April Fool

by William Deverell

  “We’re being called to court. You’re not ill?”

  “No.” He gains his feet.

  “What were you up to last night?”

  “Nothing really. Thinking, reading. Problem with the alarm clock.” He turns his face from her. Without a beard, it’s harder to hide his blush.

  “You’re not having an affair, are you?”

  Gilbert pokes his head out, flustered. “Get in here, for goodness sake. We’re late.”

  When court is called, Kroop charges in like an impatient bull. His first order of business is to ride his clerk. “That took nearly seventeen minutes. I said ten minutes, Mr. Gilbert. Ten minutes, not ten hours.”

  “I’m sorry, milord.”

  The clerk must be looking forward to the weekend with more alacrity than even Arthur. Apparently he had a breakdown some years back, due to some form of neurological imbalance of which Kroop seems either heedless or uncaring.

  The judge snaps at Meredith Broadfeather as well, tells her to remove her polemical button from her fringed, deerskin jacket. Whose Home and Native Land? “Advertising is not allowed, madam.” Broadfeather obeys but gives Lotis a look. Two militants here, a risky setup.

  She describes following Sergeant Flynn and two constables to the Brady Beach cottage. They called out, pounded on the door, struggled with it. She slipped around to the bedroom window, and almost fainted on seeing Winters naked in death.

  Broadfeather saw the officers examine the body for vital signs. They were radioing for support when one of them noticed her at the window. “They told me to skedaddle.”

  “Why had you followed them there in the first place?” Buddy asks.

  “Because when the police are in town on a weekend they’re usually looking to bust an Indian. I like to witness. I don’t like my people getting beat up.”

  That is more than Buddy bargained for–it reflects poorly on his seatmate that a leading figure of the Huu-ay-aht community so distrusts him. Jasper Flynn shows bland unconcern, doodles. The prosecutor can see no good in tangling with this witness, and ends his examination with muttered thanks.

  Lotis may have forgotten she isn’t watching a skit, and sits smiling. Arthur has to nudge her. “Oh, my turn?” She jumps up and, to Arthur’s delight, goes on the attack. “So when Jasper Flynn’s in town, you have to play a kind of witness protection role?”

  Buddy makes a grand display of being irked. “I object, that’s offensive, that’s real low.”

  “She’s entitled to explore an issue you raised, Mr. Svabo. Perhaps you asked the one question too many.” Sardonic. Buddy continues to annoy Kroop, the showy style.

  “You’ve had lots of contact with Sergeant Flynn?” Lotis asks.

  “Many consultations.”

  “Confrontations too, Ms. Broadfeather?” She doesn’t know the game, thinks it’s politics.

  “That’s right.”

  “Much racism out your way?”

  Flynn is seething. Buddy’s indignant. “Aw now, that’s too much. What’s she trying to imply, that Sergeant Flynn harbours prejudice?”

  “Whoa, why would you infer that?” Lotis firing back. Jurors are getting an inkling there are other facets to the gruff, friendly cop.

  Flynn can take no more of these outrageous slanders. He stands, bows to the judge, and strides smartly to the door. Either taunting or pretending naïveté, Lotis calls, “Wait. Come back. I withdraw the question.” But he leaves to nurse his wounds.

  “Is this going anywhere, Miss Rudnicki? Ms., I suppose, that’s what the young ladies demand. It sounds so harsh. Miz.” This is followed by himfs. Is the old fellow flirting with Lotis? The only likely answer: he’s seen the detergent commercial, has joined the numberless throng under her spell.

  “I want to bring out that Nick Faloon gave free rooms to the Native elders when the weather kept them from home.”

  Svabo takes so long to object that Kroop upbraids him. “Of course it’s irrelevant, but now it’s in, isn’t it? We may as well hear it from its source.”

  Broadfeather not only complies but adds, “He’s a minority person himself, he’s not racist.”

  This would be a good point to end on, but Lotis whittles away the winnings of a good cross by dragging it out, going back to the crime scene. “You saw the police checking the deceased for vital signs?”

  “Officers Flynn and Beasely.”

  “Did they have gloves on when they were, like, looking for a pulse?”

