Brian did a double take as he looked up and saw Arthur, on his haunches at the rim of the pit. “Jesus. Don’t scare me like that.”
Schlegg rose. “No more smoking in the room, my friend, or the privilege may be denied altogether.”
“Fank you, please delete yourself, I have an important guest.”
“Always a pleasure, Mr. Beauchamp. Please remember the time, we rise early here.” He departed, clapped his hands, and the four circles broke up, though one of the group leaders remained clinched in a hug with a tearful male patient.
“Crybaby,” Brian said. “If he was a man, he’d kill himself.”
Arthur descended into the snake pit. “Everyone but me seems to dismiss your aborted suicide as a rather empty gesture. Given that you have spurned all medical aid around here, one could hardly call it an attention-seeking device. I see it as a scream of despair.”
Reflections from the fire played on Brian’s face as he twisted away to listen to Schlegg, on a dais. “Good, excellent. So let’s have the group leaders up here for final feedback.”
“Let’s have our own session, Brian.” He took Brian’s elbow, helped him up.
“Right.” He shook himself vigorously, like a wet dog, as if to shed unwelcome feelings. “How’s your version of the trial working out, Arthur? Has it ended yet?”
“The jury is out. How has yours ended?”
They paused at the stoop of the stairs. “Widgeon shot Inspector Grodgins and Constable Marchmont, then he hanged himself out of guilt over having made a fool of me. The literary allusion is subtly entertaining-the death of Widgeon symbolizes the death of this novel. Even my disordered mind could tell, in the course of editing it, that no sane man could have written this. I have failed. Thus, the scream of despair.”
Crazy but sly, said Wentworth. Cleverly oblique.
His room was neat, the bed made, the only disarray a dirty ashtray and a spilled carton of Craven A on the desk. Brian slid open the sliding balcony door, took the ashtray outside. His trash can was full of manuscript. The DSM-V of the American Psychiatric Association was open beside the computer, a line in boldface, “Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.”
Arthur joined him outside, drew out his Peterson bent. “‘I know too much.’” Arthur repeated the phrase, it was playful, had a double edge. “That’s not my line; it’s yours, as quoted to me by Dr. Alison Epstein. You told her you knew who did it. You said the clues were all in your manuscript. What I find interesting about that manuscript, other than its lack of such clues, is that however flawed, with all its jumps and starts, it seems not the output of an insane mind. You were able to express insanity more effectively off the page.”
Brian made no response, pulled on a sweater. It was a cool night, but the rain was holding off. Arthur itched to turn on Brian’s radio, suppressed his election-result anxiety.
“I have read enough mysteries to know that an implied contract exists between the writer and his reader. The writer provides clues as his part of the bargain; they may be clever but must be sufficient. What’s the point of a whodunit if even the cleverest puzzle-solver gives up because the author has broken the contract?”
He thrust an index finger at Brian’s forehead. “The clues were in here, not in the book. You couldn’t avoid it, could you? The scattering of clues.”
Brian chain-lit a second cigarette. “What clues?”
Arthur gestured at the psychiatric texts, the thick pile of Reginav. Gilbert transcripts. “The bulk of those dozen volumes consist of eight shrinks testifying for Crown and defence. Research material for your book, I first thought. But then I realized the transcripts might be an excellent aid to constructing an airtight insanity defence. Just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“A glitch, a witness. Anything that might lead them to you.” Arthur blew two perfect smoke rings. “The twist that comes out of nowhere.”
Brian’s face was undergoing a metamorphosis, caving in, the crooked smile fading, the spark of combat dulling in his eyes. Arthur set down his pipe. “You showed Caroline some photos from Cuba. May I see your photo library?”
Brian took a deep drag, looked up in sad contemplation at the black slopes of Hollyburn, the black sky. Then he butted out and led Arthur to his computer.
The photos were grouped four to a frame. A street salsa band in Havana, old-timers playing dominoes, Hemingway’s hotel room. “Let’s go back to the start,” Arthur said.
Brian slid a bar to the top of the screen. Summertime. The three adopted children, raven-haired and beautiful, playing on a beach. “Pre-divorce,” Brian said. “I used to get them weekends.”
There were three dozen more such shots, all date-marked July 21, 2007. Brian was showing emotion as the photos rolled up the screen, phlegm in his throat. “I forgot about these. God. Look at Amelia. She’ll be a ballet dancer.”
The next grouping showed several lawyers in a Karaoke bar, a Friday night near the end of the marathon Morgan trial. Brian’s defence cronies, a duet miming on a stage, Brovak with an air guitar. Then nothing until a series of shots from an open car window, out of focus, possibly of Brian’s former house. Yes, there was Caroline sitting on the steps with one of the girls.
Brian caught him glancing at the radio. “You want to hear the results? Last time I turned it on they were head to head.”
“Scroll down to August 18.”
“What’s August 18?”
“The day Morgan and Twenty-one Others went down. Stop there, please, Brian.”
The same picture Caroline had spotted. The cluck in the suit did indeed look as if he’d just vomited off a dock. He was startled by the flash, a dribble coming from his chin. It was not one of Mr. Justice Darrel Naught’s more noble portraits, though there was little in the jurist’s bland, pasty, oysterlike face worth memorializing.
After a few moments of absorbing this picture: “Are you my lawyer, Arthur?”
“No, Brian, I am your disappointed and lamenting friend.”
“It’s not anywhere close to cut and dried.”
“Perhaps. I know he pushed at you first. There was a witness, though from a distance too far to make you out, except for the suit and suspenders.”
Brian retreated outside, lit another cigarette, still staring at the monitor, the ghoulish, soon-to-die Darrel Naught.
“I can’t believe you simply forgot taking the picture. The writer within remembered the rules, the genre’s demand for the final telling clue.”
“I need to explain. Not friend to friend, Arthur. Client to lawyer.”
Proof of a mind well repaired. For Arthur’s part, he didn’t wish to carry the burden of being a compellable witness. “On this condition. You will accept my advice. Advice only. I don’t do trials any more.”
“Like what advice? To give myself up?”
“I will simply ask you to make the decision that justice and honour require. And give me no more garbage.”
Arthur zipped his jacket, retrieved his pipe from the balcony ashtray, and sat down on a padded plastic chair to listen to a halting history of a soul-devouring effort to save a broken marriage, tearful episodes with Caroline, with the children, bouts with booze and drugs as Brian buckled under the stress of the interminable Morgan trial. A final post-sentencing carousal with fellow counsel, a wake for jailed clients.
He’d found himself driving alone, hungry, his preferred restaurants booked on a Friday night, finally finding a table at Moishe’s Steak and Chops, and there, across the room, smiling to himself but otherwise absorbed in his lamb tenderloin, sat Justice Darrel Naught.
For no pressing reason-curiosity, a lark-Brian followed him from Moishe’s, saw him enter a parking lot, got in his own car, pursued him over Granville Bridge to Creekside Drive, the False Creek docks. Brian parked on Creekside, hurried to the wharves in time to see Naught making his way to a boathouse known to his firm, Ms. Lefleur its faithful client. Here was food for vengeance, and Brian raced back to the car for his digital camera.