by Anne Emery
Beau was trying to tell me something else. I stared at him, and he tapped his left wrist with the index finger of his right hand. His eyes darted to the courtroom door. He was directing me to ask for an adjournment. There was a bad moon rising over our case.
“My Lord, I wonder if I could have a few minutes with my client. I respectfully request an adjournment. . . .”
“We’ll adjourn for half an hour. Mr. Delaney, I hope there is no need to remind you that you are still under oath, and that you are not to speak to or communicate with anyone other than Mr. Collins.”
“Of course not, My Lord. I understand.”
Delaney and I fled to a meeting room and shut ourselves inside. I couldn’t hold back. “What the hell is wrong, Beau? Why do I have the feeling that a pale stranger by the name of Corbett Reeves has just attached himself to our case like a limpet mine? I thought the case was going to tank after that Hells Angels testimony. Now it’s this guy. What do you have to tell me, Beau?”
“I was there.”
Of course. He was there when Peggy died. I don’t think I ever really believed otherwise.
My client looked as if he was facing his own death now.
“But I didn’t kill her! It was an accident.”
“What was an accident, Beau?” I realized I was shouting, and I lowered my voice. “You shoving her down the stairs? Accidental because you didn’t realize you were going to do it until it happened?”
“I didn’t push her down the stairs, Monty! We had an argument, and she fell.”
“Can you possibly imagine how this is going to sound to the jury? How it’s going to sound on the evening news?”
“Yeah, Monty, I can. I’m a trial lawyer, remember? But I panicked and reacted like a brainless lowlife. I know how lethal this is for me. I made the biggest mistake of my life when I saw her lying there. I must have been in shock. I made the decision to leave the house and come back and ‘find’ her, and call the ambulance then. Once my story was on tape with emergency services, I was stuck with it.”
“That was bad. Changing it makes it exponentially worse.”
“I know that,” he said between clenched teeth. “Now we have to make the best of it.”
Not for the first or last time, I wondered why I did this for a living. I had to undo my entire case, and fly through uncharted territory by the seat of my pants, on a wing and a prayer, with one engine in flames, and a flock of shit-hawks flying in formation just above my head, ready any minute to drop a load. . . . I took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
“All right, let’s go over it.”
Fifteen minutes later, he was back on the stand. The judge cautioned the jury to disregard the outburst they had heard before they were excused from the room. Does a jury ever really disregard anything it has seen and heard? But I had my client to deal with.
“Now, Mr. Delaney, before we broke, you were telling us about Peggy and her tendency to be a worrier, particularly about her children. Could you tell us what kind of things she worried about?”
“Well, of course, she worried about sickness, given that her first child died in his crib. But she tried not to flutter around the kids all day with a thermometer and a bottle of pills.”
“But she had her concerns.”
“Things bothered her, no question. Crime and violence were up there at the top of things she worried about.” Beau got shakier as he got closer to Peggy’s death. Little wonder, given that he was there on the scene when it happened. “The day she died, there was some horror story in the paper, a brutal crime that had been committed against a perfectly innocent bystander. She was going on and on about it, and that’s when the argument broke out.”
“You and Peggy had an argument . . .”
“Right. She was convinced that the world was getting more violent, more dangerous. People always think that, especially after hearing about a particularly gruesome crime.
“I said to her: ‘When has it not been violent and dangerous? Look at the bloodbaths of the twentieth century. World War One, the Russian Civil War, Stalin, World War Two, the Holocaust, China, Cambodia, over a hundred million people killed.’
“She replied: ‘That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it, so save me your party piece on the warlike impulse in mankind! I’m talking about criminal violence on this continent, in this country, in this city.’
“So I said: ‘In the metropolitan area of Halifax, in the run of a year, we get an average of eight homicides. Eight! Compare that to some of the U.S. cities where they have hundreds of murders every year.’ This is the way we used to argue, on the few occasions we argued at all. It was never ‘You promised you wouldn’t do that, and you did!’ Or ‘You never loved me!’ Or ‘You seem to be working late a lot these days, ever since you hired that new blond secretary!’ It was never stuff like that, because we got along so well on a personal level.”
At that point, my client was close to tears and, from my perspective, his distress appeared to be genuine. Obviously, it was out of the question to ask whether he wanted another break; that would have looked contrived even if we hadn’t had our time out. So I waited for a bit and then continued.
“So this was the kind of thing you argued about.”
“Right. How the world was going. Who was ultimately to blame for the disparity between rich and poor in such and such a country. Crime, of course, was a recurring theme, given what I did for a living. The point I was making was that this is a comparatively safe area of the world.
“But Peg said: ‘People are getting blown away in small-town Nova Scotia! That was your own client, in case you’ve forgotten.’ She was talking about a murder in Truro. The victim was Travis Bullard, who had been my client.
“‘That was an execution,’ I told her. ‘A guy known to police, as the expression goes. Not a random incident. Far from it. The guy was tied to a tree, propped up and shot, no doubt to keep him quiet or to retaliate for offending the Hells Angels or somebody.’
“Then she said: ‘The Hells Angels! They’re after your clients now. What if they think that guy told you something and they come after you to keep you quiet?!’
