William Deverell - Kill All the Judges

Brian caught him glancing at the radio. “You want to hear the results? Last time I turned it on they were head to head.”

“Scroll down to August 18.”

“What’s August 18?”

“The day Morgan and Twenty-one Others went down. Stop there, please, Brian.”

The same picture Caroline had spotted. The cluck in the suit did indeed look as if he’d just vomited off a dock. He was startled by the flash, a dribble coming from his chin. It was not one of Mr. Justice Darrel Naught’s more noble portraits, though there was little in the jurist’s bland, pasty, oysterlike face worth memorializing.

After a few moments of absorbing this picture: “Are you my lawyer, Arthur?”

“No, Brian, I am your disappointed and lamenting friend.”

“It’s not anywhere close to cut and dried.”

“Perhaps. I know he pushed at you first. There was a witness, though from a distance too far to make you out, except for the suit and suspenders.”

Brian retreated outside, lit another cigarette, still staring at the monitor, the ghoulish, soon-to-die Darrel Naught.

“I can’t believe you simply forgot taking the picture. The writer within remembered the rules, the genre’s demand for the final telling clue.”

“I need to explain. Not friend to friend, Arthur. Client to lawyer.”

Proof of a mind well repaired. For Arthur’s part, he didn’t wish to carry the burden of being a compellable witness. “On this condition. You will accept my advice. Advice only. I don’t do trials any more.”

“Like what advice? To give myself up?”

“I will simply ask you to make the decision that justice and honour require. And give me no more garbage.”

Arthur zipped his jacket, retrieved his pipe from the balcony ashtray, and sat down on a padded plastic chair to listen to a halting history of a soul-devouring effort to save a broken marriage, tearful episodes with Caroline, with the children, bouts with booze and drugs as Brian buckled under the stress of the interminable Morgan trial. A final post-sentencing carousal with fellow counsel, a wake for jailed clients.

He’d found himself driving alone, hungry, his preferred restaurants booked on a Friday night, finally finding a table at Moishe’s Steak and Chops, and there, across the room, smiling to himself but otherwise absorbed in his lamb tenderloin, sat Justice Darrel Naught.

For no pressing reason-curiosity, a lark-Brian followed him from Moishe’s, saw him enter a parking lot, got in his own car, pursued him over Granville Bridge to Creekside Drive, the False Creek docks. Brian parked on Creekside, hurried to the wharves in time to see Naught making his way to a boathouse known to his firm, Ms. Lefleur its faithful client. Here was food for vengeance, and Brian raced back to the car for his digital camera.

In the few minutes it took him to drunkenly paw through the mess in his car, he missed the awkward moment between Naught and Joe Johal, then was disappointed to find Naught retreating the way he’d come. Brian hurried down the ramp nonetheless, determined to take a photo to pass among the bar, showing Naught on a naughty midnight ramble. If he hurried, he might at least be rewarded with a record of His Lordship throwing up into the saltchuck.

But Naught had straightened up in time to see the camera flash. He swung an arm at Brian, clipped him on the shoulder. Brian pushed back, abrupt, heedless, and the judge tripped on a coil of rope, went backwards into the water.

“He didn’t come up. I panicked. I split.” Brian retreated inside, sat on his bed with a rasping sigh of relief. “It’s out. Maybe I can finally get rid of it.”

“Haunts you, I imagine.”

“It wasn’t homicide.”

“Your flight makes it seem so.” He returned inside, his pursuit not done.

“Have you ever killed anyone, Arthur?”

“No, but I imagine it comes easier the second time.”

Brian was expressionless, all but his eyes, which held tightly to Arthur’s.

“Poor Astrid, needlessly embarrassed. Had she stuck to her guns she might have saved herself from the ridicule that has branded her a false witness to murder.”

Brian slumped, his shoulders heaving-with grief, Arthur thought, but it was laughter, morbid and soft. Brian shook his head. “And everyone said I was clueless. I say, Holmes, what else have you got there? Lay it out. ‘Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

“Your continued insistence that the two murders were connected. Darrel Naught and Whynet-Moir, you said, were connected in an unusual way. ‘You have to dig deep for this one,’ you said. A teaser from the author within. Well, there’s no obvious nexus between those deaths, no common motive, no shady relationship between the two men. The modus was similar, but that’s not what you meant. You were the connection.”

Brian lay back on the bed in crucifix position.

“Found in your bottom desk drawer by the estimable Ms. Wu was a crumpled page from the Georgia Strait , October 11 last year, two days before Raffy’s charity dinner. An article with your ex-wife’s beaming countenance, a Q and A interview. A note that she’d be dining Saturday night at the manse of a man you abhor among all others, Rafael Whynet-Moir, who you believe slagged you in court, who sundered your marriage, and who, in your coloured view, was openly flirting with Caroline.”

Brian broke the silence, still splayed on the bed. “Is this how it should be written? The alleged perp, who for the last month, post-divorce, had been in a disgusting, drunken stupor, wasn’t aware that the author of Sour Memories had been swapped for Cud Brown and switched to a soiree in West Point Grey.”

“That interview piece was found scrunched up into a little ball, as if waiting to be found. Screaming to be found. Here I am, another clue. Outwit me, reader, dare guess before the final chapter that the assailant is none other than the author himself.”

Brian snorted, half laughter, half grunt of appreciation. “That’s the twist, Arthur.” He sat up, looked hard at him, as if assessing him, measuring the extent of his disapproval, his disgust, his capacity for forgiveness. “Thank God you’re not a priest, Arthur, you’d be imploring me to turn myself in and praying for my soul. No, I’m in safer hands with Arthur Beauchamp than with the Almighty. The law extends no privilege of silence to the confessional. But confession seals every lawyer’s lips.”

Arthur understood then that Brian needed catharsis, was consumed by a need to share a searing, gut-clenching secret that had driven him beyond nervous breakdown, beyond the borders of sanity. An irresistible need to escape reality had led to addiction, to cocaine-induced delirium. Now, finally, safely, he could expel the demons.

Brian gained his feet once again, checked the hallway, kicked a slipper under the door as a wedge. He again began to pace, to the balcony and back, smoking, defying house rules. “Okay, here is how it should have been written. The revelatory final chapter. Beset by jealousy, unable to sleep, Pomeroy paced and smoked and drank through the night. If indeed the judge and the ex were balling each other-such were the twisted thought processes of this pizzled perp-the divorce decree must be quashed and the judge suspended from office until inquiries are complete.”

He was performing, like the old Pomeroy, loquacious, amorally sardonic. “Armed with his faithful camera, he pulls up a few houses from 2 Lighthouse Lane in his Toyota Tercel. It is nigh on three o’clock as he vaults the stone wall, steals to the back of the house. His initial investigative process will involve checking for Caroline’s car. Is it on the street? No. In the driveway? No. Perhaps in the garage. But something was confusing about this scene, lights were on behind the house-that would be the maid’s room, of course-and someone in a dressing gown was carrying a chair to the deck railing and boosting himself up onto it.” He had two cigarettes on the go now, a pace of a pack an hour.