April Fool

by William Deverell

  “And next month?”

  “He’s on Assize for the last two weeks, Regina versus Faloon.”

  The sensation in the pit of Arthur’s stomach brings back the night of the bad clams.

  “Faloon, yes, I think that crossed my desk. That’s the one involving the young lady who was, ah, allegedly raped and murdered. Remind me, who’s counsel on that?”

  “I have Mr. Svabo for the Crown and Mr. Beauchamp for the defence.”

  Those burning black eyes track down Arthur again. “Yes. Yes. That will work. Please inform Mr. Justice Mewhort that his presence is requested in our lovely capital city for the next six weeks. I shall personally attend to his divorce trials and to the little matter involving Mr. Faloon. Himf, himf.”

  His bulky frame rises, giant Polyphemus, the Cyclopean, returning to his cave after devouring a Greek for dessert.

  PART THREE

  He was but as the cuckoo is in June, Heard, not regarded.

  –Henry IV, Part I

  23

  On Garibaldi Island, Arthur had been in the habit of rising with the sun, but when he does so this morning he’s disoriented, lost in the vastness of a voluptuous bed. Perhaps it’s a rest home, everything clean and colour-bright. But no, the four erotic Japanese prints on the wall, lovers entwined gymnastically, suggest a clinic for the sexually disabled, or perhaps a stylish bordello.

  He forgot to draw the curtains last night, so it is well that his room doesn’t face east–the sun reflects harshly enough off a nearby high-rise. That, he realizes, accounts for the garish orange of the wall beside him.

  Though the city sleeps on–it is only 5:30, two days shy of summer solstice–Arthur is now sharply awake, aware of why he’s here: Regina versus Faloon opens at 10 a.m. for a two-week run in the Vancouver Law Courts before Chief Justice Wilbur Kroop.

  And where he is, he apprehends, is 807 Elysian Tower, a condominium newly bought by his friend and partner, Hubbell Meyerson. For the remainder of the month, if he cannot wheedle his way out of Kroop’s court, this will be Arthur’s home: a luxury two-bedroom on the eighth floor, just opened, smelling of fresh carpet and wallboard and oiled wood. Next month, Hubbell will have renters for this swank waterfront investment.

  Arthur supposes there are modern people–successful in life, liberal in outlook–who would find those Japanese pen drawings boldly risqué, innovative. Even appropriate for what is, after all, a bedroom. “Fun,” is how the designer would have put it, but the prints make Arthur uncomfortable. A curve of thigh leading to a junction of parted legs and half-submerged penis causes him a familiar distress, reminds him he’s old-fashioned, a square.

  “One ought ‘not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age,’” he recites as he rises from bed. Why does he remember the words of Cato and Plutarch and forget so much else?

  In the kitchen, as promised by Hubbell, is an instrument of glistening chrome that makes cappuccinos, lattes. Somewhere there’s an instruction book. Brian Pomeroy is coming by with bagels–he likes gadgets, and will know what to do.

  He studies his hoary, hairy image in the bathroom mirror. He can’t go into court like a hayseed, so he’s reserved a chair at Roberto’s for a trim. “A bloody tonsorial overhaul in fact, you look like the ancient mariner.” He talks to fill the silence, missing the farmyard cluck and clatter. Missing Margaret.

  Day seventy-four! Two and a half months, she’s closing in on the world record. Some fellow in California redwood country holds it, and a Tasmanian pair are close behind. Those two came down because the woman got pregnant. Margaret is beyond the age.

  She has vowed to stay until the arrests end. Her companions go up and down the trees as if on escalators, though they’re careful not to disturb the eagles. The two hatchlings have survived, the mother brooding them, the male scavenging the beaches and stealing from ospreys.

  More climbers have been recruited, bronzed and lithe men and women moving through the forest like spider monkeys, extending zip lines into the valley, metal lianas in the canopy. The media liken them to the outlaws of Sherwood Forest.

  Arthur pulls on sweatpants and his Save Gwendolyn T-shirt, slides open the balcony door, looks out over the floating gas stations, over Ferguson Point and the forest, the cables and stanchions of Lions Gate, stretching like a web between the park and the North Shore. Eight floors below, on the seawall path, a lone man trots by–intrepid like Arthur, daring the dawn, firing himself up, the work week has begun.

