I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (12 page)

The Red Ensign hung limp and dripping in front of the police station. A few officers and clerical staff looked me over as I entered. I tried to avoid Jettles and his worsening cold, but he and Knepp smothered me with affection, helping me off with my rain slicker, hanging my jacket by the radiator, offering coffee. Would I like to try calling Mr. Smythe-Baldwin now? Did I need a visit to the gents' room?

After a piss and prolonged hand-washing, I joined Knepp in the squad room. He had his jacket off but his gloves still on, so I surmised his knuckles had got banged up by contact with Gabriel's face. Jettles was at his desk, as was another constable whom Knepp introduced as Gene Borachuk.

“I won't bother Mr. Smythe-Baldwin now,” I said. “Instead I'll take it up with the magistrate.” On Tuesday, the remand date.

Knepp looked apologetic. “Walker's off next week. We got a lay magistrate subbing – the local jeweller. A legal argument may be out of his league.” To Jettles: “Those serum reports in yet?”

“Lab says it's going to take a couple of days. They want to take a careful look at the pink panties.”

Knepp laid a file of photographs before me. “The item here depicted went down to Heather Street on Thursday.”
RCMP
forensics in Vancouver. “Looks like someone tried to toss it in the water and missed.”

The first photo showed what looked like a small pink garment caught in the root mass of a windblown tree that had slid down a riverbank. “That's only a few feet below where we found Mulligan's clothes,” Knepp said. “Couldn't see it behind the tangle. It was only when the ident guys came back a few days ago, one of them spotted it.”

A closer angle showed a pair of panties snagged on a rootlet. Then a close-up of them dangling from tweezers, and finally they were shown spread on a sheet of wrapping paper beside a twelve-inch ruler. Silk-like fabric, flared at the leg openings, which were trimmed with lace and ribbons.

As Jettles and Borachuk got up to hover and watch, Knepp
carried on in his excruciatingly helpful way. “Size medium, no label. Make out of it what you want, Artie, but I don't think they had a lady up there with them. That white splotch on the right cheek looks like bird shit.”

Borachuk winked at me, sharing a conspiratorial joke about Knepp's apparent expertise in fecal forensics.

“They found some clotted white stuff on the crotch,” Knepp added.

“Definitely looks like pecker tracks,” Jettles said, demonstrating his own scientific specialty.

If this female undergarment were to analyze for semen discharge, I wouldn't be sure what to make of it, other than that Knepp and Jettles would have more ammunition for their graceless innuendos.
Roscoe asked me if they was acting perverted, like them homos
.

“Okay, next item,” said Knepp. “It's my duty here to honestly disclose what we just got from the print examiners. Maybe you want to sit down.”

I blanched as he showed me the report. Several matches for Gabriel's thumbs and fingers on the plastic panes in Mulligan's wallet. A thumbprint on the face of the watch. I did sit down.

My head was buzzing as Knepp carried on about how the fingerprints put Gabriel “right smack dab” at the murder scene. Surely there was an explanation for this. But why had Gabriel kept it from me?

Knepp was grinning – he could tell I was shaken. I tried to pull myself together as he opened the exhibits locker. Mulligan's fishing gear and clothes: jacket, shirt, undershirt, trousers, boots, hip waders. Assuming his lower undergarment was accounted for, all that was missing were socks. Mulligan wouldn't have gone sockless in those country boots.

The wallet was of worn leather, soft, like deerskin. Behind one plastic pane, a Kodacolor of Irene with shoulder-length auburn hair, smiling in an appealing way. On the back, this notation:
June 12, '57
. The year they married.

Knepp pointed to a 30-30 rifle, Gabriel's. “Oh, I forgot – ident also found a couple of 30-30 cartridges there. They test fired this baby and they're checking to see if we got a good match.”

“They were found three days ago?” My voice cracked. “Where?”

He showed photographs, one shell lodged in weeds in a crack in a rock, the other beneath some ferns. They'd been planted there – that was my immediate assumption. I felt my chances for acquittal slipping away.

I said nothing more, tried to focus. Also seized from Gabriel were odds and sods of trifling significance: a chess set; a dented brass sports trophy; books, some from the Squamish library. Salary records, a pad with addresses, various handwritten notes. But also something unexpected – a carbon copy of Mulligan's unfinished memoir.

A greater volume of paper had been taken from Mulligan's cottage – the contents of his desk, I assumed – even his Remington upright. Among those bundled sheaves must be the original pages of his memoir. All too much to absorb right then. I was thinking about a stiff drink, thinking hard about it.

“I'd like to spend tomorrow looking through the papers.”

“Be our guest. You want copies, we have a duplicator. You staying the night somewhere?”

“I'm camping.”

“Keep your boots dry, pardner.”

On returning, full of beer, to my tent I found my air mattress sitting in three inches of water. I looked balefully at a lean-to where dry split alder and hemlock were stacked. A brilliant woodsman might light a fire in this rain, but not a city lawyer with a skinful. I voided into the useless firepit, removed my wet clothes, and scrunched myself into my sleeping bag in the back seat of the
VW
. I couldn't sleep for a long time, worrying about those fingerprints, those 30-30 shells. Tormented, remembering how a jury had convicted the Truscott boy on circumstantial evidence.

