Kill All the Judges (2 page)

He'd moved to a West End apartment but abandoned it after finding his twenty-fifth-floor balcony suicidally risky. Now he was in an artist's garret, or its pathetic facsimile: a third-floor room in a third-rate hotel, the Ritz, in Chinatown on the cusp of skid road. No one knew he was hiding here, not even his partners. Not even his secretary. Delete. He didn't
have
a secretary. Roseanne quit last month.

So here he was, armed with Merriam-Webster and Roget and Fowler and Widgeon and a wheezing computer and a full-monty breakdown, pouring another tequila, lighting another cigarette, staring gloomily out a dust-clouded window overlooking Main and Keefer, where the shops were closing for the evening and the grifters and hookers were taking over the streets. He thought of slipping out to one of the takeout joints, the Beautiful Sunrise Restaurant, the Good Cheer Noodle House. Or maybe the Lucky Penny Pizza, for a change. These places depressed him. Everything depressed him. Especially his day job, the defence of Morgan and Twenty-one Others.

He was sick of law, sick of the whole system; he had broken under its pressure. Dr. Epstein had put him on tricyclics and told him to find some diversion, some favourite craft. Thus was born
Kill All the Judges
. Chapter One, “The Madness of Gilbert Gilbert,” introducing said Gilbert Gilbert as tragic farceur and starring the author, the celebrated neurotic Brian Pomeroy, dazzling readers with his typical dry, manic wit.

He'll show Caroline. Such a literary snob, the academically hubristic Professor Pomeroy and her highfalutin graduate courses. Lit 403: Thackeray, Trollope, and Brontë: The English Novel in the Age of Vanity. And now
she
was published, having somehow persuaded a small press to put out her collected stories. He'd seen himself in some of them, the fucked-up boyfriend or husband. How dare she win a Best First Fiction Award for that?

He fully expects
Judges
to sell more than her paltry two thousand copies of
Sour Memories
. How might he pitch it to publishers? A memoir dressed up as fiction? Fiction disguised as memoir? Creative true crime? Creative untrue crime? A touch of Conrad?
I am able to write of these events only as I recollect them, and memory ever dims with age.
Truth, fiction, outright lies, who cares any more? Creative non-fiction, that's the general rubric, and that's what he's into, the hottest trend in literature; it gets you into the book pages, the literary blogs,
The Oprah Winfrey Show
. Eat your heart out, Caroline.

Yes,
Judges
will represent the cutting edge of creative non-fiction, stropped to razor sharpness. In the meantime, let's just call this lumpy stew of facts and fibs a mystery…

But was the Gilbert case merely an arrogant sidebar? The great Pomeroy! Poster boy of the Bhashyistan Democratic Revolutionary Front, victorious defender of assassins and addled court clerks. He could hear Widgeon grumbling: Where is the meat of this story, the main dish? Does not the title promise a serving of dead judges?

Please forgive the delay in the kitchen…

 

NAUGHTY JUDGE

B
rian Pomeroy had gone on an Easter weekend bender and only learned on returning to the Ruby Morgan trial in a bleary-eyed fog that on Good Friday a veteran family court judge had vanished after wandering from her cottage at Honeymoon Bay. She was well advanced in years, and her disappearance remained a baffling puzzle for family and friends.

Two months later, just as the bogged-down Morgan case was extended for another ninety days, there occurred a curious death at sea. A retired provincial court judge was spotted waving and shouting in the wake of the flagship of the B.C. Ferries fleet. He was swept away in the turbulent waters of Active Pass before a rescue team got to him, and he could not be resuscitated. Arguably, his eagerness to be saved ruled out a suicide attempt. But no one saw him go overboard–except, possibly, whoever might have hurled him over the railing. Father Time, he was called, with his 85 per cent conviction rate, a scourge of the criminal community and, it follows, their representatives.

