I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (17 page)

My in-basket offered up a letter from Magdalen College instructing me either to take up their scholarship offer or lose it. I set it aside as a call came in from Mary in Squamish. She was hesitant, shy. She bore bad news: she had mentioned to Monique Joseph my interest in seeing her, and word of that had got out. Chief Joseph had sent his daughter off to Washington State, exact location unknown, to stay with distant relatives.

I was thinking seriously of handing the Swift file back to Pappas with thanks and regrets, then catching a flight to England, bowing to that ultimatum from Cambridge. I told Mary she had done well.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered.

The Communist Party campaign office was on the second floor of an old brick building in the Gastown area, a slum in those years, though it was once the city's beating heart after the great fire of 1886. Today, of course, the old town is preserved, though blighted
with tchotchke shops, galleries selling cheap art, and junkies doing up in back alleys.

A gabbing group surrounded a Gestetner that was pumping out leaflets. Posters on the wall loudly exhorted the working class to seize the day. A photo of their scrawny old leader, Tim Buck. A banner: “Hands off Cuba.” In my suit I felt awkward among the Party workers in their patched overalls and hand-me-down dresses. Volunteers from among the unemployed, I assumed.

Jim Brady greeted me with a self-deprecating joke about his being an ordinary party hack, but he seemed to be in charge there, likely on loan from Mine, Mill to run the federal campaign. He looked to be in his early forties, copper-skinned, burly, healthy. Though self-taught he was well-read, according to my backgrounder, and a fine orator.

He led me to his inner office and cleared the pamphlets and periodicals from his desk to make room for our Number Three takeout. As we set to, he told me how he'd met Gabriel. Three years ago Brady was business agent for copper miners at Britannia, near Squamish. On his time off he visited the reserves and lectured about Native rights. Gabriel, then seventeen and just out of high school, went to a couple of those gatherings. Brady was impressed by the young man, invited him to “a small discussion group.” Soon after, Gabriel arrived in Vancouver, stayed two weeks with him and his wife, Grace, and joined the
CPC
's youth wing.

Brady and Gabriel had been in regular contact ever since. They both enjoyed chess – Gabriel, he said, had the skills of an aspiring master. But most of the time they talked politics, economic theory, Native rights. Grace, a Party member, would often join in.

He talked between mouthfuls. “He admired me because I broke free from the white man's prison. He admired me for my ideals. But he admired Mulligan in a different way – intellectually. I may be smart but I ain't brilliant, and Gabriel was moving away from me.”

I picked up a sadness. Both he and Mulligan had discerned something unusual in young Swift. Not just brains and drive but hints of future renown, even greatness. I had a similar sense of
him, one that had grown with each meeting, and that weighed on me, to the point I'd had gallows nightmares.

I told Brady about the difficulties of the case: Doug Wall, the rumours of homosexuality flying about, the fingerprints, the cartridges. He showed no surprise at the machinations of the Squamish
RCMP
. He knew Knepp, knew Gabriel had thumped him.

“Gabriel has a volatile temper, that's for damn sure. I like that – the passion – no one's gonna turn this system on its ass unless they're passionate, even angry. But maybe there was too much anger; sometimes it just erupted. Working for a union, you learn how to deal with anger, and I spent a lot of time teaching him to channel it, to convert them thunderclouds into political action.”

When he asked about Gabriel's chances, I answered with care. “They have no body. No credible motive. No eyewitness, just that weasel of an informer. But they've built up a trove of circumstantial evidence. Juries are fickle. Gabriel will face twelve people, almost certainly all white, most of whom will pretend they aren't racists. They will not be swayed by radical calls to action by a renegade who would like to turn this into a trial against the evils of capitalism. I'm not sure if I have his ear in that regard. But he will listen to you, Jim.”

Brady became guarded. “Is that what you see as my role? To censor him? I read somewhere, maybe Lenin, that fear of consequences merely perpetuates the system.”

“I won't aid in his martyrdom.”

“What kind of justice is ever won on bended knee?”

“No competent lawyer will play by his client's rules. I assume Harry Rankin refused to.”

“What does it matter what Gabriel's politics are? The charge is bullshit.” He grew animated. “The homosexual stuff is bullshit. Fascists like Knepp will try to silence the resistance one way or another. Read some history, learn how they try to buy you, then bend you, and if that don't work, bury you. They're setting him up
because
he's a red. Why ain't that a good defence?”

I told him, weakly, that was not the direction I hoped to go.

Brady went back to his sweet-and-sour ribs, then sighed. “I'll talk to him.”

Jimmy Fingers' office was nearby, at Victory Square, a stroll through the seamy side of town. But I had police protection, so to speak: a tail from the
RCMP'S
Red Squad. I paused at a shop window, then retraced my steps to its doorway, crossing paths with a man under an umbrella, though it was barely sprinkling. By happenstance the business I entered was the People's Co-op Bookstore, added proof I was a tool of Moscow. I stared up at a row of thick, forbidding texts.
Read some history
.

