Kill All the Lawyers Page 3

  "Charity, I really like you ..." He struggled to find the appropriate qualifying clause, but stalled. It never emerged because Charity smothered him with her mouth, then drew back, murmuring, "I know, I know. I love you, too."

  He tried to evade her thrusting tongue, her hands reaching, searching, kneading an unbidden erection to life.

  She pressed herself to him. He didn't undo his seatbelt.

  "Let's make love. Now. While we have the world spread below us."

  Fortunately—he thought at the time—another car drove in behind them just then. He paid it little heed. Dark blue, he recalled later, nondescript, an old Chevrolet or something; he didn't know his cars.

  "Not here, we have company." But she was at his belt, tugging with powerful Amazonian hands. She freed his cock, stared at it for a second as if planning strategy, then abruptly went down on him. Hot but frantic, Brian swivelled his head, saw with relief his windows were fogging fast. Where was that car? Starting to drive off.

  All resolve lost, he gave into her driving hands, her urgent, searing tongue, and closed his eyes and felt himself building within. He arched his back spastically, and exploded. As she pumped him into her mouth, the windshield exploded, too.

  They were showered with glass pellets, and Brian dizzily realized that no orgasm is powerful enough to shatter glass. He felt the rush of freezing air from outside, and realized Charity was screaming.

  Afterwards he remembered his confusion: was the explosion the sound of a gunshot or only the sound of his window shattering? But does windshield glass just shatter?

  He looked at the wide, wet mouth of Charity; she was gasping, catching her breath, semen on her blouse, glass in her hair. But no blood, no blood. Shouting at her to keep calm, Brian accelerated hard, the tires screaming on the salted pavement. With the wind scalding him through the shattered window, his pants halfway to his knees, he urged his car over the brow of a hill and down a straightaway which he took at dangerous speed.

  In the valley, he went through a radar trap, heaving a sigh of relief when he saw the wigwag lights behind him and heard the bleat of the siren: an RCMP cruiser closing in. He braked and pulled onto the shoulder.

  When the police car stopped behind him, Brian hurried out to the driver, who was scribbling in his pad, not looking up.

  "May I see your licence, sir?"

  "Someone took a shot at me!"

  The officer glanced up, saw the bits of glass decorating Brian's jacket, and glanced down.

  "Your fly's undone, sir," he said, getting out of the patrol car.

  Brian fumbled at his zipper with numb fingers as the officer walked over and looked at the rent-a-car's demolished windshield. Charity was out of the car by now, shivering in the cold.

  "Could've been a rock," the officer said.

  "Could've been a bullet," Brian said.

  The policeman spent a minute probing around the rented car and finally came up with a lead slug imbedded in the panelling.

  As he was calling his detachment office, he asked Brian, "Know any reason someone'd want to shoot at you?"

  He thought. A prurient sicko who objected to the giving of head in a public place? No: a Knot Lake redneck ... the Kitswuk Five trial ... someone had followed him from town ...

  All he said was, "I'm a criminal lawyer."

  The officer nodded as if that were motive enough.

  "What about her?" He gave an appraising look at the criminal lawyer's bouncy-breasted paramour, standing in the cold, shivering. "Maybe we got a jealous boyfriend or husband or something like that here?"

  "I don't think so."

  The officer invited Charity Slough to get into his car. "We'll have to take full statements from the both of you."

  Brian felt sick. He knew of a person who would want to kill him, all right. How the hell was he going to explain this to Caroline?

  Chapter 4. Tears in the Tamales

  January 4

  Dearly beloved,

  Though these greetings come unseasonably late from so compulsive a letter writer as I, may I belatedly offer one figgy pudding to you, Max, tons of sugarplums to you, Augustina, and a bucket of blood for the pagan Brovak. To you all a happy though doubtless soggy New Year.

  It rains in Vancouver? That soundless weak pizzle of winter? Visit the Osa Peninsula in December. Here the rain roars, trillions of drums and cymbals upon the roof of corrugated zinc under which I cravenly cower.

  But five days ago, His Highness the Emperor of the Sun rose like a wrathful avenger from over the Golfo Dulce and put the clouds to flight. The dry season has arrived faster than cops through the door of a crack house, and now I can see the view. Had I the soul of Keats or the voice of Shelley I might find some means of describing it to you.

