Desperate Acts (33 page)

“But it wasn’t merely a punch-up?”

The plaster grin on Budge’s face dissolved.
“No, sir. I seen a big stick or cane bein’ swung real hard, an’
slammin’ down inta the head of the fella lyin’ face-down on the
ground. It was awful.”

A shudder ran through the galleries and the
jury-box.

“Was the victim trying to escape these
dastardly, murderous blows?”

Budge actually hesitated for the first time,
as if he had temporarily lost his place in the script. “I don’t
know . . . I can’t remember. I guess I was just lookin’ at that
cane slammin’ down.”

“And you say that no more than four or five
minutes passed between the two events – that is, your seeing two
men grappling and then, later, one of them striking the other with
a stick?”

“That’s right, sir.” The grin was back.

Thornton was now pleased to turn Budge over
to the defense. In his opinion, Budge with his first sighting had
confirmed for the jury Fullarton’s description of the grappling and
shouting, conveniently provided four or five minutes in which
Crenshaw’s account of a fallen man and a crouching one seemed
plausible, and then returned to become horrified witness to a
deliberate homicide. Sir Peregrine would be brought on last to tell
about someone dashing wildly away up the alley.

Budge looked warily over at Marc. His wife
would have told him about her being cross-examined over the
incident with Duggan in the taproom, and he no doubt feared a
direct attack.

Thornton, of course, had skipped over a good
deal of what Budge had told Cobb during his interview. The veteran
barrister, however, was not surprised that his neophyte adversary
went straight to it.

“You have described for us, Mr. Budge, what
appeared to be a cold-blooded and vicious assault. Did you go
immediately to the alley to try and prevent further blows being
struck or to determine whether the victim was in fact dead?”

Budge was quick to respond. “’Course I did.
Whaddya take me for? I didn’t say nothin’ about it because Mr.
Thornton never asked me.”

“Just answer the counsel’s questions, Mr.
Budge.”

“Tell us, then, what you did in that regard,”
Marc said.

“I run to the cellar doors that open up into
the alley, but I couldn’t push ‘em open. They often jam from the
inside, and I usually haveta go outside to open ‘em.”

“And did you?”

“Not right away. I looked around fer a
crowbar. My heart was beatin’ a mile a minute. I couldn’t find it.
I run back to the window. There’s only the fella lyin’ there on the
ground. Where the moonlight hit his head, I could see blood an’
brains leakin’ out.”

This seemed like a self-serving embellishment
of what he had told Cobb, but it was, possibly, the truth. Cobb had
admitted being somewhat hostile in his interrogation of the burly
barkeep, and may have cut him off before he got his whole story
out. It was also possible that Budge did get himself out through
those horizontal double-doors and administered the beating himself.
But Marc was not ready to go there yet, nor give the prosecution
any sign that he intended to.

“So you assumed he was dead?”

“Alas, sir, I did. And I was plannin’ to go
upstairs and out to the alley, but I hadn’t got to the wine, and I
found myself tryin’ to calm down a crew of rowdy sailors in the
taproom, an’ by the time I did, I seen the constable comin’ in the
door an’ callin’ fer somebody to come back into the alley with
him.”

“So you knew then that the police had
discovered the body?”

“Yes. An’ the wife an’ Nestor Peck went with
him, leavin’ me to tend the bar an’ deal with that ungrateful mob
of sailors. I did
try
to do the right thing.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Marc nodded
sympathetically, though he wished he could stride across the space
between them and give the fellow a good thrashing on Etta’s behalf.
“Nothing more, Milord, though I may need to recall this witness
later on.”

Budge grimaced through his smile. No doubt he
thought that Marc would be recalling him to go after the
implications of his altercation with Duggan, and he must have been
wondering why Marc didn’t ask him whether, in that bright shaft of
moonlight, he had not recognized what he could see of Duggan’s
face. Well, let him stew a little, Marc thought.

