April Fool

by William Deverell

  “I…yes. I hoped he had one.”

  “You hoped he’d come prepared?”

  “I don’t know what I was hoping. Or thinking. I was hysterical! Afraid for my life!” She is persuasive in her passion. Forewoman Sueda is looking reprovingly at Arthur: he’s compounding the assault.

  This has sunk to being a replay of the first trial. How ill at ease he’d been with such intimate inquiries. The jury must have assumed his heart wasn’t in it, that he was grasping at straws.

  He must cut to the chase. He retrieves Exhibit 52. “Madam, in this zip-lock bag is the swab taken from the vagina of Eve Winters. I will be offering proof that it has your DNA. How might you account for that?”

  “Impossible!” Spoken with a vehemence that shakes Arthur a little. “It’s a mistake! Take my blood!” She thrusts her arm at him, pulls back her sleeve, an offering to the black-robed vampire. The room is silent, Kroop alert as a hawk, expecting the Crown to object. Buddy sits there looking petulant.

  “Ms. Angella, you were reluctant to come before this court…”

  “Because of having to face this…this inquisition.”

  “Oh, there’s a much more telling reason. You didn’t want to risk exposing yourself as the killer of Eve Winters.”

  “Order.” Kroop sends his lasers about the room, and the hubbub ceases. “Mr. Svabo, have you nothing to say?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on here.” He doesn’t even rise, the fight has gone out of him.

  “Mr. Beauchamp, that is a very bold accusation.”

  “Given a chance, I will back it up.” Arthur bites that out.

  Kroop gives him a much-welcomed cold eye. “Then get on with it.”

  Arthur opens his briefcase. “Three years ago, Ms. Angella, you engaged Dr. Winters’s services.”

  She looks at him with alarm, then beseechingly at the three Crown heads, as if in disbelief that no one is objecting. Buddy looks like a motorist stalled at a rail crossing as the noon express rounds the bend. Ears’s grin has turned gargoylelike. Flynn is playing with his moustache with both sets of fingers.

  “You had a problem maintaining relationships with men. You sought Doctor Eve’s advice.”

  Finally, she says, “This is irrelevant.”

  “Who told you this was irrelevant?”

  “It has nothing to do with anything that ever happened anywhere.”

  A sweeping compendium of all that is under the sun. Arthur pulls the missing file from his briefcase, produces a patient consent form. “This is your signature?”

  Angella goes white. “I only saw her a few times. I…I couldn’t afford her, it turned out.” Arthur glances at the jury, makes eye contact, wins smiles.

  “And you didn’t inform the Crown of this?”

  “Because it’s…it’s nobody’s business. It’s privileged.”

  Kroop sighs. “Counsel, do you have copies of this material, so Her Majesty’s envoys don’t have to crowd around you?” Buddy is jostling Arthur’s side, Ears breathing minty essences near his neck. “It is becoming apparent that Mr. Svabo is in the dark about certain matters. You may enlighten him during the afternoon break.” He rises. “I suppose it’s too much to expect you would give the Crown notice.”

  “I assumed they’d done their homework.”

  The room empties of all but counsel, staff, and Angella. She is at Buddy’s ear, hectoring him. He disengages. “Can’t talk, Adeline, you’re under cross, can’t talk.” The sheriff takes her aside. Her careful hairdo is coming apart.

  As the Crowns pore over a photocopy of Gowan Cleaver’s file, Arthur enjoys a moment with Faloon. “How are you holding out?”

  “Real excellent, Mr. Beauchamp, and better by the minute the way I see this is going.”

  “I’ve been ill mannered, I haven’t asked about Claudette.”

  “She phoned, she’s relieved to know I’m innocent. We want to have the pleasure of you and your wife to join a small group of friends next month, God willing, for our wedding.”

  “I shall definitely ask her.” I’m sorry, Arthur, weddings only make me sad. But thanks for calling.

  Outside the courtroom, Arthur toys with his cellphone. As soon as he turns it on, it rings. Reverend Al, frantic and panting, as if he’s running. “It’s chaos here. Selwyn has disappeared.”

  This is the information he gasps out: The celebration has become a shambles. Garlinc has reneged on the deal. The billionaire Arizona developer trumped the Save Gwendolyn offer by doubling it. There was an angry confrontation with Clearihue, almost a mob scene. No one was aware Selwyn had wandered off until Margaret raised the alarm. A group of kayakers spotted him disrobing at a deserted stretch of shoreline, letting out his ponytailed hair, wading out, swimming languidly. They thought he was enjoying himself, and they paddled on. That’s what they told the search party a few minutes ago. Everyone is rushing to that area of beach.

