Kill All the Judges Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PART ONE THE LIFE OF BRIAN

  1 THE MADNESS OF GILBERT GILBERT

  2 NAUGHTY JUDGE

  3 THE ORANGE SUPERSKUNK OF HAMISH MCCOY

  4 THE VALENTINE AGENCY

  5 THE THREE-ELEVEN FERRY

  6 CAROLLING CAROLINE

  7 THE CONQUEST OF NORBERT

  8 EAT THE RICH

  9 A BLUNDER BAY CHRISTMAS

  10 NEW LOVE BLOOMS AS THE OLD LIES DYING

  11 VALE OF TEARS

  12 THE WHISPERED ANSWER

  13 RUNNING MATE

  14 TRIAL RUN

  15 THE NEWS AT SIX

  16 HOTEL PARANOIA

  PART TWO POETIC JUSTICE

  17 THE THIRD FIDDLE THEORY

  18 SOMEONE ELSE IS GOING TO DIE

  19 THE BADGER

  20 SEE NO EVIL

  21 THE SNAKE PIT

  22 APRIL FOOL

  23 THE CARNIVAL COMES TO LIGHTHOUSE LANE

  24 THE OWL AND THE HOOKER

  25 FOWL PLAY

  26 THE MAID, THE MAJOR, AND THE MEXICAN

  27 JUST THE FAX, MA’AM

  28 A TRAGEDY OF JUSTICE

  29 FOWL MURDER

  30 ON HER MAJESTY’S SERVICE

  31 FEMME FATALE

  32 EBBE AND FLO

  33 THE REAL MCCOY

  34 YEAR OF THE RAT

  35 CRUCIFICTION

  ALSO BY WILLIAM DEVERELL

  COPYRIGHT

  To the memory of David Gibbons, QC,

  my former partner in law, whose generosity, good humour,

  and largeness of spirit touched all who knew him,

  and whose courtroom artistry was surpassed by none.

  THE MADNESS OF GILBERT GILBERT

  There was no dispute about the facts. A hundred-pound weakling with the redundant name of Gilbert F. Gilbert had stepped into a crowded Vancouver courtroom and aimed a small-calibre revolver at Chief Justice Wilbur Kroop. A police officer leaped from the witness stand, and as he tackled Gilbert the gun fired. The officer stopped the bullet with his heart.

  All these facts were admitted by the defence at Gilbert Gilbert’s murder trial in January 2007. It was conceded, too, that the accused–forty-five, single, friendless–was a senior court clerk. Thus he had easy access to the courtroom from Kroop’s chambers, where he’d been hiding.

  They called Kroop the Badger, not just because of his squat, broad body but because of his claws. The defence portrayed him as a notorious bully who had taunted and shamed Gilbert, who made a fool of him in open court and sent him off in tears, who drove him to the precipice of madness and made him jump.

  The defence argued that in his delusional state the accused had convinced himself Kroop was a former Nazi death camp commandant whom Gilbert had been ordered by God to eliminate. “God’s will be done!” he shouted at his jailers, at the many doctors who examined him.

  His counsel was Brian Pomeroy, of the feisty criminal law firm of Pomeroy, Macarthur, Brovak, and Sage, and he was assisted by young Wentworth Chance, who did most of the work, burying himself in the law, interviewing specialists in post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia. In comparison, the Crown’s witnesses in rebuttal were a mediocre lot.

  With Chance doing the heavy lifting, Pomeroy played to the jury, raising objections and cross-examining with his typical dry, manic wit. A celebrated neurotic, he’d won celebrated trials, most notably the recent defence of the assassin (alleged) of the president of Bhashyistan. But his life was in turmoil–he was drinking hard, tupping his secretary, and his marriage was heading for meltdown. Unable to face Caroline’s cold silences and searing looks, he had taken to sleeping in the office on weekday nights.

  In overcoming these handicaps, it helped that Pomeroy had drawn a dispassionate prosecutor and a judge with whom he used to smoke dope. The jury seemed interested and sympathetic–all except the sneering foreman, Harrison, a retired major from the Patricia’s Light Infantry, a former combat training instructor. He would look at Pomeroy with a disdainful curl of a smile, as if to say, You lawyers will defend anybody, won’t you? Even a hypersensitive worm like Gilbert.

