Chapter 14

(Monty)

The courtroom was packed with reporters and spectators when Beau Delaney took the stand on Tuesday after the long weekend in May. He had cut his hair shorter, or slightly so, and wore a grey business suit with a soft blue shirt, and a blue and grey striped tie. His demeanour was humble as he stood and swore on the Bible that he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I hovered over my notes at the defence table for a few seconds before we began, to make sure everything was in place for my carefully worked out direct examination of my client. With only an hour or two of leeway on the night of Peggy’s death, I wanted to bring out the evidence very precisely as to Beau’s whereabouts, his exact arrival time home, the weather he encountered on the drive, and the length of time between his discovery of Peggy and his call for the ambulance.

Beau had a present for me, just before he got up to testify. He dropped a piece of paper on the defence table. I picked it up and squinted at it. He couldn’t miss the surprise on my face. “They don’t call me a showboat for nothing!” he said, before he walked to the stand. It was a receipt for a fill-up at a gas station on the highway outside Halifax. It showed that, when the calendar turned over from January 15 to 16, 1992, Beau was still on the road. The time said twelve-fourteen a.m. I clutched it in my hand like a holy relic as I began questioning my client about the night of his wife’s death.

I asked him a few warm-up questions to get the jury familiar with him. He was calm and collected, mild and unassuming, as he told the court a little bit about his life with Peggy. He had been living with another woman, but that relationship foundered on the question of children. After going along for years without any desire for children, Beau began to have a change of heart: he wanted kids after all, and wanted them badly. His girlfriend did not. Things had been going downhill for a while anyway. So that was that. As for Peggy, she had been married to someone else. Children were a factor in the failure of that relationship as well, but in a much more tragic way. She and her husband had had a baby boy, Jonathan, who died of sudden infant death syndrome, known as crib death. The marriage could not survive the couple’s grief and loss.

“So after ending one relationship with a woman who didn’t want kids, I now fell in love with another who felt the same way, although for polar-opposite reasons. Peggy thought that if she had another baby, she would be guilty of trying to replace Jonathan. If she could feel joy with another child, that might mean she had forgotten him, or put him behind her. The thought of that was unbearable to her. Of course that’s not what happens. Each and every child is irreplaceable. By giving another child life, and giving a child a home, by giving herself to another child, how could that take anything away from Jonathan, or her love for Jonathan? Anyone who has more than one child knows what I mean: loving the next one doesn’t detract from the love of the one before. I should know — I have ten! Anyway, Peggy came around, and we were married, and we had Sarah the next year, and Derek came to us the year after that, and then Peggy gave birth to Connor, and then we got Ruth, and on it goes.

“Peggy and I were made for each other. We loved each other, we loved our children. Life was complicated at times, but life was sweet.”

I was vaguely aware of the courtroom door opening behind me, as someone made a noisy entrance and apparently clambered over other spectators to secure a seat. Delaney didn’t notice the commotion, so intent was he on telling the jury about his wife.

“Peggy was a social worker by profession and, not surprisingly, she did most of her work with children. By the time we had three kids in our own house, she quit her job to stay home with the family, but she still volunteered with kids, and became an advocate for children in trouble with the law. Understandably, given what had happened in her own life, and what she saw every day in her work, she tended to be a worrier! She knew about the mishaps and misfortunes and tragedies that could befall children at any minute, but she also knew enough to back off and not be overprotective even when she desperately wanted to. She had a finely tuned sense of humour, and could laugh at her own inclinations in this respect.”

“He didn’t kill, and I can prove it!” The strained, reedy voice of Corbett Reeves had everyone’s attention.

I whirled around and looked at him, sitting forward in his seat and peering intently at his sometime foster father on the stand. I turned back to Delaney, who gave me a quick half shake of his head. Get the kid out of here, was the unmistakeable message. We were of one mind on that; I had no idea what the pale, strange young boy intended to say. But if Beau didn’t want it said in the courtroom, neither did I.

