“I wouldn't know about that. “The music ofJamaica in her voice. She is shy but smiling, this dimpled secretary.
“How's the season been, Mr. Lang? Bleak, I hear.” He is listed as a fisherman.
“Yeah, it's been bad. They only gave us two days on the sockeye.”
I ponder telling him of my own skill with line and lure, but think the better of it: Fishing persons â fishers? â are not always fond of amateur depleters of resources.
Back in my room, I call Margaret's number. No answer. No messages from her on the hotel voice mail. She is clearly not prostrate with grief at my absence. A black thought: Is there someone else?
I gaze out into the gloom of downtown Vancouver. Rain pelts my gargoyles. How fare the evil spirits that beset George Rimbold? He answers after a few rings, his voice unnaturally strained â this worries me.
I tell him that my trial is whizzing along and I expect to see him on the weekend.
“I don't think I'll make it to the fair.”
“Nonsense.”
“Too much merriment going on. It will only depress me. I just bought some real estate, Arthur. First piece of land I've ever owned.”
“But that's excellent. Where is it?”
“Plot in the cemetery.”
“I hope, George, this is your macabre sense of humour at work.”
“Don't worry, Arthur, it's a long-term investment.”
To cheer him up, I entertain with a few nuggets from the trial â with some success, I think, because he becomes more spirited in conversation. Finally I ask if he has recently chanced upon Margaret. He has not, but he asks how my weekend evening went with her.
“I offered my heart. It wasn't summarily rejected, but is being held for inspection.”
“Sure and she will never return it. She shares your feelings, Arthur, but a lady doesn't blurt them out. She demands to be wooed and pursued.”
That, in turn, pumps up my own spirits.
My taxi takes me over Lions Gate and passes by a welter of malls and shops before finding the sanctuary ofJonathan's quiet street, a comfortable neighbourhood of sturdy frame houses buried in the urban rain forest. I alight at 141 Palmer: neo-cubist architecture, three split-levels cascading down a gentle decline that ends at a small gully â dry now in September, though a running brook when Annabelle and I were Jonathan's dinner guests a few winters ago.
I proceed up a stone walkway to the door from which naked, painted Kimberley Martin fled on a cold November night last year.
He's going to kill me.
A nasty dramatic touch or a hasty improvisation? It seems too bizarre that Jonathan would have uttered a death threat, yet unlikely she would make that claim unless her mind had gone careening out of balance.
Augustina's sporty Porsche is in the driveway behind Jonathan's sedan, and it is she who greets me at the door, a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, a smoky kiss plump on my lips. I have grown increasingly fond of this excellent person, but I fear for her foolish heart â I have noted it seems to flutter when Jonathan is near.
In the kitchen, bending to a built-in oven, is the accused in an embroidered blue apron. How domestic he appears. Steaks sizzle on a Jenn-Air grill; vegetables are steaming in a colander. Jonathan has arrayed various herbs and seasonings on his workspace â like many bachelors, he seems an accomplished chef.
“What a sordid scene of wanton lust this afternoon, Arthur,” he says. He mimics Wally: “âPoor thing, do you think you can cope?' I've
met him at a couple of bar functions â he has a repertoire of bedroom jokes. Beneath the shiny new PC paint job lurks the same old lecher.”
Despite the strain Jonathan must feel, he manages to maintain his cynical sense of humour. I have a sense he has recently resolved some kind of inner struggle, though I also pick up a worrying tone of defeatism. Can it be that he has lost hope, found the peace of surrender? I pray not. It is a contagion I dare not allow to infect my unsatisfied need to believe in his innocence.
He pours me a Perrier and ushers us to his study. “Don't offer to help. I'll call you when it's ready. I've already shown Augustina about; she can be your guide.”
His library evidences a catholic taste in literature, along with much history and philosophy and, of course, law. A poetry corner: the complete works of Ovid and Virgil in the ancient language. A three-volume set of Shaw's collected plays, plus a single edition of
Saint Joan,
a thin paperback, looking rumpled and misused, some pages bent. As I riffle through it, a large red smudge catches my eye: Scene Nine.
Augustina studies it. “Not blood. It's lipstick. Shameless.”
