Sing a Worried Song

  SING A WORRIED SONG

  by William Deverell

  ECW Press

  THE ARTHUR BEAUCHAMP NOVELS

  Trial of Passion

  April Fool

  Kill All the Judges

  Snow Job

  I’ll See You in My Dreams

  Sing a Worried Song

  ALSO BY WILLIAM DEVERELL

  Fiction

  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

  To the memory of Josiah Wood, my former law partner, a humanitarian, and a powerful progressive voice as a counsel and as a justice in the British Columbia Supreme Court and Appeal Court. His legacy is enshrined in the MI LELUM S’ULXWEN (Elders Court) Society, which he designed to train elders for the First Nations Court in Duncan, BC, as a means to encourage, in his words, “the reconciliation of cultures made necessary by the imposition of residential schools and the resulting deep-rooted suspicion of our community and its justice system.”

  Regina v. Skyler. Transcript, p. 453,

  December 16, 1986.

  DIRECT EXAMINATION OF MANFRED UNGER (CONT’D)

  Q: And when did you return to your hotel?

  A: Sometime after midnight. I read for a while, and went to sleep.

  Q: And when did you next see the accused?

  A: I’m not sure. Mid-morning. Randolph came into the room and I woke up.

  Q: Tell the jury what he said.

  A: He said, “I really did it this time.” I was confused, still half asleep, and I asked him, “Did what?” And he said, “He wouldn’t die. I must have stabbed him ten times, and he wouldn’t die.” I thought he was joking. He said, “It took him forever to die. There was blood all over.” He showed me his leg.

  Q: And what did you see on his leg?

  A: Tooth marks. Blood.

  PART ONE

  FOR THE FUN OF IT

  WEDNESDAY, NOON

  “For you, Monsieur Arthur Beauchamp, pâté végétal aux champignons, then coquilles sautées. Baked brie for Monsieur Meyerson, and le coq au vin, which I do not serve Beauchamp, who has sworn off wine in any form.”

  The year was 1987, in late April; the event was lunch, and the place was Chez Forget, ill-lit and intimate, known for the inspired cuisine of the irascible, despotic Pierre Forget. Arthur had long given up ordering from the menu, having learned it was best to let Pierre have his way.

  Arthur was shakily working on a coffee, his fifth that day. With him was Hubbell Meyerson, being supportive — he’d denied himself his favourite Chablis. Hubbell, his friend for thirty years, since college days, headed up domestic law at Tragger, Inglis, a well-established Vancouver firm. Arthur ran the criminal defence side.

  Pierre studied Arthur with rare solicitude. “How long are you sober now, Beauchamp?” Pronounced, typically, the wrong way, the French way. Beechem was correct, Anglicized over the many centuries since the William the Bastard led his cavalry onto Hastings Field.

  “Dix-huit jours d’enfer.” One does not keep secrets from the chef de cuisine at Chez Forget.

  “Bonne chance.” The wiry little man bounded off.

  Arthur had been sober since a weekend wassail eighteen days ago at the Gastown office of Pomeroy, Marx, Macarthur, Brovak for a young counsel who’d just been called to the bar. At midnight, the party had spilled onto the street outside the building’s ground-floor tavern, the Shillelagh and Shamrock. John Brovak, a brawny, wild barrister, somehow got into a feud with the bouncer, and punches were thrown.

  Arthur had been belting out a favourite folk song, “It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,” as squad cars pulled up. The officers stuck him, Brovak, and six other raucous, inebriated trial lawyers in the drunk tank for two hours, then had a good laugh as they ordered taxis and let them go. The incident seemed, happily, to have been covered up.

  “Taking a little time away from the family this week,” Hubbell said. “They’re off to Florida with their grandparents. Easter break.”

  “I’m sure you’ll keep your nose clean.”

  Hubbell looked indignant. “My behaviour will be angelic.” This family lawyer had a history of marital misconduct. Arthur couldn’t understand that. Hubbell had a perfectly lovely wife, two bright kids. Age had done little damage to this ruddy, handsome man, with his mane of silvery hair and winning smile. He was the one who used to get the girls, back in their college days. Gawky, slat-ribbed Arthur got seconds.

