“I ought to mention, dear … ah, pass on that.”
“What?”
“Oh, I guess …” He has caught himself just in time. He won’t burden Margaret with an unsubstantiated death threat. She would only worry. That’s Arthur’s job. “Well, I was wondering how to tell you about the Fargo, Stoney claims he saved my life. Its brakes were going.”
“What are you talking about, Arthur?” He detects that new, impatient tone again.
Arthur backs up, fills in the gaps, and then continues like a wind-up toy, robotically, with more tales from home, the courtesy Cadillac, the demoralized Ernst Pound and his lust to bust tomorrow’s not-so-covert Potlatch, the nonsense about Doc Dooley showing up at a marijuana bacchanal.
“Please slow down, Arthur. You’d better make sure the doc doesn’t get caught standing in the middle of a ton of export-quality Garibaldi Gold.”
“It’s Stoney’s joke. His way of needling me because I lost the Orfmeister again.”
His tales all told, Arthur gives her a livestock report. A garden report. A weather report. Not even hinted at are the bad tidings Pomeroy may relay when he arrives in a few days. Only the prying postmaster knows anything. Otherwise Arthur has obeyed Pomeroy’s emailed caution: Say nothing, rien, nada.
“Are you well, Arthur? You sound a little hysterical.”
“Everything’s fine. Tip-top.”
He apologizes for monopolizing the conversation, and asks what’s up in the nation’s capital. Her list is challenging: a Throne Speech that gave less than lip service to the environment, botched inquiries into the vast atrocity of exploiting the Alberta tar sands, another draconian crime bill on its way, creeping fascism in the Prime Minister’s Office.
She’s venting. Margaret regularly finds relief from doing that, though she does it too often in public. Not all her sound bites win applause; sometimes her barbed tongue causes too stinging a wound. But that is our sharp-tempered Margaret Blake. She has been threatened with slander suits and occasionally has had to apologize.
Pierrette is on call-waiting, and they have to wrap up. “I love you,” he says.
“I love you too, of course.”
That sounds to him mechanical, passion-free. Again, he feels a sense of not knowing Margaret. So different from Annabelle, the vivid, playful temptress. In contrast, Margaret is narcissism-free, focussed on the world around her, this threatened planet. And he is proud of her, honoured to be her life companion, even though she has been, of late, very much … elsewhere. In physical distance, yes, but emotionally too. But that’s okay with him. Way down on his worry list.
He lights his pipe and rocks slowly on the squeaking chair as he reads today’s Bleat, hot off Nelson Forbish’s printer.
A photo of Tildy Sears and her teammates graces the front page under the banner headline, “Congratulations, gals!” and the subhead, “Easy Pieces Win Ladies’ Inter-Island.” A sidebar is headed, “Scotty Phillips Blooper Fouls No-Hitter.”
Lower on the page, Forbish bangs the drum for a coming event at the community hall: Tildy will be given the keys to the island by its elected trustees. Then a dinner in her honour sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, followed by a dance. In his page-two editorial, Forbish demands she be awarded the Garibaldian-of-the-Year trophy, a traditional island honour haphazardly determined by a mysterious series of petitions, polls, and ballots. Arthur has won it once, lost another on a close recount.
Arthur retreats to his old form-fitting club chair, picks up an interpretation of Euripides’s extant plays, of which he’s writing a review, works at it awhile. Then Pomeroy’s paranoid voice intrudes, whispering, “Be wary, don’t worry.”
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
Cooler air has arrived, and it is grey and misty on the last official day of summer. Here on the north side of the island, the wet side, dew is heavy on the pastures even at noon. Arthur is on his way to Mary’s Landing in the gas-gobbling guilt machine with the spiderwebbed windshield. Reverend Al Noggins has summoned him to a tête-à-tête at the graveyard behind St. Mary’s Church. He claimed to be facing a moral dilemma, but wouldn’t divulge more.
“Now what?” Arthur mumbles. Every day, it seems, brings him something fresh to stew over. Surely Al is not about to confide he’s having an affair with a parishioner, one of those alluring widows in his flock. That would be intolerable. Some legal issue? No, a moral dilemma, he said.
