“Got him off a warehouse break-in,” I told Ophelia. “That encouraged him to do it again.”
We found a free table near one at which a woman was softly crying, her incarcerated boyfriend showing annoyance that she refused to let him touch her. Among the other lawyers in the hall were Harry Fan, infamous for his baffling, impenetrable submissions, and Larry Hill, beloved for his stirring, alcohol-fuelled courtroom orations. He’d just dismissed a client and was awaiting another; while the guards were looking elsewhere, he grinned at me and sneaked a drink from a flask.
Too many of Vancouver’s best criminal counsel were problem drinkers in those days – maybe a majority. That made a damning statement about the stresses of this rarefied, ill-regarded area of practice. I had sworn (believe it or not) never to fall victim to the curse of drink, though I tied one on occasionally to signal I was one of the guys.
As Swift shuffled to our table – he was shackled but not cuffed – his dark eyes were firmly, unwaveringly fixed on me. Decorating one of them was a purple bruise, and welts appeared elsewhere on his face and arms, badges likely earned within these brutal walls. He seemed taller than in the news photos I’d seen, and stringier. His hair was in handsome braids that hung well below his shoulders.
He declined my hand as he sat. Affronted, I said, “Do you know who I am?”
“Arthur Beauchamp.” Astonishingly, he pronounced my surname correctly. “Why are you here?” he asked.
“Because I was asked by the Legal Aid Society to represent you. This is Ophelia Moore, also from my office. My junior.” I felt silly calling her that.
“Hello, Gabriel.” Her big, dimpled smile.
He frowned as he studied her, as if taking exception to the brightness of her lipstick, if not her blue eyes and blond tresses. He brushed from his forehead strands of his own jet-black hair, then dismissed her as irrelevant to the discussion. “Why would you want to be my lawyer?”
A good question. Why would I want to represent this impolite young brave with his pointed refusal of a hand extended? This jail alone was full of the poor and the desperate who would weep their thanks for legal aid from the up-and-comer Beauchamp.
“I haven’t asked to be your lawyer, Gabriel. But you unquestionably need a lawyer. You are charged with a capital crime.”
“I turned down Harry Rankin. Why would I choose you instead?”
I felt like telling him there was no point in holding out for Clarence Darrow, as he was no longer of this earth. “If you propose to defend yourself, Gabriel, you will have a fool for a client. Trite but true.”
“I won’t be gagged by an attorney. I intend to speak with my own tongue.”
I was about to say adieu and rise, but pride held me back. I was not going to walk out like a chump, insulted, defeated. “And what would you talk about with your own tongue?”
“The colonial structures of our supposedly free society, the rampant racism, the victimization of the poor.”
Ophelia couldn’t hide her astonishment but I was prepared for this. “Then it will be a judge who will gag you, Gabriel. The prosecutor is Cyrus Smythe-Baldwin, the most able counsel of the West Coast bar. You will be meat for his grinder. Your political rhetoric will win you no friends on the jury, which will surely convict. You will then be free to declaim against the ills of our society until you are led to the gallows.”
Gabriel smiled slightly at this, maybe cynically, maybe in appreciation of my bluntness. “People around here say you’re a straight shooter. But you’ve never defended a murder.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“How many jury trials have you done?”
“Two.”
“Did you win either?”
“The second.” I didn’t tell him they were two-bit offences: an illegal firearm, drug possession.
The warehouse thief, my fan, was parting ways with his mother. He called out to Gabriel, “You got the best throat on the coast, man, and he don’t charge an arm and a leg.”
Gabriel studied me again. “You seem to have a high consumer rating in here, Mr. Beauchamp.”
“Call me Arthur, as you might an equal, because right now I stand in no other relation to you. I am not your lawyer. You are free to reject my services, and I can give you a substantial reason to do so. Dermot Mulligan was my professor. He instilled in me a love of the Greek playwrights and the Roman poets. He was a great man – a little eccentric, sure, as brilliant people often are – but he was like a god to me.”
