Blue Moon (19 page)

Mother's eyes gleamed behind the spectacles. In her quiet, masterful way, she had led her audience where she had determined they should be. Extremely audible gasps greeted her last pronouncement and immediately every eye in that large room was fastened on me. Judge Barlow was distracted. He found it difficult not to stare, but he had to keep control of the situation. “Order, order!” his attendants shouted.

The remainder of my mother's testimony did not reach that dramatic height. She told of my father's mysterious appearance on Carrick Avenue when he broke open the trunk in the attic, of her own husband's huge assortment of weapons, of John Dick's frequent, annoying requests for money.

When Mr. Sullivan cross-examined her, Mother admitted she herself had been arrested for her son-in-law's murder, then released on bond after thirteen days.

“So there is the possibility the police feel you are involved in John Dick's death?” my lawyer politely inquired.

“There
was
such a possibility,” she countered him.

Mr. Sullivan smiled broadly in her direction. “Were you in the witness room this morning?”

“For about an hour and a half.”

“Where did you go after that?”

“To the Crown attorney's office. I was there about fifteen minutes.”

“Just enough time for a cosy little chat. And then you were brought here to offer evidence?”

“Correct.”

Looking at the jury and then at my mother, Mr. Sullivan asked: “Was any inducement offered to you?”

“Oh, no.”

Mr. Sullivan chuckled. “Any promises?”

“No, there were no promises.” This time, Mr. Sullivan laughed in her face as he took his seat.

On the next day,
The Globe and Mail
carried an account of the end of that grim day:

And finally, a little past six, the still court was admonished into submission by Judge Barlow. The nightly witch hunt of Hamiltonians began again. It is impossible to adjudge the numbers which surrounded the court house, but last night it must have been in the thousands. It was the biggest mob
yet. There was shouting as the mob swayed from door to door and red pinpoints of cigarette lights underlined the macabre scene.

Evelyn Dick was brought out the west door, and the mob surged in her direction. The glamorous-looking defendant always manages to look surprised by every evening's assembled throng as she gets into the car that drives her back to the Barton Street Jail. Children, anxious to get a good look at the evil seductress, push themselves forward to the head of the crowd. For a few moments, the police spotlight envelops her as she walks towards the car. Her hand shakes as she takes a cigarette from her mouth. But on her face, on this day of all days, there is a smile. Then darkness as the car slowly ambles away with its strange cargo.

Later that night, when Mother visited, I assured her: “You looked nice and, more importantly, you did not break down. You played your role to perfection.”

Like the detectives before them, the Crown attorneys determined that the best way to convict me of John Dick's murder was to present a slew of evidence to the jury, even though the bits and pieces of the testimony were connected to me in only a peripheral way. My father had a large collection of guns and saws—therefore, I must have colluded with him to use some of those instruments to kill John. Or, my father had killed John, and I had assisted him. Such an approach, the province reasoned, would never hit the bull's eye, but, with any luck, it would lead to my conviction. And, just possibly, to the truth. Either way, justice would be seen to have been served.

Mr. Sullivan, obviously well aware of what was being perpetrated, tried to counter Mr. Rigney and his associates by suggesting that the evidence against me—most of it gained from my own lips—was inadmissible because it had been gained by coercion. In order to do this, Sullivan had to challenge the way in which Preston and Wood had obtained information from me. He insisted that prior to making potentially self-damaging statements, I had not been properly cautioned; he also maintained that a combination of threats and rewards had been used to wring incriminating statements from me.

When the trial had reached this junction, Judge Barlow was visibly shaken because he was well aware that Sullivan's best chance of saving me was approaching. In what was for him a halting way of speaking, he told the jury: “It now becomes necessary for me to make a ruling as to whether certain evidence is admissible or not admissible, in other words, as to whether it is evidence that you should hear. I must do this in your absence, of course.”

