The Long-Shot Trial, page 4
Miss Griswold and a friend (her roommate, actually) did indeed lead me to a taxi, in which, frankly, I passed out. But these thoughtful young women not only escorted me to my little flat in Kitsilano, they even had the driver wait until they tucked me into bed.
How do I know this? Because Gina Griswold, who was a rather careless prostitute, was picked up two nights later for Vag C. In the soundproof interview room of the women’s lockup, we enjoyed a good laugh over how she and her friend rescued me from that abysmal bachelor party. She assured me I had been a perfect gentleman. She also let me know that Hubbell Meyerson (I’m going to get you laid) had paid her to “look after” me.
* * *
On the following weekend, I putted out to Point Grey in my old VW bug to brave my monthly Sunday dinner with my stiff, bitchy, right-wing parents (whom, oddly, masochistically, I loved). Dr. Thomas Beauchamp, soon to be retired as head librarian at UBC, rarely got invited to dinner parties, because of his acid tongue and his compulsion to pounce on his tablemates for their errors in literary or historical allusions. Dr. Mavis Beauchamp, who taught the great ancient languages, was equally unpopular among UBC faculty: she was brittle in debate and to the right of Ayn Rand. She had recently written an opinion piece for the Toronto Telegram, decrying Canada’s acceptance of immigrants from “backward countries.”
I parked a telephone pole away so my rusted Beetle wouldn’t shame them, and, armed with a decent five-dollar Beaujolais, found Mother in her kitchen, setting out canapés. A chicken was in the oven.
“We’ve invited Professor Winkle,” she announced as I pecked her cheek. “He’s an old friend of your father and I don’t want you ignoring him. He’s been very vulnerable since his wife left him.”
“Ah, yes, the hypocritical Dr. Winkle, with his constant rants about the sinking morals of the student body. Such an exemplar of virtue.”
A private detective, hired by his wife, had caught him with his pants down, literally, astride an associate professor of history for whom he’d lobbied for tenure.
“He’ll be bringing their daughter, Madge, so please don’t seek courage through drink at the prospect of having to relate to her.”
“Mother, I beg you. Please stop trying to line me up with Madge Winkle.” Plump and pushy, commerce grad, worked for Philip Morris in sales and advertising.
“I thought that opposites would attract. She’s as bouncy and sweet-natured as you are not. Maybe a little light in the head. But she’s from good stock, and she’s attracted to you. But you don’t seem to be attracted to any kind of woman.”
(It was none of her business that I’d shared many steamy nights with a voluptuous older woman I’d fallen for. I still occasionally saw Ophelia Moore, a newly appointed magistrate, on visits to the Okanagan Valley.)
* * *
I reacted bravely to Mother’s challenge, tucking in close to Madge at the dinner table, cordially expressing interest as she explained the health benefits of filter tip cigarettes. The disapproval on my mother’s face was palpable — she believed I was faking a healthy interest in the opposite sex.
The chicken’s carcass was ultimately replaced by cake, coffee, brandy, and cigarettes. Glasses were raised in celebration of the recent provincial election and the victory of Premier W.A.C. “Wacky” Bennett, who had once again kept the dreaded socialists at bay. I hadn’t voted. My political leanings at the time could best be described as apatheistic.
From time to time I found myself having to repel questions about the Herb Macintosh case. It was assumed I knew the mining tycoon, that I had insights, knew secrets, proofs of guilt or innocence. I explained I knew little more than the readers of news accounts of the preliminary hearing. In any event, I had merely glanced through the file.
My concentration was on the Angelina Santos trial. I had dictated a memo to Gertrude to reserve a flight to Fort Thompson, without checking to see if it even had an airport — an Alaska Highway stopover, a Hudson’s Bay trading post in times long past, that’s all I knew.
I was intrigued by what I’d learned about the young immigrant. Her interviews with Alex Pappas and his unhelpful forensic psychiatrist painted a picture of a pleasant, intelligent, straightforward, and utterly sane twenty-year-old.
