Kill All the Judges (56 page)

He was in a B & B in some village called Tumwat, near a First Nations reserve where he'd spent the day hashing over old times with the chief. He had to tell Wentworth all this, his enjoyable time. “Charley Jumping Deer, an old AA comrade from the less-than-halcyon days of yore. He's a respected elder, he'll bring in 90 per cent of the vote around here.”

Arthur's manner turned far more sober when Wentworth described his own less-than-halcyon day. “Carlos was in Los Angeles?”

“Yeah. Jeez, I'm sorry.”

A very long pause. “Well, we'll just have to work around it.”

“What about Cudworth?”

“He will hang himself with his own tongue.”

“What if he insists?”

“Then I walk out!” A beat. “Forgive me. I'll see you in the morning.”

Oh, boy, he was pissed. Wentworth hadn't mentioned Pomeroy, and a powerful sense told him not to. “Right. Tomorrow. Um,
well, have a good night.” He clicked off, sunk into himself, depressed, the bearer of bad news.

“You lost Carlos, eh?”

Wentworth jumped.

“You should've stocked up with more suspects, they have dwindled to a precious few.” Brian rose a little, had trouble clearing his throat, winced as he touched his neck.

Wentworth got up, poured him a glass of water. Weird how he just woke up like that. As if he hadn't really been sleeping. “How was
your
day?”

Pomeroy drank, coughed, cleared his airway. “In your traditional parlour room mystery, Miss Marple picks out the stableboy from a host of household staff. Your suspects, however, have sneaked off like thieves in the night before you even got started on the last chapter. You've done it all backwards.”

“Are you aware you tried to hang yourself a little while ago?”

“I changed my mind. This is your lesson for the day. ‘When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'”

“Widgeon?”

“He's been written out of the script. Get with it. Conan Doyle's most famous line.” A coughing fit. “Get me a cigarette.”

Wentworth arrived at the courts bleary, bedraggled, still bugged by his romantic megaflop, and in a total funk. He'd slept badly, waking when he sensed Brian wandering to the balcony for a smoke, then turning the television on, a dumb movie, followed by a cooking show and the 6:00 a.m. news. Headline item: film industry prominents swept up in drug conspiracy.

Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
…Cudworth remains. He was at his usual station in the great hall,
but with a smaller corps of the usual clinging groupies–there'd been desertions, telling proof of Florenza's persuasiveness. Cud was ignoring Felicity, staring dully at nothing, looking not a little hung over. Wentworth had called him last night to pass on the boss's confirmation: Cud would not be starring in his own show.

He hurried to the barristers' quarters. On top of everything, he was late, his taxi had got trapped in the Lions Gate squeeze. No sign of Arthur in the commotion of lawyers in the gowning room. One of them called out to him: “A twenty-spot for manslaughter must be sounding pretty good right now, hey, Chance?” He didn't parry, wasn't in a mood to try.

On tier six, the usual milling crowd, the daytime soap fans now outnumbering Cud's diminishing army. Shawn and Ebbe eyeing each other warily, at pistol-duelling distance. Loobie avoiding him; maybe he'd run out of blind alleys to send them down. Wentworth played with the thought of confronting him, accusing him. Sure, right, make an utter fool of himself.

The court was locked, but a deputy let him in, and there was Arthur, conferring with Abigail, Chekoff, and a suit, presumably the DEA guy. Arthur didn't look happy but didn't look down. Didn't look anything. He had to be masking pain.

He finally took his seat, told Wentworth the defence had no option but to admit as a fact that on the evening October 13, 2007, Carlos Espinoza was closing a deal on a quarter kilo of coke in a Hollywood restaurant–otherwise the U.S. agent would be called, and more made of the matter than necessary.

Wentworth still hadn't mentioned Pomeroy's clumsy suicide effort, it could throw the boss off balance in his most important hour. The deputy opened the room, and as it filled, the jury came in. They didn't look ready to decide anything, seemed restless, unsatisfied, itching to hear the other side. That's how Wentworth read them, but maybe they'd had bad Mondays.

The chief justice, however, was in rare high spirits, more bounce to his entry now that he was on the country's highest
honour roll, straighter of back, chin up, a smiling nod of recognition to his underlings at counsel table.

Abigail read out the admission of fact about Carlos's whereabouts on October 13, jurors frowning, digesting this unexpected blow to the defence.
We'll just have to work around it.
Wentworth hoped Arthur had a plan for doing that.

“That is all the evidence for the Crown.”

“Thank you. Done expeditiously, commendable job. I will hear from Mr. Beauchamp.”

“Well, milord, given that one could probably drive a tank through the holes in the prosecution's case, we elect to call no evidence.”

That didn't come close to spoiling Kroop's hearty start to the day. “Save the rhetoric for the final speech, Mr. Beauchamp.” Adding with a puckish smile, “I'm going to have to watch you today. Hmf, hmf.” This didn't bode well. Whenever Kroop had a good day, Arthur had a bad one.

“Madam prosecutor, you have the floor.”

Abigail assembled a few notes, warmed up the jury with a few remarks about their vital, historic role, then reeled off a fluid summary of evidence, concise, organized, straightforward, evenhanded. Wentworth hadn't expected much less, but she was terrific, especially the way she anticipated the defence.

