The Long-Shot Trial, page 28
I blinked the dream of her away, as Etienne Larouche opened wide the church doors and summoned us to come in.
* * *
Fortunately for me, given my state of drunkenness, the reception was held in the Fort’s dining hall, so I was only an elevator ride away from my bed. The last I remember, I was standing on a chair, reciting from Twelfth Night: “What is love? ’Tis not hereafter. Present mirth hath present laughter . . .”
The chair went over, but Mike Trasov caught me before I landed on my face. He then bundled me up to the sixth floor and into my room. Mike was retired from the Force and doing security work for the hotel. Earlier, we’d talked about Fred Trudd’s murder, and as I remember he didn’t seem to care if it was ever solved.
Mine wasn’t the only clown act of the evening — Hogey Johnson, during a toast, lost control of his whisky-on-the-rocks and it emptied into the cleavage of a maid of honour. Hogey will somehow survive that catastrophe, as he has others — Angelina had a soft spot for him, and had hired him to attend to the routine legal needs of Northland Mills.
Sibyl Frick, his former faithful secretary, was now filling that role for Angelina, and enjoying a hefty raise in income. I still felt guilty that I took advantage of her, but she hugged me and we laughed over our gruesome dinner date. She reminded me that I’d apologized enough, by sending her two dozen roses post-trial.
* * *
In the morning, I bore my thumping hangover to Rustlers for a breakfast of flapjacks, coffee, and aspirin tablets, joining Angelina and a half-dozen of her friends, many of them sharing my morning-after pain. But we had a merry time recalling the many turns and twists from those frantic ten days of my last trip to Fort Tom.
Etienne made a courtesy visit, but soon had to hurry away for Sunday mass. I’d hoped that my few minutes with him might offer divine illumination about who did in Fred Trudd, but he said, flippantly, “God knows.” He didn’t seem bothered that God wasn’t sharing.
I picked up the tab despite protests from Angelina and Marsha, then exchanged farewell hugs, but was foiled in my effort to call a cab for the airport. Buck Harris’s big crew cab was backed up to the front door, eager to carry me away. The “Better Dead than Red” bumper sticker had survived, but another one, more upbeat, had joined it: “The Far North — the Future Is Forever.”
Buck ordered me into the passenger seat, insisting that a proper closure to my visit would have him returning me to the airport in the same truck that had borne me on my first visit to Fort Tom.
I didn’t feel a sense of closure. The whodunit that was Regina v. Santos had not ended satisfactorily. I felt a hollowness over that, a sense that it would never be solved, that its threads would dangle forever in the breeze.
That hadn’t bothered Mike Trasov. I told Buck it was odd that a long-time senior cop would just shrug off cracking an infamous murder case, and allow it to grow cold.
“I’m with Mike,” Buck said. “Let it be.”
Arthur — May 2023
“Let it be? That’s your ending? A lyric from a sappy Beatles song?” That was the reaction of my acquiring editor, Ellaine, in her critique of my final draft. She tagged countless other issues in need of repair, in what she claims is a life-saving effort to rescue my memoir. She let me know her reputation as a literary sharpshooter is at risk because she’d gambled on me, signed me to a quick contract. I felt the advance was reasonable, though what did I know?
My cynical life partner thinks they signed me up fast before I could send it around. “They didn’t want this fish to swim away.”
Ellaine loathes the title Defenceless, and has devised a far better one: Longshot. The not-very-dynamic ending is number two on her complaint list, so I will have to give it a big kick in the pants, rouse it into life. And that is what I’m setting out to do, on this, the anniversary of the last week of May, 1966, the anniversary of Fred Trudd’s death.
I defy the glorious weather, reject Ulysses’s pleas to walk the beach, and sit at my computer, mute my phone, remove other distractions such as bookmarked books and magazines, and begin tapping out my denouement:
Over the decades, I continued to see Angelina and Aretha in Vancouver — occasionally for business or pleasure, but often for unhappy reasons: a crisis in their family.
