April Fool Page 13

  She blows him a kiss. “Oo-la-la.”

  Lotis refuses the foie gras with the proletarian disdain Arthur has come to expect from her, and Arthur is made to feel badly not just about the homeless and hungry but about geese and their ill treatment. Still, he’s finding this relationship less prickly, as if a form of accommodation has been reached. He was expecting more vanity from an actress. Actor.

  Pierre presents Arthur with a telephone. “Normally, I would say go to hell, Beauchamp is dining. But it is Pomeroy, returning your call.”

  Brian is in his car. “Sorry I missed you, I was having a few nervous moments with Angella. She wanted a ride to Vancouver, I made a lame excuse about having to visit my uncle in jail. I won’t be ready for her until I’m wearing a body pack.”

  “When will that likely be?”

  “We’re on for Thursday night. Adeline asked if I like paella, so it’s back to El Torro, where Nick made his error in judgment. She still lives nearby in the same apartment. Maybe she wants to re-enact the event, slip me some Rohypnol, stuff underpants down my throat. Won’t Caroline be sorry then.”

  “Did she ask about your sudden exit from the case?”

  “I said it was an ethical problem. ‘I make it a rule never to represent the guilty.’ That actually came out with a straight face. She asked, ‘How do you know he’s guilty?’ I said, ‘Solicitor-client privilege.’ She nodded, impressed with my formidable grasp of ethics.”

  Arthur stands fast against dessert, orders coffee, while Lotis, who ate like a bird, plays with a fallen petal from the rose Pierre gave her. It’s so pleasant, the sun beating down, robins singing, that he’s sorry they must soon leave. He’s enjoying a healthy venting about his murder case. Lotis seems easily entertained, wide-eyed, attentive–she doesn’t treat Winters’s death as a casual act of brutality dwarfed by the evils of our rapacious economic structures. She’s curious about the case, a diligent if skeptical listener, though seems to regard it as a badly plotted screenplay.

  She’s unafraid to criticize Arthur’s defence of ten years ago, his effort to persuade a jury that Angella seduced a felon, then cried rape. “Could anyone be that desperate to get published?”

  “She tried to impress Faloon with her poor catalogue of clippings. It may not be desperation but obsession. Mental disease could be at play.”

  Arthur’s magazines are replete with ads for writing schools and vanity presses. He suspects that being published is, for some, the central fantasy of their lives, in the extreme case, neurotic, all-consuming. (Cud Brown once told him he would kill to get published. Though that was several years ago, and he was drunk.)

  “When was that rape trial?”

  “Ten years ago. The appeal process went on for several years.” Dead-ending at the Supreme Court of Canada: Our job isn’t to second-guess the jury, Mr. Beauchamp.

  Lotis finds it incredible that Angella would save Faloon’s semen. “On the off chance she might want to incriminate Nick again? Sorry, the theory leaves me underwhelmed, it’s beyond unlikely.”

  Arthur is wounded by her casual rejection of the theory. He had hoped it at least skimmed the surface of plausibility. “My dear, murder itself is unlikely, especially when planned, a rare event. The motives that propel it are just as unusual.” He’s lecturing, as if to a student, a donnish habit from his days of giving tutorials.

  Lotis relents. “Okay, she’s a borderline personality, she’s twilight zone, she has a weird reason for deep-freezing the semen. Was she on birth control?”

  “Nick was wearing a condom.”

  “Arthur, the ugly truth about condoms…”

  She pauses, looking at him bright-eyed, as if expecting him to understand the obvious.

  “They break. Take it from me. That’s how I ended up in my friendly neighbourhood pregnancy termination clinic–a dried-out safe my partner found in his trinket drawer. Ex-partner.”

  “Actually, Faloon said the condom slipped off…”

  “During intercourse?”

  “As he was…yes.” Arthur reddens. “It was too large for him.”

  “You are so…I don’t know, Arthurian. Victorian. You’re actually blushing. Whoa. Stop.” Her lynx eyes widen, her mouth forms a perfect oval. “I just had a flash how this could’ve played out. On close personal inspection, Angella finds that Nick has deposited more in her than in the safe. She starts freaking about disease and pregnancy. She flies off the hinges, calls the cops.”

