Hangman (28 page)

Blind Justice

Vancouver

Thursday, November 16 (Today)

See no evil.

Hear no evil.

Just speak evil.

The verdict.

There was a moral sickness loose in the land, and for the sake of the future, someone had to act. Switched on the TV and what did you see? A video of a black man cowering on the ground as a ring of rogue cops clubbed him senseless. The case went to court and what was the verdict? A jury that watched the same video didn’t see a thing.

Were they blind?

O. J. beat his wife. His wife left him. O. J. blew his top. His wife was found dead. O. J. led the country on a weird car chase with a suicide gun pointed at his head. O. J. was charged with murder. The nation watched his trial. A jury heard the same witnesses as everyone else. Judging from the verdict, it seems the only word they heard was “race.”

Were they deaf?

The flip side of those trials was Peter Haddon’s case. The state had nothing against him but junk evidence. What began as an accusation with no foundation somehow ended in a jury verdict that sent an innocent man to the gallows.

How did that happen?

The Hangman knew.

The rot set in the instant that “duty” became a dirty word.

There was a time when duty turned commoners into heroes. Watch an old movie and there is no doubt who the hero is. He or she is the one who understands duty: the binding force of doing that which is
morally
right.

Maybe it was Vietnam and Watergate. Maybe it was turning on and dropping out. Maybe it was too much
me, me, me
as center of the universe. Whatever the reason, duty waned, leaving us with a world in love with
anti-
heroes. Anti-heroes lack the attributes that make us heroes, and now we laugh at that nobility of spirit and mind that once prompted us to do the right thing. How corny, we think. Today, empty vessels are summoned for jury
duty
, so the guilty go free while innocents like Peter hang.

That’s blind justice.

The Hangman was strong medicine for that disease. The hope was that these hangings would smarten up jurors. The worst enemies of justice are those who believe it rarely fails. They are like Justice herself, willfully blind, and the time had come to rip that phony blindfold from their eyes.

See what you’re doing?

Look what you did to me.

Hear the cries of your victims?

Listen to my
Scream.

Fail in your duty, and I will balance the scales.

Someone has to put duty back in the jury room.

A trial isn’t a game of blindman’s bluff.

A trial is a game of hangman.

So get your verdict
right!

Those who believed the Hangman’s retribution was murder were wrong. Necessity was the defense to these hangings. Those who were hanged deserved to die, as a lesson to those of like perversity as much as for the travesties of their verdicts. Such deaths were necessary to avoid similar evil to others in future trials, and the evil to be prevented was far greater than the evil of ridding the world of these condemned. It was like sacrificing one in a lifeboat so the rest could eat.

Necessity.

If only the problem was just bad apples.

Unfortunately, the barrel was rotten as well.

So that’s why the Hangman sat in this room, one hand holding the rope while the other coiled, coiled, coiled a hangman’s noose.

For tonight.

Lynch Law

Vancouver

Tonight

William S. Burroughs was right.

Take it from me.

“A good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.”

The phone had been ringing nonstop since I sprang Ethan from that murder charge yesterday. I am suddenly the hottest lawyer in town, and crooks and killers who didn’t know I existed before are now crashing down the piss-stained door of Kline & Shaw to hurl their filthy loot at my bank account.

My
bank account.

Ethan and I aren’t partners.

What brought me up to the law courts on a drizzly night like this was a sizable retainer from the father of a skinhead charged with stomping a Sikh to death. A gang of them had done it—Oops, pardon me. The proper way to put it so no blood gets on your hands is a gang of them were
alleged
to have done it—and a motion for separate trials had been granted. The case against the ringleader had gone to the jury, so I came up to see if the verdict resulting from his trial would help acquit my client next month. At three hundred bucks an hour, why not spend the evening reading here instead of at home?

I had told the sheriff to give me a shout down in the barristers’ lounge if the jury came back. With my feet up on the table, I sat by myself in the empty room, reading a slew of newspaper stories about my Big Win! It pleased me to note that none of them had misspelled Kline.

The irony of life is how the wheel comes around. A week ago I was writing a piece on famous hangmen in the hope that it would catch the eye of the Hangman and convince him I was his kind of gunslinger. Now I was featured as the lawyer of the
alleged
Hangman, and a paper had done a sidebar on Canada’s most famous hangman to background the story on me:

No one knows how many people Arthur Ellis hanged. The estimates go higher than 600. Whatever the number, Arthur Ellis was a name to fear.

Arthur Bartholomew English was born in England in 1864. Before he was mustered out with the rank of captain, he fought colonial battles with the British army in India, Egypt, and South Africa. Kicking around, with nothing to do, he found work in the hanging trade with James Billington, who was then number one on Britain’s list of executioners. Arthur’s uncle was John Ellis, a hangman also on the list who later slit his own throat with a razor.

