The Long-Shot Trial, page 2
A treasured new addition to our cluster of structures on Blunder Bay Farm is a wood-fired sauna, and I spend an hour within it and, intermittently, under a cold outdoor shower, soaping away the otter goop.
Clothes-free, barefoot, and lobster-red, I race the fifty metres to the house, and within minutes I am supine in a robe on a couch with a mug of tea at hand, enjoying Hilaire Belloc’s rousing rhymes and rhythms. I have earned this.
Then, suddenly, that damn biography by Wentworth Chance settles onto my groin, opened to Chapter Three. Margaret looks far too serious to be ribbing me, even as I respond with a carefree recital from “Tarantella”: “‘Do you remember an Inn, Miranda? Do you remember the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees, and the wine that tasted of tar?’”
That elicits no laughter, not a smile.
“I just read that chapter,” Margaret says sternly. “‘A Will to Die For.’ I’m pretty broad-minded, but . . . rollicking about with women for hire? You? The socially shy and awkward Arthur Beauchamp? My God, taking on two at a time!”
I gulp. “Is that in it?”
“If you don’t demand a retraction, I’m going to believe it’s true.” She marches from the room.
“God help me,” I mutter, a plaintive plea to the Spirit in the sky.
His/Her answer comes quickly: Tell your own version, Beauchamp. Be not afraid of the truth. Yes, Wentworth Chance has likely penned a garbled version of the Angelina Santos case by, as he put it in his foreword, thickening the fog of mystery surrounding a spectacular murder trial in the Canadian far north. “New material!” he shouted. From what source? Who has tattled? Who retains a mind lucid enough to recall a capital murder trial in 1966, with its twists and riddles and sworn secrets?
Be not afraid of the truth. That command blossoms into something like a resolve — and to tell the truth the notion of composing a memoir of the most significant trial of my career has smouldered since my retirement from the law. Yes, I’ve often entertained an image of Arthur Beauchamp pecking away at a keyboard, the reclusive pipe-smoking island author, keeper of dark confidences, of privileged confessions. Aware of my initiative, barristers would shudder in gowning rooms, judges in their chambers.
And of course there is now the matter of rehabilitating my reputation — the awkward episode with the two sex workers, a preamble to Regina v. Santos, must be put in proper context.
I will need a writing studio, of course. Away from distractions of phone and radio and internet and the hustle and bustle of the enviro-political pursuits of a former Member of Parliament and Green Party leader who happens to be my life companion.
I hear the cabin at Blunder Point calling: Choose me! Choose me!
* * *
The following day arrives crisply cold but sunny, and though we’re a month away from spring, clumps of snowdrops bloom under the pear tree, along with a few bravely flowering crocuses.
I am eager to get started on my new venture — Arthur Beauchamp as true-crime author — and my first task is to attack the cabin with mops and brooms and cleaning supplies. I lug these in a wheelbarrow; there’s no road access.
Ulysses accelerates, picking up either a smell or a sight of something interesting. When I push my barrow into the cabin’s weedy yard I’m taken aback to see Stoney standing there, frowning in thought, a limp joint hanging from the corner of his lips, his Covid mask hanging loose from one ear.
“Something’s wrong here,” he says, apparently to me, as he kneels and peers under the floor beams. He shouts: “Any luck?”
“Nope.” The voice of Stoney’s laconic accomplice, known locally as Dog.
Stoney straightens up, a skinny, long-haired scarecrow in a beaver hat with earmuffs. He and Dog have somehow become immovable fixtures in the furniture of my life on Garibaldi, Stoney wily and lazy, Dog providing muscle and a generous spirit. Both had caught the Covid virus, both sailed through it: maybe as a result of overdosing on pot and Lucky Lager.
“For the record, boss, I am here, with Dog as my witness, pursuant to our agreement to muck out the otter’s den that you been griping about like it’s a planetary cat-ass-trophy. I saw your ad for help, and frankly it felt like a betrayal to your oldest friend on this island that you let some scab encroacher undercut me, thus rendering you in breach of contract. The bottom line is you owe compensation to Dog and me for the day we set aside.”
