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  Kill All The Lawyers

  by William Deverell

  Published by Deverell Holdings Ltd. at Smashwords

  Copyright 1994 by William Deverell

  This eBook is licenced for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for you use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you.

  KILL ALL THE LAWYERS is published 2011 by Deverell Holdings Ltd. Random House of Canada hardcover edition published 1994. Ballantine Books edition published 1995. Seal Books edition published February 2001.

  Visit William Deverell's website: www.deverell.com

  Praise for Kill All the Lawyers

  "A lawyer is killed shortly after he has astonished everyone by successfully defending an undoubtedly guilty client. A second lawyer who has a similar success is shot at, and the legal community begins to think that someone out there is attempting to correct undesirable verdicts by sentencing lawyers to death ... The social comedy is hilarious. This is a brilliantly wrought novel, ingenious, entertaining, and continually surprising. Deverell deserves an award for this one." - Robin Skelton, Books in Canada

  "This is a fast, funny novel, West Coast thriller king William Deverell's response to the blockbuster legal potboilers of such lesser, wealthier writers as John Grisham and Scott Turow." Quill and Quire

  "Deverell's crime fiction has always been exceptional. As always, Deverell offers a cynical insider's view of the legal profession. A smart, witty book with great characters and a clever plot." Margaret Cannon, Toronto Globe and Mail

  "A bitingly funny whodunit." Maclean's

  "Kill All the Lawyers is clever, amusing, laced with black humour and viciously accurate depictions of lawyers and judges." Toronto Star

  "Terrific." Toronto Sun

  "This is just an all-round great romp of a book, a wonderful and uproarious whodunit with a magnificently convoluted plot and a cast of characters to die for - a bunch of which do - by one of the country's best (and most irreverently funny) crime and mystery writers." Ottawa Sun

  "As usual, Deverell has whipped up some of the slimiest, scummiest and hilarious characters you're ever going to find between the covers of a book. It's a first-rate whodunit, populated by folks you won't want to forget." Regina Leader Post

  "Kill All the Lawyers is Deverell at his best — tongue-in-cheek, slashing and burning member of his other profession — lawyers. Simply magnificent. Brantford Expositor

  "Smart, contemporary and tart." Edmonton Journal

  "A highly readable tale, a lighthearted novel displaying throughout a deftly light touch." Winnipeg Free Press

  "Sly, wickedly amusing, ... irreverent, refreshing." Vancouver Sun

  "A romp of a whodunit." Red Deer Advocate]

  Dedicated to the defenders of the Clayoquot.

  JACK CADE: I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may worship me their Lord.

  DICK THE BUTCHER: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

  JACK CADE: Nay, that I mean to do.

  Henry the Sixth, Part Two

  William Shakespeare

  Chapter 1. The Last Summer of Arthur Besterman

  Arthur P. Besterman was a reformed alcoholic and a criminal lawyer. He had been droning away for so long at 222 Main Street that he was regarded by the court staff as a fixture, like one of the cement waste bins or water fountains. If the Provincial Court Building were ever to be sold, Besterman would go with it, still passing out his cards.

  He was a dogged lawyer but not very gifted, losing most of his cases. Two failed marriages and a nebulous sense of his own incompetence had led him to seek solace in alcohol, but a few years ago he took the cure and joined the Vancouver Trial Lawyers' chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Most of his clients were persons for whom crime had not paid, shifters and grifters assigned to him through legal aid. He earned enough to keep a small office in the Gastown area and a half-day secretary.

  An accused person who applies for legal aid often does not know who his lawyer will be. The Legal Services Society might assign a very good lawyer, or at least one of middling skills. Or an accused might get Arthur Besterman. It is a lottery.

  Thus did Arthur acquire the file of O.D. Milsom, a dull-witted middle-aged loner who had confessed to the random stabbing deaths of three young women in the previous fall. By the time the trial began the following July, the media had already convicted Milsom, and the court was packed daily with outraged citizenry.

  For Besterman, a very unusual thing happened. He won.

