April Fool (15 page)

“Okay. I'm down for doing it.” Confidence has returned.

 

While Selwyn works up his submission with old Riley, Arthur and Lotis walk down to El Beau Room, a dark, dank hotel saloon, long the haunt of the city's barristers, a place to drown away the many injustices done them in court.

By the time they arrive, Arthur has sketched for her Brian Pomeroy's scheme to get Adeline Angella loose and talkative and to steal off with a set of fingerprints to compare with the unknowns from the cottage. Brian will be joining their table later–Arthur spots him at the bar with his marriage counsellor, Lila Chow-Thomas.

Over salads and the house-special pasta–nothing else today, Arthur is made of steel–he charges his new assistant with her first duties: interviewing Winters's hiking companions, overseeing the independent analysis of the semen sample, gathering information about Rohypnol. Buddy Svabo has been playing coy with the many files police carted from Eve Winters's office. (
Nothing to hide–that's the way I always work.
). There will be a disclosure hearing Monday at which they will demand he produce them.

Lotis makes notes, head bowed, brushing hair from her eyes that soon take up their former place. “I still don't see Angella stashing the semen. Is there some kind of DNA pecker-track vault where they keep ten-year-old smears?”

“They usually discard old exhibits after appeals, or after a sentence has run its course.”

“So here's a different thought: Someone from Forensics could have planted Nick's ejaculate in Winters. Or a cop.”

“Planted how?”

She shrugs. “Soak the old swab in distilled water, squeeze it out, douche the corpse with a syringe or a turkey baster. Grade-school chemistry.”

“It would be quite a reach to prove that.”

“How many people have access to the exhibit lockers? Don't they have to sign some kind of register?”

Arthur can't keep up with the questions. Her scenarios are improbable–an analyst stealing, an exhibits clerk switching samples–far less credible than the Adeline Angella theory. Still, he must not, like the police, become fixated. He will follow the trail of these exhibits, seek a gap in continuity, evidence of mishandling. A known sample of Faloon's DNA may have accidentally mixed with the test sample.

Now comes Gowan Cleaver, pinched nose and pencil moustache–an austere man whose suits never wrinkle. “Welcome back to the lists, Arthur.” He calls to the waiter, “Just a whiff of vermouth, Samson.”

Hands are shaken. “This is my indefatigable assistant, Lotis Rudnicki. Gowan is one of our leading barristers.” A slight exaggeration–his main handicap as counsel is his caustic manner.

Cleaver accepts his martini, a double. “Quick power lunch, then back to court. Are we waiting for Pomeroy?”

At the bar, Brian's marriage counsellor gives him an exasperated look that suggests she's losing patience, then finishes her mineral water, looks at her watch, and excuses herself. Brian slumps, orders another glass of wine.

Cleaver produces a file folder with several handwritten sheets. “Dr. Eve Winters's notes on some silly dame who hated her father and thus got fucked up in life and went frigid.
Winters came to me because she started ranting on the phone, threatening defamation, fraud, breach of ethics, invasion of privacy, every tort in the book.”

He dips into the folder for a cassette tape. “Here's some of it, recorded off her machine. I told her to wait it out, not stir up any hornets' nests. Didn't matter, never went anywhere.”

“What was the nub of the complaint?”

“Okay, she comes to Dr. Winters with a problem–she can't get it up, she's frigid.”

“Sexual arousal disorder,” Lotis says.

Cleaver reacts as he might to a child who should only be seen. “I stand politically corrected. I assume you have expertise in the area.” Lotis tosses her hair, unchastened.

Brian brings his wine, straddles a chair. “In case anyone's interested, I'm having a marriage breakdown.”

“Obviously,” Cleaver says. “I see you're using Chow-Thomas.”

“Is she any good?”

“Usual feminist bias. Mind you, my marriage was beyond saving.”

“I think Caroline has got to her.”

Lotis mimes a gag reflex.

Cleaver continues. “Dr. Winters's patient is hung up on men, she flirts, gets into awkward situations when her bluff is called. Can't do it, backs out, freaks out. Another relationship in the wastebasket. Winters saw her twice, encountered blocks galore, got stood up for the next appointment. Their last contact was a month later, when this sexual-arousal-disordered person got on the blower to Winters with a rant about how she was going to sue her ass off. That was after this came out in
The Post
.”

