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

by William Deverell

  Moore could sense the pain he felt, and was somewhat forgiving. “I may have unfairly accused him of not having the cojones to go all the way,” she told me. “Arthur persuaded himself – and finally me as well, I guess – that he was ethically bound to put the best interests of an innocent client ahead of any duty to defend when execution was a plausible outcome. It is a touchy issue, with ethical considerations.”

  Beauchamp had to battle his own conscience, of course, and swallow the bile that rose whenever he thought of Knepp, Jettles, and Lorenzo swigging beers around the barbecue pit, congratulating themselves for putting that lippy Indian where he belonged. But our hero also sought refuge in doubt – maybe Swift did do it, maybe manslaughter was indeed a victory – and he even indulged in the fantasy of Swift pumping his hand in thanks when it was all over.

  Much of Beauchamp’s difficulty arose from the bond he’d allowed to develop with his client. Even as he speculated about his innocence, he admired him, envied him for qualities he himself lacked: the passion, the rebel spirit, the pride in who he was. Beauchamp couldn’t live with the thought of losing him to another Arthur, Canada’s pseudonymous hangman.

  So he didn’t sit by idly as Swift thought it over: he began a diligent campaign to sway him. His primary strategy was to make the deal more palatable. He was repeatedly on the phone with Smythe-Baldwin, begging for something to show his client he was actually working for him, seeking to bargain him down from eighteen years – the Crown’s alleged final offer – to less than half of that.

  The second leg of his campaign was to recruit allies. He sent a Tragger, Inglis driver up to the Cheakamus Reserve to fetch Bill and Celia Swift to his office. One must assume he was at his most eloquent, because later they spent ninety minutes with their son at Oakalla. Beauchamp also got a letter from the grieving widow urging leniency, a powerful and emotional appeal that can be read on my website.

  But the key to getting the client aboard was Jim Brady, the young man’s other mentor and father figure. Beauchamp spent a long Saturday evening with Brady and his wife at their home …

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 1962

  An old frame house in the heart of working-class Vancouver, not far from the CN yards. Jim had been unavailable earlier – feuding with raiding Steelworkers – but insisted I come for a dinner of fresh sockeye. He and his wife, Grace, were outside, slow-smoking the fish in a pit of cedar chips, when I arrived with a dozen each of Pilsner and roses. The three of us gathered by a backyard picnic table.

  I had them laughing over my red-baiting episodes, but when Grace said, “Now you’re one of us,” I felt a chill. Us was the Communist Party, and I had a sense of it, even in those post-Stalin years, as a disciplined secret religion, a persecuted sect. Grace was the CP’S provincial treasurer. She and Jim had met at a Party convention back East. She was Montreal Jewish.

  I was hiding my anxiety. Gabriel seemed not in a compromising mood; he’d been threatened with a stay in isolation after his loud and scathing lecture to a visiting priest about the res schools. He knew he must decide by Sunday at noon to either gamble with his life or take a plea. Fifteen years, less parole, less time off for good behaviour – that was Smitty’s most recent final offer. I’d begged him to go down to nine, but he was constrained by the Attorney General’s concern over political implications. Had Mr. Bonner read the gracious, forgiving letter penned by Irene Mulligan? Smitty assured me it would be on the AG’S desk in the morning.

  The mosquitoes were out, so Jim, Grace, and I retreated to their kitchen table – their small home lacked a dining room – with our salmon and fixings and beers. I’d had a couple, just enough to embolden me to make my pitch, and I did that with clarity and reason, but also with the unflappability of a claims adjustor weighing the risks for Mutual of Omaha. But I was too cool and detached for the Bradys, too unimpassioned. Their body language told me I wasn’t making much headway.

  I’d seen similarly unreadable faces on Bill and Celia earlier that day, but both ultimately let their masks drop. Celia’s eyes went damp with relief and she crossed herself; she’d been sure they were going to put her son in the grave. Bill weighed in with the usual refrain: “He’s alive, that slick professor. He faked his death.” Gabriel listened in silence, did not commit himself.

