Sing a Worried Song Read online

  The very air in the lounge was intoxicating, a potpourri of alluring scents, wines and whiskies, gin and rum. He had to step by Jurgenhoff, financial trusts, who was asleep on a chair, tightly clutching a rye and ginger, his toupee askew. McCowan, commercial contracts, had rolled up his pants and was hovering over a golf ball with a putter. Arthur had played the fool at many similar office festivities, and this spectacle kept temptation at bay.

  All the secretarial staff seemed to have fled for safety. Annabelle had promised to pop in, but had probably popped right out again. There was a final dress rehearsal tonight for Tristan. He knew he ought to go home to be with his daughter. But he couldn’t bear the thought of crying in front of her.

  He made himself small en route to his corridor, escaping notice. From behind a nearby office door came the sounds of grunting, puffing, moaning — a couple locked in ecstasy.

  All this distracted Arthur from his pain, but it came back as he got to his own office, his cold, lonely sanctuary. He had bungled it. The one and only prosecution he would ever do. A massive blot on his career. The jokes and backbiting. Poor Beauchamp, the old fellow deserved what he got. Tried a shady tactic and it backfired.

  He shut the door, and roared: “Shit! Shit!”

  He caught a movement, a spindly figure standing at his window, staring into the evening gloom. Roy Bullingham’s croaking voice: “You won’t mind if we wait until the weekend to move you upstairs? Sorry you’ll lose the mountains, but you’ll have the ocean and the sunset.” He raised a glass of something, probably the Laphroaig he preferred. “Welcome to the starry heights.” The old boy seemed a little tipsy.

  Arthur slumped into an armchair, fighting another withdrawal spasm. “How was the function, Bully?”

  “Meyerson gave you a vigorous roasting. Your charming and vivacious spouse responded on your behalf with grace and wit. After the champagne ran out, I made the mistake of opening the bar in the lounge. The hangers-on are there, looting it. But all work, as they say.” He thumbed through a pile of transcripts on the desk. “Bad day, Beauchamp?”

  “Horowitz pulled the rug from under me.”

  “I was so advised by a rather stiff young man who insisted on dropping off your file. He said you have a heavy night of preparation. I shall leave you to it.”

  Arthur looked balefully at the stack of papers Boynton had delivered. Bully paused at the door. “Damn good thing your arrest for drunk and disorderly didn’t sour the occasion. Never quite made the news, did it?”

  Arthur opened his mouth, but couldn’t find words.

  “Be thankful that I play golf with the publisher of the Sun. Good luck tomorrow.”

  Arthur should have known never to underestimate this sharp-witted sole surviving founder of the firm. The old boy not only had powerful antennae, but impressive connections and great discretion.

  He opened the file to the rough draft of his jury address and intoned, “Ladies and gentlemen, the onus is on the Crown to defeat the presumption of innocence and to prove this lying scoundrel is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” He let the summing-up slide into the wastebasket.

  He phoned Deborah, found her allegedly doing homework. She’d had a “totally catastrophic” day, having forgotten her English assignment and been upbraided by Mr. Lynch, then getting into a fight with her girlfriend “over some ridiculous triviality,” and then being stalked by a pimply-faced ghoul who shared a table with her in lab.

  Arthur told her to finish her homework and that he would pick up some Chinese food on the way home. “Then, darling Deborah, I want to hear all about your bad day.”

  WEDNESDAY MORNING

  Arthur tried mightily to present a calm, untroubled face as he arrived at the Law Courts on this drizzling, mournful morning. Apart from greeting the sheriffs and court staff, he kept to himself, taking his place at the counsel table to resume working on a crossword puzzle, which he went at ferociously, with pencil and eraser.

  No one approached him but Mandy. She touched his arm briefly, gently, as she passed by to take her place beside Pomeroy, who was intensely engaged with the speech he would shortly give.

  The room was packed and buzzing. Skyler, in a blazer, sat stiff and straight, a wounded but brave warrior. He looked hard at Arthur, his lips curling into a little message of a smile conveying the merest hint of triumph, of awareness that the tide had turned in his favour.

