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

by William Deverell

  Smitty had little to do that afternoon – he’d sluffed off to Lukey the tedium of leading the expert witnesses – and for much of the time reclined in his chair with eyes closed, as if enjoying a nap after an appetizing meal.

  I’d already read the reports of the crime lab people, all of whom I knew from previous cases, and asked few questions. I had nothing for the fingerprint examiner. The ballistics man accommodated me by agreeing there was no way to tell how long the 30-30 cartridges had lain on the ground. Could have been months, years? Possibly.

  The prissy Victorian clerk kept glancing at Ophelia with disapproval. She was in a dress that day, but too short – one could see her calves and ankles. He seemed doubly offended that she smothered mirth when the pair of frilly panties was displayed to judge and jury, or at least remnants of same with swatches cut from them. One of the Eaton’s brands, described in its catalogue as “flare-leg nylon tricot, $1.99.”

  These, the serologist found, contained excrement from an unknown bird as well as semen from an unknown male. No traces of blood were found on site; however, one’s blood type can be determined from semen. That was type A. Mulligan was type A. So are forty per cent of humans.

  The Crown’s version seemed in conflict with an onanistic dalliance such as masturbation. According to Lorenzo, he’d planned to confront the deceased at his fishing hole and make him take his clothes off so he could fake a suicide. That seemed a dubious way to inspire arousal and orgasm.

  The expert was unable to say how long the panties had been tangled in that tree root. Maybe weeks? Not likely, given that rain hadn’t washed away the stains.

  I checked my watch frequently, checked the wall clock, urging them to hurry up, to get to four-thirty. My entire effort for the afternoon had been desultory. I had no spark. I had, instead, a terrible sense I was blowing this case.

  Finally Day Two was done. “I have to dash off,” I told Ophelia, but didn’t say why.

  I just didn’t want to depress her. I didn’t want to deal with anyone, including the insistent reporter and cameraman I had to outrun.

  I’d like to think I was iron-willed in not pulling into a bar or liquor store, but more likely it was cowardice that drove me straight home, fear of Ophelia’s censure – I wouldn’t have been able to lie to her. I dare you. I did pause at a drive-in, then made quickly to my suite with a double patty, fries, and shake.

  I dined in front of the TV, the local news. There I was, a camera having trouble catching up to me as I fled to my car. In contrast, Smythe-Baldwin was shown easing himself into a taxi, serene, confident, declining to comment on the case. “The Crown is driven by only one goal, and it is called justice.”

  Hammersmith’s hostility to my theory of a conspiracy to frame the accused had made an impact on the jury, which I fear was seeing it as a wildly swinging mud-casting effort. But I wondered if Smitty, the seasoned defence counsel, was getting a whiff of what Hamlet smelled in Denmark. How could he not be riven with doubt about Lorenzo?

  From Lawonda’s lovely oak desk – a gift from a suitor, I presumed – I had a view out back of tall conifers, evening rays weaving through their branches. I thought of a walk to the beach but sighed and spread out my notes from the hearing, Crown particulars, exhibits. I began to work on my cross of the Joseph family. I couldn’t conceive how I was to go after those folks without seeming a bully.

  Something was bothering me, something I hadn’t done. The phone began an insistent ringing. I played awhile with ignoring it, then gave in. A male, a repeater. “I was hoping Lawonda was back.”

  “Once again, let me explain she has moved to the States.”

  “If she calls, tell her it’s Otto. I’m in a pretty bad way.”

  Possibly suicidal. There’d been others, less plaintive, men with husky, panting voices.

  It was then I remembered Gabriel had asked to see me after court. Surely, I decided, nothing was so vital that it couldn’t await the morning, before we resumed.

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1962

  I still recall the dream that awakened me briefly that night: its protagonist unbearably frustrated as he tried to sort out shape-shifting figures, Ophelia pressing me to her ample bosom, then becoming Gabriel, who, as I retreated in shame, took on Dermot’s form, who became Irene, and they were nakedly writhing, making love with Rita Schumacher in her second-floor bedroom. I was running through the snow about to cry “Eureka” because I had the answer … and suddenly I was sitting up in bed and couldn’t even remember the question.

