Kill All the Judges (48 page)

Kroop welcomed the jury to this unusual Saturday session, assuring them they'd have the rest of the day off after hearing one witness. “Depending on counsel, of course.” The innuendo: any grant of early freedom depended on the windy cross-examiner for the defence.

“Call Florenza LeGrand,” Abigail said, looking sideways at Arthur. They were in this together.

Enter Donat LeGrand's misbegotten child, costumed as femme fatale: a stylish mid-thigh black dress, a cream V-necked top exposing a dagger of flesh between her breasts. As she went by counsel table, she gave Arthur a quick sizing-up.
Florenza had heard of the cagey old dog defending Cuddles.

When asked to take the oath, she addressed the judge. “I'd like to make a statement. I am here against my wishes. I want to bury all of this. It can only hurt my family and friends, who have already been dragged through the mud.”

Kroop's benign expression slowly transformed into something more familiar. “Madam, in this forum we do not offer witnesses a choice to stand mute. I shall take severe measures if you do so.”

She glanced at Silent Shawn. He gave her nothing, not a twitch. Back to the judge. “Severe measures?”

“The appropriate order, madam, would be to hold you in the Women's Correctional Facility until you expunge your contempt.”

“How long could that be?”

“Life.”

That was a stretch–in more ways than one–but Arthur kept silent. Kroop was showing uncommon patience; a less prominent witness would have been harangued mercilessly.

Abigail rose to intercede. “Let's see how far we get, Ms. LeGrand. We can discuss this further when we touch on areas that bother you.”

A subtly attractive offer that had Florenza biting her lip, as if wrestling with an image of herself as a dowdy elder in prison brown. “Heavy,” she muttered, then looked up. “I'll go as far as I can.”

Abigail warmed her up slowly, taking her through innocuous personal information, age, family, education, abode, some scattered work experience–light sinecures with her father's shipping business and, until her marriage, manager of a chic dress shop the LeGrands owned. Though Abigail carefully avoided her wilder
escapades, the jury must have seen a spoiled woman of leisure.

She'd met Whynet-Moir on a Danube cruise in the early summer of 2006. The coincidences of shared home town and shared acquaintances led to a romance quickly consummated and an extended holiday. Vienna, Salzburg, Florence, the erudite lawyer wooing her with his learning in history and the arts.

They flew home together and were regularly seen, in the better social milieus, as the couple to watch. In early September 2006, Raffy won his ticket to the Supreme Court and they married within the month. Among the lavish gifts: joint title to 2 Lighthouse Lane.

All this was narrated in a casual, idiomatic way, as if in her living room. Arthur read much between the lines. Clearly the courtship had the near-fanatic approval of Donat and Thesalie LeGrand, an opportunity to get their naughty girl out of their hair. Let someone else rescue her if she got busted again.

Coddling Florenza, Abigail drew her through their twelve months of marriage, an unremarkable time, he spending long days mastering his new trade, she managing the house. “Believe me, it was a full-time job.” A juror made a face, the young restaurant hostess, who doubtless earned the minimum wage plus tips.

“How were you and Rafael getting along?”

“Copacetic.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we just carried on. Like any married couple.”

“Can you expand on that?”

She went silent, and Arthur thought she was about to balk, but she nodded, decision made, and there came a surge of words. “Okay, if I have to get into it…How do I put it? The bloom went off, the thrill was gone, the power went out. I kind of woke up one day and realized we weren't made for each other. Raffy wasn't…maybe adventurous is the word. I'm sorry, but people are built in different ways, I guess.”

Amazingly garrulous for one recently tight-lipped. Some drugs do that. She was probably on something prescribed, one of those wonder relaxants that don't slow one's thoughts.

“Did the bloom fade for him as well?”

“I'm not sure if he ever bloomed in the first place. I think it was all artifice.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, I may as well say it. I'm totally persuaded he married me for my money. I was an object, I was bickered over, the dowry was half of Lighthouse Lane and four million to take care of the justice minister. I knew zero about that. Now it's all over the media.”

An electric moment, a loud buzz in the room that jerked Kroop from his reverie. He sputtered, “What? What? This is out of bounds. I have ruled on that very firmly.” With a frown at Wentworth, whom he'd pistol-whipped for the same sin only yesterday.

“It goes to her state of mind,” Abigail said.

“State of mind? She says she knew zero about it.” Kroop looked wounded, astonished that she would defy him. He looked about for help. “Mr. Beauchamp.”

Arthur rose with a magnanimous smile. “I move that her mention of the four-million-dollar bribe be stricken from the record.”

“Motion accepted. The jury will disabuse their minds of anything they have heard about the subject of…” He stalled, unable to find the right phrase.

“Bribes, milord,” Arthur said. “The subject of bribes.”

“Okay, let's go back to last October.” Abigail was anxious to keep her unexpectedly frank witness chugging along. “You and Rafael were preparing to host a literary dinner. How did that come about?”

“It was Raffy's idea, he liked his soirees and dinner parties, liked to fringe about in the arts scene. I don't mean to put him down, he knew lots. Especially literature. He was working off and on at a book, something about intrigue in the Florentine dynasty.”

Arthur might have expected that, a dilettantish littérateur, more interested in being between book covers than bed covers. For this, a burden others shared, forgiveness was owed.

“Did you play any role in preparing for this dinner?”

“Not really. When I first looked at the guest list I thought it would be tedious. Until I learned Cudworth Brown had been pencilled in.”

“Why did that make a difference?”

“I'd heard him on Co-op Radio a few months earlier. I was out for a drive, surfing the FM band, and this poet was being interviewed and giving readings. I actually pulled over to listen. I was getting a kind of high from him, he had this totally radical attitude, he wasn't delivering the usual crap.”

