I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (31 page)

“No questions,” I said. However belated, Gabriel's warning to expect the truth from these folks had avoided grief to his cause. Stern cross-examinations of the Josephs would have been a kamikaze mission, sinking not the enemy's ship but mine.

Anna looked quickly at Gabriel – a quarter-second – then cast her eyes down at the aisle carpet and joined Benjamin outside as Monique came in. She was a pretty cherub, short and perky, striving hard not to show nervousness. Smitty placed her statement before her and asked her if it was true.

“Yes.” Quietly, lips quivering.

She was brief in response throughout. Had she seen him at all that Saturday? No. Had she planned to? Yes. What changed her mind? She couldn't get away from the house. Why was that? There was too much to do. Had she seen him the following day?

A long pause. She began to tremble. She looked at Gabriel, then quickly away, and her eyes filled.

“Near your house? Perhaps just before Easter Mass?”

Smitty must have felt guilty about playing the prompter so blatantly. He was trying to rush her through this, get her safely off the stand, but his efforts were failing. Monique was weeping into a handkerchief, unable to express herself.

Lukey appeared to be suppressing a smirk. He had not disclosed this conversational tidbit from Sunday, hoping to lay a trap. It might have worked if Gabriel hadn't finally owned up.

“Young lady, I must urge you to compose yourself.” The Hammer.

She wept all the harder. Gabriel was in distress, his mother and her entourage looking uncomfortable.
Someone should go to this girl
, I thought,
give her comfort, assuage her pain
.

I stood. “The defence will admit that the accused had a brief conversation with Miss Joseph at midmorning on that Sunday, in which he told her he was scared the police would falsely accuse him of being involved in Dr. Mulligan's disappearance. The defence will further admit that Mr. Swift asked her to tell the police that they were together the previous afternoon.”

Smitty gave me a tired wave as if to say,
It's a deal
, and he sat. Lukey made a pained face, displeased that I'd grasped what advantage I could from the situation.

“Defence has no questions.”

Hammersmith: “No, I'm not satisfied. I want to hear from the witness about this conversation.”

Smitty grunted back to his feet. “I have accepted my friend's admissions of fact. That, with respect, should be an end to the matter. May Miss Joseph be excused?”

“No. I expect this young lady to testify from her own memory, not as coloured by Mr. Beauchamp's second-hand version.”

“Ours is an adversarial, not inquisitive system, the judge an arbiter, not an interrogator.” Smitty then added, straight-faced, “I say that, of course, with the greatest respect.”

I had learned a lot watching Smitty over many trials. This was a lesson in not giving in, a lesson in heroism. And decency – protecting the girl from courtroom trauma. But I was keeping right out of this, scrunched down, the flak passing overhead. Monique had stopped crying but still looked frightened and confused.

“Witness, please look at me.”

“With the greatest of conceivable respect –”

“Sit down!”

Smitty did so, but with contemptuous sluggishness, as Hammersmith, still flushed with anger, a fist curled as if ready to pound on something, turned again to Monique. “What did the accused tell you on that Easter Sunday morning?”

Monique cried out in unexpected defiance, “Just what his lawyer said! Just that! That's all!”

Hammersmith winced, in the manner of someone suffering heartburn. “We'll take the morning break.”

Smitty gave me a wink as he made for the exit, drawing his morning cigar from a waistcoat pocket. Not for the first time, I got the sense he regretted his role there, was uncomfortable with prosecuting, couldn't shake off old habits like the baiting of judges.

But his junior was in charge of the key witnesses, the conspiring police. Ophelia was at Lukey's table, giving him hell for not giving us full disclosure, but he was cracking right back in his rude, mocking way.

Roscoe Knepp was up next. I wasn't prepared for him; I was still overcome by blows recently taken, exhausted. Nor was I positive any longer that Knepp was manufacturing a completely false case against Gabriel. I had a niggling sense of having been betrayed by my rebel client.

Ophelia returned to my side, muttering. “An oversight. My royal Canadian ass it was.”

When court resumed, Smitty was still off somewhere lingering over a particularly tasty Havana, a gesture of disdain – no one shouts “Sit down!” to the dean of the criminal bar. But Lukey wasn't waiting for him this time. With a vocal flourish he called upon
RCMP
Staff Sergeant Roscoe Knepp to take the stand.

The square-chinned witness, in iron-crisp
RCMP
tunic, strode with confident step to the stand and accepted the oath as if posing tall in the saddle, the Bible aloft in his right hand. “So help me, God,” he said, and planted a kiss on a page somewhere in the Book of Job or Psalms.

Lukey then announced he had no questions, was tendering the witness as a courtesy for cross-examination. He sat, beaming at me, knowing I would have to adjust on the fly – no witness is harder to cross than one yet unheard. I couldn't immediately find the cross-examination notes I'd spent many hours preparing, and I went at it blindly. Pick a topic, any topic. Doug Wall.

Knepp approached his task with disarming candour, sharing my view that Wall was less than reliable, agreeing he drank too much, that he curried favour with the law. But what could the Squamish
RCMP
do? Wall had approached them, however late; they'd had no choice but to take his statement.

Hammersmith, who had already written off Wall as a dubious party, a felon, nodded with appreciation at this earnest apologia from an officer just doing his job – it wasn't up to him to suppress evidence, however fishy. The jury, too, seemed appreciative.

Knepp calmly dismissed my allegation that he'd sought out Wall in desperation to bolster an alarmingly weak case. “I wouldn't rely on Doug Wall to bolster a parking offence.” Chuckles from the gallery. Lukey grinning.
That's your best shot?