  It was excitement that woke me, I suppose. Though I struggled, no divine afflatus came; whatever had arisen from my subconscious was erased. The dream seemed portentous as well as phantasmagorical, and for hours I stared out at the moonlight-dappled garden, trying to tie its threads together.

  It was still in my mind as I took a last swig of instant coffee and a couple of Tums, gathered my papers, knotted my tie, and strode off toward the Burrard Bridge, planning to get my mind together by briskly walking downtown. This healthy notion dissipated by the time I puffed over the busy art deco bridge and gained the downtown peninsula. I considered pausing at St. Paul’s Hospital for oxygen, but instead waved down a taxi.

  I borrowed the driver’s newspaper. A fanfare piece about the Trans-Canada Highway’s ribbon cutting. The Wasserman column, a gasping, puritanical report on Lenny Bruce’s show at Isy’s. On the third page: “Sparks Fly as Lawyer Flays RCMP.” Another bad review, the flayer coming across as desperate.

  On my being let into Gabriel’s cell, I quickly saw he was in distress. He didn’t ask after my well-being, didn’t even say hello, just sat and stared at his hands. My premonition of a calamitous turning point in this case was soon realized.

  “I want you to leave Monique alone.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Her parents too.”

  “Impossible. The Josephs have been hidden from me, Monique squirreled away in the States. It’s my only chance to have a go at them before trial.” I was met with silence. “Gabriel, I warned you I would not let you commandeer this defence.”

  “Monique’s … her statement was the truth. I lied to the police. I have lied to you.”

  I was taken over by a sense of tremendous emptiness, of loss. It is still hard to describe it, but it was as if I’d been overcome by a failure of faith. My stunned gaze wandered from his tightly clasped hands to the wall beside him, and settled on a few words of protest inked onto the wall: Burn in hell, Scheister. Who was Scheister?

  While in this fugue, I heard but couldn’t quite get a grip on the phrases tumbling from Gabriel, an explanation, a mea culpa. I raised a hand to silence him. When he finally looked up, I saw his eyes were raw. Then it was my turn to avert my gaze, back to the graffiti. Shyster, misspelled as Scheister, inscribed by a dissatisfied client. Possibly German.

  “Let’s back up, Gabriel. Do I have this right? You urged Monique to tell the police she was with you. All afternoon. In your cabin.”

  “I begged her.”

  “And she agreed.”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t promise; she was confused. We didn’t have much time together, she was already late for church.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Just around the corner from her place. I’d just got back from the river, from finding Dermot’s stuff.”

  “And you hoped this pious young woman would lie for you.”

  “I hoped.”

  I slowly regained equilibrium. “And you are telling me now that you were home alone.”

  “I felt I needed an alibi, Arthur. Knepp would be going hell for leather to lay a murder beef on me. I got frantic – I’d left my prints on Dermot’s stuff. They’d have nabbed me anyway. He was white, well-off, my boss, and I’m a fucking barely employed Indian who hates the system and punched out a cop. That’s all they needed; they’d invent a motive as they went along.”

  I would have stormed at him if others weren’t in earshot. You lied to me; that’
s what I wanted to scream. You nearly had me attacking an innocent sixteen-year-old, her mom, her dad.

  I looked at my watch. Nearly start time. “And what the hell were you doing all afternoon in your cabin?”

  “I was reading Dermot’s memoir.”

  Our trial was held up while Hammersmith listened to a vigorous but incomprehensible submission by Harry Fan on sentencing. In the dock, with hands clasped as if in prayer, was a middle-aged man charged with gross indecency at the English Bay bathhouses.

  Ophelia gave me a critical once-over as I joined her on the counsel bench. “Bad night?”

  “Bad morning.”

  Hammersmith and Fan were tangling over the pre-sentence report, so I had time to brief her sotto voce.

  “He was reading the fucking memoir?” Ophelia looked heavenward, as if for salvation. “You sure he’s not lying about lying? He saw you rip Doug Wall apart and wants to protect Monique from similar.”

  I shook my head. “I believe him; he wasn’t acting.”

  “There’s nothing in her statement about Gabriel asking her to lie.”

