Kill All the Judges (58 page)

The habitués had checked her out with reproving looks, squirms of discomfort. Even Manfred looked haughty and displeased as he took her order for a whisky sour.

“The last bastion of male hegemony. I'm surprised at you, Arthur.”

“Ah, well, old habitats die hard. They leave you alone here. If it helps, I put eight women on the jury.”

“How magnanimous of you.”

The trial, the by-election, the travails of a divorced mother of three–these topics canvassed, she said, “Shall we move on to the main topic of this evening's symposium? The headless horseman of Hollyburn. What would cause him to fake a stab at suicide? Lord knows. We talked of the children, of course, and I told him–and I almost grieve to say it–that they deeply miss him.” A moment to muse. “As do I, in an aberrant way. ‘I, the Masochist,' it's the title of one of my stories.”

“I especially enjoyed your portraits from the barrens of academia. You got my note?”

“Yes, and thank you. I spoke to him about my taking Gabriela, Amelia, and Frank to Ireland. Not as a dig or taunt–I actually encouraged him to visit. Trinity College, Dublin. Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats. A shrine. Never mind. That didn't set him off. He said, yes, he'd like to visit.”

“He sounds to have been unusually…together.”

“Oh, there was much of the same unintelligible gallimaufry I'd heard on the phone. Otherwise, he was desperately trying to be on his best behaviour. I suppose he feels there's some…” She shrugged.

“Hope? Is there?”

“Hope? Not till he has a lobotomy.” She snapped back her drink. “Loneliness is easier, chicken soup for the fucking soul. Though I have to admit he does scintillate against the dullsville of the professoriate.”

A glistening in her eyes caused Arthur discomfort. “Manfred, I think we have an empty glass here.”

Manfred did his duty with a snotty lack of enthusiasm. “I'll bet you hate being called Man Friday,” Caroline said.

“A fake suicide, you said.”

“I did twenty years' hard time with Bry; I used to know when he was lying or faking, but now maybe it's
all
lies and fakery. Yes, he had a breakdown, yes, he got wired on toot, and yeah, his shrink probably nailed it with her acute substance-induced delusional whatever. As illustrated by that literary grotesquery he's been potting about with.”

“A fair description. I've been reading it.”

“If he's been off cocaine for nearly two weeks, why is he still crackers?”

“They say it takes time.”

“Maybe. Or it's all a game.”

“He frequently mentioned you when I saw him. He said you got sucked in. Everything happened because of you.”

“He got junked up and went crazy because of me? Endearing. If you see him again, don't let him show you his Cuban photos. I humoured him. Beaches, babes, 1960 Plymouths, Habana Vieja, boring, boring. When he went out for a smoke, I dug back further on his hard drive and saw pictures of his rat hole in the Ritz, with its seedy street views. He'd been taking snaps of his so-called
followers, one of them the pizza delivery guy. Another was a bongo player. Portraits of the weird. Some cluck in a suit who looked like he'd just vomited off a dock.”

Arthur checked his watch. “I suspect my jury are returning from dinner. I should get back to the courts.”

“I'll drive you.”

Looking down over the great hall, checking his watch obsessively, Arthur was having one of his rare addiction attacks. Caroline's whisky sours had been the visual trigger, and memories had given it muscle, memories of tense hours, tense nights, waiting for juries, the antidote for nail-biting a mug of whisky or a tall gin. But tonight his only solace, if you could call it that, was
Kill All the Judges
, which he'd ploughed through to its confusing ending. Some flashes of wit. Bizarrely entertaining. Unpublishable.

It was exactly two minutes to eight. He expected the chief would call time out around nine. Attendance was down, only diehards remained, just a handful of Cud loyalists. Only two reporters left. Silent Shawn had not returned from dinner break. Wentworth had gone off somewhere to pace and fret, having picked up that the boss didn't want to be bothered right now.

Here was Dalgleish Ebbe, giving up for the evening, leaving. The judge, who'd avoided Arthur all through the trial, seemed uncertain whether to respond to his beckoning finger. But then he joined him.

“I'm curious, Dalgleish, at your devotion to this case.”

“Ah, but I'm your devoted fan, Arthur. Always a treat to see you in action. Brilliant speech, by the way.”

“Thank you. A couple of holes have been opened up on the superior court benches. I presume your name is being considered.”

“Having been left at the altar multitudinous times, I'm beyond any reasonable expectation.”

“Nonsense, an erudite fellow like you is wasted on the lower court.” Arthur dug into his briefcase. “Of course, you may not want this to fall into the wrong hands.” Passing him the fax from the Law Society's Discipline Committee.

Ebbe gaped at it, his critique of Raffy: “Someone would be doing a blow for justice if he'd drop him down a well.”

“Fuck me,” said the erudite judge.

“Good luck,” Arthur said, then sidled over to a headset-equipped radio reporter. It was eight o'clock. The polls had closed in Cowichan and the Islands.

“Any results yet?”

“I promise to let you know, Mr. Beauchamp.”

Ten minutes later, she called him over. “One poll out of 160. Mosquito Flats. O'Malley thirteen, Blake eleven, the Clown two.”

He retreated to his reserved space by the concrete railing. There hadn't been a whisper from Kroop's chambers. The old boy was probably taking a nap. Cud was walking in circles down below. The looks he'd been giving Arthur reflected felt insult and betrayal. His neighbour, his compadre, the famed barrister who was supposed to have walked away with this one, had slammed him, shamed him.