  “And Annabelle?” Hubbell asked.

  Arthur considered the many possible answers to that roomy question. She is well, he wanted to say, she is true, the marital seas are calm, her days of dalliance are over. But then he would have to knock on wood. He contented himself with: “Working feverishly on next week’s Tristan.” Arthur’s flamboyant spouse was artistic director of the Vancouver Opera. His cup rattled in its saucer as he lowered it.

  “You feel you have it under control, Arthur?”

  “For the moment. The addiction lurks, though — you always sense it there.” Like a crouching predator, ready to spring at the first sign of weakness. Arthur had just survived a long, long Easter weekend. Evenings were the worst, especially when Annabelle worked late and only fifteen-year-old Deborah was there to help him through it. But he tried not to involve her in his struggle, tried to shield her from his pain. Teenagers had better things to do. He’d had to call Bill Webb a few times, his AA sponsor.

  “How many days will the trial go?” Hubbell asked. The Skyler case, set for the next day, Thursday, April 23. It would be Arthur’s first stint as a prosecutor.

  “I’m desperately hoping we’ll be done on Monday.” Otherwise he’d be about the only lawyer missing from the Tuesday afternoon office party honouring him and Hubbell — a celebration to mark their promotion to partnerships. Arthur might yet find himself uninvited to the event and to the partnership. Managing partner Roy Bullingham made his offer contingent on Arthur “not running afoul of a situation that might grievously embarrass the firm.”

  Though the debacle in Gastown was known among criminal lawyers, word had yet to reach Bully’s forty-third-floor office.

  “Different kind of game for you,” Hubbell said. “Hitting instead of pitching.”

  “Far simpler than defending. The entire machinery of the state behind you. Everything presented in a neat package by experienced investigators. And it’s been test-run, though abysmally. If I can’t do better, I shall retire from the bar.”

  By test-run, Arthur meant an earlier trial, in December, which ended with a deadlocked jury. A new trial had been ordered. In the face of angry mutterings from the public, the Attorney-General had approached the West Coast’s preeminent defence counsel to lead the prosecution.

  For Arthur, the prospect was a challenge, something different: a sensational murder case, with its dark irony of a happy-faced clown being bumped off by an alleged thrill killer. It was a chance to see things from the other side, to work with the vaunted Homicide section of the Vancouver police. A chance to demonstrate how a prosecution should be run: transparent and even-handed, without guile or hostility.

  The press had dubbed it a thrill killing because the crime seemed otherwise motiveless. The victim, Chumpy the Clown, as he was popularly c
alled, had no enemies or anything worth stealing. He’d been a fixture on downtown streets, from Gastown to Theatre Row, busking with a harmonica, pratfalling, beeping his bright red nose at the kids. He’d been at this for ten years; he was an institution. Tour guides pointed him out. He was named Number One Busker by Vancouver magazine.

  In his other life he was Joyal (Joe) Chumpy, a beer-bellied alcoholic. A gentle, bubbly fat man with lumpy features he exaggerated under clown makeup. He was fifty-three when, on the morning of Sunday, August 3, 1986, he died in his skid road apartment, hemorrhaging from seven deep knife wounds.

  Arthur himself was among Chumpy’s many fans, and had regularly dropped him a few bills. But he was resolved not to let his feelings cloud his role as dispassionate agent of the state. Prosecutors were not allowed to show feelings. Properly, they weren’t even allowed to have feelings.

  “I should think you’d be concerned about your image among the criminal class,” Hubbell said. “The underworld doesn’t much abide turncoats.”

  “Be realistic, Hubbell. A spoiled brat who killed for pleasure, not profit, gives crime a bad name. The Mob will be cheering me on.”

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

  Arthur spent the rest of that day at the Crown office in the Law Courts, interviewing witnesses and reading transcripts until the words blurred. He puffed for a while on his newly purchased Peterson bent — he’d taken to nicotine to stave off desire for that other, crueller drug — and looked balefully at the array of interviews, the death scene photos, the grisly autopsy report.