There was nothing remarkable about her history. Completed secondary school and a year at a vocational school, learning the hospitality business. Came to Canada as a landed immigrant in 1964, stayed with a cousin in Prince Rupert while working as a hotel maid. In early 1965, she responded to Trudd’s classified ad for a full-time housekeeper, “with generous benefits.”
Professor Winkle broke up my musings by rising. Father was a heroic drinker, as was I, but Winkle, who had brought champagne and brandy, outdistanced us. He made a bizarre toast to his wife, who would be getting her decree nisi in a couple of weeks.
“To Edith, my darling love whose heart I broke. And now the bond of our union is broken.” He raised his glass. “A vinculum matrimonii.”
“A vincula matrimonii,” Father corrected. “Vinculum has the sense of bondage in the form of incarceration.”
Mother chipped in: “Literally, from the restraints of marriage — the bonds, the chains.”
“Not, however, the bonds of affection,” said Father.
My parents could go on forever like that. Madge smiled at me and I at her, sharing this little interlude of academic nitpicking. Professor Winkle finally sat, but continued excoriating himself for losing “sweet Madge’s loving mommy” over “a playful tryst” with a colleague.
Madge was less interested in her father’s love life than her own. I felt a light tickle of fingers on my right thigh, and my reaction was fluster. I faced a dilemma: responding in kind would send a false message, but not responding might be hurtful or insulting.
I suddenly found myself on my feet, cutting Winkle off, raising my brandy snifter: “To Angelina!”
This ill-considered attempt at distraction was greeted with bafflement and cries of “Angelina?” and “What’s an Angelina?” I was stuck with my impromptu change of topic, and found myself tipsily describing the particulars of the case against Miss Santos.
Nothing enhances a dinner party like a jolly conversation about murder. Mother held forth awhile on “the obvious indicia” that the shooting was a planned assassination, adding that “doubtless” the young Filipina had been improperly vetted by the Immigration Department. Father, a practical man, wanted to know why, if Angelina had been raped, she hadn’t gone to the authorities.
Madge wondered if, under Philippine law, a woman was justified in killing her attacker. She was the only one among us who was sober; her craving was for the nicotine in the cigarettes she marketed. While addressing me she would twist her mouth sideways so as not to blow smoke in my face. (I rarely used tobacco in those days, except to be polite.)
Professor Winkle had recently graded a paper on historical traditions of rape-revenge — it advised that in medieval England women were entitled to detach their abusers’ testicles. Father relied on Cogswell’s England in the Middle Ages to dismiss that theory. The practice of gouging out offenders’ eyeballs was, however, abided in the mid-1100s.
None of this back-and-forth was conducive to romance, but Madge sensed my resistance was broken when I drunkenly squeezed her hand. She looked at her watch, blew a spume past my left ear, and leaned into me. “I’m going to insist on driving you home.”
She and her father had come in the same car, and she decided to drop him off first. En route, the chatty old boy warned me to pack long underwear for Fort Thompson. While researching eighteenth-century fur trading, he’d spent time up there. “Winter lasts ten months. It’s the last frontier, redneck country, so stay out of the bars. Don’t use ten-dollar words or they’ll assume you’re a fancy boy. You let them know you went to a posh private school, they’ll pin a target on your ass.”
As he got out at his West End rental, he whispered boozily into my ear: “Good to see you getting along with Madge. Your folks have been worried.” He came even closer: “Not that there’s anything wrong with being homo.”
Madge could have dropped me off first, but now had to double back to my flat in Kitsilano. I struggled to think of a polite way not to invite her in — stupidly, I’d droned on about my charming downstairs rental with its sunroom, private patio, rose garden and . . . could I have been so bumble-headed as to have mentioned the waterbed?
I felt bad that I wasn’t attracted to her. I might have shared a bed with her, if only to answer a gnawing need for release, but I was too intoxicated to risk the humiliation of being unable to perform.
“That’s it,” I said. “The bungalow with the side light on.”
“Where’s the best place to park?”
