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

  ALSO BY WILLIAM DEVERELL

  FICTION

  Snow Job

  Kill All the Judges

  April Fool

  Mind Games

  The Laughing Falcon

  Slander

  Trial of Passion

  Street Legal: The Betrayal

  Kill All the Lawyers

  Mindfield

  Platinum Blues

  The Dance of Shiva

  Mecca

  High Crimes

  Needles

  NON-FICTION

  A Life on Trial

  Copyright © 2011 by William Deverell

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Deverell, William, 1937-

  I’ll see you in my dreams / William Deverell.

  “An Arthur Beauchamp novel.”

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-2740-6

  I. Title.

  PS8557.E8775I44 2011 C813’.54 C2011-902103-X

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.,

  P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011925619

  Cover art: Alfred Gescheidt/Getty Images

  Cover Design: Leah Springate

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario,

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  Dedicated to the First Nations people who survived,

  defied, and exposed the Native residential school system.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Part One: The Crime

  Tuesday, April 24, 1962

  Tuesday, April 24, 1962

  Tuesday, April 24, 1962

  Wednesday, April 25, 1962

  Wednesday, April 25, 1962

  Friday, April 27, 1962

  Saturday, April 28, 1962

  Sunday, April 29, 1962

  Sunday, April 29, 1962

  Tuesday, May 1, 1962

  Wednesday, May 2, 1962

  Thursday, May 3, 1962

  Friday, May 4, 1962

  Monday, May 7, 1962

  Tuesday, May 8, 1962

  Thursday, May 10, 1962

  Friday, May 25, 1962

  Wednesday, May 30, 1962

  Friday, June 1, 1962

  Tuesday, June 19, 1962

  Thursday, June 21, 1962

  Friday, June 22, 1962

  Saturday, June 23, 1962

  Thursday, June 28, 1962

  Part Two: The Trial

  Garibaldi Island, Friday, August 26, 2011

  Monday, July 30, 1962

  Tuesday, July 31, 1962

  Wednesday, August 1, 1962

  Wednesday, August 1, 1962

  Thursday, August 2, 1962

  Thursday, August 2, 1962

  Friday, August 3, 1962

  Saturday, August 4, 1962

  Sunday, August 5, 1962

  Monday, August 6, 1962

  Part Three: The Punishment

  Garibaldi Island, Saturday, August 27, 2011

  Saturday, September 3, 2011

  Saturday, September 3, 2011

  Sunday, September 4, 2011

  Monday, September 5, 2011

  Friday, December 28, 1956

  Thursday, September 8, 2011

  Friday, September 9, 2011

  Saturday, September 10, 2011

  Wednesday, September 14, 2011

  Thursday, September 15, 2011

  Friday, September 16, 2011

  Saturday, September 17, 2011

  Part Four: The Appeal

  Garibaldi Island, Wednesday, September 21, 2011

  Thursday, September 22, 2011

  Saturday, September 24, 2011

  Sunday, September 25, 2011

  Monday, September 26, 2011

  Wednesday, October 12, 2011

  Thursday, November 10, 2011

  Author’s Note

  A THIRST FOR JUSTICE:

  The Trials of Arthur Beauchamp

  A BIOGRAPHY

  BY WENTWORTH CHANCE

  FOREWORD

  AT TIMES THERE SEEMED MORE LABOUR than love in this labour of love, yet I can now sit back with weary satisfaction at having realized a long-held dream: capturing the tumultuous journey of Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp from awkward familial beginnings to early triumphs and losses, and, despite years of alcoholic despair and cuckoldom, finally securing a reputation as one of the leading trial lawyers of the past hundred years – sharing the throne, in my respectful opinion, with Clarence Darrow. (A.R.B. will forgive me for giving the edge to Darrow, with his more strenuous commitment to social justice.)

  Before you proceed on, dear reader, please practise with me this aid to pronunciation. It’s Beechem, not Beau-chom, and certainly not Beau-champ. The name came to England with the Normans, but the conquerors were stubbornly met by the Anglo-Saxons’ insistence on hard syllables.

  I am indebted to many, first among them Margaret Blake, Member of Parliament for Cowichan and the Islands, Green Party leader, and, of course, Beauchamp’s life partner, the liberal yin to his conservative yang. Thank you, Ms. Blake, for filling in so many of the gaps that your overly cautious partner shied away from.

  Many from Beauchamp’s firm, Tragger, Inglis, Bullingham, had anecdotes to tell, particularly retired partner Hubbell Meyerson, who offered several humorous tales, and Gertrude Isbister, Beauchamp’s long-time secretary. Without the aid of Beauchamp’s daughter, Deborah, I might never have been able to bring alive his self-destructive decades with her mother, Annabelle, who, though she otherwise cooperated with this enterprise, recalled only happy memories, insisting that the rest was “history, best forgotten.” Legal beagles Augustina Sage, John Brovak, and Maximilian Macarthur III offered lively anecdotes. April Wu should not go unmentioned, nor should Ira Lavitch, Nick “the Owl” Faloon, or Tony “the Angle” d’Anglio.

