by Bill Rowe
“None whatsoever. He was quite upset when I said no. He might have taken off for the airport, I suppose.”
“Was he drunk or sober?”
“Oh, sober. I wouldn’t have left him alone to drive back drunk, if only as a safeguard to innocent people on the road.”
“You said he once threatened suicide if you… I don’t suppose…”
“I look back on that as his normal bullshit, but you never know. He was distraught at the thought of another trial. Maybe they should send divers down off Red Cliff.”
After Rosie said goodbye to me to wait for Lucy, I sat there by the phone shaking. The fat was in the fire and she had sounded so calm. Soon the police would be coming around and asking their questions. Mom and Dad would be glaring at me with their inquisition. Why this and wherefore that? I had a more serious attack of the jitters.
Thank God for a father who suspected the absolute worst of his son. When, on Tuesday, having exhausted all other more reasonable alternatives, the police followed Rosie’s suggestion and sent divers down off Red Cliff, they found Rothesay’s Land Rover, empty with windows smashed and doors open. Police surmised that the condition of the vehicle was caused by the force of the fall, the impact, and the tidal action. They scoured the vicinity for a body. Two days later, people visiting the Ocean Sciences Centre spied a body rolling in the surf on the rocks off the Marine Lab. If it was Rothesay’s, it had drifted in the Labrador Current across Logy Bay. The police retrieved it from the wild water with difficulty.
I told my parents I’d heard from Rosie through her mother that the police had identified the corpse as Rothesay’s. Dad broke the glowering silence he’d imposed on me after hearing my story on Sunday past and said, “I don’t like the looks of this. I’m making an appointment for you to see lawyer Barry right away. You need to get Rosie to go, too.”
Everyone had heard of lawyer Barry. He was forever on the news. Leonard Barry, Q. C. was the pre-eminent criminal lawyer in town. Dad knew him well from working as a forensic accountant against Barry’s clients in half a dozen embezzlement and misappropriation cases. The accountant in Dad hated him, but the lawyer’s successes on behalf of his thieving clients had instilled in Dad a grudging respect for the man’s brilliance. Dad’s esteem for him went way up that day when it appeared that his skills could be needed to drag his son out of a deep, dark pool of something unplumbed but already malodorous.
The lawyer agreed, at Dad’s request, to see us that very night at his office. I persuaded Rosie to go with me, too. Mr. Barry came to the locked door himself and ushered us courteously into his empty suite of offices. He seemed to have all the time in the world as he sat there smiling at us behind his desk, reminiscing on having gone to university with Joyce O’Dell and Nina—Russell, she’d been then—younger than he was of course—she was a freshmen when he and Joyce were seniors, but her brilliance was as evident as her beauty even then. And Joe Sharpe—he wasn’t wrong-named, that man, because he was the sharpest expert witness Barry had ever had the misfortune to have to cross-examine on the stand—impossible to shake— and Head Nurse Gladys Sharpe—she should get the Order of Canada just for her rehabilitation work with children at the hospital alone. Now, for the reason we were all gathered here together:
“First, I am your lawyer. Not your parents’ lawyer, not the lawyer for child welfare or the High Sheriff or anyone else. Your lawyer. I will not be disclosing anything you tell me to anyone else, father or mother or legal guardian. Your communications to me are absolutely privileged and confidential.
“Second. Adolescents are idealistic and honourable, so don’t be put off by any comments of mine that might sound cynical. I don’t know if you are guilty of anything besides picking your nose or sneaking out a fart in an elevator, and listen, I don’t care. I presume you are as innocent of everything as two babes in arms. I don’t care if you are actually in fact guilty of anything and I don’t want to know. I give you the presumption of innocence you are guaranteed by law. And you are entitled to have everyone else presume you are innocent. But some will try to weasel out of you admissions that may tend to undermine that presumption of innocence. Don’t let them do it. My job is to maintain that presumption of innocence and not to let you say or do anything that weakens it. If you are asked a question by a police officer, refer them to me and say you will not answer anything in my absence.”
Rosie said, “The fact that we have a lawyer and refer everything to that lawyer, won’t that make police officers get suspicious of us?”
