From the Chrysalis (41 page)

“What the hell did you do to your hair?” both men demanded on separate occasions. “You look like Liza Minelli, for God’s sake.”

“It was too much trouble,” she said and shrugged, her thin shoulder blades poking out like wings. She cut it even closer when the
Maitland Spectator
finally announced that D’Arcy Devereux was one of thirteen prisoners charged with the murders of two inmates who had died during the riot in September 1971. Their trial would begin in November 1972.
 

Dace was sent back to solitary, to cold storage in a concrete vault. All visitation stopped.
It isn’t supposed to be like this,
she’d fumed as chunks of her hair fell into a porcelain sink. She wielded the largest pair of scissors she could find and hacked without a plan.
 

Things weren’t supposed to keep getting worse, but they did. Dace wasn’t just in the Hole, he was back up a goddamn tree. A tree.
 

Not for the first time, she wondered. Surely this wasn’t all because of some fucking priest, was it? She shuddered, recalling what he’d said about his school. They’d talked about such things from time to time, especially if he’d had a few beers. He’d always sworn that nothing had ever happened, that he’d gotten away. But what if it
had
happened? What then?

After enough time she wasn’t angry with him anymore, though only a fool would stop feeling afraid. A fool, or some girl who hadn’t fallen in love with D’Arcy Devereux when she was fourteen.

Chapter 29

Bird on a Wire

Maitland Courthouse, November 1972:

The murder trial of thirteen federal inmates began after a long delay. On a damp, dismal day, the prisoners shuffled off the Maitland Penitentiary bus, the former army vehicle that had hauled them into town. Somehow they figured out how to move in unison, then filed silently through a narrow limestone underpass. The passage, straight ahead under a dripping, arched stone roof, was lined with crowds of strangers jostling for a better view. At the end of the tunnel was a set of stairs which led into Courtroom B.
 

The prisoners had winter pale faces and downcast eyes, but what most people noticed were the chains and handcuffs. A little excessive perhaps, considering they were also accompanied by armed guards who knew how to follow rules. Many of the viewers were struck by the youth still visible in the lines of the prisoners’ faces, but only relatives felt any sympathy. And much of what they felt was a convoluted mixture of sorrow and exasperation.
When the hell was he going to learn?

“I’m not superstitious, but …”
more than one spectator was overheard saying. It was hard
not
to be a little superstitious about thirteen prisoners. One for each man who had suffered at the hands of his fellows during the final hours of the Maitland Penitentiary Riot, although only two had died.
 

In addition to the murders, several charges had been laid relating to the kidnapping of the guards, and the Crown was holding out for more. After investigations at both the federal and the institutional level, they was confident these men were not only the ringleaders in the largest riot in Canadian penal history, but apparently so depraved that they had overstepped their own fluid and shifting moral boundaries, allowing them to murder their own kind.
 

The Crown also thought they knew who had
directed
the beatings that left two men for dead. They spent several weeks assembling the facts on a storyboard that even a jury could understand.
 

“How’s about a little smile for the cameras, boys?” one of the swarming reporters joked, prompting Steve to say, “I can’t. They smashed my teeth.”

“Who’s
they
? Who’s
they
?” the reporters asked as the shackled boy with a missing front tooth was pulled up short by Dace.
 

It looked bad, but maybe they wouldn’t be railroaded. Their cases had attracted thirteen of the best criminal defence attorneys in the country, a situation previously only enjoyed by Dace, blessed as he was with a solvent father. But what if they never found out exactly what had happened on the final day of the riot? A couple of months ago people thought they knew, but now they weren’t so sure. There were so many different versions, as if everybody had watched multiple televisions in a department store but nobody saw the same show. How could that be?
 

Maybe the truth will still come out,
the men said, shrugging whenever they congregated in the prison cafeteria, the exercise yard or the showers. Whatever the truth was, anyway. By now the story had been told so many times it had almost been reduced to a fable.

Police and prison guards accompanied the prisoners. If they were lucky, friends and family waited inside too. Not everybody would come back again, but this was the first day. Fathers rested their eyes, reflecting on the day’s pay they could ill-afford to lose. Mothers—and there were more of them—clutched Kleenex inside their purses and prayed to God they wouldn’t live long enough to make fools of themselves and hear someone say: “Get her out of here. She’s too unstable.”

It’s hard to hold your head up when your son’s been charged with murder
, they told their best friends,
and even harder not to be able to help him
. Whatever they told anybody else, they blamed themselves, knowing in their hearts there must be something they could have done. Maybe they could have lured men who would have been better role models for their sons. Maybe they should have driven off their kids’ delinquent friends and made the family go to church more often. Perhaps they could even have found their boy the love of a good girl.

They were also grieving, for the men on trial were strangers. Most of the mothers had lost their real sons long before and could barely remember the troublesome children they had been. They dreamed of little things instead: an infant’s foot, a gap-toothed smile, a personalized Dennis the Menace playing hockey in the street.

* * *

Showtime
, Dace thought. Whatever happened, at least he wasn’t in his cell. Better still, a spectacle was about to begin, off to a fitful but predictable start. The uninitiated appeared slightly disappointed to discover court wasn’t more like the
Perry Mason
dramas they loved at home. Maybe it would be more like
Front Page Challenge
. They sat back, waiting for the “truth” to be revealed.