  Neither judge nor prosecutor interfered when Pomeroy portrayed Kroop, who, at seventy-four, was on the eve of retirement as a sadistic mountebank. However, the chief justice was spared the ignominy of having to testify, and thus spared the whip of cross-examination.

  Meanwhile, Gilbert had got himself together while in custody, was functioning again, restored to his old rabbitlike persona but with total amnesia for the events of the previous June. Physically, however, he was deteriorating, stressed, complaining of dizzy spells and heart palpitations.

  Pomeroy wondered what it would be like to take a holiday from reality. Was psychosis truly a haven from unbearable oppression, as the psychiatrists testified? Might it even be fun? Like tripping out on LSD. He’d tried nervous breakdowns a couple of times, but they weren’t fun. More like tripping out on fumes from paint cans.

  The prosecutor’s summing-up was a concise, no-nonsense plea in which she urged her case for conviction but conceded that Wilbur Kroop had stretched the bounds of civility toward his beleaguered clerk. Kroop, during all this, was in his chambers on the next floor up, pretending lack of interest but in a tight-lipped, vengeance-seeking fury.

  On the eve of his final address, Pomeroy was relaxing over a couple of drinks at the office–he felt he had it in the bag–when he got a distressing call from the oldest of his three adopted kids, fifteen-year-old Gabriela (“We miss you, Daddy, please love Mom, please come home…”) The agony, the sleepless night, would have felled many lesser men, but Pomeroy gutted it out in a ninety-minute jury speech, covering all bases, thanks to Wentworth Chance’s forensic aide-mémoir. Trauma-induced psychosis. Delusional ideation. Confabulation. Almost too much to take in one gulp.

  At one point, however, he began to cry, and because he’d been going on about the tyrannies perpetrated by Wilbur Kroop on his client, the jury mistakenly believed he was crying for Gilbert Gilbert.

  The jury went out on January 11 and stayed out for five increasingly tense days. They came back twice seeking clarifications, strain on every face, cold determination on the foreman’s. Pomeroy feared that the wuss-despising major was winning the war in that barren, locked room. That he would miss the start of Regina v. Reuben (Ruby) Morgan and Twenty-one Others, a marathon drug conspiracy trial set for January 17, was the lesser of his worries.

  But one day before, the jury finally trooped in after dinner, weary but ready. The clerk rose: “Mr. Foreman, what is your verdict? Do you find the accused guilty or do you find the accused not guilty by reason of insanity?”

  Major Harrison stood at attention and hissed, “Guilty, by God.”

  A stunned silence while the other jurors looked at one another in confusion, finally remonstrating. “Excuse me, Major, but…” “No, no, we agreed…”

  The judge asked if there was a problem.

  Major Harrison did a quick shake of his head, as if coming out of a fog. “No, sir, I’m sorry, sir. Not guilty.”

  “And are you unanimous?” asked the judge.

  “Yes, sir.” Through gritted teeth.

  Not many in the crowded court were focusing on Gilbert Gilbert during this exchange, but when the major misfired with his faulty verdict, Gilbert sat back as if punched in the face. Pomeroy turned to see him blanching, struggling to his feet, gasping and clutching his chest, and finally keeling over. He died almost instantly.

  The fates had allowed Wilbur Kroop to exact revenge, but little did anyone suspect that more judges were about to be targeted…

  As Brian reread that ghastly pa
ragraph, he felt a Pavlovian shock, the kind administered to a rat making a wrong turn in the maze. Ever since he’d installed Horace Widgeon’s program on his hard drive–Secrets of the Whodunit, $59.98, Version OS X–he’d been getting these little jolts, not painful but persistent. The sensible part of him believed there was a short-circuit somewhere in his ugly, glowing purple eMac. In his fantasies, he imagined Widgeon was pressing a zap-Pomeroy button on a supercomputer in his cottage in the Cotswolds.

  Yes, Brian had mocked the legendary creator of the Inspector Grodgins series, his mentor from afar. In the section titled “The Author as Soothsayer,” Widgeon instructs: Do not predict! I find myself forever in despair that so many beginners subscribe to the “little-did-he-know” school of composition. Let this historic and holy injunction be your guiding light: “Just the facts, ma’am.”

  Was Brian dealing in facts? Or was he making them up? Did he have any idea what the facts were? One obvious fact was that he was having the mother of all nervous breakdowns. (His shrink suspected it had gone beyond breakdown; she had a complex handle for it: stress disorder, disorganized type with delusional ideation. Ideas such as: I can make a living being a writer. And its corollary. I won’t have to practise law any more.)

