This was Smitty’s backup position, obviously. I resisted a powerful urge to offer my hand on it. Done – twenty years. Depression relaxes its grip, worries scatter to the winds. It’s on to further challenges, the Palmer brothers, organized crime, trials featuring the immoral and the simply evil, clients I wouldn’t care a hoot about …
I pictured Gabriel looking at me with astonishment and disillusion as I put such a plea deal to him. I did care a hoot about him, that was the whole damn problem with this case. I found him stimulating, challenging, homo sui generis. I wanted a friendship that would survive this case, survive his imprisonment, survive our stressful roles as counsel and client.
I explained I’d set the afternoon aside to confer with the accused. Smitty had François bring over the phone. He called the Criminal Registry, asked them to pass word to his Lordship that “counsel were in discussions” – code for settlement negotiations. A similar message went to Leroy Lukey, who undertook to advise Ophelia. Word soon came back that Hammersmith proposed returning the jury to their hotel until Monday. We agreed.
Smitty and I were able to relax then and enjoy several more cognacs while I peppered him, Wentworth-like, with questions about his many notable cases.
After parting from Smitty at around half past three, I found myself in front of the flower shop, literally scratching my head – as if that would somehow jump-start memory. I had no idea where I’d parked the Bug that morning. A two-hour zone, that’s all that came back; now I would have to shell out yet another buck for a ticket.
It didn’t strike me that I ought not to be driving anyway until, twisting to look at a pair of ankles, I almost sat on a tray of peonies. The ankles belonged to the flower shop saleslady, who asked if she could help me. Odd what one remembers – often the trivial – and what one doesn’t. I have no recall of ordering roses for my mother (where did that impulse come from?), but the next day she called Gertrude to thank me.
The first lounge I hit was The Library in the Hotel Vancouver, whose bookish decor I felt might help me analyze that altogether too cordial plea-bargain session. I felt I should level off, so I had a coffee with my shot of rye.
Twenty to twenty-five – a final position, or had Smitty got the nod to negotiate down? How far? Ten, twelve, thirteen years, less parole, less a year and a half for good behaviour … The time will go by in a blink, Gabriel. What do you say, old buddy, old pal?
Manslaughter: snap it in two and it’s either man slaughter or man’s laughter – which is what I keep hearing in my head. Your laughter, Gabriel, your mocking laughter, you with your martyr complex, with all your nobility and arrogance … You will see a jail sentence as the worst of outcomes, the only ones you will countenance being acquittal or hanging.
Damn you, Gabriel, you dissembled and equivocated with me about matters so critical as to disentitle you from choosing your preferred outcome. Surely a mind as penetrating as yours can see the elegant logic of manslaughter. You were reading the memoir; you had Dermot on your mind the day he died. You’re prone to fits of temper and aggression – anything could have sparked it off.
Did Dermot confess he’d covered up crimes against children at Pie Eleven? Did that inflame you, Gabriel – the hypocrisy of it? You’d been proud of him, hadn’t you, for taking a tough, unpopular stand against the residential school system. And you exploded, didn’t you? You didn’t mean to kill him. That’s why it’s only manslaughter.
And if that’s what happened, I can forgive you for it, Gabriel. I still want to be your friend. Please make it easy on yourself. Make it easy for me …
From “Where the Squamish River Flows,” A Thirst for Justice, © W. Chance
CERTAIN REPORTS SUGGEST Beauchamp received with relief and enthusiasm Smythe-Baldwin’s openness to manslaughter, but he claims to have been hesitant, fearful that an injustice might be done, all the while fearing Swift rejection (as it were). Ophelia Moore thinks Beauchamp advanced such a deal because he’d suffered a massive loss of confidence. In himself more than in his client. In his ability to pull a victory from the ashes of a trial that on the whole had gone badly for him. “Old Smitty reeled him in like a fish,” she said, adding that he saw in Arthur someone who hungered for his approval, so he played the avuncular game. “Poor Arthur built up so much trust and respect that he got conned. He forgot why they called him The Fox.”