  Arthur finds it helpful to reassemble the facts in that light. Angella finding the recreant condom, hiding it in panic, calling 911. The idea of a tell-all magazine article comes later, as a bonus. It is a logical scenario, and one he should have urged on the jury.

  Arthur orders the poires au chocolat. Relax, he tells himself, there’s another ferry sailing at six, and Lotis is offering useful insight into eccentric Adeline Angella.

  “She’s some kind of polyester queen?”

  “A fair depiction, I think.”

  “Was she in a relationship at the time?”

  “No. She has lived alone for her adult life.”

  “Religious?”

  “Catholic.”

  “Anti-abortion?”

  “She wrote newsletters for a pro-life organization.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  She’s on the mark. Fear of pregnancy, the massive dilemma it posed–add religious guilt to this toxic mix, and Faloon becomes the luckless victim of an ill-fitting Trojan.

  Lotis brushes hair from her face, leans forward to sniff the rose, in its slender vase. A picture deserving of a camera. Behind this portrait of nose and rose and wayward hair, an agile and (dare he say) youthful mind is at work. Compensating for the cocky, in-your-face demeanour, for her naïve notions of building a classless society.

  “Another problem dogs me. Should I dare you to come up with one last brilliance?” That’s taunting, maybe even mocking. “I’m sorry, I’ll shut up about the case.” A flock of starlings is raucously announcing the coming of evening. He gestures for the cheque.

  “You’ve got me utterly fucking engrossed in this case, let’s talk on the way to Garibaldi.”

  “You’re not going to Vancouver?”

  “No. I’m going to be your new Woofer.”

  She’s a kidder. “You’re crashing at Reverend Al’s cottage?” He knows the lingo, he’s cool, he does Tai Chi.

  “I’m broke, I’m earning peanuts. I’m ready to woof. Save on rent and food, help with the chores, sounds cool. In my free time I prep for my bar exams and help steer Operation Eagle.”

  Arthur doesn’t like the feel of this. She would be up his nose all day. “Have you ever lived on a farm?”

  “No, but it can’t be that complicated.” She perseveres in the face of Arthur’s smile of incredulity. “Okay, I’m a creature of the city, I dwell with the struggling masses. I wanted to do poverty law, but there were no jobs. But hey, the environment’s a critical part of the struggle. Like the marijuanistas say, overgrow the government. I like Garibaldi, it’s the most accidentally hip place I’ve ever been to. Clean air, good smoke. And I’m totally, totally wrapped in the Gwendolyn campaign.”

  What might Margaret feel about Lotis moving into Bungle Bay? A tinge of jealousy, perhaps, that might persuade her to climb down from her perch?

  “I hope you’ll enjoy your stay.”

  She rises. “Put me on pause while I go to the can.”

  Now what has he got himself into? He can see the Woofer house becoming headquarters for the Anarchist League. The woman was thrown out of her last place for having raucous meetings.

  Lotis is still in the washroom when Pierre pulls up in his Peugeot. “When the cat’s away, eh, Beauchamp?” He kisses his own fingertips. “Belle enchanteresse. I will drive to the ferry and you will add it to the tip.”

  Arthur doesn’t respond to his insinuations, though he takes pleasure from them.

  Pierre holds open a door for Lotis, bowing like a courtier of
the House of Bourbon. “Which sleazy motel would you and M. Beauchamp prefer?”

  “I think we can hold out until we get home,” she says, frightening Arthur, giving him a squeeze. He can smell washroom soap. She’s a hippie again, the makeup is gone, the lip ring back. She’s in jeans, a work shirt with burn holes.

  On the Queen of Prince George, they climb to the upper deck to watch the sun go down. Grebes and cormorants fish the bays, fir trees glow bright green with new spring skirts, the vivid yellow of flowering broom in clear-cuts and view corridors.

  Soon all these islands will be city playgrounds, he doesn’t see how that can be avoided. You can’t stop progress. You can’t stop humankind from its headlong rush to its overcrowded extinction. He doesn’t share Lotis Rudnicki’s belief that the world can put the brakes on.

  She asks, “What’s the one last brilliance you wanted from me?”

  Arthur has been filling his pipe and is lost for a moment. “Ah, yes, Adeline Angella. Your diagnoses have been faultless to this point, so let me test you with this: what motive, however twisted, would drive her to implicate Nick Faloon in a murder?”