  A hearing was held to determine the admissibility of Milsom's confession—and though Besterman hadn't argued it well, he did raise a point which interested the judge. O.D. Milsom had been apprehended by a group of citizen vigilantes known as the White Angels, the leader of which threatened to emasculate him unless he confessed. Did that make the following outpouring of guilt inadmissible?

  Counsel for the Crown, the wily Leroy Lukey, Q.C., argued through two days that Milsom's confession was not induced by threats or fear of violence.

  The judge sat silent through all of this, then ruled the confession inadmissible. Since there was little other evidence against Milsom, the judge then ordered the jury to acquit him. An appeal was filed on the same day. Milsom packed up his few belongings and disappeared into the void.

  Arthur P. Besterman, enjoying the best day of his life, drove straight from the courthouse to a bar in the Gastown area of Vancouver, near his office, where he ordered his first whiskey in three years. He stayed there until midnight, when he was observed stumbling out the back door to the parking lot.

  As the sun rose the next day, the twelfth of July, an early-rising jogger cutting through that lot spotted two feet sticking from the driver's window of Besterman's 1989 Chrysler New Yorker. Black shoes, black socks, grey suit. The front passenger door was open. Closer inspection revealed the remainder of Besterman's body lying supine on the front seat, his skull caved in. A fan of blood was spread across the sedan's interior, the pavement and on a nearby car, leaving a shadow where the assailant had stood. The coroner guessed a baseball bat, or something similar.

  A mugging was ruled out, since Besterman's wallet, still in his jacket pocket, contained four hundred and fifty-five dollars. Vancouver homicide visited the families of the murdered women, but no anguished father, no vengeance-lusting brother or cousin was found to be without alibi. The leader of the White Angels was questioned, too, but his witnesses confirmed he was snug in his bed at the group's downtown barracks all night.

  For a while the Bar Association maintained pressure on the authorities to solve this crime. Lawyers don't get killed. Lawyers were members of a professional elite, safe, sacrosanct, removed from the battle. Police and criminals get killed, not lawyers.

  After several weeks of failed leads, investigators became apathetic. Soon Besterman was earning, at best, only the occasional paragraph in the back pages.

  The memory of Arthur P. Besterman seemed to slowly dribble away with the coming of the winter rains ...

  §

  "... those ceaseless, sullen rains of winter. Little did Lance Valentine know, as he stared out into the grey watercolour wash outside his window, that he had also been chosen to die."

  Brian Pomeroy punched the period key, then scanned his opening paragraphs with a critic's stern and cautious eye. Imperfect, yes, but surely you must agree, Mr. Widgeon, that the yet unheralded author of these virgin paragraphs has obeyed the do's and don'ts, the edicts and statutes that you hav
e promulgated.

  We have a corpse. The law according to Widgeon: waste little time in wasting your first victim.

  But first, please: know your victim. "The writer must always retain a photograph of this unfortunate soul at an earlier time—while still in the flower of life. Take a few snapshots to remember him by, but do not dwell on him; the reader cares not whether the victim collected stamps or picked his nose or grew prize pumpkins (unless indeed it turns out he was felled, in a jealous rage, by the loser of the annual Southampton Fall Fair)."

  Mr. Widgeon (The Art of the Whodunit, $24.95, Cheltenham Press) also instructs: immediately create an air of mystery. "Something about this death must engage the reader: the senselessness of it, the apparent lack of motive, the odd choice of modus."

  Had Brian sufficiently complied? Is a blunt instrument too blunt a device? Does it limit one's options? Poison, says Widgeon, is so much more subtle, and one should never ignore the possibility of suicide.

  The hunt must be taken up quickly, and the protagonist more formally introduced. But who is Lance Valentine? Alas, the author has never met this shadowy figure with the brave and romantic name—is he a private eye with caustic tongue, a pipe-smoking homicide inspector in rumpled tweed, some kind of nosy, cozy Hercule Poirot?

  Which brings us to that annoying rule number one: Know where you are going.