  “No, they put gloves on after. Not regular ones, latex gloves.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Lotis looks questioningly at Arthur. Just sit down, his eyes implore, and she does.

  Buddy is up to re-examine. “What did you mean, the accused is a minority person?”

  “He was born in Lebanon,” Broadfeather says.

  “He’s an Arab. Okay.”

  Lotis jumps up. “Are you trying to suggest that’s bad? And you give us that load of cheese about my making racist insinuations?”

  “Yeah, well, you hurt a veteran RCMP member’s feelings…”

  “That phony exhibition of walking out…”

  “We will have ord-er!” Kroop gets his lungs into it. Scream Seven.

  Arthur must tug Lotis back to her seat. She could get the defence into trouble yet. But she’s gritty and quick. (And why is it so hard to concede that? It’s her new-generation style, her in-your-faceness. He feels creaky in her company.)

  Buddy squeezes in another witness before noon, grey-bearded Roger Kapoor, yard supervisor for Crown Zellerbach. Grizzly he’s called, for good reason–at sixty he looks able to bring down a caribou barehanded. He’s an entertaining talker with an entertaining tale: how he picked up Gertrude, warned her in pidgin English about a psychotic murderer, and subsequently observed her taking a standup pee. That prompts laughter among the jury, and is even awarded a single himf from the bench. Kapoor’s wild ride in the back of his hijacked truck elicits more jollity.

  The gruesome evidence is behind the jury now. The phantom of the courtroom is coming across more as a careless clown than a swashbuckling jewel thief, but it isn’t a harsh image. Arthur hopes he’ll find the energy for Holly Hoover, who licked his ear and fondled his groin, a memory, he sourly remembers, that arose last night.

  He looks forward to getting past the afternoon, into the soul-healing weekend. His forgotten garden, his injured septic field, his soon-to-be-shared bed…He awakes to a gentle nudge. “Uh, Margaret?”

  Lotis, tossing her hair, her condescending smile. “You were asleep. Which is okay, court has adjourned.”

  Arthur blinks, looks about, disoriented. Sheriff Willit is patiently waiting to lock up. “Was it obvious?”

  “Well, your eyes were closed, but…Don’t you remember rising for the adjournment?”

  “I stood?”

  “The clerk said, ‘Order in court,’ and yes, you stood.”

  It’s what forty years of conditioning does to one.

  They leave for the barristers’ lounge, where Arthur nestles into a corner sofa on which he slept off many hangovers. Conversation turns to Margaret, to the truce in the forest. “She’s won an admirable victory, so I expect we’ll see her coming down presently.”

  “Keep your pants on, Arthur.”

  The insolent tramp. She could be more supportive.

  She hands him a few printouts from Eve Winters’s files. “No Daisies, no hillbillies, no mother living rough with two sons, no gorgeous diamonds in the rough. Doctor Eve specialized in the bourgeoisie.”

  He studies a profile of a woman who thought herself unattractive and was so afraid of losing her husband that she abided his adultery, shouts, and slaps. “Doris is actually lovely. Beautiful within too. She won’t know that until she leaves him. She won’t suffer financially, he does well as an investment counsellor…”

  This isn’t Dogpatch. Bamfield is Dogpatch. It is where one might meet a Daisy. Maybe she lived nearby, a logging town, and after getting rid of Ruth, Eve sought an
assignation by mail. Maybe she did indeed send that letter, and the abusive husband opened it…Enough. He has too many suspects.

  Gulping coffee after an hour’s nap, Arthur follows Lotis to 67, feeling less like a sleepwalking ghoul, he’ll survive to the day’s end. Holly Hoover–the same explosion hairdo, a smart outfit–is getting a final drill from Ears, who seems bothered. Maybe it’s the smell of patchouli oil. Jasper Flynn is back in court and studiously avoiding eye contact with her.

  Lotis at Arthur’s ear: “What’s under her left eye isn’t all mascara.” A camouflaged bruise, maybe a gift from one of her regulars, feeling betrayed. Having branded Hoover an informer, Jasper Flynn has probably put the Holly Golly out of business.

  Buddy asks, “Your occupation is…?”

  “I’m a sex worker.”

  “Can you expand on that?”