  Oh, all right, I'll try. Picture me at my typewriter on my shady but windowless porch. Imagine me reaching out and picking a star fruit from an overhanging bough, yellow, plump and tart. From time to time, one of the papaya trees drops a sweet orange turd onto the grass of the yard.

  A crested flycatcher (the Yellow-Bellied though not cowardly Elaenia, or elaenia flavogaster) sings sweetly from the sour orange tree. At night the crickets lull me to sleep (a dreamless sleep, unCarolined) and at dawn the howler monkeys hoot me awake from the mango trees. I rise and pee and brush my teeth and ready myself to confront the terrifying beauty of another sunrise.

  To the East, to the East: there rises the sun, there, beyond the Golfo Dulce, that bottomless bay of sweetness between me and the nearest fax machine; beyond the prickly spine of the Central American isthmus rises the sun, painting butterscotch mountains in a lilac haze, the sea iridescent below.

  To the west, where sets the sun with even more spectacular consequences, lies boundless ocean, blue and green and infinite.

  Where sea meets land are beaches ringed with wild almonds and palms and manzanillo trees. I will not bore you with a description of these beaches (two minutes away by sandaled foot), but I should advise you that the sand, in addition to being soft and golden, is virgin: no imprints of foot or beach ball or carcinogen-skinned sun-and-fun-seeker body mar it.

  To the north, and spreading feverishly all about the house, is the most impressive sight of all: tropical jungle. Massive and green, birthing, living, dying, scented, ringing with birdsong and insect chirp, pumping out the oxygen that man greedily devours in his engines and his fires.

  Enough, enough.

  So. For me, all is well, as you can see by the ebullient spirit of this letter. I'm sure you are surprised to find me in this much-changed state, recalling as you might my panicky behaviour of three weeks ago (as I recall your whispered confabulations about my so-called nervous collapse).

  Okay, I am not quite whole, but I am recovering from Caroline's extravagant censure (not to mention the firestorm of hurtling pot ware that greeted me on my return home from Knot Lake) that temporarily scrambled my brain and left me hopelessly weeping and ranting in your kitchen, Max.

  But spans of distance and time seem to have given salve to my wounds, and I am encouraged by this and grow stronger daily. I will be Pomeroy of old soon. Or at least a carefully reconstructed version of that once priceless artefact.

  I don't exactly think of her every moment of the day any more. (Oh, when I happen to i.d. a new bird, she quickly comes back, and I remember that she still has my good binoculars.) Anyway, have any of you heard from Professor Pomeroy?

  When I phoned her from Knot Lake she seemed so concerned for me ... If only I'd told her about Charity then, over the phone, but I didn't have the cojones. And, well, I guess it was an awkward scene for her, the reporters barging into the English faculty lounge, explaining how her husband had nearly been murdered, and making indelicate inquiries about the woman who'd been with him.

  I still can't believe I almost got my brains spattered all over that rented car. If someone wanted to take a shot in my direction, why didn't they have the decency to do so when Charity Slough was not around?

  Try as I can, I remain absolutely blank as to how many were in that other car. And despite all the speculation, I really don't buy the idea that Someone Was Out To Get Me. A deranged supporter of the late and much-mourned mayor of Knot Lake. Are the police still interviewing his cronies? Or have they simply given up, as I suspect?

  The event, however, has its upside. You will remember our speculation about some weird sort of link between Arthur Besterman's murder last summer and the attempt on the life of my own good self-—the common denominator being we'd both just come off big wins—and our fanciful conjecture that a lawyer-hating lunatic was on the loose.

  It may be the stuff of fiction, but it's the stuff of transcendent and indelible fiction. As you know, Besterman's murder inspired my first hesitant plunkings upon a typewriter keyboard; now I have performed radical surgery upon my previous novel outline, and a lawyer-hating dingbat will now grace the kill-and-thrill-filled pages of the manuscript.

  (Yes, you scorning scoffers, Brian Pomeroy WRITES. Pages fly from Twelve-Finger Watson's elderly upright Underworld typewriter.)