  None of which much helped Arthur resolve the stickiest puzzle of the case: What made the accused, Randolph Skyler, tick? The handsome, charming twenty-three-year-old seemed an unlikely suspect — studying for a business masters at York University, no previous record, sole offspring of a well-to-do Toronto couple. He was a college athlete — track and field, a sprinter — and a skilled outdoorsman who often joined his dad in Northern Ontario, fishing or bagging ducks and deer.

  He’d flown to the West Coast with his best buddy for the August long weekend. That was during Vancouver’s acclaimed world fair, Expo 86, a celebration marred slightly on the third day of August by the cruel murder of a jolly busker.

  Skyler’s pal, a friend since their adolescent years, was Manfred Unger, a military cadet in Kingston and a key Crown witness whom Arthur had not yet met or interviewed. That distressed Arthur — Unger would be flying in from Ontario late, worryingly late, on the very eve of the trial.

  He rang Homicide, reached lugubrious Lars Nordquist at his desk, and asked for the latest on Unger’s ETA.

  “Half past eleven. Sorry. Witness Services’ fault. Some kind of logistical goof.” Nordquist promised to meet the plane.

  Arthur was determined not to lose sleep over it. Not on the eve of the trial. His debriefing of Unger could wait.

  He tamped out his pipe, shrugged into his coat, packed his heavy book bag, and braved the chill damp of an interminably rainy April, summoning the grit to walk past three bars en route to the parking garage and his 1960 Rolls-Royce Phantom V — a fee from a fraudulent stockbroker lacking liquidity. It was an extravagant luxury, that auto, in the shop a lot, but he’d become attached to its timeless nobility.

  Two days in court, the weekend off, finish on Monday, God willing. Five more days of drinklessness added to his current eighteen would make it twenty-three. Many years ago he had made it to twenty-six (while recovering from a back injury), so he was striving for a personal best. Counting the days, said Bill Webb, gives a sense of accomplishment, of encouragement. At what point, Arthur wondered, would he be able to say he had overcome his addiction?

  It had gotten so bad a few years ago that many believed he was washed up. But flinty, shrewd Roy Bullingham never gave up on him, and chastised him relentlessly for allowing a booze habit to undermine his great skills.

  Helping Arthur stay on the wagon was the fact that Annabelle was currently between lovers. Her affairs — romantic wanderings, she called them — were rarely discussed, except by their daughter, Deborah, who felt sorry for her dad, with his lack of marital backbone.

  Last year, she’d had a dust-up with Annabelle over her fling with a libertine artist. Chastened, Annabelle put her adulterous pursuits on hold, and Arthur’s alcohol intake slowed, to the point that he began showing up in court sober, restricting his sprees to weekends.

  He’d begun going to AA meetings — sporadically at first, with lapses, but more regularly in the new year, though there was that one spectacular blowout a few weeks ago, which put him in the drunk tank. That had prompted him to take the pledge again, with a determination fortified by the urgent need to arm himself for a sensational murder trial. If only he could get through it on the dry …

  WEDNESDAY EVENING

  In placid, affluent West Point Grey, where the Beauchamps lived, cherry trees were celebrating spring’s return with pink bouquets, and daffodils lined the boulevards like dabs of sunshine in the rain. Driving up the lane to his sturdy old brick home, Arthur remembered that his backyard garden needed to be prepared for planting, rain or shine. That, he resolved, was how he would spend the bulk of the weekend — gardening seemed the only soothing pastime he had left.

  He pulled into the double garage beside Annabelle’s Porsche, picked up his heavy briefcase, and went in, stepping carefully over large sheets of set plans and sketches arrayed across the living room floor: Annabelle’s homework. Tristan and Isolde. Opening next week, Thursday.

  He was pleased to observe that Deborah was also doing her homework — she was in his den, tapping away at a bulky new Wang computer, a device that her parents hadn’t quite figured out. “This is so neat,” she’d said on first trying it. “It even corrects your spelling.”

