by Anne Emery
I stared at Delaney, but he was barely aware of my presence. He was back on the 103 Highway in November of 1980.
“I started to drive away, then figured I’d better take his wallet. Believe me, there was no other way to identify him. Like everything else, his wallet was soaked with blood. I had a plastic grocery bag in the trunk, so I placed the wallet in that. There wasn’t much blood on me, except on the front of my jacket and on the gloves.
“I was terrified that I’d be spotted, but I drove back in the direction of Halifax, then took the long way around to the eastern shore. Went all the way to our cottage at Lawrencetown Beach. Of course at that time of the year there was nobody around. I went inside and got myself cleaned up, wrapped the gloves for later disposal, called Peg to tell her where I was, and gave her some bogus reason why I was there. I pretended I got interrupted and asked her to call me back, so we’d have double phone records to show I was really there, if the need ever arose. But it never did. Anyway, once I got rid of all the traces of blood, and got over the shakes, I drove back to Halifax, approaching the city from the opposite direction from where the murder had taken place. But, as I say, I never needed to produce any evidence of my innocence. The body wasn’t found for several days, and nobody connected me with it. Ever. They arrested Robby Tompkins for it. I knew I had to do something to get him off the hook. When Edgar Lampman died, it all fell into place. I set up the Edgar Lampman story and planted the evidence in his yard. Then invited the Mounties along to find it. Murder solved, deceased habitual criminal framed, innocent brother set free.”
I was shell-shocked. I had no idea how to react.
Beau seemed to shake himself back to the present. “I’m going to give Father Burke the benefit of the doubt here, and assume he didn’t tell you anything about my confession.”
“Your confession!?”
“He didn’t tell you I went to see him on Friday?”
“No! Brennan Burke wouldn’t break the confessional seal if they had his feet to the flames.”
That’s what Normie had witnessed at the school: Delaney urging Burke to hear his confession. This was after I confronted Beau at my office, after I told him I “knew about Robby Tompkins.” I knew a hell of a lot more now than I did then. And I understood why Burke had been paying such close attention to the movie that had made Beau Delaney a household name all across Canada as a crusader for justice.
Then there was the documentary. Something had struck me a while back, something about the documentary that didn’t make sense when I had seen it the second time, on the night of the awards dinner. Now I had it. And maybe Brennan did too. Beau’s client Travis Bullard had been killed last spring. The RCMP gave a press conference outside the detachment in Truro. A reporter asked whether there was a Hells Angels link to the killing. The officer sidestepped the question and said only that Bullard had been shot with a handgun. More details would be released later. But they never were, presumably because the police weren’t yet able to make a case against their prime suspect, a member of the Hells Angels. Beau and the reporter talked about Bullard being a Hells Angels associate. Then Peggy chimed in and said that was the longest night of her life. And Beau cut her off.
That was the line that had bothered me when I heard it. And that was the line Brennan had been zeroing in on when I found him in Michael O’Flaherty’s room. Why would Peggy have described that as the longest night of her life? She would not have known about the killing that night. It happened in Truro, a town an hour north of Halifax. She would have heard about it the next day, perhaps, or the day after that. Unless Beau got a call about it at home. But then why was that a long night for her? Or maybe Beau was not home, and she was waiting for him to return.
I looked across the desk at Beau. He was a man lost in his own thoughts.
There was something else, too, I remembered: testimony at Beau’s trial. But I had not understood its significance at the time. Beau testified about his argument with Peggy at the top of the stairs. She said something about people being blown away in small town Nova Scotia, and that one of the victims was his own client. She was worried that the killers might come after Beau himself. And he had reassured her by saying that the killing had been an execution. The guy, Bullard, had been tied to a tree and shot.
Now I asked him: “How did you know Travis Bullard was tied up when he was shot, Beau?”
He looked right through me, and didn’t respond.
