I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel

by William Deverell

  Dooley glances at my offerings with shrugging indifference. “Nice collection. The kohlrabi ought to win.”

  “I always like to throw in a few oddballs for the A.O.V.” Any other vegetable. “Not in it for the competition, of course.”

  “Of course not, Arthur.”

  “Answering the call of the community, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Sharing this fine island tradition with our neighbours in relaxed conviviality.”

  “As I see it, we’re educators. Grow local, buy local, eat local.”

  A noble cause that discredits my platitudinous twaddle. “Absolutely. Encourage others to grow their own healthy food.”

  “I’m not one to count ribbons,” Doc says. “Educate, spread the organic word.”

  I nod vigorously. “Amen.” The Mabel Orfmeister is the last thing on my mind.

  From “Where the Squamish River Flows,” A Thirst for Justice, © W. Chance

  BEAUCHAMP WENT INTO TRAINING in the final weeks before the trial, much as a young contender might in preparing for a match against the heavyweight champ. Having traded the many temptations of downtown for the relaxed ambience of Kitsilano (a neighbourhood soon to become an international hub of the psychedelic sixties), he spent his free time taking long beach walks and swimming and rowing, toning up his body while seeking to relax so he would not come into court tight and mentally stressed.

  He even managed to abstain from drink during that time, and consequently was seeing less of his cocktail companion Hubbell Meyerson. With Ira Lavitch gone and Beauchamp’s romance (if we dare call it that) with Ms. Moore having collapsed under the weight of sheer implausibility, he felt almost friendless. Frequent visits to Oakalla Prison Farm helped make up that deficit: long sessions with his client, lively debates about art, history – especially the heroic, tragic life of Louis Riel – current politics, and even occasionally about the case.

  Worries constantly broke through during Beauchamp’s training regime, a sense he wasn’t competent for the task ahead. The elaborate effort to frame Swift had gone forward, he believed, because Knepp and his intimates regarded the young counsel as green, naïve, credulous. They wouldn’t have dared such a game against Harry Rankin.

  Legal historians have already noted the case’s significance as a clash between the reigning champ, Smythe-Baldwin, and the young upstart who would one day wear his mantle.* There has been much written as well about the controversial role played by the judge, Anthony Montague Hammersmith, the former city prosecutor, a man of acerbic temper and caustic tongue.

  It is fortunate indeed that a transcript of the trial survived Beauchamp’s efforts (often alcohol-fuelled) to turf out many of his early records. For some reason he kept his copy – indeed, the entire file – papers that ultimately made their way to the UBC Law Library’s archives. (The cross of Doug Wall is now regarded as a classic and is recommended reading in criminal practice seminars.)

  Very well. The deck has been stacked and the cards have been played, so let us move smartly toward the scene of combat, up the main steps between the impassive stone lions that guard the doors of 800 West Georgia Street …

  * Clausen and Shortt, Take No Prisoners: The Life of Cyrus Smythe-Baldwin (1989).

  MONDAY, JULY 30, 1962

  I’d hesitate to say how many thousands of times in my fifty-plus years of practice I’ve walked up those hundred-year-old steps. Once, before Vancouver took off skyward, you could see outlined against the horizon the crouching lions of the North Shore that inspired their stone-faced brethren. The courthouse had the stolid British Empire look that was expected of Francis Rattenbury’s designs, but it served its purposes perfectly well, its high-ceilinged carpeted corridors and oak-panelled rooms providing a proper gravitas, a sense that justice is serious business. (Sadly, a glass and concrete greenhouse has since replaced it – Arthur Erickson’s flighty view of a house of justice – and the Vancouver Art Gallery now occupies the old building, awkwardly, unsuited to its ponderous ambience. But don’t let me go on …)

  Ophelia was already in the rotunda when I entered, beckoning me as she joined a few others studying the posted dockets. Until now the name of the judge seconded to this trial had been a secret of the registrar and the Chief Justice. I was praying for a liberal.

  “Justice Hammersmith,” Ophelia said, as I drew up behind her. “Isn’t he the one they call The Hammer?”

