“All that means is we were looking at all possible angles.”
“What was Howie’s answer?”
“He just shrugged.”
“And to tell the truth, you also suspected Mr. Griffin may have played a nefarious role in this matter?”
“I felt he was covering something up.”
“Like what?”
“Like something may have happened in his apartment he didn’t want to talk about.”
“And did you suspect he was also concealing his extensive use of cocaine?”
“Okay, I observed he was sniffing a lot, so I may have inferred that. Our Ident people found traces of cocaine in his apartment.”
“Where exactly?”
“On a plastic cutting board in the kitchen.”
“One final matter, Inspector. Do you remember us having a brief chat back in September, at the Old City Hall, just before the bail hearing?”
“Vaguely, yeah, the court was on break.” Maguire actually remembers it well — it was about Lucy’s photo. Why is Beauchamp getting into this?
“I said something to the effect that my clients had kind hearts, that they weren’t criminals in the ordinary sense, and you said there was an element of altruism, that they weren’t in it for themselves.”
“That was the gist of it, yes, I don’t disagree.”
“And you have had no reason to change your mind?”
“Not really.” He thinks of adding You can be a good person and still be a bad criminal, but reminds himself not to tempt fate.
“Those are all my questions.”
“Any redirect?”
Khan taps his pen on his pad, pondering, then finally, “No, M’Lady.”
“Inspector, before you go, there’s one matter I’m curious about.” Justice Donohue sorts through her folder of photo exhibits. “I don’t know if it was somehow glossed over. Yes, this one.” She displays it to the room. “Exhibit 92, it appears to be an image of yourself in a car, looking rather dumbfounded. I’m curious as to its provenance.”
Maguire opens and closes his mouth like a fish. Though he’s otherwise immobile, his heart beats wildly and his eyes dart left and right, at Sonia amid the press, at Lucy in the dock, at Beauchamp, at Khan. There is no rescue, no escape, no hole to crawl into and die. He feels a sharp pain, and buckles.
Chapter 20: Rivie
1
Friday, May 17
Early this morning I learned a lesson: always use the staircase railing when creeping down in the dark from the second floor of Arthur Beauchamp’s borrowed hacienda. Do not slip, as I did this morning, landing on the landing on my bum with a loud “Jesus fuck!” that drew Arthur from his bedroom, in his pyjamas — which I can attest, because he turned the lights on, are of baby blue stripes.
I was in shorts and runners, off for a pre-breakfast Lake Shore run before gearing up for Day Five of Queen v. Knutsen et al. Arthur offered me his hand, which was warm and strong, and I did my best pirouette en pointe to show I was undamaged. I promised to make another batch of the granola that he’d overpraised as “ambrosial.” He said, “Be safe,” and watched from the window as I jogged off into the dusky dawn.
Other huffing early risers join me on the Humber Bay Shores, as a cool spring sun rises above the islands and sparkles the waves and makes the city golden. Leaves are bursting open, and blossoms. Eastern Canada’s impetuous, glorious spring.
The downside to this brightly dawning day is my ass is sore and threatening mutiny if I insist on hauling it all the way to Mimico and back. I tell it to stop bitching, get a life, that stairway tumble was a bad-luck episode and now I’m vaccinated against further mishap.
I’m currently dealing with another pain in the ass, that being Lucy Wales, who is still living (but not sleeping) with Richard the Second, while using me as a cover (“I’m sorry, but I promised Rivie we would [fill in the gap] tonight”), so she can sneak around with Rockin’ Ray, who is still overnighting with Spooky-Sue, God knows why — he can’t seem to break from her even though he’s off the ayahuasca.
But he hasn’t gone back to weed and psychedelics either, though his bail conditions were altered once the trial got underway: Ray no longer has to sign in twice a week at Fourteen Division, and no one’s asking him for urine samples. Lucy and I figure the yagé caused him some permanent kind of altered consciousness, a compulsive meditation disorder.