Through some form of telepathy, this schemer, having divined the smelly deed had been done, decided it was safe to show up. I try to out-lawyer him.
“If there were a contract, Stoney, it would fail because of laches. That’s a legal term for unreasonable delay.”
Dog, who has the build of a granite boulder, squeezes out, pulls off goggles and hardhat, rises to his full five feet, three inches. Ulysses is quick to join him for some roughhousing — they love each other, Dog and dog.
“Happily, gentlemen, your day will not be wasted.” I draw their attention to the wheelbarrow and its contents, and explain their intended uses. “Fair compensation will be paid.”
Stoney balks. “Whoa. We’re being asked to scrub and dust? I’m afraid that ain’t part of my personal work ethic. Not sounding sexist, which I’m proudly not, but cleaning is generally accepted as ladies’ work. Them two hotties from Mop’n’Chop, that’s who you want. Only drawback is they overcharge too much.”
In Stoney-speak, that’s a bid to start haggling. Ultimately, agreement is reached, with a bonus for lugging my ancient oak desk up to the cabin. I carry the typewriter, an old upright Underwood that faithfully served me in decades past.
Tomorrow I shall start page one with this tentative title: Defenceless: The Trial of Angelina Santos. The case goes back fifty-six years, but I need not command my memory to speak, to use a Nabokovian allusion, because gathering dust in the vaults of my old Vancouver law firm are its transcripts. Defenceless will write itself.
* * *
Mysteriously, by the end of the workday, a twelve-pack of beer appears, several cans already empty. I politely reject Stoney’s offer of a full one — he stubbornly refuses to believe I haven’t had a drink since 1987.
Stoney and Dog pop open their cans of Lucky Lager, and we watch an orange sunset from under the boughs of the majestic arbutus. The Arbutus menziesii — known in the northwest States by the lovely name of madrone — is surely the temperate world’s most beautiful tree, all loops and swirls, russet skin and shiny leaves and ever green.
Stoney catches me admiring it. “You wanna say sayonara to this tree, eh, before it swallows the cabin and you in it.” He crushes a beer can for emphasis. A loud hiss as another is opened.
I explain to this nature illiterate that this is a magical tree, to be worshipped, a beautiful bejewelled goddess of the forest. I don’t mention the tree is of deep significance: I first made love to Margaret under it. A momentous event that ended rather embarrassingly. Enough said.
Stoney persists: “You want that crookneck limb to come crashing through the shingles and crush you to death while you’re only halfway through the biography of your life? — if that’s your pleasure, go for it.”
I make a scoffing sound, hiding the worry that he may be right — weighty arbutus limbs often break.
Stoney sizes up the hippie-crafted barrel stove, which gives off generous heat though it’s a wood-gobbler. “You’re gonna need another cord just to get through the winter and spring. I got a line on some dried fir and alder, plus Dog here famously wields a mighty chainsaw.”
“We have plenty of fir and alder butts. I enjoy splitting wood.” The truth is that I will want solitude when in the throes of creation.
“What do you say, Dog, can you see him writing a masterpiece with a twisted back?” Dog accepts that as rhetorical, merely shrugs.
“Also, maybe you wanna think about a solar panel or two — which I got a reliable source for, half-price, with a guarantee they ain’t been stole — so you can avoid the fire risk of them propane lamps, and maybe run a small fridge and plug in your phone.”
“After I settle in I will confer about these matters with my muse.”
* * *
“I hope this isn’t some quixotic venture into self-discovery,” Margaret says, as I prepare to leave for the cabin to embark on my late-life literary career.
“Nothing heavy, dear. My goals are merely to inform and entertain, while righting the wrongs that history wrote.” It’s ten a.m. I’m armed and eager. I stick a Thermos of coffee in my pack. A sandwich. A bone for Ulysses. A toilet roll for the outhouse.
“Righting what wrongs? You’re sure this isn’t some mission of vengeance? Wentworth was sued all over the place because of the people he maligned.”
