Stung

by William Deverell

  One is a slightly blurry snap of his SWAT team blasting into Ivor’s backroom. Someone screwed up, because it should be in the reject folder, but it’s marked as an exhibit, 93, so the judge and jury may have copies already. He can’t remember who took it.

  Here’s an important one, from YouTube, Exhibit 67, Levitsky and Lucy Wales backstage at the Bee-In with their staff badges. This whole pile has to be re-sorted into chronological order.

  Donahue concludes: “Your outburst, Ms. Levitsky, may have been more reflexive than deliberate, but nonetheless it was thoughtless and ill mannered. Your counsel will caution you that repetition could have serious consequences, including loss of liberty.”

  As Maguire straightens up, he feels tremors, the kind that come with impending danger. He’s too shaky to stand, and he slumps onto the witness chair, fixated on Exhibit 92. It’s the flash-lit shot of him gaping at Lucy Wales through the windshield! Here’s Gaylene’s hovering toe!

  A majestic fuckup has occurred. This photo was buried and forgotten — how did it rise rotting from the grave? He slips it back into the folder, afraid to look at Sonia, who will have read his anguish. As well, his neck is in agony with the stress.

  Meanwhile, Khan is asking him something. He only catches the name Operation Vigorous, and launches into a thick-tongued tutorial on how they set up at OPP Toronto, the name being inspired by Vigor-Gro, then in the next breath refers to it as Operation Vigorish, then has to explain that’s what everyone called it, or Vig, with a hollow laugh, then rambles about how Vig, or The Vig, is also called juice in underworld jargon, which means the cut of the take.

  The judge looks as bewildered as the jury. Khan is curt: “We don’t need to hear the whole etymology, Inspector. Tell us what Operation Vigorous did.”

  Maguire can’t remember what it did. His brain is totally occupied with not seeing Sonia. Every time he looks from Khan to the jury, his eyes skip past her, past the scandal-tattling journalists surrounding her. Maguire needs to have an intense talk with Khan, but the noon break — half past twelve until two, by judicial edict — is an hour away, and Justice Donahue prods them on.

  What did Operation Vigorous do? Yes, he has another detective story, how they caught Rivie and Lucy on amateur video at the Bee-In — he begins a ramble about it, the untold hours that Constable Ling watched YouTube videos, armed only by the image from the Jays game, then he goes on a side trip about Lorne Ling, who everyone called Long Ling though he’s actually quite short . . .

  “Mr. Prosecutor, please control your witness.”

  Khan yanks the leash, forcing Maguire to stop and catch his breath as he searches for and finds his copy of Exhibit 67, the two girls huddled over clipboards, one in a Panic Disorder T-shirt. He pulls in deep lungfuls of air, works on clearing his brain, focussing, avoiding panic. He can do this, get a grip on himself, spin it out till lunch. Khan and Beauchamp can fix this without a fuss. Of course they can.

  The jury seems relieved that the old copper hasn’t lost his mind after all, as he finds his groove, connecting the dots from Lucy’s T-shirt to the Panic Disorder gig at Squirrelly Moe’s, his undercover mission there, skipping over irrelevant details like how he drank too much and smoked half a pack of Dunhills.

  He credits Gaylene Roberts for backing him up and tailing the van but doesn’t mention how he passed out and woke up in his hotel room. He lets the jury know he was proud of her, and of his whole team, the job they did shadowing the perps.

  He manages to keep his anxiety level down, even though his neck is killing him, as Khan leads him through the critical evening of Thursday, September 17, when he joined Gaylene in the Buick.

  “And where was she parked?”

  “At the curb, facing north, maybe fifty feet in front of the condo’s entrance door. She was very weary, so I got behind the wheel. At eleven fourteen p.m. Lucy Wales exited by that door with a bicycle. She was talking on her phone as she pedalled north. I gave her some space and followed, keeping her in view as she proceeded northwest on Dundas Street, north to Runnymede, then left onto St. Clair Avenue.”

  As a map of that route gets entered as an exhibit, Maguire finds the jam to look at his wife. He smiles. She smiles too, but cautiously. So far so good, he has made it to Ivor Antiques, having nimbly fled the scene of a marriage-threatening scandal. But he’ll only be safe when they deep-six that photo by Lucy Wales.