Gabriel lost his stubborn, sardonic expression, and his lips trembled. I looked away, uncomfortable, and saw the woman who’d been sobbing at the next table slip something under it, a white packet.
Gabriel gingerly touched a bruise. Ophelia spoke softly. “Were you assaulted in here, Gabriel?”
He seemed not to hear that, still absorbed in my curt speech. Then a perplexed look. “Assaulted in here?” He swung an arm about. “Can you see how many brothers are in this joint?”
Most of the inmates there were Native. I had got so used to their disproportionate presence in the criminal system that I’d put on blinders against that uncomfortable reality.
“I’m in debt to Sergeant Knepp for this.” Gabriel pointed to his bruised eye. “We have a bad history.” He pulled up his shirt: a raised yellow mass on his left side below the ribs. “Constable Jettles felt he had to chime in as an act of solidarity, but he only kicked me once.”
“Where did this happen?”
“In the cells. No witnesses.” There was a moment in which he was obviously struggling to contain himself, all his face muscles tightening. I sensed he had a short fuse and knew it, knew he had to avoid igniting it. A deep breath. “I got my licks in.” He splayed his fingers. His knuckles were bruised and scraped.
He steadied himself, getting a fix on me based on his new information. “Arthur … Yeah, it comes back. Dermot mentioned you a few times. He was pissed off at you. You threw your life away by choosing law over literature.” A sudden smile, more proof of a mercurial temperament. “Wish you’d gone to Oxford instead, Arthur?”
“Cambridge.”
“If Dr. Mulligan was your god, what do you think he was to me?”
“I’d hesitate to say.”
He nodded, thoughtful, solemn. “You’re wondering if I murdered him.” His gesture, an expansive arc with his hand, took in Ophelia as well.
“I’m not ready to ask you that.”
“How would you go about defending me?”
“By forbidding you to talk about this case with anyone but Ophelia and me, including Jim Brady and Celia. She is your mother?”
“Yes.” He was an only child, he said, rare in an era of large families. Celia was a traditional artist in fabric. His father, Bill, had taken to drink, embittered after losing a leg in a logging accident. Both were victims of what he termed “residential school syndrome,” a phrase I’d not heard before.
“Jim Brady … he’s the union fellow?”
“Organizer with Mine, Mill, Smelter. An activist. A teacher. A man I trust.”
“Because he’s also Native?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you say anything to the police?”
“I told those lying shits to fuck themselves.” Another shift, a fierce look, his eyes sparking.
“The next thing I would do is photograph your injuries.”
On Pappas’s advice I always carried a small flash camera in my briefcase, and I quickly took shots of Gabriel from different angles. He raised his shirt and I clicked at the damage allegedly done by Constable Jettles’s boot. The flashes aroused one of the patrolling guards from his reveries, and he descended on us, hot-faced, stammering, demanding that the camera be surrendered to him.
“If you touch this camera,” I said, “I will have you charged with obstructing justice.”
“Hey, Screwloose,” called a grizzled inmate. “You know who you’re tangling asses with? That’s Arthur Beauchamp, the best young throat in town.” A kindly
review, given I’d never met him.
The guard stilled his reaching hand. “I’m taking this up with the deputy warden.”
“Observe the injuries my client has suffered. If you’d like to be called as a witness, I’ll arrange it.”
The camera went back into my briefcase. The guard went back to his duties, glaring at the laughing inmates. Gabriel pursed his lips, presumably reflecting on the interaction but saying nothing about my use of the proprietary phrase “my client.” Visiting time was ending, the room emptying, prisoners being returned to their cells for the pre-dinner count.
“Today is Wednesday. I’ll return on the weekend.”
“Can you bring me some reading material?”
“In particular?”
“Woodcock’s Anarchism. Camus’s Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. The new collection by I.F. Stone. The latest Monthly Review.” The last I recognized as a dense Marxist publication. The Mulligans’ neighbour, Thelma McLean, had recalled him “lazing about on their porch with a book.” Lazing seemed hardly appropriate. This was a complex fellow; I could see why Dermot Mulligan was attracted to him.
