I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel

by William Deverell

  On my exit, Ira recoiled from the sight and smell of me. “You must’ve been really rockin’ out last night, Stretch.” Late thirties, thick sideburns framing a skinny face with the requisite goatee. Naked, a towel around his middle. “Did I not hear the sweet illegal sound of female laughter?”

  I didn’t pause to ask what had titillated him through the wall, but I was alert to the alarming possibility that I’d broken the landlord’s first commandment: thou shalt not entertain women after eight.

  Back in my rooms, when I opened a window to expel the fart-thick air, I saw that my car was parked below. Then I spotted a typed note in my portable Smith-Corona: I set your alarm. Sweet dreams. O. Beside it, an ashtray with two lipsticked cork-tipped butts.

  I decided that Ophelia had tanked up the Bug and driven me home, for I couldn’t imagine I’d been in any shape to do so myself. But then what? In a state barely short of panic, I checked the sheets. No wetness other than from my own sweat, but I did come across a white splotch midway down the mattress sheet. The juices of coitus? Or its disproof, the masturbatory spill of denied desire? (There shall be no censoring of this, the authorized, non-publishable version.)

  I fought like a gladiator for memory, but all was a void. I didn’t dare return to my erotic dream to seek answers; I’d already sent its images packing, back to the subconscious. I studied the note again, that round, inviting, lusty O. I returned to the washroom for a cold, punishing shower.

  Gertrude winced as she watched her shaky boss, eyes as ugly and red as the Canadian Ensign, shuffle into his office. A few minutes later she appeared with a mug of coffee and a packet of breath mints.

  “Anything else?” she asked. “Aspirin?”

  That she was treating my temporary malady with the casual ease of an emergency room nurse confirmed my sense that this sprightly young woman (we called them girls back then, or young ladies, expressions once considered polite) had the stuff of indispensability.

  “Mr. Smythe-Baldwin returned your call. MUtual 4-7141. He’ll be in his office until ten.”

  It was nearing that time. I was hardly ready for the great barrister, a crafty veteran with a Hogarthian appetite for the table and an equal lust for a favourable verdict. Smitty, he was called by friends. I had watched him many times take the skin off witnesses and wasn’t confident I could salvage my own, even from the other end of a phone line.

  I was vulnerable not only because of my weakened state but because I was hugely distracted, my thoughts constantly whipping off to the events of the previous night, to Ophelia, the sheets on the floor, the evidence of seminal discharge. Clearly she had used the shower before leaving. What went on before that? I could barely countenance the awkward but compelling scenario: we had got it on … had sexual relations (let’s not hide behind euphemism!). My first time – supposedly an event that good men and true never forget – and it was smothered in alcoholic fog.

  I had not even the vaguest idea what I might say to Ophelia on our next encounter. It was her land registry day; I wouldn’t see her until much later, so there was yet a chance to recover crucial information from my abused brain cells.

  My hand hovered above the phone shakily, and I waited until I was able to still it, then dialled. I got Smythe-Baldwin’s personal secretary.

  “I am returning the call he returned to me.”

  “And who might you be?” I pictured her as grey-haired, steely-eyed.

  “Sorry. Arthur Beauchamp, counsel for Gabriel Swift.”

  “Please hold.”

  I did so, for nearly two minutes – a lag lawyers call a power delay. I assumed Smythe-Baldwin was calmly reviewing his file while going through a ritual of unwrapping, clipping, and lighting a five-dollar Cuban cigar, grunting his pleasure at that first tasty puff. Meanwhile, I was wondering if Pappas had wangled me into taking this case because he thought I’d be meat for Smythe-Baldwin’s grinder.

  When he finally picked up, I introduced myself. He said, “You pronounce your name bee-chem, which is not the proper way. Beech’m – a single vowel. The English tongue rebels against excessive syllables. Which is why Cholmondeley becomes chum-lee – thank God for that – and Magdalen College is maudlin.” Cambridge’s venerable all-male college. I’d won a scholarship there, and I wondered if this was a subtle thrust, he being a British-born Oxfordian. But it appeared he knew little about me.