“It will,” said Barry, “especially since your lawyer is me. But it is much better for a police officer to be suspicious of you and even to believe you are guilty of a crime, than to have you provide evidence which, factually or falsely, could convict you of that crime in court. Okay, give me your story. I’ll tell you if it hangs together.”
“Pretty good,” Barry said after we were finished. “Here are the three realistic possibilities from the point of view of the police. One, Rothesay accidentally drove his car over the cliff. Two, he deliberately drove his car over the cliff to commit suicide. Three, one or both of you caused his car with him inside to drive or roll over the cliff, whereby you committed manslaughter or murder. Your story points to possibility number one or number two, accident or suicide. Let’s keep everybody guessing forever which one of those two it was. Let us make sure that nothing arises or is said that might tend to make possibility number three, homicide, even credible. Rosie, stay at his wake beside your mother, and be there the whole time, even when she is not there.”
At the funeral home, two police officers maintained a close watch on me and Rosie. It was a toss-up who gawked at Rosie more, the police or the lineup of mourners who came. Poor Nina was there for a while, but after she screamed over Rothesay’s closed casket that everyone she loved in the world had died—Joyce and Pagan, and now Heathcliff—my mother helped her out to the car and home. A police officer who identified himself as Constable Locksley Holmes sidled up to me when Rosie was across the room talking to Suzy, and asked me if I could shed any light on relations between Rosie and her mother. For instance, was there any reason Mrs. Rothesay had excluded her daughter Rosie from the list of those she loved? I replied that maybe it was because her mother had been grieving for loved ones who had died, and Rosie was still alive. Constable Locksley Holmes gazed at me coolly and without a word for thirty seconds, as lawyer Barry had informed us the police were trained to do to unnerve suspects, turned to his colleague, and said, “We’ve got another crafty one on our hands here, just like that guy last week before we sent him up.”
Rosie came over. “What did they want?” she asked me as they sauntered away.
“They wanted to know if your mother loves you, even though you’re still alive,” I said as the constable turned and looked back at us. Rosie smiled at him and waved.
WITHIN DAYS, CONSTABLE LOCKSLEY Holmes came up to me outside my house and identified himself as the lead police officer on the investigation into Rothesay’s death. A piece of pipe had been found on the ocean bottom off Red Cliff by the divers, he said, and the forensic experts had determined that it had only been there for a few days and that at least one and maybe two blows to Rothesay’s head corresponded with its shape. Would I be kind enough to let him into the garage or basement of my house right now to exclude the possibility of any similar pipe being there and hence to absolve me of all possible guilt? I blurted that it wasn’t my house—he’d have to ask my father or mother. Sure, he could do that, but in the meantime, did either Rosie or I happen to have a piece of pipe with us when we drove to Red Cliff that night?
If I hadn’t talked to lawyer Barry, I would have doubtless figured the jig was up and confessed to everything there and then. Instead, I told the officer I was only allowed to answer questions in the presence of my lawyer, Mr. Leonard Barry, Q. C. He gave me thirty seconds of the hairy eyeball again but destroyed its effect by involuntarily swallowing hard. Why did I have a lawyer, he asked,
especially a high-powered one like Barry, if I wasn’t guilty of something? Because, I replied as advised, I was underage and by law I was not responsible enough to act independently. Just one final question, said Constable Holmes: Since the autopsy had determined that there was enough alcohol in Rothesay’s system to render him legally and probably physically incapable of driving his car, hadn’t I noticed that or hadn’t Rosie mentioned that to me? Gosh, I couldn’t comment on that, I said, in the absence of my lawyer. “I had hoped to avoid this embarrassment to you,” said Constable Locksley Holmes, “but I must ask you to accompany me to the police station.”
