William Deverell - Kill All the Judges

“Shut that damn door!” someone yelled.

Arthur could see his stalker out there, so he stayed inside. McCoy slammed the door behind him as he left.

Ill-adjusted to the dimness, Stoney stumbled into the cannabis sacks. “Yow, this stuff is really working.” Constable Pound tried to pull him away, but Stoney resisted. “Hey, man, this hemp is heating up.”

“What’s the problem over there?” Judge Wilkie was standing.

“Mr. Stonewell is trying to interfere with the exhibits, sir.”

Stoney spoke with urgency: “Your Honour, I have some experience in these matters, and this here skunk is dangerous, it’s cooking…”

Pound gave his arm a tug. Stoney went off balance and their momentum carried them against a post, knocking a kerosene lamp off its hook. It fell on the sacks. There were loud gasps as the superskunk quietly ignited, giving off an otherworldly blue glow.

Stoney bolted up the aisle and past the judge to the front door. “That shit is going to explode!”

Arthur had known compost to smoulder but had never heard of it exploding. Despite this egregious case of shouting fire in a crowded theatre, only a handful of locals joined the court staff and visiting press in panicky flight out the two doors. Otherwise, evacuation was calm and orderly, children and seniors first.

He stayed put for a few moments, transfixed. A bubbling sound was coming from the oily sludge the cannabis had become. The flames had spread to other bags and were hotter now, yellow with orange tips, dancing in the gusts from the open doors. By the time the hall’s extinguishers were finally located and brought into play, flames were licking up the cedar-shingled wall.

“Holy shit.” Nick, beside him, finally excited about something. “This place is totally doomed, Grandpa, we got to split.” He grabbed Arthur’s arm, breaking him out of his rapture. Volunteers were running about, filling buckets, forming a brigade, as Arthur grabbed his briefcase and followed Nick out to the slushy lawn. Others hurried to move their vehicles out of harm’s way.

A familiar voice. “I need to talk to you about this Pomeroy character.”

“Cud, the community hall is burning down.”

“I weep. I did my first reading here.” He emerged from behind Arthur, a wet, hatless head poking from a Mexican poncho. “Meantime, another tragedy unfolds. Struggling poet Cudworth Brown is looking at doing life in the crossbar hotel for a murder he didn’t commit. The evidence against him is flimsy, claims celebrity barrister Arthur Beauchamp, but he’s too busy to take on his old chum’s case, so he refers him to a lunatic.”

A siren could be heard faintly; the volunteer fire department was on its way. But the pumper would be too late to save the hall-flames were leaping to the roof.

This would be a day to remember and mourn. A heritage building, a loss of history. Arthur felt depressed, weary. He wanted to go home, go back to bed, wake up again, start this day over. He wanted…a drink.

That was prompted by Cud pulling out a flask, having a nip. Brandy, by its scent. “The trial starts in two months. Pomeroy ain’t nowhere near prepared, he wants to sell me out.”

Arthur finally bit: “Why do you say that?”

“Last time I saw him he looked like a suicide bombing. Bedraggled, a week’s growth, red, wacky eyes. Asked me if I’d be willing to cop to manslaughter. I almost punched him out.” A pause to catch his breath, then he shouted frantically over the sound of the approaching siren: “ Manslaughter ? I didn’t fucking chuck any fucking judge off a deck!”

Despairing of finding justice through normal channels, convinced that all lawyers were reactionary, mendacious, and corrupt, Cudworth Brown sought out a reliable private investigator. An arts reporter he’d seduced during his literary forays into Vancouver made inquiries, then recommended the enigmatic, urbane Lance Valentine, formerly of Scotland Yard. There were rumours of misbehaviour, she warned, rumours that the Yard had quietly let him go to avoid a scandal.

Cudworth called the Valentine agency, whose sultry-voiced secretary promised she could fit him in. And so it happened that late on a dreary, drizzling December day, Cud made his way to the tenderloin area, near Main and Keefer, which he thought an odd choice of location for this polished private eye…

The Widgeon icon was bouncing at the bottom of the screen. It did that once in a while; it meant Widgeon was trying to warn Brian. Trash this page, he was silently screaming. You are writing from the point of view of the wrong character.

A mouse-click took him to Widgeon’s Chapter Eight. We do not really care to know what lesser characters think-they have mouths to speak. See with your hero’s eyes. Hear with her ears. Do not distance your hero from the reader, bring him close enough so the reader may sense his sweat, his prickles of fear, feel her hot breath as she closes in on the villainous cur who swindled dear Auntie Maude…

“Who is this Horace Widgeon you’re constantly on about?” Dr. Alison Epstein had asked a couple of days ago as he fidgeted on her couch.

She’d never heard of him? Brian was shocked. Thirty mysteries and three how-to’s and five times nominated for the Dagger Award. “He writes escape fiction.”

“I don’t feel the need to escape,” she said.

When piqued, this normally gracious woman occasionally gave in to an unprofessional snappishness. This happened when Brian was rambling and evasive. Which he usually was throughout his allotted three-quarters of an hour. She would peel and dig, trying to get down to the rotten core, but he wasn’t going to let her find it. None of her business.

“I didn’t fucking chuck any fucking judge off a deck!”

That is what this repulsive fellow claimed, of course. That, in Lance Valentine’s experience, was what they all say: they’re not guilty. Clients who protested the loudest, complaining they’d been falsely accused, were invariably guilty.

This one, this obscure backwoods poet, didn’t strike Lance as being an exception to the rule. A rugged, cocky, broken-nosed look of a brawler. Unshaven. Tattoos were doubtless part of the package, but were hidden under his long-sleeved, tasselled deerskin jacket. He subscribed to some kind of conspiracy theory that he was being railroaded. The usual story.

“You want me to find the chucker?”

“Nobody else is trying.”

Lance fiddled with a rose in a vase. He must always have a fresh rose on his desk in the morning. That’s what he told the ravishing Rosy Chekoff when she applied to be his secretary. From the outer office, he could hear the tapping of her keyboard. If he twisted his head he could see her profile, a view that invariably caused him to breath rapidly. Rosy was also married to a detective, this one a civil servant, West Vancouver Serious Crimes.

“Let me ask you, Cudworth-is that what they call you? Or Cud?”

“Sometimes Cuddles. Sardonically.”

“You got a lawyer, Cuddles?”

“Yeah, I got a lawyer. Mind if I smoke?”

“Have one of mine.”

Cud bent over Lance’s desk to get a light, then straightened with a wince. Chronic bad back, Lance reckoned. He’d been a high-rigger, an ironworker. Retired to Garibaldi Island, his childhood home, on a small disability pension. Ran the recycling depot there. Two books of poetry, one CD, muted acclaim.

Cud straightened, holding that back, and squinted out the dusty window at the little barrio of decrepitude that was the Downtown East Side. “Kinda pissy low-rent location, but I guess it’s part of the private dick shtick. You keep a bottle of Johnny behind the books?”