I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (36 page)

Twenty to twenty-five – a final position, or had Smitty got the nod to negotiate down? How far? Ten, twelve, thirteen years, less parole, less a year and a half for good behaviour … 
The time will go by in a blink, Gabriel. What do you say, old buddy, old pal?

Manslaughter: snap it in two and it's either
man slaughter
or
man's laughter –
which is what I keep hearing in my head. Your laughter, Gabriel, your mocking laughter, you with your martyr complex, with all your nobility and arrogance … You will see a jail sentence as the worst of outcomes, the only ones you will countenance being acquittal or hanging.

Damn you, Gabriel, you dissembled and equivocated with me about matters so critical as to disentitle you from choosing your preferred outcome. Surely a mind as penetrating as yours can see
the elegant logic of manslaughter. You were reading the memoir; you had Dermot on your mind the day he died. You're prone to fits of temper and aggression – anything could have sparked it off.

Did Dermot confess he'd covered up crimes against children at Pie Eleven? Did that inflame you, Gabriel – the hypocrisy of it? You'd been proud of him, hadn't you, for taking a tough, unpopular stand against the residential school system. And you exploded, didn't you? You didn't mean to kill him. That's why it's only manslaughter.

And if that's what happened, I can forgive you for it, Gabriel. I still want to be your friend. Please make it easy on yourself. Make it easy for me …

From “Where the Squamish River Flows,”
A Thirst for Justice
, © W. Chance

CERTAIN REPORTS SUGGEST Beauchamp received with relief and enthusiasm Smythe-Baldwin's openness to manslaughter, but he claims to have been hesitant, fearful that an injustice might be done, all the while fearing Swift rejection (as it were). Ophelia Moore thinks Beauchamp advanced such a deal because he'd suffered a massive loss of confidence. In himself more than in his client. In his ability to pull a victory from the ashes of a trial that on the whole had gone badly for him. “Old Smitty reeled him in like a fish,” she said, adding that he saw in Arthur someone who hungered for his approval, so he played the avuncular game. “Poor Arthur built up so much trust and respect that he got conned. He forgot why they called him The Fox.”

That theory seems less cynical when we remind ourselves that Beauchamp had a yawning need for the love he never felt from his father. He had long been a fan of the old Q.C.,
^*
and though not as obsessive as those who lurk outside the mansions of rock stars, he'd been copying him for years. The cozy rapport with jurors. The shark-like circles swum around witnesses before striking. A tongue that spared neither opposing counsel nor judge. The oratorical flourishes and overblown mannerisms that became more common in Beauchamp's fustian years.
^†

With all due respect to former Madam Justice Moore, I hold a less acerbic view of Smythe-Baldwin's willingness to consider manslaughter. The veteran defender was famously
warm-hearted and helpful to young colleagues of the defence bar, and though he believed that a homicide occurred by the Squamish River, he also felt that Beauchamp had got a raw deal. I was not surprised that my biographee became touchy when I put to him Moore's view he had been under Smythe-Baldwin's spell. Clearly, forty-eight years later, it remains a raw issue between him and Moore.

At any rate, he went home that night to brood over the matter. It must have tormented him, for Moore recalls him looking drained the next morning.

O
n entering Ophelia's office, I fell prostrate on her little sofa. The excesses of the previous day had produced a thundering headache.

“I suppose you blame Smitty.” She stared pitilessly at me from behind her desk.

“I couldn't keep up with him. Anyway, we're trying to work something out. I told him bluntly there was no chance of Swift's copping a plea to non-capital. But he might go for manslaughter.” I held up a hand to forestall loud response. “I'm going to discuss it with Pappas, but you first. Quietly.”

“I guessed something like that was happening. I tried to phone you at home.” She had more bad news, from the Prince Albert diocese. “The bishop has been following this in the news. His chief flunky says the Church wants nothing to do with it. They're putting the clamps on everyone who ever worked at Pie Eleven, especially Sister Beatrice.” Whom Ophelia had just phoned. A falsetto imitation: “I'm not going to talk about it. I don't know anything.”

Ophelia told reception to hold her calls, opened her window, and smoked her way through my recitation of Smitty's spiel – the whole thing – the critique of my performance, the broad hint that Attorney General Bonner wanted this nasty matter settled quietly to stop the hemorrhaging of reputation of a famous local, the pitch about Gabriel earning a college degree in a minimum security facility, early parole, the dangers of leaving the case with Ozzie Cooper and his fans on the jury.

She butted out with an air of decisiveness. “Smitty must have decided he's got a shitty case.”

I ought to have expected as much from her. Clearly (as my thinking went back then, prior to my supposed liberation from false assumptions) women didn't have sharp instincts for criminal
litigation, an understanding of how we play the game. Ophelia might have been scoring well in family court, but this was the big time.

“He's got a cinch.” I tried to tell myself I wasn't exaggerating, but now, in 2011, I'm not sure if Ophelia was wrong to slam me in her talks with Wentworth. That massive lack of confidence …

“Something has gone haywire; that's my bet,” she said. “Maybe Doug Wall got tongue-loose in a bar, told everyone he was paid off by Roscoe. Maybe Lorenzo had an attack of conscience and flipped out. Whatever, they're hiding it from us.”