  “To discourage the police from looking elsewhere. It’s beyond gorgeous out here. Fade out into a Cecil B. deMille sunset.”

  The dying sun burnishes the forested islets to the east, and overhead the clouds are the hues of wild roses, and to the west, scarlet. Arthur is staring at this display but isn’t seeing it. “To discourage the police…Please expand on that.”

  “The big question could be: What motive did she have to murder Dr. Winters? Maybe Angella was one of her patients, something bizarre developed between them.”

  This comes with the sudden thud of revelation, and Arthur spills tobacco. He works so clumsily at getting his pipe lit that he burns his thumb. He must talk to Winters’s secretary, or subpoena her clinical records. Why had he not considered such a link? His brain has become flabby, he must get it in trim or he may bungle this case. Alzheimer’s, that’s his fear.

  On Garibaldi, Arthur finds the Toyota still at the dock, the Fargo still in Stoney’s yard, and the backhoe still in Arthur’s, its scoop in the air like a claw. It hasn’t seen recent duty, the loss-leader pond remains undug. At least the tools are gone from the garage.

  While Kim Lee helps Lotis settle into the Woofer house, he heads to his own. The first of the kids must have arrived today: Edna Sproule’s truck is on the upper road, and flashlights are active in the goat corral. Edna is a fourth-generation islander, owner of Boris, billy-goat sperm donor. Arthur will join her after he changes into country clothes.

  From the bathroom window, as he finishes showering, he hears a shriek of delight: “Whoa, he’s adorabubble.” Lotis Morningstar Rudnicki has seen her first kid birth.

  Arthur feels the threat of heartburn, his stomach gurgling, he ought not to have had the poires au chocolat. He decides to rest a bit. Soon he is asleep in his club chair. He dreams of Margaret in a birdcage. “Day five hundred!” the judge shouts. He’s in court naked and unprepared. He cannot think of a question. He has lost his touch, lost his memory, lost everything.

  11

  At the Woofer house, over Kim Lee’s breakfast, a hot gluey substance with seeds, Arthur plans his day. There will be extra chores with the kids–four so far. Edna Sproule’s truck is in the yard, and though he knows he should help her, he feels depleted–April has been a cruel month.

  He hears Lotis coming down the creaky stairs, late, she slept through the crowing cocks. She is clad in her sleeping garb, an oversized T-shirt that covers only the bare essentials. It urges, “Support the Sicamous Seven,” whoever they may be.

  She squints at the wall clock. “Oops, didn’t realize there was a seven-thirty call. Sorry, I had trouble falling asleep. Kept hearing a maniac laughing outside. Crept downstairs to check if the house was safe, and none of the doors was locked.”

  Steadfastly averting his eyes from the junction of thigh and T-shirt, Arthur explains that the keys have been long lost, that what she heard was likely a screech owl.

  “Drink coffee, yes?” Kim Lee extends a mug.

  “Thank you, Sister Kim, is that birdseed porridge? I think I’ll settle for a Tijuana breakfast: coffee and a hump.” She opens a window wide, lights her hump, sits on the sill, has the delicacy to cross her legs. “What’s on the list of chores?”

  “Have you ever milked a goat?”

  “No, but I can fake it.”

  Edna Sproule has midwived twin kids by the time Arthur and Lotis join her. “Udderly fantastic,” Lotis says, looking awed at these sucking, wobbly-kneed progeny of hard-working Boris.

  Edna frowns. “Where have I seen you before.”

  “Scream Seven. Still available on video.”

  “No…that commercial. Where the wife comes home to find her husband did the laundry, and there’s a mountain of suds.”

  “And I say, ‘Did you use enough soap, dear?’”

  “Yes, that just breaks me up! You’re the one in the ad! Oh, my. Oh, my.” She seems overcome.

  “Girl’s got to get through college.” Lotis seems to need to explain.

  After the goat-milking demonstration, he shows her how to raid the chicken shed for eggs, introduces her to the greenhouse and vegetable garden, explains the uses of fork and hoe, shows her what a thistle looks like. Before the morning is over, she has managed to douse herself with the hose, wade into a bed of stinging nettles, and tear her jeans on barbed wire. Arthur enjoys every minute.

  He will now take her up to the Gap, the highlight of the day. Margaret will learn he has a new playmate at Bungle Bay. The cat’s away, and the mouse will play. Madam has the poet, after all, with whom to stay.

