I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (38 page)

“I won't say anything that will denigrate Dermot Mulligan.”
Denigrate:
a word not often heard in that old and ugly building.

“Everyone's in accord with that. The government would like to stem all the odious speculation.”

We worked on it until we were satisfied. Time and location. A quarrel. A push. The deceased sent plunging onto sharp rocks and then swept away by the river, apparently dead. That was enough.

“All neat and clean,” Gabriel said. “Whitewashed.” It was not a complaint but something accepted, not to be quarrelled with. He lay back on the cot, stared at the ceiling. “As my counsel, can you make the plea for me?”

“Hammersmith will want to hear it from you.”

“Is he bound by this agreement?”

“Practically.”

“What does that mean?”

“If he goes off half-cocked, the Appeal Court will almost surely reverse him.”

“Almost surely.”

I heard skepticism, felt an edge of tension.

“He hates what I represent; he's itching to put me away. But not you, Arthur. You're with me, getting me the best deal possible – a decade plus, even though Jim told me you think I'm innocent.”

Gabriel turned his head toward me and squinted, as if trying to fathom the depths of my betrayal. “The word is going around the joint, Arthur. You're the new white hope around here. Take a bow. Your first murder case – huge success.”

“I told you to get another opinion if you had doubts.”

“You have the silver tongue, Arthur, no question. Worked Mom and Dad like a sideshow magician, got them wondering if I really did it. But the
pièce de résistance
was with Jim and Grace – using them, using the Party.
Take the eleven-year fall, you're more useful alive than dead
. That's practically what he said.” His voice rising. “Meanwhile, you admire me, you're fond of me. In return for such brotherly feelings, I guess it's not too much to ask that I subtract a decade from my life.”

I was on my feet. “Christ, Gabriel, let's do the trial then! Take the stand, take your chances! It's your fucking life!” I can't remember ever having spoken that ignoble word before, one I despise for its immoderate use, but I was irate.

“And it's your fucking system!” Sitting up again. The
AA
meeting had gone silent; he lowered his voice, but it was hard and cutting. “Your fucking liberal, democratic, egalitarian justice system that you so blindly cherish – thanks to it, I'll do eleven and four for a crime I didn't commit. I wasn't
there!”

We were both standing by then, two feet apart, and he was inching closer. I wasn't going to back up.

He grabbed me by the shoulders. “I loved Dermot, goddamnit, as I ought to have loved my father. And you, my white, polite, bourgeois brother, you worshipped him too. Dermot told me about your absurd parents. Dermot was the father we both hungered for.”

If Dr. Mulligan was your god, what do you think he was to me? His fierce challenge at our first meeting.

I felt consumed by his dark, intense, knowing eyes. Paramount among my bag of mixed emotions was an astonishing impulse to embrace my passionate, radical aboriginal brother, and I nearly did that.

But he let go, stepped back against the bars, shuddered, caught his breath. “He killed himself, Arthur. I don't know why. Whatever his atrocity, whatever his guilt, I can't believe I would not have forgiven him.”

S
o, after four days, we were again in the grand court of the Vancouver assizes, and for that occasion we had a little play to enact, a farce: the dance of the barristers. Smitty had his patter, I mine. The reporters at their overflowing table already had wind of the plea deal, and their expressions were sour and cynical. They had wanted to see Smitty work Gabriel over, wanted conflict, titillation, revelations about pink panties. But none of that was in the script. Gabriel would have only one line, one word:
guilty
.

In the lower gallery, behind the prisoners' dock, were Bill and Celia and their supporters from Squamish, a dozen that day. In the balcony, in uniform, were Knepp and Jettles. They knew about the deal, of course, and looked smug. Manslaughter would do. The guilty plea would mean their villainy would never be discovered.

Leroy Lukey was leaning back, affecting an interest in the carved ceiling patterns. He would have wanted the case to go the whole route – conviction, sentence, a proper Canadian hanging – but I doubted he had much say, or if Smitty even consulted him. On the courthouse steps he'd called me a lucky cocksucker, slapping my shoulder in false camaraderie.