As the follower took up his pursuit again, I scripted a comic scene of officers informing Mavis Beauchamp that her son had been offered the Communist candidacy for Vancouver Centre. Thus, finally, I might be disowned, made free.

A creaky elevator in a creaky old building hoisted me to the fifth floor and a hallway of shady businesses: a loan advisor, a theatrical agent, an escort service, and, at the end of the hall, “Private Investigations, Discreet Service” – Jimmy “Fingers” O'Houlihan. He had a tendency during his brief career as a beat cop to finger the innocent, thus his nickname. One such case, involving a prominent businessman, blew up in his face. He quit, went private. His services were mostly on behalf of the cuckolded. In those days adultery was the only well-trodden ground for divorce, and Fingers had a knack for coming up with the goods, not always legitimately.

His secretary paused from blowing on her freshly painted nails to tell me her boss was finishing with a client. I could see him behind a windowed partition: a handsome, roguish brush-cut blond in his early thirties, with an Irish gift of gab. Soon he led out a weeping well-dressed woman.

“That shit,” she said.

“My heart goes out, ma'am. Harvey Frinkell is expecting you. Not cheap, but the best aren't.”

He helped her into her cashmere sweater, let her out, then embraced me. “My man Beauchamp! My hero, my saviour!” He propelled me toward his office, instructing his secretary to phone Frinkell. “Tell him there's some heavy sugar coming his way.”

He accepted my bottle of Jameson with a snort of pleasure and poured two doubles. “Never too early in the day. Can't say I wasn't expecting you.”

“Toby Schumacher seems pleased with your work.”

“That so? Then why did he balk at my fee? I had Mulligan all set up. He was my chocolate Easter bunny – I was going to serve the writ on Good Friday so he could share Jesus's pain. Then he ruins everything by pegging out. All the work I put into that job, it ain't fair.” Chuckling.

I entertained him awhile with tidbits from
Regina v. Swift
, deflecting a few questions about matters delicate or confidential. Finally he went to his filing cabinet, looked through what he called his dead files. “Here we are.” He pulled some eight-by-tens from a folder, along with his surveillance notes.

“They had this routine, Mulligan and Rita Schumacher. They wouldn't lower themselves to check into motels, so she'd sneak him into the house and they'd go at it in the bedroom upstairs.” Checking his notes. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, when Schumie had a late seminar. He gave me a spare key and I found a perch on the bedroom balcony, but I was two hours up there. It was March, it was fucking cold.”

He topped us both up. I was feeling a niggling discomfort as I tried to picture my mentor as a reckless roué.

“Four thirty-three, Rita parks her Chev Corsair in the driveway, enters house. Nine minutes later, Mulligan shows up in his Buick wagon, parks around the corner, slips down the alley, and she lets him in through the back. At four fifty-five they're in the bedroom, shedding, at four fifty-six he's sucking on her titties, and at five-oh-one he's between her legs.”

The photos were all black-and-whites. The first showed a mussed bed, Mulligan in a naked romp with Rita Schumacher. No
flash had been used, of course, so the scene was grainy and dark; one could hardly be expected to identify the rear end as the icon's. But with the interior lights turned on, other pictures were clearer, including a post-coital shot that showed him sitting up and putting on his horn-rims: short, thin but with a pot, bald of scalp and groin, a thick, stubby penis.

“So eventually she goes off for a quick shower, and Mulligan, he just hangs around in his underwear, as if he's got all the time in the world.”

A shot of Rita in slip and bra at a mirror, doing her makeup. Then Mulligan helping her into a back-buttoned blouse. Yet another photo had her slipping into a dress, again being assisted by Dermot, barefoot, still wearing only his underpants – white Stanfields or similar. A bulge down there, his erection seemingly resurrected. Almost fifty, and indefatigable.

“Schumie and his lady had a dinner engagement that night, okay? But he told her he was gonna be late picking her up, so he'd drive up and honk and wait for her. Understand, this was a set-up; I scripted it for him. All that effort and the pinchy bastard stiffs me for half the bill because I didn't have to go to court.”

I raised my glass in sympathy. Odd that the demand letter from Frinkell had not been remarked on in the police particulars. Because it didn't tie in with their theory of a homosexual affair? I would have to sit down with Irene and discuss it – an awkward prospect I'd been avoiding.

“So it's six-thirty and Schumie drives up in his old Packard and hits the horn. She says to Mulligan, ‘He's here. I have to run, darling.' Exact words, because she opened the balcony door to look out and wave. I had to make myself small – Jesus, that was a close call, but it was dark. Then she tells Mulligan to go out the back way after they drive off.”

He packed away all the photos, including some he seemed reluctant to show me. “Missed out on a financial opportunity.” I didn't get his meaning. “You think Schumie did Mulligan in, counsellor?”

“What's your view?”

“You ever seen a man sick with jealousy? Schumie was sitting right where you are, ranting like a loony.”

“Did Mulligan ever find out you had these photos?”

“Not from me, anyway.” Jimmy Fingers shrugged, almost too nonchalantly. “Harvey Frinkell has a set.”