April Fool

William Deverell

Description

'A new edition of the Arthur Ellis Award winning crime novel Arthur Beauchamp, the scholarly, self-doubting legend of the B.C. criminal bar, is enjoying his retirement on B.C. s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client. Nick The Owl Faloon, one of the world s top jewel thieves, has been accused of raping and murdering a psychologist. Beauchamp has scarcely registered how unlikely it is that the rascally Faloon could commit a savage murder when his own personal life takes an abrupt turn. His new wife, Margaret Blake, organic farmer and environmental activist, has taken up residence 50 feet above ground in a tree of an old-growth forest that she is determined to save for the eagles and from the loggers. Beauchamp shuttles between Vancouver and the island, doing what he can to defend Faloon, save the forest, and rescue his wife. Part courtroom thriller, part classic whodunit, April Fool sees Deverell writing at the top of his for

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773051079
• Langue: English

Extrait

APRIL FOOL
AN ARTHUR BEAUCHAMP NOVEL
William Deverell



To Ecojustice Canada and all defenders of our natural heritage.


THE ARTHUR BEACHAMP NOVELS
Trial of Passion
April Fool
Kill All the Judges
Snow Job
I’ll See You in My Dreams
Sing a Worried Song
Whipped
ALSO BY WILLIAM DEVERELL
Fiction
Needles
High Crimes
Mecca
The Dance of Shiva
Platinum Blues
Mindfield
Kill All the Lawyers
Street Legal: The Betrayal
Slander
The Laughing Falcon
Mind Games
Non-fiction
A Life on Trial

CONTENTS AUTHOR’S NOTE PART ONE ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN FOURTEEN FIFTEEN SIXTEEN SEVENTEEN EIGHTEEN NINETEEN PART TWO TWENTY TWENTY-ONE TWENTY-TWO PART THREE TWENTY-THREE TWENTY-FOUR TWENTY-FIVE TWENTY-SIX TWENTY-SEVEN TWENTY-EIGHT TWENTY-NINE THIRTY THIRTY-ONE THIRTY-TWO THIRTY-THREE THIRTY-FOUR ERISICHTHON ABOUT THE AUTHOR SNEAK PEEK: Whipped , An Arthur Beauchamp Novel COPYRIGHT


AUTHOR’S NOTE
Many fans tell me they delight in taking sightings, somewhat in the manner of avid birders, of several of my characters who flit from one plot to another, but in April Fool I have finally succumbed to urgings to recreate a protagonist. Returning to the scene of the crime is Arthur Beauchamp, the fusty Latin-rapping dean of West Coast criminal lawyers. He earns this role for having aided and abetted Trial of Passion to become the first Canadian winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing.
Many friends old and new must be thanked: cops and robbers and lawyers, environmentalists, and forensic scientists.
RCMP Sgt. Trent Rolfe, with his wide experience in the Unsolved Crimes Unit, helped provide an insider view of current crime-scene techniques and the handling of exhibits. RCMP forensic scientist Stefano Mazzega was of critical assistance with DNA profiling procedures. As to human profiles, novelist Ann Ireland helped enrich many facets of that embattled seeker of love, Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp, Q.C., as he grapples with the ineffable mystery of the female psyche.
Senior defence counsel Peter Jensen has, sadly, passed away, but he helped me to navigate current courtroom procedures, as did federal prosecutor Peter Hogg. (Though I’ve used my literary licence to tweak slightly the rules of court).
Help on environmental issues came from Jerry DeMarco, former lead counsel for the Sierra Legal Defence Fund (now named Ecojustice Canada), and from landscape ecologist Jan Kirby, with whom I live in wedded bliss. Mort Ransen’s documentary Ah, the Money, the Money, the Money , about an island rising to the challenge of the clear-cutters was the inspiration for the subplot. Some years ago, I spent a couple of stimulating days with Dwight Erickson, once the world’s number-five jewel thief, who demonstrated his art and provided a wealth of useful tips.
Thanks to all.


PART ONE
“. . . the uncertain glory of an April day.”
— THE TWO GENTELMEN OF VERONA