  “Let’s hope she withheld that.”

  “Well, we’d better find out. Lukey has her waiting for us in the witness room.”

  “You talk to her. I’m too depressed.”

  Hammersmith sentenced the fellow in the dock to two years less a day, expressing the hope that such a jail term would help him correct his devious tendencies. The man went down to the cells sobbing, and Gabriel replaced him.

  Mounting the stand as the jury returned was Chief Benjamin Joseph, a short, stout fellow with an easygoing way of talking. He had presided over a tribal council meeting on the Saturday afternoon and returned home at four, expecting to watch the final game of the Stanley Cup, only to find it was set for Sunday. Monique was with her mother in the kitchen, helping prepare a “big old ham that with the Lord’s help was gonna get us through the Easter weekend.”

  This casual jocularity cast serious doubt on Knepp’s anthropological expertise: You’re dealing with people who are withdrawn. It’s in their nature. I’d not bought that, though I had believed Benjamin was a corrupt truckler to authority. That came from Gabriel, his feelings coloured by his resentment of a protective dad.

  Benjamin’s opinion of Gabriel, on the other hand, was unexpectedly neutral, even slightly approving. “Known Gabby since he was a kid. We called him that because there was times he wouldn’t stop talking.” But as he grew up, “he got on the wrong side of every issue, talking up revolutionary socialism, he called it.” Monique, he implied, was too young to commit to a relationship with this beater of war drums.

  I put myself in Benjamin’s place. Were I the father, I might also have put my foot down; here was a sixteen-year-old involved with a militant who’d slugged a cop. (In fact, decades later, when my own daughter was sixteen, I railed at her for bedding a pot-smoking draft dodger from Duluth.)

  I was sorely depressed by how our case was crumbling, chunk by chunk, at an accelerating pace, and couldn’t imagine what I could seek from this unpretentious gentleman that might slow the decay. Ought I to portray him as too palsy-walsy with the uniformed thugs at the local detachment? I looked over at the jury, the six and six, fathers and mothers.

  “Your witness,” Smitty said.

  “No questions,” said I.

  As Benjamin walked past the dock, he gave Gabriel a closed fist of support, hidden from the judge. I had trouble working through my surprise at that. Gabriel, who seemed relieved and contrite, struggled to find a smile for me.

  Ophelia returned from her session with Monique, looking grave. “Bad. She did tell Knepp – and Lukey – that Gabriel asked her to alibi for him.” Morosely I read her scribbled notes.

  But now I had to concentrate on Anna Joseph, who spoke in a voice softer even than Irene Mulligan’s, and with a gently slurring Salish accent. Hammersmith repeatedly urged her to up the volume, then finally sat back and resigned himself to waiting for the next batch of pages from the court reporters – he had them working in shifts, pumping out a running transcript.

  Anna was younger than her common-law spouse (or as we say today, no less awkwardly, partner), church-going, and lacking in guile. She was firm in her recall of that Saturday afternoon: she and her daughter sharing kitchen duties, Monique preparing a fish soup, Anna worrying over the logistics of an Easter Sunday banquet “with a whole army of relatives.”

  As to Monique’s mid-teen romance? “I says to her, finish high school before you get serious. If he loves you he’ll wait for you.” I sensed she felt Gabriel Swift was bound for trouble, and she didn’t want Monique along for the ride.

  “No questions,” I said. However belated, Gabriel’s warning to expect the truth from these folks had avoided grief to his cause. Stern cross-examinations of the Josephs would have been a kamikaze mission, sinking not the enemy’s ship but mine.

  Anna looked quickly at Gabriel – a quarter-second – then cast her eyes down at the aisle carpet and joined Benjamin outside as Monique came in. She was a pretty cherub, short and perky, striving hard not to show nervousness. Smitty placed her statement before her and asked her if it was true.

  “Yes.” Quietly, lips quivering.

  She was brief in response throughout. Had she seen him at all that Saturday? No. Had she planned to? Yes. What changed her mind? She couldn’t get away from the house. Why was that? There was too much to do. Had she seen him the following day?

  A long pause. She began to tremble. She looked at Gabriel, then quickly away, and her eyes filled.