Cleaver reads from a photocopy of the Doctor Eve column: “‘A strict religious upbringing has barred the doors of awareness for this sad woman, who has painted herself into a lonely corner. She has a desperate need to examine her
sexuality, to discover inclinations which may be truer to her heart.' Winters changed the name, of course, and identifying details, called her Lorelei.”

The siren of the Rhine, who lures and leaves men to their fate. A silence as Arthur exchanges glances with Lotis and Brian, then asks, “Would the woman's name be Adeline Angella?”

Cleaver looks at him oddly. “Yeah, I think that's it.” He studies the notes. “Angella.”

Three pair of eyes grow large around the table. “This was when?” Arthur asks.

“Two years and two weeks ago.”

“Do you remember the Faloon rape?”

“Vaguely, it didn't connect.” Cleaver rises. “Hope I've been of help.”

“Your lunch is on me.” Arthur decides to order the apple pie–but only one scoop of ice cream.

Brian groans. “I am looking forward with unimaginable delight to having dinner with this flirtatious ball-crunching iceberg. I intend to protect my ass.” He snaps open a cellphone. “Latest Japanese gimmick–wireless relay to the recorder in my crotch. I just did a tester.”

He presses various buttons on the phone. A women's voice.
Brian, that is an extremely sexist comment, and I find it quite cheapening to have to meet you in a public bar. Goodbye.

“Loud and clear,” Lotis says.

Brian looks at her. “I think you're weird.”

“Back at you.”

 

That night, Arthur is awakened in his hotel suite by Brian's haunted, inebriated voice. “Arturo, we've got to talk, it was right out of Stephen King, I had to pull a last-minute el foldo.”

Arthur manages only a sleepy grunt.

“What time is it? Chris'almighty, it's after midnight? Sorry, I'll come by for breakfast…No, I'll be too hungover, let's make it lunch.” He hangs up before Arthur can croak a response.

 

13

A
rthur sees no hangmen on this morning's Appeal Court roster. The three judges are a liberal lot, the chief justice himself presiding, Selden Horowitz, shrewd but kind, on the cusp of retirement at seventy-four.

Arthur eases himself into a chair, weary. He slept poorly, missing the softness of a Garibaldi night, unused to the clanging city. Selwyn Loo's table is almost bare, the seat beside him empty: Lotis is off arranging for the DNA analysis. She will visit Faloon, introduce herself. She is not to mention the Lorelei business yet–institutional walls have ears.

Selwyn is on his feet for only ten minutes, a performance that seems to startle the court, a précis of facts and law without a wasted word. “On page 401, Justice Duff affirms the principle that an unfair hearing has no legal force.” At that point, Horowitz asks him to pause, and the three judges huddle and whisper.

“Mr. Prudhomme,” says the Chief Justice, “it would seem that the judge below was in a fit of pique.”

“Got up on the wrong side of the bed,” says a fellow justice.

And with that, Arthur understands that the day has been won. Prudhomme can't find an opening; the third judge chimes in. “Yes, he forgot that an accused party has the right to be heard before conviction and sentence. And what's this nonsense about doubling the fine and jail term every day? After three weeks, by my rough calculations, that comes to $3 billion and forty thousand years in jail.”

“Well, milords,” Prudhomme begins, then stalls, past hope.

“We will hear you, of course,” says Horowitz, making a point of extending the courtesy Santorini withheld.

Prudhomme sighs. “Out of discretion, I'll simply ask that the matter be remitted to Justice Santorini for reconsideration.”

That results in a debate about whether it's fair to return the matter to a mind apparently settled, but Arthur rises and whispers to Selwyn, “Stick with Santorini.”

Later, the appeal allowed, the matter sent back, Selwyn asks Arthur, “Why Santorini?”

“Better the devil you know. This makes him malleable–Eddie's terrified of the court of appeal.” Equally important, they have bought Gwendolyn more time.

 

Brian is red-eyed and haggard as he joins Arthur in his suite. He is garrulous nonetheless, and paces, smoking. They are in Arthur's favourite small hotel, overlooking English Bay, sailboats dwarfed by hulking anchored freighters.

“Brovak's just back from Mexico. He acted insulted that I accused him of pulling that prank with the panties. The guilt on his face was as obvious as your nose, Arthur. ‘At least cover for me,' I begged him. ‘Tell Caroline you did it.' But he won't, and he's lost a friend. I may even leave the firm.”