  Then he deflates with the prospect of writhing under the spurs of Wilbur Kroop. Arthur could apply to adjourn the matter out of his court, but would have to eat crow for having agreed to defend an absent accused. Faloon, he assumes, remains somewhere on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean.

  He tries to puff himself up. He has won more trials before Kroop than he lost, and most of his defeats were reversed on appeal. He is not afraid of him. It is the jury, not the judge, who decides guilt, and if he is forced to go ahead, he still retains his trump card, Adeline Angella with a motive for murder.

  The strategy will be to bait the line with red herrings: Hoover and the late-night wanderer, Harvey Coolidge, and even Ruth Delvechio, Winters’s jilted lover. The prosecution mustn’t suspect Arthur has a different fish in mind.

  Brian Pomeroy’s efforts to track Angella’s movements on April Fool’s Day haven’t borne fruit, though one of her alibis is blown. Brian found a past-event calendar on the Web site of Victims of Sexual Abuse: its wine-tasting event was the previous weekend. But it remains uncomfortably possible that on the evening of March 31 she was at her favourite bar, the Wanderlust, and the next day at the Holy Rosary bingo.

  Brian recently finished a month of rest and therapy, but won’t be in court today–Angella must remain ignorant of his spying. At any rate, it’s doubtful whether he’s recovered from what his partners decided was a full-blown nervous breakdown–they packed him off to Arizona, to a clinic.

  Nor will Lotis Rudnicki be present. She has been called to the bar–not without some gripes from a few stuffy benchers–and is a full-fledged lawyer now. But she’s needed in Victoria to counsel arrestees, take statements, arrange for legal aid and bail. Larry Mewhort has been predictably lenient, releasing all on their promise to appear for trial.

  Unhappily, the Appeal Court upheld Kroop’s order restraining trespassers, though it vacated his bail conditions and varied Mewhort’s. All arrestees must wear electronic monitors on ankle bracelets. Somewhere, presumably, sirens sound and lights flash if they return to Garibaldi.

  As colleges empty, recruits flood to the West Coast. So far, 188 people, mostly young but some seniors too, have been equipped with monitors–which they flaunt like badges of honour. A game is being played, with rituals, the loggers boating in each morning, then watching an RCMP sergeant read the injunction to the presumptive arrestees, after which constables strain with hacksaws and bolt cutters and pry bars. By the time the last protestor is unchained and arrested, the working day is over, and everyone leaves. They take weekends off.

  Arthur’s elevator stops for a pair in cycling gear. “Yay, Gwendolyn,” one says, admiring his T-shirt. When he steps outside into the crisp morning, he finds the seawall busy with runners, joggers, walkers–simultaneously disgorged from their buildings at 6 a.m., a clockwork emigration. He will not be at ease in the city, with its spurts of energy, an unnatural place where all that grows has been planted by man.

  Nor does he expect to feel relaxed in the courtroom, Kroop or no Kroop. Again, he worries that his craft has corroded beyond repair. But Doc Dooley was encouraging. “The well-exercised mind doesn’t cease to work at sixty-eight. Your skills will return as if they never went away.”

  Mens sana in corpore sano. He pictures Émile Van Doork stumbling from a hotel room after successive jolts: seeing Cat naked and helpless, finding he was duped. His own heart must stay combat-ready. He has a trial to win.

  He attacks the seawall promenade.

  “I bear bagels,�
� says Brian Pomeroy. He has caught Arthur fresh from the shower, swaddled in a towel. “Though you are wet, I am dry. I have taken the cure.” He is chipper and tanned. He sweeps into the kitchen, surveying with approval its aesthetics, its gadgetry.

  He has brought orange juice, and pours a glass for Arthur, then vigorously sets to mastering the coffee machine.

  “That Arizona clinic has performed a miracle,” Arthur says.

  “The Tough Love Health Club. Middle of the desert. Nowhere to escape, nowhere to run to, you stick it out or die.” He finds a bagel slicer. “Ever been in a dry-out centre, Arthur?”

  “I lasted three days.”

  “Tough Love comes with brutal therapy. The screwing around with other women, the guilt, that’s what led me to drink. The resident panic mechanic decided I have some kind of overactive testicular drive complicated by hedonistic impulses. Or some shit like that. I have to control it, it’s that simple. Easy to do if I stay off the behaviour-altering chemicals.”