At the police station, lawyer Barry laughed at the pipe. It was so common a type that the constable could probably find a similar piece of pipe in his own house. Good luck on getting a warrant from a judge to search for similar pipe anywhere. Its recent arrival on the bottom? Persist in this line of investigation, said Barry, and the constable should be prepared to explain the presence of all recent garbage dumped into the Atlantic by livyers on shore and vessels at sea. And blows to Rothesay’s head? After falling off a cliff, and having been in the water for several days hammering against waves, rocks, and cliffs, good luck to the constable on getting expert evidence to agree that the wounds to his body were caused by anything specific, let alone by a random piece of common pipe dumped by God knew who into the Atlantic Ocean. Booze in his body? So what if there was? Neither Tom nor Rosie administered a Breathalyzer that night, so far as he was aware. But entirely apart from that, the last case he’d had where alcohol was an issue, its presence was disputed after the body had been in calm fresh water for three days, let alone one covered with open gashes in turbulent salt water for some five days.
Constable Locksley Holmes contrived to accost me one day after classes and said, “Some kids who were up on Red Cliff making out in an abandoned building when you and Rosie were there told us they saw a male and a female pushing a four-wheel drive Jeep over the cliff.”
“They must have been into the pot,” I said.
The constable grinned. “Tom, this is just a friendly observation from one young man to another. We have determined your motive, and it is a very understandable one. All the evidence about what Rothesay the pervert did sexually to your girlfriend—huge penis in her mouth, in her vagina, up her anus, every night for months on end—well, let me put it this way, I would have killed him too. No jury would convict you after what he did.”
I told the constable to make all those same points in front of my lawyer and walked away. I called Barry and told him of the encounter. “Time to fire off a letter to the chief of police,” he said. He told me to drop down to his office for my copy of the letter that he’d be having hand-delivered that afternoon. The letter said that Barry was preparing a statement of claim against Constable Locksley Holmes and the police department and the minister of justice for the most scandalous harassment of his underage client. He listed the particulars and concluded that the police chief “would be well advised to call off your budding Lieutenant Columbo and instruct him to cease and desist in his television-whodunit dramatics forthwith. It is clear to all but the wilfully blind that Rothesay’s unfortunate death was a case of suicide or misadventure following on allegations against him of a most ruinous nature which were about to go to trial for a second time.”
But the subtle pressure on Rosie and me continued. Hardly a day went by that we didn’t come out of our houses to see a police car idling across the road or receive a call to come in with our lawyer to answer a few more questions: Where are the shoes and clothes you wore that night? Whose idea was it to drive to Red Cliff? It was a frightening time. I woke up each morning doubting that our love for each other would get us through it. Then, in the shower my fortitude would return. At least until I’d catch Mom or Dad secretly looking at me with an unnerving combination of mystification over what I might be involved in and absolute horror at the possibilities, and my courage would start to wane again. Most of the time, fortunately, they went about the house forcing themselves to look normal. They didn’t even interrogate me, which was completely out of character. Lawyer Barry must have instructed them to back off.
BRENT HAD GRADUATED FROM high school with the rest of our grade eleven class in June—this was before grade twelve was brought in—and he was away when Rothesay went missing. He’d been drafted in the eighth round, two hundred and fifteenth overall, by the Montreal Canadiens, and was now in Hamilton training with the Bulldogs, for whom he would play in the upcoming season. We wrote each other every week during his first month away, and that gradually tapered off to every month or two as time went by. Going into Memorial University with Rosie and Suzy that fall, I realized it would be the first academic year since kindergarten that Brent and I would not be together. Strangely, I did not miss him. In fact, I missed no one I was away from. Even when Rosie and I were apart for days, travelling for sports or other university activities, I had to lie when we came together again by saying how happy I was we were back with each other. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her, or miss Brent, for that matter, or that I didn’t relish her company or wouldn’t have enjoyed Brent’s. It was just that since the trial and Rothesay’s death there was something in the core of me that was numb. Lifeless. I took real pleasure, compared to the past, from nothing.
DURING THE LATE WINTER, a goon blindsided Brent on the ice and gave him a hairline fracture of the skull. He was in the hospital for weeks, and his future in professional hockey was touted by the commentators as doubtful. He’d be off until next season at the very least.
He came home in May and called me up to go out and have an evening meal with him downtown at the Sports Restaurant. When I walked in, Brent was already there, sitting in the booth by himself with, I was surprised to see, a glass of beer in front of him. Before this, he professed to despise drinking. And he was still months short of legal drinking age. Seeing him for the first time in nearly a year, I was surprised by his appearance. He looked, not beefy, but pudgy. He’d said in a letter that he hated the feeling of getting out of shape as a result of little activity and lots of eating. His headaches kept him from working out as strenuously as he wanted to.