  Arthur is in shock twice over. The perfidy of Garlinc. If Selwyn drowns, they have driven him to it. “I’m being called to court. I feel helpless, but I’ll pray.”

  He can barely digest this horrible information. A genius IQ, a boundless future, but a depressive condition. Arthur is overtaken by a powerful image of G’win d’lin drowning in the Salish sea, her hair pulled by the tides like strands of kelp.

  The Owl doesn’t like the way Mr. Beauchamp comes back to court looking like his doctor told him he has a month to live. When he approaches Faloon, his eyes are damp and red. “Excuse me if I seem distressed. I may have lost a dear friend.” He slumps into his chair.

  Faloon isn’t sure if he means the friend is dead or has run off, like an absconding wife. Given he was ready to paste Sergeant Flynn for sabotaging his marriage, it sounds like the latter.

  You wouldn’t believe from his defeated look that the trial’s been coming up roses all day. A normal lawyer would be looking forward to finishing off Angella. There’s nobody in here who looks happy. Mr. Svabo is smouldering, his dreams of besting the great Beauchamp burned to ashes. Sergeant Roadkill obviously wants to be somewhere else, anywhere, the South Pole in his Jockey shorts. Faloon’s sharp eyes made out a cartoon on his writing pad, gross, a woman eating cock. Flynn caught himself, scribbled over it.

  Everyone stands for the judge, who is feared widely and known as Father Time. The Owl is thankful that his fate is in the hands of twelve peers, ordinary, lowly citizens like himself.

  Mr. Beauchamp takes a minute to compose himself, staring at Adeline Angella as if she’s a picture in a museum. Maiden Turning on Tap, dabbing her eyes. He waits a bit more, then launches in, very controlled at first but you can tell he’s furious inside, trying to keep the lid on.

  She, on the other hand, looks like she’s unravelling when Mr. Beauchamp gets on her about how she was living a fantasy life with her movie magazines and dreams of seduction. And how she had a sexual arousal disorder, as Doctor Eve called it. Flirting, then not making it to the end game. Faloon remembers how it was like making out with an air mattress, how she faked orgasm, though you can’t ever tell.

  The great barrister is getting into it now, he’s on lockdown. He’s put his wife worries aside, he has a trial to win. Now he’s reading snatches from Doctor Eve’s files. “Adeline appears to be in deep denial,” “Adeline demonstrates little awareness of the source of her turmoil.” The last note, “Adeline failed to show up for today’s session.” When Mr. Beauchamp asks why, he gets, “I didn’t feel we were going anywhere.”

  A month later, Adeline got into Doctor Eve’s column as Lorelei. Mr. Beauchamp reads it to her, her strict upbringing, her need “to discover inclinations which may be truer to her heart.” Which seems a nice turn of phrase, reminding Faloon of Doctor Eve’s poetic way of talking about the wind in the pines.

  “I considered her a charlatan,” Angella says at one point.

  The coup de grâce is a recorded call, which Mr. Beauchamp manages to play on a cassette player after some fumbling. “You’re an unprincip
led, unethical bitch who pokes fun at her patients in print. You think you’re so high and mighty and clever, wait till I see my lawyer, you bitch. I hate you.” Very unbuttoned, and an extreme reaction considering nobody would have a clue who Lorelei was.

  The jury is all ears. The judge is staying out of it, but maybe that’s because he’s having trouble with his false teeth, you can hear the clicking. You have to wonder what he’s thinking behind his wide fleshy face and dark buried eyes.

  Angella starts getting sniffy with her answers. If she felt this column was libellous, why didn’t she hire a lawyer? “Unlike some people around here, I couldn’t afford high-priced help. Anyway, I decided it was beneath me.”

  A magazine writer ought to be adept at research, does she agree? Surely she researched date-rape drugs? Weren’t these drugs mentioned on her own Web site? She knew, didn’t she, that Rohypnol was easy to get on the black market? She has to concede to most of this, but won’t admit she knew Dr. Winters reserved for the West Coast Trail.

  She denies knowing much about Bamfield, but then has to admit she knew Faloon was running a small lodge there. She had a right to know where her brutalizer was living on parole, so she consulted the police, who keep a sexual offender registry.