* * *
At workday’s end, I have accomplished practically nothing. Ulysses gets his way, and romps down to the shale beach, checking on me occasionally, as if wondering why I’m moping along.
An annoying vibration in my pants pocket reminds me I have not unmuted the phone. Sometimes I forget to do that for hours, occasionally days. Also annoying is the little impatient light that tells me I have voice mails. Usually these are from online thieves, but the log of unanswered calls brings up “Arthur,” and a number that, sadly, I recognize. Arthur Blue is in trouble again.
Yes, Arthur Blue is Angelina’s second-born. Fifty-two years old now, and his life has been a downhill slog. Raised in Fort Tom, treated like a prince, a degree in Aboriginal Studies, a lackadaisical attempt at a wilderness tour business — funded by his mother — and then he drifted down to Vancouver, hung with the wrong crowd, got hooked on street drugs.
A sad but not uncommon story. His sister, Aretha, got all the glory: the child of rape whose mom valiantly resisted an accusation of murder. Since Angelina retired, Aretha smoothly runs the show, as president and CEO of Northland Mills and Realty.
I had declined official godfather status for baby Arthur Blue — I wouldn’t have time to perform the duties. He is aware of that and it doubtless adds to his many reasons for feeling rejected. Out of guilt, I’ve defended him for free. Once for coke, once for smack, the last one for fentanyl. Each time, he avoided jail by agreeing to enter rehab.
His last call was ten minutes ago. In the process of getting through to him, I learn he’s in the Customs and Immigration lockup, just north of Blaine, Washington.
“This is my one call, Arthur, I’m being held by Immigration until the real cops show up. It’s a harrowing scene, man. I was down in Seattle with some bros, someone must’ve slipped a packet of feelgood into my overnight bag —”
I break in. “Muzzle it. Listen to me.”
“Don’t slough me off on Shapiro, okay? This one needs the master.”
“I am sloughing you off. And Lev has health issues, so he’s going to slough you off to a lawyer who is still practising. He’ll see that you’re represented in court tomorrow for a bail hearing. The bad news is you’ll be held overnight.”
“Aw, God, I know better than to bug you. I just . . . your number is filed away in my brain. And I’ve been in a fucking frenzy since Dad called. He had some bleak news about Mom. Worse than bleak. She has inoperable brain cancer.”
Arthur — May 2023
In his seventies, Johnny Blue remains a handsome man, and he’s still practising, as senior partner in the firm he founded, Blue and Associates, LLP. As a fierce champion of Indigenous rights, he has argued several appellate briefs in the Supreme Court of Canada.
He picked me up at the Fort Tom airport in his hybrid Volvo, and having updated me on his great-grandfather status — Aretha’s three offspring have produced seven more so far — he seems unable to talk about Angelina out of fear of choking up, and is mostly silent.
He’d poured out words yesterday, though, when I phoned him, struggling as he relayed a neurologist’s diagnosis that his wife of fifty-four years has less than sixty days to live, as a tumour races through her brain. She has been released from hospital and is resting at their home, a full-time nurse in attendance, a doctor regularly dropping by.
When I told him about his son’s latest predicament, he sighed, and thanked me for getting him counsel. “We spoiled him. No, that’s too easy. It was my fault. I wounded him, crippled him. I made him ashamed of me.”
I’d heard it before, but Johnny never explained why he blamed himself. I’m not sure if I want to know.
Yesterday, on learning I’d booked a morning flight up here, he said, “I’m grateful, Arthur. Angelina reveres you. And also we need to talk.” Then, emphatically, “I need to talk. It’s about paternity.”
And here’s his chance, and he can’t seem to get it out, to repeat that tricky p-word; he’s focusing on the road, his hands tightly gripped on the steering wheel as we pass by the new industrial zone, the railway yards and train station.
In this silence, I spin decades back to the jury’s emphatic not-guilty verdict, Angelina’s radiant smile as Johnny bolted toward her. I see him whisper in her ear, and see her kiss his cheek. We found love during the trial. Really? Or had they shared intimacies before her arrest?