“I accused her of not listening to reason and said I’d had enough of the argument. I reached out to calm her down, and she yanked her hand out of reach. I grasped her arm, and she pulled back to get away from me, and that’s how she fell. Backwards down the stairs.”
I could hear the muttering and whispering of voices and the scratching of pens on notebooks behind me, as the news sunk in. The two prosecutors were on the edge of their seats, as if ready to attack. Delaney had been home after all.
He continued his story: “She barely made a sound when she landed on the rocks. She didn’t scream or cry out. I just kind of heard the breath go out of her. I stood stock still for a couple of seconds, then leapt down the stairs. She was not breathing. It was obvious that she was dead. That’s when . . . that’s when I left the house and got into the car and drove away.”
I stood there without speaking for a few seconds, then plunged in.
“Mr. Delaney, everyone in this courtroom wants to know why you told the police in your statement that you were not home at the time leading up to Peggy’s death. Please clear that up for us.”
“It was a lie told for self-preservation. I’m sorry. I wish I could take it back. I wish I had told the whole truth right from the beginning. But I panicked. I knew how bad it would look for me if I said I was there. I was afraid that fact alone — after all, I’ve been doing criminal law my whole adult life — I was afraid that fact alone would convict me. I’m standing there, a head taller and eighty pounds heavier; she ends up at the bottom of the stairs; there’s a pressure mark on her arm.”
He turned to face the jury, and spoke to them urgently. “I knew I was innocent, that I hadn’t killed Peggy, but I was afraid I looked guilty. I was t
errified that I would be sent away for a murder I didn’t commit, and that my children would be all split up, some of them in foster homes, in group homes, back with violent and dysfunctional families, after all Peggy and I had done to forge a strong family life for them. For all of us. I couldn’t bear the thought of that, so I did what I could to try to avoid it. I have spent my entire career defending people who do illegal, evil, or stupid things and then lie about them. I always thought I would be more honest than that, or at least more clever. But no.
“It was stupid of me,” he said, “stupid and unprofessional. Morally and legally wrong. You can perhaps imagine how deeply I regret my actions in that respect. I am truly sorry.”
I waited a couple of seconds, then asked him: “What did you do then?”
“I took off in the car, went out driving on the highway, trying to come to grips with what had happened, and what I should do.”
“How long were you out driving?”
“An hour and a half, two hours, something like that.”
Long enough and far enough to burn off some fuel, and make a credible stop to top up his gas tank. I was thankful that we had not got to the point where I was going to submit the cherished midnight gas receipt as evidence. Nobody else need ever know about it, especially the Crown, the judge, and the jury!
“What time did you get home again?”
“Twelve thirty-five. That is probably when Mr. Gorman saw me. The second time he saw me, I should say. After the snow had started.”
“What happened then?”
“I went in and called for the ambulance.”
“Thank you, Mr. Delaney.”
Now it was time to hand him over for vivisection by the Crown. Gail Kirk rose to her feet. Delaney steeled himself for what was to come.
“Mr. Delaney, you lied to the police, did you not?” Gail wasn’t going to waste time on chit-chat.
“Yes, regrettably, I did.”
“You now expect us to believe that you are telling the truth today. That you didn’t kill your wife, even though you were right there, and the two of you were engaged in a heated argument, and you grabbed her arm. Why should we believe you stopped there? Why should we believe you when we know you lied?”
“I hope I will be believed, because it’s the truth. My actions were stupid and cowardly but, despite appearances, they were the actions of an innocent man.”
“If you were innocent, Mr. Delaney, why set up an elaborate ruse by leaving the house and staging a second coming? You are well known in this city. You’re a long-standing member of the bar. Surely, you would have thought, if you were innocent, people would believe you, or at least give you the benefit of the doubt pending the outcome of the investigation. Don’t you agree?”
“We never know how we’re going to react when we’re tested in a situation of incalculable stress. I failed the test. Miserably.”
“You weren’t going to tell us the difference, were you, Mr. Delaney?”
Silence.
“You fully intended to maintain that lie, didn’t you? You had no intention of coming clean with the court and the jury, until . . . what, Mr. Delaney?”
Silence again.
“Until certain events in this courtroom made it impossible for you to keep up the fiction any longer, starting with your daughter’s revelation about the Hells Angels conversation — of course that was a conversation, not a woman talking to herself! And, well, it just became impossible to keep the lie going, didn’t it, Mr. Delaney?”
“All I can say, Ms. Kirk, is that I loved Peggy, I didn’t kill her, I panicked when she died, and I have lived ever since with the terror of being wrongfully convicted of her death, and being sent away from my children, and seeing my family torn apart and dispersed.”
“What did you do when you went down the stairs immediately after Peggy fell?”
No reply.
“Mr. Delaney? Did you bend down, take her in your arms, say something to her?”
He hesitated, then replied: “I knew she was dead.”
“You made that decision instantly? She’s dead? No cradling her in your arms? No crying out her name? Nothing?”
“Objection, My Lord,” I said. “My learned friend is badgering the witness, and not letting him answer the questions.”
“Overruled. Carry on, Ms. Kirk.”