I likewise no longer have to sign in. I still shoot the shit with Constable Louella, mostly by phone — we bonded like superglue on that Passover trip to Golden Valley, my mains regarding it as so cool for me to arrive under escort by a black, feminist cop who helped in the kitchen and told ribald jokes. I’m meeting her for a coffee and gab this weekend and I know she’s going to pester me about the rumours of a high-level blow job in the OPP. (More on that later, and the resulting disorder in court.)
Louella’s on night shift, and occasionally patrols up Beaconsfield looking for my lurker — just in case he still knows where I live. Which seems unlikely given I’ve been there two weeks and seen no one skulking around or spying except the nosy neighbours across the street.
Lucy speculated the lurker was Howie Griffin. Obviously (she said in that cocksure voice of hers), he wants to strangle you for ruining his life. I called bullshit — the lumbering creep I chased on my bike didn’t have Howie’s height, broad-shouldered physique, or agility.
The traffic roar from the Gardiner deadens with distance as I turn into East Humber Park, and the robins’ songs come clearer. I pause at a lookout, settle my tender rump on a shoreline rock. I squint across Lake Ontario, look over the curvature of the earth, to the mountainous southern tail of the continent. I draw from my fanny pack the letter from Chase D’Amato, postmarked Puerto Próspero, Costa Rica, on May 1.
It came via Okie Joe, from his “safe mail drop.” A little handwritten page, letting me know he’s well, congratulating the Rebellionairs for our forthcoming victory, expressing his unwavering (really?) love for me, and it’s always summer where he’s at, in the wild, and how he saw a tapir the other day, and a rare red-rumped antshrike, and I can’t tell if he’s bullshitting or not. Nice to hear from him anyway. (“He’s got a job,” Okie Joe said. “A new identity.” The image comes of a zip-line Tarzan, adjusting Lola Lovelylegs’s safety harness.)
* * *
I slip inside the house, hoping not to reawaken Arthur, but lights are on in the room he uses as a study, and the radio is playing, the CBC. And in the kitchen there’s coffee in the maker, plenty for sharing. Thanks to my pratfall he never got back to bed so I hope he’s not too pissed off.
Although, actually, he’s never pissed off. At least I’ve never seen him so. He’s such an extreme gentleman it feels eerie. Most of the men I’ve shared space with have been louts. Or self-centred. Or distant. Like what’s-his-name. D’Amato.
Arthur and I have fallen into the genteel habit of having tea each evening in our fat chairs under the moose head. My impression is he’s lonely, needs someone to talk to, to share with, and so he tested me and found me a good listener, an honourable person who would keep his secrets. (Little did he know.)
There’s a burden he wants to let go, and I’m sure I’ll eventually hear it, though from the way he drops hints about the challenges of his long-distance marriage it’s likely to do with infidelity. I open up too, about me and D’Amato, who I am trying to stop loving.
Or we talk about books. Or current events or the state of the planet or what we’ll have for dinner tomorrow. We rarely mention the trial, it’s off-limits, tea and stress don’t mix. Bach often plays in the background, or maybe it’s Vivaldi.
I don’t want to disturb him, so I creep upstairs with my granola and coffee, and warm up my computer. I try to pry some creative time out of every morning before racing off to court, playing Leonard or Joni or k.d., catching up on my memoir before brain-fad
e sets in.
Anyway, Dear Diary, here is my account of the imbroglio (is that the word?) caused when Madam Justice Colleen Donahue flashed Exhibit 92 to the jury. It was my first look at the photo, and I couldn’t tell whether Jake Maguire’s face registered ecstasy as he was being fellated or, assuming that’s a vile rumour, shock and dismay at being outed as a cop.
When I finally escaped the hullabaloo, after they took Maguire away in a gurney, I found an empty interview room to dictate a meandering voice memo, an aide-mémoire. This is it:
So okay, Judge Donahue had a copy of the windshield pic and she was obviously out of the loop about the conspiracy to save two marriages, and so she asked why Maguire looked so dumbfounded in that picture. She wanted to know the picture’s “provenance,” which somehow seemed a condescending way to put it.