Ophelia had managed to sit as far from me as possible without ending up in the aisle. It was not that I stank – the whole deal stank. She had stopped opposing me but remained disgusted at our criminal justice system for having produced this miscarriage, this monster. I, on the other hand, was not bothering with such thoughts. They were too negative, too irksome, too distracting.
Alea jacta est
. Only by numbing myself would I survive the day.

Ophelia's form of protest was to wear pants again, teasing the Dickensian clerk. He was like a man with a phobia, fidgeting at his desk. But he remembered to bring Gabriel from the cells. After his cuffs came off he remained standing, at ease, a captured enemy soldier.

As Anthony Montague Hammersmith took the bench, he frowned at me, a slight arching of eyebrows above his half-moon glasses. He'd been briefed on the plea bargain but refused to meet counsel in his chambers. “It wouldn't seem right,” said the clerk. “His Lordship doesn't want to be seen as in on the deal.”

“Proceed, Mr. Smythe-Baldwin.”

Smitty explained that the Crown had filed a new indictment, for manslaughter. The record would include a transcript of the trial, an admission of fact by the accused as accepted by the Crown, and a letter from Irene Mulligan.

“And this is the admission of fact?” Hammersmith pushed his half-moons up the bridge of his nose and perused it with a frown. “Time, date, place; then we have a quarrel, which is not explained, ‘as the result of which the accused sent the deceased plunging onto sharp rocks and then into the river, in an apparent unconscious state.' ” Down slid the glasses. “That's the total admission?”

Smitty glanced at me. He had not quarrelled with my final edit. “The matter cries out for brevity, milord. Reputations have already been unfairly maligned. In any event, there's nothing more we
can
say. We, the Crown, don't know the details. Only the accused does.”

“Mr. Beauchamp?”

“The defendant's signed admission is enough to make out the crime of manslaughter. My client accepts responsibility but disputes the testimony of Corporal Lorenzo as to an alleged conversation with the accused relating to motive and intent. There has been an enormous amount of malicious talk about this incident, and neither the Crown nor defence wishes to escalate that.”

There was a rumbling from the press corps. Hammersmith looked their way, but instead of reproving them he grimaced, as if to let them know he felt their pain. He had the jury brought in and thanked them, assuring them they hadn't served in vain. They had no role to play in sentencing, and they bore the expressions of loyal workers fired without cause.

There was an oddly supernal moment when Gabriel was asked
to plead to the new indictment. He seemed to be pondering the alternatives while looking up at the shafts of tinted sunlight streaming through the stained glass. Necks stretched as all followed his gaze. Then the sun was swallowed by clouds and the windows lost colour. Gabriel looked down at the empty jury box, then the judge, and said, “Guilty.”

Smitty and I recited our scripted lines and filed the admission of facts and Irene's letter. Smitty proposed that a fair term of incarceration “under all the circumstances” would be eleven years, four months. I did not oppose but threw in ten minutes' worth of encomia about Gabriel and read aloud Irene's letter, all for the edification of the sulky press and the disappointed jurors.

Again Hammersmith looked hard at me, as if to let me know he hadn't forgiven me for my insolent theatrics. Then he turned to Gabriel. “Sentencing. The young man standing before me took the life of an esteemed professor and writer who rescued him from the poverty of the Native reservation where he was born and raised and in which, without Dr. Mulligan's intervention, he would likely have been mired for his remaining years.”

He carried on portraying Gabriel as a thankless malcontent. I saw what was going on. He was taunting Gabriel, trying to incite rebellion from my stone-faced client. The Hammer's mean streak was showing, glaringly. He, like the jury, had been robbed of a more dramatic role – he'd longed to intone those final words of the ultimate sentence: “May God have mercy on your soul.”

Getting no reaction from Gabriel, his Lordship took a turn at the madly scribbling press. “I have heard in this court concerns about reputations being maligned. Indeed they have, and I speak not of the reputations of the dead. Unmentioned among those slandered is a senior officer of the
RCMP
who was accused of shamelessly rigging his case out of malice. Given that his good name and those of other veteran officers have been so sorely impugned, I feel obliged to put on record that the victims of those verbal assaults impressed me to a man as dutiful, fair, and even-handed.”