  A collective thank-you to the good folks of Garibaldi Island, where Beauchamp has entered into a relaxed, bucolic retirement. Reverend Al Noggins, our hero’s ally and spiritual adviser, shared confidences if not confessions. The island postmaster, Abraham Makepeace, and the editor of the Island Bleat, Nelson Forbish, were unsparing of their time.

  It would be inappropriate not to extend my sincerest gratitude to the subject of this biography, and I do so unequivocally, despite an unaccountable chilling of friendship that followed his reading of the final draft. And finally, I acknowledge the unrelenting support of my publisher and its editors, publicity staff, and lawyers.

  GARIBALDI ISLAND, FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, 2011

  My onions are shiny, my peaches plump, my bean pods crisp and fresh. All the e
ntries are cuddled in foam in the back of my beloved 1969 Fargo, ready for the drive to the community hall tomorrow and the judging at the 2011 Garibaldi Island Fall Fair.

  Pacing on the veranda, I try to pump myself up: this year the Mabel Orfmeister Trophy for Most Points in Fruits and Vegetables must be brought home to Blunder Bay, where it belongs. Doc Dooley has ruled too long; he must be overthrown.

  I will wait half an hour before heading out. I don’t want to get there too early. I don’t want to appear anxious. I often felt this kind of tension as a lawyer, at the outset of a trial. I hope my beets and cukes will speak with the eloquence I displayed in court.

  I go inside and flop into my club chair, reach for the poems of Catullus, recite aloud a favourite line: “No fickle lusts, no rooting between other sheets – your husband will lie only in the valley of your breasts.” Emphasis added, as if for Margaret’s ears. Has anyone else been lying there, in that valley? I have been playing with that worry lately. A stupid concern, obviously false, unworthy of me.

  Now my hand reaches out to A Thirst for Justice: The Trials of Arthur Beauchamp. This opus has been sitting beside the chair since its pre-summer release – presumably it was considered to offer light reading for the beach or cottage.

  I have tossed away the book’s cover jacket with its repellent illustration, my beaklike nose in profile, a frightening sight for those of tender years. I have marked up pages, written marginal notes of the kind that crazies scribble in library books. So many flagrancies, so many wounds exposed, so much grist for the Garibaldi gossip mill. Locals who snaffled early copies are having trouble making eye contact with the impotent cuckold.

  From time to time I suffer a masochistic urge to tell the whole story, shout it to the world, bold and uncensored. But I have contented myself with vocalizing to my club chair, or to the goats, the sheep, and Bess, the milk cow. I can’t find the courage to do anything but ruminate (as Bess does her cud, chewing again what has already been chewed and swallowed).

  Astonishingly, the biography has won plaudits for Wentworth Chance, my self-proclaimed official biographer and (I’d thought) champion. It was seen as “candid” and “brave.” The Toronto Star considered it “a remarkable story of self-redemption.” Who knew that shy Wentworth could speak so loudly on paper? Who could have guessed that A.R. Beauchamp, Q.C., so wise, so wary, would have posed so nakedly for those interminable taping sessions?

  I leaf through it again, seeking to recognize myself, wondering who this fellow could be – so accomplished in the courthouse, so mired in insecurity outside its walls. My years as a tormented, self-doubting alcoholic. “The Wet Years” is my least favourite section, but one I’ve reread often, mainly because I have a mental blank about the drunken episodes that Wentworth makes seem almost heroic – hurling insults at a judge at a Law Society dinner, dousing a prosecutor with my gin-spiked water jug, my raucous barstool recitations from the Song of Solomon or the Rubáiyát. A flask of wine! A book of verse!

  “Where the Squamish River Flows” is the poetic title of one of the early sections, complete with black-and-white photos of the cast: young Beauchamp himself, in the apparent guise of Ichabod Crane, Gabriel Swift, Professor Dermot Mulligan, Ophelia Moore. To kill time I return to it, though I’ve read it until its print smudged, looking for shadowy clues to what truly happened on the shores of that misty river on the Easter weekend of 1962. Evil, unforgivable evil …

  PART ONE

  THE CRIME

  From “Where the Squamish River Flows,” A Thirst for Justice, © W. Chance

  IT WAS JUST AFTER THE 1962 EASTER WEEKEND when Beauchamp’s first murder file landed on his desk. Only twenty-five, he was in his fourth year of practice and still regretting his choice of criminal law over pursuit of a doctorate in classical studies. So it was a matter of extreme irony that the case that finally tilted him toward the law involved the death of his respected – nay, idolized – tutor in the Greek and Roman classics, Dermot Mulligan, D. Th., Ph.D.

  Let us put this life-shaping event in context. His firm, Tragger, Inglis, Bullingham, was perhaps the most conservative, the most staid of Vancouver’s major law offices, and it regarded its small criminal division almost with embarrassment, its staff as untouchables. This is where Beauchamp toiled, in a windowless office on the fourteenth floor of a West Hastings bank building.