“Anyone about whom I might write harshly is gone.” Chief Justice Wilbur Kroop who, at eighty-nine, was brought down by Covid-19.
“Nothing intimate about us, please. I don’t want to read about how those kayakers came to shore after hearing us hollering our heads off like we were being attacked.”
I was particularly loud, imploring Jesus Christ to save me. They caught us nakedly entwined under the madrone tree, orgasmically exhausted.
“And I may initiate divorce proceedings if I see any mention of Taba Jones.”
An accomplished potter with whom I’d had an illicit encounter years ago. I was the seducee, though that didn’t earn me a whit of forgiveness. Taba felt she was being frozen out of the Garibaldi community after Margaret came home in retirement, and rebuilt her business in Ontario.
“This isn’t a full-blown memoir, darling. It’s pre-us, in 1966, when I was pretending to be a city sophisticate and you were a topless teenage hippie with flowers in your hair.”
She invariably rolls her eyes when I tease her about her back-to-the-land phase with Garibaldi’s Earth Seed Commune. As if it’s shameful, though I find it endearing.
“And the bacchanal with those two sex workers? Seriously, Arthur, can you imagine the sniggers and averted faces —”
“I’ll handle it!” Too loud. I can’t abide the helpless, self-pitying fool I become when quarrelling with the woman I love. I tamp it down, apologize, promise her the right to critique the final draft. We kiss and we hug and we laugh a little and we are fine again.
* * *
In the cabin, I start a fire. I adjust my chair. I roll a sheet of paper into my Underwood. I type: Defenceless: The Trial of Angelina Santos — that shall be my working title.
Now travel with me, dear reader, to the long ago . . .
1966 — The Handoff
As of early fall in 1966, I had finally graduated from the fourteenth floor of our West Hastings bank building, where the toilers moiled, to a spacious office with a pair of windows on the fifteenth floor, where the barristers held court. Tragger, Inglis’s associates and section heads occupied the sixteenth, partners the seventeenth. Above them was the roof, where pigeons ruled.
My windows once afforded spectacular views of Burrard Inlet and Stanley Park, until a posh new hotel noisily sprang up next door. Its upper floors and a rooftop cocktail lounge provided feeble compensation, though on a rainless day I could still make out a wedge of waterfront and a topping of North Shore mountains. The hotel, the Hastings Royal, became a favourite oasis for our solicitors, many of whom enjoyed adulterous liaisons in its rooms.
The better view was out my door, where perched my secretary, the shy and lovely Gertrude Isbister: twenty-three, sweetly smiling as she clacked away at her Selectric.
But that view was spoiled late on a Friday afternoon by the chief of the criminal division as he approached from across the secretarial pool: Alex Pappas, in his signature wear, a checked sports jacket with leather trim. Stout and short, with the wattles of an iguana.
I was expecting him for our regular week’s end review of billings and disbursements. The door was open because I wanted him to see me watching him. Among the secretaries, Pappas was known as “Mister Hands.” He liked to idly brush them against buttocks and breasts. I especially didn’t like it when he touched Gertrude.
I went out to meet him, blocking his access to her, and directed him inside with a friendly grip on his leather-patched elbow. (The conversation that follows — indeed, all dialogue — is as best remembered.)
“A minor glitch this week,” I said. “Willy Welger’s cheque bounced.”
“I told you, pal, get it up front.”
“We’re covered.” I handed Pappas the $10,000 bail receipt, assigned to the firm.
“Once again you prove you’re not as dumb as I assumed. What else?”
“Tony d’Anglio was pleased with how the extortion preliminary fell apart. Ten went into general for that, fifteen into trust for future services.”
“He pay by cheque or cash?”
“Cash.”
“Next time, you want to let me know when it’s cash.” In case that seemed ambiguous, he added, “It’s already dirty money, they never want receipts.”
Pappas had been a brazen pocketer of tax-free currency during his many years as a scrappy, loud-talking, top-earning criminal counsel. I didn’t want to insult him by telling him I like to keep my hands clean. When he saw I wasn’t interested in being corrupted, he just shrugged and said, “I got a nice, easy little murder for you.”