“My Lord,” I said, getting to my feet. “This is not a defence witness, and I respectfully ask either that he be escorted from the courtroom or that the jury be excused while we discuss the matter.”

Kenneth Palmer wasn’t about to take any chances of the trial tanking at this late stage. He turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would ask that you retire to the jury room for a few minutes. You’ll be called back shortly.”

But Corbett did not want to lose his few minutes of fame. He got up and shouted: “You don’t want them to —”

The sheriff had reached him by then, and told him not to say another word. The judge had the same instruction, backed up by the threat of contempt of court. That kept him quiet until the jurors were out of earshot.

But then he started again. “I want to be part of this trial. I want to get on the witness stand, and —”

Justice Palmer interrupted him in a booming voice: “I do not intend to hear another word from you! Understand? Now, Mr. Collins, what do you have to say about this?”

“My Lord, this person is not a witness. He is not a part of our case. And I would ask that, rather than risk any more outbursts and disruptions of the trial, he be removed from the courtroom, and in fact removed from the premises altogether.”

The judge gave a signal to the sheriff, who quickly hustled Corbett out of the courtroom. His final words were: “Nobody wants to hear the truth!”

Gail Kirk glared daggers at me, as if she thought I would stoop to engineering such a spectacle, or as if she might be able to plant that belief in the judge. But Ken Palmer knew otherwise, which was clear from the sympathetic look he gave me, and that was all that mattered. If I were going to engineer anything, it would have been a lot more clear on the subject of my client’s innocence. Corbett’s demeanour did not inspire any confidence in me that he was truly on Delaney’s side. Beau’s reaction said it all: the kid was bad news.

Beau was trying to tell me something else. I stared at him, and he tapped his left wrist with the index finger of his right hand. His eyes darted to the courtroom door. He was directing me to ask for an adjournment. There was a bad moon rising over our case.

“My Lord, I wonder if I could have a few minutes with my client. I respectfully request an adjournment. . . .”

“We’ll adjourn for half an hour. Mr. Delaney, I hope there is no need to remind you that you are still under oath, and that you are not to speak to or communicate with anyone other than Mr. Collins.”

“Of course not, My Lord. I understand.”

Delaney and I fled to a meeting room and shut ourselves inside. I couldn’t hold back. “What the hell is wrong, Beau? Why do I have the feeling that a pale stranger by the name of Corbett Reeves has just attached himself to our case like a limpet mine? I thought the case was going to tank after that Hells Angels testimony. Now it’s this guy. What do you have to tell me, Beau?”

“I was there.”

Of course. He was there when Peggy died. I don’t think I ever really believed otherwise.

My client looked as if he was facing his own death now.

“But I didn’t kill her! It was an accident.”

“What was an accident, Beau?” I realized I was shouting, and I lowered my voice. “You shoving her down the stairs? Accidental because you didn’t realize you were going to do it until it happened?”

“I didn’t push her down the stairs, Monty! We had an argument, and she fell.”

“Can you possibly imagine how this is going to sound to the jury? How it’s going to sound on the evening news?”

“Yeah, Monty, I can. I’m a trial lawyer, remember? But I panicked and reacted like a brainless lowlife. I know how lethal this is for me. I made the biggest mistake of my life when I saw her lying there. I must have been in shock. I made the decision to leave the house and come back and ‘find’ her, and call the ambulance then. Once my story was on tape with emergency services, I was stuck with it.”

“That was bad. Changing it makes it exponentially worse.”

“I know that,” he said between clenched teeth. “Now we have to make the best of it.”

Not for the first or last time, I wondered why I did this for a living. I had to undo my entire case, and fly through uncharted territory by the seat of my pants, on a wing and a prayer, with one engine in flames, and a flock of shit-hawks flying in formation just above my head, ready any minute to drop a load. . . . I took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

“All right, let’s go over it.”

