Kill All the Lawyers Page 2

  "Your witness," the judge said.

  Brian studied with distaste the slick-haired young man slouching in the witness box. "Bring out the props," he whispered to the student, who heaved several thick files onto the counsel table with a loud thunk, papers spilling from them.

  "You have quite a criminal history," Brian said, opening one of the dead files—some old expropriation matter, he didn't remember it. He pretended to study a page, then opened another file, frowning. "Bunch of stolen cheques." He picked up another file, ten-year-old financial statements for Pomeroy, Macarthur and Company, and flipped through the pages. "False pretences, assault, let's see ..." Riffling through records of office disbursements for 1983, he shook his head sorrowfully. "My, my." Another file. "Goodness."

  The prosecutor rose to complain. "If counsel wishes to put a criminal record to the witness he knows how to do it."

  Brian decided he had milked what he could from these minor offences and abandoned the files and strolled toward the witness until he was within intimidation distance, close enough to smell the staleness of his breath. "You want us to believe that you overheard Mr. Eagle Talon say they were going to dynamite the dam?"

  "Yeah."

  Juror Eight, the retired United Church minister, was still looking at all those files on the counsel table. Brian waited until he could make eye contact, then picked up the worn copy of the Bible. Until recent years, the archaic practice had been to require witnesses to kiss this book. Brian thought of all the lying, unsanitary lips that had touched it.

  "You swore on this holy book to tell the truth, didn't you?"

  "Yeah, I did."

  "Just as you did last June."

  "What do you mean?"

  "When you were on trial for dealing in stolen cheques."

  "Yeah, I guess I swore on the Bible then."

  "And you lied through your teeth at that trial. Just as you've been doing at this one."

  "Counsel might like to reword his pronouncement as a question," said the judge. Her tone, though, was of friendly admonition—she had quietly joined the camp of the defence.

  "You were found guilty."

  "I shouldn't of been."

  "Your jury was mistaken, or just stupid?"

  "They blew it."

  Too late, the prosecutor yelled, "I object!"

  Brian sighed. "My learned friend doesn't want the truth to come out."

  "Counsel, please refrain from making editorial comments," said the judge.

  "And he should back away from the witness," said the prosecutor.

  "I don't like being that close to him myself," Brian said.

  He returned to the counsel table, and whispered to Augustina: "How am I doing?"

  "Cut it to the bone and avoid that sneering tone," she said.

  Brian had a sense the jury wanted to get out of here to do their Christmas shopping. He diced the witness up a little more, got him stammering over some minor contradictions, and suddenly sat down, announcing he didn't find it necessary to call any evidence.

  The jury acquitted the Kitswuk Five at twenty-three minutes past noon on Friday, December 11.

  Outside the courthouse, Brian and Augustina, their arms around their happy clients, spent a few humble minutes before some microphones and cameras, as the stone-faced folks from Knot Lake walked sullenly from the courthouse.

  §

  Winners buy lunch at Au Sauterne; that was the custom. Wentworth, ever eager for a free meal, volunteered to get there early and hold a table. He was half-way through a basket of hot crispy rolls when Brian and Augustina joined him, soon followed by wiry, balding Max Macarthur—he was five-foot-five, and Wentworth had oftentimes heard him complain of heightist attitudes on the part of his jocular partners. But they were always jabbing at each other.

  Max said, "Cops screwed it up, eh?"

  "Augustina, tell him how I held the fink's feet to the fire."

  "Guess this means you can get ready for the Hullipson trial on Monday," Max said.

  "I have earned some time off. I have just won a trial of mythic proportions. The jury was out half an hour. Wentworth, tell this pod person how I decimated the squeal."

  Brian began to replay highlights from the Kitswuk trial, but Max continued to treat his victorious partner with an air of casual indifference.

  "Hate to be a drag," said Max, "but before you pump yourself up and float off like a balloon, can we talk about Hullipson?" This was a two-dayer—a minor-league monkey-wrencher was charged with removing surveyors' ribbons. Max had been babysitting it for Brian, who had picked up the case while in Knot Lake last summer, doing the Kitswuk preliminary.

  "You said you'd take Hullipson if your trial didn't run over."