Three men were at a table next to Brent’s booth. One of them was pressing hockey stats on him in a loud voice. He stopped begrudgingly when Brent and I shook hands enthusiastically and I slipped into the booth. “Want a beer?” Brent asked.
“I can’t,” I said, “I didn’t bring my fake ID.”
“I’ll vouch for you. I’ll go up and get it. They’ll take my word for it here.”
“Okay, thanks, I’ll have a Dominion.”
“Who would have thought it?” mused Brent, coming back with my beer and another for himself, and sitting down. “I’ve got these big hands, big feet—look, size twelve, for the love of—big wrists, big ankles, big neck, big dick—uh sorry, Tommy, I saw what Rosie said at the trial—big shoulders, big bones generally. Who the hell would have thought, like my old man says, I’d have a skull on me like Waterford crystal?”
A fleeting image stirred in my own skull of head-butting my best friend Brent into a lifelong coma. “Maybe we all have an unknown fatal flaw that comes to the fore at some point in life,” I said. “Just a matter of time and place.”
“Deep. I like that, Tommy-o. You’re here one minute and already we’ve talked more about the realities of life than twenty weekends on the bus with those featherbrains—nothing but NHL possibilities and tail. Did you take your old man up on going to Europe this summer?”
“I said no.”
“Can’t bear to part from Rosie, huh? You two must still be big.”
“Yes, Brent, of course. What did you think?”
“Well, you never know. Christ, she dumped me.”
“What are you talking about, Brent? Rosie never dumped you.”
“Well, not technically, maybe. She never went for me. Kind of the same thing. Instead, holy shit, she ended up with you. I think what shagged me with her was t
hat she had a deal with her buddy to set me up with her…” He snapped his fingers five or six times. “The one with the body.”
“Suzy.”
“A bombshell. A lot of the guys had their jockstraps stretched out of shape over her, pal. I seriously looked Suzy over myself, but there was something about Rosie, though, something extra. Kind of like the difference between a good farm team player and a top player on the NHL. I kept thinking about what the old man said that time: What kids we could have made, me and her! But she wanted you, man. I couldn’t believe it.”
“So everything worked out great, Brent. You wouldn’t have wanted a girl with such lousy taste she preferred me over you.”
Brent didn’t crack a grin. “Ain’t that a fuckin’ fact. It did work out. Imagine if I really got in heavy with her and all that fuckery about Rothesay… I can see the old man now. Rosie told me in her letter when I was injured that you’ve been a tower of strength all through this whole shitstorm.”
“Nah. I only did what anyone in my place would do. Suzy and Rosie were the towers of strength from the start.”
“Yeah, but for a guy who found out someone like Rothesay was rooting at her—man, I dunno. I wouldn’t’ve been out of the dressing room on that one, champ. You’ve got more balls than a driving range.” Brent surprised me yet again by pulling out a cigarette and lighting up. Blowing out the smoke he used to hate even worse than booze, he asked, “You going to stick with her when all this is over and done with?”
“Naturally, I am, Brent. Jesus, what are you talking about? Why wouldn’t I?”
“Him ploughing her every which way, no bodily orifices barred, with that baseball bat of a cock of his, didn’t that get to you? Shit, man.”
“Who are you going out with yourself these days, Brent? There was one you mentioned…”
“Yeah, I was going out with this living doll, Anita, an octoroon she called herself as a joke—you know what that is?—because of the hair and the great lips. Certain angle, she looked like she had a touch of the tarbrush. Fucking beautiful. I met her in Montreal. Up from Brazil to go to school. Father a brain surgeon, mother a judge. She’s going to start studying to be an architect next year. I brought her to the hotel to meet the folks when they were visiting, and the old man turns to the old lady, right there in front of her, and says, ‘No one told me she was a neeegro.’ That kind of finished her with me. Good old Dad, I’ll kill that nasty fuck, first chance I get. No, it’d really bug me, Tombo, knowing all about it, you know, everything Rothesay did to Rosie, and Christ, me, I’m hung like a bull moose.”