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PART ONE
The Life of Brian
Neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring.
John Heywood, 1546
— Chapter 1 — The Madness of Gilbert Gilbert
There was no dispute about the facts. A hundred-pound weakling with the redundant name of Gilbert F. Gilbert had stepped into a crowded Vancouver courtroom and aimed a small-calibre revolver at Chief Justice Wilbur Kroop. A policeman leaped from the witness stand, and as he tackled Gilbert the gun fired. The officer stopped the bullet with his heart.
All these facts were admitted by the defence at Gilbert Gilbert’s murder trial in January, 2007. It was conceded too that the accused—forty-five, single, friendless—was a senior court clerk. Thus he had easy access to the courtroom from Kroop’s chambers, where he’d been hiding.
The Badger, they called Kroop, and not just because of his squat, broad body but his claws. The defence portrayed him as a notorious bully who had taunted and shamed Gilbert, who made a fool of him in open court and sent him off in tears, who drove him to the precipice of madness and made him jump.
The defence argued that in his delusional state the accused had convinced himself Kroop was a former Nazi death camp commandant whom Gilbert had been ordered by God to eliminate. “God’s will be done!” he shouted at his jailers, at the many doctors who examined him.
His counsel was Brian Pomeroy, of the feisty criminal law firm of Pomeroy, Macarthur, Brovak and Sage, and he was assisted by young Wentworth Chance, who did most of the work, burying himself in the law, interviewing specialists in post-traumatic disorder, schizophrenia. In comparison, the Crown’s witnesses in rebuttal were a mediocre lot.
With Chance doing the heavy lifting, Pomeroy played to the jury, raising objections and cross-examining with his typical dry, manic wit. A celebrated neurotic, he’d won celebrated trials, most notably the recent defence of the assassin (alleged) of the president of Bhashyistan. But his life was in turmoil—he was drinking hard, tupping his secretary, and his marriage was heading for meltdown. Unable to face Caroline’s cold silences and searing looks, he had taken to sleeping in the office on weekday nights.
In overcoming these handicaps, it helped that Pomeroy had drawn a dispassionate prosecutor and a judge with whom he used to smoke dope. The jury seemed interested and sympathetic—all except the sneering foreman, Harrison, a retired major from the Patricia Light Infantry, a former combat training instructor. He would look at Pomeroy with a disdainful curl of smile, as if to say: You lawyers will defend anybody, won’t you, even a hypersensitive worm like Gilbert.
Neither judge or prosecutor interfered when Pomeroy portrayed Kroop, who was on the eve of retirement at seventy-four, as a sadistic mountebank. However, the Chief Justice was spared the ignominy of having to testify, and thus spared the whip of cross-examination.
Meanwhile, Gilbert had got himself together while in custody, was functioning again, restored to his old rabbit-like persona but with total amnesia for the events of the previous June. Physically, however, he was deteriorating, stressed, complaining of dizzy spells, heart palpitations.
Pomeroy wondered what it would be like to take a holiday from reality. Was psychosis truly a haven from unbearable oppression, as the psychiatrists testified? Might it even be fun? Like tripping out on LSD. He’d tried nervous breakdowns a couple of times, but they weren’t fun. More like tripping out on fumes from paint cans.
The prosecutor’s summing-up was a concise, no-nonsense plea in which she urged her case for conviction but conceded that Wilbur Kroop had stretched the bounds of civility toward his beleaguered clerk. Kroop, during all this, was in his chambers on the next floor up, pretending lack of interest but in a tight-lipped, vengeance-seeking fury.
On the eve of his final address, Pomeroy was relaxing over a couple of drinks at the office—he felt he had it in the bag—when he got a distressing call from the oldest of his three adopted kids, fifteen-year-old Gabriela (“We miss you, Daddy, please love Mom, please come home”). The agony, the sleepless night, would have felled many lesser men, but Pomeroy gutted it out in a ninety-minute jury speech, covering all bases, thanks to Wentworth Chance’s forensic aide-memoir. Trauma-induced psychosis. Delusional ideation. Confabulation. Almost too much to take in one gulp.
At one point, however, he began to cry, and because he’d been going on about the tyrannies perpetrated by Wilbur Kroop on his client, the jury mistakenly believed he was crying for Gilbert Gilbert.
The jury went out on January 11 and stayed out for five increasingly tense days. They came back twice, sought clarifications, strain on every face, cold determination on the foreman’s. Pomeroy feared that the wuss-despising major was winning the war in that barren, locked room. The lesser of his worries was that he would miss the start of Regina versus Morgan and Twenty-one Others, a marathon drug conspiracy trial set for January 17.
But one day before that, the jury finally trooped in after dinner, weary but ready. The clerk rose: “Mr. Foreman, what is your verdict? Do you find the accused guilty or do you find the accused not guilty by reason of insanity?”
Major Harrison stood at attention and hissed, “Guilty, by God.”
A stunned silence, while the other jurors looked at each other in confusion, finally remonstrating. “Excuse me, Major, but…” “No, no, we agreed…”
The judge asked if there was a problem.
Major Harrison did a quick shake of his head, as if coming out of a fog. “No, sir, I’m sorry, sir. Not guilty.”
“And are you unanimous?” asked the judge.
