Kill All the Judges (30 page)

The rain came in cascades under the shadow of the mountains, obliging Arthur to sprint from the parking lot to Hollyburn Hall, three storeys of post and beam and cedar shakes overlooking a frothy creek.

“Beastly weather,” said an attendant who met him at the door. “Mr. Beauchamp, isn't it? You're here to see Mr. Pomeroy?”

“Please.” He was led past a reception area to a baronial hall with a fireplace so wide-mouthed as to be a threat to the forests. Fifteen or so inmates of either sex, some reading, some playing cards, a woman at a baby grand performing a nimble-fingered polonaise. All were alert enough yet slightly robotic, as if being kept at maintenance level.

He spied Brian on the lip of that vilest of architectural conceits, a conversation pit, staring into the roaring, spitting fire. With him was a balding, bearded man with a therapist's attentive air.

Brian's voice rose over the ambient tinkling and shuffling. “To be alone is the fate of all great minds.” He glared at his companion. “Schopenhauer.”

“He's so very insightful, isn't he?”

“I want to be
alone
! Leave me to my fate!” Brian's shout echoed in the vast hall. The pianist paused mid-bar, then carried on gamely.

“Here's Schopenhauer now,” Brian said.

“Schopenhauer?”

“Yeah, you idiot, Arthur Schopenhauer, my guru.” Brian didn't rise but grasped Arthur's hand. “Thank God you're here. I'm being facilitated. They're driving me bonkers.”

Arthur sat by the pit's carpeted steps and introduced himself, as did Dr. Oswald Schlegg, who said, “Brian has a flair for the dramatic. Delightfully challenging. I enjoy our little tussles.”

“Tell this dick he's not getting anything from me. He's working for them. He funnels everything to them.” Brian was shaking. His eyes darted about. Though Arthur couldn't put a finger on what kind of madness this was, he could read the obvious withdrawal symptoms.

As Schlegg continued on his rounds, Pomeroy eyed him disdainfully. “The elevator doesn't go all the way to the top. He hasn't a clue I'm faking it.”

“I see. Well, how are you, Brian?”

“Boss. The fun never stops. I'm trying to figure out their game. Did Caroline ask you to come?”

“No.”

“I have to get word to her. She got sucked in.”

“How, Brian?”

“It happened because of her.” He closed his eyes, swayed to a Chopin étude. “Everything.”

Arthur couldn't make sense of this. “I'll try to speak to her.”

His eyes snapped open. “What happened to my trial? Why am I off the case?”

“I'm taking it on. I'm using your office. I hope you don't mind.”

“You haven't let the pigeons in?”

“No, everything's fine.”

“I hope you can finish it.”

“The trial?”

“Yeah, I had a block, I couldn't get it past Chapter Fifteen. How far have you got into it?”

“The book?”

“The trial. I can help. I can do some edits.”

Arthur twisted uncomfortably. He had no back support. He eased himself down to a cushioned ledge. Brian followed.

“We call it the snake pit. I'm fine, don't be fooled, I'm playing along with them.” A waiter came by with a tray of drinks; Arthur took an orange juice. “It's safe, I checked, everything is fresh-squeezed here. You're in the Buckingham Palace of recovery
centres, they specialize in drug psychosis, the joint's full of cocainiacs. You get traders, speculators, lawyers. Hard not to feel sorry for them.”

A burst of sparks and a hiss from a cedar log. Despite the fire, Arthur felt clammy. As advertised, Brian was crackers. Arthur wasn't sure how to relate to him.

“What's the latest? I have to keep on track.” Brian produced a pocket pad, and made notes as Arthur described his day in court, his lacklustre performance.

“I should have warned you,” Brian said. “I didn't make Shiny Shoes a suspect. I had to pare down the list.”

“Loobie set me on the wrong path.”

“Loobie doesn't know the path. Only I know the path. Anyway, he isn't a suspect either.”

“Who?”

“Loobie. But I may make him one.”

