I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (5 page)

Her casual use of the forbidden word caused me an erotic shiver. This wasn't the way that ladies, in my experience, talked. (Today I would hardly notice.)

“Drink sound good?”

Drink sounded ear-splittingly good. A dense haze of smoke greeted us as we entered by the door marked “Ladies and Escorts” – beer parlours were segregated in those days, not so much to protect the allegedly fragile other sex from freebooting males but to protect the allegedly dominant sex from the wiles of women on the prowl. I remember that the room was horribly decorated with plastic palm trees and paint-peeling depictions of beach scenes.

We found a table away from the din of a speaker. Ophelia flagged down a waiter, and soon four glasses of the
boisson de la maison –
draft beer – were on the table.

During the first hour or so I recall succumbing to Ophelia's
questioning about my provenance and, my tongue loosened, telling her of my sequestered childhood, evenings spent in the frigid silence of a loveless home, days in the conservative confines of St. Andrew's Boys' School, skipping grades, graduating at fifteen, lacking friends of a similar age. Mine, I confessed, was a little, closed-in world, without adventure. I suffered from debilitating shyness.

I sensed Ophelia was wondering, though she was too kind to express it, whether this character had ever been laid. Again I caught a tantalizing view of an armpit not shaved – a statement of independence, I assumed, of earthiness.

I carried on at doubtless boring length (because she demanded being briefed on the life thrown away) about my study of the ancient classics, the glories of Greek and Roman culture. At some point, I was reminded later, I began loudly spouting the aphorisms of Publilius Syrus (“We desire nothing so much as what we ought not to have”). And I was getting very loud, talking over Elvis as he begged for the safety of his blue suede shoes. Soon my theatrics were attracting applause from neighbouring tables. It was as if I had shed my carapace and the jovial inner showman had emerged.

I dimly remember people buying us rounds. I remember a pitcher appearing on our beer-slopped terrycloth table cover, but I don't remember it disappearing. Aside from a couple of trips to the men's, the rest is blank, though Ophelia later filled in some gaps – not all – and, more recently, responded to Wentworth Chance's indelicate sleuthing with further details.

I
was Mars and she Venus, and we were hot and slippery with rut and sweat, nakedly entwined upon the springy heights of Olympus. Hungrily she drew my erect phallus toward her mouth, but I was fearful of entering there; I was unversed at this – it was unnatural, long forbidden by codified law. Then a proxy orifice blossomed open, a thick-tufted nest to hide in …

(That I remember that dream speaks not just to its intensity but also to the frequency with which versions of it have repeated over the years, like a bad X-rated film.)

I woke up with not just an erection but a rock-crusher of a hangover, and with no immediate sense of where I was or what day it was, or even the season of the year. An obscene racket from an alarm clock beside my bed announced it was just after eight-thirty, presumably in the morning. I concluded I was in the bedroom of my flat. What wasn't coming back, even fuzzily, was how I'd got there. My single bed was in utter disarray, its sheets on the floor, and I was naked, my boxer shorts hanging, for no apparent reason, on my doorknob.

I pulled them on, staggered out to the shared bathroom for what seemed an interminable pour. My resonating groans of urinary relief must have alerted my hallway neighbour, Ira Lavitch, a beatnik, a coffeehouse impresario. His lazy drawl: “You hanging in there okay, my good man? Hope you didn't use all the hot water.” There was a damp bath towel on the rack – one of mine – but I had no memory of using the shower during the night.

On my exit, Ira recoiled from the sight and smell of me. “You must've been really rockin' out last night, Stretch.” Late thirties, thick sideburns framing a skinny face with the requisite goatee. Naked, a towel around his middle. “Did I not hear the sweet illegal sound of female laughter?”

I didn't pause to ask what had titillated him through the wall, but I was alert to the alarming possibility that I'd broken the
landlord's first commandment: thou shalt not entertain women after eight.

Back in my rooms, when I opened a window to expel the fart-thick air, I saw that my car was parked below. Then I spotted a typed note in my portable Smith-Corona:
I set your alarm. Sweet dreams. O
. Beside it, an ashtray with two lipsticked cork-tipped butts.

I decided that Ophelia had tanked up the Bug and driven me home, for I couldn't imagine I'd been in any shape to do so myself. But then what? In a state barely short of panic, I checked the sheets. No wetness other than from my own sweat, but I did come across a white splotch midway down the mattress sheet. The juices of coitus? Or its disproof, the masturbatory spill of denied desire? (There shall be no censoring of this, the authorized, non-publishable version.)

I fought like a gladiator for memory, but all was a void. I didn't dare return to my erotic dream to seek answers; I'd already sent its images packing, back to the subconscious. I studied the note again, that round, inviting, lusty O. I returned to the washroom for a cold, punishing shower.

Gertrude winced as she watched her shaky boss, eyes as ugly and red as the Canadian Ensign, shuffle into his office. A few minutes later she appeared with a mug of coffee and a packet of breath mints.

“Anything else?” she asked. “Aspirin?”

That she was treating my temporary malady with the casual ease of an emergency room nurse confirmed my sense that this sprightly young woman (we called them girls back then, or young ladies, expressions once considered polite) had the stuff of indispensability.

“Mr. Smythe-Baldwin returned your call. MUtual 4-7141. He'll be in his office until ten.”