  She broke free to give him a hug. “Can you handle alone, Dad? Mom’s dropping me off for skating.” She had a figure skater’s figure, leggy, limber. Also green hair these days, to go with her green eyes.

  “Sure, I can handle alone. I feel terrific. You just worry about your lutzes.”

  He was feeling soiled by his immersion in Regina v. Skyler and was looking forward to a long, cleansing soak in the bathtub. He found Annabelle upstairs in the master bedroom, dressing for an evening out.

  “Don’t want to smudge,” she said, with a touch of her lips to his. She was thirty-nine, as striking as when he met her eighteen years ago: still svelte, wide mouthed, with large, teasing eyes, and a crop of black hair cut short this month. Eighteen years, and she still gave him palpitations. They used to be just tremors of love, but later, love and hurt.

  “I’m sorry, it came up suddenly. The board is insisting I attend the fundraiser at the Media Club. Per Gustavson will be there, signing albums and cassettes.”

  “Ah, your gifted heldentenor.”

  “If you won’t feel too ill at ease at a cocktail do, darling, you have just enough time to change.”

  The invitation wasn’t emphatic, but Arthur welcomed it nonetheless as a gesture at togetherness. It had been three years since her last extramarital frolic: a thirty-year-old abstract artist, undiscovered and likely forever to be. She preferred younger men. There was only one upside to that: Arthur would have felt even more diminished if her lovers had been his age. But in preparing for her forties, she seemed to have put her restless, reckless years behind her, emboldening Arthur’s hopes. He was almost willing to believe.

  “I would be poor company. I shall be in my den obsessing over the trial.”

  “You’re holding out okay?”

  “It’s hard not to feel the pressure.” He showed her a story in the day’s Sun: “Leading Counsel Takes on Thrill Kill Rerun.” Pictured was fifty-year-old A.R. Beauchamp, QC, in his robes, tall, gangly, and hawk-beaked, overconfidently snapping his suspenders.

  As she read this backgrounder, he undressed in the bathroom and began filling the tub.

  “O
h my God, Arthur. Talk about divulging. ‘He candidly admitted to having had alcohol problems.’”

  “The reporter bluntly put it to me. I’d have looked the fool by equivocating.” Prospective jurors would have read that too, but Arthur felt no shame in it. “Tell Mr. Gustavson I look forward to seeing his Tristan and that I have a tape of his Siegfried that I very much like.” The tenor was a bull of a man, Swedish, much in demand in Europe. “How old would you say he is?”

  “Why?”

  “He seems to have just gotten widely known.”

  “Not yet thirty-five. Most of the great ones don’t mature until they’re in their forties. Like lawyers, darling. Do me up.”

  He was down to his underwear when he approached her and began fumbling with a zipper at the back. “You look quite smashing, dear.” He felt a touch of Eros as his fingers met her skin, and there came an unexpected erection. She felt it too, and playfully pressed her rump against his loins.

  “I love you too, darling. Just hold on to that until I get back.”

  He forced himself to laugh with her as he returned quickly to the bathroom, flustered. Yet it was a good sign, that brief, humble erection, proof of healing vitality. There’d been a long period when his penis had vastly underperformed, a time of weariness and depression. As the tides are controlled by the moon, his capabilities tended to rise and fall according to current cuckoldry conditions.

  As he lay in the tub, soaping himself, images came of Annabelle offering herself, and his cock rose again, unaided, like a periscope. Then came a wave of performance anxiety, and it descended.

  §

  Wrapped in a terry cloth robe, he went down to his den, selected a tape of Liszt études and settled into his club chair with the Skyler file. He pulled out the photographs first. Mug shots rarely flatter, but in his, Randolph Skyler looked handsome, if defiant. A morgue shot showed Joyal Chumpy’s blanched, pudgy body, drained of blood through seven stab wounds. Photos from the crime scene were even more repellent: a room that announced impoverishment and alcoholism and savage, senseless murder. Chumpy was sprawled on a ratty, blood-soaked single bed, a litter of empty beer bottles beside it. The scene inspired Arthur to double down on his pledge.