The pompous baronet was next. Thornton’s
attempt to lead him through his testimony with the affable
efficiency he had used on the previous witness soon foundered, for
Sir Peregrine Shuttleworth’s responses were long-winded, tedious
and rambling. He too claimed he had packed up and left the clubroom
a mere four or five minutes after Crenshaw had done so, but he felt
obliged to add that it would have been sooner if he had not had to
bear the crushing responsibilities of club chairman and
orchestrater of amateur theatricals. When Thornton finally got him
cloaked and ready to depart, Sir Peregrine was pleased to report
that he had indeed looked out the cloakroom window (“There was a
moon out there that could have shone upon the lovers in Act Five of
The Merchant
!”). What he observed in its glow was a man
running away north up the alley, with a hat in his hand. No, he did
not see a body lying in a pool of blood on the ground, as his “eyes
were on the stars.”

“You say, sir, that the fellow was slim and
agile – and hatless?”

“The hat was flapping in his hand – must’ve
been hard to keep it on, running away that fast.”

“Did you get any impression of the colour of
his hair – in the Shakespearean moonlight you so eloquently
described for us?”

“By Jove, I did, come to think of it. It was
a very pale colour, very pale.”

“A gentleman with a slim build and very pale
hair,” Thornton murmured just loud enough for the jury to hear.
“Not unlike the gentleman up there in the dock?” he added more
forcefully and swung his head up and around to indicate Brodie on
the far side of the room. Sir Peregrine’s gaze followed, of course,
as did that of the jury.

Thornton sat down, well pleased with himself,
for he had put in place the final detail of his elaborately spun
tale. Over a fifteen-to-twenty-minute period, someone very like
Brodie had been observed arguing with Duggan (Fullarton), grappling
with Duggan (Fullarton and Budge), crouching over a prostrate
Duggan (Crenshaw), clubbing Duggan (Budge again), and hightailing
it up the alley and away from the scene of the crime
(Shuttleworth). With much of this admitted in Brodie’s own
statement!

Marc went through the motions of confusing
the baronet about the time of his departure, asked him why he
hadn’t mentioned the “hatless” business to Cobb when interviewed by
the constable, and pressed him moderately on the corpse being
“invisible” in the Bard’s moonlight. That was all he could do – for
the moment. But in his own mind he knew that Shuttleworth could be
lying about not following Crenshaw out immediately and, if so,
could not only have seen Brodie fleeing but noticed the unconscious
body as well, after which he could have gone out to have a look,
discovered Duggan just coming to (Brodie had left him on his back,
but he had been found face-down), somehow engaged him in a brief
dialogue, figured out who he was, and killed him. And while Budge’s
testimony seemed to pin down the time of the actual clubbing,
Budge’s grasp of what he saw and when was the least reliable of the
five “possibles,” as he had staggered around in a dark wine-cellar
muttering to himself about imperious wives and their suspicions.
And, of course, he himself could be the murderer.

Kingsley Thornton announced that the Crown
now rested its case, and the judge adjourned proceedings until ten
o’clock Monday morning. Thornton smiled at Marc in a way that
suggested a certain amount of sympathy for his rival’s unenviable
position (and just a touch of apprehension?). Apparently he had not
concluded that Marc’s ineffective cross-examination was entirely
the result of inexperience. Permission to recall the Crown’s key
witnesses was either a sign of desperation or a cunning stratagem
not yet fathomable.

It was the latter that Marc now felt he had
no choice but to implement. He could see no way to shake the
credibility of the Crown’s version of events. Convincing the jury
that Brodie’s “confession” was an elaborate ruse would not be
difficult for Thornton in his summation because its substantive
details jibed flawlessly with the eye-witness accounts and because
Brodie had been caught in a “lie” (omitting reference to the second
note). Character-witnesses alone would not suffice. That left Marc
with his alternative-theory defense. However distasteful it might
be, he would have to grill and badger and accuse. Moreover, with
Nestor Peck’s return, Marc now had a good chance of identifying
some or all of Duggan’s blackmail victims for certain. If Nestor
was not recovered enough today to be interrogated, then he would
surely be well enough before Monday morning. That Nestor knew a
fair amount about his cousin’s activities was not in doubt. If
necessary, Marc could call Nestor to testify to what he did know,
and thus would not have to rely upon the ambiguities of a
target-list scrawled on the inside of an envelope. It was also
possible that Nestor had more than hearsay evidence of the
particular indiscretions of the victims, though Marc was not sure –
even now – that he could bring himself to use such destructive
evidence in open court. Being a barrister, as he had discovered
about everything else of importance in life, was not as
straightforward as it first seemed.