He approached the newswoman again. “Coming in now,” she said. “Twelve polls heard from, Conservatives 1,008, Green 875, NDP 610, no one else close.” Arthur went off to fret. The NDP was holding, bad news. But these must be the mining and lumber camps, small polls quickly counted.

He wondered whether the jury was stuck on something. Some point he might have made clearer. Some argument inadequately put. They weren't buying Arthur's bold assurances about driving a tank through the holes of the Crown's case.

His fingers curled around his phone. Don't call her. Too early.

“Blake 2,558, O'Malley 2,549,” the obliging reporter announced.

“Splendid! Hurrah!”

But by nine o'clock, she'd slipped behind. Conservatives 7,518, Green 7,498. Everyone else had fallen from the race.

Before long, Kroop called the jurors in, explained with yawning unction that he didn't want to overwork them after an already long day, and sent them off to a comfortable downtown hostelry.

“What now?” Wentworth asked in the gowning room.

“You go home and get a good night's sleep.”

Outside, he waited until Wentworth pedalled off, then hailed a cab.

“West Vancouver, please. Hollyburn Hall.”

They crawled, only one lane open to the bridge, Arthur restive, fidgety, finally digging out his phone. Margaret wasn't picking up, and there seemed no hope of reaching campaign headquarters. He could imagine them, all wired on caffeine, Margaret trying to keep calm amid the tempest around her.

On his tenth try, he finally connected, to a background of whoops and groans, cheers and lamentations. Margaret could barely be heard. “Vocal chords gone. Fingernails too.” He didn't realize she'd passed the phone on until his undying expressions of love were interrupted by a male voice. “Oh, you're just saying that.”

Arthur asked the voice for the results of poll eighty-nine, Tumwat First Nations reserve. Green forty-one, Tories nine; Arthur had pulled it in. The amiable young volunteer stayed on the phone until the taxi pulled into the driveway of Hollyburn Hall. With three polls uncounted, at a quarter to ten, Margaret had a sixteen-vote edge.

In the main hall, some kind of break-into-groups session was underway, four clusters of patients nodding and murmuring. In one of the circles, a man was sobbing. Elsewhere, a wail. “Everyone hates me!”

Not partaking was Brian Pomeroy, who was in the well of the conversation pit, in repartee with Dr. Schlegg. Arthur made his way toward them, around the crackling fireplace, past a vocalizing groupie: “Don't give me that bullshit.”

Brian was lecturing the balding, bearded Facilitator. “Damn right I was trying to send out a message. I was at the end of my rope. Save me, I was screaming, save me from group therapy. I did one, no more.
Everyone
had a story that would drive you to suicide. Stop ragging me, doc, I ain't facilitatable. Bring me an exorcist.”

Brian did a double take as he looked up and saw Arthur, on his haunches at the rim of the pit. “Jesus. Don't scare me like that.”

Schlegg rose. “No more smoking in the room, my friend, or the privilege may be denied altogether.”

“Fank you, please delete yourself, I have an important guest.”

“Always a pleasure, Mr. Beauchamp. Please remember the time, we rise early here.” He departed, clapped his hands, and the four circles broke up, though one of the group leaders remained clinched in a hug with a tearful male patient.

“Crybaby,” Brian said. “If he was a man, he'd kill himself.”

Arthur descended into the snake pit. “Everyone but me seems to dismiss your aborted suicide as a rather empty gesture. Given that you have spurned all medical aid around here, one could hardly call it an attention-seeking device. I see it as a scream of despair.”

Reflections from the fire played on Brian's face as he twisted away to listen to Schlegg, on a dais. “Good, excellent. So let's have the group leaders up here for final feedback.”

“Let's have our own session, Brian.” He took Brian's elbow, helped him up.

“Right.” He shook himself vigorously, like a wet dog, as if to shed unwelcome feelings. “How's your version of the trial working out, Arthur? Has it ended yet?”

“The jury is out. How has yours ended?”

They paused at the stoop of the stairs. “Widgeon shot Inspector Grodgins and Constable Marchmont, then he hanged himself out of guilt over having made a fool of me. The literary allusion is subtly entertaining–the death of Widgeon symbolizes the death of this novel. Even my disordered mind could tell, in the course of editing it, that no sane man could have written this. I have failed. Thus, the scream of despair.”

Crazy but sly, said Wentworth. Cleverly oblique.

His room was neat, the bed made, the only disarray a dirty ashtray and a spilled carton of Craven A on the desk. Brian slid open the sliding balcony door, took the ashtray outside. His trash can was full of manuscript. The DSM-V of the American Psychiatric Association was open beside the computer, a line in boldface, “Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.”

Arthur joined him outside, drew out his Peterson bent. “‘I know too much.'” Arthur repeated the phrase, it was playful, had a double edge. “That's not my line; it's yours, as quoted to me by Dr. Alison Epstein. You told her you knew who did it. You said the clues were all in your manuscript. What I find interesting about that manuscript, other than its lack of such clues, is that however flawed, with all its jumps and starts, it seems not the output of an insane mind. You were able to express insanity more effectively
off
the page.”

Brian made no response, pulled on a sweater. It was a cool night, but the rain was holding off. Arthur itched to turn on Brian's radio, suppressed his election-result anxiety.

“I have read enough mysteries to know that an implied contract exists between the writer and his reader. The writer provides clues as his part of the bargain; they may be clever but must be sufficient. What's the point of a whodunit if even the cleverest puzzle-solver gives up because the author has broken the contract?”