  Brian examined the typewriter keys, as if seeking coded answers there. No suspects, no motives. One victim. Crushed to death beneath an enormous writer's block.

  Three pages of manuscript, the fruit of two weekends and twelve evenings of creative labour. Why had he boasted to Caroline and, worse, to his snide confreres at the office that he was writing a mystery?

  The phone rang. He waited for Caroline to pick it up in the living room. It rang again, jangling in his brain, breaking up the knots of concentration. Oh, for sanctuary, a place unwired to the pestering world.

  "I'm feeding the owl, Brian," Caroline called. Turning to the window of his den he could see her, under the pear tree, tending to the ever-voracious Howland.

  Stubbornly, he refused to answer the phone, and after the fourth ring he heard his own polite voice from the answering machine, apologizing for his absence.

  "Brian, it's me." Augustina. "Yoo-hoo. Brian? Caroline? Come on, I know you're ..." Her voice suddenly went tense. "Brian, I'm scared." Then shrill with terror. "Oh, my God, he's coming through the door now! He has a knife!"

  Brian knocked over his chair going for the phone.

  "Augustina?"

  "That's sweet, Brian, because there could have been somebody with a knife. Guess what? We've got the Kitswuk Five."

  Chapter 2. The Case of the Kitswuk Five

  Wentworth Chance was in hog heaven on this sodden mid-December Friday. Here he was, at twenty-three, six months out of law school, helping win a big Tony Award-winning West Coast trial, the case of the Kitswuk Five.

  It was he, Wentworth, the lowly articling student, who had stumbled upon that obscure case from Manitoba which had convinced the judge to turf the wiretaps.

  "That just leaves the fink," Brian Pomeroy said. "I'm going to take him off at the knees."

  They were in the office girding for battle, the tenth day of the trial of five braves of the Kitswuk Nation who were accused of planting dynamite near a salmon ladder beside the newly built Knot Lake Dam. Power for a smelter; silt to kill the spawning streams. A popular politician—mayor, Legion president, and prime booster of the Town of Knot Lake—had been touring the site with the construction superintendent when the blast caused the dam to breach on one side. The two men were carried off with the torrent, and met their deaths by drowning. The Kitswuk Five were charged with manslaughter.

  Brian had won a change of venue for the trial: Vancouver, far away from Knot Lake, where the townspeople were hostile toward the accused.

  "What did I do with the sheets on the informer?" Brian asked.

  Wentworth handed him a skimpy file: a few stolen cheques, an assault, a false pretences.

  "Not much of a record," Brian said. "Need some props." He told Wentworth to go to the closed-files locker and bundle up about thirty pounds of paper. Wentworth didn't ask why. One doesn't question. One just does. Happily.

  Wentworth was a somewhat emaciated-looking young man whose face was pitted with teen-aged wounds. He was astigmatic, given to wearing half-moon reading glasses, which he thought made him appear mature and learned. He had grown up in a village on the Alaska Highway—a filling station, basically—and had hungered for the lights. Now he was living in a great port city, a connection town full of crooks and flakes—which the West Coast of Canada seemed to attract in unusual abundance—and articling for a firm that seemed to be at the centre of all its action.

  Wentworth had been near the top of his graduating class and was entertained by scouts from several large firms. But he was idealistic and wanted to fight for people's rights. For law graduates set upon this course, there was only one firm in Vancouver, that holy shrine of the underdog, the office of Pomeroy, Macarthur, Brovak and Sage. Brian Pomeroy, defender of Greenpeaceniks, Sea Shepherds and Earth Firsters (though for some unfathomable reason he wanted to be a mystery writer). Maximillian Macarthur III, who seemed to get every big civil liberties case in town. John Brovak, the abrasive Rambo of the criminal courts. The scandal-haunted beauty Augustina Sage, champion of aboriginal rights.

  These were bold and doughty barristers, not simpering solicitors. These were guerrilla fighters in the Great War of Justice.

