I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (21 page)

Ophelia moved a little closer to me, a scent of perfume and a hint of warmth intimating a thaw was setting in. So I was emboldened to ask, “And where's Jordan this afternoon?”

“I'm taking a little vacation from him.”

I suppressed a smirk of triumph. Perhaps she had punished me enough for fraternizing with Frinkell. Geraldson had been a stopgap; she'd merely used him to demonstrate to me her value.

Hubbell took that inopportune moment to return clutching three doubles on the rocks. “Mr. Johnny Black here is going to help us through this terrible time. How are you two getting along?” He put an arm around Ophelia. “Unlike Pappas, I wouldn't mind if you squeezed my nuts. Just not too hard.”

She shrugged away. “You're getting a little smashed, Hub. And we have company.”

Advancing was Cyrus Smythe-Baldwin, and in tow was Leroy Lukey, a beefy fellow, still in his twenties. “May I take advantage of this august occasion,” said Smitty, “to present my aide-de-camp, Mr. Lukey – whom I believe you know, Arthur – and to make acquaintance with the young lady at your side, whom I take to be your own junior, Mrs. Moore.”

He kissed her hand, commended her for quelling the Oakalla revolt, and complimented me on my taste in juniors. I agreed, looking at Lukey, that I had the better deal. Smitty laughed and went off to talk to Pappas.

“Heard this one?” Lukey got close. “What did Tonto say when the Lone Ranger tied his cock in a knot?” He waited. “ ‘How come?' ”

Out of some warped sense of politeness I affected a smile, as if finding this vaguely humorous. Ophelia pinched me in the side hard enough to raise a welt.

Lukey raised his glass. “To equal injustice for all. The offence will be scoring fast and early.” He assumed the stance of a running back waiting for the snap.

“The race goes to the swift, Leroy.”

He took a moment to get it. “Like the archbishop said to the choirboy, up yours, my son.”

He'd been sizing up Ophelia, smarting over my claim to have gotten the better deal. “First criminal trial? Maybe you want to add a learning curve to the others on display.”

“What I lack in experience I make up for with an instinct for bullshit.” She smiled graciously and sipped her Scotch.

“Sister, you are going to be a distracting influence in court. First female lawyer I've met who doesn't look like a dyke.”

“And I wish I could say you don't look like a dick.” She took my arm, about to lead me away.

Lukey persisted. “You guys like surprises?” He pulled an envelope from a pocket, handed it to Ophelia with a bow. “Read what Walt Lorenzo says. Then maybe we can talk about your guilty plea.”

He wandered off. Ophelia took the envelope as I slugged back my Scotch. When I looked around, she'd gone somewhere with her own drink, presumably to find privacy to read about Walt Lorenzo, whoever he was.

Frinkell came wandering past again, this time wiping his face and shirtfront with a handful of napkins. He didn't return any of the curious looks, just headed straight to the washroom.

A second later Ophelia hove into view, her glass empty, even of ice cubes. Her other hand held the envelope from Lukey and several sheets of wet stationery. “Let's get out of here,” she said.

All the firm's able-bodied lawyers had been expected to continue on, drunk or sober, to the Conservative rally in the Forum, so the fourteenth floor was unoccupied but for cleaning staff.

Meanwhile, Ophelia was draped over an armchair, looking wan. “I thought the plan was to shy away from this idiot.”

“That's why this stinks.”

The idiot in question was Corporal Walt Lorenzo. This astonishingly inept actor – stage name Burt Snyder — had been brought in from Winnipeg
RCMP
to share a cell with Gabriel at Oakalla.

I smoothed out the drying papers and read them again – Lorenzo's brief of evidence. The first page described the set-up: his instructions, his cover as a longshoreman and heroin peddler, his attempted insinuation, over several days, into Gabriel's confidence. Glaringly displayed was an undeserved sense of self-importance.

Subject and I had little conversation at first, as I pretended to want to keep to myself. There was no mention of the crimes he and I were
“charged with” until Day Four, when he asked what I was in for. I related the cover story, and asked the same question of him. He said he was being “framed for murder.”

Verbatim notes of the aforementioned and following conversations were made daily by me, when I was taken from the cell to see my “lawyer” or a visiting “relative” or to make a court “appearance.”

The verbatim notes, a dozen Photostatted scraps of paper, were stapled to his quotation-mark-riddled brief. He and Gabriel had been together three weeks, from May 6 to 28, an unusually long time for an operation of this kind, giving rise to a suspicion this operative had been too proud to admit failure and cooked up a stew of lies.

On May 12 (Day Six) I broached the subject of politics, and he was pleased that I “supported” the aims of the Communist Party, whose programs and philosophy I studied in my training for this assignment. I also mentioned in passing that I was part Ojibwa, on my mother's side, which I believe caused him to relax his guard further
.

Those patent lies had done just the reverse. Gabriel had told me the man betrayed only a rudimentary knowledge of politics, let alone the history of class struggle. I'd chided him for even passing the time of day with him. “I was only feeling him out,” he said.

Lorenzo continued to try to engage him, claiming a tentative but growing friendship. He prided himself on his skill at chess, but “I made sure I lost most of the games.” Eventually he affected curiosity about Gabriel's crime, claiming he'd heard “scuttlebutt about it in the joint.”