T
he threat of an exploding bladder propelled me naked from my car. As I watered a giant spruce, my head thick from drink, I took in the sylvan wonderland with its carolling thrushes, its pristine lake, the morning sun warming my bottom. The Squamish Hotel beer parlour where I'd been drowning my worries the night before had been much less pleasant. I had traded tales with railway workers and lumberjacks and had to swallow my distaste at their crude racist jokes about Natives, their mimicry of the Salish accent. I wondered how Swift could ever find a fair-minded jury from such a lot.

Finally I finished and turned around, to find my tent dismantled, spread on a slope in the sun, drying out. More confounding, the deflated air mattress was on a rope clothesline, steaming from the heat of a fire in the pit. A man in shorts and hiking boots – a man I felt I should know – was approaching from the lean-to with more wood, a motorbike leaning beside it.

“Better put some duds on. You're in a public park.” The guy was grinning at me. Borachuk. Constable Gene Borachuk.

I blushingly dashed to the front of the car, got clean clothes from the trunk, and dressed while he fed the fire. About my age, and obviously an outdoorsman with his Thermos and coiled rope and sheathed knife and tanned, muscular legs. Mine were white, thin as cornstalks.

“I was planning a little hike up to Cheekye Falls. Don't suppose you'd like to come.”

“Actually, no.”

“I didn't think so.” Looking at my scrawny chest.

“Thank you for this.” I hung my damp clothes on the line and he passed me a tin cup, poured coffee from his Thermos. We squatted by the fire. “Good thing you didn't catch me driving up the 99 last night. I'd have needed a lawyer.”

“Heard you were telling some tall tales in the Squamish beer parlour.”

Meaning Knepp had eyes on me. But it didn't seem likely that Borachuk was here on his orders. There had to be a different reason. I said, “Can I ask a couple of questions?”

“Shoot.”

“Last Sunday, Easter Sunday, after Gabriel led everyone to Mulligan's fishing hole, you and Grummond picked him up in a squad car. Why?”

“He hadn't been very forthcoming earlier. Roscoe asked us to check him out for an alibi.” A shrug. “Seemed a fair thing to do.”

“You were driving, Grummond was in the back with my client. Did you hear their conversation?”

“Yep. He said he was with his girlfriend all afternoon. I signed off on that.”

“Okay. And then on Monday, Gene, you were on duty when my guy was brought to the station and charged, right?”

“I helped book him.”

I quoted, reasonably verbatim, from the prologue to Gabriel's taped interview: “ ‘Suspect looked like he'd been in a fight, because we observed facial bruising.' ”

“That report I didn't sign off. Saw the bruises later, when I brought him some chow in the cells. Nasty welt on his side too.”

“Kicking a man when he's down doesn't seem to be in the proud tradition of the force.”

He winced. “This is an off-the-record meeting.”

“I'm not sure if I can agree to that, Gene. I have an obligation to my client.”

“Nothing I tell you can hurt his chances.”

“I can promise discretion.”

Borachuk rose and returned to his bike. From a saddle pack he pulled a thick bundle of documents. “Copies of everything.”

Quite a gesture. I riffled the pages – about three hundred sheets, including the carbon of Mulligan's memoir. A bundle of photos too, mostly of Mulligan at various tasks. “You must have been up all night.”

“Arthur, I got into this business hoping to make inspector one day, maybe superintendent. I'm not going to get there by condemning the men I work with; that's just the way the system works. But I'm not sure if I deserve to get there if I give false evidence in court. So if anyone asks me how your client got that whacking, I have problems. Roscoe's pissed off at me – he keeps saying we've got to sit down and talk about when I saw those bruises. Roscoe … well, he's got a honking big hard-on for Swift.”

“I have received that loud and clear. He salted the scene with evidence, didn't he? Hid those 30-30 shells for the
ID
squad to find.”

“Can't help you there, Arthur. Almost wish I could.”

“What's his hold on Chief Joseph?”

“Roscoe calls him a good Indian. They share an attitude about Gabriel.”

“Pretty obvious, isn't it, that he coerced Monique to say she wasn't with Gabriel last Saturday afternoon.”

“He didn't take her statement, Arthur. Brad and I did. There was no coercion.”

I wondered how true that was. “If not you, her father.”

He shrugged. A deep breath. “Arthur, it doesn't make your client less guilty if a couple of cops pounded the shit out of him. The case doesn't turn on that. I'm taking a gamble that you're a sympathetic guy. I can't go through channels on this. There'd be a hearing, and I'd be exonerated and blacklisted at the same time.”

I suggested he avoid channels by going directly to Smythe-Baldwin. The old fox was an honourable fellow, and we might work something out for Borachuk. That was the right thing to do, and maybe I could wrest some advantage from it. But my client's interests came first. I could not be party to hushing up the matter just to help an honest cop.

Fire extinguished, camp disassembled, Borachuk off to the falls, I headed to Brackendale for breakfast. Twiddling the radio dial,
I caught a fawning interrogator on
CKNW
asking Ophelia Moore about her triumph at Oakalla. Enjoying the attentions of the media, though I'd assigned her a full weekend of interviews with Gabriel. She was self-deprecating with her interviewer, casually basking in her fame while I struggled alone in the muddy trenches. (That, of course, is how I felt at the time; now I see the petulance of disappointment in it.)

The Big Chief Drive-in was busy but Doug Wall was not about. Several elders were sitting by the stove, with some children they were minding. The soft murmur of the Salish dialect. At another table sat a few of the Paul Bunyans I'd met the previous night.