Mr. Sullivan's first point of attack was my uneaten lunch on the day Woods and Preston had arrived to tell me of John's death. Preston admitted I had been given nothing to eat until five o'clock that evening, when I was finally charged with vagrancy. He heatedly denied having promised me a good meal if I confessed to my husband's murder. In turn, Wood told essentially the same story, although he explained he did not charge me with murder because he still did not know where he stood with the accused. He denied saying, “The sooner you explain things, the sooner you will get out.”

During his cross-examination, Mr. Sullivan insisted I should have been charged with the murder of my husband rather than held under the bogus charge of vagrancy.

Barlow was swift in his reply: “She was not in custody on any charge; she was merely detained. Her statements to the police are completely admissible. A proper warning was given. Nothing was done that ought not to have been done.” In subsequent testimony, Preston denied ever losing his temper, threatening to make me talk one way or the other, or opening a desk drawer in which I could clearly see a rubber hose.

In a turn of events that startled Barlow, Mr. Sullivan announced that his client would offer testimony in rebuttal. As I rose to take the witness box, the judge shook his head, either in exasperation at the
legal manoeuvring of my counsel or in anticipation of my offering any kind of evidence which he would find creditable. On the twentieth of March, I explained, I was refused breakfast when I was summoned at daybreak from my cell. Preston had told me: “You'll get it when I am ready to give it to you.”

“Were threats ever made against you by Preston or Wood?” my counsel inquired of me.

“Well, Detective Preston assured me the sooner I talked the sooner I would get home. He didn't really threaten me on that day. He said he had known of me since I wras a child and hoped he could get me out of the mess I had made.”

“He said he would help you if you talked?”

A furious Barlow interrupted him. “That is not what she said!”

“I'm sorry, my Lord,” Sullivan assured him.

Mr. Rigney tried to make light of the situation by insinuating the greatest grievance I had with the police was the lack of meals provided at times pre-deter mined by myself. On the day in question—the twentieth of March—I admitted I had been given a lovely lunch.

“That's good,” a now sarcastic Rigney reassured me. “What time did you have that lovely lunch, pray?”

“Well, I don't know.”

“Well, I hope it was as soon as possible after you made your request?”

“Well, it wasn't long after.”

“About noon, I suppose?”

“I guess so.” Rigney sought the judge's eyes, which seemed to beam approval.

In his counter-rebuttal, Sergeant Preston sighed and then observed: “There are so many times that woman was hungry, I couldn't keep count of them.”

Mr. Sullivan then turned his attention to the drive I had taken with the police up the Mountain. In gruesome detail, Wood recounted how I had described to him the way in which Bohozuk had fired his first shot at John's head, the bullet coming out the right eye. My lawyer, listening in silence to what he knew was a litany of lies I had composed, finally told the judge that the thirty-odd mile trip had to be considered an outing, that no warning was proffered to me, the resulting evidence therefore inadmissible. Quickly, Barlow ruled the
information was given voluntarily and, was, therefore, fully admissible. The jury was summoned so that the trial proper could resume.

On Friday, the 13th of October, I celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday. On that morning, Mr. Sullivan arrived at the courthouse, carrying an assortment of heavily fragrant scarlet lilies and white carnations which had been left at his office with a card, “To Evelyn from an Admirer.” I received over a hundred birthday cards plus an assortment of gifts: nylons, a strand of pearls with clustered pearl earrings, lipsticks, nail polish, facial preparations, bottles of perfume and eau de Cologne. I penned a note which was published in the
Spectator
the following week: “I would like to pay tribute to everyone, to the senders of letters, the senders of gifts, and to matrons and officers for kindness shown me during my custody.” What I did not mention were the many death threats. One of the matrons told me of the sperm-impregnated black brassiere that had arrived: “Evelyn, it was still wet when I opened the parcel.”

My missive caused a flood of “Letters to the Editor”—some of which railed against me, especially against my movie-star appearance. The newspaper contacted the inspector of prisons for Ontario who replied: “As a remanded prisoner there is no objection to another woman in the corridor helping Mrs. Dick to look presentable. Naturally a woman prisoner does not want to appear in Court looking like a tramp.”

