April is my Ophelia now, someone with whom to play whodunit. She also plays Ophelia’s role as devil’s advocate. “Irene accepted his philandering, didn’t she? Isn’t that the sense you got from his friend, that history prof?”
Irvine Winkle. Irene let him have his affairs, he said, that was their deal. “But inwardly she must have smarted. Worse than that, maybe – revulsion at her role, a sense of outrage that finally erupted.”
“Then what an awesome actor she must have been. Her tears. Her performance on the witness stand. And you, Arthur Beauchamp, such a wily observer, could you have been taken in so easily?”
“Wily is not how I would describe myself back then.”
“But thinking back?”
What did I see then, in my interviews and watching her on the stand? Was there deception in that painted face, those damp, lowered eyes, her soft, hesitant voice? I’m not sure now; maybe I just wasn’t looking for dissimulation. But I must concede April’s point. “No, I didn’t see a woman capable of murder.”
“And if she was, why would she have been so supportive of Gabriel? I mean, he was her out. Why wouldn’t she be bloody pleased to see him take the rap? Instead, she defended him totally.”
“Maybe to put everyone off the scent. Me included.” He didn’t do it, Arthur. Her soft, trembling voice. Her seemingly dogged faith in Gabriel’s innocence scuttled any suspicions I might have felt.
I didn’t see her as a convincing actor, but maybe she picked up some tricks from her partner, with his flair for roles in college musicals. I was fairly talented, I am not ashamed to admit, cutting quite a figure in my sailor suits.
Goodnight, Irene; Irene, goodnight. There is more mystery to her than I thought.
Another odd bit comes back. She “wasn’t real countrified,” said Thelma McLean. Didn’t like the horses, the whole rural scene – yet she held a master’s degree in farm history. I remind April of that. She wanders over to my computer and clicks on to the Internet.
That evening after dinner, April returns to her computer tasks while Niko and Yoki demonstrate to Marie the art of goat milking. “First make Miss Goat happy, warm hands. Use hands this way, like loving.” Yoki’s English is steadily improving. “You try, yes? First message udder, like so.”
Massage, but Marie understands, and does well with her gentle nursing touch.
This is part of our effort to keep her from constantly fussing with her cellphone, checking to see if it’s on, if the battery holds power. None of us want to admit that Kestrel’s promised weekend call may never come. There’ve been several – from Marie’s husband, from her parents, other friends – but all understood their conversations had to be brief.
The tension has got to April, whom we find helping herself to the ten-year-old Laphroaig I keep for Reverend Al. Properly, she’s taking it neat “Sorry, I can’t resist superior malt.”
I want desperately to join her.
Then I hear again the tinkling refrain “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” Marie starts, and her fingers, so sure with the nanny goat, fumble for the answer button. Then her eyes widen. “Oh, God, Kestrel, my darling, I’ve been so … never mind. Where are you, honey?”
For us, a wide smile. “My heart is racing.”
Back to Kestrel, listening. Then: “Yes, of course we’ll meet you there.” A pause. “No, I’m not alone. Mr. Beauchamp, and a lovely woman helping him … Yes, Arthur Beauchamp … Well, that’s good, because he wants to meet you too.”
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2011
In the morning, after April completes her research by computer and long-distance phone, we take off in her Civic, cross to the big island, over the high, steep-sided Malahat, and carry on to the hamlet of Buckley Bay, where the ferry will arrive from our northern sister island of Denman. That is where Kestrel has been shacking up – as Marie puts it disapprovingly – with a covey of young hippies. We are to meet her just before four o’clock and will make it with minutes to spare – the single-deck shuttle is just coming across a narrow sound.
April, Marie, and I hurry from the parking lot to the ferry slip and strive to make out Kestrel on the deck. But there’s a dense group of walk-ons, some with bicycles, most with packs. Marie is having trouble spotting her daughter even as the boat nudges into the dock, even as it disgorges its cluster of travellers. She is clearly disappointed, but then her eyes suddenly light up.