Maguire’s face got pinker and pinker and only his eyeballs were moving, speedily, crying out for rescue. Arthur must have hoped the prosecutor would step up, but Khan seemed to be at a loss. It was Nancy who rose, it’s always the woman who takes action in life-and-death crises like this. She was asking for a recess when Maguire gasped, and fell sort of sideways, and a court officer barely caught him before he hit the floor.
There was no physician in this crowded court, but there was a nurse: Sonia, his wife, who bolted from her seat to his limp, prostrate form, cradling him, frantically seeking a pulse, wailing, begging him not to die, then kissing him on the mouth, and his eyes opened and he took a breath, and said, “I love you.”
I witnessed this dazzling moment because I was close by, and so were Lucy and Ivor and Amy, having deserted the dock, acting on humanitarian instinct, sensing a heart attack or a stroke. It was chaos, the jury stunned and gaping when shepherded out, Miss Pucket bawling, “Order in court!” senselessly, uselessly, as court officers tried to clear the room, the media resisting, the judge in a stop-action stall at her chambers door.
The only cool head among the lawyers was Khan’s storky student, on her phone, instructing an emergency response crew how to find their way to the sixth floor, 361 University Avenue, and bring a gurney.
Meanwhile I wrote furiously and so did the reporters, even while being herded out, a few already phoning in to set up their live reports.
The ambulance crew came within minutes, and brought along an emergency doctor. As they wheeled Maguire out, Sonia at his side, word came from the judge via Miss Pucket that we were done for the day and would counsel kindly join Her Ladyship in her chambers.
We of the Sarnia Seven were the last ones out of the room, and I darted down the hall to find this quiet little room.
* * *
It was a coronary, as we learned later that evening, something about clogged arteries. Maguire is at Toronto General and the prognosis is good, provided he sticks to a healthy diet.
Earlier that same Tuesday — there’s irony here — Gaylene Roberts and Sonia Maguire had a wet lunch and were overheard by a reliable source (sympathizers are everywhere) regaling each other with stories about oddly lovable Jake Maguire. There was much hilarity over Gaylene’s confession of passing out then waking up with her head between Jake’s legs. The reliable source noted that the women shared a ribald sense of humour. That leaves me wondering if Jake felt guilty over something he didn’t do, and the stress did him in.
Enough of that, I see Arthur below striding out for his daily walk downtown. I’ve only got half an hour to assemble myself for court.
But first, Dear Journal (or Diary or whatever you are), on the Howie Griffin front:
I had another dream of him the other night. I was being Becky and I awoke writhing and wet. These dreams have got to stop. Why are they recurring? Is it a punishment? Always, on awakening, I have a moment of (a) hating myself for what I did to him and (b) hating myself for being subconsciously horny for him.
Nancy Faulk’s theory is he’s enraptured by me, a concept I find confusing. He fell in love with brainless Becky McLean, not a cool, cunning, eco-guerrilla saboteur. He doesn’t know me. He’s never met me. Maybe he just wants to score some Passionata.
Howie started off as number five on the Crown’s witness list, but there’ve been no sightings of this reclusive bird, and meanwhile about twenty others have paraded to the stand.
Someone overheard our lawyers wonder if he’s suicidal. How would you live with that, Rivke Levitsky?
* * *
I step from the sixth-floor escalator into a vast herd of humanity: loud, robed barristers, clerks and paralegals, court officers looking for troublemakers among the Bee-Dazzled, witnesses, journalists, spectators queuing for seats in 6-1. Plus us wrongdoers — we are the job creators without whom this whole edifice would collapse.
The room has been sold out ever since the start of day three, with Facebook freaks and Twitterheads having orgasms over how an OPP Inspector expired after cross-examination by a hotshot criminal counsel and was brought back to life by a kiss on the lips from his wife.
The press corps has grown too, a mob of them over there stalking Gaylene Roberts, nagging her about why Exhibit 92 is being kept from them. She gives the official explanation: an error, an irrelevancy, nothing to do with this case, it accidentally found its way into an exhibits folder and is now withdrawn. With that, Roberts is let into the courtroom.