  Anyway, as to the Bad Day at Knot Lake, I prefer the cops' main thesis. A couple of sauced-up rednecks driving around with a rifle.

  If the shot came from their car at all. I'm more and more inclined to the theory that someone mistook my rental car for a moose. It was, after all, hunting season.

  (At night here, I am sometimes awakened by the thrashing sounds of a fresh kill in the jungle, a scream of perishing parrot in the claws of a hunter owl, a kinkajou screeching for mercy as the ocelot sinks fangs to the throat. It is at these times, as I lie under my white shroud of a mosquito net staring into humming jungle darkness—my murder plot spinning through my head—that I wonder: Maybe there is a homicidal maniac out there.

  One who has broken the office code of silence as to the current whereabouts of this fellow Pomeroy.

  But those minor night-time shivers soon pass, and I am again secure in the enveloping, mothering blanket of the jungle.)

  Everything, I hope, goes swimmingly at the office? The income taxers haven't demanded to audit the books? Brovak has not been secretly meeting Judge Lukey in the steam baths?

  John, I forgive your obscene caterwauling on the subject of my leave of absence ("What? So you can jack off in front of a typewriter for six months just because you got your nuts caught in a ringer over a little pussy?") and I ask you again to thank Twelve-Fingers Watson for giving me free rent to his curious villa down here.

  The landlord's taste is as garish as one would expect of a coke dealer. The purple plastic bar stools have to go. The stuffed Jaguar already has. But everything works, including the toilet, although I had to tease out a small green snake from behind the float.

  Since there are no nuclear plants or hydroelectric dam developments nearby I am (mercifully) without electricity, but the propane stove and fridge suffice. Fresh water is gravity-fed to me from a pulsing stream which passes under a little bridge, and empties into the ocean near a sandbar.

  I'm afraid everything was a little fuzzy with mildew and fungus when I first moved in. I hired Señora Ròbelo to come up from next door to clean. She brought along only six of her children, leaving I forget how many others under the care of her oldest girl, whom I will come to.

  Señora Ròbelo and her flock of tumultuous angels are my neighbours down the road. Señor Ròbelo is nowhere to be found. I gather that he ran away a few months ago to join his mistress in Golfito, the old banana port across the Golfo Dulce.

  Despite this betrayal, Señora Ròbelo remains buoyantly, chirpily cheerful, a squat mass of muscle and bustle and love, the mother of all mothers. Here's a woman unembittered, a woman for whom life goes on. Caroline, childless, poisons her mind with thoughts of vengeance against her (soon-to-be) ex-husband. Oh yes, she has seen a lawyer, one Abigail Hitchins who boasts of her collection of pelts of errant husbands. Tell Caroline—I shall not be writing to her—it was a mistake to hire Abigail.

  Tell her if she does divorce me I intend to marry Señora Ròbelo's nineteen-year-old daughter, who bears the unbearably lovely name of Leticia and smites all who cross her path with her beauty. She has hot copper skin, eyes that flash like distant stars and a smile of molten gold.

  Leticia had a year of college (her noble ambition is to become a botanist) but, sadly, had to abandon her studies to help support the family, and is now working for the National Parks Service.

  Let me pause awhile at my typewriter. Let my eyes trail down the rutted road up which three Ròbelo tots pad along as bare of foot as their skinny dog. What do I see behind those almond trees? A tongue of ocean lapping at the sand. The Golfo Dulce, sweet and warm, warmer than a mother's womb.

  It calls me, it calls me.

  Your humble servant,

  Ernest Hemingway

  §

  January 4

  Dear Caroline,

  I just finished a letter to the firm, so I thought I should add a note to you. Relax, I won't make it a habit, and of course I will honour your gracious request upon our final, touching parting.

  ("I'll write you," Pomeroy said softly.

  "Don't bother," snapped Caroline as she held open the door.

  Pomeroy walked toward the waiting taxi with his suitcases, unaware that he had left his favourite binoculars behind.)

  But in the infinitesimally unlikely possibility that you care to hear how I've been doing for the last three weeks, I shall hunt and peck for some appropriately non-volatile words to transmit to you.

  Let me first assure you (since I know you've been distraught with worry) that I am well. My mind is whole. My body is strong. My sudden dismissal from your life after five years of unblemished matrimony has not caused blade to hover above wrist. Writing is therapy.

