“I figured it was simple, I didn’t need no lawyers. The one I hired for the trial cost me a year’s receipts and didn’t know his arse from his elbow.”
“Have you even got a scrap of proof Clearihue murdered this judge? Any idea where he even was that night?”
Vogel scratched his head. “Maybe at home. He lives up there with all them moneybags in West Vancouver.”
“How far from Whynet-Moir?”
“Twenty-minute walk downhill, I did it mesself.”
Mr. Chance will also check his whereabouts on October 13. How was he going to do that? Call him up? Was it even worthwhile pursuing this? But he must, for Mr. Beauchamp, for Arthur, whose wife spent two and a half months up a tree because of this jerk. Wentworth will provide pro bono services to the rancher. Justice must be done. Beauchamp’s enemy is his enemy.
He repacked his briefcase, paid the bill, got a receipt, two $7.99 specials with Big Gulp colas, then checked the time. “Oh my God, I’m due in court.”
“I’m down here for only a few days, then I got to get back to the range. I got two hundred head and only my three granddaughters there to help. If you’re able to come up when it ain’t winter, we got a pretty swimming lake.”
Wentworth thanked him and hurried up Granville Street.
“We’re so happy you’re here to save Granddad’s farm,” said the prettiest one as she pulled her jeans off. “We usually go in with no clothes on.”
The first witness was already on the stand as Wentworth rolled in, two minutes late. Kroop examined him like a buzzard circling roadkill, hungry for this defender of Gilbert Gilbert. His legs buckled a little as he bowed to the court and sat. The judge scared him, the Darth Vader of the courts.
Abigail Hitchins was examining a stout miner of Arctic diamonds, who gave the impression he’d rather have attended a street riot than a literary salon at Whynet-Moir’s. Wentworth would bet his wife had to drag him there.
He hadn’t had any dealings with Cud except to shake his hand, so Wentworth wasn’t sure why they’d bothered to subpoena him. No damage done until Abigail steered him to Cud’s reading of “Up Your Little Red Rosie, Rose.”
“Do you remember what that poem was about?”
“Well, as the title suggests, an unconventional sexual practice.” He seemed to be trying not to smile. Wentworth was scribbling madly, recording all this, but he couldn’t resist an urge to turn to Cud, looking sheepish beside his stern mother. Mr. Beauchamp nudged him: pay attention. Not Mr. Beauchamp. Arthur. He has to learn to think of him that way.
“Could you be more explicit?”
“An act of buggery.”
“And what was the reaction?”
Wentworth couldn’t understand why the boss wasn’t objecting; this evidence was irrelevant, highly prejudicial.
“Some people were shocked, the ladies especially. It was fairly…vivid.”
Arthur rose, strolled over to Abigail, offered a slim volume. “It’s all in here, Ms. Hitchins, funded by the Canada Council for the Endowment of the Arts. Why don’t you read the whole thing?”
“Order.”
Arthur ignored Kroop and turned to the witness, who’d given up trying not to smile. “I’ll bet you had a good laugh over it afterwards.”
“I was in stitches.”
“We will have order!” Kroop bawled, quieting the rumble of laughter in the room. “Counsel, await your turn. Ms. Hitchins has the floor.”
The boss gave Wentworth a friendly nudge as he sat. That’s how it’s done, he was saying. Turn the tables on them.
Abigail was obviously expecting a suicide defence, so she asked about Whynet-Moir’s mood and demeanour. “Happy, attentive, entertaining, charming to the ladies. Very gracious host. He seemed pleased the way his literary evening was going.”
The hostess was, ditto, very pleasant, spirited, happy, said the mining mogul. He’d been seated several chairs from Cud and Flo, saw no unusual interaction, but wasn’t really looking.
It went on like that with the next witness, and the next. Whynet-Moir the perfect host, Cud knocking them back like there’s no tomorrow, no one picking up on the under-table grope session. Abigail asked each to identify Cud in the gallery, and no one had trouble, despite Cud’s cleaned-up act, his neat haircut, though the bent nose was a kind of giveaway. Arthur didn’t ask many questions and looked sour. “We need that blasted ring,” he grumbled.
The judge didn’t say much, except for some apple polishing, lauding these big shots for doing their civic duty, regretting they’d been inconvenienced.
Thesalie Smithers was Cud’s left-hand table companion-the facelift victim, thirty going on sixty-five, and sugary sweet.
“Mr. Brown was so interesting. We talked about poetry. I asked him where his inspiration came from and he said, ‘from the heartsickness of wounded love.’ I remember that, it was so poetic. I have to say he was a little…frank with some of his language.”
Abigail pursued that with gusto, had her describe how Cud cussed out capitalism and organized religion. This didn’t get marks from Kroop, who was looking so malevolent that Wentworth shuddered. The boss again gave him the point of his elbow: Settle down.
“What can you say about his state of sobriety?”
“I’d say he was feeling it. His glass never seemed empty.”
Whynet-Moir, though, was sober throughout. “Such a lovely host,” Wentworth scribbled. “So attentive. So charming and witty. Never a sour expression.”
Arthur rose in cross-examination. “You found Mr. Brown interesting and entertaining?”
“He was, yes, quite different from my experience.”
“He used a little rough language, but he was otherwise pleasant and polite?”
“He was…yes.”
“Charming in a kind of rugged way.”
“Yes, interesting. Charming.”
Arthur teased from her Cud’s spiel about how poets are born not made, babies with their rhyming “ma-ma” and “da-da.” Wentworth had heard him use the same line on daytime CBC, it got several moms phoning in for a giveaway copy of Karmageddon. He saw only one cynical expression in the jury, the restaurant hostess from Commercial Drive. Maybe she’d heard Cud deliver that line at a poetry bash.
“Florenza LeGrand also seemed to find him charming and entertaining?”
Thesalie Smithers hesitated. “All I can say is they seemed to be having a very nice conversation.”
“They were smiling, laughing.”
“Yes, but others were too.” A change of tone, defensive.
“They would get close, whisper in each other’s ear.”
“They might have.”
“Mrs. Smithers, let’s speak boldly. They were getting on like a house on fire, were they not?”
She took her time framing an answer. “Florenza is a high-spirited young woman. A bit of a tease.” It must have griped her, Wentworth figured, that Cud had focused his attention on Florenza.
“A flirt.”
“You could put it that way.”
“Indeed, the flirting had extended to playing footsie.”
“Footsie? That’s a new one on me.” Kroop made a sound like “Hmf, hmf.” A kind of chuckle.
“I think it might have been called foot snuggling in your time, milord.”
A ripple of laughter. Kroop’s smile stiffened. “Mr. Beauchamp, nothing has been heard that even remotely supports this, this…footsying.”
“The trial is young, milord.” Wentworth was perplexed by the extreme lack of deference Arthur was paying to the fearsome judge-it was as if he wanted to get up his nose. “Madam, I doubt that you are such a poor observer not to have noticed the intimate play of feet and hands next to you.”
“I had no such idea.” Mrs. Smithers spoke boldly under the judge’s protection, but if her blush meant anything, she was hedging.
“Would you like to think about that answer?”
“No, I…I wasn’t really interested in knowing what they were doing.”
The blush broadened. The boss sat with a loud, lugubrious sigh.