Rosie O'Dell (43 page)

The lawyer agreed, at Dad’s request, to see us that very night at his office. I
persuaded Rosie to go with me, too. Mr. Barry came to the locked door himself
and ushered us courteously into his empty suite of offices. He seemed to have
all the time in the world as he sat there smiling at us behind his desk,
reminiscing on having gone to university with Joyce O’Dell and
Nina—Russell, she’d been then—younger than he was of course—she was a freshmen
when he and Joyce were seniors, but her brilliance was as evident as her beauty
even then. And Joe Sharpe—he wasn’t wrong-named, that man, because he was the
sharpest expert witness Barry had ever had the misfortune to have to
cross-examine on the stand—impossible to shake— and Head Nurse Gladys Sharpe—she
should get the Order of Canada just for her rehabilitation work with children at
the hospital alone. Now, for the reason we were all gathered here
together:

“First, I am
your
lawyer. Not your parents’ lawyer, not the lawyer for
child welfare or the High Sheriff or anyone else. Your lawyer. I will not be
disclosing anything you tell me to anyone else, father or mother or legal
guardian. Your communications to me are absolutely privileged and
confidential.

“Second. Adolescents are idealistic and honourable, so don’t be put off by any
comments of mine that might sound cynical. I don’t know if you are guilty of
anything besides picking your nose or sneaking out a fart in an elevator, and
listen, I don’t care. I
presume
you are as innocent of everything as two
babes in arms. I don’t care if you are actually in fact guilty of anything and I
don’t want to know. I give you the presumption of innocence you are guaranteed
by law. And you are entitled to have everyone else presume you are innocent. But
some will try to weasel out of you admissions that may tend to undermine that
presumption of innocence. Don’t let them do it. My job is to maintain that
presumption of innocence and not to let you say or do anything that weakens it.
If you are asked a question by a police officer, refer them to me and say you
will not answer anything in my absence.”

Rosie said, “The fact that we have a lawyer and refer everything to that
lawyer, won’t that make police officers get suspicious of us?”

“It will,” said Barry, “especially since your lawyer is me. But it is much
better for a police officer to be suspicious of you and even to believe you are
guilty of a crime, than to have you provide evidence which, factually or
falsely, could convict you of that crime in court. Okay, give me your story.
I’ll tell you if it hangs together.”

“Pretty good,” Barry said after we were finished. “Here are the three
realistic possibilities from the point of view of the police. One, Rothesay
accidentally drove his car over the cliff. Two, he deliberately drove his car
over the cliff to commit suicide. Three, one or both of you caused his car with
him inside to drive or roll over the cliff, whereby you committed man
slaughter or murder. Your story points to possibility number
one or number two, accident or suicide. Let’s keep everybody guessing forever
which one of those two it was. Let us make sure that nothing arises or is said
that might tend to make possibility number three, homicide, even credible.
Rosie, stay at his wake beside your mother, and be there the whole time, even
when she is not there.”

At the funeral home, two police officers maintained a close watch on me and
Rosie. It was a toss-up who gawked at Rosie more, the police or the lineup of
mourners who came. Poor Nina was there for a while, but after she screamed over
Rothesay’s closed casket that everyone she loved in the world had died—Joyce and
Pagan, and now Heathcliff—my mother helped her out to the car and home. A police
officer who identified himself as Constable Locksley Holmes sidled up to me when
Rosie was across the room talking to Suzy, and asked me if I could shed any
light on relations between Rosie and her mother. For instance, was there any
reason Mrs. Rothesay had excluded her daughter Rosie from the list of those she
loved? I replied that maybe it was because her mother had been grieving for
loved ones who had died, and Rosie was still alive. Constable Locksley Holmes
gazed at me coolly and without a word for thirty seconds, as lawyer Barry had
informed us the police were trained to do to unnerve suspects, turned to his
colleague, and said, “We’ve got another crafty one on our hands here, just like
that guy last week before we sent him up.”