On the day when the floral tribute was bestowed upon me, I was anxious to get back to the Barton Street Jail in order to examine the card and study the signature. I was—and remain—convinced that the mastermind behind the John Dick murder had, as a sardonic twist, sent the flowers to me: Mr.Y, the lawyer, had twice presented me with the exact offering—identically coloured lilies and carnations. Twilight had just descended, and I clutched the bouquet closely to my person. I got out of the car quickly and walked smartly up the steps. Just as I reached the top, a turnkey at the door seized the flowers from me and tossed them in the direction of the crowd, who moved away to avoid contamination. They gasped, but they allowed the flowers to lie there in the gathering dusk, a red and white blur on the grey stone driveway.

I made one friend at Barton Street. Stella was a prostitute who had landed herself at the jail several times for soliciting. A woman of uncommon, delicate beauty, she did not look conventionally Italian because both her parents were born in villages north of Milan, where facial and bodily characteristics often display northern European features. Dissatisfied with the perfect railway timetabling instituted by Mussolini, the Viscontis immigrated to Canada in 1924, two years after II Duce and his blackshirts marched on Rome. Stella's parents were simple, uneducated people, but they feared that demonic forces would be unleashed if the previously divided states of Italy were brought together by a man of the new leader's ruthless will.

At first, the Viscontis' new homeland promised salvation. Like many of the European immigrants who settled in Hamilton, they particularly loved spending Sundays at the Royal Botanical Gardens—then and now, the only cultural or natural institution in Hamilton that could defeat Toronto hands-down. The frame steel canopies—manufactured locally which then sheltered the sidewalks of Hamilton reminded them of the covered colonnades in the small rustic towns of their youth. They sometimes travelled up the Mountain on the Saturdays in summer when bands performed at the sanatorium—the beds of the patients were wheeled out of the rooms, providing the patients with their own special balcony seats.

Mr. Visconti's job was hellish, but he endured it willingly. At the Dominion Foundries, he “teemed the heat,” directing molten steel from a ladle into waiting ingot moulds. The cooled ingots were stripped from the moulds and then rolled into desired lengths and thicknesses. Like the other workers, Mr. Visconti was provided with neither faceguard nor safety suit while he stood completely exposed to flying sparks and explosions of red-hot steel.

Stella was born in 1924, the year the couple arrived in Hamilton. Four sisters followed her, the last born in 1930. The Viscontis were poor but extremely happy. At school, Stella was a precocious student, whose ability to write fluently and beautifully gave great pleasure to her parents and teachers. Although it was then uncommon for the children of immigrants to attend university, the Italian community in the city had, by the time Stella turned 12, determined that she was to
enrol at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto when she finished high school. From her earliest years, she told everybody who eagerly listened to her that she wanted to become a writer.

Until 1939—just as the war started in Europe—everything remained on an even keel for the Viscontis. In October of that year Mr. Visconti fell to his death, consumed instantly in a bath of liquid steel. As her husband had not carried life insurance, Mrs. Visconti had to go out to work. Quite soon, she became a riveter at National Steel Car. The February 1942 issue of
The Car Builder
included this passage about her:
“Luanda Visconti is a heater. Tongs in her right hand, her left on the handle of the heater, Lucinda places three cold black rivets in the copper jaws of her machine. In a moment they are white hot. Her foot presses down one of the pedals at the base of her machine, tongs grip the rivet firmly, she draws it out and flips her wrist. It has no sooner left her tongs than she has another in its place”

Since Mrs. Visconti was earning a decent salary, she was able to keep her five daughters in school. She was even able to afford to pay a housekeeper to look after the children in the afternoons until she arrived home from work at eight o'clock. Lucinda's work was mildly dangerous, but she thought she could survive it. But she did not survive the cervical cancer that carried her quickly and decisively away in February 1943.