Gabriel had politely declined to respond, returning to a biography of Louis Riel. Thereafter, Lorenzo seemed not to have made similar blunt overtures, confining himself to denunciations of the rich. He tried to interest Gabriel in an “escape plan,” but he didn't bite on that, either.

I sensed he was weakening. We had developed a bonding, especially as we agreed politically, and he took me to be a “comrade.” I didn't have the impression he was a real “bad” person, and it's my experience that people like him eventually have to get it off their chest
.

Finally, on Day Nineteen, the previous Saturday, the frustrated spy must have realized his chances for promotion would dry up if he didn't produce. Over the cribbage board that evening, he tearfully regurgitated to Gabriel a crime he claimed he'd bottled up. He had once killed a man, broken his neck in a back-alley fight, but escaped detection.

I told him my secret was torturing me and he was the first person I'd ever told this, because he was like a brother, and I felt deeply in my heart I could trust him. I said, “It was me or him, I had to kill him.”

Swift heaved a big sigh, and I could sense him giving way. Then he said, “I had to kill too.” He said he had no choice, Professor Mulligan had to pay for his crimes. He got very choked up so I didn't get his full meaning, but he went on about children being strapped and beaten, sexually assaulted, at some Indian school in Saskatchewan. He told me he'd planned to confront the deceased at his fishing hole, and make him take his clothes off so he could fake a suicide, but the deceased tried to grab his rifle and there was a tussle and he hurled him down over the rocks, into the river, where he shot him as he flailed
.

That was faithfully copied from one of his stapled notes, word for word. Signed and dated:
27-05-62, at 0910 hours
.

I was of course floored by this unexpected, yet almost credible, scenario – credible at least to those who might see Gabriel as obsessively vengeful – but I couldn't remotely see my client blurting out a full, quick, unadorned confession. Apparently nothing else was said, other than Lorenzo swearing he would never repeat those words. Gabriel was, to employ his cellmate's compositional bad habit, “emotional.”

It seemed hardly plausible that on Ophelia's visit two days later there'd been not a whisper of this. “Gabriel was just like … normal,” she said. “Anger-free, talkative in his cynical way – he'd actually been getting his hopes up.” She stood, put on her jacket. “This is going to be hard.”

“I'll bet the farm that Roscoe Knepp knows Lorenzo, that they served together. Maybe Lorenzo owes him one.”

“Maybe Knepp saved his life? This is so sick. Could a jury possibly believe anything so obviously cooked up?”

I wasn't sure.

Gabriel was slumped in his chair, looking up at the walls of the tiny interview room as if wondering why they seemed to be closing in on him. I had waited for an explosion, tensed myself for it, but he'd just gone small, arms crossed, shoulders curled in. “Does Knepp know this guy?” he asked.

“We're working on it.”

He must have wondered how hard we were working, Ophelia in her tight designer dress, I in a conservative dark suit. I was too embarrassed to explain we'd been at a Conservative Party function.

“He'll be laughed out of court,” Ophelia said.

A wan smile from Gabriel. “I live in the real world.”

“What world is that?” she asked.

“Tell me how many Natives will be sitting on the jury.”

“I doubt there'll be any.”

“That's the real world.”

He seemed less despairing than resigned, settled, accepting of the worst. It's never easy getting one's hopes up, risking them being dashed; it even strips you of anger. If anything, he seemed more relaxed now that he was back in the real world.

“It's crap, a transparent farce.” I tried to sound enthusiastic. “Let's do a rerun. Everything that passed between you and Lorenzo on Saturday.”

He looked at his hands, sighed, straightened up. “Okay, I didn't say a fucking thing to him all day, until maybe half an hour before lights out. Then we sat down to play some crib. And he went into this malarkey about killing someone. It was pathetic. I told him so.”

Ophelia was startled. “Why didn't you say that when I saw you?”

Gabriel looked down again. “I didn't want you to climb all over me about it. I just told him he wasn't going to win an Oscar, that he was a lousy ham actor. That was all, and he went red and shut up. I honestly never thought he was a cop – he was too dumb.”

Ophelia made notes as I drew from Gabriel a detailed account of all his dealings with Lorenzo. He seemed contrite, as he ought to have been; humiliating Lorenzo may have incited him to devise that extravagantly false confession. My client's quick tongue had again caused a self-inflicted wound.

I had him look again at Lorenzo's statement. “He says you ‘went on about children being strapped and beaten, sexually assaulted, at some Indian school in Saskatchewan.' So let me ask: did Dermot tell you his writing block had to do with Pie Eleven?”

“No, but I sensed it. I think he'd uncovered some abuse situation there. Maybe the Church told him to take no action and keep his mouth shut. Maybe that's why Rome fell. I hope I won't be asked in court if that motivated me to kill him. I would die laughing.”

I told him to make inquiries through the prison grapevine; another inmate might have encountered Lorenzo. I intended to seek out other sources.

“I guess I shouldn't have belted Roscoe in the chops.” A cynical smile.

“Don't give in to him,” I said.

“He wins. I hang.”

Ophelia: “Don't even dream it.”

“Je n'ai pas l'espoir
. Except to hope I have his courage. Riel's.”