  As Lotis is changing, a vehicle purrs up the driveway. Miraculously, it’s the formerly mufflerless Fargo. Stoney has succumbed to a spate of initiative–the new muffler works well, except for a wheezing sound. He turns off the engine, takes a pull from a beer can.

  “I straightened out that legal technicality with the backhoe, they’re gonna give me a few more weeks because of this contract. So I’m gonna start on your pool like I promised, I’m a man of my word.”

  To deny the existence of any contract would take too much effort. Arthur will let Stoney dig the pool. What damage can he do so far from the house?

  “Got a muffler off Myron’s old Chev, kind of had to bang her in place. Should hold until the next crisis. Told you I’d do it for free, but there’s fuel costs, eh, and I’m in a kind of debit situation…”

  Arthur reaches into his wallet, fans out some twenties.

  “If you’re going to take the old girl out for a spin, man, you may want to gas up.” Stoney sets to work, the backhoe chuffing into life.

  Lotis returns, in black tights, distracting Stoney, who misdirects the machine into a thicket of salal.

  “You are watching the birth of a pool.”

  “Will it have a swim-up bar?”

  “It will be shared by frogs and salamanders.”

  “Glad I didn’t bring my suit.” She pulls out a cigarette.

  “I thought you were quitting.”

  “After my carton runs out.” Brushes the hair from her almond eyes.

  Their first stop is the three-pump gas station–the gauge was hovering below empty–the second is Hopeless Bay. Not Now Nelson Forbish is leaving the store, eating Cheezies. He’s doing the rounds, delivering this week’s Bleat on his ATV.

  He extends a cheese-and-salt-coated hand to Lotis. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of the movie star.”

  “I’d recall it if you had.”

  Nelson brings out pencil and pad. “I heard you may be auditioning for Arthur’s movie.”

  Lotis looks perplexed. “Duh…what?”

  “Not now, Nelson. We have a busy schedule.”

  “A picture.”

  Lotis hugs Arthur around the middle, and he starts like a nervous horse. Such embraces are natural to her–she’s a performer, expansive, American–b
ut foreign to him, rarely enjoyed even as a child. He’s not sure what his reaction should be, and stands like a scarecrow, arms akimbo. Nelson says, “Another.” The feel of her supple body brings blood rushing, Eros rising from the ashes of disuse. Accompanied, of course, by shame.

  Hattie Weekes, the island’s most fearsome gossip, is on the deck, squinting, capturing this. Arthur decides he may as well wrest advantage from the situation–word will go like the wind to the Holy Tree. He holds the door for Lotis. Hattie is already at the coin phone, stirring her wallet for a quarter. A word once sent abroad, said the great Horace, flies irrevocably.

  A pile of Bleats sits on the counter. “HERE COMES HOLLYWOOD!” shouts the front page. Nelson has relegated the Battle of the Gap to the inside. “An uneasy truce holds at the protest site, while lawyers rush off to court, the results of which aren’t known at press time.”

  Arthur tells Makepeace, “Ms. Rudnicki may charge anything to my account but cigarettes.”

  The postmaster hands him a small sack. “If you’re going by the Gap, this is for the preacher. Fifties and or hundreds, here and there, mostly cheques. This here’s a generous one.” Makepeace holds an envelope to the light. “Two thousand on a bank in Chicago.”

  “Someone said they seen her barenaked in a movie called Bodice Ripper.” This is Joe Rosekeeper, lascivious retiree, who’s staring at Lotis through the plate window.

  “Not Arthur’s type,” Emily Lemay says. “No meat on her. Come over some evening, handsome, I’ll serve you up some steak and potatoes.” She chortles, enjoys seeing him turn red. She’s been flirting more boldly since breaking up with Handyman Sam.

  Emily has just ferried from the city and brought today’s paper: “DAY SEVEN!” Santorini’s irate outburst has earned front page. A sidebar describes Arthur and Santorini as “former courtroom foes.” Arthur’s streak of notable wins against the former chief Crown is mentioned, along with their imbroglio in court many years ago. Here is the horse’s ass quote, the full text returning to him now, a reference to “kitchen cockroach ethics.”

  Arthur imagines Santorini reading the paper over breakfast, his rage. He may go off the deep end when the hearing resumes tomorrow; Arthur must be alert for grounds of appeal.