  “So you are the young fellow Pappas warned me about. An aspirant for stardom. I must keep my sword unsheathed and my pencils sharpened.” I’m sure he used a more striking metaphorical image. Though his quotes are cobbled from tattered memory, I have tried to capture his lovely fustian articulation. “And how does it feel having been granted the daunting task of representing a defendant whose mouth runneth over rather too illiberally, or so it would seem from the foul imprecations he directed to the arresting constabulary?”

  Unlike me, he’d earned the right to be pompous, an attribute the press found endearing. I could offer no comment on those imprecations, I said, not having seen the police report, or any particulars of evidence whatsoever. He promised to send a runner within the hour.

  “Rather interesting fact situation. Embittered, short-tempered Native slaps away the spoon that fed him, drowns his benefactor in the Squamish River at flood time, only several miles from where its raging waters empty into the sea. One assumes the sharks stripped poor Mulligan to the bone and left the scraps for the bottomfeeders. Nicely thought out – no mounds of earth, no charred corpse, no bullet holes.”

  Then an excursus: “I defended a missing-body case myself, Beauchamp, back in – when was it? – forty-nine. Everything else was there: motive, opportunity, blood traces on a chainsaw, a sloppy alibi. Had to settle for manslaughter, but I called it a victory.”

  If that was a hint of an offer, I wasn’t biting. That he even mentioned the option of manslaughter suggested his case was feeble. He hadn’t bamboozled me; I was feeling surer of myself. But I couldn’t hold back from a little pandering.

  “I’d be surprised, Mr. Smythe-Baldwin, if you noticed me watching with awe from the counsel bench during several of your recent successes. It will be an honour to meet you formally next week in the Squamish police court.”

  “We prefer to call it Magistrate’s Court, young man. Else the police will think they run it.”

  I felt like a chided student. “Sir, your reputation was built as a defender of the innocent, or at least those presumed so. Will you be comfortable prosecuting someone who actually is innocent?” I astounded myself with my effrontery; maybe I was still alcohol-impaired.

  “The Attorney General personally urged me to accept his retainer, old chap, having wrongly surmised that the defence would be run by a leading counsel. I’m sure he now regrets being stuck with my atrociously high fees.”

  I had barely recovered from that slight when his runner showed up at noon with a thick legal-sized envelope.

  A standard RCMP/GRC incident report was the first of a dozen carbon-copied pages I perused over a takeout cheeseburger.

  On 21/4/62 at 1925 hrs, undersigned received telephone call from MRS. IRENE MULLIGAN re missing person, her husband DERMOT MULLIGAN, address upper Squamish Valley Road, rural area 10 m. nw of Cheekye. Alleged missing individual went off fishing, exact location unknown, on Squamish River at approx.1400 intending to return for supper and failed to show. Neighbours have been alerted.

  U/S proceeded to said address at 1945 hrs.

  Signed,

  Constable Brad Jettles

  Jettles hadn’t responded to the call with lightning speed. Likely he was the sole officer then available at the small detachment. In 1962 the village of Squamish was a frontier town, and its fallers, riggers, truckers, and sawmill and construction workers tended to be boisterous on holiday weekends.

  Jettles’s next incident report was longer, hammered out the following morning, a Sunday, presumably over coffee – there was a brown ring-shaped stain on the reverse side of one of the pages.

>   On 21/4/62 at 2005 hrs, undersigned arrived at Squamish Valley Road north of Cheakamus Reserve, which is reached by gravel road, area mostly scrub, also some small farms including the above-noted with a hay field, barn, corral, and a few horses and fenced garden plot. Residence is a typical A-frame structure with large addition at the back, on a rise over the Squamish River, which had flooded its banks in places. This is a vacation home which the missing person, a Vancouver doctor, DR. DERMOT MULLIGAN, shares with his wife IRENE when not in Vancouver.

  On arrival, U/S met with BUCK AND THELMA MCLEAN, neighbours across from the Mulligans on Squamish Valley Road. They had just finished a search with flashlights along the nearby riverbank where Dr. Mulligan went fishing. Chinook and steelhead were running. They said he went off somewhere in the afternoon on foot with his gear and hip waders.