  He chances a glance at Ms. Yolo. She is grinning. He feels a weird sense of partnership, like they’re in this together. Her ex-boyfriend, Ray Wozniak, stares straight ahead, like a clothing-shop dummy. Rivie Levitsky is writing. Maguire wants to apologize to her: You weren’t flinching, sorry. You were just twisting to look up.

  In the jury box, nineteen-year-old Abbie Lee-Yeung, second row, last seat, also makes occasional notes, and otherwise follows everything intensely, and seems fascinated by Rivie Levitsky. Occasionally she also sneaks a look at Doc Knutsen, as if trying to figure him out. Probably looked him up online, which jurors aren’t supposed to.

  It’s still a long while before the lunch break as he launches into how his flying squad took down the Earth Survival Rebellion. Setting up and playing the footage from the pinhole camera fills most of the time. Lucy was clearly audible: “And what about Chase. Shouldn’t he go with her?” Then Okie Joe, “No way they’ll ever nab him.”

  Chase D’Amato was smart, he didn’t try to go with her. But he won’t be doing stunts for Greenpeace for a while. Or doing Rivke Levitsky. There’s an indication he’s in the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife. Good luck to him, is Maguire’s attitude, who doesn’t want to go through another trial.

  The jury has a few sour faces when Dr. Knutsen, with a casual shrug, calls Gooch a casualty of war. Others seem indifferent, finding it hard to mourn a small-time criminal junkie.

  Finally it’s twelve thirty. Maguire waits for the room to clear, then explains to Azra Khan that a couple of issues have cropped up.

  6

  “Let’s deal first with the annoying case of Howell J. Griffin,” says Khan. “My guess is Beauchamp’s rubbish about him conspiring with the late Gooch has caused an anxiety attack. Beauchamp’s massive red herring became the media’s lead story. Now he has a lawyer. Name?”

  Maguire says, “Adelsen, Gaylene told me. G.J. Adelsen.”

  “Anyone heard of him?”

  Maguire, the clockwork junior, and the flamingo shake their heads. They’re downstairs in the Crown Counsel offices, waiting for a takeout order to arrive, two sandwiches, a salad, and a Whopper and fries.

  Maguire had to ask Gaylene to take Sonia for lunch because of this emergency session. Before they parted Sonia asked why he’d turned white on the stand, and he said heartburn, he had to lay off the strong coffee. She didn’t seem very convinced of that.

  “So, okay,” says Maguire, “it’s a simple matter of telling Mr. Adelsen that nobody’s prosecuting his client. Howie was negligent up the yazoo, but thinking with your pecker ain’t a crime.”

  Khan shakes his head. “I don’t have time or patience to handle this Adelsen. You and Finley will have to sit down with him over a beer and find out what their game is.”

  As if Maguire would enjoy grabbing a beer with this machine. Finley — that’s his first name, or second? Khan had overlooked making introductions. Maybe to him, lawyers, like royalty, are a class above, and don’t shake hands with commoners.

  A secretary comes in with the food orders, plus a Thermos of coffee. Maguire greedily fills a mug. Finley makes himself useful, looking up Adelsen on his phone. “G.J. Adelsen. Okay, looks like he’s actually female. Greta Jane Adelsen.”

  “Good work, Finley,” Khan says, kind of caustically. “Please reach out to her. Tell her we won’t need Howie for another week or so while we consider obstruction of justice charges. I want him to stew. But if he’s willing to sit down with us and be candid, we’re prepared to light
en up on him.”

  Khan turns to Maguire. “As to the awkward photograph, Jake, that’s highly regrettable.” He repeats those last two words with a dry tone that says there’s jack-all he can do about it. Except maybe place blame. “Who did you have collating these photos?”

  “Constable Wiggens. Wiggie.”

  “Wiggie. Ah, yes, the human skyscraper. Not the brightest star in the firmament, is he?”

  Wiggie has his failings but Maguire won’t let him be scapegoated. “Your junior here, Finley, was supposed to have filtered out the extraneous ones.”