  So Wentworth Chance applied for articles with the offices of Pomeroy Macarthur—as did thirty-seven other classmates. The offices were located in Gastown, Vancouver's old section, at the neck of the downtown peninsula, near the docks of Burrard Inlet. The city had attempted to restore the area but had failed, and its streets counted many junk import shops and tourist traps. The area is near Chinatown and merges with skid road, whose derelicts often migrate into Gastown to solicit spare change and frighten tourists.

  Pomeroy, Macarthur and Company were on the second floor of a nineteenth-century red brick building between the CPR tracks and the bronze statue of Gassy Jack Deighton on Maple Tree Square. Deighton, a lush, was one of the spiritual founders of Vancouver, a pioneer oddball of the Left Coast.

  On the ground floor of the building was the New Age Awareness Centre, where seekers were massaged, enlightened and made whole. Formerly, the space had been rented out as a rock and roll club. The new downstairs tenants were much quieter, except for the primal screamers.

  When Wentworth Chance had arrived for his interview with the firm, he couldn't get up his courage to go inside, and instead wandered through the New Age Awareness Centre seeking strength. In one of the rooms, according to the sign outside the door, someone was doing a workshop on "Dreamwork, Trance Channeling, and Past Life Regression."

  The hell with this new age stuff, he decided, criminal law was his dreamwork. He went upstairs and, after waiting with numerous law school peers, ultimately found himself in the library-boardroom looking upon his gods. They seemed out of sorts, as if hung over, especially John Brovak. Brian Pomeroy appeared bored with the process and spent the whole time standing, staring out a window.

  The interview went something like this:

  Brovak: "How many more eager beavers are out there?"

  Sage: "I counted five anyway."

  Brovak: "Aw, God help me. I need to go home and conk off."

  Macarthur: "Yeah, I have brain-fade. Let's just take this guy and get it over with."

  Brovak: "You got a car?"

  Chance: "I can't afford a car."

  Macarthur: "Well, you better buy a bicycle because you're going to be pedalling a lot of paper around."

  Wentworth had heard he would see lots of paper during his year-long internship before being called to the bar. Running back and forth to court registries, filing documents, work which they could hire a grade one dropout to do. Except they would have to pay the minimu
m wage and comply with the Fair Labour Practices Act.

  Since signing on with the firm last June, Wentworth had been toiling something like a hundred hours a week. He was not getting overtime, unless one counted his share of the tab the firm picked up for the drunken debauches that Friday lunches at Au Sauterne often evolved into. Au Sauterne being a restaurant across the square where individual entrees cost as much as the monthly payments on his new Outback 310 twenty-one-speed bike.

  Ah, but there were perquisites. Had Wentworth accepted articles with the firm of Staid, Stolid, Boring and Sober, he would rarely have seen the inside of a criminal courtroom or witnessed the slash and duel over the rights of the accused. Though he was on overload, and his nickel-nursing bosses barely paid him the interest due on his student loans, he loved this firm. Would they keep him on when he was called to the bar next year?

  §

  Laden with a box of old files, Wentworth followed Brian and Augustina Sage into the courtroom. They took a seat at a crowded counsel table and turned to look at their clients: buckskin and feathers, noble, proud, and probably guilty, though that, Wentworth had learned, was not important to a lawyer. From the gallery, several witnesses from Knot Lake were staring at these haughty savages with abhorrence.

  The Kitswuk Five had originally retained Augustina Sage, the junior partner, but she had asked Brian Pomeroy to lead the defence. He was a tree-hugger; the case was right up his ecological alley. Wentworth's black-robed hero was six-foot-one and ungainly, with a bony face, an untidy Mark Twain moustache and a blond thatch roof, unruly tufts of straw. Wentworth knew from tales told in the office coffee room that Brian suffered a tendency to complicate his personal life with flubs and footshots, but in court he was cool and quick-witted.

  Conferring in whispers beside him was Augustina Sage, slim, slinky, with teased curls, dark almond eyes and tawny skin from a Métis mother. Wentworth had a crush on her.