Connections begin to snap together, fitting like tiles. You fucking slimy Nazi pervert . . . Why would he have called Trudd a pervert unless Angelina had told him about his indecent acts? He would have been in Pouce Coupe when Marsha Bigelow spread the word about Trudd’s lewd behaviour.
Biggs and Barnes: had that matching set of smarmy sleuths stumbled on the truth? My notes from 1966 have Biggs, with his beery breath, leaning to my ear: “Trudd’s one-night stand couldn’t have got her pregnant. He had no viable seed. Two marriages over three decades plus a few short-terms, and no fruit from his loins.”
Dr. Genevieve Royce, the prison doctor, advised that Angelina’s hymen had recently been ruptured. How recently? On the night of the rape, May 29? Or some days before that?
Did I ever have consent sex with anyone, no, never. I was hundred percent virgin. Had Angelina lied to me? The thought is staggering. That I’d been taken in is unthinkable.
Johnny’s voice intrudes, ghost-like. “You’ll see some attractive changes here.” He turns off the highway into a new community park surrounding the restored trading post. He parks, and we sit in silence awhile, watching toddlers in a playground and teens playing a mixed-gender softball game.
Then: “How goes your memoir about Angelina’s trial?”
He’s fully aware of my literary pretensions — I’ve consulted with him and his spouse about several murky details. “It’s done, all but some tweaking and concocting a suitable closing note. I have a new title: Longshot. I also have a publisher.”
“Congratulations.” A deep breath. “Angelina has demanded that I be open with you. Will you undertake not to mention, in words spoken or written, what I am about to relate?”
Between lawyers, an undertaking is an enduring covenant. I can find no option but to agree. And I’m intrigued.
He speaks softly but clearly as he recalls events from 1966 heretofore unspoken. “One Sunday evening in early May, I walked her home from the food bank. We sat together and talked. About little things, growing up in different worlds, living different lives. Nervous chatter from a young couple unsure about how to engage, while they tingled with desire.”
I smile, remembering my similarly awkward romantic moments.
“And then I kissed her, then we necked — is that still a word? We didn’t get far, mostly heavy nuzzling. I couldn’t figure out how to snap open her bra.” A smile, finally. “And then she drew back a little, and apologized. ‘It’s not you,’ she said. I realized I’d sparked a flashback — a couple of weeks earlier Trudd had groped her. Came from behind, scared her out of her wits. She was afraid of him. Then she gave me a lingering kiss and I told her I loved her, and I slipped out into the alley, out of view, unseen.”
The pattern continued, and it was not restricted to Sundays. Johnny would come by on odd evenings, and they would talk and kiss and touch. Eventually neither could restrain their desire. He used condoms, mostly.
I was hundred percent virgin. She’d said that in such a jaunty way.
And then, on May 21, Trudd sneaked into the basement bathroom, pie-eyed, masturbating as Angelina exited the shower, grabbing at her as she brushed by. That evening, Johnny visited her in her flat, implored her to leave Trudd’s employ. But she had accepted $300 as an apology and she showed up on Thursday to care for the cats. And was raped that night.
On Saturday, Trudd stomped out of the mediation hearing, back to his hotel. Johnny returned that evening, travelling by motorcycle, and went directly to Trudd’s house. “It wasn’t just a whim that took me there — Trudd had shown up drunk and in a rage, and I had an awful, nagging sense that he had done something to her. I parked the bike in the bushes. Only the cats knew that I spent most of the night there.”
We watch as a girl takes a mighty swing at a softball and it bounces into the parking area. Johnny scrambles from the car, throws it back, calls: “Nice try, Peggy. Foul ball by inches.”
On his return, he lights a cigarette, blows smoke out his window. I finally break the silence. “You did a DNA test?”
He nods. “Some years ago. Quietly, secretly. I am Aretha’s father.”