“Oh, just in front of the driveway. Yes, this is fine, right here. That was most generous of you, Madge. Were my head not spinning, I’d invite you in. My insides are roiling. Nothing to do with you.” For a full minute, I carried on in this bizarre, repulsive way, digging myself in deeper.
Somehow I escaped unscathed from that vehicle, staggering as I hung on to the passenger door. Madge took a deep pull on her cigarette, and blew a smoke ring at me, a perfect zero that wobbled and broke apart.
“Fuck you,” she said.
Arthur — March 2022
I punch the period key with emphasis, then wait for the shame and remorse to kick in. That was cruel. Not to Madge personally, but to her loved ones: she died of lung cancer a few years ago. I hadn’t kept in close touch with her, but sent condolences to her husband, kids, and grandkids. That scene with Madge Winkle must be buried, overtyped with x’s. I dare not emulate my biographer, with his obsession over giggly secrets and raunchy speculations.
I was disrespectful elsewhere in that draft chapter. The acerbic sketches of my parents do not show their sole offspring in the warmest of light. Having set out to chronicle a bizarre, gripping trial, I’ve gone off track — as if still gripped by the trauma of having been raised lovelessly. And then boasting about “many steamy nights with a voluptuous older woman.” A transparent effort to seem Hemingwayesque. How undignified of me to describe the late high court justice as “voluptuous.” Forgive me, dear Ophelia.
I blame these gaffes and gaucheries on the sawing and hammering on the roof — the din has disrupted my focus. I loved the arbutus tree once, but I curse it now.
A sudden, eerie silence as tools are stilled. Then the sound of boots scraping down the ladder. A grunt and pull, a failed start, another grunt and pull, and Dog’s chainsaw roars into life.
I give up, shroud my typewriter, pack my work-in-progress into my old leather briefcase, arouse Ulysses from his slumber, and damp down my stove. I step outside into a misty day — brightened, however, by the happy faces of daffodils in scattered clumps by the path to the outhouse. Spring is icumen in.
I retreat a few metres, up a rise, so I can check the work-in-progress of my crew. The hole in the roof, directly above the loft, is now covered with fibreglass insulation. Stacks of rough-cut shakes, split by Dog from old cedar butts, lean at the base of the offending tree, which has been punished with a severe haircut. Dog is bucking up the crookneck limb that Stoney had insisted would crush me to death.
With climate change accelerating, the March storms have become more severe every year, and a week ago a southwest gale amputated that limb. My death didn’t happen, because (a) the branch merely punched a big hole in the roof, then rolled off, and (b) the storm was at night.
We were four days without power. I got back to my manuscript only today. I’ve been discombobulated. That shows in my typewriter’s gross domestic product.
Dog shuts down, snaps open a beer. Stoney, astride a sawhorse, salutes me with his own frothy can. “I’ll only say it one more time.”
I steel myself for another I-told-you-so.
“I tried. I warned you, boss. It’s a magical tree, you said, a goddess. It seems kinda creepy, but you were blinded by love. Maybe I’m not a big-time attorney with a wall full of degrees in Greek and Latin, but in the struggle to survive on this here island I’ve developed instincts about life-threatening trees.”
I wait patiently until he finishes, then ask if they intend to finish the roof job today.
Stoney studies the dwindling pile of shakes. “Somehow they must’ve got undercounted. Not a problem, we’ll split more tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’re gonna need to anchor them solar panels you said you wanted for the roof.”
“I did?”
“For a mini-fridge, remember? Hook up a laptop, a CD player, mood music to get your creative juices bubbling. They’re available cash on delivery at a haggle-free price, except for extras, unknowables, and my commission. I also got a line on a solar technician in case you don’t trust me to do the job.”
In my confused state during the power outage, had I mumbled something about wanting solar power? I tell Stoney we’ll talk about it when the roof is done.
“No problem,” he says. It is a phrase I have learned to passionately distrust.
