I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (3 page)

Before heading off to Oakalla Prison, I squirreled myself away in the Crypt with the file and several back issues of the
Sun
and the
Province
. The file was skimpy indeed: a legal aid form and a sheet of paper with some phone numbers – no details, no police report.

The news stories (still extant, crisp, yellowed, and well-fondled by Wentworth Chance) revealed little. After Dr. Mulligan's disappearance, some clothing, presumably his, was found by the riverbank half a mile from his cottage. They were being examined for bloodstains. Irene Mulligan was speechless with grief, secluding herself and refusing to be interviewed by the press.

A person of interest had been questioned, held, and released, but Swift's name wasn't mentioned until his re-arrest. In his remarks to the press, Staff Sergeant Roscoe Knepp of the Squamish
RCMP
had used the typically prolix phraseology of his trade: “I can only affirm at this point in time that the arrested individual had been in the employ of Dr. Mulligan for approximately two years and five months. A formal charge of murder in the first degree has been preferred against the aforesaid individual. We are pursuing further investigative leads.”

Press photos showed Swift being bundled into a cruiser: a young, slender, bronze-skinned lad in rough clothes, a pair of braids, sparking black eyes. He'd called out to reporters that he was being “framed by a fascist f—ing cabal of racist brownshirts.” That gave me a jolt. Such bluntness would gain him little sympathy in a white man's court. What in God's name had I gotten myself into?

Swift was obviously a much-politicized young upstart. He was a farmhand, a labourer, a son of the Cheakamus tribe, born on its reserve, educated in a church-run school. No interviews with his friends or family decorated those pages, though encomiums for Dr. Mulligan filled columns.

The few neighbours who would speak of Swift – all white and working-class – claimed to know little of him. Thelma McLean, who lived across the road with her tree-faller husband, had often seen him “lazing about on their porch with a book,” a curious observation, implying an association between reading and laziness. “I can't remember speaking to him, but he seemed troubled, always hiding in a book.” Mrs. McLean and other neighbours were attending to Irene Mulligan, shielding her from the media swarm outside her house.

Before slipping the file into my briefcase, I looked through the contacts Pappas had jotted down. Staff Sergeant Knepp's number was there, and that of the court clerk in Squamish. The final name caused me tremors. M. Cyrus Smythe-Baldwin, Q.C., the lion of the criminal courts, had been named special prosecutor.

From “Where the Squamish River Flows,”
A Thirst for Justice
, © W. Chance

IN 1962 THE PUNISHMENT FOR CAPITAL MURDER was to be hanged by the neck until dead. This sat heavily on Beauchamp's mind as his Volkswagen Beetle sped him toward the regional jail and a first meeting with Gabriel Swift. Two executions had already been scheduled for that year (both were ultimately carried out, before Christmas), and the nation's mood vigorously favoured retaining the death penalty.

Only three years earlier, a fourteen-year-old boy named Steven Truscott had been sentenced to the gallows for a rape-murder conviction based on circumstantial evidence. (Though his sentence was finally commuted to life, it took fifty years before it was found he'd been innocent all along.) This case was to torment Beauchamp throughout his defence of Gabriel Swift. If a grade seven student with a blameless history could be condemned to hang, what chance had an angry militant Indian who, it was alleged, had cruelly repaid Dr. Mulligan's affection and generosity?

Beauchamp held a cynical view as to why he'd been chosen for this defence. Pappas hadn't wanted to sully his own reputation, nor the reputations of his more favoured underlings, by taking on a loser. He resented the young upstart, resented his greater skill, and Beauchamp was being asked to pay the price of his boss's vanity and jealousy. However well defended, a trial that ended with a sentence of death would be a crushing reverse, one that would forever soil Beauchamp's career.

He was torn in another, deeply personal way about defending the suspected killer of a man who'd been his professor and mentor. He wondered if he'd be able to give it
his all, especially since he felt it unlikely that Swift was innocent. In all events, he knew he had to level with this militant aboriginal about his affection for Dr. Mulligan.

Beside him that afternoon in his 1957 Beetle, driving through the sprawl of suburban Burnaby, was the divorcée Ophelia Moore, the sole woman among the forty-three solicitors of Tragger, Inglis. Though almost a decade older than Beauchamp, she'd been called to the bar only six weeks earlier, and since the partners didn't seem to know what else to do with her, she'd been seconded to be his junior counsel. Short, slightly heavy but pleasingly so, rosy dimples, blue eyes, and blond curls – the kind of attractive package that tended to cause Beauchamp distress …

A
distress I couldn't account for, and have never really understood. It has something to do, I'm sure, with the guilt-ridden yearnings of one persuaded in childhood that sexual desire is dirty, the act unspeakable. Strong inferential evidence suggests that my tutors in that regard stopped sleeping together soon after the supposed miracle of my conception. As if in disgust at what they'd produced, they had quickly retreated to separate bedrooms off the echoing upstairs hallway of their split-level rancher.

Their house was only a stroll from the
UBC
campus, where Thomas Beauchamp was chief librarian and Mavis Beauchamp taught Latin. As their only child I was not deprived, but I was their compliant prisoner, dependent on their support through eleven years of private schooling and seven of higher learning, with only scholarship money to pay for fripperies like movies, books, and the occasional draft beer. It wasn't until January of that year, after the firm had given me a Christmas bonus, that I could afford my own digs: a West End bachelor flat in a stately old manse converted into suites. It was cramped, with a linoleum-floored kitchenette and an oil stove, a small bedroom and shared bath, but boasted wide windows and views of Stanley Park with its vast acreage of emerald sward, brown sand beaches, and towering conifers. Released from the constant cold appraisals of the
pater
and
mater familias
, I'd thought I might burst forth like a flowering plum tree in April. There would be adventures, maybe romance …

Not so. I was a freak of society, an unreformed wonk (even back then students were categorized as wonks, wheels, or jocks), incapable of normal human interaction, confused by the rules of the mating game. And barely able to communicate, by words or gesture, with Mrs. Moore, whom I addressed as such, unable to tongue those four wee syllables
O-phe-li-a
. Fair Ophelia of the
plump red lips. She was thirty-four, older than me by nine years, but – help me, Sigmund Freud – I was bewitched by her.