  My dissertation in the Bradys’ little kitchen was followed by an awkward silence, broken by a haunting train whistle. Grace got up to make tea. Jim played with his empty long-neck Pilsner bottle, casually spinning it on the oilcloth-covered table. When it came to a rest, its mouth pointed accusingly at me.

  “What are the chances he will be hanged?” he asked.

  “Too high. You saw them in court – Knepp and Lorenzo.”

  “It was obvious they were colluding in a lie.”

  “That wasn’t so obvious to the judge and jury.”

  “But it’s obvious to you, Arthur.” He sat back, frowning. “Or is it?”

  “I’m certain they were lying. But Gabriel lied as well. That is a matter of record. Also – I measure my words – his accounts to his own lawyers have not always been consistent.”

  Grace was staring at the kettle, urging it to boil, but she picked up that her husband was watching her for a reaction, and returned him a troubled look. I had a sense they much valued each other’s advice.

  “So you’re not entirely sure he’s innocent.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s the point.”

  “Do you believe he’s not guilty?” Not letting up. He’d done many labour arbitrations, knew something about cross-examining.

  I spoke honestly. “He may well be innocent. I expect he is. A great crime may have been committed against him”

  “And if he rejects the plea bargain?”

  “I will continue to defend him as best I can. I will put him on the stand. But there will be no political theatre. I will not let him portray himself as a brave communist martyr taking on the fascist state.”

  Jim winced. I had the cynical thought that was a scenario the CP might prefer: Gabriel expendable, a tactical sacrifice to advance more significant goals. The organizational hallmark of communist parties the world over was their discipline. And that’s actually what I was counting on.

  “If they convict, he can appeal,” Jim said. “Right up to the Supreme Court of Canada.”

  I sighed. “And after years of appeals, a fresh trial, more appeals, he could be out on parole.” I slapped a hand on the table, spoke with emotion. “Damn it, I’m fond of Gabriel. I admire him, I am awed by him. I see something of genius in him. I want him to live. He will survive jail. He has an unbounded future after that.” Abandoning caution, I added, “He will be of immeasurably less value to the Party as a dead martyr than as a great leader and thinker.”

  Jim brooded, flushed as if ashamed. As Grace brought the tea, he rose and mumbled something about duties elsewhere. I took that to mean bathroom duties, but he closed the door to the living room and I heard him talking, presumably on the telephone.

  Grace took over. “Even if he loses all his appeals, they could commute a death sentence. Like young Truscott.”

  “And he’d spend his life in jail.”

  “Can you appeal a conviction based on a guilty plea?”

  “No, not really.”

  I hadn’t mentioned the attack on him by the White Clansmen. That would distract from the main issue. I didn’t want them thinking a long jail term would be fraught with danger.

  Jim’s voice became louder, more animated.

  I sipped my tea. Grace sipped hers. There came a sudden silence from the living room. That seemed to serve as a cue for Grace to grasp my hand. “Thank you for saying what you did.” Finally smiling.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are some who feel it’s necessary to sacrifice our bravest sons and daughters.”

  Jim took a few moments to return, as if composing himself after winning an argument. He went directly to the fridge, snapped the cap off a Pilsner. He gave G
race a weary smile before turning to me. “We expect Gabriel to take the deal,” he said.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 1962

  After reading Irene’s note, Attorney General Bonner had satisfied himself there was little danger of a media uproar if Crown and defence consented to a twelve-year sentence. I told Smitty I was sorry, I couldn’t possibly go above ten and a half. A few hours later we telephonically shook on eleven years and four months.

  A few hours after that I was staring at Oakalla Prison, a sullen, brooding monster staring back at me through the softly falling rain, a monster with multiple barred eyes. I’d been waiting almost an hour in my Volkswagen, in the visitors’ parking lot, for Jim Brady to return from his visit.

  When he finally emerged through the gloom and rain, he went straight to his old Ford coupe without pausing to chat. Just a nod of his head signifying the work was done – Gabriel would take the eleven and four.

