April Fool

by William Deverell

  “Whom did he come forward to? I want every word of every interview that led to this. I want every piece of paper you’ve got on this fellow.”

  “Not. Can someone tell me why we’re even here?” A testy, aggrieved tone. “The case is tight–we’ve got DNA, you guys are looking at a ten-billion-to-one shot. Faloon is going to do it all, the freaking book, and he can forget parole.” His temperature is up, his face red. “How are you doing with those new tests, Artie? What about our rights to disclosure? I’ll eat my shirt if the results don’t spell Faloon in neon.”

  “The presence of the defendant’s DNA has been confirmed.”

  “Bam. Case closed.” Buddy punches the air, causing Takahashi to jump. “Cop a plea, Artie, let’s get this stinker buried. You’ve got no idea the pressure I’m under from some lobby groups.”

  Feminist groups, he might have said, were he not aware of Takahashi giving him a cold eye. “Let’s get on with this,” she says. “I have a continuation.”

  Arthur moves to the issue of Dr. Winters’s files. He doesn’t mention Adeline Angella. The defence, he explains, merely seeks to know if any patients harboured a murderous delusion or grudge. “Why is the prosecution balking at producing her records? It causes suspicion to bloom like the flowers of spring.”

  Buddy acts offended. “These are peoples’ emotional lives we’re talking about, they came to her expecting she would keep their secrets.”

  “And carry them to the grave?”

  “You want the moon–Dr. Winters practised a dozen years, we’re talking several hundred people with painful traumas.” Buddy turns to Takahashi. “It’s a fishing expedition, and he’s looking for a red herring.”

  “What do you say to that, Arthur?”

  “We have a particular fish in mind.”

  “Yeah, who?” says Buddy.

  Arthur can’t believe he’s pretending ignorance–doesn’t he know Doctor Eve was consulted by Lorelei, the temptress? A desperate need to examine her sexuality.

  “You should produce the files, Buddy,” Takahashi says.

  Buddy had hoped to win at least a draw. He looks at Sergeant Flynn, raises his arms in supplication. Flynn puts down a text, picks up his briefcase, and walks ponderously to their room.

  “This shark is beating me to a pulp, Jasper. Give him the files.”

  Flynn hands Arthur a disc. “This is everything, sir. What Dr. Winters didn’t keyboard in, our techies scanned.”

  Arthur is distrustful of the wizardry that supplanted copiers. Does information remain errorless when it has passed through the innards of a computer, digested, digitized, shat out? He asks for a printed list of patients. Buddy greets that with a sigh of such anguish you’d think he’d been ordered to strip naked. He lifts a weary hand toward Flynn, who produces a computer printout, about forty pages.

  Arthur looks at the second page–between a G. Anfield and a P. Annhauser, there’s an A. Angella. He leafs through the remaining pages with no change of expression.

  “This was compiled how?”

  “From the deceased’s index cards,” Flynn says.

  “I’m sorry, people,” says Takahashi, packing her notes away. “I can’t keep my courtroom waiting.”

  Buddy rises. “Anything else you need, Artie, I’m always happy to oblige.”

  As the others pack up, Lotis gives Arthur an exaggerated look of dumb surprise. The name Angella has been overlooked by the techies in the course of their scanning and keyboarding. Maybe computers have made cops lazy. Unless Svabo’s blustering hides a dramatic talent, he has no clue that Angella is holding back critical information.

  Lotis sums it up. “Angella doesn’t want the bulls to know she screamed blue murder at Dr. Winters.”

  Brian Pomeroy picked up her anxiety about testifying–unusual given her enjoyment of the spotlight. But the searchlight of suspicion glares fiercely too, and she must have hoped Flynn’s team lacked the patience to read Winters’s files. They have their killer; why put in the extra hours?

  Arthur says, “I take it you are adept with a computer.” Why would he think otherwise?–this young smarty knows everything else about the modern world.

  Predictably, Lotis pulls a notebook computer from her pack, flicks it open, slides in the disc. After a few moments and a few cascading screens, she types “Angella.” The computer tells her, “Not found.” Lotis sweeps hair from her forehead, puzzled.