I spoke again: “You know, I spent a few seconds here consoling myself with the idea that one of the Mounties might have leaked the information to you, given the fact that the victim had been a client of yours in the past. But I had to dismiss that notion. Defence lawyers, and famous ones in particular, are not all that popular with the police. You’re the last person in the world the Mounties would leak sensitive case information to. Yet you testified on the stand that Bullard had been tied to a tree and propped up while he was shot. How did you know that?”
Delaney leaned over and spoke intently.
“Travis Bullard was your quintessential lowlife with an antisocial personality disorder. A skinny little runt with tiny eyes; I don’t even know what colour they were. He had patchy facial hair and a front tooth missing and he always had a hood pulled up over his head even when it was the middle of July. I first represented him as a young offender on a rape charge, two or three years before he was killed. The victim was twelve. Travis had drifted to Halifax from Bible Hill, in Colchester County, after dropping out of school in grade ten. He found trouble as soon as he got here, stealing from corner stores, getting into fights with other lowlifes, grabbing girls and terrifying them. Then he got ambitious, started doing favours for some of the bikers here in town. That fostered in Travis delusions of grandeur. He saw himself driving a Harley and wearing a Hells Angels patch on his back. Never going to happen, of course. But these guys don’t perceive reality the way you and I do. That is to say, they’re not in touch with reality at all.
“Anyway, Steve Crossman, who as you probably know is a member of the local chapter of the Hells Angels, had a beef against a guy named Ronny Brown, who was from Bible Hill or somewhere around Truro. This guy had absconded with some property rightly belonging to the Angels. A quantity of blow he was supposed to sell on their behalf. Crossman knew Travis Bullard was from Bible Hill, so he engaged Travis for a little intimidation job. ‘Go find Ronny Brown and threaten to break his legs off at the knees unless he comes up with four thousand dollars by two weeks from today. Motivate him, then leave him to go and scrape up the cash. Got that?’
“Travis got it. Or so he said. But he didn’t get it. He thought that, when Ronny Brown wasn’t home and couldn’t be located, he, Travis, could then do a nut job on Brown’s common-law wife. Rape, a beating that amounted to torture, while her little boy, Nicky, looked on in terror. A seven-year-old boy whose life, and personality, from that day on, would never be normal. Because of Travis the psycho. Travis, who then turned on Nicky, who was screaming and, however ineffectually, trying to save his mother . . . Travis turned on him and started beating him.” Delaney’s voice had risen, his face was red, and there was a look of intensity in his eyes as he recounted the horrors that were inflicted on the mother and her child.
“Well, she had no trouble identifying my old client Travis Bullard as the savage who did this to her and little Nicky. They arrested him and he called me, whining that they had him in jail and were going to keep him there the whole weekend before he could get bail. Imagine that. But I’m dedicated to my clients, as you are yourself. We were scheduled for a bail hearing in Truro before hangin’ judge William Chamberlain. I wasn’t about to take a chance on him. He’d never let my guy see the light of day. So I did some fancy footwork and put it off until we could get Diane MacKinnon, who lives by the dictum that there’s no such thing as a bad boy. You and I know better. Anyway, I gave the judge a sob story about Travis Bullard’s hard life, which was
true enough, and racked up enough bail conditions that if he got out he’d barely be allowed to take a leak without reporting it or being supervised, let alone get near a woman or child anywhere in the province. However improbably, the judge fell for it, and I got Travis released. I told him to keep his nose clean and stay out of trouble if he wanted to remain free on bail. No more attacks on women and children. He just laughed and made an obscene gesture and a crass remark about the victim. Something to the effect that maybe Nicky would take his, Travis’s, place with Nicky’s mother, since he’d been shown what to do.
“Right then and there, I decided I had had enough of Travis Bullard. This time, Monty, it was premeditated. I had a gun. Hard to believe, eh? Well, I suppose nothing is hard for you to believe at this point. I got the gun a few years ago — I stole it actually — from the ‘estate’ of a deceased client. Never really thought I’d use it. I kept it hidden under the floor of our cottage in Lawrencetown. Anyway, to make a long story short, I drove to the cottage, retrieved the gun, made sure it was loaded, and also took a length of rope from the shed. I set Travis up with a hare-brained scheme that required him to meet somebody in a remote wooded area outside Truro. This was the sixth of March last year.