  Despite his hurling of calumnies at the prison padre, Gabriel was still in the relatively relaxed confines of PCU, safe from the White Clansmen. There was an AA meeting going on, led by a Salvation Army volunteer, so we met in his cell. I took a chair, he the cot, both of us alert to the hazards of looking squarely at each other, of reading each other’s faces. I brought out some paper and we began to work through the rough statement of facts I’d proposed to Smitty. A final version would be filed with the court before sentencing.

  We were calm and businesslike on that rainy Sunday afternoon. No chagrin from me, no apologies or expressions of shame. No regrets voiced by him, no faulting the evil capitalist system. We were formal, cautious, purposeful, a typical solicitor and typical client going over the contract, deliberating, suggesting a change of wording here and there. In the aural background, men confessed their woes to each other.

  “I won’t say anything that will denigrate Dermot Mulligan.” Denigrate: a word not often heard in that old and ugly building.

  “Everyone’s in accord with that. The government would like to stem all the odious speculation.”

  We worked on it until we were satisfied. Time and location. A quarrel. A push. The deceased sent plunging onto sharp rocks and then swept away by the river, apparently dead. That was enough.

  “All neat and clean,” Gabriel said. “Whitewashed.” It was not a complaint but something accepted, not to be quarrelled with. He lay back on the cot, stared at the ceiling. “As my counsel, can you make the plea for me?”

  “Hammersmith will want to hear it from you.”

  “Is he bound by this agreement?”

  “Practically.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If he goes off half-cocked, the Appeal Court will almost surely reverse him.”

  “Almost surely.”

  I heard skepticism, felt an edge of tension.

  “He hates what I represent; he’s itching to put me away. But not you, Arthur. You’re with me, getting me the best deal possible – a decade plus, even though Jim told me you think I’m innocent.”

  Gabriel turned his head toward me and squinted, as if trying to fathom the depths of my betrayal. “The word is going around the joint, Arthur. You’re the new white hope around here. Take a bow. Your first murder case – huge success.”

  “I told you to get another opinion if you had doubts.”

  “You have the silver tongue, Arthur, no question. Worked Mom and Dad like a sideshow magician, got them wondering if I really did it. But the pièce de résistance was with Jim and Grace – using them, using the Party. Take the eleven-year fall, you’re more useful alive than dead. That’s practically what he said.” His voice rising. “Meanwhile, you admire me, you’re fond of me. In return for such brotherly feelings, I guess it’s not too much to ask that I subtract a decade from my life.”

  I was on my feet. “Christ, Gabriel, let’s do the trial then! Take the stand, take your chances! It’s your fucking life!” I can’t remember ever having spoken that ignoble word before, one I despise for its immoderate use, but I was irate.

  “And it’s your fucking system!” Sitting up again. The AA meeting had gone silent; he lowered his voice, but it was hard and cutting. “Your fucking liberal, democratic, egalitarian justice system that you so blindly cherish – thanks to it, I’ll do eleven and four for a crime I didn’t commit. I wasn’t there!”

  We were both standing by then, two feet apart, and he was inching closer. I wasn’t going to back up.

  He grabbed me by the shoulders. “I loved Dermot, goddamnit, as I ought to have loved my father. And you, my white, polite, bourgeois brother, you worshipped him too. Dermot told me about your absurd parents. Dermot was the father we both hungered for.”

  If Dr. Mulligan was your god, what do you think he was to me? His fierce challenge at our first meeting.

  I felt consumed by his dark, intense, knowing eyes. Paramount among my bag of mixed emotions was an astonishing impulse to embrace my passionate, radical aboriginal brother, and I nearly did that.

  But he let go, stepped back against the bars, shuddered, caught his breath. “He killed himself, Arthur. I don’t know why. Whatever his atrocity, whatever his guilt, I can’t believe I would not have forgiven him.”

  MONDAY, AUGUST 6, 1962

  So, after four days, we were again in the grand court of the Vancouver assizes, and for that occasion we had a little play to enact, a farce: the dance of the barristers. Smitty had his patter, I mine. The reporters at their overflowing table already had wind of the plea deal, and their expressions were sour and cynical. They had wanted to see Smitty work Gabriel over, wanted conflict, titillation, revelations about pink panties. But none of that was in the script. Gabriel would have only one line, one word: guilty.