  Here is Jonas Anfield, who doesn’t know how to tell his wife to stop having affairs behind his back. The next file isn’t Adeline Angella but Penny Annhauser, whose boyfriend hates dogs and she loves them.

  Arthur has underestimated Svabo’s duplicity. “We have caught them red-handed, concealing information from us. They have spirited away the Angella file but forgot her name was also in the card index. It explains why our lightweight friend seemed a little jittery.”

  “That may not be the actual scenario.” Her impish smile.

  “What other possibility is there?”

  “The other possibility is that we already have that file. Dr. Winters left it with her lawyer, your misogynist pal Cleaver. He gave it to us at El Beau Room, remember?” Apologetic, as if embarrassed to witness the deterioration of the icon’s mental faculties.

  He harrumphs. “Yes, of course. I have it at home. Yes, that helps explain why Svabo hasn’t twigged.”

  But how telling it is that Angella didn’t share with Buddy her history with Winters, her furious demands for redress. As for Père Réchard, Lotis will run out to the jail with a copy of his statement, and will ask Faloon for his version.

  They pause by the table where Jasper Flynn was reading a text. Lotis picks it up: the current edition of Canadian Divorce Law.

  “Troubles on the home front,” she says.

  That takes Arthur where he doesn’t want to go, his own prosaic, snapless marriage. The worms of paranoia keep finding new places to dig at him. This morning, over coffee, he was haunted by an unsavory vignette: Margaret and Cud sharing confidences, intimacies. He’s not simply a lout with a Hogarthian appetite. He turns out to have a coarse, homespun charm. When one pokes hard, one finds little tender areas, he’s sensitive beneath his baboonish exterior. A decade younger than her, virile, needy. You’re not going to tell your old man, I hope? No, of course not.

  What is the matter with him, what causes all these improbable imaginings? It’s the Annabelle Syndrome. She twisted his psyche with her constant scavenging of handsome men, caused a permanent warp, something complex and crippling. Acute jealous anxiety disorder, little understood.

  He reminds himself to call a casualty of another troubled home front, Brian Pomeroy, who has been leaving fulminating messages, his marital crisis worsened by his evening with Angella. The untimely call from Caroline, who overheard Angella’s chiding tones and her “Ouch, your knee,” has slammed shut the door of reconciliation.

  Now comes Arthur’s first use of the evil cellphone as Lotis steps him through his call to Brian, who receives the news of the day with grunts of interest, then begins to rail.

  “I’m suing for access if she doesn’t cough them up this weekend. Easter is coming up, for Christ’s sake. I want to take them camping. Caroline would prefer to keep them at home in front of the tube, scarfing junk food while she marks her students’ puerile essays on Benét and Auden and Spender.”

  Arthur waits until this eruption is done. He has learned it’s never wise to offer family advice, especially to friends. Nor does he intend to plead Brian’s case to Caroline, who is as bright and brittle as her husband. He suspects Brian savours being wronged, the nobility of it–a spy on the rack, refusing to confess his clandestine role on behalf of an innocent man. (Yet there is intensity in his marriage. It breaks, it mends; over many separations and reunions, it stays alive. If there’s romance in conflict, Arthur’s a drab lover.)

  “Adeline Angella, at least, is talking to me. She phoned last night, offended–why hadn’t I held to my breathless departing promise
to call her? I told her she was very much on my mind. When I see her next, it’s in public, with witnesses.”

  Brian will find a pretext to ask where she was on April 1–if she has an alibi, it’s best to know early. If it’s a false alibi, the defence must prepare to counter it. If it’s honest, the defence must shift targets.

  After helping Edna Sproule with a breech birth, Arthur runs to the house to clean up, then rushes to the ferry to pick up Lotis, fresh from her visit to Faloon. She heaves her packsack over the tailgate, lights a cigarette, and they head off. She has finally got a haircut, now she can see.

  “I thought you were quitting.”

  “Tomorrow. Cold turkey Tuesday. Last time I quit, it was the headless scene from Scream Seven. Be happy I won’t be in your hair.”

  “In whose hair will you be?”

  “Not sure how to answer that.” She flips through a notepad, quick to change topics. “I told Nick he’d better fess up to Claudette about screwing Holly. It’s important, I said. You used a safe, what happened to it? He can’t remember, thinks Holly trashed it.”