  Pomeroy rose and scanned the jury with his best, winning, boyish grin. He began by offering solicitous words about Joe Chumpy, whom all of Vancouver loved, and Manfred Unger, a tragic figure driven to take his own life, driven by guilt over his murderous act.

  “My client was severely tested by Mr. Beauchamp, who — and let’s make no bones about it — is one of the best anywhere at his craft. But Mr. Skyler not only survived the shelling, but stood up very well indeed. Some of you ladies and gentlemen might be troubled by some aspects of this young man, but he’s a bright graduate student with a future, and he deserves a scrupulously fair trial.”

  Brian then walked around the counsel table and stood beside Arthur, who carried on with his crossword, occasionally chewing his pencil end.

  “Now, I’m not going to pretend I’m any kind of match for Mr. Beauchamp here; I’m just a simple journeyman. You ladies and gentlemen can expect a vigorous and eloquent address from my learned friend, who I see is so absorbed in his crossword puzzle that the cynical among us might think he’s trying to distract attention from me.”

  Several jurors laughed. And there was more mirth when Pomeroy stood in front of Arthur, blocking the jury’s view of him. Arthur, caught out, smiled sheepishly, and put his puzzle away.

  “The jury can expect my learned friend to attack Mr. Skyler’s testimony with great gusto, but he’ll be grabbing at air, because there’s absolutely nothing in the Crown’s case to rebut a single word he spoke. In the end this is about reasonable doubt. There’s ample reason to doubt Mr. Gillies’s shaky identification, to explain the thumbprint on the Coors, to justify my client’s lack of frankness with the police, to conclude that Manfred Unger was morbidly inspired by the thrill-killing villain from a popular mystery novel.”

  “‘You don’t have the balls’ — that was the challenge hurled at poor Manfred, who hero-worshipped my client, who took that dare seriously and did a horrendous act to win his approval. Out of loyalty to Unger, the accused kept his awful secret until it drove his friend to suicide.”

  After canvassing the evidence, drawing from it every exculpatory crumb and particle it afforded, he exhorted the jury in the revered words of Viscount Sankey: “Throughout the web of the English criminal law one golden thread is always to be seen” — the prosecution must always prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

  “As you deliberate, ladies and gentlemen, please spare a thought for the many cases where persons have been wrongly convicted, and how shattering and soul-destroying that must be, a lifetime sentence for a crime done by another.

  “So I urge you to return this young man to his family and his studies. Has he not suffered enough? Must he live out his life within the cruel walls of a cold, dank, and merciless prison?” With trembling voice he recited a verse from Oscar Wilde’s remembrance of Reading Gaol: “‘All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; and that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.’

  “In closing, I remind you your verdict must be unanimous. There will be debate, but to those of you not convinced, not morally certain, that this young man did this horrible deed, I call upon you to stand firm, stand tall for justice, and return a verdict of not guilty.”

  There was a single handclap as he sat, and it came from Juror Twelve, in the back row. She was red-faced as she joined the rest of the jury for the morning break.

  §

  Pomeroy had considerably raised the jury’s expectations for Arthur, to the point that anything less than
a roof-rattler might seem a letdown. So, rather than allowing his opponent to dictate the rules of the game, he abstained from any histrionics when he stood to address the jury. There would be no drama in his voice, no anger, no fustian arm-waving. No notes. More like a fireside chat with folks from the neighbourhood.

  “Let me start off, my friends, by offering my apology for having been absorbed in my crossword. Frankly, I was bedevilled by one stubborn clue: ‘Whose nose grows.’ Thirteen letters, so it couldn’t be Pinocchio. Starts with a B and an A. Should have known better than to start the darn thing — I get obsessed. I actually got into serious trouble one time when I missed about six bus stops working on one, and got home to a cold dinner and a colder wife.” Juror Five, the crossword fan, led the laughter.

  “‘Whose nose grows.’ I don’t know why that clue bothers me so much. Maybe because my own oversized sniffer is one of my more distracting features. Anyway, let’s get to work.”

  With the jury warmed up and relaxed, Arthur began by praising Pomeroy: “Such a charming and adroit lawyer. Such a well-wrought speech.” Turning to Brian with a broad smile. “Hell of a job, Brian, given the obvious difficulties of your case.” To the jury: “Let’s face it, he made some of his most awkward arguments seem almost rational.” Pomeroy had no choice but to grin and bear it.