That theory seems less cynical when we remind ourselves that Beauchamp had a yawning need for the love he never felt from his father. He had long been a fan of the old Q.C.,* and though not as obsessive as those who lurk outside the mansions of rock stars, he’d been copying him for years. The cozy rapport with jurors. The shark-like circles swum around witnesses before striking. A tongue that spared neither opposing counsel nor judge. The oratorical flourishes and overblown mannerisms that became more common in Beauchamp’s fustian years.†
With all due respect to former Madam Justice Moore, I hold a less acerbic view of Smythe-Baldwin’s willingness to consider manslaughter. The veteran defender was famously warm-hearted and helpful to young colleagues of the defence bar, and though he believed that a homicide occurred by the Squamish River, he also felt that Beauchamp had got a raw deal. I was not surprised that my biographee became touchy when I put to him Moore’s view he had been under Smythe-Baldwin’s spell. Clearly, forty-eight years later, it remains a raw issue between him and Moore.
At any rate, he went home that night to brood over the matter. It must have tormented him, for Moore recalls him looking drained the next morning.
* Smythe-Baldwin passed away in 1981, predictably of a heart attack, though some called it heartbreak after his failed defence of the serial killer Dr. Au, known as The Surgeon.
† See Chapter Eighteen, “The Fustian Years.”
FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 1962
On entering Ophelia’s office, I fell prostrate on her little sofa. The excesses of the previous day had produced a thundering headache.
“I suppose you blame Smitty.” She stared pitilessly at me from behind her desk.
“I couldn’t keep up with him. Anyway, we’re trying to work something out. I told him bluntly there was no chance of Swift’s copping a plea to non-capital. But he might go for manslaughter.” I held up a hand to forestall loud response. “I’m going to discuss it with Pappas, but you first. Quietly.”
“I guessed something like that was happening. I tried to phone you at home.” She had more bad news, from the Prince Albert diocese. “The bishop has been following this in the news. His chief flunky says the Church wants nothing to do with it. They’re putting the clamps on everyone who ever worked at Pie Eleven, especially Sister Beatrice.” Whom Ophelia had just phoned. A falsetto imitation: “I’m not going to talk about it. I don’t know anything.”
Ophelia told reception to hold her calls, opened her window, and smoked her way through my recitation of Smitty’s spiel – the whole thing – the critique of my performance, the broad hint that Attorney General Bonner wanted this nasty matter settled quietly to stop the hemorrhaging of reputation of a famous local, the pitch about Gabriel earning a college degree in a minimum security facility, early parole, the dangers of leaving the case with Ozzie Cooper and his fans on the jury.
She butted out with an air of decisiveness. “Smitty must have decided he’s got a shitty case.”
I ought to have expected as much from her. Clearly (as my thinking went back then, prior to my supposed liberation from false assumptions) women didn’t have sharp instincts for criminal litigation, an understanding of how we play the game. Ophelia might have been scoring well in family court, but this was the big time.
“He’s got a cinch.” I tried to tell myself I wasn’t exaggerating, but now, in 2011, I’m not sure if Ophelia was wrong to slam me in her talks with Wentworth. That massive lack of confidence …
“Something has gone haywire; that’s my bet,” she said. “Maybe Doug Wall got tongue-loose in a bar, told everyone he was paid off by Roscoe. Maybe Lorenzo h
ad an attack of conscience and flipped out. Whatever, they’re hiding it from us.”
“Okay, Ophelia, we take that chance, and it turns out Smitty was playing us fair and we end up killing our client. You’d feel okay about that?”
I gained a sitting position and tendered her my theory, the one I’d worked at so assiduously while earning my hangover. I reminded her of Gabriel’s words to me: Something happened there, I think, in Pius Eleven Res School. He left the Church soon after. Gabriel had forgiven Mulligan for sins committed on his watch – or so I’d believed.
“Dermot was complaining of writer’s block. So naturally, during one of their daily discussions, they explore the reasons for it. Finally Gabriel wrests from him the dark and terrible secret Dermot hadn’t been able to put to paper. A secret so shocking that it prompted in Gabriel a sense of betrayal – his god had failed – and ignited a fierce anger, a murderous rage.”