What to make of this? Anything? Clearly, this script was roughly handled during the amateur theatrics of November twenty-eighth. But Kimberley knew her lines â why would her lipstick be in this book?
“Seize the evidence,” I tell her softly. “Don't mention it to Jonathan just yet.”
“Why?”
“In case it . . . compromises his defence.” Although I'm not sure why it would.
Wordlessly, she puts both copies of the play in her briefcase, then continues showing me about.
“This is the chair where she passed out, quote unquote,” Augustina says.
An overstuffed armchair, a matching couch by it. Over here, a large built-in desk, with a Selectric typewriter. Beside it, a review
copy of some heavy tome about law in the Middle Ages. Framed on the wall, a photograph of a smiling, confident-looking older man in hunting gear, holding a dead pheasant by the neck, a bottle of champagne in the other hand.
“Viscount Caraway,” says Augustina. “Jonathan says the picture tells it all; he thinks it's funny. He says he only recently brought the photo out from hiding. He and his father have had some kind of a rapprochement.”
“How has his father reacted to all of this?”
“With pride, I think.”
The viscount was in the news again, I recall, shovelling coals of hell and damnation upon Whitehall for selling Ulster out to Irish popery. It strikes me as cynically apropos that Kimberley Martin is Roman Catholic.
My tour takes me to the fireplace: a spent condom and a few linen sheets met their doom here on November twenty-seventh. Jonathan's panicky incineration of evidence may yet serve him poorly at this trial.
Augustina leads me through the living room â original art on the walls: modern, confusing to my eye â then down to the billiard room: the table covered, cues stacked neatly. A shiny varnished bar â the cocaine chopping block.
Our tour then takes us to the upper level, to a spacious master bedroom with a queen-sized brass bed. Here is where Kimberley did it with Jonathan, as the girls of Mop'n'Chop might put it.
French doors lead to a sundeck at the back. A large window looks out upon a mature weeping willow, obscuring Dr. Hawthorne's house, about forty feet away.
“This is the closet where her clothes were all neatly hanging. That's the suit she put on.” Hidden in the back. “The ensuite. Nice big bath, a Jacuzzi. Over here, the dresser drawers she snooped in, where she found the famous tie.”
Augustina gets up onto the bed, lies face down, her legs splayed,
her feet touching the second-to-the-end bedposts, raising a comely blue-jeaned rump. “Try it, Arthur. Oh, I forgot, you're in love with someone else. Actually, it would be really hard if she were resisting. On her back, yeah, no problem. So why would he have tied her facedown? Obvious. So he could spank her. I didn't say that.” But she abruptly becomes solemn. “Arthur, do you believe he's innocent?”
I hedge: “Innocence is irrelevant. We defend, juries judge.”
“Yeah, I know all that, but what's your gut reaction â is he innocent?”
“I want to believe he is.” But I sense that is not enough for her, too vacillating and weak. “Beyond a moral certainty, I cannot say, but I am determined to give him the benefit of doubt.”
That seems not to satisfy her at all. Her face clouds. “He's been terribly wronged, Arthur.”
I dare not suggest to her that her judgement might be impaired by the tenderness she obviously feels for the haunted soul we defend. Yet, I, too, have grown in my regard for this brother in pain â almost more than I dare to admit.
What did George Rimbold say?
You believe or you don't believe, there's no goddamn in-between.
I cannot be agnostic as to Jonathan's innocence; I
must
believe.
The food is excellent, the conversation intense, and it continues over compote and coffee. We discuss strategies: how to pry Wally Sprogue from Kimberley's bosom; how to cross-examine her â unrelenting politeness or the dentist's drills and needles? Were inhibitions so enfeebled through the cocktail mix of cocaine and alcohol that she succumbed to repressed desires? Augustina has talked to experts, one of whom is under subpoena, but it's an area of risky forensics that we may wish not to touch.
Have we missed anything? Are there clues floating about like gossamer too indistinct to see? Or are we looking in the wrong
direction? I say nothing about the Shameless blotch on the text of Shaw's play. I'm still unsure what to make of it.
Jonathan tells me his psychiatrist, Dr. Jane Dix, will be attending tomorrow, and I am advised to spend some quality time with her. But he continues to be reluctant to say how she may be of use. She will not know the court's rules of engagement and may urge some inappropriate mental defence.