  "Aw, for the love of God," Brian said, letting Max get to him, "I've just fought the hardest trial of my fife, and I'm a helpless wreck! Hullipson's a mischief-under-two-hundred, a summary trial; any idiot can handle it."

  "Good, that's settled," Max said.

  Brian saw that he was stuck with Hullipson. Well, it was Friday. That meant he had the weekend to prepare. Call up the prosecutor and ask for a late start, fly up to the Chilcotin on Monday morning, maybe take his notes for The Novel with him, and seek inspiration in the winter wilderness. Maybe take Charity, too. Or take Charity instead of his notes. Or maybe not take Charity, because maybe the idea is crazy.

  The affair with Charity Slough was, after all, only a casual four-month amourette, and Brian had been promising to write the final chapter to it. Hippie poet from his creative writing group. Big, beautiful, bosomy, and boring out of bed. His wife Caroline was, of course, ignorant of this relationship. Damage would be caused to precious parts of his body if she were to learn of it.

  They were into a second bottle, of Bordeaux when John Brovak arrived. His drug case had run late.

  "I'm bagging ass for the rest of the day," he said. "If Leroy wants to sit Friday afternoons, he can sit without me. Instead of on top of me—the fat man's preferred position."

  Mr. Justice Leroy Lukey, newly appointed to the bench, was Brovak's bête noir, and for the next several minutes he related a long list of this judge's latest atrocities, before launching into a ramble about his skiing plans this weekend.

  Brovak had once served, though not with distinction, on the Canadian Olympic ski team. He had an athlete's body, fluid and muscular, and women thought him unbearably handsome, despite his scars and marks of dissolution.

  He paused to order another bottle of wine, lit a smelly cigar, then turned to Brian with a supremely bored look.

  "So what's new?"

  "Won the Kitswuk Five, guess you heard."

  "Coulda won that one blindfolded and gagged." He turned to Wentworth. "Want you to run down after lunch and ask one of the guys to sit in for me. It's Friday, and I ain't gonna be chained up in a courtroom."

  §

  Brian and Brovak stayed on after the others returned to the office, and, celebrating too much, Brian lost count of the many cognacs consumed. He was alerted to the lateness of the day when dinner customers began arriving.

  Navigating from the restaurant and down the street, he realized he couldn't remember where he had parked his car. He observed that December's early night had fallen, and mists obscured the towers of glass to the west, the city's uptown hub. In the harbour, a massive freighter was being prodded toward the cranes of Centennial Pier, tugboats clinging to her like pilot fish. The lights of the North Shore Sea-Bus twinkled then faded into the distant gloom.

  For a while Brian wandered aimlessly through the streets of Gastown among old brick warehouses converted to loud, cheap bars, among shops with Christmas-lit window displays of tawdry souvenirs. He finally found his little energy-conserving Honda at a meter with a clutter of tickets on the windshield.

  He worried about negotiating the Lion's Gate Bridge to his house in North Vancouver. Maybe he should stop by Charity's for a coffee.

  No, he told himself. N-O.

  Chapter 3. Affair with a Bad Poet

  Caroline Pomeroy returned home from the campus bleary-eyed after a hopeless afternoon of grading papers for her English Lit 403s: Thackeray, Trollope and Brontë, The English Novel in the Age of Vanity. When she heard the news of Brian's victory on the radio, she felt some of her tension ease. It was blue hell around the house whenever he lost. The moping, the gnashing of teeth.

  She went out to the back to feed Howland, the screech owl, who was yawning himself awake on his pear-tree perch beside his nesting box.

  "Come on, sack artist, time to get up and go to work. Heavy night of hooting ahead."

  One morning last spring, Caroline and Brian had heard a great cawing and scolding of crows behind the house, and found Howland broken-winged after battle with them. The Pomeroys were rabid birders (Brian had actually taken an Audubon Society course called "Bird Aid"). They put a splint on the wing, and it mended. Spoiled by the good life in North Vancouver suburbia, Howland spurned the woods beyond his pear tree, and now he was simply there, a kind of lazy relative hanging around the back yard, waiting for a little action, waiting for the night.