Ophelia applauded. “Bravo, well-rehearsed. So he sits down, plans it out, and coolly arranges a suicide tableau before chucking Dermot in the drink. Right. Both essentials of capital murder are there: planning and deliberation. Congratulations, Arthur. You figured it out, now you can let them hang Gabriel in peace.”
Her scorn stunned me. She didn’t let up. “Oh, yeah, and somewhere along the way, Gabriel prevails upon him to jerk off in his panties. Arthur, you can’t do this thing with a loser’s attitude. Do you or do you not believe Gabriel did in Dermot Mulligan?”
Hesitation. “I can’t answer that.”
“Try.”
I accepted a cigarette – I needed a nicotine lift. “I’m not certain I can separate what I believe from what I want to believe.”
“You’re going to advise him to accept twenty years? Even if he’s innocent?”
“That’s their opener. I’ll bargain them way down.”
“Okay, sixteen years. Is that about right for a guy framed for punching a racist cop in the mouth? You’re really underestimating Gabriel. He’s bright – brilliant in his way, he’s capable of being a very persuasive witness for himself.” She was unrelenting. “Damn it, you have it in you to pull this one out. Smitty sees that; it’s why he likes your manslaughter.”
I abandoned the cigarette and rose. “I’m going to put it to Gabriel. If he shows interest, I think we can assume he did it.”
“Sorry if I don’t join you. The whole thing makes me sick.”
However base as a human being, Alex Pappas was a crafty courtroom veteran whose reaction I welcomed after that frigid exchange.
“Boy oh boy, you got to count that as a win – a big win. What did you agree to do, marry his ugly daughter? Was he drunk? You want to grab it before he returns to his senses.”
He got on the blower to Bullingham and gaily relayed the news. “Give me some credit, Roy. I mentored him, the firm’s golden boy.”
He handed me the receiver. Bully told me we must pop open some champagne when it wrapped up and have a little talk.
They all seemed to assume the golden boy would have no trouble bringing the accused around.
Old Jethro expressed disappointment, as I signed in, that I was alone. “Where’s your female associate? She’s some doll. Real smart cookie, Miss Moore, real persuasive.”
Maybe that’s why I hadn’t insisted she come. I didn’t want her persuading Gabriel to make the wrong choice. I didn’t want him to commit himself, not yet.
He’d been moved to the Protective Custody Unit. PCU. “He got into a fight at breakfast, and now we got a death threat against him. It’s what happens when you get famous.”
A scrap. I found that distressing; it wasn’t how one earned time off for good behaviour. The threat had come from the White Clansmen, a few of whose members were guests at Oakie. Seventeen years since Hitler’s end, and people like that were still floating around.
Gabriel was playing chess in the common area of the segregation wing, and he signalled me to wait while he checkmated his opponent. There were other visitors: a probation officer, a clergyman, an assortment of glum relatives. The poor fellow Hammersmith had jailed for having been indiscreet at the bathhouses.
The ambience was less repressive than in the main cellblocks, mostly because PCU housed not the dangerous but the endangered – informers, misfits, sex offenders, the occasional corrupt cop or politician. It was unusual for one who’d merely been in a fight to be sent there rather than isolation. The warden’s real motive might have been to limit Gabriel’s effectiveness as an organizer and advocate for his fellow inmates.
By now I had enough Aspirins in me to mask my pain, but Gabriel gave me a frowning once-over as he joined me, probably guessing that I’d tied one on. He was astute that way, a good reader of people, so I confessed. “I relaxed a little too hard yesterday.” I chose not to say celebrated.
“As long as you weren’t drowning your sorrows.”
“Why did those characters threaten you?”
“Because I called one of them a racist piece of shit. He came at me and he got his thumb broken.”
His casual attitude rankled me. “Dying with a shiv between your ribs is even more ridiculous and bathetic than dying at the end of a rope.”