Rosie came over. “What did they want?” she asked me as they sauntered
away.

“They wanted to know if your mother loves you, even though you’re still alive,”
I said as the constable turned and looked back at us. Rosie smiled at him and
waved.

WITHIN DAYS
,
CONSTABLE LOCKSLEY
Holmes came up to me outside my house and identified himself as
the lead police officer on the investigation into Rothesay’s death. A piece of
pipe had been found on the ocean bottom off Red Cliff by the divers, he said,
and the forensic experts had determined that it had only been there for a few
days and that at least one and maybe two blows to Rothesay’s head corresponded
with its shape. Would I be kind enough to let him into the garage or basement of
my house right now to exclude the possibility of any similar pipe being there
and hence to absolve me of all possible guilt? I blurted that it wasn’t my
house—he’d have to ask my father or mother. Sure, he could do that,
but in the meantime, did either Rosie or I happen to have a
piece of pipe with us when we drove to Red Cliff that night?

If I hadn’t talked to lawyer Barry, I would have doubtless figured the jig was
up and confessed to everything there and then. Instead, I told the officer I was
only allowed to answer questions in the presence of my lawyer, Mr. Leonard
Barry, Q. C. He gave me thirty seconds of the hairy eyeball again but destroyed
its effect by involuntarily swallowing hard. Why did I have a lawyer, he asked,
especially a high-powered one like Barry, if I wasn’t guilty of something?
Because, I replied as advised, I was underage and by law I was not responsible
enough to act independently. Just one final question, said Constable Holmes:
Since the autopsy had determined that there was enough alcohol in Rothesay’s
system to render him legally and probably physically incapable of driving his
car, hadn’t I noticed that or hadn’t Rosie mentioned that to me? Gosh, I
couldn’t comment on that, I said, in the absence of my lawyer. “I had hoped to
avoid this embarrassment to you,” said Constable Locksley Holmes, “but I must
ask you to accompany me to the police station.”

At the police station, lawyer Barry laughed at the pipe. It was so common a
type that the constable could probably find a similar piece of pipe in his own
house. Good luck on getting a warrant from a judge to search for similar pipe
anywhere. Its recent arrival on the bottom? Persist in this line of
investigation, said Barry, and the constable should be prepared to explain the
presence of all recent garbage dumped into the Atlantic by livyers on shore and
vessels at sea. And blows to Rothesay’s head? After falling off a cliff, and
having been in the water for several days hammering against waves, rocks, and
cliffs, good luck to the constable on getting expert evidence to agree that the
wounds to his body were caused by anything specific, let alone by a random piece
of common pipe dumped by God knew who into the Atlantic Ocean. Booze in his
body? So what if there was? Neither Tom nor Rosie administered a Breathalyzer
that night, so far as he was aware. But entirely apart from that, the last case
he’d had where alcohol was an issue, its presence was disputed after the body
had been in calm fresh water for three days, let alone one covered with open
gashes in turbulent salt water for some five days.

Constable Locksley Holmes contrived to accost me one day after classes and
said, “Some kids who were up on Red Cliff making out in an abandoned building
when you and Rosie were there told us they saw a male and a female pushing a
four-wheel drive Jeep over the cliff.”

“They must have been into the pot,” I said.

The constable grinned. “Tom, this is just a friendly observation from one young
man to another. We have determined your motive, and it is a very understandable
one. All the evidence about what Rothesay the pervert did sexually to your
girlfriend—huge penis in her mouth, in her vagina, up her anus, every night for
months on end—well, let me put it this way, I would have killed him too. No jury
would convict you after what he did.”

I told the constable to make all those same points in front of my lawyer and
walked away. I called Barry and told him of the encounter. “Time to fire off a
letter to the chief of police,” he said. He told me to drop down to his office
for my copy of the letter that he’d be having hand-delivered that afternoon. The
letter said that Barry was preparing a statement of claim against Constable
Locksley Holmes and the police department and the minister of justice for the
most scandalous harassment of his underage client. He listed the particulars and
concluded that the police chief “would be well advised to call off your budding
Lieutenant Columbo and instruct him to cease and desist in his
television-whodunit dramatics forthwith. It is clear to all but the wilfully
blind that Rothesay’s unfortunate death was a case of suicide or misadventure
following on allegations against him of a most ruinous nature which were about
to go to trial for a second time.”