Arthur understands he must listen to the commercials before the feature begins. But he can empathize with Brian, his marriage crisis. Between the two of them, they have as much understanding of women as they have of the mechanics of gamma-ray bursters.

“You've been through it, Arturo. How does it fall apart?”

What has Brian heard? Has Margaret given a press conference?
Cud and I are deeply in love
…It dawns he's speaking of Annabelle, relief floods in. “Hardly made in heaven. I wore the horns.”

“But who came out the winner in the end? The great Cyrano met an eco-suffragette with whom he has an abnormally
non-fractious relationship. How do you do it? What is the answer, my adored master?”

Arthur takes that as rhetorical. He doesn't have an answer anyway. To sit around like a lump, accept whatever fate deals–that's his traditional response. At least Brian is actively fighting for his marriage. It may be messy, but there's life in it, excitement.

“One of the factors contributing to the debacle of last night was my hostile hearing from the marital fixer–you saw her, Lila Chow-Thomas.” Brian relates this between bites of room-service sandwiches, washed down with beer from the mini-bar. “Thin-skinned woman, offended because I asked to meet in a bar. Only because I wanted to talk to her alone, without Caroline running interference. I made the mistake of asking if being attractive was a handicap to her work. I wasn't flirting, but she flounced out. Afterwards, at what my bar dares call happy hour, I had a couple of doubles, smoothing the way for a historic bad trip, which, by the way, El Torro is the perfect locale for, shit-coloured brick, bullfight posters, dental office music.”

Arthur works his way through this thicket of words and images as he watches Brian set up a laptop computer. Arthur has remained, and vows he ever will be, computer illiterate, leery of this contrivance and its baffling lexicon of disks and bits and ports and prompts. Clearly, this one will be used as a playback device, the evening's events copied to it from the recorder that spent last evening in Brian's crotch.

“She's already there when I roll in, looking as if she just stepped out of HMS
Pinafore
, navy jacket and knee-length tartan skirt and leggings. The lady may be aesthetically challenged, but she's attractive in a 1950s-movie sort of way, a notable feature being her two thrusting vital statistics. Heavy makeup, hot lipstick, her hair in bangs and bows. She has a
copa de vino
going, I'm about to learn she's a bit of a juicer. There's some innocuous chat about wine, about how the sangria at El Torro is, as she puts it, fun. A lot of sangria is what Nick drank
here ten years ago, but I go along with it, tell the waiter to bring a pitcher–I'm reckless, already hammered. Let me take you on location…”

From the computer's speakers come the opening bars of a bolero. Lights blink and flicker on the screen, an inscrutable message appears: “Right click to pause.”

I thought you might not show up. Afraid of what I might write.

Why?

Well, defending that sort of people…Criminals, sexual predators, it's hard to paint a sympathetic picture…All right, I have to admit I'm biased.

You have a right to be. I know what you've been through. I looked up your Web site.

Brian pauses the recording, lights another cigarette. “Maybe she picked up a pornographic undertone, because she gave me a startled look. You looked up my
what
? She was primping, flirty nuances, playing with her hair.”

What does it feel like when you ask them if they enjoyed it?

Come again?

When you're cross-examining. That's what Mr. Beauchamp asked me, or almost. He accused me of being a willing party.

“Okay, pause again, here's where she introduces the topic of you, Senior Queen's Counsel Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp, the defender of her rapist. This is where it starts to get chilling, because in a spooky way that trial was the highlight of her life. She's slugging up the sangria as she recounts the horrors of the witness stand.”

Arthur can hear the bolero louder, an accelerating pulse, like a heart keeping beat.

Are you friendly with Mr. Beauchamp?

He runs in different circles. Hasn't been the same man since your trial. Basically, that was the end of his practice, he quit soon after.

He was so…I wanted to
kill
him.

Brian stops the recording. “I miss a prawn with my fork, it clangs against the dish. She wanted to kill you, Arturo. What
was I to say? Goodness, my dear, you had every right to feel that way.”

Arthur wonders if he ought to shrug off such a harsh remark from this prim, mannered woman. No doubt many others spoke as angrily after feeling the whip of his cross-examinations, but after ten years this was hardly spontaneous.

“She starts doodling instead of making notes–she doesn't want to interview me, she wants to talk. About her interview with Buddy Svabo, about how she must relive the horrible ordeal–as if she hasn't been dining off it for the last ten years–about Faloon, about the Winters murder. Burbling away as I top up the sangrias.”

