The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “In anticipation,” Dorkin said.

  Meade shrugged.

  “You don’t think that his sentence might be commuted?” Dorkin said.

  “I think it’s very unlikely,” Meade said.

  “So do I.”

  Meade glanced at his watch.

  “Look,” he said. “Don’t take it too hard. You did everything you could have been expected to do. And a good deal more. Now it’s over. It isn’t your affair any more. I suggested to you once before that a lawyer is like a doctor. Some of his patients are going to die, and as a professional that is something he just has to learn to accept. You can’t take things too much to heart.”

  “No,” Dorkin said, “I suppose not.”

  “Terrible things are going on in Europe, you know. The Germans apparently have murdered millions of people, more than anyone ever imagined. This is small stuff by comparison. Anyway, I’m afraid I have to go. Before you go back to Utopia, I think you should take a week’s leave. I’ll get onto Utopia and fix it up. Go to Montreal. Get right out of it. Or somewhere along the shore. It’s still nice this time of year.”

  “Thank you,” Dorkin said. “I may do that.”

  “Consider it an order,” Meade said. “As well as a reward. I’ll fix it up, and you can pick up the papers at the office in Fredericton on Monday morning.”

  He went out, leaving the door open behind him, and Dorkin continued to sit. He wondered if the powers that be in the army had agreed to his request to defend Williams because they felt certain he would lose. And he reflected that what determined whether or not someone was going to hang didn’t really depend on whether or not he was guilty. It depended on what kind of prosecutor he faced and what kind of defence he had managed to obtain. Even without someone as charismatic and unscrupulous as Whidden, it seemed to him that the odds were all on the side of the prosecution. And thinking of Whidden, he found himself remembering Swift’s definition of lawyers. “A race of men bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that black is white and white is black, according as they are paid.”

  Anyway, he told himself, he now didn’t need to give a shit, and he was aware of a gathering, guilty sense of relief. It was out of his hands. He couldn’t be responsible any longer even if he wanted to.

  After a while, the janitor came to the door.

  “Are you planning to be much longer, sir?” he asked. “I’m wondering what I should be doing about locking up.”

  “It’s all right,” Dorkin said. “I’m going now. Sorry if I held you up.”

  He put on his raincoat, picked up his case, and went down the hall to the back door. It was still raining, and the path out to the sidewalk was covered with sodden leaves. Everyone had gone home except for one little cluster of four men. There was an old church across the street from the jail. Its front door was seven or eight feet above the ground with a little porch and two flights of steps set against the wall, and the men were sheltering under them in the shadows, drinking probably, and having one last look.

  Dorkin had decided that for tonight anyway he would say nothing to Williams about his impending discharge from the army, nor about his own removal from the case. Tomorrow would be time enough. Meanwhile, he could soothe him with talk of an appeal— which there still could be even if he were not in charge of it.

  He had to ring at the door of the jail and was let in by Cronk, who made him wait while he went for Carvell. Dorkin sensed at once that something was wrong.

  “He’s had some kind of breakdown,” Carvell said when he ar-rived from the cells. “He walked back here all right, but when he got to his cell he collapsed.”

  The guardian Mountie in his red coat was standing by the open door of the cell. Inside, Williams was lying curled up on his bunk, his knees against his chin, facing the wall. They had covered him with a heavy blanket, but he was shivering and making small whimpering noises like an animal.

  “I’ve sent for the doctor,” Carvell said. “Maybe he can give him something that will make him sleep. That minister he’s been seeing—Reverend Limus or whatever his name is—has been here, but I didn’t see that he was likely to do any good, so I told him to come back tomorrow. He might help then.”

  “There’s nothing I can do?” Dorkin asked.

  “No,” Carvell said. “I don’t think so.”

  On the bed, the whimpering gave way to a strange low hooting sound, and the shivering became more violent. Dorkin turned away and walked back down the line of cells to Carvell’s office and sat down. He felt the terrifying depression that had assailed him earlier beginning again to gather, and he set himself to keep it at bay. He had never been someone who went to pieces. It was the first time that he had ever even thought of such a possibility.

  Half an hour later, when the doctor had come and gone, having given Williams a small advance on oblivion, Dorkin was let out the front door into the rain by Henry Cronk. It was now well after midnight. The Mounties’ car was back in their yard, and there was only one small light burning in the office. Except for those in the jail, it was the only light visible anywhere, and there was no sound except the rain, nothing but a dank silence that made the town seem less something that humans had made than an extension of some primal forest. The little cluster of men who had been loitering under the steps of the church were gone, but as Dorkin descended to the side-walk what he had taken to be merely a darker corner of the darkness there moved, and the figure of a man emerged and came towards him, his shoes squelching through the wet leaves on the street. He was wearing an old black raincoat and a cloth cap. A moment before his face came into the lights from the jail, Dorkin recognized the high-footing drunkard’s walk as that of John Maclean.

  “Wet night,” Maclean said.