* * *
Johnny and Angelina reside in a spacious bungalow on the Wolf River Reserve. It’s designed with Dene Nation motifs and nestles in the pines above a cascading brook. Aretha is here, spelling off the nurse, and she clasps me in a tight hug. Still a beauty in her middle years, endowed with her mother’s smile and grace. And now I see Johnny Blue in her too, and I recall, during our occasional get-togethers, my puzzlement at her apparent lack of Trudd-ness.
Johnny confided that he’d shared his DNA test results with her, and with Arthur Blue, but no one else. Angelina didn’t need to see the results. She knew all along that her daughter shared the genes of Santos and Blue.
I am led to the master bedroom, and left to be alone with her. This is one of those times that I thirst for strong drink. But there is no numbing of the pain as I look into Angelina’s half-lidded eyes, her face blown up slightly with steroids, her lips curled in a determined effort to smile.
An exchange of kisses. A slightly hoarse, cynical voice: “Welcome to my death, Arthur.”
“I am overwhelmed with sadness. You have earned everlasting happiness in the afterlife — that is my only solace.”
“I wasn’t a good girl, Arthur. I’ll be lucky to graduate from purgatory.”
“You have always believed in a forgiving God.”
“Only my God and my lover knew I had sinned. Now our children know. And finally my famous lawyer knows. My famous lawyer who believed my lies. And who is bound to silence.”
That’s likely true. Fifteen months ago she waived, in writing, the solicitor-client privilege that would have bowdlerized my memoir, but our agreement surely doesn’t extend to deathbed confessions.
“No, I was not a virgin. Not even close. Johnny and I made love sometimes three, four times a night throughout that crazy month of May.”
I gently remove a cup of fruit juice from her trembling hands, and hold it to her lips. “And so your Aretha was born out of love. My mind is spinning.”
“While mine just inches along.” A self-mocking laugh. “Poor Arthur. You tried so hard to hide your shock that I could carry a rapist’s baby with so much hope and love and joy. You were the innocent one, and I the schemer.”
Those words take an effort, and she breathes heavily for a while. I the schemer. And what was the scheme? To deny Trudd’s sisters their legal right to inherit his lands, business, and fortune? To enhance her chances for an acquittal? To deflect any suspicion that Johnny was involved in Trudd’s death?
Her voice turns weary. “There was no other way. No other way. Forgive me. Forgive Johnny.” She grips my hand, then lets go and closes her eyes. “I am so tired.”
I stay awhile, daubing my eyes with tissues as she sleeps. Then I’m pulled away to join Johnny and Aretha and her three teenagers out on the patio, sharing lemon tea and gluten-free pastries, striving to lift our gloom by enjoying the sun and the view and the birdsong.
I lighten the mood with some funny courtroom anecdotes, and then it’s time to go, and we all hug, and I head off with Johnny in his car.
* * *
I have some lag time before catching my return flight, so Johnny suggests we take a rest stop in town. Again, we travel in silence, and again I can feel Johnny’s tension, his hands taut on the steering wheel. Something other than his wife’s decline is deeply troubling him.
I look out across the surging Wolf River to the high-banked valley that was once the scene of Trudd’s life and death, the house levelled years ago, condominiums sprouting up. Memories return, and an ugly fantasy teases me. Was Angelina working me all along? Had I been duped by her beatific charm, by her disguise, her role-play as a naïve domestic? The alleged precarious health of her mother: a charade to gain sympathy? Raped by Trudd, finding herself pregnant, did she plot to gain control of Trudd Enterprises by cooking up an inheritance scam? Or, even more ghastly, did she do so by making a false complaint of rape?
I shake off such absurd concepts. I will not fall victim to a conspiracy theory, the pervasive evil of our time.
Downtown, a modern greystone annex thrusts from the rear of the historic courthouse. The RCMP detachment has moved; in its place is a cannabis store. Where Rustlers once stood, a modern office building hosts a Tim Hortons and a Subway. Mercifully, Marsha Bigelow passed away before having to witness this fast-food invasion.
Johnny stops at a dockside café, just above high-water mark on the twisting, surging river. The Toscana, pizza and pasta. “Funky and interesting,” he says. We take an outside table near a dock where boats are tethered.
