Read Online I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel by William Deverell - Free Book Online Page B

all day to be legal aid duty counsel at 312 Main Street, which in those days incestuously housed both the police station and the magistrates’ courts. Such coziness would be regarded as appalling today, but in the sixties the line between justice and enforcement was fuzzy. The Public Safety Building was (and remains) Vancouver’s ugliest structure, an institutional intrusion into skid road, with its strip clubs and beer parlours and general sense of carefree lawlessness.
    The fifth-floor cells at 312 were mostly populated by alcoholics and vagrants, who were dealt with in bunches in court – hapless hungover men and women who would troop up to get their week or month or more in custody. It was an offence to be homeless back then (Vagrancy A) or to be in a state of intoxication in a public place ( SIPP ), and Vag A’s and SIPPS comprised the bulk of those who were run through the daily mill in Courtroom Two. The human zoo, we called it.
    Occasionally real criminals would be called up, and while their lawyers spoke to bail I’d use the break for whispered conferences with derelicts in the dock. I spent the lunch hour doing quickie interviews in the cells. The work was as exhausting as it was unfulfilling, and Magistrate Scott was grumpy, erupting at poorly prepared counsel.
    At day’s end I had a couple of drafts next door at the West Coast Central Club, whose “membership only” designation was largely ignored, particularly by the many police who enjoyed off-hours there. Its roof occasionally served as a landing site for escapees roping down from prison windows at night.
    When I returned to the Crypt at five-thirty, I was still in a sour mood. Gertrude had kindly waited up for me, but I was peremptory when I asked her to phone Oakalla. “Do it quickly – they go bananas when they don’t get notice.”
    Then I saw, sitting on my desk blotter, copies of Woodcock’s
Anarchism
, the Camus, the I.F. Stone, and the
Monthly Review
for April, along with a sales slip. She had hiked down to the People’s Co-op Bookstore, a task that I’d promised to do and forgotten, and paid twelve dollars from her own purse.
    The top item on my blotter was a note from Ophelia:
This just in
. It was clipped to another RCMP witness report, one long handwritten sentence:
Last Saturday, I would say around 2 o’clock, as I was driving my 1958 Nash Metro hardtop near the Mulligan farm on Squamish Valley Road, I saw an Indian male who I identify as Gabriel Swift, crossing the road with a rifle and going into the bush
. Signed two days ago by Doug Wall, with an address on Squamish Valley Road.
    This smacked of devious afterthought by overeager beavers at the Squamish detachment. Some scumbag who owed them a favour. I could see the car buff, the often undersigned Brad Jettles, dictating
1958 Nash Metro hardtop
.
    Ophelia whisked into my office. “I guess we have to track down Mr. Doug Wall.”
    I held my voice steady. “Yes, I was thinking of going up there tomorrow for the weekend. Take my camping gear. Rough it a bit.”
    â€œHow fun.”
    â€œLegal aid – they’re pinchy, they won’t pay for hotels.” Abrupt, decisive, businesslike: “I’ve arranged to see Gabriel this evening to ask a few questions and keep him informed. I was going to ask if you have some time this weekend to get a more detailed statement from him.”
    â€œI can cancel everything but Victor Borge tomorrow night at the Queen E.” Letting me know she hadn’t left the weekend open for camping trips. She obviously had a date with her new beau. “Do you not want me to go to Oakalla with you tonight?”
    â€œOf course I don’t not want you to. I mean, I do, I’d like you to come.” The stammering buffoon. “I didn’t want to assume you had the time.”
    â€œArthur, is this about what happened the other night?”
    â€œI wasn’t being