An unease began to be felt among the judiciary, who shared nervous jokes about seeking danger pay for their job–inherently risky because the courts are crucibles of bitterness; every trial has its loser, some of whom are sociopathic or demented, and every loser has a lawyer, competent or otherwise, who shifts blame to those who sit in judgment.

Finally, on August 17, after the last objection was made and denied and the last plea for leniency ignored, the Morgan trial finally dragged to the finish line. Judge Naught had survived seven months of putting up with the defence counsels' whining, their insults, their spurious objections. He paid them back by sentencing each of their clients to twenty years. Except the ringleader, Ruby Morgan, who got life.

Though exhausted, Naught was in a mood to celebrate and began by sharing whiskies with the prosecution team. That was late in the afternoon, in chambers. Accounts are hazy as to where he went next. Not to the El Beau Room or any other watering hole favoured by bar and bench. Not home, to his dreary bachelor apartment.

A bland and forgettable face, a middle-aged paunch in a suit, Darrel Naught likely would have gone unnoticed in the city's better dining salons. Proof that he'd eaten was subsequently found in the remnants of lamb tenderloin in his stomach contents.

He was last seen alive at a quarter to midnight, at Fishermen's Wharf on the False Creek docks, heading for a boathouse owned by Minette Lefleur, whose cards advertised “personal, discreet escort and massage service” and who catered to the top tier, including several notables. One of her cards was found in Naught's wallet.

As Naught gained the boathouse ramp, Joe Johal–Honest Joe, as he's known in his commercials–was just leaving, shrugging into his coat in a light rain. They almost collided on the gangplank, a moment made more awkward because they recognized each other. Johal's Chevrolet-Pontiac dealership had lost a breach of contract case before Naught several years ago.

“Evening, Judge,” said Johal, and he carried on briskly to the parking lot. His last view of Naught was of him standing uncertainly on the ramp. Or so Johal said at the inquest (to his credit, he'd come forward as a witness). Minette Lefleur testified that Naught failed to show for his midnight massage. She knew nothing further.

Judge Naught's body was found the day after his disappearance, floating in the scum of False Creek. Because there were no external
injuries, the coroner's jury couldn't decide among accident, suicide, and foul play. There was scuttlebutt, not taken seriously, that the perpetrator was to be found among the many defence lawyers who'd been overheard calling down curses on his head.

The police couldn't connect anyone to his death. No one disliked him enough to kill him, nor were many going to miss him. In fact, however, he had not met his death by fair means but foul–committed, naturally, by the least likely…

 

Brian glared through a haze of cigarette smoke at that last ugly paragraph, its offensive foretelling, its runaway negatives, its blatant pandering to the reader.
Do not predict! Do not give the ending away!

He was in a foul mood, felt he'd been sucked into the blackest hole of the galaxy. Two and a half pages had he written in the five weeks since he'd crawled from divorce court like a whipped dog. On September 4, that day of infamy, Caroline had won custody of the three kids, sole rights to the family home and to practically everything he ever owned, including his late mother's stemware, his Honda 350cc bike, and the bedsheets between which he and his wife of twenty years had loved and fought. Brian had the clothes on his back and this old Mac computer.

And here was the rub: Brian still…loved her. That was the tricky part, he loved her. Yes, he'd been unfaithful, somehow he'd never understood how to fight that; it was like…well, nicotine. Caroline had retaliated with her own lovers, insipid academics. Despite everything, he loved her, despite the competitiveness, the literary swordplay, the oh-so-clever duels over words. (Or maybe
because
of those things, he wasn't sure any more.)

The judge who presided over this carnival of marital injustice was Rafael Whynet-Moir, a rookie, newly appointed to the B.C. Supreme Court. He will also die–assuming Brian can think of a felicitous way of death, nicely worked but not too complex, fitting
for one who had treated the author with such contempt. (
I'm sorry, Mr. Pomeroy, but this court isn't swayed to pity a defendant so bereft of the simple social skills required for the relationship of marriage.
) Poison à la Borgia? Too effete, too Dame Agatha. A gremlinized paraglider plummeting toward a hissing, spitting volcano into a boiling, sulphurous crater? Better.