  “The sleepwalking?”

  “He downplayed it.” Imitating his soft voice: “‘I’m dreaming I’m in the cage like a animal, I wake up and I been wearing out the carpet, it ain’t nothing to bother Mr. Beauchamp about.’”

  One suppresses the truth one fears–another reason for Arthur to see him soon. He once ran a sleepwalking defence after learning, from his expert, that people can do complex tasks when disconnected from reality. But he has no taste for arguing his client acted unconsciously; it implies a savage murderer hides within.

  “I phoned Claudette to confirm he paced up and down in his sleep, and she said, yeah, it was like he was locked in a cell. He also talked in his sleep.” Examining her notes. “Things like: ‘Let me out of here. What’s your badge number? I’m clean, ask Corporal Johnson, he handles me.’”

  He interrupts. “Ah, so let us assume Réchard isn’t lying.” She is getting a little too overweening with her brilliant deductions. He’s not too senile to see the logical premise. “Nick was trying to justify his night with Holly Hoover. ‘I couldn’t help myself. She was beautiful.’ He’d suppressed it and it came out in his dreams.”

  “Good for you,” she says, wetting an index finger and awarding Arthur an invisible check mark.

  He drops her at the Woofer house, watches as she shouts a greeting to Kim Lee, retrieves her pack, kneels to shake Slappy’s paw. Lotis the nymph, if rural tales be true, as from Priapus’ lawless lust she flew…

  Adding to the Owl’s misery, he’s been expelled from Protective Custody and is back in the main monkey cage. He can’t be in PCU at the same time as Father Yvon Réchard, according to prison regulations, because the aggrieved party might cause injury to what in police lingo is a co-operating individual.

  Not that Faloon would be capable of such unprofessional behaviour, but others in the main wing definitely are, for instance the burly person he’s talking to in the yard, Greg McDeadly they call him, though it’s really McDade. You don’t want to call him McDud, which a loudmouth did years ago and has the knife scars on his ass to prove it.

  McDeadly is a connected guy who works for the d’Anglio family and can get you favours. When he’s on the street, which isn’t often, his job for Tony d’Anglio is to put the rub on competing crime czars and traitors and rats. He recently got collared for an attempt on Twelve-Fingers Watson, which is why he’s here.

  McDeadly insists he can get transferred easy to PCU, with his connections, it’s in his field of expertise to take down Father Réchard. “I will do you justice. Pay me when you get out, Nick, I know you’re good for it. For me it’s a matter of principle when it comes to squealers. The practice should be discouraged.”

  “It’s very kind of you to offer, but Mr. Beauchamp isn’t worried about this fish, he’ll serve him up to the jury with pickles on the side.” Which is a load of bravado, because Faloon isn’t sure that will happen, not at all. Not with him having flunked the DNA retest, according to Beauchamp’s new student, who came out here yesterday with a sackful of bad news.

  She asked him if he’d ever slipped anyone what they call rochies or roofies, for instance to immobilize the mark before putting on a snatch, and he was offended. He has ethical standards when it comes to drugs, like guns.

  Claudette is due this afternoon, and he’s tense with wanting to see her big smiling face. He has to be cheerful for her, he doesn’t want her to know how hopeless things feel.

  “What was you supposed to have told this songbird?” McDeadly asks.

  “‘She was beautiful, I just couldn’t help myself.’” Phrases that feel foreign to his tongue, yet why that distant niggle of memory that he spoke them?

  “That don’t sound too bad, you could’ve been asking the father for forgiveness over jacking off.”

  “It’s bad enough.” Faloon looks like a schemer, playing along with Réchard that he was Catholic–how is that going to look to a jury? The Arab infiltrator. Maybe that’s the whole deal, it’s why the government has zeroed in on him like a laser-guided missile, he’s Lebanese, an Arab, a terrorist.

  What makes him worry that he used those words is that at breakfast the next day Father Réchard came up to him with a knowing look and a lowered voice: “I know exactly what you mean.” After that the priest’s counsellor came visiting, a dumptruck with a reputation for pulling off deals so he can go skiing.

  Faloon has finally got round to facing the possibility of himself as the perpetrator. He walks in his sleep, talks in his sleep, so maybe he stalks in his sleep, kills in his sleep. Compelled by a force outside him. I just couldn’t help myself.