  All eyes settle on the junior Crown, who finally shows human emotion — a pained expression as he confesses he found what is now Exhibit 92 in the discard pile with five other prints from the smartphone of Lucy Wales.

  “I assumed its vital importance had been overlooked.”

  Left with the rejects were a cat in a tree, a pizza menu, a close-up of a nipple, and some dickhead leering in a subway car. But Maguire gaping wide-eyed in the Buick is already tagged as an exhibit. So is Lucy’s last shot, Exhibit 93, her snap of Maguire’s squad busting through the doors of Ivor’s backroom.

  “This is vexing,” Khan says. “Maybe, Jake, it will go unnoticed in the blizzard of exhibits the jury will be engulfed in.”

  “No, whoa, Katie bar the door. How do you stop the press getting ahold of this and asking questions?” Maguire is agitated, getting loud. “My wife is in the courtroom. What about Gaylene, she’ll be scarred for life and all she ever did was pass out with exhaustion after seventy-two hours on the go.”

  It seriously bothers him that he never mentioned the penilingus incident to her, not wanting to embarrass her, not wanting to lie about having to fight off a hard-on, and then it was all supposed to have been handled by the lawyers. Even Lucy Wales was okay with censoring it from the script.

  Khan looks puzzled. “She passed out? Really, Jake? That’s, ah, not the impression I was given when I met with defence counsel.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They didn’t offer any graphic detail, but—”

  “We weren’t fucking doing it, Azra! She was bagged. She slid over onto me. I wasn’t going to wake her.”

  “That’s what you told Arthur Beauchamp?”

  “Exactly.” Except for the loosened belt, the manual readjustment of his dick, which he can’t bring himself to mention in this company — the flamingo has already gone from pink to crimson. And Khan is focussed on his roast beef on multigrain, it’s occupying his mouth, preventing him from confessing Beauchamp conned him.

  Maguire is stunned, immobile. He can’t remember eating his Whopper but feels it lodged halfway down his food tube. The flamingo, however, has set her tofu salad aside and is poring through her exhibits folder, exhuming another copy of Exhibit 92.

  Khan chews slowly, swallows. “Being practical, Jake, can we expect the sheriffs to sneak into the jury room and remove all their copies?” He turns to Finley. “How many of these prints are out there?”

  “Six for the jury to share.” He’s sweating, aware he’s carrying the can for this. “We have three, defence has two, the judge one.” He stops himself, rattled, checks a list. “No, wait, they haven’t been passed out to the jury in case there was an objection.”

  “How could the original be marked as an exhibit then?” Khan asks.

  “I don’t honestly know, sir. Constable Wiggens didn’t raise an issue.”

  Khan sputters. “What a cockamamie . . . Never mind. I’ll work things out with Beauchamp at the end of the day. Maybe we can agree on a simple consent order expunging the exhibit.”

  Maguire sees a rainbow forming in the mist of his despair.

  * * *

  As his examination-in-chief resumes, Maguire is back on his feet — literally, but also he’s got his head screwed back on. The jury seem content to assume he’s lucid again after his brain farts of this morning. Khan has just had a whispered conference with Beauchamp, and they were nodding in agreement. All is good. Sonia looks much less worried. He’s looking forward to that massage tonight. Maybe that will morph into something even more rewarding.

  There’s not much more the jury needs to know about the bust, except that Maguire gave orders to take down the remaining conspirators, the antique dealer and his lady and Wozniak. Who pissed on the uniformed guy standing below his window and is lucky they didn’t beat the shit out of him.

  There’s a last-minute flurry of exhibits, from Ivor’s backroom and front desk, from the residences of all accused, their computers. And then he tells how they found Levitsky’s poorly trashed Finnair confirmation and how that led to her being collared at Departures and taken to the Peel PD.

  “And then,” he concludes, “Mr. Beauchamp over there showed up out of the blue.”

  “Uninvited, I presume,” says Khan drily, this exchange getting laughter. “Please answer his questions.”

  Beauchamp stands, grinning. “Uninvited but not unwelcome, I hope.”

  “You’re always welcome, sir.”

  “I hope you don’t mind my saying you did an admirable job on this case.”

  “To be honest most of the credit belongs to Inspector Roberts.”