“Do not underestimate her. I wouldn't be surprised if she tried to get you soused enough to reveal her name has been bandied about.” Arthur opens the window to let out the smoke, and he can see grey prominences above the horizon, the Gulf Islands, that world impossibly distant. This is not the last time, he suspects, he'll feel twinges of regret about taking on this case. He can't back out, but he'd rather be fishing.

“Fast-forwarding here, because she toddles off to the loo. The one thing she doesn't mention is going to Winters for therapeutic advice, how she threatened to sue her.”

A significant omission. The cassette from Dr. Winters's answering machine was teeming with insults.
You're an unprincipled, unethical bitch. Wait till I see my lawyer, you bitch. I hate you.

“She comes back smelling like a hothouse flower, drenched in something called Fantaisie, which I'm later to learn is her
parfum de goût
. In the meantime, I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And I'm drunk, Arthur, and I start to pour it out, how I'm a victim of a cruel joke, how I haven't been home for twelve days. And I'm getting an audience–she exudes sympathy, she's human, she isn't a psychopathic monster after all. In the meantime, I'm in such a state of flotation that I've let chances slip by, the waiter has grabbed her empty glass with all her fingerprints. I turn the subject to her, expressing wonder
that this femme fatal remains unpartnered. We pick up here.”

I will never repeat my mother's mistake. She's…well, she's free of him now, in a better world. I refuse to speak of my father.

Arthur distinctly hears a sniffle. “But she
does
speak of him,” Brian says, “and out comes the tissue, and she gets up a head of steam, comes off the rails a little.”

He used to scoff at my ambitions, said I'd never be a writer…Oh, no,
he
was the writer, two self-published novels that went nowhere. He never gave me affection, he never hugged. He thought I wasn't in the house one time, and I heard him tell Mother they should have just gone ahead and terminated the pregnancy…

Another pause in the recording. “Here I am, honest to God, holding her fucking
hand
. I'm thinking fingerprints, I'm stuffing her used tissues into my pocket. Fingerprints on tissue? Anyway, it turns out that her literary loser of a father snuffed himself, put a bullet in his head. I wanted to explore this, but suddenly the heart-rending episode is over, the clouds break, the sun comes out, rainbows appear.”

I'm being such a goose. I usually don't drink this much. I've just had my first work of fiction published. Would you be interested in reading it? I'm just around the corner.

I'll walk you home.

“Her flat is in an unhip metal-grey stack of units. She's been fifteen years in the same apartment, which somehow doesn't seem normal. I find myself entering the elevator with her–I'm a robot, programmed to follow a path to catastrophe. Her place has three locks, it smells of disinfectant, the décor is so square it's cubic, with doilies. There's a balcony with a kind of viewette of a strip mall. Sitting prominently on a table: a metre-high pile of movie magazines and about a dozen copies of this.”

He passes Arthur a copy of
Tales of Passion
, April edition. The cover illustration is of a well-muscled man outside a window, a woman in a nightie peering out. Readers are invited to turn to
page twenty-eight, a story by Adeline Angella, “You're Not Supposed to Ask.”

“She wanted to read it
aloud
. Over cognac. On her couch. The evening continues to morph into high surrealism.”

Mind if I visit the little boy's room?

Yes, of course, freshen up.

“Note, Arturo. I do not say, ‘I have to go to the washroom.' I am regressing. I am talking
her
language. I rummage in the medicine cabinet, looking for a secret stash of rochies.
Nada
. The bedroom door is ajar, and I can't help glancing in as I pass by, and there she is on the bed, pulling off her leggings, and she gives me this chiding tease, ‘You're not supposed to
lo-ook
.'

“I study the situation in the living room, where we have a soft light, cheesy piano music on the stereo,
Tales of Passion
open to her story. Cognac in liqueur glasses. Unthinkingly, I pick mine up, sip, and I'm overcome by a delusion that it's been doctored with ten milligrams of Rohypnol. Angella comes out in bare feet, pink toenails, sits catlike on the sofa, pats a spot beside her, tells me it's only twelve pages, and I should sit. I'm about to take a rain check on the literary reading when a paranoid rush hits: I've got
my
fingerprints all over everything, her cosmetics, her Parfum Fantaisie. Why not go all the way, leave a sample of my semen? I'm panicking, Adeline is tugging at me to sit down. Here are the final few minutes.”

Don't be a silly. It's early. We can watch the
Tonight Show
after.