He was in a foul mood, felt he’d been sucked into the blackest hole of the galaxy. Two and a half pages had he written in the five weeks since he’d crawled from divorce court like a whipped dog. On September 4, that day of infamy, Caroline had won custody of the three kids, sole rights to the family home and to practically everything he ever owned, including his late mother’s stemware, his Honda 350cc bike, and the bedsheets between which he and his wife of twenty years had loved and fought. Brian had the clothes on his back and this old Mac computer.
And here was the rub: Brian still…loved her. That was the tricky part, he loved her. Yes, he’d been unfaithful, somehow he’d never understood how to fight that; it was like…well, nicotine. Caroline had retaliated with her own lovers, insipid academics. Despite everything, he loved her, despite the competitiveness, the literary swordplay, the oh-so-clever duels over words. (Or maybe because of those things, he wasn’t sure any more.)
The judge who presided over this carnival of marital injustice was Rafael Whynet-Moir, a rookie, newly appointed to the B.C. Supreme Court. He will also die-assuming Brian can think of a felicitous way of death, nicely worked but not too complex, fitting for one who had treated the author with such contempt. (I’m sorry, Mr. Pomeroy, but this court isn’t swayed to pity a defendant so bereft of the simple social skills required for the relationship of marriage.) Poison a la Borgia? Too effete, too Dame Agatha. A gremlinized paraglider plummeting toward a hissing, spitting volcano into a boiling, sulphurous crater? Better.
These disasters inspired much black humour in barristers’ hangouts like the El Beau Room and the law courts lounge. Judges became leery of going out in public. Security was tightened. Yet most thought the toll-two dead jurists, one unaccounted for, and one close call-was an unusual coincidence.
That consensus held until the second weekend of October, when Mr. Justice Rafael Whynet-Moir opened his waterfront manse at 2 Lighthouse Lane in West Vancouver to a fundraiser for the Literary Trust, which aids writers fallen on hard times. He had invited for dinner a dozen rich friends who paid handsomely for the pleasure of rubbing elbows with three published authors most of them had never read.
The evening seemed on its way to success. Whynet-Moir filled glasses with oleaginous charm. His partner, the capricious Florenza LeGrand, excessively wealthy heir to a shipping line empire, was at her effervescent best. At thirty-three, she was twenty years younger than Whynet-Moir, but he’d won her with his smooth good looks and false air of cultivation.
No one suspected that this posturing judge, this self-proclaimed connoisseur of the arts, this pander to performers, potters, and poets, would soon be crisping in hell…
Do not indulge in personal agendas, cries Horace Widgeon, Chapter Seven, “Creating the Credible Villain.” Avoid the temptation to put the black hat on your obnoxious boss or the civil servant who sniffily told you to come back after lunch. Otherwise, you may end up modelling your villain on a very dreary bloke. Likewise, subjecting those you abhor to cruel deaths may provide a fleeting thrill-but it’s a self-indulgent, masturbatory thrill that’s not shared with the reader.
Presumably, Widgeon considered masturbation shameful. His amanuensis, the constantly complaining Inspector Grodgins, had a favourite adjective for the dreary blokes he had to put up with: “wanking bureaucrat” and “wanking judge” and “wanking bloody chief constable.”
Obviously, Brian was in too much hurry to settle accounts with Rafael Whynet-Moir. But that might be the only way he could stop hearing his voice, which regularly percolated through the rumbling, the traffic in his mind. This court is emphatically of the view that the children need to be with their mother, particularly since the respondent hardly seems able to care for himself. All the time with an appraising eye on Caroline in the front row. While she looked right back at him, interested.
As a sidenote, Whynet-Moir’s dinner was but one of several such literary benefits staged that night at fine residences in Vancouver. The prize-winning author of Sour Memories attended one that was far less dramatic. (Too bad you weren’t assigned to your admirer’s house, Caroline, you’d have had raw material for a story in which something actually happens.)
Brian had gone as far as he could to appease Widgeon: He’d made this cloying judge more attractive than he actually was. He lit another Craven A and knocked back a slug of tequila to sharpen the wit.
Of the three writers whom Whynet-Moir invited, the most exotic was Cudworth Brown, a roistering poet who was a surprise nominee for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his second published collection, Karmageddon. A risky choice for any banquet table, this muscular ex-ironworker had a reputation for barroom brawls that was evidenced by a handsomely bent nose.
He was also a man of appetite who downed three martinis and a bottle of Bordeaux over hors d’oeuvres and dinner, and several cognacs afterwards.
By midnight, all guests had left but Cudworth Brown, who’d either imposed himself on the hosts, or, as the police surmised, hid somewhere in the house. A few hours later, neighbours on Lighthouse Lane were awakened by a metallic crash. They converged in a yard where a cypress tree had brought to a halt Judge Whynet-Moir’s Aston Martin. Its sole occupant was Cudworth Brown, passed out behind the air bag.
West Vancouver Police were quickly on the scene but couldn’t arouse anyone in the house. On the deck they spotted a metal patio chair, tipped over. They looked below the wraparound cedar deck and saw, thirty feet down, a nightrobe swirling in the waves and Whynet-Moir’s broken body being gnawed by crabs in the tidal wash.
Cudworth Brown was arrested and charged with murder.
After stuffing the reader with appetizers, now comes the meat of the story-the prosecution of Cudworth Brown. But again his guru feels offended.
Set up as quickly as you can. Get your body to the morgue, create a taste of mystery or intrigue-and then you can afford the luxury of relaxing with your protagonist. Develop him or her. Humanize your hero with a charming quirk or pastime. And don’t forget to describe him! (But be warned: it’s no simple task for the rakish, square-chinned narrator to describe himself without sounding vain.)
Ah, the hero. Here is where Brian screwed up last time. A dozen years ago, during a sabbatical from practice, he had written his first and only Lance Valentine mystery-with Caroline taunting him through the whole process. It never found a publisher but got encouraging responses. “Try again-this time with a credible protagonist.” “Most of it works except your main character. He’s a dud.” Lance Valentine, private eye, was a snore; the dashing name failed to deliver.
But this Pomeroy character seems even less attractive, an overwrought lawyer whose life has gone to shit. Who buggered up his marriage of twenty years. Who has to seek permission to see his children. Who has been fucking up his practice. Who hates himself.
Maybe he should rework his creative non-fiction concept, revise it with a protagonist who won’t disgust the book-buying public, recreate Lance Valentine, jazz him up, give him a vice or two. Look at the mileage Widgeon has got from his grumbling, rumpled, Meerschaum-pipe-smoking Inspector Grodgins. A grandfather, for Christ’s sake. Drives a beat-up Ford Escort, for Christ’s sake.
Brian has known only one hero. A grizzled, grass-chewing farmer who raises goats on a snoozy island in the Salish Sea.
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