“Yes, sir.” Through gritted teeth.
Not many in this crowded court were focussing on Gilbert Gilbert during this, but when the major misfired with his faulty verdict Gilbert sat back as if punched in the face. Pomeroy turned to see him turning white, struggling to his feet, gasping and clutching his chest, and finally keeling over. He died almost instantly.
The fates had allowed Wilbur Kroop to exact revenge, but little did anyone suspect that more judges were about to be targeted…
As Brian reread that ghastly paragraph, he felt a Pavlovian shock, the kind administered to a rat making a wrong turn in the maze. Since he’d installed Horace Widgeon’s program in his hard drive—Secrets of the Whodunit, $59.98, Version OS X—he’d been getting these little jolts, not painful but persistent. The sensible part of him believed there was a short-circuit somewhere in his ugly, glowing, purple eMac. The delusional part of him believed Widgeon was pressing a zap-Pomeroy button on a supercomputer in his cottage in the Cotswolds.
Yes, Brian had mocked the legendary creator of the Inspector Grodgins series, his mentor from afar. In the section titled, “The Author as Soothsayer,” Widgeon instructs: Do not predict! I find myself forever in despair that so many beginners subscribe to the ‘little-did-he-know’ school of composition. Let this historic and holy injunction be your guiding light: “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Was Brian dealing in facts? Or was he making them up? Did he have any idea what the facts were? One obvious fact was that he was having the mother of all nervous breakdowns. (His shrink suspected it had gone beyond breakdown; she had a complex handle for it: Stress Disorder, Disorganized Type with Delusional Ideation. Ideas such as: I can make a living being a writer. And its corollary. I won‘t have to practise law anymore.)
His collapse had been kindled by the pressure of work, the Gilbert Gilbert homicide, then the endless hell of Regina versus Reuben (Ruby) Morgan and Twenty-one Others—a conspiracy involving one ton of cocaine, eight hundred hours of wiretap, twenty-two traffickers, thirteen quarrelsome lawyers, and Justice Darrel Naught, an insufferable fat fascist who wouldn’t know a reasonable doubt if it perched on his nose. Each evening after court, Brian and his cronies shared woes, and he would often arrive home late—if he came home at all—smelling of pot and booze. Defensive and snappish, moody and uncommunicative, he had driven Caroline to file for divorce, and this time the grounds weren’t adultery but cruelty. And this time she meant it.
He’d moved to a West End apartment but abandoned it after finding his twenty-fifth-floor balcony suicidedly risky. Now he was in an artist’s garret, or its pathetic facsimile: a third-floor room in a third-rate hotel, the Ritz, in Chinatown on the cusp of skid road. No one knew he was hiding here, not even his partners. Not even his secretary. Delete. He didn’t have a secretary. Roseanne quit last month.
So here he was, armed with Miriam-Webster and Roget and Fowler and Widgeon and a wheezing computer and a Full Monty breakdown, pouring another tequila, lighting another cigarette, staring gloomily out a dust-clouded window overlooking Main and Keefer, where the shops were closing for the evening and the grifters and hookers taking over the streets. He thought of slipping out to one of the takeout joints, the Beautiful Sunrise Restaurant, the Good Cheer Noodle House. Or maybe the Lucky Penny Pizza, for a change. These places depressed him. Everything depressed him. Especially his day job, the defence of Morgan and Twenty-one Others.
He was sick of law, sick of the whole system, he had broken under its pressure. Dr. Epstein had put him on tricyclics and told him to find some diversion, some favourite craft. Thus was born Kill All the Judges. Chapter One, The Vengeful Nerd, introducing Gilbert Gilbert as tragic farceur, and starring the author, the celebrated neurotic Brian Pomeroy, dazzling readers with his typical dry, manic wit.
He’ll show Caroline. Such a literary snob, the academically hubristic Professor Pomeroy and her highfaluting graduate courses. Lit 403: Thackeray, Trollope and Brontë, The English Novel in the Age of Vanity. And now she was published, she’d somehow persuaded a small press to put out her collected stories. He’d seen himself in some of them, the fucked-up boyfriend or husband. How dare she win a Best First Fiction Award for that?
He fully expects Judges to sell more than her paltry two thousand copies of Sour Memories. How might he pitch it to publishers? A memoir dressed up as fiction? Fiction disguised as memoir? Creative true-crime? Creative untrue crime? A touch of Conrad? I am able to write of these events only as I recollect them, and memory ever dims with age. Truth, fiction, outright lies, who cares anymore? Creative non-fiction, that’s the general rubric, and that’s what he’s into, the hottest trend in literature, it gets you into the book pages, the literary blogs, the Oprah Winfrey show. Eat your heart out, Caroline.
Yes, Judges will represent the cutting edge of creative non-fiction, stropped to razor sharpness. In the meantime, let’s just call this lumpy stew of facts and fibs a mystery…
But was the Gilbert case merely an arrogant sidebar? The great Pomeroy! Poster boy of the Bhashyistan Democratic Revolutionary Front, victorious defender of assassins and addled court clerks. He could hear Widgeon grumbling: where was the meat of this story, the main dish, does not the title promise a serving of dead judges?
Please forgive the delay in the kitchen…
Posted by William Deverell on May 09, 2008
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