  She stares at him for a moment. “I’ll expand on that by saying I’m a recently retired sex worker.” A casual, stoned way of talking.

  “Okay, but tell us something about how you do it.”

  “I usually do it on my back.”

  This has Kroop bawling for order. Giggles continue to escape from the gallery as Buddy reorganizes. “I meant the nature of your…your area of operations. You have a boat, I understand.”

  She makes no bones about having been hostess of the Holly Golly. One of the jurors, a business writer, is making notes, intrigued by such entrepreneurship. “By the way, I’m trying to sell her, if anyone’s interested.”

  A rebuke from the judge. “Must I remind everyone that a trial is a commercial-free medium?”

  “Let’s go to March 31, Ms. Hoover, in Bamfield. You were in the bar that night.”

  “I didn’t have a date, decided to go straight. Almost didn’t. Should’ve kept my mouth shut.”

  “Let’s back up here.”

  “Okay, backing up. There was a band at the pub. That’s why I went.” Arthur can’t get a handle on her. Is she scornful of the prosecutor, the judge, the process? What kind of high is she on? Stoned yet aware. Flynn still won’t meet her eye, though she occasionally looks his way. He’s doing a lot of moustache twirling.

  Hoover recognized Eve Winters, told her she was a fan. “I should’ve stuck with that, should’ve settled for an autograph.”

  “What you should’ve done doesn’t matter, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay. So we picked up we were on the same length.”

  Buddy sends a hard look to Ears, who presumably messed up the pre-trial interview. “I’m a little lost here, Ms. Hoover.”

  Kroop’s piping whine: “If you’re lost, Mr. Svabo, how do you expect the jury not to be? Please find yourself.”

  “You were on the same length–what’s that mean?”

  “She was coming on. I was coming back at her.”

  “Wait. You mean sexually?”

  “Totally.”

  A tale known to Arthur, but not to Buddy. Flynn whispers something to him. The jury seems uncertain how to take Hoover, her unexpected frankness.

  “Move it along, Mr. Prosecutor.”

  “Ms. Hoover, did you give a different version of this to Sergeant Flynn?”

  “No, I gave him a shorter version.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He told me not to complicate my story, it would only get me tangled up in this. And there’s another reason I didn’t say much.”

  Buddy is getting the kind of answers one expects from blind questions. He’s too afraid of Kroop to ask for a recess, has no choice but to tough it out. “What’s the other reason?”

  “I didn’t want to malign Dr. Winters’s name, she’s an honourable lady. She has a reputation and I have none.”

  “Continue with your story,” says Buddy, sweating because he doesn’t know where it will go.

  “I knew she was staying over in West Bam, so I asked if I could give her a lift in my canoe. I didn’t want her suspecting I was a tramp, and said I made beads and bangles and bath oils. Which I used to. Guess I’ll go back to it.”

  “Just stick to what you did that night.”

  “Right. So we agreed to leave separately and meet on the pier. I figured her as fairly straight for gay, careful socially, but she’d just done the West Coast Trail, she was hyped for a new adventure. A kind of shipboard romance, not knowing the Titanic is going to sink.”

  “Mr. Svabo, please control your witness.”

  “Ms. Hoover, I’d ask you not to ramble. Please, please, just answer my questions.”

  “You said, ‘Continue.’ That’s what I was doing. Continuing.”

  Arthur goes to Lotis’s ear. “What is she on?”

  “I bet she ate a bunch of pot. Slow-acting fudge pot.”

  The rest of her tale, embellished by detours Buddy can’t reroute, is as was told to Arthur while the elements warred outside Cotters’ Cottage.

  “So what made you think she was inviting you over?”

  “She said, ‘I have a bottle of wine, two glasses, and a corkscrew.’”

  Buddy huddles with his advisers. Who knows what comes next–maybe a casual admission that after asphyxiating the Rohypnotized Eve Winters, she doctored the body with Faloon’s semen. Buddy looks up at the clock, then to the bench.

  “Too early for the afternoon adjournment, Mr. Svabo. You haven’t earned an adjournment. You have not properly prepared this witness. You will have to slog on.”

  “Then what, Ms. Hoover?”