 

These disasters inspired much black humour in barristers' hangouts like the El Beau Room and the law courts lounge. Judges became leery of going out in public. Security was tightened. Yet most thought the toll–two dead jurists, one unaccounted for, and one close call–was an unusual coincidence.

That consensus held until the second weekend of October, when Mr. Justice Rafael Whynet-Moir opened his waterfront manse at 2 Lighthouse Lane in West Vancouver to a fundraiser for the Literary Trust, which aids writers fallen on hard times. He had invited for dinner a dozen rich friends who paid handsomely for the pleasure of rubbing elbows with three published authors most of them had never read.

The evening seemed on its way to success. Whynet-Moir filled glasses with oleaginous charm. His partner, the capricious Florenza LeGrand, excessively wealthy heir to a shipping line empire, was at her effervescent best. At thirty-three, she was twenty years younger than Whynet-Moir, but he'd won her with his smooth good looks and false air of cultivation.

No one suspected that this posturing judge, this self-proclaimed connoisseur of the arts, this pander to performers, potters, and poets, would soon be crisping in hell…

 

Do not indulge in personal agendas
, cries Horace Widgeon, Chapter Seven, “Creating the Credible Villain.”
Avoid the temptation to put the black hat on your obnoxious boss or the civil servant who sniffily told you to come back after lunch. Otherwise, you may
end up modelling your villain on a very dreary bloke. Likewise, subjecting those you abhor to cruel deaths may provide a fleeting thrill–but it's a self-indulgent, masturbatory thrill that's not shared with the reader.

Presumably, Widgeon considered masturbation shameful. His amanuensis, the constantly complaining Inspector Grodgins, had a favourite adjective for the dreary blokes he had to put up with: “wanking bureaucrat” and “wanking judge” and “wanking bloody chief constable.”

Obviously, Brian was in too much hurry to settle accounts with Rafael Whynet-Moir. But that might be the only way he could stop hearing his voice, which regularly percolated through the rumbling, the traffic in his mind.
This court is emphatically of the view that the children need to be with their mother, particularly since the respondent hardly seems able to care for himself.
All the time with an appraising eye on Caroline in the front row. While she looked right back at him, interested.

As a sidenote, Whynet-Moir's dinner was but one of several such literary benefits staged that night at fine residences in Vancouver. The prize-winning author of
Sour Memories
attended one that was far less dramatic. (
Too bad you weren't assigned to your admirer's house, Caroline, you'd have had raw material for a story in which something actually happens.
)

Brian had gone as far as he could to appease Widgeon: He'd made this cloying judge more attractive than he actually was. He lit another Craven A and knocked back a slug of tequila to sharpen the wit.

 

Of the three writers whom Whynet-Moir invited, the most exotic was Cudworth Brown, a roistering poet who was a surprise nominee for the Governor General's Award for Poetry for his second published collection,
Karmageddon
. A risky choice for any banquet table, this muscular ex-ironworker had a reputation
for barroom brawls that was evidenced by a handsomely bent nose.

He was also a man of appetite who downed three martinis and a bottle of Bordeaux over hors d'oeuvres and dinner, and several cognacs afterwards.

By midnight, all guests had left but Cudworth Brown, who'd either imposed himself on the hosts, or, as the police surmised, hid somewhere in the house. A few hours later, neighbours on Lighthouse Lane were awakened by a metallic crash. They converged in a yard where a cypress tree had brought to a halt Judge Whynet-Moir's Aston Martin. Its sole occupant was Cudworth Brown, passed out behind the air bag.

West Vancouver Police were quickly on the scene but couldn't arouse anyone in the house. On the deck they spotted a metal patio chair, tipped over. They looked below the wraparound cedar deck and saw, thirty feet down, a nightrobe swirling in the waves and Whynet-Moir's broken body being gnawed by crabs in the tidal wash.