  “But at the end of the day, the issue here is a simple one, isn’t it? Either Mr. Skyler was telling the truth or he was lying. No middle way. If his story is false, there’s only one verdict open. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it, ladies and gentlemen?” A couple of jurors nodded. A good start.

  For the next half hour, he methodically picked away at Skyler’s many slips and fibs, adding subtle brush strokes intended to portray a bigoted, arrogant, posturing narcissist. “Falsus in uno, it is said, falsus in omnibus. Untrue in one thing, untrue in everything.

  “So are we to believe Mr. Skyler, or are we to believe Manfred Unger, who saw the teeth marks, who attended to that wound, who heard his bosom friend say, ‘I really did it this time. He wouldn’t die’?”

  So began the process of resurrecting Manfred Unger from his previous role of stumbling, self-contradicting witness. Arthur raised him on a pedestal, shone a sympathetic light on him, reminded the jury of the terrible pressure the sensitive young cadet must have been under, with his military dad and pious mother.

  “Add to that, the poor fellow was in love with a man who held a metaphorical pistol to his head, who could out him, shame him, destroy him, if he didn’t reshape his evidence. And who did indeed destroy him. Manfred Unger had failed his idol with his too-obvious cover story, and Manfred knew that. He was wretched and desolate with self-reproach, and so he jumped from Granville Bridge.

  “Having observed poor Manfred, having heard him, having felt his pain, did he seem to you, my friends, to be a man capable of savage, cold-hearted murder? Yet that is what Randy Skyler begs you to believe. The ‘baboon-in-the-toque’ theory wasn’t going to fool you — he finally figured out that you folks were too smart for that, so he came up with this last-gasp effort to blame his dead best friend.”

  Arthur saw that Skyler was looking at him with a smirk of disbelief, and he took an impulsive shot at him: “And no one’s buying this one either, Randy.” There was a massive intake of breath in the courtroom. Taking a swat like that was simply not done in a summing-up. But no one issued a challenge.

  Skyler’s smile did not go away, though it was stiff and fixed as Arthur carried on calmly, reminding the jury what Skyler had scribbled in the margins of For the Fun of It: “‘You’d think his hands would be tired! Nice!’ ‘One less loser!’ Well, folks, that’s pretty much how the smiling gentleman over there regarded Joe Chumpy. ‘One less loser.’” All eyes were on Skyler as his smile slowly faded.

  Arthur gathered together a few loose ends, spoke of the jury’s high responsibility, and asked them to listen attentively to the judge’s instructions. He returned to his chair, glanced at the crossword lying there. “‘Whose nose grows.’ Thirteen letters. Aha!” He looked in triumph to the jury, then to Skyler, and spelled it out: “B-A-R-E-F-A-C-E-D-L-I-A-R.”

  That caused some laughter in the back. Mandy Pearl stifled a smile, as did Justice Horowitz, who covered up by briskly ordering the noon break.

  Arthur slipped outside. He had no appetite for lunch, nor for the reviews, the polite, lukewarm praise that would tell him he hadn’t quite pulled it off. Composing himself, like an athlete returning from the field of play, he strolled about the gardens of Robson Square, puffing on his Peterson, occasional raindrops spitting on him from the leaden sky.

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

  Concluding his instructions, Horowitz finally turned the case over to the jury, with what Arthur felt were superfluous reminders about the presumption of innocence. They could not convict, the judge emphasized, unless they were convinced Skyler was lying.

  Skyler’s expression — an innocent wronged, being crucified — relaxed when the jurors disappeared but tightened when Horowitz ordered him confined to await the verdict: a standard practice in murder trials. Arthur doubted Skyler would have absconded, given he likely believed he’d won over the jury, or at least had earned his reasonable doubt.

  Boynton spoke low as they changed in the barristers’ room, a sour harangue. “We know he’s lying. Brian and Mandy know he’s lying. Justice Horowitz knows he’s lying. Everybody who was in chambers knows he’s lying, and that includes the court clerk and the court reporter. Everybody but the jury knows about Laurence Wyacki. And the jury may think Skyler’s lying, but that’s not enough, is it?”