“Well? Mr. Delaney? What did you do in those first seconds after your wife’s fall?”
“I just stood there, in shock.”
“Did you touch her?”
Another long hesitation. Then: “No. I panicked and left.”
“You tell us you panicked, and yet you were calm enough to refrain from calling out ‘Peggy!’ or shaking her, or even checking her pulse. You made an apparently calm and collected decision, within seconds of her fall, that she was dead and nothing could be done for her.”
Beau said nothing.
“You’re a highly trained, very experienced criminal lawyer, aren’t you, Mr. Delaney?”
“I am a defence lawyer, yes.”
“Were you concerned about contaminating a crime scene, leaving traces of yourself —”
“No. I simply did not know what to do.”
It went on like that for two hours. Kirk proceeded to take Delaney through the events of that night, minute by minute, chipping away at his story, leaving no doubt in the jury’s mind that she considered his version of events — his Plan B version of events — unworthy of belief.
I got up on redirect, not that I had anything I wanted to do aside from give him another chance to proclaim his innocence to the court. We adjourned in the middle of the afternoon, and would return the next day for our summations and the judge’s charge to the jury.
The media were all over us when we left the courtroom, firing questions at Delaney and at me about his dramatic reversal on the stand. I tried to put a good face on it, but I was beyond caring at that point. I had no intention of watching, hearing, or reading any news about the day’s events. Beau did a better job. By turns humble and defiant, he pleaded his case as a wrong-headed but innocent man blown completely off course by the sudden death of his beloved wife.
I stayed away from my client that evening. Instead I went to the Midtown Tavern with Father Burke to lift a few pints and confess to the sins of anger and thinking ill of my fellow man. “I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment, and whoever says ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hellfire.” That sort of thing.
I gave an impassioned summation on my client’s behalf the next morning. I stressed all the glowing references given by our character witnesses. I emphasized that there was no reason Mr. Delaney wanted his wife dead, and every reason for him to want her alive, to be with him and their ten children. True, they had an argument. But that argument had not ended in violence. If it had, there would have been signs of it. Such as blood at the top of the stairs if he had struck her on the back of the head. Significantly, there were no signs of a struggle apart from the pressure wound on Peggy’s arm. There was no skin or other material of any kind under her fingernails. And if Mr. Delaney had done this, how, in such a state of rage, did he manage to carry her body down the stairs and arrange it with absolute perfection on the rock at precisely the angle that would have caused the wound as it was measured in the autopsy?
Instead, Mr. Delaney panicked. And what did he do in his panic? Something he himself described as stupid and cowardly. He fled the scene, and then tried to cover up for himself later. He did not, calmly and precisely, arrange his wife’s body at the foot of the stairs. The Crown had presented no evidence that Mr. Delaney was, ever, a violent man. In fact, when attacked late at night by a client who was drunk and on drugs, Mr. Delaney defused the situation and did not react with violence, as Mr. Theriault so forthrightly testified. I mentioned the ten children as often as I decently c
ould, to drive home the fact that he would not have wanted Peggy dead, and to remind the jury what was at stake if he were convicted. I did the best I could.
Unfortunately, when the defence calls witnesses, the Crown has the advantage of speaking last. Gail Kirk spoke with considerable eloquence, and barely restrained sarcasm, about the unlikely story Delaney was relying on to avoid conviction for murder. That was followed by Justice Palmer’s charge to the jury. The instructions were even-handed and fair; it would not be easy to find in them grounds of appeal. Then it was up to the jury. They retired at three thirty in the afternoon that Wednesday to begin their deliberations.
I was not at all confident of my client’s chances. Nor was I confident that I had heard everything I should have heard about him, Peggy, and the unwelcome new boy in town, Corbett Reeves.
(Normie)
“He’s going to bleed me of every cent I have! We’re going to wind up in the poorhouse! What do you mean, calm myself down? He wants to take my son out of the country, and he obviously hopes to bankrupt me so I’ll have to give up the fight. Money is no object in Giacomo’s family. The lawyer has come up with all these Charter of Rights challenges. They’re bogus, but they’ll drag things out and require endless court appearances and filings, and — Brennan, have you heard a word I’ve been saying?”
The poorhouse? What was that? Was it like an asylum? Were we going to have to live there? I was really scared when I came into the house Thursday after school, and heard Mum on the phone in the kitchen. I usually yell “Hi Mum!” when I get in, but I just tiptoed into the living room and sat down.
“His lawyer is here from Italy, and I met with them. I certainly wasn’t going to call Beau Delaney while he’s waiting for the jury’s verdict! He’s probably curled up in the fetal position on his bed. So I left the baby with my friend Fanny, and went by myself. The lawyer, Pacchini, was very cordial in the beginning, and is very knowledgeable about Canadian law.” (I had his name down in my diary as “Pakeenee,” but the real spelling is “Pacchini.” Anyway, Mum was still talking.) “You just have to spend two minutes in this guy’s presence and you know he’s brilliant. So the pressure is on: settle this now, give us the six months in Italy, or face months — years! — of soul-destroying, family-savings-draining litigation. I’ve seen this kind of thing, Brennan; it takes over your life, it —”