Perhaps it had to do with today’s signal event, the Marijuana Growers Fall Fair and Potlatch. Arthur doesn’t give a hoot about it, frankly. He wouldn’t care if all the crops on show got confiscated — that would smarten them up. Should there be a major bust, no amount of cajolery will see him involved in the defence of a bunch of losing stoners. He has sworn — loudly, in public, during interviews — that he will never undertake another trial; he is hors de combat, a gentleman farmer now.
Mary’s Landing is in a quiet, mist-thick nook: a public dock, a pebble beach, a small wooden church and annex, and, on a knoll beyond the parking lot, Garibaldi’s graveyard, whose two hundred dead are sheltered by a giant big-leaf maple now changing into yellow autumn dress. The church lot is empty when Arthur rolls in and proceeds, as directed, up the path to the little cemetery, with its clutter of crosses and tilting, weather-worn gravestones.
He is in a dark suit, something he almost compulsively wears when visiting a cemetery. An inbred formalism, probably inherited from his starchy father and enhanced by attending too many funerals. A breeze soughs through the branches of the maple, sending leaves spinning and conjuring filmy shapes from the patches of fog. He shivers, looking about for malefactors. Be wary.
There is an order of precedence in this graveyard: pioneers near the front, with the ocean view, long-timers down the hill, newcomers in the misty bottom, with the flashier stones one expects from parvenus. Arthur intends eventually to be buried in this graveyard, hopefully among the long-timers. Epitaph: Here lies a fusspot.
Out of the fog comes Reverend Al on a scooter. He chugs into the lot, parks by the Cadillac, doffs his helmet.
“What’s with the Mafia getaway car,” he says, coming up the trail.
“Stoney’s loaner,” Arthur shrugs. “Why are we meeting among the dead?”
“Because people respect one’s privacy in a graveyard.” They are startled by a sound — a squirrel scooting up the maple’s trunk. “You’ve heard about the Potlatch, of course.”
“At the old quarry.” Arthur checks his watch. “As of fifteen minutes ago.”
“The worst-kept secret in the history of humankind. I have a moral issue: To whom do I owe the greater duty, to the law or to local growers, many of whom I’ve counselled? They may be dopers and stoners, but they’re our dopers and stoners …”
“Okay, so what?” Arthur doesn’t want to sound impatient, but Al becomes prolix when excited.
“A parishioner phoned me this morning. He has a place on Tatter Inlet just a few lots from Kurt Zoller’s water taxi dock. He was up just before dawn, taking a piss off his deck when a launch pulled in, and he saw Kurt hustle outside to help tie it up. A bunch of characters with fishing gear disembarked. He said it looked fishy. I told him I’d investigate.”
“I advise you to stay right out of it.”
“Okay, but the dilemma is compounded by something else I heard. The other day. From Honk Gilmore. I assumed he was joking —”
“Yes, yes? Heard what?”
“That Doc Dooley would be dropping by, as a political statement. He wants to challenge the marijuana laws. I thought he was kidding, but I phoned the doc anyway this morning, and he wasn’t home.”
Arthur is overwhelmed by a vision of Dooley being cuffed and led away for prints and mug shots. What if the good doctor, in a moment of caprice, were actually to show up to judge the annual fall harvest?
He looks at his watch: it’s half past twelve. He o
rders Al to go home. “I will handle this.”
§
As Stoney warned, the automatic transmission is disobedient on steep inclines, but Arthur makes it up to Evergreen Estates without stalling. He parks and jogs to the crest of the hill and into Doc Dooley’s terraced acre of gardens, berry bushes, and orchard, and finally to the steps of his vine-covered bungalow.
“The doctor’s out,” the housekeeper announces, looking suspiciously at the panting visitor, in his dark suit.
“But his van is here.”
“He took his bicycle. Said he’ll be gone awhile, wouldn’t say where.”
Arthur carries on to Dooley’s little medical clinic in Evergreen Estates’ micro-mall, but the door is locked. He tries the emergency pager number, and is told that only an off-island physician is on call. He’ll try to intercept Dooley on the road.