“The moon was rising, and the trees were bare and spooky against it. I had the gun and the rope in my jacket pocket. There was Travis, right where he was supposed to be, for the first and last time in his life. I didn’t waste any time. I took aim and shot him in the leg. He screamed and went down. I ran over and grabbed him, shoved him up against a tree, and bound his wrists together behind the tree trunk with my rope. He was in extreme pain but he couldn’t fall. He stared at me in sheer terror. And he had reason. I stood in front of him and told him in precise detail what I was going to do and why.”
Listening to Delaney, I felt a chill all over me in spite of the warmth of the room.
“I reminded Bullard of what he had done to that mother and her little son. I told him that could not have happened unless he was a fucking psycho, and that I was not going to allow him to do that to any woman or child or anyone else ever again. He was going to die so the world could be a better place. He was pleading and crying, but I was beyond caring. I got down on my knees in front of him. To pray for the repose of his soul? No. I knelt down so the entry wounds on his body would not reveal that the shooter was six and a half feet tall.
“I shot him in the stomach. He screamed in agony. I wanted to prolong it, to punish him for what he had done. But I couldn’t. I didn’t have it in me. I shot him in the heart to end it. Then I got up and ran away from the scene and was sick. I threw up in the stream there. I don’t know how much time passed. I went back, unfastened his arms, and let him slump to the ground. He may have been still alive, but barely. That’s when I shot him in the back of the head, behind his ear, to make the point that this was an execution. I picked up the rope, returned to the stream, got sick again, and then got into my car and drove away.
“It was late, and Peggy would be wondering where I was, so I had to boot it home and hope for the best. When I got to the house, she was all in a lather worrying about me. Turns out Bullard’s girlfriend — yes, despite his history of rape and violence, there was a devoted girlfriend — had made a call to my home number. She wanted to ask if I knew where Bullard had gone after the bail hearing, because he was supposed to go to her place and he never showed up. She called around everywhere. No Travis. Luckily, Peggy never tells people where I am, just says — used to say — I can’t come to the phone. I told Peggy the last I saw of Travis was outside the Truro courthouse at four o’clock that afternoon, and I decided to go to our cottage afterwards to check things out there. I apologized for not calling and letting her know. As for Travis, I said, ‘Let’s hope nothing happened to him. He was known to be in trouble with the Hells Angels.’ That’s what she believed, and that’s what the police believe.”
I sat there looking at Delaney, unable to speak. Peggy had said that was the longest night of her life. Now I knew what she meant. And why Beau had cut her off in mid-sentence.
“This was the cause of the blow-up with Peggy at the top of the stairs. We were talking about crime, and my work, and one thing led to another and I ended up confessing to her that I had killed the guy. Of course she was horror-struck. She said: ‘You told me it was the Hells Angels! How could you?’ Well, you can imagine. I grabbed her arm, she shoved me away from her and the recoil from that propelled her down the stairs. I didn’t kill Peggy! Please understand that, Monty. No matter what else I have ever done, I did not kill my wife. I loved her. It really was an accident. But I panicked and made all the stupid moves you know about. And I knew that little wacko Corbett was around somewhere. Peg told me she had let him in. I started to look for him, but then I had to take off, get out to the highway and get a gas receipt to show I wasn’t home from the trial in Annapolis Royal yet. And then I had to make a noisy return to the house at twelve thirty! I believe Corbett was hanging around outside. I know he was in the house after I left. He saw Peg lying there, and just walked around her dead body, over and over again, as he carted stuff out of the house to sell!”
By this time I was sitting with my head in both hands as I tried to come to grips with what I had just heard. Beau Delaney was an executioner. He had not killed his wife in an uncontrolled moment at the top of the stairs, but he had killed Adam Gower in a fit of uncontrollable rage. And his second killing was a premeditated execution of a person he believed — he knew — to be a brutal abuser of women and children.