  "You're on your own tonight, Howland. We have tickets to Candida at the Playhouse."

  Howland nodded wisely.

  "I just bloody hope Brian hasn't forgotten."

  Howland winked at her knowingly.

  "Pretend it's a fresh kill, Howland." Caroline passed him up a strip of butchered rabbit.

  What for their own dinner? She returned to the house and poked around in the fridge, then began to prepare a quick casserole d'leftovers—they would just have time to gulp and go.

  She and Brian really must start spending more time together. He'd been working too many evenings, in the law library ... And when he did spend an evening at home, he lo
cked himself away in his little den with that beastly murder mystery he claims he's writing, his shelves full of soft-boiled Father Browns, hard-boiled Marlowes and medium-boiled Archers, and Inspector Maigret and Inspector Migraine and Inspector Diddle, and Inspector Fiddle, and Inspector Piddle.

  She'd give more credence to his pretensions of literary creation if he ever summoned the courage to show her this masterwork. She didn't hear those typewriter keys clicking all that much.

  It never occurs to him that she might like to write. They had even taken the same creative writing class together and she was the one with the Ph.D. in English literature.

  Caroline put the casserole in the oven and went to the bedroom to dress. A simple huggy semi-mini of the ecologically correct hue: green to match the emerald of her eyes. Let the theatre-going public know that Caroline Pomeroy still has curves and legs. Maybe Brian might notice, too. His love-making recently had been, so to speak, a little flaccid. She tried to suppress thoughts that she was to blame. (Still childless after five trying years: her fault?) Incorrect thinking, is what her feminist pal Abigail Hitchins would say.

  Anyway, she had an appointment with her gynaecologist on Monday. She hadn't yet told Brian she'd had tests done. She was thirty-one, deteriorating, soon to be geriatric. Now or never. Never, she feared. Barren—the cruellest adjective.

  Brian was grievously late. As the minutes dragged by, Caroline found herself adding to the list of her husband's shortcomings. Why is his career more important than hers, why does he always compete? Even when they're out birding, it's "There's a White-Tailed Ptarmigan, that's mine, saw it first." Don't marry a criminal lawyer, Abigail had warned.

  The casserole had almost dried out when Brian finally arrived, just an hour before opening curtain. Caroline quelled her temper momentarily, kissed him at the door, and could barely stand the smell of him.

  "You're drunk," she said.

  "Hey, can't a guy celebrate? You heard, I ..."

  "I heard."

  "So whatta you say, letch ... let's go out tonight, maybe down to the Lion's Arms for a drink after dins. I'm starving. What's on the menu?"

  "A former casserole."

  Brian watched with amiable confusion as she dumped the casserole into the organic waste, put on her coat and strode to the door.

  "You've quite obviously forgotten." Green-fire eyes threw darts at him. "You're a self-centred, immature, thoughtless bastard." She marched out of the house and went alone to the play.

  Brian poured himself two fingers of rum and drag-tailed to the backyard to seek consolation from Howland. The owl gazed down upon him with disgust.

  "I plead not guilty, m'lord."

  But no acquittals were to be won in front of Mr. Justice Howland Owl. Odd how he resembled the chief of the trial division. Those big ear tufts. The yellow eyes. The scowl, the censorious play of feature.

  Howland swivelled his head away, as if he could no longer stand to look at the miscreant.

  "I won the Kitswuk Five!" he declaimed, then muttered, "Biggest night of my life, I come home, I'm treated like a piece of shit by the wife and the owl."

  He downed his rum. "I'll show her. I'll write!" He'd be hard at work on his masterpiece when she returned from her frivolous evening at the theatre.

  "You're s'posed to be wise, Howie. So give me a plot."

  Howland wouldn't look at him. Brian whistled. The owl turned and sent him a dirty look and whistled back.

  "Who killed the criminal lawyer with a blunt instrument in the parking lot? Whodunit, Howland?"

  "Hoo," said Howland.

  "Yeah, who. And why and how. Give me the perfect murder."

  He took a stagger step to his left, and, trying to regain balance, found himself entwined in a folding aluminum chair.

  Suddenly Howland was airborne, swooping on a field mouse making a run for it across the grass to the woodshed.