  Mr. Beauchamp asks about her reaction to Faloon getting nailed for this bad beef.

  “I wasn’t surprised.”

  “And the reason for that is that you, madam, framed him for your own act of murder, an act as exquisitely planned as it was cold-hearted.”

  So far, Mr. Beauchamp is keeping his temper. He owns the courtroom, everyone else is a bit player, even Faloon, even the judge. It’s his finest hour, it’s got to be the cap to his noble career.

  He wades right into it, the whole gruesome scene, right up to Angella closing down Eve’s pipes. And maybe he’s too relentless, maybe he’s taking out his marriage crisis on her, this is becoming what’s called badgering the witness. He begins shouting at her, accusing her of having sneaked into Bamfield on a mission of death, and she screams right back. “It’s a lie, I didn’t, I didn’t! I wasn’t anywhere near that place…I’ve never been there!”

  “I put to you that on the night of March 31 and in the ensuing small hours you were indeed in the village of Bamfield.”

  “Help me!” She calls this out to the back.

  A deep bass answers: “She was with us!”

  The Owl swivels around, sees four suits, all balding and porky, all in bow ties, standing shoulder to shoulder, looking like they’re about to belt out “Down by the Old Mill Stream.”

  “Sit down! One more eruption and I’ll have you behind bars!”

  They retreat to their seats, but Mr. Beauchamp looks like he was just hit by a truck.

  “Your Lordship, please let me explain,” Angella says. “These gentlemen escorted me home at one o’clock that morning. That’s what they came here to say. I was a little tiddly, I’d been celebrating.”

  A while ago, Faloon was thinking about Sebastien Plouffe, buried underneath millions in the basement suite at the Cimitière Saint Pierre. Now he’s thinking he might not be paying respects at his gravesite any time soon. Mr. Beauchamp isn’t reining Angella in, he’s still staring at the bow ties, it’s like he’s drifted somewhere. She’s taking advantage. “They’re the Whalley Wanderers, your Lordship. I have fifty other witnesses. My story had just come out, I was giving copies to my friends…”

  Mr. Beauchamp takes a slow, heavy breath, braces himself. “Cease, madam! The question then arises, whom did you hire to murder Dr. Winters?” That’s what he comes up with, his voice hoarse. To Faloon, it’s a bad question, the jury’s going to think he was B.S.’ing them earlier, it’s a retreat to plan B, maybe C, maybe the end of the alphabet.

  She gets him good. “I can barely afford to hire a cab, Mr. Beauchamp.”

  Faloon turns to see Lotis Rudnicki, the gorgeous sidekick, coming in, hair flying all over, shorts and flip-flops, a top which you can tell there’s no bra under it. She runs past Faloon to Mr. Beauchamp, speaks urgently into his ear.

  “Miss Rudnicki, you may not enter the bar of this court looking like that. You may not enter the courtroom period, dressed like that.”

  “He’s alive!” she shouts, as if expecting everyone to know what this is about.

  Silence, then Mr. Beauchamp speaks softly. “There was a near-drowning, an event involving our colleague, Mr. Loo.”

  “Yes, yes…the fellow without sight? Brilliant counsel. Well, I see the time is…We’ll adjourn for the day.” The judge scrambles off awkwardly.

  As the court empties, Angella gives Faloon a gotcha look. Gotcha again.

  Arthur pries open an eye, sees a multicoloured sky. The sun’s dying breath on Japanese lovers on the wall. It’s 9 p.m., he’s been down three hours, a needed refuelling. The bedroom door is ajar. Low conversation. Lotis Rudnicki and Hubbell Meyerson are still here. He can sense her pacing because of the ebb and flow of her distressed voice. “Todd Clear-cut! That prick!” The smell of her cigarette. “That shit-eating limousine liberal, he nearly killed him!”

  Before Arthur took his nap, he’d talked with Selwyn by phone, in the Vancouver Island hospital where he’d been taken by helicopter. He’d swum as far as McGuff’s Islet, where he was dashed against the rocks. Cuts, bruises, a twisted knee, nothing broken. “I was sincerely thinking about it, Arthur.” Suicide. “But instead I just kept swimming. Then suddenly I was tossed onto the shore like a gaffed fish. I gave up. Decided to save it for a more propitious day.” Still cynical, but his life force had overpowered the dark urgings of Thanatos.

