back to the car for his digital camera.

  In the few minutes it took him to drunkenly paw through the mess in his car, he missed the awkward moment between Naught and Joe Johal, then was disappointed to find Naught retreating the way he’d come. Brian hurried down the ramp nonetheless, determined to take a photo to pass among the bar, showing Naught on a naughty midnight ramble. If he hurried, he might at least be rewarded with a record of His Lordship throwing up into the saltchuck.

  But Naught had straightened up in time to see the camera flash. He swung an arm at Brian, clipped him on the shoulder. Brian pushed back, abrupt, heedless, and the judge tripped on a coil of rope, went backwards into the water.

  “He didn’t come up. I panicked. I split.” Brian retreated inside, sat on his bed with a rasping sigh of relief. “It’s out. Maybe I can finally get rid of it.”

  “Haunts you, I imagine.”

  “It wasn’t homicide.”

  “Your flight makes it seem so.” He returned inside, his pursuit not done.

  “Have you ever killed anyone, Arthur?”

  “No, but I imagine it comes easier the second time.”

  Brian was expressionless, all but his eyes, which held tightly to Arthur’s.

  “Poor Astrid, needlessly embarrassed. Had she stuck to her guns she might have saved herself from the ridicule that has branded her a false witness to murder.”

  Brian slumped, his shoulders heaving–with grief, Arthur thought, but it was laughter, morbid and soft. Brian shook his head. “And everyone said I was clueless. I say, Holmes, what else have you got there? Lay it out. ‘Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

  “Your continued insistence that the two murders were connected. Darrel Naught and Whynet-Moir, you said, were connected in an unusual way. ‘You have to dig deep for this one,’ you said. A teaser from the author within. Well, there’s no obvious nexus between those deaths, no common motive, no shady relationship between the two men. The modus was similar, but that’s not what you meant. You were the connection.”

  Brian lay back on the bed in crucifix position.

  “Found in your bottom desk drawer by the estimable Ms. Wu was a crumpled page from the Georgia Strait, October 11 last year, two days before Raffy’s charity dinner. An article with your ex-wife’s beaming countenance, a Q and A interview. A note that she’d be dining Saturday night at the manse of a man you abhor among all others, Rafael Whynet-Moir, who you believe slagged you in court, who sundered your marriage, and who, in your coloured view, was openly flirting with Caroline.”

  Brian broke the silence, still splayed on the bed. “Is this how it should be written? The alleged perp, who for the last month, post-divorce, had been in a disgusting, drunken stupor, wasn’t aware that the author of Sour Memories had been swapped for Cud Brown and switched to a soiree in West Point Grey.”

  “That interview piece was found scrunched up into a little ball, as if waiting to be found. S
creaming to be found. Here I am, another clue. Outwit me, reader, dare guess before the final chapter that the assailant is none other than the author himself.”

  Brian snorted, half laughter, half grunt of appreciation. “That’s the twist, Arthur.” He sat up, looked hard at him, as if assessing him, measuring the extent of his disapproval, his disgust, his capacity for forgiveness. “Thank God you’re not a priest, Arthur, you’d be imploring me to turn myself in and praying for my soul. No, I’m in safer hands with Arthur Beauchamp than with the Almighty. The law extends no privilege of silence to the confessional. But confession seals every lawyer’s lips.”

  Arthur understood then that Brian needed catharsis, was consumed by a need to share a searing, gut-clenching secret that had driven him beyond nervous breakdown, beyond the borders of sanity. An irresistible need to escape reality had led to addiction, to cocaine-induced delirium. Now, finally, safely, he could expel the demons.

  Brian gained his feet once again, checked the hallway, kicked a slipper under the door as a wedge. He again began to pace, to the balcony and back, smoking, defying house rules. “Okay, here is how it should have been written. The revelatory final chapter. Beset by jealousy, unable to sleep, Pomeroy paced and smoked and drank through the night. If indeed the judge and the ex were balling each other–such were the twisted thought processes of this pizzled perp–the divorce decree must be quashed and the judge suspended from office until inquiries are complete.”

  He was performing, like the old Pomeroy, loquacious, amorally sardonic. “Armed with his faithful camera, he pulls up a few houses from 2 Lighthouse Lane in his Toyota Tercel. It is nigh on three o’clock as he vaults the stone wall, steals to the back of the house. His initial investigative process will involve checking for Caroline’s car. Is it on the street? No. In the driveway? No. Perhaps in the garage. But something was confusing about this scene, lights were on behind the house–that would be the maid’s room, of course–and someone in a dressing gown was carrying a chair to the deck railing and boosting himself up onto it.” He had two cigarettes on the go now, a pace of a pack an hour.