But the subtle pressure on Rosie and me continued. Hardly a day went by that we
didn’t come out of our houses to see a police car idling across the road or
receive a call to come in with our lawyer to answer a few more questions: Where
are the shoes and clothes you wore that night? Whose idea was it to drive to Red
Cliff? It was a frightening time. I woke up each morning doubting that our love
for each other would get us through it. Then, in the shower my fortitude would
return. At least until I’d catch Mom or Dad secretly looking at me with an
unnerving combination of mystification over what I might be involved in and
absolute horror at the possibilities, and my courage would start to wane again.
Most of the time, fortunately, they went about the house forcing themselves to
look normal. They didn’t even interrogate me, which was completely out of
character. Lawyer Barry must have instructed them to back off.

BRENT HAD GRADUATED FROM
high school with the
rest of our grade eleven class in June—this was before grade twelve was brought
in—and he was away when Rothesay went missing. He’d been drafted in the eighth
round, two hundred and fifteenth overall, by the Montreal Ca
nadiens, and was now in Hamilton training with the Bulldogs, for whom he would
play in the upcoming season. We wrote each other every week during his first
month away, and that gradually tapered off to every month or two as time went
by. Going into Memorial University with Rosie and Suzy that fall, I realized it
would be the first academic year since kindergarten that Brent and I would not
be together. Strangely, I did not miss him. In fact, I missed no one I was away
from. Even when Rosie and I were apart for days, travelling for sports or other
university activities, I had to lie when we came together again by saying how
happy I was we were back with each other. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her, or
miss Brent, for that matter, or that I didn’t relish her company or wouldn’t
have enjoyed Brent’s. It was just that since the trial and Rothesay’s death
there was something in the core of me that was numb. Lifeless. I took real
pleasure, compared to the past, from nothing.

DURING THE LATE WINTER
, a goon blindsided Brent
on the ice and gave him a hairline fracture of the skull. He was in the hospital
for weeks, and his future in professional hockey was touted by the commentators
as doubtful. He’d be off until next season at the very least.

He came home in May and called me up to go out and have an evening meal with
him downtown at the Sports Restaurant. When I walked in, Brent was already
there, sitting in the booth by himself with, I was surprised to see, a glass of
beer in front of him. Before this, he professed to despise drinking. And he was
still months short of legal drinking age. Seeing him for the first time in
nearly a year, I was surprised by his appearance. He looked, not beefy, but
pudgy. He’d said in a letter that he hated the feeling of getting out of shape
as a result of little activity and lots of eating. His headaches kept him from
working out as strenuously as he wanted to.

Three men were at a table next to Brent’s booth. One of them was pressing
hockey stats on him in a loud voice. He stopped begrudgingly when Brent and I
shook hands enthusiastically and I slipped into the booth. “Want a beer?” Brent
asked.

“I can’t,” I said, “I didn’t bring my fake ID.”

“I’ll vouch for you. I’ll go up and get it. They’ll take my word for it
here.”

“Okay, thanks, I’ll have a Dominion.”

“Who would have thought it?” mused Brent, coming back with my beer and another
for himself, and sitting down. “I’ve got these big hands,
big
feet—look, size twelve, for the love of—big wrists, big ankles, big neck, big
dick—uh sorry, Tommy, I saw what Rosie said at the trial—big shoulders, big
bones generally. Who the hell would have thought, like my old man says, I’d have
a skull on me like Waterford crystal?”

A fleeting image stirred in my own skull of head-butting my best friend Brent
into a lifelong coma. “Maybe we all have an unknown fatal flaw that comes to the
fore at some point in life,” I said. “Just a matter of time and place.”