ONE
Nick the Owl Faloon is sitting beside a stone fox by the name of Eve Winters, who is apparently some kind of shrink. They’re scoffing up fresh-caught sockeye, sharing a long table with four couples from Topeka, Kansas, who are up here on a wet spring holiday. In spite of all the happy talk, the Owl picks up there is an edge to this dinner, the men regretting they brought their wives along. A fishing extravaganza that put them back a few yards each, and they bring their wives when they’d rather get plotzed and bond.
Though square, they are nice, average people, and Faloon hopes they’re well insured so he’s not going to feel bad about the coming night’s entreprise risquée, his plan to whack their rooms out. Two weeks ago, while here on a previous dining experience, he made a clean play for the master key, slipping it off its hook long enough to wax it. He also checked a typical room; there was no nighter to secure the door from inside, just a security chain.
“And are you a sports fisher too?”
It’s Eve Winters, she has finally become aware of his existence, maybe assuming the little owl-like creature to her left can’t possibly be as boring as the other guy beside her, a condominium developer with a spiel of corny jokes. She is somewhere in her thirties, very tall and slender, ash blonde, looking in good health — she has done the trail, Faloon overheard her say that, six gruelling days. Sports fisher, she’s politically correct, a feminist.
“No, ma’am, I run a little lodge down the hill. Less expensive than this here establishment, but to be honest my food isn’t as good.”
The Owl is speaking of the Nitinat Lodge, which is on a back street in this two-bit town of Bamfield without much of a view, and mostly gets backpackers and low-rental weekenders. The Breakers Inn, looking over the Pacific Ocean, survives on its summer fat and still, in March, gets the fishers from Topeka or Indianapolis. And the way these tourists are spending tonight, that’ll pay the chef’s salary for the month. Faloon had to lay off his own cook for the off-season.
“But I would imagine you have a more exotic clientele,” Eve Winters says in a clear, liquid voice, maybe so her other seatmate can get the point. She has marked down the condo developer as a chauvinist bore, with his story about the fisherman and the mermaid. What is interesting about this guy, to Faloon anyway, is that adding to the bulge of his size forty-eight kitchen is a thick moneybelt.
Faloon tells Eve Winters how he bought his small lodge a year and a half ago, and how he caters to hikers mostly; he likes vigorous outdoorspeople, finds them interesting. That gets this lovely creature talking about her six days on the West Coast Trail with three friends. He enjoys the refined way she expresses herself: “I had a sense of eternity out there, the wind in the pines, and the wild relentless surf.”
It isn’t easy to concentrate on tonight’s job, Operation Breakers Inn, because he feels a little hypnotized by the soft grey eyes of Eve Winters, who doesn’t take on sharp outline; she’s like an Impressionist painting. The Owl, who is starting to wonder if he needs his eyes checked, senses her aura, a silver haze floating about her head. No makeup, but none needed, her face tanned gently by the wind and whatever sun you get this time of year on the West Coast. Dressed casually, jeans and light sweater.
Hardly anyone does the trail so early in spring, when it’s still a swamp. This has meant a near-zero occupancy rate at the Nitinat since last fall, and by now, the final day of March, he is two months behind in his mortgage payments. His financial adviser, Freddy Jacoby, also his fence, warned him, you’ll get three months’ business max, maybe four if it don’t piss in June. The Nitinat Lodge was his retirement program, cash in on the tourist trade, accommodate wayfarers in the middle of what turned out to be nowhere or, more accurately, the western shore of Vancouver Island — you can only get here by logging roads or the local packet freighter, the Lady Rose.
Eve Winters says she supposes he’s walked the West Coast Trail many times, and he replies no, not once, and it’s one of his greatest sorrows. A skiing accident prevented him from pursuing his passion for the outdoors; he gets along with two pins in his right leg. That isn’t the honest truth, which is that the Owl doesn’t like walking more than he has to. Faloon is an easy person to talk to, he brings people out — he’s curious by nature, an information-gatherer. So he urges her on about how she found Bamfield “unspeakably funky” and stayed on for a week after her three girlfriends left on the Lady Rose.
What Faloon finds unspeakably funky about Bamfield, permanent population three hundred and something, is that it’s almost useless to have a car — you take a water taxi to go anywhere, an inlet splits the town in two, and the terrain on this side is sort of impenetrable. This is the pretty side, though, West Bamfield, with its boardwalks rimming the shore, resorts and craft stores, eye-popping beaches a stroll away, but East Bamfield has the only saloon. The most attractive thing about the town, though, is the RCMP detachment is a couple of hours away by boat or car, in Port Alberni.
The lady lets drop that her full title is Dr. Eve Winters, and according to the card she gives him she has a Ph.D., her angle being something complicated, a “relationship analyst.” He gets the impression he’s supposed to have heard of her. And maybe he has; he remembers something in one of the papers, a weekly column with her picture, like Ann Landers. She’s not staying here at the Breakers, but renting a cottage down by Brady Beach. The Owl assumes, without asking, that Dr. Winters is alone there. The Cotters’ Cottage, locals call it, is owned by an old couple in East Bam.
“So tell me — is there any entertainment in town on a Friday night?”
The Owl has the fleeting thought that she’s asking him for a date, but then he realizes how absurd that would be. April Fool’s Day is tomorrow, maybe she’s practising for it. Yet he plays with a daydream of escorting her to the Bam Pub, walking in, displaying her. This is quickly interrupted by an image of Claudette glaring from behind the bar. Claudette St. John, bold of tongue and broad of beam, is obtainable, achievable. Eve Winters is infinitely not.
He tells her there’s a jazz quartet from Nanaimo at the Bam Pub, as the Owl and the other lo