At the first blush of our acquaintance, in the Hotel Georgia's cocktail lounge, an oasis frequented by the firm's bottom-rung lawyers, I had committed a double gaffe. She had been enjoying the attentions of Erlander from Estate Planning, Kruger from Corporate, and Bixbee from Personal Injury while I, the only unattached male at the table, sat beside her nervously knocking back whisky sodas. Finally, as Bixbee went off to piss and the other fellows lost themselves in hockey talk (the Leafs were on a roll with Mahovlich, Keon, and Shack), she turned to me mutely, as if daring me to open my mouth.

I said something like (the words are severely garbled in recall): “It must have taken great courage to enter a male profession. You should be proud of yourself.”

She looked at me sadly – writing me off, I assumed – then said, “How come you're the only guy here not trying to get into my pants?”

The crudity both shocked and thrilled me. “I, ah, really don't see you in those terms.” That was the second blooper, as well as a lie.

She nodded. “I get the message.” I took that as a response to what she supposed was a coded communication, that I was, in the current usage, a homo. She seemed to relax and explained her trespass upon the male domain: she'd got “screwed” in divorce court; a law degree would enable her to pursue her well-to-do ex for increased support.

Unfortunately, on that day in late April as we motored down Boundary Road, she still seemed to think I was not attracted to women, and that we were therefore freed from the games opposite sexes must play. It was warm in the car, and she'd taken off her suit jacket. A cautious side glance took in the outlines of a bra beneath her gossamer blouse. Sheer nylons beneath a skirt that had ridden above her knees.

“So, Arthur, what do you do for fun,” she asked, “when you're not defending the dregs of society?”

“I mostly read books.”

“It's about the only lonely pleasure left, isn't it, unless you count self-abuse. Have you read
Tropic of Cancer?”

A sexually explicit novel banned beyond the borders of France, and particularly in chaste Vancouver, where several months earlier the morality squad had seized copies from a local bookstore. “I can't say I have.”

“I'll slip you mine. Please don't use it as a sexual aid – it gets the pages sticky.”

I braked hard at a red light that seemed to come out of nowhere. When she raised an arm to brace herself, she exposed a bed of hair in the gully of her armpit, which,
horribile dictu
, caused an arousal reaction, a tugging below. I worried that I was deviant in some way, the armpit outscoring the breast as visual stimulator.

(Pause here. That vaguely fetishistic interlude is something I feel bound to get off my chest. After all, Mr. Wentworth Chance has already stripped off much of my protective cover, so I may as well go naked. But since I intend this account never to see the light of day anyway – so many secrets, so many privileged truths and lies – it doesn't matter. It's merely purgative.)

We were in the Burnaby hinterland by then, and ahead I could see the spirit-deadening ocherous four-tiered architecture of Oakalla Prison, on Deer Lake, whose beach on the opposite shore was a preferred destination for escapees able to swim.

“Do you have – how do I put it? – a special friend, a companion?”

“I hope I don't disappoint you if I confess to being heterosexual, Mrs. Moore.”

Her laughter was melodic and seemed to come from deep in her throat. “It disappoints that you call me Mrs. Moore.” That prompted another glance to my right, earning a glimpse of nyloned knee as I gripped the shift knob, trying to gear down.

Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
whispered a prince bolder than I to his Ophelia.

“How's the sacroiliac, Jethro?” I asked of the moustachioed old boy in charge of admissions.

“Haven't set down in ten days. This lovely young lady with you?”

“Ophelia Moore has just finished her articles. You may be seeing more of her.”

“How much more of her?” An unabashedly lewd grin. She gave him a wink, playing along.

I was an Oakalla regular by then, known to the staff, so the process of signing in was casual. While Jethro made pleasant with Ophelia and tried to see through her see-through blouse, I flipped through the visitors' registry.

Swift had been transferred there yesterday after being remanded in Squamish police court. He'd had a visitor that evening: Jim Brady, a name familiar to me from left-wing labour circles. Brady had come with a lawyer, Harry Rankin, an eloquent socialist, hero to the destitute of Vancouver's rough streets. I assumed I had lost Swift as a client, and was surprised at how disappointed I felt.

Swift's only other visitor, earlier that day, was Celia Swift – his mother, as I later learned.

Usually in a murder case, lawyer interviews were held in rooms the size of wardrobe closets, but all were in use, so Ophelia and I were led to the gymnasium-like visitors' hall with its long central table, its array of smaller tables and chairs bolted to the floor, most of them occupied by inmates with parents, girlfriends, lawyers, or probation officers.

One of the green-clad convicts called, “Hey, counsellor, you're the slickest,” and proudly pointed me out to his mother.

“Got him off a warehouse break-in,” I told Ophelia. “That encouraged him to do it again.”

We found a free table near one at which a woman was softly crying, her incarcerated boyfriend showing annoyance that she refused to let him touch her. Among the other lawyers in the hall were Harry Fan, infamous for his baffling, impenetrable submissions, and Larry Hill, beloved for his stirring, alcohol-fuelled
courtroom orations. He'd just dismissed a client and was awaiting another; while the guards were looking elsewhere, he grinned at me and sneaked a drink from a flask.