Garibaldi’s primary artery, Centre Road, bisects the island, so Arthur chooses it first, driving slowly, peeking up and down its unpaved dead ends. But he comes across no cyclists in the sparse weekday traffic. At a T-intersection he turns up Gwendolyn Valley Road, a potholed lane that climbs steeply to the quarry before petering out as a trail to the national park. It’s not often used off-season.
The Cadillac again threatens to stall on the uphill until Arthur shifts down manually. He can barely conceive of the doctor, in his ninetieth year, pumping his way up this most mountainous of the island’s byways. But maybe nothing is beyond the Orfmeister multi-winner.
The old Caddie finally lurches onto the quarry’s white, dusty entrance road. A limestone seam, thrust from the ocean floor in eons past, was well worked and the pits abandoned half a century ago, leaving steep-sided gulleys in the hill. There are alleyways and cul-de-sacs not easily accessed, and caves as well, and it is in one of these that Arthur suspects the pot partiers have gathered.
In the parking lot, he sees only the old, rolled Pinto that Stoney tried to foist on him. Doubtless the less reckless members of the Growers Association have parked elsewhere, to avoid attention, and hiked up here, or, maybe like Dooley, pedalled.
He pulls in beside the Pinto, finds a broken tree limb to use as a walking stick, then climbs a circuitous path around the rim of the quarry, hoping to gain a vantage point. He hears muffled conversation below but can’t see anyone until, finally, he mounts a rocky ledge with a panoramic view. In a narrow defile is a single makeshift table with a meagre display of offerings: half a dozen small brown-paper bags. There seem to be only two attendees at this annual gala: Dog and a long-haired, bearded tough in a biker’s jacket. No bicycle, no Doc Dooley. It’s one-thirty, the event should be well under way.
The biker, whose leather club jacket proclaims him to be a Devil’s High-Rider, is poking his nose into one of the paper bags, apparently newly bought. Meanwhile Dog, presumably the vendor, is wandering about in an apparent woozy insensibility, clutching a half-empty beer bottle.
When Arthur twists around, he catches glimpses in the second-growth fir at the base of the quarry of several men and women moving about with the swaggering gait peculiar to the unmounted members of the RCMP’s narcotics division. Radios, binoculars, and gun-sized bulges. The snout of Zoller’s orange Hummer pokes from the undergrowth.
When Arthur swivels another eighty degrees, he sees two officers in the parking lot combing through his Cadillac. A broad-shouldered woman is reaching under the driver’s seat, and her male associate is cleaning out the glove compartment.
Arthur hurriedly retraces his steps, anxious to set matters right and avoid having to sue the federal government for its servants’ trespasses. As he reaches the parking area, he sees the male officer dump the contents of the car’s ashtray into an exhibit bag.
Before Arthur can protest, he is grabbed in a bear-like grip by the female officer, and is shoved forward over the trunk of the car.
“Spread ’em!”
Arthur is too winded even to curse as her hands sweep down his spread-eagled body and up his thighs, expertly, muscularly, indelicately.
“Looks like we got number one, anyway. Let’s see some ID, pal.”
Her partner is examining the cracked windshield. “Nice old buggy. Ask Al Capone over there if somebody took a shot at him.”
Arthur is wondering if Brian Pomeroy is psychic and this is the forewarned danger. He can sputter only a couple of intelligible words: “appalling” and “ridiculous.”
“Heard it before,” says his captor. She handcuffs him, swings him around, goes through his pockets, and fishes out his wallet.
“Who’s the suit?” This third voice is familiar, and when Arthur is able to focus he sees, coming from a channel cut into limestone walls, the head of the Vancouver Island Coordinated Drug Enforcement Unit, a combatant in trials past. As Inspector Eugene Klostert closes in on them, his smile wavers, fades, and is replaced by grimacing dismay. “Mr. Beauchamp?” he says pleadingly, as if begging him to deny it, hoping this is his doppelganger, impresario of the soft-drug Mafia.
The woman officer backs away, uncertainly. Ernst Pound emerges from the passageway, stops suddenly, backs up a step. He seems to be looking for a place to hide.
“Take those goddamn bracelets off him, and give him back his wallet,” Klostert commands, and while she does so, he joins the other officer for a huddle.