  “Near your house? Perhaps just before Easter Mass?”

  Smitty must have felt guilty about playing the prompter so blatantly. He was trying to rush her through this, get her safely off the stand, but his efforts were failing. Monique was weeping into a handkerchief, unable to express herself.

  Lukey appeared to be suppressing a smirk. He had not disclosed this conversational tidbit from Sunday, hoping to lay a trap. It might have worked if Gabriel hadn’t finally owned up.

  “Young lady, I must urge you to compose yourself.” The Hammer.

  She wept all the harder. Gabriel was in distress, his mother and her entourage looking uncomfortable. Someone should go to this girl, I thought, give her comfort, assuage her pain.

  I stood. “The defence will admit that the accused had a brief conversation with Miss Joseph at midmorning on that Sunday, in which he told her he was scared the police would falsely accuse him of being involved in Dr. Mulligan’s disappearance. The defence will further admit that Mr. Swift asked her to tell the police that they were together the previous afternoon.”

  Smitty gave me a tired wave as if to say, It’s a deal, and he sat. Lukey made a pained face, displeased that I’d grasped what advantage I could from the situation.

  “Defence has no questions.”

  Hammersmith: “No, I’m not satisfied. I want to hear from the witness about this conversation.”

  Smitty grunted back to his feet. “I have accepted my friend’s admissions of fact. That, with respect, should be an end to the matter. May Miss Joseph be excused?”

  “No. I expect this young lady to testify from her own memory, not as coloured by Mr. Beauchamp’s second-hand version.”

  “Ours is an adversarial, not inquisitive system, the judge an arbiter, not an interrogator.” Smitty then added, straight-faced, “I say that, of course, with the greatest respect.”

  I had learned a lot watching Smitty over many trials. This was a lesson in not giving in, a lesson in heroism. And decency – protecting the girl from courtroom trauma. But I was keeping right out of this, scrunched down, the flak passing overhead. Monique had stopped crying but still looked frightened and confused.

  “Witness, please look at me.”

  “With the greatest of conceivable respect –”

  “Sit down!”

  Smitty did so, but with contemptuous sluggishness, as Hammersmith, still flushed with anger, a fist curle
d as if ready to pound on something, turned again to Monique. “What did the accused tell you on that Easter Sunday morning?”

  Monique cried out in unexpected defiance, “Just what his lawyer said! Just that! That’s all!”

  Hammersmith winced, in the manner of someone suffering heartburn. “We’ll take the morning break.”

  Smitty gave me a wink as he made for the exit, drawing his morning cigar from a waistcoat pocket. Not for the first time, I got the sense he regretted his role there, was uncomfortable with prosecuting, couldn’t shake off old habits like the baiting of judges.

  But his junior was in charge of the key witnesses, the conspiring police. Ophelia was at Lukey’s table, giving him hell for not giving us full disclosure, but he was cracking right back in his rude, mocking way.

  Roscoe Knepp was up next. I wasn’t prepared for him; I was still overcome by blows recently taken, exhausted. Nor was I positive any longer that Knepp was manufacturing a completely false case against Gabriel. I had a niggling sense of having been betrayed by my rebel client.

  Ophelia returned to my side, muttering. “An oversight. My royal Canadian ass it was.”

  When court resumed, Smitty was still off somewhere lingering over a particularly tasty Havana, a gesture of disdain – no one shouts “Sit down!” to the dean of the criminal bar. But Lukey wasn’t waiting for him this time. With a vocal flourish he called upon RCMP Staff Sergeant Roscoe Knepp to take the stand.

  The square-chinned witness, in iron-crisp RCMP tunic, strode with confident step to the stand and accepted the oath as if posing tall in the saddle, the Bible aloft in his right hand. “So help me, God,” he said, and planted a kiss on a page somewhere in the Book of Job or Psalms.

  Lukey then announced he had no questions, was tendering the witness as a courtesy for cross-examination. He sat, beaming at me, knowing I would have to adjust on the fly – no witness is harder to cross than one yet unheard. I couldn’t immediately find the cross-examination notes I’d spent many hours preparing, and I went at it blindly. Pick a topic, any topic. Doug Wall.