A slender youth separates from the group: dark glasses, hair clipped short under a ball cap, running shoes, an over-large man’s shirt, the below-the-knee shorts that are the apparel of the times for teen boys. The floppy shirt hides budding breasts, so the only feature to reveal she’s a girl is the pretty face that emerges when she tucks her glasses away. Marie is aghast. “What have you done to your hair?”
But they are quickly in each other’s arms. April and I return to the car, giving them their space and their time. We chatter with relief, admiring Kestrel’s cleverness, her satiric cross-dressing disguise. She could pass for seventeen, is tall enough.
Marie is on her phone, likely with Samson, who is flying tonight to the coast to meet us. Eventually she and her daughter arrive at the car. On being introduced, Kestrel studies me intently, with an impish smile. She knows all about me, my achievements and my follies, my frailties and addictions – she’s read Wentworth’s exposé.
She and Marie climb into the back seat and April drives off, finding a winding uphill byway, seeking a secluded spot to confer and share the drinks and submarines we bought along the way. I pretend I’m not trying to hear the backseat talk, but I catch phrases:
“It was cool, Mom, they were friends I met …”
“But were you … I mean …”
“Oh, God, no! No one ever got that close …”
Something about the dangers of hitchhiking. “This isn’t a war zone, Mom, it’s Canada.” I pick up that she was sheltered in Vancouver from time to time by a volunteer group called Cool-Aid.
April chooses a lay-by off a meadow with a view east to the mainland peaks above the Salish Sea. Below are Denman and Hornby Islands and little Fanny Bay strung along the shore, several dozen houses of the waterfront’s well-to-do. In one of them, Irene Mulligan lives with her caregiver.
Kestrel is ravenous, and we adults haven’t fed well today either. There is a time of quiet enterprise as we set to. Kestrel finally straws up the bottom bubbles of her Fanta, then leans forward to my ear.
“When can I meet Dr. Swift?”
I turn to her. “Why?”
“It’s a big deal for me. I guess I’ve earned the right.”
I’m not surprised. A hero to Canada’s ever-more-politicized aboriginal peoples. Admired as Guevara was by rebels of a previous generation.
“I shall do my earnest best to make that happen, Kestrel.”
“Is he still mad at you?”
“Kestrel, it is a very sad thing that happened between us. I carry the blame. I didn’t have the courage or the strength of will to fight for his freedom, so I bartered for his life instead. But if I had lost him to the executioner, it would have been the world’s loss too. And your dream of meeting him would have to wait for heaven.”
“I’m not willing to wait for any heaven.” The determined, spunky sparrow hawk. “Okay, I guess, yeah, it must’ve been tough. But is he still mad at you?”
“I’d say cool.”
“He’s cool?”
I laugh. “He’s cool.”
“He didn’t do it, Mr. Beauchamp.” To her continuing credit, it’s Beech’m.
“You’re sure?”
“No way. Not a damn chance in hell.” She pulls her cellphone from her pack. “I’ll show you.”
“That’s her house,” April says, checking the number against her notepad. A gabled cottage that a realtor might designate as a “charmer”: two storeys, trimmed lawn, flowerbeds, picket fence with gate ajar, stone steps leading through forest to a rocky tidal shelf.
“Which is the main bedroom?”
April asks.
“Facing the front, those tall windows,” Kestrel says. “I knocked first. I saw someone moving inside and the lights were all on, but nobody answered. So I waited around awhile, then I decided to climb up onto that little balcony. Just like that dirty old dick who caught them screwing –”
“Kestrel, please!”
“Well, he was a dick, Mom. A private dick.” O’Houlihan’s videotaped testimony had been on the front pages; Kestrel must have read them avidly.
The sun is touching the hills behind us. We are parked several houses down, in the shadows of a tall fir. We can see no one outside but some roof repairers at a house across the way. Noise comes from the back of Irene’s house – one of those ubiquitous, annoying leaf blowers.
Marie and Kestrel find a path through the trees to the beach while April and I stroll with feigned nonchalance toward the cottage. We pause as we glimpse in the backyard a long-haired, large-breasted Amazon working the blower.