***

As Marc had now taken the decision to use the
alternative-theory defense, he felt it was time to run the details
past Robert Baldwin. After saying goodbye to Beth and Diana Ramsay
before they headed across to the jail to visit and comfort Brodie,
Marc walked the two-and-a-half blocks over to Baldwin House, hoping
that he might catch Robert there before he went off to the
Legislature for the afternoon to witness the debate on the Tory
amendments to the Union Bill. But he found only Clement Peachey in
chambers. Peachey told him that Robert, Hincks and Dr. Baldwin were
expected to go out to Spadina, the country residence, for the
weekend, where a number of politicians would no doubt be invited
for tea and manipulation. Robert had told Peachey, however, that he
would be back in chambers briefly later in the day to pick up some
papers and visit with his children for an hour. Marc decided to
sketch out his defense in writing and leave it in a sealed envelope
on Robert’s desk. Peachey said he would make sure that Robert got
it.

With that, Marc went up Bay Street to The
Cock and Bull, where, it being lunch-time, he found Cobb taking a
noon meal in his “office.” Marc ordered a meat-pie and a flagon of
ale, and briefed Cobb on the morning’s events.

“You ain’t asked me about Nestor,” Cobb said,
polishing off his ale and drawing his sleeve across his lips.

“How did you find him this morning?”

“Out like a light, but snorin’ like a hog. I
figure he’ll be ready to talk to us before the day’s out.”

“Could you get off your shift by suppertime?
Say, six o’clock?”

Cobb looked amused. “Any time you say,
major.”

“I’ll be at your place at six, then.”

“An’ won’t Nestor be pleased to see us!”

***

Marc spent a half-hour with Brodie to bring him up
to date on the defense he had decided to use and the hopes he had
for Nestor’s contribution to it. Having seen and heard for himself
the near-impervious case laid out against him by Kingsley Thornton
in the courtroom, Brodie was resigned to accepting Marc’s strategy.
Marc turned the talk towards happier topics, like Diana Ramsay and
the unwavering support she had offered her lover.

“When you get me acquitted,” Brodie said to
Marc as he was leaving, “Diana wishes us to announce our
engagement.” The look of boyish hope that Brodie gave him as he
made this remark cut Marc to the quick.

***

“He’s ready to talk alright,” Dora said to Marc and
her husband as she led them towards the spare-room. “He ain’t
stopped tellin’ me about the awful days he spent in some shack up
in the bush, fendin’ off bedbugs an’ ants an’ eatin’ food unfit fer
humans, even of the lowly variety.”

“That’s good news, then,” Marc said. “You’ve
done wonders for him – and us.”

“An’ he’s startin’ to eat us outta house an’
home,” Dora carried on, as she usually did when she latched onto a
topic of interest to her. “I give him a coupla cups of soup when he
woke up, an’ by noon he was onto ham an’ eggs. If he keeps this up,
we’ll haveta hire us another rooster to keep the hens happy.”

Nestor now looked quite comical, sitting on
the bed swathed in one of Cobb’s generous nightshirts. His facial
features had returned to their customary shrivelled condition, and
the tiny, shifty eyes were once again restless and wary in their
bony sockets.

“I know what you fellas want,” Nestor said as
Marc and Cobb pulled up stools and sat opposite him.

“An’ we’re gonna get it, ain’t we,
Nestor?”

“What’s in it fer me?” Nestor said.

“Savin’ yer miserable, good-fer-nothin’ hide,
that’s what’s in it, you ungrateful – ”

“It’s okay, Cobb,” Marc said. “I believe that
Nestor’s going to cooperate fully with us, in view of the fact that
he himself might be liable to criminal prosecution unless he can
convince us of his innocence by telling us the absolute truth.”

Nestor tried defiance briefly, then said with
a sigh of resignation, “I guess I ain’t got much choice, have
I?”

“Not really,” Marc said. “Tell us first of
all why you ran away.”

Nestor stifled a sob, reached up to touch a
well-salved wasp-bite on his chin, and said, “It wasn’t ‘cause I
was scared the police would think I killed Albert. I was really
scared the killer would think I was Albert’s partner an’ come
lookin’ fer me, too.”