Somehow, without formal words of agreement, we both understood, Gabriel and I, that I was his lawyer now. At least for the time being.
This time he shook my hand.
From “Where the Squamish River Flows,” A Thirst for Justice, © W. Chance
THUS THE YOUNG LEGAL EAGLE (a befitting descriptor for the beak-nosed barrister) found himself, at twenty-five, taking on a challenge as formidable as any faced by his heroes – such masters of the craft as Winnipeg’s Harry Walsh, Toronto’s Joe Sedgwick, Vancouver’s Angelo Branca, and, not least among them, the eloquent Cyrus Smythe-Baldwin, who would be playing an unaccustomed role this time, as the attorney general’s hired gun.
Beauchamp was apprehensive but thrilled – even a bit full of himself – as on the drive back to Vancouver he drank in the applause from Ophelia Moore over his clever handling of his new client. Having silenced the guard who tried to confiscate his Kodak, Beauchamp had quickly cut through prison red tape: in ten minutes Gabriel Swift was in the infirmary having his injuries looked at by the prison doctor.
Though Beauchamp found Swift’s brashness hard to take, he’d been impressed by his intellect, and in the end had few qualms about representing him. He regretted not pursuing Swift’s rhetorical question, “If Dr. Mulligan was your god, what do you think he was to me?” Someone much admired was the implication, and that comforted Beauchamp and persuaded him Gabriel would be worthy of his best efforts.
He’d been taken aback to learn that Dr. Mulligan had shared confidences about him with Swift, even to the point of declaring he’d “thrown his life away” by choosing law over literature. It was an issue Beauchamp himself had been working through, incessantly. He was only too aware that if he bungled the case it was his client’s life that might be thrown away, lost to the hangman. This case was to provide the most challenging moments of his young career, and – though he might not have realized it – would determine whether he’d chosen his lifework well or badly … or even disastrously.
It was getting on to rush hour as his VW took them into the turmoil of Kingsway, the neon-lit diagonal scar that runs from the bowels of Burnaby to downtown Vancouver. Notwithstanding the day’s lateness, Beauchamp and Moore intended to return to the office and their Dictaphones, to transcribe their notes. But a mischance on Kingsway, on the two-mile motel strip, changed these plans …
TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 1962
I had yet to encounter a green light as my Bug toiled up that garish avenue, and the congestion was compounded by an accident ahead, but Chance is not wrong that I was very pleased with myself, savouring Ophelia’s compliments – “That guy was right, you are the slickest” – while pretending to shrug them off with modest smiles.
As far as I could tell, the case against Gabriel seemed flimsy: no body, no motive, no indicia to put him at the scene, and nothing to rebut suicide. So weak was the case that I did not discount the prospect of applying for bail, though its granting was almost unheard of in capital cases. No decision would be made until I saw the Crown particulars.
But something was niggling at me, something I’d done or hadn’t done, something critical. Maybe Ophelia’s exposed knees were distracting me.
“Am I missing something?” she said. “You never asked him if he did it, even though he gave you an opening.”
“A counsel ought not to take his client’s statement until he has received the Crown’s version. If asked too early, it might limit options.” Doubtless I didn’t use those precise words, but the young Beauchamp did have a tendency to pontificate. I can hear myself – vain, teacherish, telling this newly called counsel how the pros do it.
“Something bothers me.” My admirer hesitated, as if finding the matter awkward.
“Please expound, Mrs. Moore.” I still couldn’t bring myself to call her by her given name.
“You don’t think it was odd that he turned down Harry Rankin? For you?”
I felt the air hiss from the ears of my distended head. “What do you read from that?”
“He knows he can’t manipulate a top counsel, but maybe he thinks he can get around you.”
I braked for yet another red light and looked at her. She seemed to flinch at her own brazenness and, as if in contrition, placed her hand on mine as it clutched the gear knob, and squeezed. Could this be the beginning of something? Spartacus was billed at the North Van Drive-in. Did I dare suggest we catch it?