  The McLeans and other civilians hiked up and down beside the river from dusk until it got too dark. They found no sign of Dr. Mulligan. U/S asked if he had a boat, and was informed he has a canoe, which I observed had been pulled from the water and was on high ground. The family vehicle, a 1960 Buick Invicta station wagon, was in the driveway. The only other vehicle present was Buck McLean’s new 1962 C120 4×4 International pickup, plus a 1956 Massey Harris 444 Standard near the barn.

  Jettles clearly suffered a fetishistic interest in rolling stock. It was a struggle getting through the report, and I didn’t know how I would survive until day’s end, when I hoped to meet with Ophelia and review – subtly, carefully – the events of the past evening. Gertrude, a mind reader, entered the Crypt with a tall mug of hot coffee, then slipped silently away.

  I read on. Mrs. McLean had escorted Jettles into the Mulligan cottage, where a couple of other local women were gathered around Irene Mulligan, comforting her and encouraging her to eat what she could of a re-warmed dinner made for two. The constable, still under the misapprehension that Mulligan was a medical doctor, learned little from her, only that she had warned him not to slip on the mossy rocks and not to be late for supper. She had gone for a half-hour walk that afternoon along Squamish Valley Road, as she often did, then returned home to prepare their meal.

  Mulligan was a hardy outdoorsman despite his slight build and donnish way of dressing. This I knew from my own conversations with him, when he’d talked of his love for canoeing, hiking, skiing, and fishing, though he recoiled at the thought of hunting. He’d once confided, somewhat ruefully, that Irene was pretty much a homebody and didn’t share those enthusiasms. He said her one passion was duplicate bridge – a hobby not easy to pursue in the wilds of the Squamish Valley. She much preferred to stay in the city.

  On further inquiries, U/S learned the Mulligans employ an Indian groundskeeper who also house-sits for them during their absences. Name GABRIEL SWIFT, who is known to the detachment, as is his 1953 Triumph Tiger 650 twin-cylinder motorcycle. When not house-sitting, this individual resides at the Cheakamus Reserve, and according to Mrs. Mulligan wasn’t around that day. She insisted he was a “faithful” employee and “entirely honest” and has never been any kind of trouble.

  However, in private Mrs. McLean approached U/S to dispute this, and she agreed to attend RCMP Squamish today, 22/4/62, at 0900 to fill out a witness statement form. U/S did not have backup to make inquiries on the reserve at night, and postponed that. Aided by Buck McLean and some other men, we did one more riverbank search to no avail. Dogmaster called in from E Division, with civilian search-and-rescue effort continuing today, Sunday, 22/4/62.

  Signed at 1037 hrs,

  Cst B. Jettles

  Irene Mulligan had been in too distressed a state to be interviewed at length. Obviously I had to talk to her soon, before the prosecution could persuade her to alter her good report card for Swift. She would be a valuable character witness.

  Thelma McLean was the neighbour who’d later alerted the press to Gabriel’s unsavoury habit of hiding in books, thereby seeming “troubled.” In her police statement of Sunday morning, she voiced other grave concerns: Swift had “worked his way into Dr. Mulligan’s confidence” and “had the run of the place.” He also tended to look at her in a way that unsettled her (she did not describe this look). Swift, she said, had been in the Mulligans’ service for thirty months, since they’d bought the riverside farm. “The professor would come most weekends, sometimes longer, two weeks, a month, and Irene, she came less frequent, usually only a weekend or two in summer, but otherwise their caretaker had the place to hisself. Slept in their bed, I believe.”

  Her statement was made not to Jettles but to Staff Sergeant Roscoe Knepp, whose efforts to draw her out had born dubious fruit. She said the neighbourhood was “a thieves’ playground,” with “tools and building materials and anything you leave outside your house constantly disappearing, including clothes, even my own underthings and stockings I left on the line overnight.”

  One would have thought her insinuation that Gabriel stole her underwear would prompt at least a sideways look from Knepp, but instead he prodded her: “Q: Did you observe that he had any sexual problems, or unusual perversions?” Mrs. McLean was likely having difficulty sorting out which of the known perversions were unusual, and could only reply: “I thought he was very spooky.”

  That seemed so at odds with Irene Mulligan’s assessment that I could only conclude that Knepp and his witness were in competition to show who was the more intolerant. Gabriel had told me he and Knepp had “a bad history,” which I took to mean the staff sergeant had a grudge against my client. I found a clue to that in Gabriel’s blotter, which was stapled to the police reports. In October 1959 he’d been convicted of assaulting a peace officer.