Jonathan can't seem to stop ruminating the mystery of Kimberley Martin. “She's a complex puzzle. Amazing woman. Bloody awesome, in fact. Too vibrant. Too damn
real.
Why can't I hate her? I can't find my anger; maybe I've buried it too deep.”
I am perplexed by his forbearance. The wrongly accused usually tend to flare in indignation at their tormentors, but Jonathan seems to flounder in a swamp of . . . what? Not self-pity. Self-reproach, maybe, or shame.
“Actually, I feel a sort of sick admiration for the skilful way she's managed to trash my life.” A wry smile. “I'm like a rat worried into a corner, trapped in a dead-end maze. A blameless rat, for what that's worth. I can't
prove
my innocence.” He seems to be working up one of his heads of steam.
“The law does not require you to do so, Jonathan,” I say softly.
“The law is an ass.” His fist thuds the table; coffee slops; forks and spoons bounce. Augustina looks alarmed. “The law. The law! I'm trapped in the bloody
clutches
of the law. Presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt, grand precepts, aren't they? It's a system of beautifully constructed bullshit. The rule of law that I shove down innocent throats, that I teach and preach, and supposedly celebrate, has reared back at me like some monstrous, rabid animal. It won't allow me to clear my name! If I continue to play dead like this I'll be chewed alive. Jesus bloody Christ, at least if I fight, I may have a ten-per-cent survival chance.”
I down a last draught of decaffeinated coffee, wait until he cools down. “What are you saying, Jonathan?”
“I'm saying that this gag order is choking me. Even in the unlikely event I'm not
proved
guilty, I'll still be subjected for the rest of my life to a kind of universal smirking disbelief. But I can't defend myself, can I? Somebody give me the reasons one more time.”
Augustina takes his hand, gently unballs his fisted fingers. “Jonathan, don't be so damn pessimistic. You're not going to hang unless you provide the rope.”
I explain again to him. There are a dozen reasons for not putting him on the stand: He must admit to a guilty mind â his frantic efforts to destroy or alter crucial evidence, the sheets, the condoms, the dry-cleaned suit. None of this could they prove without his generous help. He could be trapped within the coils of his many lies. But, most perilous, the dangerous Dominique Lander would be unleashed against us in rebuttal.
“Miss Lander may find pleasure under the whip, but the lash of rejection bites deeper. She abominates you with the kind of venom that only a disorganized mind can concoct. She is determined to destroy you and will enjoy an immense sadistic thrill in doing so. No, Jonathan, you are to be acquitted by your silence.”
He calms himself, sadly shakes his head. “There's no other way of keeping her off the stand?”
“That's the ultimate effect of our arrangement with the Crown. If you don't testify, neither does she.”
“And nobody hears that you played master-and-slave games with that weirdo,” Augustina says. “Wouldn't you rather have people smirking than laughing out loud?”
He smiles ruefully. “I've really done it to myself. What a pathetic jerk I've been.” He sighs. “God save me.”
“He will,” says Augustina. “Won't you, Arthur?”
Our after-dinner conversation has not only enervated me but inculcated an almost morbid fear that I may fail in the godlike trust
imposed on me. And now I have returned to my hotel too late to try Margaret once again, and this causes me to descend into a yawning chasm of emptiness and loneliness.
Love and pain are twin emotions.
I crawl into bed and fall into a fretful sleep.
And then she calls.
“Arthur? Is it too late?”
I look at the bedside clock: a few minutes after midnight. “Not at all.” I am suddenly wide awake, my body pulsing.
“Were you sleeping? Don't lie to make me feel good. Fall Fair Committee, two nights in a row. They were still going at it when I left. People were at each other's throats. That ridiculous Leanna Sawyer started it all. You know her. Bossy Jesus freak? Wanted no beer on the grounds. No beer at the fall fair? I told her she was nuts.”
She needs to vent steam, and I insist she does so on my dime, so I disconnect and call her back. She talks non-stop for twenty minutes, an exuberant rhapsody: I am on her side, cheering her on, clucking with displeasure at the chicanery of her enemies.