Suddenly the engine coughed and died. I thought at first I’d taken it out of gear but then realized that what I hadn’t done (that was the worry niggling at me) was stop for gas. Beetles of that vintage had no fuel gauges, only a reserve tank opened by bunting a little lever with one’s foot. And I’d forgotten I’d already done that, forgotten I was running on reserve.
So we have a picture of the slick mouthpiece looking about wildly for a gas station as traffic clogs up behind him, finally having to ask Ophelia to take the wheel while he pushed. Mercifully, a pedestrian helped me ease it into the parking lot of the Lotus Land Motor Hotel, which boasted three and a half suspect stars and a beer parlour.
“Fuck it, then,” Ophelia said. “Fuck going to the office.”
Her casual use of the forbidden word caused me an erotic shiver. This wasn’t the way that ladies, in my experience, talked. (Today I would hardly notice.)
“Drink sound good?”
Drink sounded ear-splittingly good. A dense haze of smoke greeted us as we entered by the door marked “Ladies and Escorts” – beer parlours were segregated in those days, not so much to protect the allegedly fragile other sex from freebooting males but to protect the allegedly dominant sex from the wiles of women on the prowl. I remember that the room was horribly decorated with plastic palm trees and paint-peeling depictions of beach scenes.
We found a table away from the din of a speaker. Ophelia flagged down a waiter, and soon four glasses of the boisson de la maison – draft beer – were on the table.
During the first hour or so I recall succumbing to Ophelia’s questioning about my provenance and, my tongue loosened, telling her of my sequestered childhood, evenings spent in the frigid silence of a loveless home, days in the conservative confines of St. Andrew’s Boys’ School, skipping grades, graduating at fifteen, lacking friends of a similar age. Mine, I confessed, was a little, closed-in world, without adventure. I suffered from debilitating shyness.
I sensed Ophelia was wondering, though she was too kind to express it, whether this character had ever been laid. Again I caught a tantalizing view of an armpit not shaved – a statement of independence, I assumed, of earthiness.
I carried on at doubtless boring length (because she demanded being briefed on the life thrown away) about my study of the ancient classics, the glories of Greek and Roman culture. At some point, I was reminded later, I began loudly spouting the aphorisms of Publilius Syrus (“We desire nothing
so much as what we ought not to have”). And I was getting very loud, talking over Elvis as he begged for the safety of his blue suede shoes. Soon my theatrics were attracting applause from neighbouring tables. It was as if I had shed my carapace and the jovial inner showman had emerged.
I dimly remember people buying us rounds. I remember a pitcher appearing on our beer-slopped terrycloth table cover, but I don’t remember it disappearing. Aside from a couple of trips to the men’s, the rest is blank, though Ophelia later filled in some gaps – not all – and, more recently, responded to Wentworth Chance’s indelicate sleuthing with further details.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25, 1962
I was Mars and she Venus, and we were hot and slippery with rut and sweat, nakedly entwined upon the springy heights of Olympus. Hungrily she drew my erect phallus toward her mouth, but I was fearful of entering there; I was unversed at this – it was unnatural, long forbidden by codified law. Then a proxy orifice blossomed open, a thick-tufted nest to hide in …
(That I remember that dream speaks not just to its intensity but also to the frequency with which versions of it have repeated over the years, like a bad X-rated film.)
I woke up with not just an erection but a rock-crusher of a hangover, and with no immediate sense of where I was or what day it was, or even the season of the year. An obscene racket from an alarm clock beside my bed announced it was just after eight-thirty, presumably in the morning. I concluded I was in the bedroom of my flat. What wasn’t coming back, even fuzzily, was how I’d got there. My single bed was in utter disarray, its sheets on the floor, and I was naked, my boxer shorts hanging, for no apparent reason, on my doorknob.
I pulled them on, staggered out to the shared bathroom for what seemed an interminable pour. My resonating groans of urinary relief must have alerted my hallway neighbour, Ira Lavitch, a beatnik, a coffeehouse impresario. His lazy drawl: “You hanging in there okay, my good man? Hope you didn’t use all the hot water.” There was a damp bath towel on the rack – one of mine – but I had no memory of using the shower during the night.
I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel Page 3