  He didn’t go that far when talking to Lotis Rudnicki, who’s street-smart and too much of a knockout to be doing the ugly work of a lawyer. She must have seen he was dejected–the Father Réchard business, the ironclad DNA evidence. On top of it all, Mr. Beauchamp never coming to visit. Obviously, that’s because he doesn’t believe in Faloon and can’t look him in the eye. Out of loyalty to his most faithful client, Mr. Beauchamp has put aside his blissful life to take on a hopeless loser. Faloon owes it to him not to let his career end with such a dull thud.

  McDeadly pulls out a packet of tobacco and papers. Smoking is illegal in the joint these days, even outside, but it isn’t enforced to the hilt. He halves the rollie, one for Faloon, and they light up, the Owl going along even though he doesn’t normally smoke.

  “I want to get a private letter out,” Faloon says. He chokes, it’s pipe tobacco.

  “That can be done.”

  “You have a reliable source for this fine product, McDeadly?”

  “Yeah, one of the screws is my ex-brother-in-law, he kites it in. You want a lid?”

  “Please.”

  Waiting for the visiting hour, for Claudette, he washes his armpits, drags a comb through his receding hair, tries on a smile: the cool, confident, innocent look while inside all is torment. The killer who strikes in his sleep, will that be the headline? How does he share his terrible thoughts with the woman he loves–if that’s what it is, love.

  He’s going to clear the air. For at least one brilliant holy moment of your life you have to be totally honest with the one lady who gives a shit about you. Who’s prepared to make the great sacrifice of marrying you, even though he can’t remember proposing.

  He’s been rehearsing the right words to tell Claudette about Holly, and even as he waits outside the visitors’ room, he practises under his breath. “In case something happens to me, I don’t want an event from the past to rear its ugly head between us.” Too formal. “She took advantage in my drunken state.” Not true. The fact is Holly looked hot and she was offering, and he…well, he’s human.

  He is marched in, and there she is, the bountiful hostess of the Nitinat Lodge. Soon to be owner.

  They both want to touch but can only put hands to the glass. “I sorely miss you, darlin’,” she says with her lovely Mari
time accent.

  He asks how she’s doing, and she’s doing fine, the lodge is doing great, wait till he sees the flowerbeds she planted. She runs on about that, how they’re going to have a great time running the Nitinat, a husband-and-wife team, she’ll do the cooking and he’ll clean the eaves and paint the decks.

  He puts on a happy face. “Yeah, we’ll be sitting fat.” Enjoying the idea of being in love is one thing, with marriage come chores…

  “So how’re you feelin’?”

  “I’m tops. I’m going to be out of this coop soon. I always look on the sunny side.” She studies him dubiously. He asks if she had the papers notarized yet about putting the lodge in her name.

  “I will, honey, what’s the rush? You ain’t going to die in the next couple of days.”

  “I want the legalities done, I’ll feel better if you’re secure.”

  She carries on about Bamfield, about the search for the loot, how one guy dug his way into an underground vault that had fifty gallons of stilled hooch, all of Bamfield partied. Faloon isn’t sure if he even remembers where the treasure is. Sixty paces northeast of where the path breaks off for Brady Beach–or is it northwest?

  Claudette also tells him there’s a story going around about how Holly Hoover came calling on Mr. Beauchamp in the night. She doesn’t believe there was an improper outcome to that, because he seemed really straight and proper.

  The mention of Hoover releases a spring latch in Faloon, and his mouth pops open. “I fucked her.” No preparatory text, nothing, just the blunt admission, and when he tries to explain and apologize in a low, scared voice, she puts up a hand to stop him.

  “I kind of knew you did.” Her weary sigh means he could’ve saved a lot of misery by being honest from the start.

  “Thank God it’s off my chest. I’m sorry, things have been piling up, they…” He brakes. “No, that’s crazy, why am I saying that? You’re here, I’m happy, this is the high point of the week.”

  He’s not going to tell her about Père Réchard, or about how there may be a monster inside him, the sleepwalking killer. He can’t handle it, doing the book, forever looking at bars. It would destroy her too, visiting every week, then once a month, five times a year, growing older, sadder, lonelier…