“That has to be her nurse-attendant,” April says. “Morg, she’s known as. That’s all I could find out, except she’s probably a tough cookie – if she is a she; the neighbours I talked to weren’t sure. Dotes on Irene. They’ve been together many years.”
We swing the gate open and advance up the stone pathway to the front door. Carpe diem. Suddenly an alarm goes wheep, wheep, wheep; April points to the motion detector above the door. The leaf blower goes silent. I am already knocking.
Morg races to the front and stops short on seeing us. Fiftyish, the physique of a basketballer, big hands, good for grabbing the throat. But she doesn’t resume her advance. There is recognition in her eyes, so I assume she watches the evening news. “You can’t come here. She doesn’t want to see you.” Stammering. “It’s her nap time; I tucked her in. Goodness, please, don’t do this to us.”
The alarm subsides and the door creaks open. “It’s all right, Morgana. There’s no point any more. They can come in.” I am looking at a wizened face flanked by flowing grey hair, an incongruous stubble of beard. Eyes enlarged by thick rimless glasses, not the horn-rims I remember. A little paunch. A sweater and skirt, open-toed slippers. Normal toenails.
“I wish I could say it’s a pleasure, Arthur.” He is not too bent by age and, at ninety-nine, walks unaided with barely a wobble as he closes the door behind Morg and leads us into his living room. Bookshelves floor to ceiling, enough to stock a small public library. There, on a table, as if for show, is A Thirst for Justice.
“I take it you were expecting us, Dermot.”
“Indeed. I gather that is the young lady who took my picture the other night.”
“No, that was your great-granddaughter.”
Dermot expresses no surprise, just a sigh of resignation. Kestrel told me, out of her mother’s hearing, “I caught him with his cock and balls hanging out.” That was two evenings ago. She snapped him with her flash, then ran off to join her waiting hippie friends, and they sped back to the Denman ferry. I spent a couple of stunned minutes staring at her cellphone screen. His thick, stubby penis, not much altered by the years.
He puts his desktop computer to sleep. “Online bridge. Quite a bit better than nothing.”
I introduce April as my private investigator. He bows.
“I still keep some port about. Would you like a small glass to celebrate? No, that’s not for you, is it, Arthur? I never quite saw you as an aspiring drunk. I suppose your biographer was right; it was the trial. I was about to make some tea, if you’d both care to join me.”
“Very kind of you,” I say.
“Please be comfortable.” He leaves for the kitchen.
We lower our bottoms onto a sofa, stare dumbly at each other. April had found some records – Irene Mulligan’s driver’s licence, a marriage certificate from 1958 with the name Irene Middleton – items easy to come by in the fifties, before social insurance numbers, when governments were looser with paperwork. It had to be around then that Dermot developed the fiction of Irene. There was no Irene Middleton among the graduating classes of the Minnesota agricultural college.
Cross-dressers tend to grow into their fetish, Dr. Dare told me. I remember how flustered Mulligan was in the guise of Irene, when as a student I visited their home on the wrong day. Emboldened, he later made up scenarios, testing me, testing others, getting thrills from the game. That powerful performance when I interviewed his alter ego, who expressed such shock at seeing Frinkell’s letter.
So many clues went over my head. The cloistered, boring life they ostensibly shared, never seen out for dinner or at entertainments. Gabriel didn’t mention ever seeing them together; in fact he didn’t see much of her at all during her brief times in the Squamish Valley. She never answered when Thelma McLean came calling. No photographs of them together.
Other clues: his talent for the stage, delighting audiences with his high tenor. In the lecture theatre: an uncanny ability to change pitch. In court: his clumsiness in high heels, overdressed, over-powdered. In the A-frame: no sofa where a couple might sit.
The modus operandi seems almost self-evident now. At the fishing hole he unpacked the women’s clothes he’d brought, all but socks, and began taking on the guise of Irene. The excitement of the moment, the thrilling plan to disappear, and the erotic stimulus of the nylon tricot panties gave rise to an act of masturbation. An erring toss or an errant wind sent them flapping onto the tree root. He put his undershorts back on, finished dressing, fastened his wig in place, then made for Squamish Valley Road, becoming Irene taking her daily walk.