  I groaned. The former city prosecutor was an acid-tongued conservative and, worse, gifted with an intelligence rare on the bench, at least among the many failed politicians awarded judgeships as consolation prizes. At least he wasn’t one of the dullards who barely listened to the evidence and convicted blindly. His charges to the jury were constructed to survive the Appeal Court, and most did.

  I went directly to the gentlemen’s changing room and gowned up, shrugging into a robe that gave evidence of previous sweaty battles, old stains, and repairs – it was a hand-me-down from a retiring barrister. This was Long Vacation, as the midsummer months were called, and only a few lawyers were at their lockers, mostly doing continuations. I exited through the barristers’ lounge, earned good-luck wishes from a few colleagues working out a plea deal.

  I smilingly greeted the many standing in the hall outside the assize court. They were on the jury panel, dutiful citizens summoned from the voters’ list, waiting to be escorted into the courtroom. I didn’t see many non-Caucasian faces there.

  The court was a high-ceilinged chamber with stained glass doors and windows and cascading daises in darkly varnished oak. The judge overlooked the court clerk and official reporter and, a few steps below, Crown and defence lawyers at their adjoining tables. A raised prisoner’s dock was the room’s centrepiece. For the spectators, rows of seats at the back and a gallery above. To the right was the witness box; behind it, the press table. To the left was the jury box, with its twelve uncomfortable chairs.

  As I headed up the centre aisle I was aware of a hushed tension, reporters nudging each other. The clerk, a straight-backed old boy, seemed about to take flight; his elbows were out like vestigial wings, but he remained glued to his chair. Smitty and Lukey were watching him struggle, glancing occasionally at Ophelia.

  I saw what the problem was. Ophelia was wearing trousers. Black, sedate, formal, but trousers nonetheless – unheard of in those days. I felt a little aggrieved that she’d chosen this ticklish murder case to push the boundaries.

  Alerted to the emergence of his Lordship from his chambers, the clerk was propelled upwards as if on a pogo stick. “Order in court!” Anthony Montague Hammersmith in his crimson-enhanced robe stepped stiff-legged from the chambers door and mounted the steps. A halo of russet hair around a bald dome, manicured moustache, half-moon reading glasses that made him look four-eyed.

  “I have a sense, Mr. Clerk, that someone is missing.” Sardonic off the bat.

  The clerk looked confused and glanced again at Ophelia, as if she might in some sense be the one missing. Then he realized that the centrepiece of this arraignment was absent.

  “Bring up the prisoner,” he bawled, and a pair of uniformed court officers led Gabriel from the well below the prisoner’s dock.

  More flustered than ever, the clerk had trouble with his lines. “Oyez, oyez, oyez. All persons having business at this Court of Oyez and Terminator and General Gaol Delivery holden here this day in, ah, Vancouver, draw near and give your names when called. God save the Queen!”

  He meant Oyez and Terminer, to hear and determine. More orotund in Latin: audiendo et terminando. Such lovely though arcane jargon – calling for prisoners to be brought before the assizes – is meaningless even to most lawyers, a throwback to England’s Dark Ages.

  “You may release him,” said Hammersmith, and Gabriel’s cuffs were removed. He sat, looking about, rubbing his wrists, taking in this grand and sombre court. He caught my eye, nodded, then looked behind him, spotting his mother and several friends from the Cheakamus Reserve. A nod and smile for them.
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  He was in better shape than his lawyer: clear-eyed, unafraid, finding strength from his Métis hero. On my last visit, two days ago, I had explained that the Prince Albert diocese had taken a cowardly stance, and he said, “Why are you surprised?” His cynicism hinted he was almost looking forward to a pronouncement of guilt, a chance at martyrdom, noble defeat. He often quoted Riel’s simple, stirring words at Batoche: In a little while it will be over. We may fail. But the rights for which we contend will not die.

  “Are we ready, gentlemen?” Ignoring the gentle lady beside me, at whom the clerk was still looking with steely disapproval.