  “Splendid. Come with me to an AA meeting. A booster shot, best taken at least twice a week to start with.”

  “Sorry, I’m not religious. Call me when they set up a chapter for the godless. I can stay off the gargle on my own, Arthur, I don’t need help from a higher power–you’ve got to find the strength within, that’s what they teach at Tough Love. And I can feel it, brother, I can feel the power.”

  Arthur won’t nag him. Maybe he is one of the rare ones and has the strength. Maybe the boozing was a response to stress. That also seems to be lessening.

  “No more secrets. I told Caroline the whole story, my secret agent role. I’m back in the neighbourhood, house-sitting for friends down the street. Next stop, a workshop on Cortes Island. Caroline and I will be with five other couples, under the baton of a relationship guru recommended by Lila. Intensive is the word for this sort of circle jerk. We’re expected to pour out everything, our bottled feelings.”

  Arthur can’t imagine confessing his traumas and failings to strangers. He wouldn’t know where to start. He imagines himself listening with a sick grin as Margaret advertises his plodding ways, his oppressive formality. (“He wasn’t such a drag when I married him,” she says tearfully.)

  The coffee machine bubbles merrily, hisses steam, produces frothy coffees. They take their mugs and bagels to the living room, which has a Japanese motif, like the bedroom but without the touch of Eros. Brian sits on a tatami rug and asks, rhetorically, “How in hell have we managed to get to day one of a murder trial without a client?”

  Not a call or postcard. Claudette hasn’t heard from him either. The French police seem not to be trying hard to find him. The death of Émile Van Doork has been written off as due to natural causes, and fraud and theft aren’t a top priority.

  “If Nick promised to call, he will. He hasn’t because he’s lying low.” But Arthur’s optimism feels strained.

  “What if he’s dead? Ever heard of a stiff being convicted of a crime?”

  “If he’s dead, a body would have been found. He’s scared and on the run.”

  “Maybe he should stay on it. How did Captain Bligh crash the party?”

  “Somehow I must have offended the gods.”

  “Any chance of bypassing the old bugger?”

  “Minuscule.” By now, Arthur is almost costumed for work, a three-piece suit. He picks up his briefcase.

  “Don’t forget your phone.” Brian is looking into the bedroom, the cellphone on the night table, with its confusing instruction booklet. Arthur has been powering it up.

  He succumbed to the importuning of friends. The phone promises him easier access to Garibaldi, to the defenders of Gwendolyn Valley, even to Faloon when he attempts contact. It can’t be that difficult to master. He has broadcast the number on the island.

  “Is Hubbell kinky?” Brian is studying the Kama Sutraesque prints.

  “I suspect he’s trying to be hip.” Hubbell is of an age with Arthur, and about as lacking in libertine leanings. Bullingham would have a fit.

  It is Bully himself he encounters as he and Brian ford the fountains and pools of the piazza outside the tower housing Tragger Inglis Bullingham. Every morning at nine the old man trundles off for scones and coffee at the Confederation Club, where he and his cronies complain about the state of the world.

  “Glad to see you still know how to knot a tie, Arthur.” He acknowledges Brian, shakes his hand hastily, avoiding prolonged contact with such rabble. “You won’t have much fun with Wilbur Kroop and his ill-fitting dentures, but good luck anyway. I have made Riley available should you need case law. When you have time, pop in and we’ll talk about the Wilson case. Chairman of Brunswick Trust, dispatched his wife–allegedly of course. Set to go this fall, Cleaver’s maintaining a holding pattern until you’re available.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, Bully.”

  “Nonsense, you’ve had a long-enough vacation.”

  Bully has never been known to take one, and holds with suspicion anyone who does. He won’t listen to further protest, and sets off for the club.

  Arthur and Brian carry on to the mezzanine, to Roberto’s hair salon. Arthur has entrusted his hair to Roberto since he was a barber named Bob with a striped pole outside a homely two-chair shop. Now he’s a stylist and operates from a parlour of elegant yet restrained taste.

  There is much tsk-tsk’ing as he examines the tangle of whiskers and hair. “We must do away with the beard. It detracts from the commanding nose. It is such a power symbol.”

  “Cyrano,” says Brian, not looking up, studying the models in an Italian fashion magazine.

  “The Cyrano look, si, perfecto. Swordsman of the courts. The moustache can stay, it gives accent to the nose.” Arthur bows to his will, and tufts begin to fly.