Strangers swelled the ranks of family and friends: court appointed lawyers for the Crown and the Defence, courtroom junkies and a lone stenographer off to the side, recording the spoken word. There were no videotaped recordings of the whispered consultations between lawyers and their clients, no clips of the sleep-deprived accused or the eager eyes of the spectators as they leaned forward to catch a lawyer’s conversation or interpret a prisoner’s expression.

It was unprecedented to have so many accused people in the prisoner’s box. It would have been impossible if the structure hadn’t been enlarged. A list of the prisoners’ names, ages, hometowns and most recent crimes had been published in the newspapers. In the absence of more knowledge, those had been reiterated every day. Except for Big Alf, Dace and his fellow accused were under thirty and had grown up in jails. At the end of the first day, news reporters tried to add a couple more colourful details about the prisoners, but most of their descriptions ran to their stock phrase:
the accused showed no emotion.
 

The trial witnesses: murderers, convicted thieves and confidence men who’d had previous disagreements with some of the accused and were understandably concerned about reprisals, were offstage in anterooms, eating bologna sandwiches and waiting for their cues. This was their opportunity to step into the limelight. Their only tangible compensation was the free cigarettes the Crown attorneys doled out like Valium.
Relax. Have a Menthol.

Understandably anxious, the lawyers spent most of their time either pacing or talking. Their witnesses would have to wait for days like ill-prepared understudies, their agitation and erratic behaviour escalating as their dreams of stardom died.

After less than an hour, some of the spectators grew impatient waiting for the courtroom drama to begin. They left as quickly as they’d come, careless of banging the double doors behind them. The more committed—or perhaps just the courtroom junkies with more time on their hands—breathed sighs of relief and spread out in the gleaming oak pews. They swivelled their heads, contemplating paintings on the walls depicting the colonization of Upper Canada, of Indians meeting the White Man for the first time.

Liza rushed into the courtroom just in time to see Dace straightening the red tie his father had bought him. Her face was so expressionless he knew she must be holding her breath. She didn’t know her feelings showed in her eyes as she paused in the entrance to Courtroom B. She scanned for the most advantageous seat: a bench she deemed close enough to watch him, but not close enough for her to be scrutinized by the Prosecution or the press, both of them out for blood. Preferably his blood, although hers might do.

Dace’s attorney Hubert Gold spotted her at the same time. Gold already had a small dossier on her, put together by his research assistant after they’d noticed Liza coming to the preliminary trial, held in
voir dire
late last month. She had been hard to miss: a taut young girl with anxious eyes who looked like she wished she didn’t know so much. Her presence had also been duly noted last week when the jury had been chosen. He’d talk to her, he told Dace. A pretty, clean cut schoolgirl could help jurors visualize him in a different light.
 

A rising young criminal defence lawyer, a decade older than Dace, Hubert Gold had offered to take Dace on
pro bono
, although if his father wanted to pay him, that was just fine. “Huey” as his friends preferred to call him, was a small, lithe man, prematurely balding, known to enjoy sparring with legal minds. Sparring was also his social style. Dark and Jewish, he preferred to augment his looks by keeping a svelte blond girl by his side—a
shiksa
, the kind of girl he would never marry.
 

To his credit, Gold had visited Dace several times in prison, more than most of the other defence lawyers had. He had argued for his release from Segregation so he could help his client, although he’d been less successful in talking to the other inmates. His passion for his work was so contagious that Dace had sat up and started eating again. With the trial of thirteen convicts sure to garner publicity, Huey Gold wasted no time in letting everyone know that he had given up his fledgling practice in downtown Toronto and was living in a hotel in Maitland during the preliminary hearing and trial. He had also lined up over sixty witnesses by mail.

Meanwhile the Crown attorneys gossiped about the spectators, close enough for Dace to hear every word they said. “Ah, that’s number three’s cousin. The college kid, washing her life down the drain. And right behind her is number eight’s old lady. One of Maitland’s finest: a third generation welfare recipient. And that’s number four, no, number five. Number four grew up in foster homes, surprise, surprise. The little pervert ain’t got no friends.”
 

The Crown and the press shifted their collective focus back to the infamous thirteen, an unused chain gang idling in the rebuilt prisoners’ box, an insult to everybody who worked for a living.
 

“It’s a holiday for them. The bastards should be put to work,” muttered one of the Crown attorneys.
 

“A baker’s sad and sorry dozen,” somebody else commented. “And I’m willing to bet there’s not one innocent man among them.”
 

A defence lawyer spoke almost simultaneously. “Thirteen of us stepping on each other’s toes just to keep these animals out a few more years. Shouldn’t they be looking more scared?”
 

“Too disoriented. I don’t know how my client’s holding up. He’s not too stable as it is. He’s already tried to hang himself once. The poor saps have been in solitary for so long this is just like a little outing for them. They don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

”’Poor saps’, my ass. Take a look at number three. What’s his name? Oh yeah. D’Arcy Devereux.”

“The sharply suited one with the foreign-looking eyes?” somebody said with a snort, pretending to scan some documents on the table in front of him. “He’s some cool customer. Didn’t even blink when his cousin showed up for him.”