  The mouse didn't stand a chance.

  "You dunit, Howland."

  §

  The next morning, Brian awoke to find himself on top of the covers of the bed, with his shirt off but his pants on, and Caroline snoozing beside him under the sheets. Though it was Saturday, and a brutal hangover was settling in, the Hullipson case had to be prepped. He avoided further marital discord—imminent, because Caroline seemed to be stirring awake—by retrieving the balance of his clothes and heading out the door.

  He pouted. He felt wronged. His Honda didn't seem to want to stop at the office; it continued on to East Chinatown, among the lap-sided gingerbread houses, with tiny green patches of lawn, skeletal trees and winter gardens. He stopped in front of a rooming house with its roof canting wearily to one side. There lived Charity Slough.

  He found her at her desk, sitting beneath a chart of the constellations. Tall, voluptuous Charity Slough. Ursa Major.

  He heard himself asking her to join him on a trip to the Chilcotin.

  "Well, that sounds positively cuspy," said Charity.

  Cuspy. What the hell did that mean? He stared through hangover eyes at her chart of the constellations: bear, ram, crab, unicorn. Snake.

  She kissed him. "Fee-yew. Brian, you look like someone dragged you through a bush. What rhymes with meander?" She was working on a poem.

  "Philander."

  Driving to the office, he thought: that was barmy, inviting Charity to Knot Lake, what an imprudent thing to do. He felt himself being watched by all the Santas and Rudolphs in the windows, felt besieged by jingle bells and twinkle lights, the total effect of which was to plunge him into deeper gloom and shame.

  In Knot Lake, in the cold and wintry Chilcotin foothills, he would tell Charity that it was over, this immature effort to assert his manhood, this ridiculous liaison with a mystic poet of indifferent talent.

  He and Caroline spent Sunday trying to repair the damage of Friday night's altercation, counting wintering loons at the Reifel Waterfowl Refuge. He was the first to spot the Green Heron wading among the reeds; a find, a rarity on the Coast, well beyond its wintering grounds, and he beat Caroline to it with his camera. She congratulated him, but rather coolly. The heron may have sensed the chill, too. It swivelled its head at them, frowning, and took wing.

  §

  The circuit judge presiding at the Knot Lake courthouse—the local Legion Hall except on every second Monday—was a bawdy old fellow before whom Brian had appeared a couple of times. As court opened, he congratulated Brian on the Kitswuk Five win. Brave of him, thought Brian, here in Knot Lake, unfriendly terrain.

  The young prosecutor, perhaps unnerved by the respect Brian was being afforded during the first hour of the trial, drew him aside during the morning break to say that she would be happy if he pleaded to just two of the eight counts. They finally bartered Hullipson down to one count of mischief, the prosecutor agreeing not to oppose a conditional discharge.

  Court was recessed, Hullipson went home smiling, and the judge ambled down from his bench to ask if he could buy Brian lunch.

  "You're alone?" he said.

  Brian glanced at Charity, who was sitting in the back row, smiling a little too omnivorously at him. "Ah, no, not quite."

  He tried to think of an excuse for lunch, but the judge saved him the trouble.

  "I can see you may have already eaten." The judge had spotted her.

  Brian suddenly remembered that this judge had met Caroline. A law retreat a few years ago.

  "Enjoy your dessert," said the judge with a slow, fat wink.

  On their way back to the motel in the rented car, Charity looked at Brian with eyes that seemed to seek too much connection.

  "We're paired?" she said. It wasn't a question; she tended to inflect her voice at the end of sentences. "We met in superior conjunction, you know. Between Mercury and Venus?"

  This has to end, he thought.

  They made love energetically in their room, and after dinner made love again, she indefatigable, he with increasing effort and bravery as he grew more concerned about her staring moony eyes that searched for his own eyes, for accord, completion, astral connection.

  Next morning, driving to the airport, he tried with all the steel in his soul to bring himself to tell her he wanted out of this. He steered his car into the parking area of a lookout point over frozen Knot Lake, stopped and stared at the brittle whiteness of the valley and its sled-scarred lake, trying to rehearse an opening line.