Paul Prudhomme and Todd Clearihue, who’d been enjoying this pageant until now, have sunk in their chairs. Another judge. More delay.
“All defendants will be remanded in custody until tomorrow at ten o’clock.” A dark look about the room: “I cannot preside at a forum in which the air is thick with distrust.” “Ad hominem,” he challenges credulity, “I have never had my fairness doubted in thirty years of meting out justice.”
The clerk studies the rotas for the week. All Supreme Court judges are on trial assignments, reserved judgment days, or ill.
“Who’s doing divorces in Vancouver?”
“We have, ah…Mr. Justice Mewhort sitting all month.”
“And next month?”
“He’s on Assize for the last two weeks, Regina versus Faloon.”
The sensation in the pit of Arthur’s stomach brings back the night of the bad clams.
“Faloon, yes, I think that crossed my desk. That’s the one involving the young lady who was, ah, allegedly raped and murdered. Remind me, who’s counsel on that?”
“I have Mr. Svabo for the Crown and Mr. Beauchamp for the defence.”
Those burning black eyes track down Arthur again. “Yes. Yes. That will work. Please inform Mr. Justice Mewhort that his presence is requested in our lovely capital city for the next six weeks. I shall personally attend to his divorce trials and to the little matter involving Mr. Faloon. Himf, himf.”
His bulky frame rises, giant Polyphemus, the Cyclopean, returning to his cave after devouring a Greek for dessert.
PART THREE
He was but as the cuckoo is in June, Heard, not regarded.
23
On Garibaldi Island, Arthur had been in the habit of rising with the sun, but when he does so this morning he’s disoriented, lost in the vastness of a voluptuous bed. Perhaps it’s a rest home, everything clean and colour-bright. But no, the four erotic Japanese prints on the wall, lovers entwined gymnastically, suggest a clinic for the sexually disabled, or perhaps a stylish bordello.
He forgot to draw the curtains last night, so it is well that his room doesn’t face east-the sun reflects harshly enough off a nearby high-rise. That, he realizes, accounts for the garish orange of the wall beside him.
Though the city sleeps on-it is only 5:30, two days shy of summer solstice-Arthur is now sharply awake, aware of why he’s here: Regina versus Faloon opens at 10 a.m. for a two-week run in the Vancouver Law Courts before Chief Justice Wilbur Kroop.
And where he is, he apprehends, is 807 Elysian Tower, a condominium newly bought by his friend and partner, Hubbell Meyerson. For the remainder of the month, if he cannot wheedle his way out of Kroop’s court, this will be Arthur’s home: a luxury two-bedroom on the eighth floor, just opened, smelling of fresh carpet and wallboard and oiled wood. Next month, Hubbell will have renters for this swank waterfront investment.
Arthur supposes there are modern people-successful in life, liberal in outlook-who would find those Japanese pen drawings boldly risque, innovative. Even appropriate for what is, after all, a bedroom. “Fun,” is how the designer would have put it, but the prints make Arthur uncomfortable. A curve of thigh leading to a junction of parted legs and half-submerged penis causes him a familiar distress, reminds him he’s old-fashioned, a square.
“One ought ‘not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age,’” he recites as he rises from bed. Why does he remember the words of Cato and Plutarch and forget so much else?
In the kitchen, as promised by Hubbell, is an instrument of glistening chrome that makes cappuccinos, lattes. Somewhere there’s an instruction book. Brian Pomeroy is coming by with bagels-he likes gadgets, and will know what to do.
He studies his hoary, hairy image in the bathroom mirror. He can’t go into court like a hayseed, so he’s reserved a chair at Roberto’s for a trim. “A bloody tonsorial overhaul in fact, you look like the ancient mariner.” He talks to fill the silence, missing the farmyard cluck and clatter. Missing Margaret.
Day seventy-four! Two and a half months, she’s closing in on the world record. Some fellow in California redwood country holds it, and a Tasmanian pair are close behind. Those two came down because the woman got pregnant. Margaret is beyond the age.
She has vowed to stay until the arrests end. Her companions go up and down the trees as if on escalators, though they’re careful not to disturb the eagles. The two hatchlings have survived, the mother brooding them, the male scavenging the beaches and stealing from ospreys.
More climbers have been recruited, bronzed and lithe men and women moving through the forest like spider monkeys, extending zip lines into the valley, metal lianas in the canopy. The media liken them to the outlaws of Sherwood Forest.
Arthur pulls on sweatpants and his Save Gwendolyn T-shirt, slides open the balcony door, looks out over the floating gas stations, over Ferguson Point and the forest, the cables and stanchions of Lions Gate, stretching like a web between the park and the North Shore. Eight floors below, on the seawall path, a lone man trots by-intrepid like Arthur, daring the dawn, firing himself up, the work week has begun.
Then he deflates with the prospect of writhing under the spurs of Wilbur Kroop. Arthur could apply to adjourn the matter out of his court, but would have to eat crow for having agreed to defend an absent accused. Faloon, he assumes, remains somewhere on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean.
He tries to puff himself up. He has won more trials before Kroop than he lost, and most of his defeats were reversed on appeal. He is not afraid of him. It is the jury, not the judge, who decides guilt, and if he is forced to go ahead, he still retains his trump card, Adeline Angella with a motive for murder.
The strategy will be to bait the line with red herrings: Hoover and the late-night wanderer, Harvey Coolidge, and even Ruth Delvechio, Winters’s jilted lover. The prosecution mustn’t suspect Arthur has a different fish in mind.
Brian Pomeroy’s efforts to track Angella’s movements on April Fool’s Day haven’t borne fruit, though one of her alibis is blown. Brian found a past-event calendar on the Web site of Victims of Sexual Abuse: its wine-tasting event was the previous weekend. But it remains uncomfortably possible that on the evening of March 31 she was at her favourite bar, the Wanderlust, and the next day at the Holy Rosary bingo.
Brian recently finished a month of rest and therapy, but won’t be in court today-Angella must remain ignorant of his spying. At any rate, it’s doubtful whether he’s recovered from what his partners decided was a full-blown nervous breakdown-they packed him off to Arizona, to a clinic.
Nor will Lotis Rudnicki be present. She has been called to the bar-not without some gripes from a few stuffy benchers-and is a full-fledged lawyer now. But she’s needed in Victoria to counsel arrestees, take statements, arrange for legal aid and bail. Larry Mewhort has been predictably lenient, releasing all on their promise to appear for trial.
Unhappily, the Appeal Court upheld Kroop’s order restraining trespassers, though it vacated his bail conditions and varied Mewhort’s. All arrestees must wear electronic monitors on ankle bracelets. Somewhere, presumably, sirens sound and lights flash if they return to Garibaldi.
As colleges empty, recruits flood to the West Coast. So far, 188 people, mostly young but some seniors too, have been equipped with monitors-which they flaunt like badges of honour. A game is being played, with rituals, the loggers boating in each morning, then watching an RCMP sergeant read the injunction to the presumptive arrestees, after which constables strain with hacksaws and bolt cutters and pry bars. By the time the last protestor is unchained and arrested, the working day is over, and everyone leaves. They take weekends off.