1966 — Owls and Howls
Alex Pappas was unceasingly irked that I was more centred on the Santos case than the Herb Macintosh file. He regarded the latter as a trifling concern compared with the lurid spectacle of a violent murder in a mansion. His lack of interest in Angelina’s defence was reflected in lines like “Can’t she just say she forgot hunting season was over and mistook her boss for a moose?”
We quarrelled over how to defend Macintosh. The mining magnate wanted a brawler in his corner, and Pappas was determined to impress him, to enter the fray like a pit bull, ripping away at witnesses’ throats. I urged a more cerebral approach: sway the jury through rational argument.
Pappas was forever barging into my office with some new wrinkle that had to be discussed immediately, or a new lead or a witness who had to be interviewed. I resented being unable to squeeze in enough time to prepare for Angelina’s trial. But I finally stole an early October weekend and braved a flight to the distant outpost they called Fort Tom.
I was nervous about going up there — the frozen far north, redneck country. I’d be out of my element: semi-sophisticated Vancouver and its comfortable middle-class suburbs. I had little life experience that would prepare me for the rough-and-tumble of the backwoods, and in my dreams I found myself venturing like Charles Marlow into the Heart of Darkness.
* * *
As the ancient DC-4 banked toward a desolate airstrip, I took in a panorama of Fort Thompson, bathed yellow in the early evening sun: a sprawl of modest homes around a town centre that looked somehow decayed. The abundance of churches hinted that the townspeople had hopes for a happier afterlife.
The main artery, the Alaska Highway, bisected the town east and west, bridged a fast-flowing river, and crawled up high eastern bluffs where sat homes of the well-to-do. Beyond, to the west, were the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
We descended over hills of logs and sawn lumber, then passed a mill, smoke spewing from its stacks. Just off the airport’s access road I spotted the town’s sole tourist attraction, a restored log fort built over the ruins of a North West Company fur trading post.
As the aircraft met the runway with jolting bounces, a couple of men up front cheered sardonically: loggers, from the look of them, heavy smokers, heavier drinkers. I’d had a glass or two myself, along with aspirin, seeking to deaden the discomfort of an unrelenting cold.
I was among the last of the two dozen passengers to disembark into the chill evening air, and there I was, in a remote northern outpost where in two months I had to defend twenty-year-old Angelina Santos on a charge of capital murder.
It would be too late to do anything that Saturday evening but size up the town. On Sunday, I hoped to view the crime scene before meeting Angelina, whom I’d arranged to be flown in from the women’s prison in Prince George. My return flight was early Monday, so I would have a busy time of it. But today, after a look about, I hoped to retire early and enjoy a sound sleep in the town’s premier hotel, the Fort.
* * *
Several minutes later, I found myself standing with my overnight bag and briefcase outside a shed-like terminal building, watching the last of three taxis disappear up the road. I was about to return inside to ask about ground transportation when a burly, full-bearded fellow in a camouflage jacket wheeled a suitcase toward me.
“Need a ride, partner?”
“I’d be most grateful.” I wiped my nose, apologized for my cold, expressed the hope that the Fort Hotel would not be out of his way.
“You won’t get any quality sleep in that old barn, not on a Saturday night — beer parlour’s full of loud drunks, and they got a rockabilly band in there. It’s a heritage building, but the owner was letting it fall apart.”
“Would that be Frederick C. Trudd?”
“Fred Trudd, yeah. Lived a prick, died a prick.” Sizing me up, the dark suit and tie, the long overcoat. “You Angelina’s new lawyer?”
We shook hands. Buck Harris was his name. Owned a hunting lodge just out of town. I was welcome to stay. On the house.
My feeble protests were ignored — Harris went to a pay phone, told his wife to expect a guest for dinner. He then led me to a workhorse crew cab adorned with a bumper sticker promoting a Social Credit candidate in the recent election. “Better Dead than Red,” said another. Two rifles were hung at the back of the cab.
The sun was dipping as we drove off, into a checkerboard of forests and clearcuts. Harris pointed out the two-storey restored fort, then we passed the Wolf River Reserve of the local South Slavey band: scattered dwellings, a log-built community hall on a hill.