I would have to digest all this later. But while I had him there in front of me, I wanted all the information I could get. “Corbett Reeves says you threatened to kill him. Says in fact you started to kill him, and changed your mind!”
“He’s a psychopath.”
“You’re not trying to tell me he’s like this Bullard guy, who attacked the woman and her son.”
“He’s worse. Or he will be. They don’t label them psychopaths when they’re that young . . .”
“Conduct disorder,” I said.
“Right, but that’s what it is. He’s a grandiose, self-involved, deluded little shit. Your classic kid without empathy, without a conscience. Brennan Burke told me he saw what Corbett was the first time he looked into his eyes.” Delaney paused for a bit, then continued: “The kid had a consistent pattern of very bad and disruptive behaviour, aggressive behaviour, when he was with us, and he hurt the other children. By that I mean he was deliberately, physically cruel to some of them. That’s why I got rid of him, before he did something worse. Which he will, somewhere, some time.”
“What’s his background? He lived with your family a couple of times. Where was he the rest of the time?”
“Foster homes, group homes, an elderly relative in the Valley.”
“Who are the natural parents, does anybody know?”
“Well, the mother is the niece of the woman in the Valley. The girl was a cocktail waitress in Toronto. The father is a rich American. I don’t know his name, but I did learn this much: he was some kind of management consultant in the U.S., the guy you’d bring in to ‘downsize’ your company and throw your workers out into the street without a job. He was in Toronto for a convention. He got the young waitress pregnant, and was back in the States, of course, before he found out about it. She tried to chase him for money, but he told her to drop dead. I also heard he rose to the level of chief financial officer of a major American corporation and ended up in prison for swindling his shareholders out of millions of dollars. A role model for Corbett, if only he knew.”
“What about the mother, the waitress? What else do you know about her?”
“Not a thing. As far as I know, she’s had no contact with Corbett since he was a baby.”
“Did you threaten to kill Corbett?”
“Yes.”
“Did you intend to carry out the threat?”
“I
just wanted to frighten him off.”
“He says you were ready to do it when you took him to Hemlock Ravine.”
Delaney gave me a long look. “I backed off. I don’t think I would have done it. I really don’t think so,” he repeated.
Who was he trying to convince? Me, or himself?
“You can understand, Monty, why I will never let these stories get out. I’m the man who cleared Robby Tompkins of his wrongful conviction for murder. I’m the man they made a movie about, with the Jack of Hearts in the leading role. Righteous defender! Exemplary father of ten children. I will not let anyone, or anything, sully that reputation, or come between me and my children again.”
“Are you threatening me, Beau?”
He looked at me with an expression of astonishment. “Of course not! You’re not going to reveal this. You’re my lawyer. Our conversation is covered by solicitor-client privilege. Have you any idea how many unsolved murders and other crimes I have the solution to, having learned the truth from my clients? I’ve never said a word, and I never will. It’s the same for you, in your own practice. And I know Brennan Burke’s not going to reveal anything I told him either — seal of the confessional.”
I sat in silence, wondering what on earth I could possibly say.
“Monty, you’ve spent twenty years doing criminal law. You know the score. Most of the people we represent are no-hopers, lowlifes, screw-ups, people who never had a chance. Most of them are bad, impulsive, not too bright. But they’re not evil. You’ve probably heard these stories, you know, the guy who broke into a family’s house and ended up shovelling piles of their belongings into a kit bag. Then it was revealed in the news that among the items taken were the only photos the family had of their baby who had died. The burglar heard the story, packed the photos up and left them in a safe place, then made an anonymous call to announce where they could be found. Or the guy who was being chased by a lone Mountie way out in the country, and the Mountie had a heart attack, and the fugitive went back and called on the police radio and waited till the other Mounties came to get their comrade. Saved his life. These are people who misbehave, but they are not evil. They have a conscience.