  His collapse had been kindled by the pressure of work, the Gilbert Gilbert homicide, then the endless hell of Regina v. Reuben (Ruby) Morgan and Twenty-one Others– a conspiracy involving one ton of cocaine, eight hundred hours of wiretap, twenty-two traffickers, thirteen quarrelsome lawyers, and Justice Darrel Naught, an insufferable fat fascist who wouldn’t know a reasonable doubt if it perched on his nose. Each evening after court, Brian and his cronies shared their woes, and he would often arrive home late–if he came home at all–smelling of pot and booze. Defensive and snappish, moody and uncommunicative, he had driven Caroline to file for divorce. This time, the grounds weren’t adultery but cruelty. And this time she meant it.

  He’d moved to a West End apartment but abandoned it after finding his twenty-fifth-floor balcony suicidally risky. Now he was in an artist’s garret, or its pathetic facsimile: a third-floor room in a third-rate hotel, the Ritz, in Chinatown on the cusp of skid road. No one knew he was hiding here, not even his partners. Not even his secretary. Delete. He didn’t have a secretary. Roseanne quit last month.

  So here he was, armed with Merriam-Webster and Roget and Fowler and Widgeon and a wheezing computer and a full-monty breakdown, pouring another tequila, lighting another cigarette, staring gloomily out a dust-clouded window overlooking Main and Keefer, where the shops were closing for the evening and the grifters and hookers were taking over the streets. He thought of slipping out to one of the takeout joints, the Beautiful Sunrise Restaurant, the Good Cheer Noodle House. Or maybe the Lucky Penny Pizza, for a change. These places depressed him. Everything depressed him. Especially his day job, the defence of Morgan and Twenty-one Others.

  He was sick of law, sick of the whole system; he had broken under its pressure. Dr. Epstein had put him on tricyclics and told him to find some diversion, some favourite craft. Thus was born Kill All the Judges. Chapter One, “The Madness of Gilbert Gilbert,” introducing said Gilbert Gilbert as tragic farceur and starring the author, the celebrated neurotic Brian Pomeroy, dazzling readers with his typical dry, manic wit.

  He’ll show Caroline. Such a literary snob, the academically hubristic Professor Pomeroy and her highfalutin graduate courses. Lit 403: Thackeray, Trollope, and Brontë: The English Novel in the Age of Vanity. And now she was published, having somehow persuaded a small press to put out her collected stories. He’d seen himself in some of them, the fucked-up boyfriend or husband. How dare she win a Best First Fiction Award for that?

  He fully expects Judges to sell more than her paltry two thousand copies of Sour Memories. How might he pitch it to publishers? A memoir dressed up as fiction? Fiction disguised as memoir? Creative true crime? Creative untrue crime? A touch of Conrad? I am able to write of these events only as I recollect them, and memory ever dims with age. Truth, fiction, outright lies, who cares any more? Creative non-fiction, that’s the general rubric, and that’s what he’s into, the hottest trend in literature; it gets you into the book pages, the literary blogs, The Oprah Winfrey Show. Eat your heart out, Caroline.

  Yes, Judges will represent the cutting edge of creative non-fiction, stropped to razor sharpness. In the meantime, let’s just call this lumpy stew of facts and fibs a mystery…

  But was the Gilbert case merely an arrogant sidebar? The great Pomeroy! Poster boy of the Bhashyistan Democratic Revolutionary Front, victorious defender of assassins and addled court clerks. He could hear Widgeon grumbling: Where is the meat of this story, the main dish? Does not the title promise a serving of dead judges?

  Please forgive the delay in the kitchen…

  NAUGHTY JUDGE

  Brian Pomeroy had gone on an Easter weekend bender and only learned on returning to the Ruby Morgan trial in a bleary-eyed fog that on Good Friday a veteran family court judge had vanished after wandering from her cottage at Honeymoon Bay. She was well advanced in years, and her disappearance remained a baffling puzzle for family and friends.

  Two months later, just as the bogged-down Morgan case was extended for another ninety days, there occurred a curious death at sea. A retired provincial court judge was spotted waving and shouting in the wake of the flagship of the B.C. Ferries fleet. He was swept away in the turbulent waters of Active Pass before a rescue team got to him, and he could not be resuscitated. Arguably, his eagerness to be saved ruled out a suicide attempt. But no one saw him go overboard–except, possibly, whoever might have hurled him over the railing. Father Time, he was called, with his 85 per cent conviction rate, a scourge of the criminal community and, it follows, their representatives.

