The Case Against Owen Williams (17 page)

Dorkin explained what he was looking for. A radio, not too expensive, something for temporary use. He said nothing about Williams and let Mr. J. Meltzer, who presumably this was, assume that the radio was for Dorkin himself. There were a number of radios, and for three dollars Dorkin chose a small one that picked up cfcfnb in Fredericton and wlbz in Bangor. The cbc was so far away it would have needed an aerial, and Williams would never have listened to it anyway. Then Dorkin went quickly through a pile of magazines and picked up half a dozen cowboy pulps for a nickel each.

Somewhere midway through all this, Dorkin detected the shift in Meltzer's manner and realized that he had been recognized. How? he wondered. Meltzer himself was easy: the eyes, the colouring, the shape of the face, the nose, although these might also have been something other—Lebanese, for example, or Armenian. But he, Dorkin, who had none of these markers, was not easy at all, and yet somehow through some indefinable giveaway, they always came after a few minutes to know him as one of them.

Dorkin sensed Meltzer's urge that they acknowledge each other, but the uniform and the two pips still daunted him.

Dorkin hesitated, then held out his hand, and Mr. Meltzer brightened and took it.

“I'm from Saint John,” Dorkin said. “And you? Have you always lived here?”

“Yes. My father came here just before the turn of the century. But he married a girl from Saint John, and I still have relatives there.”

For a quarter of an hour, they compared notes on whom they knew and whom they didn't. Mostly they didn't, but Meltzer had heard of Dorkin's father, whose firm opinions on just about everything had made him well known. And it turned out that Dorkin's older sister had been a friend of a distant relative of Meltzer's.

“She inherited a bit of my father's character,” Dorkin said. “She used to boss me around when I was younger. And still would if I let her.”

Then Dorkin paid him, they shook hands again, and Meltzer walked with him to the door.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

When he had delivered his purchases to the jail, Dorkin crossed the street to keep the appointment he had made with Corporal Drost. Before he tackled the pile of depositions, he wanted to see whatever remained of that night to be seen.

In the outer office, he found Constable Hooper two-fingering a report on an old Underwood typewriter. In spite of the height and the muscle, there was something of the puppy dog about Hooper. He was the kind of Mountie who spent spare evenings coaching kids' softball teams. He raised his wide blue eyes to Dorkin, and there followed a little dance that Dorkin had danced a dozen times with fresh Mounties. His uniform confused their reflexes. It did not have a spot in their particular hierarchy, but it was an officer's uniform all the same, and it triggered a saluting instinct that Dorkin let float around in its confusion for a second or two before he turned on the cordiality.

“I'm Bernard Dorkin,” he said. “You may remember me from the preliminary hearing. I've been made responsible for Private Williams's defence, and I've arranged with Corporal Drost to have a look at the stuff you collected.”

Hooper fetched Drost from an inner office. Dorkin shook hands with him, but his game didn't work so well with Drost. In the more ordinary matters of simple assault and low-level property damage, Dorkin would now have sat down with his Mountie, and they would soon have come to feel that they were after the same thing—which was to do whatever needed to be done in the interests of justice and the public peace in whatever way was the least trouble and expense to everybody. But in this more exalted matter, he and Drost were not after the same thing at all, and Drost was carefully keeping his distance, the more so because it was obvious that he had been chewed out by Grant for not securing the murder site more effectively and was not going to risk being chewed out again by being any more helpful to the defence than he had to be.

And yet, at the same time, Dorkin sensed in Drost's manner something more than caution—a kind of puzzlement, a kind of uncertainty of tone and gesture—and it came to him all of a sudden as they were still dancing their dance of introduction that Drost might be wondering if perhaps they were indeed on the same side, if perhaps Dorkin's role as defence was a put-up job by the army. Hence all these extraordinary privileges of access.

In this atmosphere of equivocality, Drost led Dorkin down a hall to a small, windowless room with shelves filled with boxes around three walls. The only furniture consisted of two straight-backed chairs and a large table.

“I'll start with the clothing,” Drost said.

He took down a box from a group of four, set it on the table, and began emptying it, carefully taking out the items one by one rather like a travelling salesman displaying his wares. There was a trashy looking white dress made out of some kind of satiny material with a V-neck and a little red cloth flower crudely sewn into the angle of the V. There was a white slip, stained slightly yellow by the wearer's armpits, and a heavy white brassiere similarly stained, a white garter belt, a pair of rayon stockings, one with a long tear up the back, one ripped almost in two near the ankle. And there was a red belt and a small leather handbag and a pair of scuffed, black shoes. Very sad, Dorkin thought.

After a few seconds, he picked up one of the shoes. The heels were not as high as he had imagined from the photographs he had seen in court—not more than half an inch higher than the heels of ordinary walking shoes. They would not seriously have impeded her on the forest paths.

“And there weren't any pants?” he said.

“No,” Drost said. “They weren't anywhere around the pit, and we looked along the route back to town, but we didn't find anything. But you can't look under every rock, and they could have been thrown into the creek.”

“What about the purse?” Dorkin asked. “Were there any finger-prints?” Drost hesitated, shifted uneasily.

“Yes,” he said. “Some.”

“But none of Williams's?”

“Not that they could tell.”

“Some of hers?”

“Probably, but it was hard for them to be sure.”

“Any others?”

“Yes, a couple. But we've no way to know whose. They could be anybody's. We can't fingerprint the whole town.”