“You fucking asshole.”

Whether that was loud enough to be heard by Hammersmith's artillery-weakened ears I wasn't sure, but he at least knew it was a slur. To this day I'm not sure where it came from. I didn't see Gabriel's lips move, and unless he threw his voice like a ventriloquist, the author had to be a spectator near the dock. Bill Swift was a candidate, but it didn't seem his voice.

“I will pretend I didn't hear that.” A toss of his russet tuft as he glared at me again, as if I were the suspected heckler. More likely he was blaming me for wheedling the Crown into granting such a benign sentence. “I shan't speculate by what legerdemain the proposed eleven years and four months was arrived at, but counsel know well enough that the court is not bound by any such agreement. I am firmly of the view that the term proposed cheapens the offence. The appropriate sentence in my opinion is twenty years. However, with some misgiving, I will impose a sentence of sixteen years and four months in Her Majesty's penitentiary. The jury is excused. This court is adjourned.”

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

THE FOLLOWING DELICIOUS BIT comes from a retired city policeman who was operating a prowl car in the small hours of Tuesday, August 7, 1962, on the unit block Powell Street. He at first thought a drunk was being rolled, but when he pulled over, he saw that a homeless man, known to the officer, merely had an affectionate arm over the shoulder of a tall gentleman in a suit. The latter was in a very bad emotional state, choking back sobs. Both were drunk.

My confidant, who prefers not to be named, recognized the distraught man as a barrister currently in the news, our own Arthur Beauchamp, and while he had every right to throw him in the drunk tank, this uniformed Samaritan broke with protocol to drive him home and even assisted him into his suite. (As an inopportune consequence, Beauchamp later found himself defending his landlords under the illegal suites bylaw. That case he won.)

Beauchamp's drunken crying jag was more evidence to support Moore's view he was in agony over not having fought the Swift case to the bitter end. “He'd rationalized that to the extreme. Once the gates of denial were sundered, he gave in to a sense of incalculable failure.” Powerfully said. Of course, Justice Hammersmith's unexpected slap – the additional five years – added prodigiously to his mortification.

(Some observers and bloggers have tried – and failed – to make something of the fact that another communist of even greater fame was arrested only ten days later, on a charge of incitement to rebellion. His name: Nelson Mandela. He served out his term. Swift, as we shall see, did not.)

It is difficult to analyze Swift's reasoning in copping a
plea, to use the argot, given his unavailability to this (or any other) author. It seemed entirely out of character. Maybe an appetite for martyrdom had given way to that most fundamental drive of animate beings: for life to go on. But one also suspects the stuffing had been beaten out of him by the many reversals during the trial. As he lost hope, he lost his feistiness, disappointing the press with his failure to erupt. Yet that does not explain the rift that ensued between him and Beauchamp.

That began when Swift mailed Beauchamp a formal letter severing their relationship. He declined visits from him. He undertook his own appeal of the sentence, during which he subjected three Appeal Court justices to a hectoring sermon about their historic false roles and assailed the guardians of law and order, particularly the Squamish
RCMP
. It was a grand speech, hearers said, however inflammatory. The court upheld the sentence.

Ironically, to the bar and to much of the public, Beauchamp was still seen as a winner, despite the extra five years that were tagged on. That wasn't seen as his fault; he was a smart bargainer who'd got a killer off with sixteen and a bit. The Swift case may have spurred in him, as if in penance, a powerful drive to excel in the courts, to never fall down again, to never lose. But in all his remaining years at the bar he was to remain bitterly disappointed with himself over the case. He bore his pain openly, visibly, like a scar. “Ophelia was right,” he told me. “It was an act of cowering gutlessness, pleading him guilty.”

The “sense of incalculable failure” Moore spoke of seems a significant determinant in his growing drinking problem. Not to mince words, the Swift case was undoubtedly the
causa sine qua non
of his alcoholism, and may have caused enduring psychological damage. Certainly it exacerbated the sense of inadequacy and self-doubt trained into him by his coldly critical parents.