  “Hello, John,” Dorkin said. “Yes, it is.”

  “Sorry I never got hold of you again,” Maclean said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I didn’t want you to think I just ran off with your money.”

  “It’s all right. I understand.”

  “Look,” Maclean said, “is there somewhere dry we can get to? I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  Dorkin hesitated. He didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s my car. We can talk there.”

  “You look down,” Maclean said.

  “I am.”

  “Little snort would do you good.”

  “Maybe.”

  He unlocked the car, and they got in. Maclean had a dank smell like that of a wet dog. He fished out of an inside pocket a packet of Turret cigarette tobacco and set about carefully rolling himself a smoke.

  “You don’t happen to be carrying any tailor-mades?” he asked.

  “No,” Dorkin said. “I don’t smoke.”

  “I remember. I just thought maybe. Anyhow, I wanted to tell you what happened. This guy came to see me a few days after we talked.”

  “Oh? What guy?”

  “I don’t know. He gave me a name, but I didn’t catch it. I saw him in court. Behind Whidden and those other guys. Anyhow, he said he worked for the attorney-general or somebody like that, and he told me that I was a witness for the prosecution and that you had no right to be talking to me. He said I could find myself in serious trouble if I let you interfere with what I was going to say in court. I didn’t like the sound of that much. I didn’t want to let you down, but guys like me, you know, they can do anything they want to with. I can’t afford any lawyers.”

  “It’s okay,” Dorkin said.

  “I found out what you wanted to know about Coile. Later on, when I heard the Mounties had been asking about it too, I figured them or Carvell would have told you, but I guess they didn’t.”

  “No. They didn’t tell Carvell either.”

  “Well,” Maclean said. “That’s too bad.”

  “Yes. But it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Do you think one of Coile’s pals could have done it for
him?”

  “Killed the girl? Don’t think so. Doesn’t seem to me to make sense.”

  “You didn’t hear anything about Coile messing around with her?”

  “A lot of talk. Especially about the older sister. Just talk, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “You didn’t hear anything about who may have shot at Louie Rosen?”

  “No. Not a word. I’d tell you if I had. Nobody seems to know anything. Lots of rumours though.”

  “Such as?”

  “Louie knew too much about somebody and was telling you what he knew. But also that he’d been sharp with too many people too often, and that day he just happened to drive by one of them when he had a gun with him.”

  “Could be,” Dorkin said.

  He looked at his watch.

  “While I was asking around about things,” Maclean said, “I found out something else. Something sort of funny, made me wonder.”

  “Oh?” Dorkin said.

  “It was back in the spring. Late May, maybe June, this guy I was talking to didn’t remember exactly. In the woods back of The Silver Dollar. Nights they have dances, there’s a lot of drinking goes on there. People from the dance. And guys who are just around out there to drink and fight, you know. And sometimes some of the boys go out on the chance of picking up a drink. Or maybe just sit around and listen to the music.”

  “Or roll somebody who’s had too much?” Dorkin said.

  “Well, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t go in for that stuff. But I’ve been rolled once or twice myself. Anyhow. This guy I was talking to went back into the woods a ways to take a leak, and he was standing there when this guy came sneaking along a path and was right on top of him before either of them saw the other. Then this guy looked as if he’d been caught with his hand in a store till and went back off the way he came. He was all dressed up in bib overalls and an old jacket and a railroad cap pulled right down to his eyes.You’ll never guess who it was.”

  “Daniel Coile?”

  “No, that minister Clemens. Very peculiar.”

  Dorkin’s heart flipped over.

  “Yes,” he said. “Very peculiar. Was your friend sure?”

  “Positive. He knew Clemens to see all right, and Clemens was right on top of him before he realized he was there.”

  “What did your friend think Clemens was doing out there?”

  “No way to know for sure. But we think he was out there looking at the girls. There’s a lot of screwing goes on out there. I’ve heard a couple of the girls who are regulars at the dances don’t do it just for the fun of it, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sarah Coile?”

  “No, I never heard anything about her. I don’t want to go into names. It doesn’t make any difference who. But anyway that night Clemens said he saw your soldier, he may have been out in the woods looking life over instead of talking about God to old Salcher and his crazy wife. Might even have been doing more than just look at the merchandise.”

  “Did your friend ever see him out there again?”

  “No. Just that one time. And no one else saw him that I know of. But it stands to reason that if he was out there once all dressed up like that, he’d be out there again, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. Your friend didn’t follow him?”

  “No. No reason to. Didn’t matter to him what Clemens was doing. Or where he went. But I thought about that, and I’ll bet you that what he was doing was driving up to the Salcher place and leaving his car there and sneaking down through the woods.”

  “What else have you heard about Clemens?”

  “Nothing. I never even heard this until I started asking around about the other stuff. Some of the boys joked for a couple of weeks about Clemens out there all dressed up looking at what he couldn’t get at home, then they all forgot about it.”