He shrugged; he wasn’t worried, he had friends in there. That was true – he was widely admired on the inside. Not by Corrections, though, to whom he represented trouble: he was too vocal, an agitator, demanding of rights. He’d initiated several complaints, caused an annoying lot of paperwork. (I had an awful premonition of guards turning their back on him in the yard.)
“How’s the writing going?”
“The atmosphere in here isn’t conducive to the arts. I’m doing a Dermot – I’m blocked. What’s up?”
“I want you to sit quietly and listen to this. Afterwards, ask any questions you want, then take a few days to absorb it all. The Crown may be willing to accept a guilty plea to manslaughter – homicide without intent, in the heat of the moment.”
He didn’t storm off. Remained quite still, in fact, eyes large as if in surprise – or a surge of relief?
I felt encouraged. I parroted Smitty’s pitch: our bleak outlook, the expected hanging address from the judge, a jury in thrall to a foreman whose brother was a Mountie. I tried to describe the negotiations in as neutral a way as possible, though I delicately left out the bits about the emasculation of my promising career. I told him the Crown could get soft on the twenty years. In any event, such a stiff sentence could be appealed. Early parole could be sought.
A flicker of annoyance – I was trying too hard to sell this. “What about the truth, Arthur? What about my right to take the stand and tell the truth?”
“Okay, there’s an enormous amount to explain. How your prints got in Dermot’s wallet. Why you begged Monique to alibi for you. We can’t corroborate your account of being in your cabin all afternoon. That you were absorbed in Dermot’s memoir has unfortunate connotations, given the prosecution’s vengeance theory.”
“What is your estimate of my chances?”
“Not in our favour.”
“Spell it out bluntly.”
My spelling out was sterile, formal. “A verdict of capital murder is more likely than an acquittal. Hammersmith will likely curtail the options of non-capital murder or manslaughter, based on your testimony that you weren’t present. Your word against Lorenzo’s on that issue. If they believe him, they will believe you killed with intent and will convict you of capital murder.” Gabriel’s searing gaze didn’t falter. “If I can get them down substantially from twenty, I will likely recommend this deal. It’s your right to seek another opinion. I could ask Harry Rankin to see you.”
“I didn’t level with you about a couple of things. Is that why you’re giving up on me, for not being straight with you?”
“I am bloody well not giving up on you.” That was so vehement it sounded false.
Gabriel contemplated one of the barred windows, as if assessing his chances – Deer Lake was out there, a swim to freedom. Or maybe he d
idn’t want me to see his struggle to control himself. “What would I admit to?”
“You would say nothing. Simply plead to the manslaughter indictment.”
“The judge has to know what I did. He doesn’t sentence in a vacuum.”
“A sufficiently ambiguous recital of facts will have to be filed. It remains to be worked out,”
“How about … when I caught Dermot masturbating, I kicked him into the fucking river. How does that sound? Would you like me to admit to something like that?” The sarcasm suggested the fuse had been lit. “Is that recital of facts ambiguous enough, Arthur?” He was half out of his chair. “For Christ’s sake, do you think I killed Dermot Mulligan?”
Instead of hedging with the standard disclaimer (what I think doesn’t matter), I simply asked, “Did you kill Dermot Mulligan?”
He didn’t explode but visibly deflated, as if he’d taken a punch. Wearily he shook his head several times. He wasn’t just expressing denial, I think now, forty-nine years later. There was also bafflement, disillusion. Shock at my betrayal.
From “Where the Squamish River Flows,” A Thirst for Justice, © W. Chance
WE MUST CREDIT BEAUCHAMP for staying relatively sober that week, despite the crushing pressures on him, despite the sense of timidity and guilt he must have felt. Most of the pressure came from his bosses, who believed he’d engineered the plea bargain of the decade and were dismayed that he’d told the client not to make a rush decision.
I believe Beauchamp when he says their cajolery had no effect on him. I believe it because he needed no help in pursuing a course he’d committed himself to, after what he claimed was a nebulous reaction from Swift. (Beauchamp wouldn’t relate this privileged conversation, but a note dictated to his file reads: G to think over, 2 days.)
I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel Page 25