  A brief writer's block conquered, Pomeroy has become known hereabouts as "El Escritor," The Writer. Daily must he reject invitations to literary teas. Cruelly he refuses autographs. His muse is his only master.

  I should mention before I forget. Saw a Rufous-Crested Coquette (very rare) near here yesterday. Of course it flitted off before I could find the right lens, so you'll just have to take my word. Others I have captured on Fujichrome include a family of Spectacled Foliage-Cleaners, and a solitary Scaly-Throated Leaftosser.

  A shrieking flycatcher called a Yellow Tyrannulet also hangs around here—which reminds me: Ms. Abigail Hitchins. You might advise your pal I have just received her letter, wherein that Great Humourless Champion of Women's Rights proposes to take from me everything but my undershorts. I know she is your long-time bosom (silicon-enhanced, I suspect) buddy, but she also happens to be a grasping, greedy, malevolent cunt.

  Let's keep the lawyers out of it.

  Merry Christmas, by the way.

  ("How did you spend yours?" she asked with an irritating politeness.)

  Alone, alone.

  Until my cleaning woman came up from down the road with a gift of Christmas tamales. At which point, for some unaccountable reason, I started to cry. Señora Ròbelo took a Kleenex to my nose like a child and made me blow it.

  Her husband ran off with a whore and left her with ten thousand kids. Her sister died, leaving her three more. She is happy. She copes. She forgives. She doesn't run out and hire Abigail Hitchins.

  Expecting not to hear from you, I remain,

  Yours sincerely, Brian.

  P.S., is it fair, Caroline? One little fling with a woman I hardly knew, and I'm sent packing? She was in my writing group, as I think you know, and we had coffee after one of the readings and I got foolish and we decided to have this little one-night thing in Knot Lake. That's it. A one-night stand. Very casual acquaintance.

  B.

  Chapter 5. The End of Brovak

  On the second Tuesday of February, Wentworth Chance arrived at the office ashen-faced and out of breath.

  "John Brovak just snapped in Court 54," he announced.

  The firm convened an emergency meeting in the library, where Wentworth delivered a breathless summary of Brovak's last moments before being taken to the cells. When he finished, Max Macarthur and Augustina Sage sat looking at each other in silent wonder.

  "Cocaine psychosis," said Max grimly.

  "Cerebral meltdown," Augustina said softly. "The Monster finally did him in."

  Regina versus Watson and Twenty Others—more commonly referred to as the Monster—was a case Brovak had been fighting for half his career. Mistrials, retrials and appeals, the case sputtering, stalling, reviving itself, wheezing forward—for six years.

  Over that span, attrition had reduced the ranks of the lawyers from an original high of twelve to a current low of four. Brovak, who had started with two clients, had inherited seven more from lawyers who had dropped out to preserve their marriages or their sanity.

  When the Appeal Court ordered yet another new trial last year, the Justice Department, wearying of the battle, had wanted to halt proceedings. But Staff-Sergeant Everit Cudlipp of the RCMP insisted on one last go-round: he had smashed the West Coast's biggest cocaine ring, and he wanted satisfaction. So the Monster had commenced in September and had been plodding along before a jury at the Vancouver courthouse for the last five months.

  Appointed to direct this latest rerun—it was as if a macabre joke had been played on Brovak—was Mr. Justice Leroy Lukey, newly elevated to the bench despite his failed efforts to prosecute O.D. Milsom for four serial murders. He and Brovak had been mauling each other from opening bell. Today was day eighty-eight of this sweaty match. The Hunk Meets the Hulk.

  "From the top," said Max.

  He and Augustina sat in morbid silence as their articling student related his story once more. Wentworth, who had been junioring His Satanic Majesty, was nervous and flustered in the telling. The mirthless expressions on his bosses' faces did little for his equanimity.

  "So John was cross-examining this cop, and at some point the judge turned his back to him and said, 'You've asked that question five times.' And John said, 'Are you speaking to me or to the wall?' And then everything kind of went still. The judge just said, 'You heard me, you've asked that question five times.' And John said something like, 'I got five different answers, and at least four of them are lies.'