“Mr. Beauchamp will urge you to disbelieve Ms. LeGrand, but you will have examined her words and manner closely, and, yes, you will conclude she's lived a life of too much ease. You may have found her naive, saucy, irreverent, even sinful–shamelessly sinful. But she offered herself to you without disguise. Blunt, forthright, and with unembarrassed honesty. How easily she could have held back the truth, pretended she saw nothing, shielded from harm the man for whom she'd proclaimed her love.”

As she patched up some of the holes Arthur poked in Flo's evidence, a few heads nodded in the jury box. Abigail's hopes to lasso Florenza had been dashed, but she was determined to leave court
with at least one scalp. You couldn't blame her; no barrister worth her salt wouldn't covet victory over mighty Beauchamp.

Abigail didn't waste any time crowing over how the Carlos theory blew up on the defence, and dismissed the political cover-up angle as remote and fanciful. Despite her learned friend's valiant attempts, none of his “shadowy suspects” had ever taken form.

As to Astrid Leich: “You will recall how coherently her evidence flowed until…well, she had difficulty at the end, but who under the demanding gaze of judge and counsel and jury might not have faltered? Think of the pressure that good, decent woman was under in this tense, crowded courtroom.” Leich had made a little slip, a forgivable lapse, soon corrected.

“Bear closely in mind that the man she first pointed to, Brian Pomeroy, the defendant's former lawyer, is the very man she saw at 2 Lighthouse Lane only six weeks ago. They are of similar age, and not dissimilar in body proportion, and from fifty metres not vastly dissimilar in features–close enough in hair colour, facial structure, broad foreheads, strong chins.”

Wentworth felt she was making a lot of hay with this. Their noses, he wanted to shout. Look at their noses. Tom Altieri was studying Cud, maybe buying into this, or wanting to. Strong-chinned Cud was slouched there, hungover, brooding.

“The telling fact, and it's beyond contradiction, is that the accused fled the scene in a stolen car. Why? What would possess an innocent man to rush off in such blind haste? Who runs but the guilty? The cowardly, maybe, but Mr. Brown has demonstrated himself to be anything but that.”

Wentworth didn't dare another peek at Cud, but this, above all, must have hurt.
The thing is, man, I panicked, I turned yellow.
Maybe the truth, finally, the unmanly truth. Too late.

“He was intoxicated but obviously not blind drunk. He found the key to the Aston Martin, he drove it from the garage, he made it halfway down the street. Was he sober enough to form the intent to kill? That is the question. Drunkenness is no excuse for
homicide but does permit a verdict of manslaughter. And you may be of a mind to consider that verdict.”

So that's where she was going, not for the throat, no, a high-minded approach, offering a comfortable middle way, tempting the jury with easy compromise. But the jury would not be told that the judge held free rein in sentencing, with life imprisonment the max. Juries aren't allowed to consider such things.

She ended on a strong note, about how the jury should be proud of themselves for taking part in this great, hallowed, democratic process of the common law.

Eight and a half out of ten.

The boss seemed in no hurry to leave court during the break, instead hung about the prosecutors' table, offering Abigail a bouquet of compliments, earning a little hug. As Wentworth headed morosely for the door, Haley joined him. “He's
so
courteous, even in defeat.” He merely nodded. “Oh, stop being such a grump, Wentworth.”

“Sorry, it's the tension.”

“I know how to relieve that.”

He was totally uninterested.
Find happiness once, and the next time is always better.
April hadn't written him off. That was the one bright spot of his day.

Cud and Felicity joined him on the terrace. “Okay, that's the crucifixion; I'm ready for the resurrection.” He hugged Felicity. “Rhymes with erection, baby. The jury don't know the real me, Woodward, that's what Arthur's got to work on.”

The boss opened casually, with his standard courtroom jokes, tested over the decades, jury relaxants, he calls them. Then some banter about how, with farm chores stacking up, his wife campaigning, he'd felt bound to take this trial on short notice, and now knew why the first lawyer had a breakdown. Laughter.

He schooled them on the basics, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, the presumption of innocence that remains with the accused through every moment of the trial. A great baritone tremolo as he concluded with a quote from Canada's highest court: “‘If the presumption of innocence is the golden thread of criminal justice, then proof beyond a reasonable doubt is the silver, and these two threads are forever intertwined in the fabric of criminal law.'”

Then he made a show of abandoning a folio of notes on the table–I don't need these, was the message–and strolled toward the jury to talk from the heart. It was the old Beauchamp, the master, one of his best, maybe just a step below the McHugh case, the rogue chiropractor.

He made what hay he could over the scandal–Whynet-Moir and the justice minister–telling the jury they must be mindful that someone may have desperately wished to stop Whynet-Moir's mouth, to hush up “what we now know has become an explosive political scandal.”

That got Kroop into it. “You're in danger of transgressing, Mr. Beauchamp.”

The judge remained obsessive about refusing to hear the word
bribe
, stubbornly holding onto his early, ill-thought-out ruling. That didn't deter Arthur, who hammered away at the possibilities: a hired assassin, or someone with a grudge against Whynet-Moir, or someone whose freedom or reputation was at stake, someone who brokered the multi-million-dollar payout–this with a fierce look at Shawn Hamilton, who remained poker-faced under the jury's gaze.

Arthur deftly handled Astrid Leich, reminding the jury of her confident fingering of Brian Pomeroy.
This is the man.
Said twice, emphatically. Having made a completely wrong identification of Brian Pomeroy– “Mr. Brown's former
lawyer
, for goodness sake”–how could her second choice be relied on even in the remotest degree? “Especially after, during a break, my flustered friends for the Crown persuaded her to attempt a last-minute patch job as a means of saving face.”