  As Smitty and I put our appearances on record, Hammersmith nodded at me and bowed slightly, which I took as a salute to my successful appeal against the most recent of his wrongful convictions. He did not remark on Ophelia’s attire but looked at her with discomfort: an unknown quantity, a courtroom rara avis, in pants but unmistakeably female.

  I applied to have my client join me at counsel table. “I would appreciate having him at hand to seek his counsel during jury selection.”

  Hammersmith studied Gabriel coolly. Here was the insolent young Native who’d blown up in the Chief Magistrate’s court. A troublemaker. “I would imagine, Mr. Beauchamp, that he needs your counsel more than you his. Mr. Smythe-Baldwin?”

  “I make no objection.”

  His reaction displeased Hammersmith. “It is not my practice to let prisoners stray from their historic and proper station, and I cannot see how I can countenance it in a capital case.”

  Smitty raised his eyebrows at this lack of appropriate servility. Hammersmith clearly distrusted the old Q.C. – he was defence-oriented, not a real Crown. They’d fought many bruising battles when the judge was senior prosecutor, so there were likely unhealed wounds.

  Leroy Lukey caught my eye and winked. I wouldn’t have put it past him to have gone judge-shopping. However else could we have ended up with The Hammer?

  Jury selection, as was typical in those days, was a speedy process; members of the panel remained mute, not subject to questioning. I had names, addresses, occupations, and the right to challenge up to twenty without cause. I weeded out whom I could: the lugubrious dog trainer (probably worked with the police a lot), the red-faced hausfrau (imagined as a scold), the red-necked steelworker (who scowled at my client), the banker, the lumber executive, the prim vice-principal, the retired army officer.

  The ones who got seated looked only marginally better: six of each sex, a range of ages, occupations varying from waitress to electrician to antique dealer to pumphouse operator. Two jurors got on after I ran out of challenges, a grumpy-looking customs agent and a hockey coach and former minor league workhorse, Ozzie Cooper. He had enough of a reputation among his peers to get himself elected foreman. This was the Vancouver jury I had expected and feared – not a person of colour aboard.

  Hammersmith ordered them sequestered, which meant that a block of hotel rooms would be provided. No radio, no newspapers. None looked too happy as they returned to court after setting their immediate affairs in order.

  “Call your first witness, Mr. Smythe-Baldwin.”

  That was an identification officer, custodian of the exhibits. After taking the oath, he kissed the Bible. This unsanitary practice was a custom that pervaded the lower courts in the sixties. It was adopted by police officers in high court in an effort to give their testimony credence, though it’s now a curious relic.

  The ID officer began the dreary process of describing and labelling the Crown’s sixty-seven exhibits. Diagrams, maps, garments, fingerprints, serum samples, cartridges, documents. Frinkell’s letter. Dermot’s memoir. Several innocuous photographs taken from Mulligan’s desk, mostly of him: feeding his horse; astride his horse; riding his horse, playfully doffing a hat to reveal his bald top; Irene in their city home, hair piled up, dressed as if for a party. None showing them together.

  Smitty called Irene next. Like all subpoenaed witnesses, including policemen, she had been excluded from the room. It took so long to fetch her that I feared she’d run off, but finally she came, walking unsteadily up the aisle in high heels. Pleated skirt, elaborately buttoned sleeves, tight collar, something puffy and flowerlike adorning her blouse. Over-powdered, with glossy lipstick exaggerating a thin mouth. Even through the half-veil attached to her rather shapeless hat I could see the dark circles under her eyes.

  “Ghastly,” Ophelia whispered.

  “Madam, I expect this is distressing to you,” Smitty said, “so we shall try to keep it as brief as possible.”

  He led Irene quickly through undisputed terrain: age, residence, year of marriage, husband’s achievements and station in the academic community, date of purchase of the Squamish Valley farm, and, with the aid of survey maps and photos, the layout of that property. She described their general run of activities there. She conceded she found the hobby farm lonely and hadn’t been looking forward to spending her husband’s sabbatical there.