  By the spring of that year he had built a creditable record of victories, but only one of note: a dangerous driving charge against the Highways minister, Phil Gaglardi. Many had been cases from the Legal Aid Society, earning a paltry thirty-five-dollar per diem. Occasionally, to the disapproval of his seniors, he would even act pro bono – a beggar, a vagrant, a street drunk. He was a pushover for the sad stories of the oppressed.

  Earlier that year he’d finally escaped from the stifling oppression of his parental home on University Hill, to a West End bachelor flat. One might often see him having a fifty-cent breakfast in one of the busy diners on Denman Street, or on lonely walks by English Bay: gangly at six foot three (friends called him Stretch), hair clipped short, sombre of expression, his lugubrious eyes and heroic nose combining to give an impression of craggy world-weariness.

  Picture him on a chill and misty April morning in Tragger, Inglis’s requisite uniform – overcoat, hat, dark suit, black shoes – striding beneath the pink-blossoming trees of the West End toward the crypt, as he called his windowless office, to prepare the cross-examination of a young woman whose front teeth had been knocked out by a detested client …

  TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 1962

  Ah, yes, Schlott – Hugo Schlott – that was his name. A beefy, red-faced, post-pubescent progeny of a doting, disbelieving mother who was paying my fee. The chief of the criminal section and my immediate superior, Alex Pappas, had handed it off to me with a smirking “Do your best, pal.”

  Truly the Schlott case represented the low point of twenty-five years of a life poorly lived, spent in random wandering without clear direction. It offered stark proof I had taken an ill-conceived detour from the path of enlightenment to the path of shame. The doors of academia had been opened wide, bounteous scholarships offered. Instead I was bound upon my barrister’s oath to defend an odious bully.

  I had no stomach for the trial, and I fully intended not to punch in that day. Instead I would march into the den of the managing partner, Roy Bullingham, and announce I would be applying to Cambridge to complete my thesis on The Aeneid. I owed that to Dermot Mulligan, for he had opened those academic doors and I had failed him. Dr. Mulligan – author, classicist, philosopher, mentor throughout my master’s program at UBC – had disappeared on Easter weekend, only a few days before, from his retreat by the Squamish River, and it was feared the river had taken him to his death.

  That it was a pleasant spring morning seemed only to add to my malaise. That I entered my building amid a hurrying group of pretty secretaries only made me feel more lonely. Members of the intimidating other sex tended to spurn this socially dysfunctional sad sack; I’d never known the touch of Venus, that which they call love.

  For no accountable reason, those few moments in the rattling elevator stick in my mind (though withheld from my prying biographer as too delicate for his omnivorous ears). I’d plastered myself to the back wall of the crowded cage behind the comely Gertrude Isbister: nineteen, newly hired, among the loveliest of the flowers that adorned our secretarial pool. As the lift lurched in ascent, she made a misstep while adjusting her skirt. Without thought I reached out to steady her, my hand resting for an electric second on the fluffy fabric of her tight angora sweater.

  I said, “I truly beg pardon. Excuse me” – something like that, my face aflame. Whether out of shyness or reproach, she did not respond, though she didn’t move away and continued tugging at her skirt. We were let out on the fourteenth floor (in reality the thirteenth, which, according to local legend, was the haunt of ghosts wailing from the air conditioners). As Gertrude preceded me, I saw that her right stocking was po
orly aligned, puckered at the knee. Staring rapturously at that juncture of skirt and knee, I barely missed colliding with Geoffrey Tragger as he exited his office.

  “Steady there, son,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “Beauchamp, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. Arthur Beauchamp.” I was surprised. This absent-minded senior partner, a corporate tax specialist, rarely recognized, let alone spoke to the forty-odd inferiors in practice there.

  “You’re on the criminal end, are you not?” (These and following conversations are reconstructed as best I can remember; do not call it creative non-fiction – I seek to offer a fair rendering, without gloss.) “Your name was mentioned this morning … Yes, Mr. Bullingham wants a tête-à-tête. Something that’s been in the news … Well, never mind. He’s waiting for you.”

  Bully’s secretary showed me straight in. He was seated behind his massive oaken desk, a gaunt man of middle years, a skin-deep sheen of affability disguising the Scrooge within. Lolling in an easy chair across from him was Alex Pappas, wearing a rumpled suit and a vanity hairpiece, fleshy wattles quivering below a stubbly chin.

  “We got something for you, kid,” he said.

  “Alex believes you’re up for this,” said Bully. “Your first murder.”

  I had rehearsed an exit line from Pliny: Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur. Many fear their reputation, few their conscience. My conscience (I might have added) will not let me defend a violent misogynist, sir. Fie, I say, to reputation. But my tongue was tied. A murder? Something that had been in the news? I trolled through the possibilities: the gangland turf war then adorning the front pages, or maybe that psychotic who’d mistaken his mailman for the Antichrist.

  Bully was sifting through the papers in a thin folder. “You really think he has it in him?”

  “He’s streaky,” Pappas said. “Won five straight, dropped the next two. Then four wins – charity cases.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of his penchant for defending life’s losers. Noble intentions, I’m sure, but we can’t have too much of that. What about Crawford?”