“Okay, Ophelia, we take that chance, and it turns out Smitty was playing us fair and we end up killing our client. You'd feel okay about that?”

I gained a sitting position and tendered her my theory, the one I'd worked at so assiduously while earning my hangover. I reminded her of Gabriel's words to me:
Something happened there, I think, in Pius Eleven Res School. He left the Church soon after
. Gabriel had forgiven Mulligan for sins committed on his watch – or so I'd believed.

“Dermot was complaining of writer's block. So naturally, during one of their daily discussions, they explore the reasons for it. Finally Gabriel wrests from him the dark and terrible secret Dermot hadn't been able to put to paper. A secret so shocking that it prompted in Gabriel a sense of betrayal – his god had failed – and ignited a fierce anger, a murderous rage.”

Ophelia applauded. “Bravo, well-rehearsed. So he sits down, plans it out, and coolly arranges a suicide tableau before chucking Dermot in the drink. Right. Both essentials of capital murder are there: planning and deliberation. Congratulations, Arthur. You figured it out, now you can let them hang Gabriel in peace.”

Her scorn stunned me. She didn't let up. “Oh, yeah, and somewhere along the way, Gabriel prevails upon him to jerk off in his panties. Arthur, you can't do this thing with a loser's attitude. Do you or do you not believe Gabriel did in Dermot Mulligan?”

Hesitation. “I can't answer that.”

“Try.”

I accepted a cigarette – I needed a nicotine lift. “I'm not certain I can separate what I believe from what I want to believe.”

“You're going to advise him to accept twenty years? Even if he's innocent?”

“That's their opener. I'll bargain them way down.”

“Okay, sixteen years. Is that about right for a guy framed for punching a racist cop in the mouth? You're really underestimating Gabriel. He's bright – brilliant in his way, he's capable of being a very persuasive witness for himself.” She was unrelenting. “Damn it, you have it in you to pull this one out. Smitty sees that; it's why he likes your manslaughter.”

I abandoned the cigarette and rose. “I'm going to put it to Gabriel. If he shows interest, I think we can assume he did it.”

“Sorry if I don't join you. The whole thing makes me sick.”

However base as a human being, Alex Pappas was a crafty courtroom veteran whose reaction I welcomed after that frigid exchange.

“Boy oh boy, you got to count that as a win – a big win. What did you agree to do, marry his ugly daughter? Was he drunk? You want to grab it before he returns to his senses.”

He got on the blower to Bullingham and gaily relayed the news. “Give me some credit, Roy. I mentored him, the firm's golden boy.”

He handed me the receiver. Bully told me we must pop open some champagne when it wrapped up and have a little talk.

They all seemed to assume the golden boy would have no trouble bringing the accused around.

Old Jethro expressed disappointment, as I signed in, that I was alone. “Where's your female associate? She's some doll. Real smart cookie, Miss Moore, real persuasive.”

Maybe that's why I hadn't insisted she come. I didn't want her persuading Gabriel to make the wrong choice. I didn't want him to commit himself, not yet.

He'd been moved to the Protective Custody Unit.
PCU
. “He got into a fight at breakfast, and now we got a death threat against him. It's what happens when you get famous.”

A scrap. I found that distressing; it wasn't how one earned time off for good behaviour. The threat had come from the White Clansmen, a few of whose members were guests at Oakie. Seventeen years since Hitler's end, and people like that were still floating around.

Gabriel was playing chess in the common area of the segregation wing, and he signalled me to wait while he checkmated his opponent. There were other visitors: a probation officer, a clergyman, an assortment of glum relatives. The poor fellow Hammersmith had jailed for having been indiscreet at the bathhouses.

The ambience was less repressive than in the main cellblocks, mostly because
PCU
housed not the dangerous but the endangered – informers, misfits, sex offenders, the occasional corrupt cop or politician. It was unusual for one who'd merely been in a fight to be sent there rather than isolation. The warden's real motive might have been to limit Gabriel's effectiveness as an organizer and advocate for his fellow inmates.

By now I had enough Aspirins in me to mask my pain, but Gabriel gave me a frowning once-over as he joined me, probably guessing that I'd tied one on. He was astute that way, a good reader of people, so I confessed. “I relaxed a little too hard yesterday.” I chose not to say celebrated.

“As long as you weren't drowning your sorrows.”

“Why did those characters threaten you?”

“Because I called one of them a racist piece of shit. He came at me and he got his thumb broken.”

His casual attitude rankled me. “Dying with a shiv between your ribs is even more ridiculous and bathetic than dying at the end of a rope.”

He shrugged; he wasn't worried, he had friends in there. That was true – he was widely admired on the inside. Not by Corrections, though, to whom he represented trouble: he was too vocal, an agitator, demanding of rights. He'd initiated several complaints, caused an annoying lot of paperwork. (I had an awful premonition of guards turning their back on him in the yard.)

“How's the writing going?”

“The atmosphere in here isn't conducive to the arts. I'm doing a Dermot – I'm blocked. What's up?”

“I want you to sit quietly and listen to this. Afterwards, ask any questions you want, then take a few days to absorb it all. The Crown may be willing to accept a guilty plea to manslaughter – homicide without intent, in the heat of the moment.”