William Deverell - April Fool

Arthur is no sooner seated than Buddy is upon him. “I don’t get it. Goddamnit, what’s the point ?” He raises his voice. “What are you trying to prove ?”

“That you’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

Buddy blows. “Okay, Artie, no more mister nice guy! I’m going to have my guys review Dr. Sidhoo’s results, and I want her on the stand, and she better freaking be able to back this up!”

Not only does the entire gallery hear this, but the jury too-they are taking their seats. Buddy shuts up when he sees them, scurries to his seat as Kroop shuffles in. Angella mounts the stand, head high, chest out, like a robin about to serenade the spring. “May I say something?” she asks the judge.

“Madam, this is a solemn inquiry with ancient and respected rules. One of which forbids witnesses from making speeches. Otherwise trials might extend into the gloom of eternity. Please just answer counsel’s questions.”

Arthur doesn’t want it thought he’s afraid of what she’ll say. “Ms. Angella, tell us what’s on your mind.”

“I want to correct any insinuation that I profited from my misfortune by writing articles and making speeches. The fact is, for the last ten years I’ve barely made enough to pay the rent. I am in debt. I am clinging to the poverty line.”

Arthur nods. “Not much money in the writing game, I suppose.”

“The magazine market is very tight.”

“Maybe you’ll profit better from your fiction.” From his briefcase, he pulls out yet another magazine. “ Tales of Passion , April edition. Your first published story?”

“Yes, as I told your colleague, Mr. Pomeroy, when he came sneaking around for information.”

“This is the plot, as I apprehend it: Harry has locked himself out of his townhouse. He has to break in through a back window. In error, he enters a lookalike unit, and comes upon Tracy, a rookie policewoman, who is undressing for bed. Do I summarize fairly?”

“Thank you for reading it.” Her tone distrustful.

“What interested me, as an amateur critic of the genre, was the pervading subtext of rape.”

“I don’t know what you saw in it, but most of my friends found it very comical and romantic.”

Arthur opens the magazine to her story. “‘Tracy felt her breath come quickly as he moved toward her, his shirt undone, revealing rippling muscles.’ One would expect this cop to be running for her gun, not standing there panting in her undies.”

“Well, he was also getting undressed, he thought he was in his own place.”

An unresponsive answer, but Arthur merely says, “Let us see what the jury makes of it,” and files the magazine as an exhibit. “Where did you get the catchy title from? ‘You’re Not Supposed to Ask.’”

“It came to me.”

“It came to you because you spoke those words ten years ago when Nick Faloon asked permission to kiss you.”

“That’s not so.”

“He wasn’t supposed to ask. He was supposed to perform. A parlour game was enacted that night-you the playful maiden, he the pretend intruder. Ultimately you took him to your bed…”

“I object,” Buddy says wearily.

“I uphold. This is not the time for windy speeches, Mr. Beauchamp.”

Arthur strolls to the witness stand, close enough that she is forced to look straight at him. “Let me put to you, briefly and bluntly, a fair and reasonable version of what happened.”

He does so in short sentences. She tried to wheedle the Kashmir Sapphire story from Faloon. Seduction was her final tactic. The condom failed its task. A fear of pregnancy, an unravelling, a call to 911. In panic she hid the condom where no one would think to look. It remained untouched, unseen, like a vice hiding in Pandora’s box.

“That is absurd. That is so pathetic.” This is the voice of ten years ago, more confident. “There was no condom.”

“Yet you claim you begged him to use one.”

“I…yes. I hoped he had one.”

“You hoped he’d come prepared?”

“I don’t know what I was hoping. Or thinking. I was hysterical! Afraid for my life!” She is persuasive in her passion. Forewoman Sueda is looking reprovingly at Arthur: he’s compounding the assault.

This has sunk to being a replay of the first trial. How ill at ease he’d been with such intimate inquiries. The jury must have assumed his heart wasn’t in it, that he was grasping at straws.

He must cut to the chase. He retrieves Exhibit 52. “Madam, in this zip-lock bag is the swab taken from the vagina of Eve Winters. I will be offering proof that it has your DNA. How might you account for that?”

“ Impossible !” Spoken with a vehemence that shakes Arthur a little. “It’s a mistake! Take my blood!” She thrusts her arm at him, pulls back her sleeve, an offering to the black-robed vampire. The room is silent, Kroop alert as a hawk, expecting the Crown to object. Buddy sits there looking petulant.

“Ms. Angella, you were reluctant to come before this court…”

“Because of having to face this…this inquisition.”

“Oh, there’s a much more telling reason. You didn’t want to risk exposing yourself as the killer of Eve Winters.”

“Order.” Kroop sends his lasers about the room, and the hubbub ceases. “Mr. Svabo, have you nothing to say?”

“I don’t know what’s going on here.” He doesn’t even rise, the fight has gone out of him.

“Mr. Beauchamp, that is a very bold accusation.”

“Given a chance, I will back it up.” Arthur bites that out.

Kroop gives him a much-welcomed cold eye. “Then get on with it.”

Arthur opens his briefcase. “Three years ago, Ms. Angella, you engaged Dr. Winters’s services.”

She looks at him with alarm, then beseechingly at the three Crown heads, as if in disbelief that no one is objecting. Buddy looks like a motorist stalled at a rail crossing as the noon express rounds the bend. Ears’s grin has turned gargoylelike. Flynn is playing with his moustache with both sets of fingers.

“You had a problem maintaining relationships with men. You sought Doctor Eve’s advice.”

Finally, she says, “This is irrelevant.”

“Who told you this was irrelevant?”

“It has nothing to do with anything that ever happened anywhere.”

A sweeping compendium of all that is under the sun. Arthur pulls the missing file from his briefcase, produces a patient consent form. “This is your signature?”

Angella goes white. “I only saw her a few times. I…I couldn’t afford her, it turned out.” Arthur glances at the jury, makes eye contact, wins smiles.

“And you didn’t inform the Crown of this?”

“Because it’s…it’s nobody’s business. It’s privileged.”

Kroop sighs. “Counsel, do you have copies of this material, so Her Majesty’s envoys don’t have to crowd around you?” Buddy is jostling Arthur’s side, Ears breathing minty essences near his neck. “It is becoming apparent that Mr. Svabo is in the dark about certain matters. You may enlighten him during the afternoon break.” He rises. “I suppose it’s too much to expect you would give the Crown notice.”

“I assumed they’d done their homework.”

The room empties of all but counsel, staff, and Angella. She is at Buddy’s ear, hectoring him. He disengages. “Can’t talk, Adeline, you’re under cross, can’t talk.” The sheriff takes her aside. Her careful hairdo is coming apart.

As the Crowns pore over a photocopy of Gowan Cleaver’s file, Arthur enjoys a moment with Faloon. “How are you holding out?”

“Real excellent, Mr. Beauchamp, and better by the minute the way I see this is going.”

“I’ve been ill mannered, I haven’t asked about Claudette.”