Rattled, desperate to recoup, I retreated three years to the summer of 1959, Knepp's faceoff with Gabriel outside the Squamish Hotel beer parlour. Bill Swift had been drunk, said Knepp, and was causing a scene. And yes, he admitted sorrowfully, he may have used inappropriate language in ordering Gabriel not to intervene. On being assaulted, Knepp stumbled and fell. He
and his partner “proceeded to arrest both individuals.” He said it was part of police training “to keep a cool head under such circumstances.”

A disbelieving guffaw from the back of the room. Hammersmith looked about but was unable to pinpoint the offender. He couldn't resist a little drollery: “That rude objection is not sustained. In my view, the sergeant showed admirable restraint.”

“I'm sure the witness appreciates being cheered on by the bench,” I said.

“Do I take it your purpose is to discredit him, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“I gather I haven't made that plain to your Lordship.”

Tempers might have flared had not Smitty chosen that moment to enter. All went silent as he bowed to the judge almost theatrically, then took his seat in the anticipatory manner of one settling in to watch the Friday-night fights on
TV
.

I reminded myself my real opponent was not Hammersmith but Knepp. While he was dancing and jabbing, I was missing with my punches. I was embarrassed that the great barrister had returned to see me at my worst.

I put it to Knepp that he'd been furious when the local magistrate rewarded Gabriel with a suspended sentence.

“Not at all,” Roscoe said, affecting shock, finally overacting. “As a police officer my duty is to gather the evidence, not to question what the courts do with it.”

Another snort from the back of the room. Hammersmith looked up sharply, this time zeroing in on a familiar face. Jim Brady in the back row, covering up by applying a handkerchief to his nose.

I hurried on. “Thelma McLean said you described my client as a shit-disturbing commie. You don't dispute that?”

“I don't think I used that exact language, but your client never made a secret of his radical sympathies. If there was any kind of demonstration, he'd be there.”

He continued to bob and weave as I flailed about, trying to egg him on, prodding him to admit to his vendetta, his racism, his slanders about Gabriel. My cross finally deteriorated to its low
point when I accused him of fetching his old pal Walt Lorenzo from Winnipeg to play the role of lying jailhouse informer.

His response: Lorenzo was indeed a good friend, but more importantly a fine undercover officer. They had worked together as constables in a small detachment in Alberta, and years later had joined in breaking up a heroin ring that Lorenzo had expertly infiltrated. “I put out a special request to have Walt brought in for the Swift case. He was someone I could trust to do a professional job.” He put on a mask of confusion and hurt as he denied there was anything improper about a trip with their wives to Reno to celebrate smashing that heroin ring.

Eventually my efforts to discredit Knepp proved tiresome, and Hammersmith interrupted wearily. “Am I to understand your defence involves a conspiracy among police officers to perjure themselves in an effort to frame the accused for murder? Do I have that right?”

I didn't know what to say. It seemed a preposterous defence the way he'd framed it. The gutter tactics that he'd earlier inveighed against.

“A conspiracy theory.” Hammersmith shook his head, smiling as if in pity. “Good luck with that one, Mr. Beauchamp.”

That earned laughter, led by the hockey coach, Cooper. I was piling up the penalties and he was clearly against me. Most of the jurors, if I read them right, were of similar mind, appalled by my desperate measures.

I think I was suffering at that moment what actors call flop sweat, the clammy sense that one has so badly flubbed his role that the audience is about ready to boo the bum offstage. I'd been going after Knepp for an hour; nothing was working. Smitty was watching me with growing disappointment, if not concern.

In short, I choked. I actually seized up, unable to frame a next question. I no longer knew what to ask. I played for time by shuffling through my notes.

“Harvey Frinkell,” Ophelia whispered.

I had no idea what she meant.

“His letter.” She scribbled in big letters on her pad:
Exhibit 37
.

“Time passes, counsel.”

“Excuse me, milord. Ah, yes, Exhibit Thirty-Seven – may I have that?”

The clerk passed me Frinkell's letter, the one found on Mulligan's desk, his threat of a messy suit. I'd let the suicide defence gather dust while trying to put a shine on an unsalable conspiracy theory.

Knepp said he'd found the letter in what he called an in-basket. He hadn't shown it to Irene or contacted its author, Frinkell. “I didn't think it was my business to stir up an unhappy marital situation.”

That seemed rather puerile. “Put yourself in Dr. Mulligan's shoes, Sergeant. Had you received a letter like this, you would be fairly distraught, wouldn't you?”

“I wouldn't be happy, I guess.”

“A distinguished scholar, a world-renowned ethicist – and suddenly he's looking at a scandalous trial, at becoming a laughingstock, at his world falling in. Enough to make you want to end it all, isn't it?”

“Well, I'm not Dr. Mulligan. I wouldn't say.”

I'd finally got the jury interested. Maybe they'd forgive the hapless ninety per cent of my cross-examination. “No more questions.”

All eyes followed Hammersmith's to the wall clock. “I see the noon hour is upon us. Let us break for lunch.”

I told Ophelia I wasn't hungry; I needed to be by myself. I escaped out into the hot summer air, found my way across the
CPR
tracks to the industrial docks, and stood on a pier for a long, long time, staring into the slurping waters of the inlet, trying to form a picture of Mulligan similarly gazing down at the thickly flowing Squamish River. Naked but for socks, perhaps, as he flung away that soiled gaudy undergarment.

Maybe he intended it to be found. A clue.
There it is. Now find my murderer
.