I suddenly felt giddy, my heart pounding. Maybe there was an element of panic. I had yearned for a chance to redeem myself after an earlier flop, but was haunted by fear of failure, of screwing up. I was emotionally paralyzed at the thought of losing a client to the gallows and had vowed not to take another capital murder until the death penalty was rescinded. But in 1966 it was still on the books.
Yet I was weary of representing narcotics dealers and shakedown artists — there was no pride in that and little glory.
Pappas talked fast as I slid into my desk chair. “Up to you, Stretch. You got to stop kicking yourself over the Swift case. We put you in the starting lineup before you were ready. This one’s almost too straightforward, a dinky little domestic shooting. As in, the domestic dropped her boss with a hunting rifle after he raped her. You want it? Otherwise, I’ll give it to Shapiro.”
I went briefly into Walter Mitty mode. Was this a chance to defend the honour of a housemaid in distress? That had a seductive appeal.
Pappas checked his watch. “Give me twenty minutes, and I’ll see you in my office so you can look at the file. We can have a drink on it, then call it a day.”
* * *
As Alex Pappas topped up my whisky glass with premium Scotch, talking non-stop, I realized I was being set up to fail. This dinky little homicide was a throwaway, a reject. Pappas had done a quick preliminary last week, decided it was a loser, and was trying to dump it off on me.
The media feasted on murders but I hadn’t read anything about this case. Then it came to me that the two-day preliminary had opened September 12, the day of a provincial election. The case got buried under the return to power of the erratic right-wing Social Credit Party.
“Fort Thompson, it’s up near the Yukon border. Fort Tom, they call it. Beautiful up there in the late fall. You may have to cop her out, but if you feel lucky, give manslaughter a shot, that counts as a win. Might get you associate status. I told Bullingham you’re ready for the sixteenth floor.”
Pappas seemed far too anxious to fob off this case. I wondered if he’d mismanaged his calendar, overbooked. Maybe he just didn’t want to be stuck in Fort Tom for a week in November.
“The trial won’t go for more than two, three days. Short and quick. Hell, one day if you cop a plea. Take the week off. You hunt? They got deer, elk, black bear. Cougar, you could bring home a trophy.”
The transcript of the preliminary was unusually thin for a homicide. I wondered how much effort Pappas had put into it when he was not hunting for creatures to kill.
I glanced through the file summary. Four months ago, a local businessman, Frederick C. Trudd, was shot dead, with his own rifle, by his Filipina housemaid. Her claim to having been abused by him, if true, might win sympathy but would offer no defence in law.
“I won’t try to kid you, pal, you got to accept Jesus as your saviour and pray Hail Mary. We have to make a pretense of trying to win, we been paid fifteen grand.” A substantial sum in those days.
“A housemaid has come up with a fee that high?”
Pappas refilled my glass. “They’re scrambling for more.”
“Who?”
“The townspeople took up a collection.”
“Could she be that popular?”
“The deceased was that unpopular. Angelina is her name. Angelina Santos. Twenty years old. Chewy little number, nice boobs, sweet disposition. Her only fault is that she took dead aim at an unarmed target from sixty feet away.”
An unpopular deceased. Possibly a rapist. Would not a local jury be eager to find a reasonable doubt? “Any witnesses?”
“Nope. Just Angelina. She couldn’t tell a lie.”
But was the confession voluntary? I had won a few cases in which police overreached when taking statements. I took stock: why was I sitting there devising defences? Hadn’t I sworn not to be a dumping ground for Pappas’s losers?
Then I was hit with sudden insight: Arthur Beauchamp, you are a craven coward. All your adult life, all through law school, you’d dreamed of being a great counsel, of taking on hopeless cases and turning them around. You were infected in high school, devouring biographies of the great counsel, Marshall Hall, Birkett, Darrow.
Pappas topped me up as I leafed idly through the transcript. A sixteenth-floor office would be nice. So might the rank of associate, whatever that meant, other than a higher standard of living. What else might I exact from the earnest supplicant?