Arthur played with the concept of Loobie as suspect. All his misdirections…Nonsense. “Brian, were you ever in Ms. LeGrand's house? Did you talk to her?”

That provoked a startle response. Brian cast a wary eye at Arthur. “That wasn't me. Ask April. She'll confirm.”

“April? Was she there?”

A pause. He seemed rattled. “Lance called her.”

“Florenza has a guard named Rashid out front. With a dog named Heathcliff.”

Brian began twitching. “Don't talk to me about dogs.”

“You remember Heathcliff? A Doberman pinscher.”

“It wasn't me. It was Lance. He likes dogs.”

“Who's Carlos the Mexican?”

“Her pretty boy. Lance wasn't explicit.”

“Help me, Brian. Tell me what Florenza had to say.”

“Lance wouldn't tell me. He was sworn to silence.” He looked around as if for rescue. “When you call Caroline, tell her to bring the kids. I want them to know I'm okay.”

This was going nowhere. Something in Brian's disordered mind was blocking transmission.

“Let's discuss the opal ring. I'd like to help you look for it.”

Brian hollered at the pianist. “Do you know any Bartók?” In a lower voice: “Chopin, for God's sake, mush for the masses.”

“Let's go to your room and look for it.”

“For what?”

“The ring. What did you do with it, Brian?”

“It's not there. It…it was filched. This place is a den of pilfering thieves.” Suddenly he rose, hurried away, the pianist glaring at him. Arthur followed him up a carpeted staircase, arrived at the landing in time to see a door close. Arthur found it unlocked and Brian within, scuttling about in his madness, searching drawers, shelves. “You see, it's gone!” He slumped into his desk chair, stared at the ceiling. “The power must not be used for evil, and now it's too late.”

Arthur guessed Brian had hidden the ring and forgotten where. He did his own desultory search, room to room. These quarters were far grander and more tasteful than the spare, cell-like rooms at the Alcohol Addiction Centre, in which he'd gone fairly mad himself. A balcony view of dark forest, pelting rain. Camera, cellphone, computer, printer, a few paragraphs of foolscap in the tray, proof of some productivity.

Here were the bound transcripts of
Regina v. Gilbert F. Gilbert
, presumably research material. Encouragingly, there was evidence of rehabilitative effort: an addiction manual lying open on the desk, a fifteen-step course book. Even some psychiatric texts. The Diagnostic Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. He was seeking answers–an interesting task given his delusional state.

“They're connected, you know.”

“Who?”

“Those two pricks. Darrel Naught and Whynet-Moir. Everything is connected, but they're especially connected. Not the way you think, not in an obvious way. You have to dig deep for this one.”

Arthur quit the hunt. “Brian, we found a seemingly errant page from your manuscript.” He read from it: “‘He and Florenza were in her sitting room with Heathcliff, the Doberman.'”

“That was Lance. You're too late, you're not going to get anything from him. He's dead.” He pulled a page from his printer. “His secret died with him.”

Arthur perused a long paragraph in which Lance Valentine met his bloody end, torn apart by a junkyard pit bull.

“I warned Wentworth this was going to happen.”

Someone else is going to die.

“I'm finally free of him.”

 

APRIL FOOL

“S
urely, doctor, the presence of trace amounts of diometamicrobials in the bloodstream, despite the Category Three oxidation rate, proves that deceased had inhaled a lethal dicyanogen at least ninety minutes prior to his body being discovered. I take it you've read Clark and Tree's definitive study, ‘Parameters of Cyanogen Oxidation Rates.'” As the so-called expert bowed his head in defeat, Wentworth turned to see his leader smiling with pride…

How unlikely that scenario seemed in the cold light of dawn as, on a drizzly Tuesday, Wentworth Chance wearily pedalled his aluminum-frame click-transmission Outback 310 past CN's sprawling railway yards, past the train station, up into the old city, Chinatown, skid road, Gastown. He had dug all night into forensics manuals, autopsy procedures, bodily fluids analyses, studied with morbid fascination the police close-ups, the body in the tidal wash, naked on a morgue slab, awaiting the knife. He'd slept only three hours, a sleep disturbed by gory dreams.