A hangman gets paid by the number of necks broken by his noose, so English sought executioner’s work out in the colonies. Having hanged prisoners in the Middle East, he finally settled on Canada as a good base and made his home in Montreal. For anonymity, a trade name was needed, so Arthur English, family man, turned into Arthur Ellis, hangman.

Have gallows, will travel was his calling card. A portable hanging machine, made from the wood of the scaffold that hanged the Patriotes of 1837, accompanied the hangman. Assembled with nuts and bolts, it was painted a suitable red.

From 1913 to 1935, Arthur Ellis executed Canada’s killers, as well as the killers in colonies spread around the world. His weakness was a fondness for strong drink, and one night of drunkenness saw him shouting and brandishing a loaded .38 in the middle of an opera at Montreal’s Orpheum Theatre.

What finished Ellis’s career was the botched hanging of Thomasino Sarao. The prison told the hangman that the woman weighed 145 pounds, so he calculated a long drop. What she weighed in fact was 187 pounds, so the sound heard on the scaffold when Ellis released the trap was a squish instead of a thud. The extra weight and gravity had torn off her head.

Now, a new Hangman is on the loose.

Like Thomasino, his victims lose body parts.

The legs and arms are gone.

The body remains.

If there’s another victim, will he tear off its head?

*    *    *

“What you reading, Jeff?”

Ethan had found me in the barristers’ lounge.

“A piece on us.”

“The interview in the
Star?
”

“No, I left Justin’s paper at home.”

“I hear you’ve got Suzy phoning around to secure new office space?”

“We’re moving uptown.”

“You and her?”

“Me, her, and
you
, Eth. What did you think? That I would abandon you if I made it big?”

“You don’t need me.”

“Yes, I do. Every barrister needs a good solicitor.”

“You can have your pick of solicitors now.”

“Who am I going to choose? Some silver spoon? You think that would make me happy? Working with some West Side prick?”

“You’d really stick with me?”

“You’re my right-hand man. It’s onward and upward, Eth. Just one condition: The time has come for you to stop drinking.”

“I drink to drown my sorrows.”

“Your sorrows are gone. You drank because the assholes wore us down. That’s history, buddy. We beat the fuckers. Now we’re going to thrash them at their own game.”

Ethan nodded.

“You’ll quit the bottle?”

Another nod.

“Then it’s a deal. No more puddles of piss at our door. From now on, we do the pissing.”

Ethan smiled.

I gave him a grin.

We shook hands.

Kline & Shaw.

“Is this why you left the message with Suzy for me to come here?”

“No,” I said. “Let’s walk and talk.”

I swung my feet off the table and we left the barristers’ lounge. The hall lined with judges’ photos was deserted at this late hour. The hum of a vacuum cleaner echoed from one of the chambers courts opposite the library. We turned in the other direction and passed through a set of doors that led out to the great hall. It was suddenly colder in this open area, where we had to choose between three routes. The staircase ahead descended to the court registry where I had filed my habeas corpus motion. The escalator ascending beside us to the right doubled back to carry those who had difficulty with stairs up to the next level. Beyond that was the great hall, reached by an entrance that yawned wide in front of the escalator.

That yawn swallowed Ethan and me.

The courts were tiered behind us as we walked into the glass wedge. Voices filled the upper reaches of the huge cavern from the level where the skinhead was being tried for murder. The main doors to our left in the side wall of the wedge were usually locked after the court day was finished, even if a jury was deliberating late. The death of the Sikh, however, was such a racial tinderbox that the chief justice had ordered that nothing be done that would make it look like access to justice was being denied. Painted on the glass beside the doors was a welcome—ALL COURTS WHEN IN SESSION ARE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. So instead of the usual procedure of having the public enter by the back doors, the main doors remained unlocked tonight.

It was murky in the great hall. There was light up on the fifth level, where the trial was going on, but it was insufficient to penetrate down here. The government was cheap when it came to lighting public buildings, so all we had to guide us through the cavern was the glow from a few pot lamps.

The doors slid open to admit an elderly Sikh. His white turban was soaked with rain. The swish of traffic crossing Hornby Street on Nelson came in with him. Cars streaked by in flashes of white and red. The doors slid shut to exclude their noise.

Another turn right put the doors at our back. The Sikh took the escalator that rose from the U between us and the dim entrance from which we had emerged. A concrete divider separated us from him. Eth and I faced a flight of thirty wide stairs, and by the time we climbed them to reach the next level, the Sikh had left the escalator to trudge his way up the zigzag route that scaled the tiers of courts.

With the toe of the wedge to one side and the stack of courts to the other, we walked the length of the great hall while rain ran in rivulets down the sloping glass roof. So heavy was the downpour that lights glittering in the office towers looming overhead had no more definition than bright smears. So cold was it in the vault that we could see our breath. So shadowy was it at the far end that the bust of Lord Denning, Britain’s great judge, could have been a mugger skulking to waylay the two of us in the dark.