Arthur rubs his wrists and shakes the dust from his suit. “I take it, madam, you’re a master of some form of martial arts.”
“Just a little judo, sir.” She looks shaken, maybe by the prospect of a massive claim in damages for assault and false arrest.
Klostert draws him aside, clearing his throat. “I’m hoping you’ll let this one go, Mr. Beauchamp. Owens found a roach and some doings in your car’s front ashtray.”
“It’s a loaner, Inspector.”
“I’m not going to doubt that. Maybe they didn’t have cause, but they’re frustrated. This whole operation has gone to shit.”
The circumstances would have inflamed the suspicions of any normal, over-anxious cop, and Arthur has suffered no lasting injury. “I will forgive.”
Any explanation of why he’s here would require mention of Doc Dooley, so he’s content to let Klostert assume that a client facing arrest summoned him — by cell phone or maybe smoke signals. To maintain that fiction, he sets off to look for a handy client.
The inspector overtakes him, bellowing at Ernst Pound, who has found no place to hide and stands paralyzed near a limestone wall. “Operation Pot-Snatch? Is that what you call this, Constable? I call it Operation CFU, Completely Fucked Up.” Arthur feels badly for the stressed-out local cop who has capped off his dismal career by helping engineer a law-enforcement disaster.
Klostert rejoins Arthur, puffing, his voice cracking. “Damn nincompoop. We’ve been conned.” A trail of empty beer cans leads them to the clearing with Dog’s skimpy display: the several paper bags. Dog is no longer upright, but stretched out on an air mattress, passed out or asleep, beside an empty case of Blue.
Standing over him, like a proud huntsman with his kill, is Garibaldi’s auxiliary constable, still in his biker’s jacket with the Devil’s High-Riders insignia, though he has removed his dark glasses, ill-fitting beard, and hairpiece. He’s still holding his bag of marijuana, presumably his evidence of trafficking. Zoller looks confused on seeing Arthur and Klostert approach.
“Sir, the suspect is one Dogmar Zbrinjkowitz, alias Dog.” Arthur is astonished at how faultlessly the surname flowed from Zoller’s tongue. “He didn’t make me, Inspector. It was easy as a pie, except I had to wake him up to do the buy.” He opens the paper bag and peers into it. “I think we can safely assume this will analyze as high-grade cannabis sativa.”
A scrawled sign on the table reads: “$30 an oz, prime organic.”
Klostert asks, “Did you ask him where they moved the Potlatch to?”
“Couldn’t get him to spi
ll, sir.” Zoller glares at Arthur. “I guess it’s too late now that he’s lawyered up.”
Klostert looks down on the supine form, now snoring. “You know this man, Mr. Beauchamp?”
“A long-time upstanding member of this community. Until now.”
The inspector shakes his head. “I had better things to do today. I was going to get off early, take the boys fishing.”
“What do you want me to do with him, sir?” Zoller asks.
“He’s your collar.” Klostert walks off, muttering, still shaking his head.
Pound remains immobile, but offers Arthur a wincing smile. Zoller is left with the task of bringing the drug lord to justice. He shakes Dog, who opens his eyes and stares at him with the rheumy-eyed contemplation of an aging spaniel.
Zoller speed-reads the caution: “Dogmar Zbrinjkowitz, you have the right to remain silent, but anything you say will be used as evidence. Where are your confederates?”
Arthur feels he ought to tell Dog to say nothing, but that would imply a lawyer-client relationship, and Arthur does not want to get mixed up in this. His firm vow never to do another trial has now been buttressed by the new fear of being embarrassed in a public courtroom, made the butt of jokes in barristers’ rooms over the intimate search by the judo expert: “Heard she gave his dick a real good squeeze.” “Enough to give the old boy a hard-on.”
Zoller persists. “It will go easier for you if you cough up your co-conspirators.”
Arthur is fascinated by the look of concentration on Dog’s face. This humble young man of few words seems to be turning red with the effort to remain silent. Finally a loud noise erupts, recalling to Arthur one of the Bard’s best-loved lines: A man may break a word with you, sir, and words are but wind.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22
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