He'd compiled sixty legal-size pages of notes for his cross of the pathologist and serologist. He'll prove…well, he's not sure what he wants to prove. Maybe that because Whynet-Moir landed on his head, he must have intended suicide. He has a list of poisons, he'll ask if they tested for them.

He locked his bike in the rack outside Club d'Jazz. Or what was Club d'Jazz–workers were dismantling the sign. Pasted inside the door was a notice: “The Gastown Riot–Opening Soon.” What
kind of deal was this? “Heavy metal is
BACK
! Opening Wednesday, Blood'n'Guts!” He assumed these new tenants would be even louder than the brass sextet that was going all hours last night, probably their eviction party.

In the waiting room, the frazzled receptionist was fending off a pair of sports-jacketed thugs demanding to see “a goddamn lawyer, any lawyer.” Macarthur was in Holland; Sage in Thailand; Brovak in a week-long appeal; Pomeroy in a ding ward; and Wentworth, still in helmet and rain gear, looked like a courier, so they paid him no attention.

He escaped to his office, changed into his suit, twisted the cap from a bottle of Zap energy juice, and began a final read-through of his cross-exam notes. He hasn't even started ploughing through the eight hundred pages of transcript the old rancher gave him. He hasn't had a chance to track down Carlos the Mexican. Now the boss wants him to interview a guy named Rashid, the guard at 2 Lighthouse Lane. He's also supposed to spend time with the client, prepping him for the stand. Junioring his god has not become the glorious lifetime experience he'd anticipated.

Arthur came to his door looking dead serious.

“I am going to have Hank Chekoff busted from the force. Come with me.”

He joined him in Pomeroy's office, where April Wu was seated stiffly on a chair. Brian's cellphone records were on the desk, a January 9 call circled with a marker.

“Let's go over this again. Brian called you from Ms. LeGrand's house.” She didn't respond. “You spoke to her, to confirm Brian's identity.”

“Very well, yes, I remember.” Wentworth was blown away, this sounded grave.

“Bad chi, Ms. Wu. You might not have been caught had you not left this behind in the copy machine.” Flourishing the page of manuscript, the unfinished scene with Pomeroy, Florenza, and Heathcliff the Doberman. “A little carelessness can make for great
undoing.” That fetched a resentful look; she'd been out-maxim-ized.

“I had no intention of stealing it. I was simply making a copy.”

“For whom?” Met again with silence. “Whom do you report to? Sergeant Chekoff?”

She looked at Wentworth as if for help. He shuffled uncomfortably, embarrassed for her. She picked up her handbag, made as if to leave. “I presume you won't be wanting my services any longer.”

“Ms. Wu, you have committed a criminal offence. Close the door, Wentworth.” He stood against it with arms folded, feeling foolish. April gave him a look he'd never seen before, cold, as if measuring him for a karate kick to the groin.

Arthur read from the Criminal Code: “‘Anyone who wilfully attempts to obstruct, pervert, or defeat the course of justice is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years.' I can't imagine you want to do penitentiary time, Ms. Wu.” The boss softened his tone, that's how he does it, tough, then cool and confiding. “I suspect you'd rather come clean with us.”

She whirled to say something to him, thought better of it, sat again, and muttered something in Cantonese. “You will allow me to walk out of here if I…”

“If you're truthful about what you've been up to. You can walk out of this office with a head start but I intend to raise the matter in court. Wentworth, make notes. Oh, first call the Registry and let them know we may be late.”

He connected with Kroop's clerk, explained something had come up, something he couldn't discuss. Which was that the firm had been infiltrated by an enemy agent. She'd been hired just before Christmas, after phoning to ask if there was an opening. Wentworth began to pace. Despite his exhaustion, he was thrilled, this was scandalous, heads will roll in the West Van cop shop, it could even abort the trial.