Heedful of Dermot’s age, April rises when a kettle whistles, leaves for the kitchen to help. Wentworth’s book is beside me. I ruefully flip through its pages and find a passage highlighted with two pencilled exclamation marks: He was torn in another, deeply personal way over defending the suspected killer of a man who’d been his professor and mentor. He wondered if he’d be able to give it his all.
Dermot’s voice: “Thank you, young lady, you’re very gracious indeed.” I close the book quickly as they return. April sets the tea tray down but Dermot insists on pouring.
“New meaning is given to the plucky expression ‘Never say die,’ ” he says. “A murder trial sans mort. No murder, no murderer. Novel, I suppose, even in the wide experience of so celebrated a counsel as you, Arthur. Wisely, you scorned my advice to become a classicist. The sheer, beautiful irony of it is not lost on us, is it?”
I am unimpressed by his sang-froid. Does he imagine he can seduce me with courtliness? “I hardly scorned your advice. You were no less a hero to me than you were to Gabriel.” A gentle poke; too gentle. I’m fighting my emotions.
“I was appalled when he was arrested. I’d never thought such an eventuality might occur. You surely must have realized that I left that legal letter to be found by the police – a considerable motive for suicide. In the end I was left praying you would prove me wrong, would brilliantly demonstrate that your choice of the law was the right one.” A poke back at me that I feel in the gut. “At all events, he’s a folk hero now, either despite or because of my vast disservice to him. I, however, am now lost to history, a squalid figure of fun.”
“The self-pity leaves me dry-eyed, Dermot.” My idol. The great guru of moral values. What a repulsive person.
“So, Rome has indeed fallen. What was the precipitating factor, Arthur?” He is seated now, in a recliner, his feet up. “My supposed reflections parroting Camus and Nietzsche and Sophocles? Quotes cribbed from my works. I give the forger, whoever he or she may be, a failing grade.”
“You may be relieved to know, Dermot, that the Appeal Court found it equally unpersuasive.”
“Or were your endeavours inspired by that pair of repellent slime moulds Frinkell and O’Houlihan?”
“In today’s tolerant society, your legacy might have outlasted the vulgar headlines prompted by a few titillating photos. But it would never have outlived the rape of a young teenager under your charge.” An icy silence descends. “Sebastien v
isited you, didn’t he?”
Dermot studies April, who has stayed out of this, though is alert, absorbed. “You must be very clever at what you do,” he says.
“It’s your great-granddaughter you should thank, Dr. Mulligan. She’s fourteen.”
As Dermot reflects on the significance of that – Caroline’s age when raped – the teacup shakes in his hand; he’s struggling to maintain his self-assured manner. “Poor Sebastien. What was one to do? He was … what, nineteen? Drunk, when he appeared on my doorstep. Threatening at one moment, sobbing the next. A litany of injustices. A few thousand to tide him over – until his next fix, I suppose. I could have paid him, but what follows that? Can money ever cure such problems?”
My thoughts spin back to that windshield-smashing spree and Sebastien’s wry reflection on his crushing sense of futility: “It seemed to be the most sensible thing to do at the moment.” Anger has been welling up in me, the cumulative anger of weeks, months, decades, and I can no longer master it.
“Sebastien was your son! You denied him his birthright! As callously as you ravished his mother, an adolescent, your student! You condemned her to a life of prostitution and addiction! And by God, you were no less pitiless during the trial. Brilliantly playing the tearful widow over an unclaimed human foot, knowing it would further sabotage the defence of a young man who admired you unstintingly. Whom you contrived to sacrifice to the hangman at what you dare call a murder trial sans mort. Were you so desperate to retain your legacy that you’d have sent him to his death? I believe so! I believe you have the heart of a murderer. Damn you!”
This is not me. I never let go like this, I am a great masker of anger, but now I’m fighting tears of wrath and revulsion, and I look away, look out his open windows, where a wren is sweetly carolling. I murmur. “A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.”
“One of the great sage’s loveliest aphorisms. How apt.”
I want him to decrypt and solve this riddle. I can’t help myself; I’m his student again, impatient for his knowledge.
I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel Page 40