  An unease began to be felt among the judiciary, who shared nervous jokes about seeking danger pay for their job–inherently risky because the courts are crucibles of bitterness; every trial has its loser, some of whom are sociopathic or demented, and every loser has a lawyer, competent or otherwise, who shifts blame to those who sit in judgment.

  Finally, on August 17, after the last objection was made and denied and the last plea for leniency ignored, the Morgan trial finally dragged to the finish line. Judge Naught had survived seven months of putting up with the defence counsels’ whining, their insults, their spurious objections. He paid them back by sentencing each of their clients to twenty years. Except the ringleader, Ruby Morgan, who got life.

  Though exhausted, Naught was in a mood to celebrate and began by sharing whiskies with the prosecution team. That was late in the afternoon, in chambers. Accounts are hazy as to where he went next. Not to the El Beau Room or any other watering hole favoured by bar and bench. Not home, to his dreary bachelor apartment.

  A bland and forgettable face, a middle-aged paunch in a suit, Darrel Naught likely would have gone unnoticed in the city’s better dining salons. Proof that he’d eaten was subsequently found in the remnants of lamb tenderloin in his stomach contents.

  He was last seen alive at a quarter to midnight, at Fishermen’s Wharf on the False Creek docks, heading for a boathouse owned by Minette Lefleur, whose cards advertised “personal, discreet escort and massage service” and who catered to the top tier, including several notables. One of her cards was found in Naught’s wallet.

  As Naught gained the boathouse ramp, Joe Johal–Honest Joe, as he’s known in his commercials–was just leaving, shrugging into his coat in a light rain. They almost collided on the gangplank, a moment made more awkward because they recognized each other. Johal’s Chevrolet-Pontiac dealership had lost a breach of contract case before Naught several years ago.

  “Evening, Judge,” said Johal, and he carried on briskly to the parking lot. His last view of Naught was of him standing uncertainly on the ramp. Or so Johal said at the inquest (to his credit, he’d come forward as a witness). Minette Lefleur testified that Naught failed to show for his midnight massage. She knew nothing
further.

  Judge Naught’s body was found the day after his disappearance, floating in the scum of False Creek. Because there were no external injuries, the coroner’s jury couldn’t decide among accident, suicide, and foul play. There was scuttlebutt, not taken seriously, that the perpetrator was to be found among the many defence lawyers who’d been overheard calling down curses on his head.

  The police couldn’t connect anyone to his death. No one disliked him enough to kill him, nor were many going to miss him. In fact, however, he had not met his death by fair means but foul–committed, naturally, by the least likely…

  Brian glared through a haze of cigarette smoke at that last ugly paragraph, its offensive foretelling, its runaway negatives, its blatant pandering to the reader. Do not predict! Do not give the ending away!

  He was in a foul mood, felt he’d been sucked into the blackest hole of the galaxy. Two and a half pages had he written in the five weeks since he’d crawled from divorce court like a whipped dog. On September 4, that day of infamy, Caroline had won custody of the three kids, sole rights to the family home and to practically everything he ever owned, including his late mother’s stemware, his Honda 350cc bike, and the bedsheets between which he and his wife of twenty years had loved and fought. Brian had the clothes on his back and this old Mac computer.

  And here was the rub: Brian still…loved her. That was the tricky part, he loved her. Yes, he’d been unfaithful, somehow he’d never understood how to fight that; it was like…well, nicotine. Caroline had retaliated with her own lovers, insipid academics. Despite everything, he loved her, despite the competitiveness, the literary swordplay, the oh-so-clever duels over words. (Or maybe because of those things, he wasn’t sure any more.)

  The judge who presided over this carnival of marital injustice was Rafael Whynet-Moir, a rookie, newly appointed to the B.C. Supreme Court. He will also die–assuming Brian can think of a felicitous way of death, nicely worked but not too complex, fitting for one who had treated the author with such contempt. (I’m sorry, Mr. Pomeroy, but this court isn’t swayed to pity a defendant so bereft of the simple social skills required for the relationship of marriage.) Poison à la Borgia? Too effete, too Dame Agatha. A gremlinized paraglider plummeting toward a hissing, spitting volcano into a boiling, sulphurous crater? Better.