  We’ll block the sale, Arthur vowed to him, with far more confidence than conviction.

  He can hear Hubbell talking to an associate at Tragger Inglis. The terms bandied about are breach of contract, unjust enrichment, restraining order. Bullingham computed the cost of pro bono services, deducted that from the surge of new business its gesture will earn, offered legal aid to the Save Gwendolers.

  Arthur can’t remember much of his cross of Angella this afternoon, except those gruelling moments when it blew up in his face. The Whalley Wanderers, Angella’s honour guard, three local merchants and a retired fire chief, standing proud in their bow ties. Arthur felt as if he were dying on his feet. Had a bottle been handy he might have ended a fifteen-year dry spell.

  His former number-one suspect had given a brief reading at the Wanderlust on that last evening of March. Digital photos were taken of the literary event. Strangers bought her drinks. “Sweet Adeline,” that’s how the boys serenaded her from the stage. Lotis had uncovered this shatterproof alibi too late.

  What, then, could account for Adeline’s molecules showing up in Exhibit 52? Contamination between exhibits seems likely, Angella’s DNA in accidental mix with Faloon’s, a scandalous forensic error. Dr. Munni Sidhoo may not be the expert she’s cracked up to be…

  He can only pray her findings will be confirmed by Crown forensics–their DNA people are working overnight, checking her results. But then what? Did Angella engineer the murder some other way? How? Or does the answer lurk elsewhere, another paradigm?

  Upon hearing Brian Pomeroy make noisy entry and smelling his steaming takeout cartons, Arthur rises, finds plates, chopsticks. Lotis is perched on the counter, morose, wiggling her flip-flops. Brian is digging into the bar, about to break his weak vow of temperance.

  Hubbell protests that he’s expected home, his dinner is being held. “Got your second wind, I hope. By the way, Margaret is arriving tomorrow on the noon ferry. Told her I’d pick her up and bring her here.” He goes to Arthur’s ear. “You won’t whisper about you-know-what.” Margaret’s a casual friend of Hubbell’s wife. Marital cheating seems fraught with complication. How can it be worth the effort?

  He’ll be in court when Margaret arrives, another misaligned attempt to link up. To ask her not to come would send a dangerously wrong message. Now it’s too late to call her, she’s early to bed, rises with the dawn. He wonders wh
at she made of his pathetic messages of yesterday.

  Lotis shouts. “Fucking Clearihue. Fucking Whalley Wanking Wanderers. Fuck everyone!”

  Brian downs his shot of vodka and pours another. He seems somewhat in dread of her. Maybe he truly thinks she’s a dryad. Maybe he suspects she sees through him.

  She has shed copious tears of grief and relief for Selwyn, reinforcing Arthur’s impression that her feelings are not platonic. Maybe she too is blind, denying these feelings, regarding herself as too tough to fall sway to the bourgeois concept called love. She’s devastated by the failure of the Gwendolyn campaign. Arthur wants to comfort her but isn’t sure how. He lacks hugging skills.

  While picking at her chop suey, Lotis issues a string of epithets, crowned by a threat: “I’ll kill that cocksucker.”

  “Right on, sister,” Brian says. “Kill the capitalist pig.” Drink has loosened the recidivist’s tongue. “There’s something I want to share with you, my love. I too am a kitchen communist.”

  “Hey, man, get therapy. Release the self-centred child within. Learn to relate to normal human beings.”

  “I’ll tell you about therapy.”

  “Not interested.” She stalks away.

  Arthur makes tea, leads Brian to the living room, where Lotis is making up the couch as a bed. “Shall we presume you’re staying the night?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  He regrets his formal tone, extends an invitation.

  Brian is unrelenting: “You’ll want to keep your bedroom door locked, Arturo, so you don’t wake up with vampire bites on your neck.”

  She says nothing, kicks off her flip-flops, bends to her packsack, pulls out a bag of dirty clothes, proceeds to the laundry room.

  “I told you, she’s a loose cannon. It was her bright idea to test the jism for Angella’s prints. That test doesn’t hold up, we’re tits up, Adeline will be dancing off to sign a contract with Real Woman for a story about how she bested you again.”

  He’s right, if the jury thinks Arthur targeted the wrong perp, they’ll suspect he’s been selling false goods all along. He made the mistake of running a prosecution, not a defence. Hubris.