  “You on top of the jury roll?” Brian asks. A panel of sixty will be showing up, homemakers and plumbers and shoe sellers culled at random from voters’ lists. They’ve been well picked over, most having served on at least one jury during this assize. Arthur would have preferred them fresh and innocent–experience breeds cynicism, distrust of the system.

  “Watch out for three, eighteen, thirty, and fifty-one. They were on the Michaelson jury.” A contentious conviction last month. One ought not forget Shakespeare’s counsel: The jury, passing on the prisoner’s life, may in the sworn twelve have a thief or two guiltier than him they try. It is not thieves, however, whom Arthur will worry about, but the overly righteous and stern.

  Brian’s phone rings. “You have reached the Sixth Sense Law Office. We know who you are and what you want, so at the sound of the tone, please hang up…Of course, Lila, I knew it was you…By your laugh, I’m reminded of the bells of St. Mary’s…No, not a drop…Yes, it’s been suggested, but I’m not AA material, not clubby enough…Sure, if you have some ideas…Always willing to listen…” He takes his phone outside, lights a cigarette.

  Here is a marriage under repair. The new improved Brian Pomeroy. New life, relenting wife. There’s glue in the shared love of children–Margaret has never known the joy. Ah, but she has a nest of them now.

  “The swordsman takes shape,” says Roberto, flourishing his scissors like an épée. “You will look twenty years younger.”

  In the locker room, the makeover from humble farmer continues as Arthur dons starched shirt and dickey, striped pants with suspenders, drycleaned gown. In this uniform, he feels transformed, a different man, competent, assured, his self-doubt dissipating like mist. Bring on Wilbur Kroop. He is Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp, Queen’s Counsel, standing tall, freshly shorn, and of imposing nasal eminence.

  He strides up the stairs to level six, to the largest of the assize courts, 67, scene of many of his famous duels. From a vine-draped terrace, one can gaze down to the Great Hall, or up to the massive skylight. Young lawyers mill about the terrace, waiting for the doors to open, eager to watch the return of Cyrano, along with reporters and curious citizenry: fans of the courtroom who shun the daytime soaps, preferring thei
r drama live.

  Nearby, in a crowded witness room, Buddy Svabo and his errand runner, Jasper Flynn, are readying witnesses: crime scene officers, analysts, technicians. Not the key people, Holly Hoover, Adeline Angella, who are to be served up like dessert at the end of Buddy’s menu.

  Deputy SheriffWillit opens Court 67. It’s wider than long, the jury box to the right; in the middle, the prisoner’s dock, glassed in on three sides, and the witness stand to the left. In ascending levels are counsel table, clerk’s station, judge’s bench. At the back, behind a shiny brass bar, the public gallery, behind that, wall-to-wall windows looking out upon the glass towers of midtown Vancouver.

  The room fills to half-capacity. Attendance will grow as the public becomes aware the trial is in progress, presuming Arthur isn’t able to abort it. He’ll have a full house for his scene of exoneration with Adeline Angella, whose lies put Faloon behind bars. This chance to reverse Arthur’s one great failure has helped energize him.

  Buddy has a junior, Charles Stubb, known as Ears, a tribute to a pair of pennantlike flappers. He rises from counsel table, thrusts both hands, imprisoning Arthur’s one. “Honoured to be opposite you, Mr. Beauchamp, can’t wait to watch you in action.”

  “You’ll be watching an old dog who hasn’t learned a new trick in years.”

  “It’ll be something for my memoirs.” Stubb intends a political career but is entirely lacking in charisma, though a voracious glad-hander.

  “Order in court,” says Gilbert the clerk, a pitiable Bob Cratchit type. All rise as Kroop shambles from chambers and parks his ample form with a complacent grunt, as one might sit down to a tasty dinner. It’s 10 a.m. exactly–Kroop, a stickler for time, has fined lawyers for being as little as ten minutes late.

  A brusque nod to Buddy, a thin, sinister smile for Arthur. “I have before me a transcript of proceedings before Justice Mewhort in which he ordered trial of the accused in absentia–I daresay he is more profitably engaged elsewhere–a ruling that learned counsel for the defence seems to have heartily endorsed.” He quotes Arthur’s words, now regretted: I am prepared to choose a jury on June 19 and go to trial. “Gentlemen, are we ready to proceed?”