“You’re not out of the woods, Eth. You must keep that in mind.”

“You think they’ll charge me?”

“They could,” I replied. “There’s nothing to stop the AG from giving his consent.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“I know. You were framed. What we must decide is what do we do about it?”

The statue of the goddess of justice blocked our way. Blindfolded Themis stood on her pedestal, her cape flowing behind and her scales held high. At her feet stood Ethan and I.

“Twins are strange, Eth. The bond that ties them together is almost supernatural. An identical twin is like a doppelgänger, the ghostly double or counterpart of a living person. Your twin brothers had that bond, so that’s why Justin is obsessed with Peter’s hanging. Psychologically, he was hanged too.”

Ethan shook his head.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Justin and Peter weren’t identical twins. They were fraternal twins.”

“So?” I said.

“They didn’t share the same DNA. And they didn’t look alike.”

“Nature or nurture? They shared a
womb
, Eth. You can’t get closer to a brother than that.”

“What’s your point?”

“Justin is sick. And we can use that sickness to help both him
and
you.”

“How?” he said.

“Listen and I’ll explain. Justin is the Hangman. He has hanged five people. Konrad in Seattle, because she was on Peter’s jury. Curry in Vancouver, to throw the cops off track. Busby in Seattle, because he too was on that jury. Hunt on the boat, after she figured out who he was. And the Greek in Seattle, to kill two birds with one stone. Not only did hanging him avenge what he did to Peter, but hanging the Greek while you were in jail might have helped free you.”

Ethan frowned.

“Now what’s wrong?”

“Something I should have noticed about Justin’s trip to Vancouver.”

“You mean when he drove up to see your mom? And to get the page proofs from you?”

“Yes,” he said. “The same night Jayne Curry was hanged in Vancouver.”

“So what’s wrong?”

“He
drove
up, Jeff. That’s what Justin told me when he phoned from Mom’s and we agreed to meet later for dinner to discuss his book. He was already at the restaurant when I arrived, and could have lynched the Curry woman in the interim. After we ate, I drove him to the airport, where we drank in the lounge until he caught the last flight to Seattle. What didn’t log in my mind as a mystery before now was that if he
drove
up to Vancouver in a car, what happened to the vehicle when he
flew
home?”

“Maybe it was a one-way rent-a-car.”

“I suppose.”

“You can ask him when he comes up to talk with me.”

“Justin’s coming?”

“He will when you ask.”

There was some sort of commotion upstairs, as two men got into a war of words. The term “Nazi” was used by one and the term “raghead” by the other. The trial was being retried outside the court.

“You’re in danger of standing trial for a murder Justin committed. Justin’s in danger of being charged with the Hangman crimes in the States. If he is, your brother will face the noose himself, so how I suggest we defuse both dangers is this.

“Justin retains me to act for him in the Hangman case. In exchange for surrendering the Hangman to the Mounties, I’ll get them to guarantee to try him here for the Canadian crimes, and to make Seattle authorities promise not to seek the death penalty if they attempt to extradite him later.

“That will free you from being a suspect in the Hunt murder. When Justin stands trial for the Hangman crimes, I’ll plead him not guilty by reason of mental disorder. That disorder will be that he was psychotic at the time, and was suffering under the delusion
that he was his brother.
Because of the psychic bond existing between twins, Justin thought he was possessed by the spirit of his dead brother, and Peter Haddon used him as a means to seek revenge from beyond the grave. The defense can also be raised to stop any attempt by the Americans to extradite him south to face a hangman in the States.”

“How do you know he’s insane?”

“I don’t,” I said. “But shrinks need a cash flow like everyone else, and they’ll be scrambling to take part in that Cadillac defense.”

“So all we need is Justin?”

“That’s your job, buddy.”

“I’ll talk to Mom.”

“When?”

“Tonight,” he said.

“Time is of the essence, Eth. If they charge you with Hunt’s hanging before I can work a deal, I’ll be caught in a conflict of interest if I surrender him to free you.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Good. Call me later.”

I lingered by the statue while he walked toward the stairs and watched him disappear from sight step by descending step. The cavern around me was as bleak and austere as could be, a far cry from the cozy buzz of the Rattenbury courts. I had come a long way since that day in Kinky’s court when Mrs. Mudge’s explosion had hooked me on the law. If there was any justice in this dog-eat-dog world, I wouldn’t have been left to make my name in this shitty shell. So bankrupt of foresight were the silver spoons that they made the dumb mistake of letting the old courthouse go. Like the Old Bailey in London, it had built up respect for the law during the hangman’s reign, and while the Brits had the smarts to keep that tradition going, the slicks from the West Side had trashed it here. The result was this hole, which stood for nothing in a contemptuous time, and nothing proved that point better than the fact that some malcontent had spit on the goddess of justice.

No, it wasn’t spit.

It was a trickle of blood.

A red streak marring the robe of Themis.

I’ll be damned.

Who did that?