  After several more minutes of his morose company, Arthur fled outside, by the Robson Square exit, and filled his pipe. He was soon joined by Mandy, who he guessed had followed him. As he lit her cigarette, she squeezed his hand.

  “How long, do you think?” she asked.

  “It will not be tonight. Tomorrow. Late tomorrow. Even longer if they’re divided.”

  “We’ll be grabbing dinner at the El Beau Room, Brian and I. Join us?”

  “Thank you, Mandy, but I’m off to home to shower and change. Annabelle and I have an opera opening to attend, and we’ve reserved a late table at Pierre’s.”

  This mention of wife and itinerary failed to deter Mandy. She touched his cheek, then jotted a number on a business card. “My home phone. Call whenever.”

  §

  It was five o’clock when Arthur hung up his wet raincoat and wearily trudged upstairs to the main bedroom. Its bathroom door was ajar, the shower rumbling. Annabelle had laid out his old tux, ill-fitting now as he grappled with the added weight of middle age. He suspected he was not going to enjoy Wagner’s tale of noble, wounded, death-seeking lovers. He was not in the mood for tragedy.

  He kicked off his shoes as Annabelle swept into the room, naked but for towel-wrapped hair, and she started on seeing him. “My God, Arthur, announce yourself. You could have been anyone.” She sat at her high-mirrored vanity. A glass of red wine was on it. “Please get a move on, dear. We have to be there an hour before.”

  Undoing his buttons, shouting over her hair dryer, he unloaded his day, trying to be jaunty and offering his assurance that he would not be dragged away to court in the middle of the second act. “It’s beyond all possibility that the jury could come back with an early verdict. Too much for them to mull over. They don’t have time, what with two hours off for dinner.”

  It would only upset her were he to mention he’d planned for the extreme unlikelihood of a quick verdict. Jack Boynton had insisted on knowing his seat number at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre: H17, near the aisle. There was always a chance the jury could pop in to ask questions of the judge, but typically such questions were easily dealt with, and Boynton would amply cover for him.

  Annabelle caught him in the mirror staring at her shapely naked form, a vision by Renoir. She raised her glass to his reflection. �
��Am I making you uncomfortable?” As if to lower any expectations, she quickly put on underclothes and a slip. “When are our reservations at Pierre’s?”

  “I told him ten-thirty.”

  “I can’t imagine we’ll be out of the theatre much before eleven. Depending on ovations.” She sat to paint her toenails ruby-red. “I really had hoped to go backstage for a celebratory drink with the cast and crew.”

  “Pierre knows we’re coming and will wait for us. We’ll likely have the place to ourselves.”

  “Sounds wonderfully romantic, darling. Eating like starving wolves under candlelight at midnight.”

  He paused while stepping out of his pants. “I could whip something up now.”

  “No time. Let’s take your car, Arthur. It shows us better.”

  “To whom do you want to show off?”

  “Darling, it’s opening night.” She rose, approached, startled him with a luscious hot-tongued kiss. “Congratulations on a trial well fought. You’ll win. You always win.”

  Once again, that electrifying touch of her skin. His trousers were now around his ankles, his blood flowing.

  “Oh, wow, excuse me.” Deborah was standing in the doorway, her skates slung over her shoulder. “Sorry, I didn’t think you guys would be making out at half past five in the afternoon.”

  Arthur whipped a robe on, embarrassed, hoping she hadn’t seen his erection — which had receded like a breaking wave. Annabelle didn’t have such qualms and would often parade about naked in the house. She was justly proud of her thirty-nine-year-old body.

  “Guilty or not guilty?” Deborah asked.

  “We’re not guilty, darling,” Annabelle said, laying out her makeup.

  “I mean your trial, Dad.”

  “We won’t know until tomorrow. Tonight your mother and I are going to relax.”

  “Hmm. You didn’t look too relaxed just a moment ago.” Deborah was a modern girl, sexually educated, at ease with such matters. Maybe too at ease — Arthur wondered if she was a virgin. He picked up his tux, and went to the bathroom.