  In the lower gallery, behind the prisoners’ dock, were Bill and Celia and their supporters from Squamish, a dozen that day. In the balcony, in uniform, were Knepp and Jettles. They knew about the deal, of course, and looked smug. Manslaughter would do. The guilty plea would mean their villainy would never be discovered.

  Leroy Lukey was leaning back, affecting an interest in the carved ceiling patterns. He would have wanted the case to go the whole route – conviction, sentence, a proper Canadian hanging – but I doubted he had much say, or if Smitty even consulted him. On the courthouse steps he’d called me a lucky cocksucker, slapping my shoulder in false camaraderie.

  Ophelia had managed to sit as far from me as possible without ending up in the aisle. It was not that I stank – the whole deal stank. She had stopped opposing me but remained disgusted at our criminal justice system for having produced this miscarriage, this monster. I, on the other hand, was not bothering with such thoughts. They were too negative, too irksome, too distracting. Alea jacta est. Only by numbing myself would I survive the day.

  Ophelia’s form of protest was to wear pants again, teasing the Dickensian clerk. He was like a man with a phobia, fidgeting at his desk. But he remembered to bring Gabriel from the cells. After his cuffs came off he remained standing, at ease, a captured enemy soldier.

  As Anthony Montague Hammersmith took the bench, he frowned at me, a slight arching of eyebrows above his half-moon glasses. He’d been briefed on the plea bargain but refused to meet counsel in his chambers. “It wouldn’t seem right,” said the clerk. “His Lordship doesn’t want to be seen as in on the deal.”

  “Proceed, Mr. Smythe-Baldwin.”

  Smitty explained that the Crown had filed a new indictment, for manslaughter. The record would include a transcript of the trial, an admission of fact by the accused as accepted by the Crown, and a letter from Irene Mulligan.

  “And this is the admission of fact?” Hammersmith pushed his half-moons up the bridge of his nose and perused it with a frown. “Time, date, place; then we have a quarrel, which is not explained, ‘as the result of which the accused sent the deceased plunging onto sharp rocks and then into the river, in an apparent unconscious state.’ ” Down slid the glasses. “That’s the total admission?”

  Smitty gla
nced at me. He had not quarrelled with my final edit. “The matter cries out for brevity, milord. Reputations have already been unfairly maligned. In any event, there’s nothing more we can say. We, the Crown, don’t know the details. Only the accused does.”

  “Mr. Beauchamp?”

  “The defendant’s signed admission is enough to make out the crime of manslaughter. My client accepts responsibility but disputes the testimony of Corporal Lorenzo as to an alleged conversation with the accused relating to motive and intent. There has been an enormous amount of malicious talk about this incident, and neither the Crown nor defence wishes to escalate that.”

  There was a rumbling from the press corps. Hammersmith looked their way, but instead of reproving them he grimaced, as if to let them know he felt their pain. He had the jury brought in and thanked them, assuring them they hadn’t served in vain. They had no role to play in sentencing, and they bore the expressions of loyal workers fired without cause.

  There was an oddly supernal moment when Gabriel was asked to plead to the new indictment. He seemed to be pondering the alternatives while looking up at the shafts of tinted sunlight streaming through the stained glass. Necks stretched as all followed his gaze. Then the sun was swallowed by clouds and the windows lost colour. Gabriel looked down at the empty jury box, then the judge, and said, “Guilty.”

  Smitty and I recited our scripted lines and filed the admission of facts and Irene’s letter. Smitty proposed that a fair term of incarceration “under all the circumstances” would be eleven years, four months. I did not oppose but threw in ten minutes’ worth of encomia about Gabriel and read aloud Irene’s letter, all for the edification of the sulky press and the disappointed jurors.

  Again Hammersmith looked hard at me, as if to let me know he hadn’t forgiven me for my insolent theatrics. Then he turned to Gabriel. “Sentencing. The young man standing before me took the life of an esteemed professor and writer who rescued him from the poverty of the Native reservation where he was born and raised and in which, without Dr. Mulligan’s intervention, he would likely have been mired for his remaining years.”