She has taken over Maguire’s role and gets to stay in court now that she has testified. She was the first witness on Wednesday, and was sombre but crisp, expanding on how Operation Vig was so competent compared to us amateur saboteurs. She let it out that she conked out in the Olds after having slept only three hours in two days. Nobody pressed her on that one, the judge now a party to the backroom deal to suppress hints of scandal.
So we have the unreal situation of Lucy being in a pact of silence with three prosecutors, two defence counsel, and one judge to protect the asses of two dicks. That’s got to help on her sentencing.
The other witnesses this week were mostly technicians and crime scene people and handlers of various exhibits like the pry bar, Ray’s abandoned avenger outfit, Lucy’s employment records at her old drug store, plus there was CCTV footage from the gas station where we refuelled Ivor’s old van, plus proof the van was registered to Ivor Antiques Ltd. Hardly any cross-examination, a little bit from Nancy Faulk to establish the keys to the van were hanging just inside the alley door, accessible to anyone.
Nancy will be leading the necessity defence but otherwise has seen limited action, occasionally dropping hints that Ivor and Amy unwittingly believed their backroom colleagues were merely planning a demonstration.
Lucy tears herself away from a pair of punked-up comrades with anarchist tats, and joins me just as the crowd streams down the hall to 6-1’s yawning doors.
“News bulletin,” she says. “The guys I was talking to? One of them is a server in an intimate hole-in-the-wall in Little Italy. He looked after Nancy and Doc last night. They were pretty cozy together, which, for Doc, is saying something. Like he didn’t seem worried about her germs? Maybe something’s happening there? Do opposites really attract? Never mind, I see Miss Pucket tearing her hair out because we’re two seconds late.”
2
My bottom feels better, expressing discomfort only when I sit flat, so I perch at an angle as we, the Sarnia Seven, clump together in what they call, medievally, the dock.
Doc looks distracted, impatient, as he waits for the main event, when fellow scientists will grapple over the honeybee holocaust. Last night’s dinner, I learned, was paid out of his publisher’s first advance — his book, part science, part politics, is a call for direct action on environment issues.
He keeps glancing at Nancy. Has he finally been taken captive by the most merciless of human emotions and feeling palpitations of the lonely heart? It takes some effort to visualize moody, messianic Helmut Knutsen getting it on with blunt, quick-tempered Nancy Faulk. But mazel tov, couple up, enjoy, abandon me t
o spinsterhood, the Seven’s sole surviving single-o.
Ivor and Amy are holding hands, as ever, and so are Lucy and Ray, more covertly. As everyone stood for the judge’s entrance, Lucy turned to scan the gallery to satisfy herself that neither Dick Two or Sooky-Sue were present. I’d spotted them earlier in the melee but they’d failed to queue in time.
The man standing in the witness box is a leftover from yesterday, the last witness, name forgotten, the stone-faced toxicologist. He’d been cut off at four thirty while being cross-examined about Gooch’s oxycodone level. On Gooch’s admission to the Sarnia hospital that level had been 11,285 nanograms per millilitre of blood plasma.
Arthur, whose shtick with witnesses is endless amiability, welcomes him back to centre stage, gets a grunt of thanks. “You agreed yesterday, Doctor, that Gooch’s reading was absurdly high. But you have no reason to doubt its accuracy?”
“No, since a sample tested six hours later was well over nine thousand nanograms.”
“Such extreme levels must be unprecedented in the annals of toxicology, Doctor.”
“There are several reports of higher oxycodone readings, but in each case the overdose victim did not survive.”
“Overdosing can damage the central nervous system?”
“Indeed.”
“And can turn a human being into a vegetable?”
“Oxycodone can be a factor inducing a coma, if that’s what you mean.”
“And it can cause death.” Arthur sounds that line with a deep, funereal rumble that makes me shiver.
“Such a result is, sadly, becoming more common.”
Arthur then asks him to consider the effects of LSD on “for example, a tall, robust young man” two hours after he’d ingested five hundred micrograms. “Is it fair to say that such a person, at peak level of LSD intoxication, could be out of his mind and wildly hallucinating?”
Stung Page 39