Kroop's eyes widened but he didn't chastise. Arthur was astonished not so much by the loose language but by the drift of her evidence, the way she bulled ahead, unstoppable. “I had a sense of liberation from him, he was where I wanted to be. The whole thing felt kind of life-changing. And I went out and bought his books and his CD. They spoke to me of freedom, of living a life without regret.”

A nice turn of phrase, but life-changing? Arthur had never quite seen Cud in that light, Christ-like, with powers to transform and heal. He resisted the urge to glance back and see how he was taking this. Soon it would be time for Felicity to march out again.

“Tell us how you spent Saturday, October 13.”

“I just tried to keep out of everybody's way. We had staff buzzing about, caterers all afternoon, and Raffy was totally involved, directing the show. I spent some time in the exercise room, took a drive, did some shopping, got back maybe an hour before the guests so I had time to change.” Pausing to catch her breath. Arthur listened, rapt.

“Cudworth was the first to arrive, and when I came down, Rafael had already seen him in. He went out to greet more guests…oh, before that, he told me to change the seating cards,
he didn't want to be near Cudworth. That was fine with me; I put him on my right. Then I saw Cudworth out on the deck, having a smoke, and I joined him.”

“And what transpired?”

“Well, I was ready for him. I had his two books. I let him know how meaningful I found his work, and was about to ask him to sign the books when I thought it would be better to ask him to wait. He didn't really know me yet.” A fair paraphrasing of Cud's version. So far, a credible witness with far more to say than anyone expected.

Abigail took her through the dinner talk, Cud in top form, playing up the hard, lonely life of the under-recognized poet. If Florenza recognized the pitch for what it was, a fundraiser for Cuddlybear, she didn't say. “He told me about growing up in a mining town, being taunted for his literary ambitions, learning to fight by standing up to bullies. He'd hitched across Canada, worked on high steel, sent all his money home to his impoverished parents. He'd had a terrible accident with his back, and found his way to his lonely little island, destitute. Only the poetry saved him from suicide. I was riveted, he'd lived a life of pain but a life without compromise.”

This was Cud at his bullshitting best, he'd used the thoughts-of-suicide line to seduce a score of Garibaldi maidens. The lazy libertine wasn't capable of suicide. Flo continued to impress as credible, if naive, but Arthur had picked up unnatural intrusions in her relaxed, idiomatic speech, the clever phrases,
a life without regret…without compromise
. Was Silent Shawn also a wannabe author, a writer of scripts?

“Tell us about your end of the conversation.”

“There wasn't much. He asked if I was happy. I told him I could be happier. No, that's not what I said, I told him I was living a lie. I told him his poetry had awakened something in me.”

“During this, was anything else going on between you?”

“I'm not going to downplay it. I couldn't keep my hands off him.”

It started with a nudging of knees, a touching of hands. There was audible heavy breathing in court as those hands grew bolder, he going under her dress, her fingers finding their way slowly, unerringly, to Cud's so-called private parts. The intimate details repelled Arthur.

The adventure with the opal ring provided comic relief, a release of erotic tension that helped pacify the several jurors shifting in discomfort.

“I wanted him. That's all I can say. When I think about it now, I feel badly. I'd had too much to drink…But that's not it. With Raffy it wasn't…it wasn't happening, Cud seemed so different, so opposite, so alive, a beautiful, lustful savage. He was worried Raphael would notice we were playing around, but I'd reached the point I didn't care. I was going to have this man. I'm sorry if that seems abrupt and immature. I was horny and infatuated and a little loaded, and I wasn't thinking about consequences.”

She looked at Cud. Arthur swivelled around, saw his puzzled face. Cud's attitude toward their antics had been cynical, he'd believed she'd merely wanted a sex slave for the night. Now he was hearing about infatuation. Felicity looked frozen.

Florenza didn't say much about her exchanges with Cud on the patio, didn't mention asking him to sign the two poetry books.
Never regret. New love blooms as the old lies dying.
The jury could well have read something ominous in those inscriptions.

As to his reading of “Up Your Little Red Rosie,” Flo thought it hilarious. “I got it, but I don't think anyone else did, the way he was sticking it to all the stuffed shirts. I remember him smiling at me, like it was our secret joke.” She looked at Cud again, who engineered a wan grin.

It was nearing morning break, but no one asked for a break, certainly not Abigail, whose allegedly reluctant witness was sailing along. Arthur was getting antsy, this was definitely liable to spill over to the afternoon.

The other guests gone, the caterers looked after, Flo went upstairs to her husband, already in bed, exhausted from his day and with a slight heartburn. A glass of warm milk and a swig of stomach medicine settled him down, and by the time Flo had removed her makeup he was asleep. Again, this fairly accorded with Cud's version, though in his she'd sounded sinister:
I gave him something to help him sleep.
She bypassed a salient line:
We'll just have to find some way to get rid of him.
Which the jury might have presumed was in jest. Maybe not.

She and Cud met by the pool as planned, took a diversion into the steam room. After a few moments of play, they abandoned the last vestiges of civilized reserve–that's how Arthur saw it. His sense of morals was offended by this hormonally unbalanced pair.

Her account was expurgated but raw enough. They'd been near climax when a cool gust signalled Raffy's presence. He sorrowfully reminded Flo of the time, just after one. Urged her to come to bed. Made complaint about her wantonness, ever so timidly, then left.

“And what did you and Mr. Brown do then?”

“We showered and gathered our clothes.”

“Did you and he have anything to say at that point?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Morning break,” Kroop said. “Ten minutes.”