“The presence of the defendant’s DNA has been confirmed.”
“Bam. Case closed.” Buddy punches the air, causing Takahashi to jump. “Cop a plea, Artie, let’s get this stinker buried. You’ve got no idea the pressure I’m under from some lobby groups.”
Feminist groups, he might have said, were he not aware of Takahashi giving him a cold eye. “Let’s get on with this,” she says. “I have a continuation.”
Arthur moves to the issue of Dr. Winters’s files. He doesn’t mention Adeline Angella. The defence, he explains, merely seeks to know if any patients harboured a murderous delusion or grudge. “Why is the prosecution balking at producing her records? It causes suspicion to bloom like the flowers of spring.”
Buddy acts offended. “These are peoples’ emotional lives we’re talking about, they came to her expecting she would keep their secrets.”
“And carry them to the grave?”
“You want the moon-Dr. Winters practised a dozen years, we’re talking several hundred people with painful traumas.” Buddy turns to Takahashi. “It’s a fishing expedition, and he’s looking for a red herring.”
“What do you say to that, Arthur?”
“We have a particular fish in mind.”
“Yeah, who?” says Buddy.
Arthur can’t believe he’s pretending ignorance-doesn’t he know Doctor Eve was consulted by Lorelei, the temptress? A desperate need to examine her sexuality.
“You should produce the files, Buddy,” Takahashi says.
Buddy had hoped to win at least a draw. He looks at Sergeant Flynn, raises his arms in supplication. Flynn puts down a text, picks up his briefcase, and walks ponderously to their room.
“This shark is beating me to a pulp, Jasper. Give him the files.”
Flynn hands Arthur a disc. “This is everything, sir. What Dr. Winters didn’t keyboard in, our techies scanned.”
Arthur is distrustful of the wizardry that supplanted copiers. Does information remain errorless when it has passed through the innards of a computer, digested, digitized, shat out? He asks for a printed list of patients. Buddy greets that with a sigh of such anguish you’d think he’d been ordered to strip naked. He lifts a weary hand toward Flynn, who produces a computer printout, about forty pages.
Arthur looks at the second page-between a G. Anfield and a P. Annhauser, there’s an A. Angella. He leafs through the remaining pages with no change of expression.
“This was compiled how?”
“From the deceased’s index cards,” Flynn says.
“I’m sorry, people,” says Takahashi, packing her notes away. “I can’t keep my courtroom waiting.”
Buddy rises. “Anything else you need, Artie, I’m always happy to oblige.”
As the others pack up, Lotis gives Arthur an exaggerated look of dumb surprise. The name Angella has been overlooked by the techies in the course of their scanning and keyboarding. Maybe computers have made cops lazy. Unless Svabo’s blustering hides a dramatic talent, he has no clue that Angella is holding back critical information.
Lotis sums it up. “Angella doesn’t want the bulls to know she screamed blue murder at Dr. Winters.”
Brian Pomeroy picked up her anxiety about testifying-unusual given her enjoyment of the spotlight. But the searchlight of suspicion glares fiercely too, and she must have hoped Flynn’s team lacked the patience to read Winters’s files. They have their killer; why put in the extra hours?
Arthur says, “I take it you are adept with a computer.” Why would he think otherwise? — this young smarty knows everything else about the modern world.
Predictably, Lotis pulls a notebook computer from her pack, flicks it open, slides in the disc. After a few moments and a few cascading screens, she types “Angella.” The computer tells her, “Not found.” Lotis sweeps hair from her forehead, puzzled.
Here is Jonas Anfield, who doesn’t know how to tell his wife to stop having affairs behind his back. The next file isn’t Adeline Angella but Penny Annhauser, whose boyfriend hates dogs and she loves them.
Arthur has underestimated Svabo’s duplicity. “We have caught them red-handed, concealing information from us. They have spirited away the Angella file but forgot her name was also in the card index. It explains why our lightweight friend seemed a little jittery.”
“That may not be the actual scenario.” Her impish smile.
“What other possibility is there?”
“The other possibility is that we already have that file. Dr. Winters left it with her lawyer, your misogynist pal Cleaver. He gave it to us at El Beau Room, remember?” Apologetic, as if embarrassed to witness the deterioration of the icon’s mental faculties.
He harrumphs. “Yes, of course. I have it at home. Yes, that helps explain why Svabo hasn’t twigged.”
But how telling it is that Angella didn’t share with Buddy her history with Winters, her furious demands for redress. As for Pere Rechard, Lotis will run out to the jail with a copy of his statement, and will ask Faloon for his version.
They pause by the table where Jasper Flynn was reading a text. Lotis picks it up: the current edition of Canadian Divorce Law.
“Troubles on the home front,” she says.
That takes Arthur where he doesn’t want to go, his own prosaic, snapless marriage. The worms of paranoia keep finding new places to dig at him. This morning, over coffee, he was haunted by an unsavory vignette: Margaret and Cud sharing confidences, intimacies. He’s not simply a lout with a Hogarthian appetite. He turns out to have a coarse, homespun charm. When one pokes hard, one finds little tender areas, he’s sensitive beneath his baboonish exterior. A decade younger than her, virile, needy. You’re not going to tell your old man, I hope? No, of course not.
What is the matter with him, what causes all these improbable imaginings? It’s the Annabelle Syndrome. She twisted his psyche with her constant scavenging of handsome men, caused a permanent warp, something complex and crippling. Acute jealous anxiety disorder, little understood.
He reminds himself to call a casualty of another troubled home front, Brian Pomeroy, who has been leaving fulminating messages, his marital crisis worsened by his evening with Angella. The untimely call from Caroline, who overheard Angella’s chiding tones and her “Ouch, your knee,” has slammed shut the door of reconciliation.
Now comes Arthur’s first use of the evil cellphone as Lotis steps him through his call to Brian, who receives the news of the day with grunts of interest, then begins to rail.
“I’m suing for access if she doesn’t cough them up this weekend. Easter is coming up, for Christ’s sake. I want to take them camping. Caroline would prefer to keep them at home in front of the tube, scarfing junk food while she marks her students’ puerile essays on Benet and Auden and Spender.”
Arthur waits until this eruption is done. He has learned it’s never wise to offer family advice, especially to friends. Nor does he intend to plead Brian’s case to Caroline, who is as bright and brittle as her husband. He suspects Brian savours being wronged, the nobility of it-a spy on the rack, refusing to confess his clandestine role on behalf of an innocent man. (Yet there is intensity in his marriage. It breaks, it mends; over many separations and reunions, it stays alive. If there’s romance in conflict, Arthur’s a drab lover.)
“Adeline Angella, at least, is talking to me. She phoned last night, offended-why hadn’t I held to my breathless departing promise to call her? I told her she was very much on my mind. When I see her next, it’s in public, with witnesses.”
Brian will find a pretext to ask where she was on April 1-if she has an alibi, it’s best to know early. If it’s a false alibi, the defence must prepare to counter it. If it’s honest, the defence must shift targets.
After helping Edna Sproule with a breech birth, Arthur runs to the house to clean up, then rushes to the ferry to pick up Lotis, fresh from her visit to Faloon. She heaves her packsack over the tailgate, lights a cigarette, and they head off. She has finally got a haircut, now she can see.