  His sheet also showed a juvenile offence for shoplifting (he was fourteen) and two adult convictions under the Fisheries Act. A minor record, paling against those earned by most of the sorry folk I’d defended. The one indictable offence, assault of a peace officer, would provide fodder for my next session with Gabriel. He’d been let off with a six-month suspended sentence. (Some years later the magistrate confided to me over a dram that he had an unsavoury view of Knepp, and had suspended that sentence to stick it to him.)

  The mere reading of these reports was wearying. I thought of crawling under my desk for a snooze, but of course that would, by some arcane means, trigger a visit by a senior partner. They liked to poke their heads in to see if the worker bees were putting in their billable hours. I compromised by setting my chair into a semi-reclining position and resting my feet on the desk. I began reading Jettles’s next incident report.

  He’d shown up at the Mulligans’ early on Sunday with two other constables. A score of mountain-hardy men had gathered in the pre-dawn morning – back-country guides, white-water experts – and Jettles had briefed them on their task. Both riverbanks were to be scoured by foot and by boat, five miles each way.

  Jettles and his backup team had intended to carry on to the Cheakamus Reserve and seek out Gabriel Swift. But that turned out not to be necessary, for he noticed Gabriel standing among the volunteers, hiking boots on, a rucksack, a rope coiled around his shoulders, a Brooklyn Dodgers cap on his head.

  As the search crew began dispersing upriver and downriver, U/S politely asked the subject if we could sit down together. He said he had “no time to sit down” and he “knew where to go.” When I ordered him to stay, he used foul language and set off by foot south, downriver, very fast, leaving everyone behind. U/S pursued but lost the suspect and radioed CST. GRUMMOND and CST. BORACHUK to follow Squamish Valley Road south and intercept …

  I awoke to Gertrude’s nudge and her soft voice. “It’s five-thirty, Mr. Beauchamp. I’m going home.”

  Through sleep-blurred eyes I made out that my feet were still on the desk but shoeless – my black brogues were on the floor beside me. Gertrude was in her coat, maintaining a straight face as she handed me a list of calls she’d intercepted. I managed a hoarse thank-you before she left, and took a few minutes to work the kinks out of my neck.

  Amo
ng the afternoon callers, my mother, a reminder about Sunday dinner: Six-thirty, please don’t be late. I recalled that Professor Winkle from the History Department would be there. He’d been a colleague of Dr. Mulligan, so I expected the evening to be even more joyless than usual.

  Two calls from a client in constant need of coddling: a Liquor Branch quality controller facing his second impaired driving that year. Jim Brady, the labour activist, Gabriel’s friend and political mentor. And finally, Ophelia Moore – but she left no message, no greeting, no offer of sympathy or affection. Gertrude had appended a note: I told her you were tied up.

  Worried that Ophelia might have assumed I was putting her off, I shod myself, stuffed the Swift file into my briefcase, and hurried down to her floor, the twelfth. I found her office empty. A few overtime toilers were still about, and one called, “Try the Georgia.”

  My long nap had resurrected me, and I sped on the wings of Mercury to the Georgia Hotel, across from the courthouse. In its street-front bar a dozen young lawyers and articling students were crammed around two joined tables, Ophelia sandwiched between two slavering wolves from Russell, DuMoulin.

  She appeared to be enjoying herself with immoderate gaiety. There wasn’t room to slide an extra chair in beside her, and anyway I wasn’t about to demean myself by joining this sordid competition for her favours. The chief challenger was the dashing Jordan Geraldson, who’d recently won a $150,000 personal injury case, a West Coast record.

  I slipped onto a barstool, my back to them, pretending eagerness to chew the fat with Harvey Frinkell, a divorce lawyer. “I heard you sprang O’Houlihan,” he said. “Good job.” Jimmy “Fingers” O’Houlihan was a slippery gumshoe I’d got acquitted of suborning a witness. Frinkell made wide use of his services against adulterers.

  “Hey, I know her,” he said, eyes fixed on the mirror behind the bar, watching Ophelia in the reflection. He bent to my ear. “I did her husband’s divorce. Pretty good job – she walked out of that courtroom practically naked.”