It was nearing that time. I was hardly ready for the great barrister, a crafty veteran with a Hogarthian appetite for the table and an equal lust for a favourable verdict. Smitty, he was called by
friends. I had watched him many times take the skin off witnesses and wasn't confident I could salvage my own, even from the other end of a phone line.

I was vulnerable not only because of my weakened state but because I was hugely distracted, my thoughts constantly whipping off to the events of the previous night, to Ophelia, the sheets on the floor, the evidence of seminal discharge. Clearly she had used the shower before leaving. What went on before that? I could barely countenance the awkward but compelling scenario: we had got it on … had sexual relations (let's not hide behind euphemism!). My first time – supposedly an event that good men and true never forget – and it was smothered in alcoholic fog.

I had not even the vaguest idea what I might say to Ophelia on our next encounter. It was her land registry day; I wouldn't see her until much later, so there was yet a chance to recover crucial information from my abused brain cells.

My hand hovered above the phone shakily, and I waited until I was able to still it, then dialled. I got Smythe-Baldwin's personal secretary.

“I am returning the call he returned to me.”

“And who might you be?” I pictured her as grey-haired, steely-eyed.

“Sorry. Arthur Beauchamp, counsel for Gabriel Swift.”

“Please hold.”

I did so, for nearly two minutes – a lag lawyers call a power delay. I assumed Smythe-Baldwin was calmly reviewing his file while going through a ritual of unwrapping, clipping, and lighting a five-dollar Cuban cigar, grunting his pleasure at that first tasty puff. Meanwhile, I was wondering if Pappas had wangled me into taking this case because he thought I'd be meat for Smythe-Baldwin's grinder.

When he finally picked up, I introduced myself. He said, “You pronounce your name
bee-chem
, which is not the proper way.
Beech'm –
a single vowel. The English tongue rebels against excessive syllables. Which is why Cholmondeley becomes
chum-lee –
thank God for that – and Magdalen College is
maudlin.”
Cambridge's venerable all-male college. I'd won a scholarship there, and I wondered if
this was a subtle thrust, he being a British-born Oxfordian. But it appeared he knew little about me.

“So you are the young fellow Pappas warned me about. An aspirant for stardom. I must keep my sword unsheathed and my pencils sharpened.” I'm sure he used a more striking metaphorical image. Though his quotes are cobbled from tattered memory, I have tried to capture his lovely fustian articulation. “And how does it feel having been granted the daunting task of representing a defendant whose mouth runneth over rather too illiberally, or so it would seem from the foul imprecations he directed to the arresting constabulary?”

Unlike me, he'd earned the right to be pompous, an attribute the press found endearing. I could offer no comment on those imprecations, I said, not having seen the police report, or any particulars of evidence whatsoever. He promised to send a runner within the hour.

“Rather interesting fact situation. Embittered, short-tempered Native slaps away the spoon that fed him, drowns his benefactor in the Squamish River at flood time, only several miles from where its raging waters empty into the sea. One assumes the sharks stripped poor Mulligan to the bone and left the scraps for the bottomfeeders. Nicely thought out – no mounds of earth, no charred corpse, no bullet holes.”

Then an excursus: “I defended a missing-body case myself, Beauchamp, back in – when was it? – forty-nine. Everything else was there: motive, opportunity, blood traces on a chainsaw, a sloppy alibi. Had to settle for manslaughter, but I called it a victory.”

If that was a hint of an offer, I wasn't biting. That he even mentioned the option of manslaughter suggested his case was feeble. He hadn't bamboozled me; I was feeling surer of myself. But I couldn't hold back from a little pandering.

“I'd be surprised, Mr. Smythe-Baldwin, if you noticed me watching with awe from the counsel bench during several of your recent successes. It will be an honour to meet you formally next week in the Squamish police court.”

“We prefer to call it Magistrate's Court, young man. Else the police will think they run it.”

I felt like a chided student. “Sir, your reputation was built as a defender of the innocent, or at least those presumed so. Will you be comfortable prosecuting someone who actually is innocent?” I astounded myself with my effrontery; maybe I was still alcohol-impaired.

“The Attorney General personally urged me to accept his retainer, old chap, having wrongly surmised that the defence would be run by a leading counsel. I'm sure he now regrets being stuck with my atrociously high fees.”

I had barely recovered from that slight when his runner showed up at noon with a thick legal-sized envelope.

A standard
RCMP/GRC
incident report was the first of a dozen carbon-copied pages I perused over a takeout cheeseburger.

On 21/4/62 at 1925 hrs, undersigned received telephone call from MRS. IRENE MULLIGAN re missing person, her husband DERMOT MULLIGAN, address upper Squamish Valley Road, rural area 10 m. nw of Cheekye. Alleged missing individual went off fishing, exact location unknown, on Squamish River at approx.1400 intending to return for supper and failed to show. Neighbours have been alerted
.

U/S proceeded to said address at 1945 hrs
.

Signed
,

Constable Brad Jettles

Jettles hadn't responded to the call with lightning speed. Likely he was the sole officer then available at the small detachment. In 1962 the village of Squamish was a frontier town, and its fallers, riggers, truckers, and sawmill and construction workers tended to be boisterous on holiday weekends.