  Dorkin sat listening to the rain on the roof of the car, trying to think it out. Maclean opened the window a crack and threw his cigarette butt out and immediately started rolling another.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “that’s the news. I thought you might be interested. But it may be too late to do much good now.”

  “Yes,” Dorkin said. “Maybe. But I’m glad you told me about it.”

  “Makes you wonder a little about that evidence Clemens gave in court. About the time he said he saw your soldier and all that.”

  “Yes,” Dorkin said, “it does.”

  Maclean finished rolling his cigarette and lit it.

  “It wouldn’t be worth the price of a little pony of rum, would it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Dorkin said. “Sure.”

  He fished out his billfold and took out a five, then thought, and added another.

  “Well, now,” Maclean said. “You don’t need to do that. You paid me once before and never got anything for it.”

  “It’s okay,” Dorkin said.

  “Well, I ain’t going to argue. If you’re going down back of the armoury, maybe you wouldn’t mind just letting me off there. There’s a place there where I think I may be able to get fixed up before morning.”

  In the parade square, as he was getting out, Maclean said, “Just one thing. I didn’t mention any names, and I don’t think this guy I talked to about Clemens would want to be talking to Mounties or anything like that.”

  “He won’t,” Dorkin said. “I don’t know his name, and I’m not going to ask.”

  “I don’t want to have to talk to any Mounties either.”

  “It’s okay. There won’t be any Mounties.”

  “Good,” Maclean said.

  He winked and closed the door, and Dorkin watched him walking down the alley in the rain, close into the shadows under the walls of the houses like a stray cat.

  “It certainly does make you wonder,” Carvell said. “But it’s not very much to go on.”

  He sat with his elbows on the desk, smoking a cigarette.

  It was nine o’clock the morning after the trial. Dorkin had been awake most of the night. Now he was sitting across from Carvell in the wooden armchair that he had come by habit to sit in over the weeks.

  “We don’t even know if he was in the woods that night,” Carvell said.

  “I think he was,” Dorkin said. “Alden Bartlett told me that he saw Sarah Coile going along Broad Street in the middle of the afternoon on July 1 on her way to Vinny Page’s. The parade had been over for two hours or more by then, and none of her friends that I talked to had any idea where she was in the early part of that afternoon. I suspect she had been to see Clemens. I suspect that he was the father of her child, and I suspect that she made him feel threatened enough that he decided to get rid of her.”

  “It’s a house of cards,” Carvell said.

  “I don’t think so. Not this time. And whatever she and Clemens said, it also made her uneasy enough that she went about setting Williams up to think that he was the father of her child.”

  “You were wrong about Coile.”

  “Half wrong. I talked to his sister-in-law, Fern MacMillan, and her husband, and they told me that Coile was messing around with the girls. That’s why the older sister left.”

  “Could be,” Carvell said. “But suppose Clemens did knock her up and then murder her, why on earth would he attract attention to himself by coming forward as a witness?”

  “He may have felt that he was in more danger than we know. If Williams were convicted, that would be an end to it. And I don’t think that Williams would have been convicted if it hadn’t been for his testimony. Do you?”

  Carvell considered.

  “Possibly not. But he wouldn’t know that.”

  “But he would. If he were the murderer, he would know better than anyone else how thin the case against Williams was.”

  “It would still be risky stuff,” Carvell said. “He had no way of being sure of what the police knew and whether what he was telling them was going to fit.”

  “But he covered himself. He never said it was Williams. If some-thin
g happened to prove that it couldn’t have been Williams, or Sarah either, he couldn’t have been accused of anything more than having made an honest mistake. It wasn’t as if he’d said that he’d talked to them or met them face to face. It was a very adroit lie, and all the vaguenesses he built into it only made it that much more convincing to the jury.”

  Carvell smoked and studied the day beyond the barred windows. The rain had ended overnight, and it was a bright, limpid morning, full of the sounds of Saturday turmoil in a country town— of the normal world flooding back.

  “I’ll tell you a tale out of school,” Carvell said. “Hooper has always been sceptical of Clemens’s evidence, but he wasn’t going to break ranks. You know what the Mounties are like.”

  “Would he talk to me?” Dorkin asked.

  “He might.”

  “What about Drost?”

  “Drost isn’t here. He left for Fredericton this morning. He’s being transferred to Ottawa. He only stayed on because of the trial. For the time being, Hooper’s in charge. I don’t think he’d go very far in bucking the brass, but at least there’s no one on the spot to tell him what to do.”

  “Their car’s in the yard,” he said. “I’ll get him to come over here, so he won’t have to worry about MacDougal.”

  Dorkin let Carvell do the talking, and Hooper sat, his legs crossed, his cap with its yellow band and its buffalo badge perched on his knee. He listened without comment or question, every now and then eyeing Dorkin warily with his guileless blue eyes. When Carvell had finished, he studied the polished toes of his boots.

  “We’re not trying to get you in hot water,” Carvell said. “But there are some real questions about all this. You’ve had some doubts yourself.”