  Irene spoke in a breathless voice, no weight to her syllables, and Hammersmith twice asked her to speak up. His war service, with the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, had dulled his hearing.

  Smitty’s first task was to discredit the suicide hypothesis, and he drew from her that Mulligan had been in good health, diligently working on his memoirs, planning a time out to visit the Seattle fair. Then she added, “But in his last days he seemed to be brooding over something. Worried.”

  Smitty hid well his displeasure at that excursus, and proceeded cautiously in asking about Gabriel and his role as caretaker/house-sitter. He’d had the run of the house before Irene showed up the week before Easter, but thereafter declined invitations to come in to warm himself after chores. He even brought his own lunch, so she had negligible contact with him. His mornings were often spent with Dermot, sharing yard and barn chores, talking, debating. In the afternoons, from three to six, Dermot would usually closet himself in his study and Gabriel would disappear.

  “Dermot was very fond of him,” she added.

  Smitty had no interest in asking whether Gabriel shared that fondness, and moved on quickly: “Dermot was fond of him, but what were your feelings?” A tricky question, but Smitty had obviously interviewed her carefully and may have been expecting something noncommittal.

  “I regret I never got to know Gabriel better, but he was unfailingly polite and helpful. A very nice young man. Very intelligent and well-spoken.”

  Hammersmith: “I’m sorry, very what? Intelligent and soft-spoken?”

  “Well-spoken,” Smitty said.

  “Unfailingly polite and helpful,” I added.

  “Please be seen and not heard, Mr. Beauchamp. Your time will come.”

  (A verbatim transcript that Wentworth Chance found in the law school archives and copied to me serves as an aide-mémoire, so to bring back specifics like these I don’t have to rely on old memory cells, with all their smudges, erasures, and flaws.)

  Smitty moved Irene quickly to the Saturday of Easter weekend. Mulligan had spent the morning at his desk and after lunch gathered up his fishing gear, promising to be back by supper.

  “And he went off to his fishing hole?”

  “That was his intention.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “I don’t think anyone did.”

  “Except Gabriel Swift.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And your husband never returned.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Let us leave it there. Other witnesses will fill out the rest more than handsomely.” And Smitty turned her over to me.

  I began by expressing appropriate words about her husband’s disappearance, reminded her to try to keep her voice up, then made what hay I could from Gabriel’s role as Mulligan’s diligent hired man, omnivorous student, and faithful outdoors companion.

  “He never showed hostility to your husband?”

  “I never heard a cross word.”

  Hammersmith cupped an ear. “He nev
er did a crossword?”

  I could see that the jury was having trouble hearing her too, and I repeated her answer. “And did the accused show any lessening of affection in the days just prior to your husband’s disappearance?”

  “No.”

  “In fact, on the previous day, Good Friday, they hiked together to the top of the Stawamus Chief?”

  “Yes.”

  Hammersmith asked, “Who or what is the Stawamus Chief, madam?” Irene looked at me for help.

  Ophelia retrieved an article from a travel magazine with graphic, dizzying photos of the mountain, and passed it around while I educated his Lordship. “A fifteen-hundred-foot sheer rock face just south of Squamish. It is accessed by back trails, and the cliff face descends almost perpendicularly to its base. Certain death for anyone who might slip over the edge.”

  Hammersmith looked up from the photos, stared at the Crown table, saw no one stirring. “I hear no objection to counsel’s travelogue. The article will be the next exhibit.”

  I returned to Irene. “And they seemed to be getting along well that day? No problems between them?”

  “Not at all. I saw them go off together; they were chatting amiably.” Her voice was stronger now, though still husky. Much throat-clearing.

  “There’d been no quarrels on this trek?”

  From the bench: “How could she know? Unless she had somehow transported herself there.”

  “Let me rephrase. Your husband didn’t seem distressed on his return?”

  “Just exhausted.”

  “Now in answer to my learned friend, you said that in the days before Easter Dr. Mulligan seemed to be worried. He was brooding. Did you find that strange?”

  “It wasn’t normal for him.”

  “Did you know what was distressing him?”