He’d moved to a West End apartment but abandoned it after finding his twenty-fifth-floor balcony suicidally risky. Now he was in an artist’s garret, or its pathetic facsimile: a third-floor room in a third-rate hotel, the Ritz, in Chinatown on the cusp of skid road. No one knew he was hiding here, not even his partners. Not even his secretary. Delete. He didn’t have a secretary. Roseanne quit last month.
So here he was, armed with Merriam-Webster and Roget and Fowler and Widgeon and a wheezing computer and a full-monty breakdown, pouring another tequila, lighting another cigarette, staring gloomily out a dust-clouded window overlooking Main and Keefer, where the shops were closing for the evening and the grifters and hookers were taking over the streets. He thought of slipping out to one of the takeout joints, the Beautiful Sunrise Restaurant, the Good Cheer Noodle House. Or maybe the Lucky Penny Pizza, for a change. These places depressed him. Everything depressed him. Especially his day job, the defence of Morgan and Twenty-one Others.
He was sick of law, sick of the whole system; he had broken under its pressure. Dr. Epstein had put him on tricyclics and told him to find some diversion, some favourite craft. Thus was born Kill All the Judges. Chapter One, “The Madness of Gilbert Gilbert,” introducing said Gilbert Gilbert as tragic farceur and starring the author, the celebrated neurotic Brian Pomeroy, dazzling readers with his typical dry, manic wit.
He’ll show Caroline. Such a literary snob, the academically hubristic Professor Pomeroy and her highfalutin graduate courses. Lit 403: Thackeray, Trollope, and Bronte: The English Novel in the Age of Vanity. And now she was published, having somehow persuaded a small press to put out her collected stories. He’d seen himself in some of them, the fucked-up boyfriend or husband. How dare she win a Best First Fiction Award for that?
He fully expects Judges to sell more than her paltry two thousand copies of Sour Memories. How might he pitch it to publishers? A memoir dressed up as fiction? Fiction disguised as memoir? Creative true crime? Creative untrue crime? A touch of Conrad? I am able to write of these events only as I recollect them, and memory ever dims with age. Truth, fiction, outright lies, who cares any more? Creative non-fiction, that’s the general rubric, and that’s what he’s into, the hottest trend in literature; it gets you into the book pages, the literary blogs, The Oprah Winfrey Show. Eat your heart out, Caroline.
Yes, Judges will represent the cutting edge of creative non-fiction, stropped to razor sharpness. In the meantime, let’s just call this lumpy stew of facts and fibs a mystery…
But was the Gilbert case merely an arrogant sidebar? The great Pomeroy! Poster boy of the Bhashyistan Democratic Revolutionary Front, victorious defender of assassins and addled court clerks. He could hear Widgeon grumbling: Where is the meat of this story, the main dish? Does not the title promise a serving of dead judges?
Please forgive the delay in the kitchen…
2
Brian Pomeroy had gone on an Easter weekend bender and only learned on returning to the Ruby Morgan trial in a bleary-eyed fog that on Good Friday a veteran family court judge had vanished after wandering from her cottage at Honeymoon Bay. She was well advanced in years, and her disappearance remained a baffling puzzle for family and friends.
Two months later, just as the bogged-down Morgan case was extended for another ninety days, there occurred a curious death at sea. A retired provincial court judge was spotted waving and shouting in the wake of the flagship of the B.C. Ferries fleet. He was swept away in the turbulent waters of Active Pass before a rescue team got to him, and he could not be resuscitated. Arguably, his eagerness to be saved ruled out a suicide attempt. But no one saw him go overboard-except, possibly, whoever might have hurled him over the railing. Father Time, he was called, with his 85 per cent conviction rate, a scourge of the criminal community and, it follows, their representatives.
An unease began to be felt among the judiciary, who shared nervous jokes about seeking danger pay for their job-inherently risky because the courts are crucibles of bitterness; every trial has its loser, some of whom are sociopathic or demented, and every loser has a lawyer, competent or otherwise, who shifts blame to those who sit in judgment.
Finally, on August 17, after the last objection was made and denied and the last plea for leniency ignored, the Morgan trial finally dragged to the finish line. Judge Naught had survived seven months of putting up with the defence counsels’ whining, their insults, their spurious objections. He paid them back by sentencing each of their clients to twenty years. Except the ringleader, Ruby Morgan, who got life.
Though exhausted, Naught was in a mood to celebrate and began by sharing whiskies with the prosecution team. That was late in the afternoon, in chambers. Accounts are hazy as to where he went next. Not to the El Beau Room or any other watering hole favoured by bar and bench. Not home, to his dreary bachelor apartment.
A bland and forgettable face, a middle-aged paunch in a suit, Darrel Naught likely would have gone unnoticed in the city’s better dining salons. Proof that he’d eaten was subsequently found in the remnants of lamb tenderloin in his stomach contents.
He was last seen alive at a quarter to midnight, at Fishermen’s Wharf on the False Creek docks, heading for a boathouse owned by Minette Lefleur, whose cards advertised “personal, discreet escort and massage service” and who catered to the top tier, including several notables. One of her cards was found in Naught’s wallet.
As Naught gained the boathouse ramp, Joe Johal-Honest Joe, as he’s known in his commercials-was just leaving, shrugging into his coat in a light rain. They almost collided on the gangplank, a moment made more awkward because they recognized each other. Johal’s Chevrolet-Pontiac dealership had lost a breach of contract case before Naught several years ago.
“Evening, Judge,” said Johal, and he carried on briskly to the parking lot. His last view of Naught was of him standing uncertainly on the ramp. Or so Johal said at the inquest (to his credit, he’d come forward as a witness). Minette Lefleur testified that Naught failed to show for his midnight massage. She knew nothing further.
Judge Naught’s body was found the day after his disappearance, floating in the scum of False Creek. Because there were no external injuries, the coroner’s jury couldn’t decide among accident, suicide, and foul play. There was scuttlebutt, not taken seriously, that the perpetrator was to be found among the many defence lawyers who’d been overheard calling down curses on his head.
The police couldn’t connect anyone to his death. No one disliked him enough to kill him, nor were many going to miss him. In fact, however, he had not met his death by fair means but foul-committed, naturally, by the least likely…
Brian glared through a haze of cigarette smoke at that last ugly paragraph, its offensive foretelling, its runaway negatives, its blatant pandering to the reader. Do not predict! Do not give the ending away!