  “She said, ‘I don’t know what your situation is, I’m just out of a relationship.’ I felt I had to be up front, I told her I was a sex worker but this wasn’t business. She was nice about it, asked a lot of questions, but the romance deflated like a flat tire. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.” She’s wandering again, and no one is trying to stop her. “I wouldn’t be in this courtroom if I’d stayed with her that night. She’d probably be alive.”

  That comes to Arthur’s ears with such credibility that he shelves the possibility she is the murderer. His cross will be difficult, he won’t have his heart in it. But why had she kept the truth from the prosecutors until now?

  Buddy shows visible relief, fear of the unknown dissipating, as his witness explains how, after several awkward minutes, they took leave of each other, Winters to her cottage, Hoover to her trailer.

  Arthur is moved by this rainy, misty parting. Hoover is torn with guilt that she was honest with Doctor Eve when a lie might have saved her life. A conundrum of truth and consequences.

  “Okay, so you went directly home?”

  “I stood there doing a slow burn with a cigarette, feeling like an idiot. Went up the hill. Unlocked the door. Showered, painted my toenails, and went to bed.”

  “And to sleep?”

  “Eventually. Played some music. Smoked some grass. Cried a little.”

  “You were there all night?”

  “By myself.”

  “No more questions.”

  “Okay, but I have something else to say. I don’t appreciate being falsely outed by Jasper Flynn as an informer…”

  “I said, no more questions!” Buddy, drowning her out.

  “Order! Cross-examination will begin after the recess.”

  So as not to overhear Buddy’s tirade against his helpmates, Arthur spirits Lotis to an empty interview room, chortling. “She had Buddy practically standing on his head. Flynn’s hold on her is broken, he’s sabotaged her, ruined her, driven her from Bamfield. She’s in no mood to help the Crown, has nothing to lose by telling the truth. I hate to say it, but we have an honest witness on our hands.”

  Lotis looks horrified. “You bought that…that show-and-tell?”

  Arthur is taken aback. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Whoa, Arthur, you’re too exhausted to see through her smoke.” She sits him carefully in a chair. “She’s an actor doing a stock character, the prostitute with a heart of gold.” Mimicking: “‘I didn’t want to malign her name, she’s an honourable lady.’ Hey, man, this stoner has give
n three or four different stories about how she met Eve, she’s a chronic liar.”

  “Her account is entirely the same as that I heard two months ago.”

  “She’s a world-class manipulator. Told you how cute you were, and gave your cock a rub to seal the deal.” Grinning. “It’s awesome that you can blush on command. Damn it, Arthur, she’ll have you buying the Holly Golly before she’s through.”

  Arthur almost hears a clank, the rusty gate of his mind swinging open to a different view. The bossy nymph (and how he hates to admit this) could be right again. What if Hoover’s the assailant? What if her whole thrust is to disarm the notorious Arthur Beauchamp? Someone told me you were a vicious son of a bitch in court.

  My God, had six years of potting about in his garden done this to him, made him a romantic trusting fool? Arthur is the only foe Hoover fears. She has Jasper Flynn duped, as well as Buddy and Ears, and here comes Beauchamp stumbling along behind them, zombies under her power. I’ve got nothing against Nick. He believed that.

  Back to Plan A. This involves Faloon’s night with her, and a condom he never saw again.

  Gilbert bursts into the room, frantic. “There you are. Please!”

  Kroop nods to Arthur, who rises, willing away the weariness. “Ms. Hoover, let us clarify for the jury that in mid-April you and I met in Bamfield in the very cottage where the murder occurred.”

  “I heard you were staying there, interviewing people, looking for me.”

  “When I returned from dinner you were in the cottage, uninvited.”

  “It was raining pretty bad, didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “I found you sitting on the floor with two bottles of cider. I made coffee for myself, and you gave me an account of your role in this case.”

  “The same as I just gave in court.”

  “You were there for an hour before going on your way?”

  “About that, yeah.”

  “Nothing untoward happened?”

  She hesitates. “You were a gentleman, if that’s what you’re asking.” She’s not about to mention her low-grade sexual assault.

  “Well, that’s what I want my wife to hear.” Laughter from the pews.