“No,” Dorkin said, “I suppose not.”

“This is what was in the purse,” Drost said, taking a smaller box out of the bigger one and putting the stuff out on the table: a dollar bill, some change, a lipstick, her wartime identification card, two photographs, one of a girl, one of a soldier.

“That's her,” Drost said. “The other one is of her brother.”

Looking at the photograph of Sarah, Dorkin had the feeling he often had when looking at photographs of the dead: the sense of the instant fixed while the flow of time out of which it had been lifted drove inexorably on. She was standing in front of some chokecherry bushes, full-leaved, heavy with fruit, on what must have been, given that and the fall of the light, a late afternoon in mid-summer. She was standing with her feet apart, her hands crossed in front of her, wearing a snug, sleeveless summer dress. The bare arms were plump, the breasts pressed together between them heavy, the face round. She was laughing, looking straight into the camera, and the impression was of a big, strapping country girl, the sort of girl who from that kind of background was almost certain before very long to get herself knocked up by somebody.

The autopsy report had said that she was five-foot-six and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, and she certainly looked as if she weighed all of that. Dorkin recalled MacCrae's remark that if Williams had tried to assault her, she would have beaten the shit out of him.

Dorkin looked at the other picture.

“What about the brother?” he asked.

“He's overseas,” Drost said.

Not good for Williams, Dorkin thought. The sister of one of the boys who was risking his life for his country.

When Dorkin had looked his fill, Drost packed up the stuff and brought down two more boxes.

The first contained the squalid debris from the pit: cigarette packages and chocolate bar wrappers in varying states of decay; a squashed shoebox; a copy of
The Daily Gleaner
dated June 5, 1944, which had been soaked and dried; bottles broken and unbroken; a woman's stocking left behind from some earlier midnight amour; a man's cap left behind probably by some drunk; the rubber ring from a condom; two entire condoms, the contents dried, the sides stuck together.

The final box contained Williams's stuff: his battle dress uniform, his wedge cap with its Seaforth badge, three pairs of under-shirts and shorts, three pairs of socks, two regulation dress shirts, a regulation necktie, a handkerchief, two regulation towels, and a regulation face cloth. And a tin of Sheiks.

“Could you open that?” Dorkin asked.

It contained two condoms in their little cardboard sleeves. One of the original three was missing. Williams had not had occasion to use a condom. And whoever had raped Sarah, if it was rape, had not used a condom. Dorkin wondered what had become of the third condom. He made a mental note to ask when the time was right.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess I've seen it all.”

He waited while Drost packed up the stuff and put it back on the shelf.

“You don't think he did it,” Drost said, when they were back in the office.

His air of uncertainty persisted, and he was obviously fishing.

“A defence attorney always thinks his client didn't do it,” Dorkin said.

They both made as if to laugh.

“But there's still the missing hour,” Drost said.

Dorkin hesitated. He had no intention of giving anything away to Drost, but he wanted to pick his way. So long as Drost believed that he was on a fool's errand—or that he was being used by the army to make a pretence of caring for even the humblest Zombie that fell—he would be co-operative, perhaps more co-operative than he realized. But the minute he began to feel that Grant's case, and therefore his own ass, was being seriously threatened, he would shut up like a clam.

“There's not really that much time missing,” Dorkin said. “They dawdled along talking. If you think about it, it's hard to see how he could have had time to do what was done.”

Dorkin watched it work. Drost put him down as either a fool or a surreptitious accomplice. Either would do. Dorkin left feeling pleased with himself.

By the middle of the afternoon, the Zombies under the direction of Sergeant MacCrae and Private Smith had his office ready. The room was far larger than he needed, and he would much rather have had two smaller rooms—one for himself and one for Smith— but he had ordered them to use a couple of filing cabinets and a bookcase to make a divider that reached halfway across the room and gave at least an illusion of privacy.

He sat down at his desk to make a beginning. He circled in red on his calendar Tuesday, September 26, the day on which the trial was now scheduled to begin. He had exactly five weeks in which to prepare. The printed evidence that Meade had secured for him made a thick pile at one corner of his desk. He laid out a foolscap pad, took off at random the first deposition, and began to read:

“On Saturday, July 1, I, Lavinia Jean Page, of Wakefield in the County of George…”

The sun shone all that week, and most of the next, but August was waning, the overnight temperatures dropping towards frost, the first leaves turning. Every morning, Dorkin got up early, breakfasted at the hotel, then came back to his desk in the armoury to work on the case, reading, reflecting, making notes, getting up now and then to look down into the street in front of the armoury—a street of picturesque Victorian residences, tended lawns, beds of flowers.

Inside the armoury, the atmosphere was less poetic. Captain Fraser's campaign of persecution against the Zombies went on unabated, and twice a day, rain or shine, MacCrae marched them for half an hour in full kit up and down the parade square at the back. There was also a blizzard of petty orders and a daily trail of bedraggled miscreants to Fraser's office to be put on charge and confined to barracks. It was all vaguely insane, and every minute Fraser was in the armoury, his paranoia pervaded the atmosphere like the smell of something dead in the woodwork. Fortunately, at four o'clock every afternoon, he locked his desk and went off to the local golf club to work on his cirrhosis of the liver. Immediate command of the armoury then devolved on MacCrae, the air cleared, and a great calm would descend, which would last until nine o'clock the next morning.