  “Were you not required here, Inspector, you would now be enjoying your retirement, so please accept my good wishes for finally escaping the clutches of the law.” More laughter. “Seriously, we all hope you and your wife, who I see sitting over there, will enjoy a long, active, and loving life together.”

  “Thank you, counsellor.” Maguire doesn’t want to be cynical but he suspects Beauchamp is buttering him up to bring his guard down. Thankfully, the old smoothie doesn’t go so far as to ask Sonia to stand. She gives Maguire a little wave, blushing.

  Beauchamp finally gets to work, starting with the night watchmen and their gong show. He reads out Maguire’s recorded reference to them as the Three Stooges. He has him describe how Barney Wilson twice missed the door of the OPP interview room, how he walked around in stretchy socks, his feet swollen, as Beauchamp puts it, “from splashing through this poisonous pesticide.” That earns an objection, sustained.

  Beauchamp uses Maguire to acquaint the jury with Archie Gooch’s record, the falls he took for theft, hit and run, and mixing and dealing lid proppers. Beauchamp then glances over a stapled report he’s holding. “He also committed a bruising assault on his girlfriend in his meth lab, did he not?”

  That gets Khan up again, complaining, “My learned friend is on a fishing expedition and he’s casting for hearsay. It’s also irrelevant. Mr. Gooch is not on trial. Mr. Gooch is dead.”

  Justice Donahue obviously also thinks he’s fishing. “Mr. Beauchamp, I confess that I too can’t see how reviling the dead advances the interests of anyone, especially your clients.”

  Beauchamp comes back hard. “I would be immensely grateful if Your Ladyship withholds judgment on that. We are early into the trial. The defence has a right to explore every reasonable defence. My client is facing a manslaughter charge for which the maximum penalty is life imprisonment. I beg to be allowed to do my job.”

  She glares at him, her nostrils flaring at this dressing-down. Maguire doesn’t know how they’re going to unlock horns, until Khan agrees the witness may be asked how Gooch’s “behaviour toward his female partner” was handled in court.

  Maguire answers carefully, about how an assault bodily harm was withdrawn in favour of a no-harassment order. Beauchamp is okay with that, and carries on. “Inspector, Mr. Gooch’s criminal record was known to the company when they hired him?”

  “It’s in their personnel records, yes. He was supposed to be on drug rehab.”

  “And in those records, there’s no indication he had any training for this job.”

  “The foreman for security showed him around the previous day, that’s all.”

  “Company records also show th
at Howell Griffin personally posted Gooch for the September tenth night shift?”

  “We have a memo to that effect.”

  “I’d appreciate being able to show it to Mr. Griffin when he testifies.”

  Khan interjects to say they’ll fish it out for him, which prompts a ripple of laughter.

  Beauchamp won’t let Gooch rest in peace. He wants to know about the THC content in his blood, and how to interpret it. Maguire says he’s not a doctor, then Beauchamp qualifies him as an expert anyway, because of his eight years on narcotics. And of course Maguire has to concede that high-THC-content weed mixed with overdose levels of oxycodone meant Gooch might have been out of touch with reality.

  “Enough to put him into a fatal stupor, do you agree?”

  Khan is sitting on his hands instead of objecting, so Maguire just says, “A toxicologist and the pathologist who examined Mr. Gooch have subpoenas for tomorrow.”

  “Suffice it to say Mr. Gooch was a serial abuser of drugs.”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “Grand larceny, drug trafficking, beating up a woman — what else? running over a cyclist and fleeing the scene — very odd that a fellow with that background would get hired on a security detail, don’t you agree?”

  Khan is baited to rise again. “That’s rhetoric disguised as a question.”

  The judge, silent since her exchange with Beauchamp, comes out of her sulk. “For what it is worth, Mr. Beauchamp, your point has been abundantly made.”

  “Thank you, M’Lady. Inspector, you were suspicious of Gooch right from the get-go, weren’t you?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You felt he might have taken a bribe.”

  “I don’t remember thinking that.”

  Beauchamp checks a transcript. “In your initial interview with Howell Griffin you asked, ‘What do you think, Howie, is Archie the susceptible kind of guy who’d take a bribe?’”