Fifteen minutes later, he was back on the stand. The judge cautioned the jury to disregard the outburst they had heard before they were excused from the room. Does a jury ever really disregard anything it has seen and heard? But I had my client to deal with.

“Now, Mr. Delaney, before we broke, you were telling us about Peggy and her tendency to be a worrier, particularly about her children. Could you tell us what kind of things she worried about?”

“Well, of course, she worried about sickness, given that her first child died in his crib. But she tried not to flutter around the kids all day with a thermometer and a bottle of pills.”

“But she had her concerns.”

“Things bothered her, no question. Crime and violence were up there at the top of things she worried about.” Beau got shakier as he got closer to Peggy’s death. Little wonder, given that he was there on the scene when it happened. “The day she died, there was some horror story in the paper, a brutal crime that had been committed against a perfectly innocent bystander. She was going on and on about it, and that’s when the argument broke out.”

“You and Peggy had an argument . . .”

“Right. She was convinced that the world was getting more violent, more dangerous. People always think that, especially after hearing about a particularly gruesome crime.

“I said to her: ‘When has it not been violent and dangerous? Look at the bloodbaths of the twentieth century. World War One, the Russian Civil War, Stalin, World War Two, the Holocaust, China, Cambodia, over a hundred million people killed.’

“She replied: ‘That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it, so save me your party piece on the warlike impulse in mankind! I’m talking about criminal violence on this continent, in this country, in this city.’

“So I said: ‘In the metropolitan area of Halifax, in the run of a year, we get an average of eight homicides. Eight! Compare that to some of the U.S. cities where they have hundreds of murders every year.’ This is the way we used to argue, on the few occasions we argued at all. It was never ‘You promised you wouldn’t do that, and you did!’ Or ‘You never loved me!’ Or ‘You seem to be working late a lot these days, ever since you hired that new blond secretary!’ It was never stuff like that, because we got along so well on a personal level.”

At that point, my client was close to tears and, from my perspective, his distress appeared to be genuine. Obviously, it was out of the question to ask whether he wanted another break; that would have looked contrived even if we hadn’t had our time out. So I waited for a bit and then continued.

“So this was the kind of thing you argued about.”

“Right. How the world was going. Who was ultimately to blame for the disparity between rich and poor in such and such a country. Crime, of course, was a recurring theme, given what I did for a living. The point I was making was that this is a comparatively safe area of the world.

“But Peg said: ‘People are getting blown away in small-town Nova Scotia! That was your own client, in case you’ve forgotten.’ She was talking about a murder in Truro. The victim was Travis Bullard, who had been my client.

“‘That was an execution,’ I told her. ‘A guy known to police, as the expression goes. Not a random incident. Far from it. The guy was tied to a tree, propped up and shot, no doubt to keep him quiet or to retaliate for offending the Hells Angels or somebody.’

“Then she said: ‘The Hells Angels! They’re after your clients now. What if they think that guy told you something and they come after you to keep you quiet?!’

“I accused her of not listening to reason and said I’d had enough of the argument. I reached out to calm her down, and she yanked her hand out of reach. I grasped her arm, and she pulled back to get away from me, and that’s how she fell. Backwards down the stairs.”

I could hear the muttering and whispering of voices and the scratching of pens on notebooks behind me, as the news sunk in. The two prosecutors were on the edge of their seats, as if ready to attack. Delaney had been home after all.

He continued his story: “She barely made a sound when she landed on the rocks. She didn’t scream or cry out. I just kind of heard the breath go out of her. I stood stock still for a couple of seconds, then leapt down the stairs. She was not breathing. It was obvious that she was dead. That’s when . . . that’s when I left the house and got into the car and drove away.”

I stood there without speaking for a few seconds, then plunged in.

“Mr. Delaney, everyone in this courtroom wants to know why you told the police in your statement that you were not home at the time leading up to Peggy’s death. Please clear that up for us.”

“It was a lie told for self-preservation. I’m sorry. I wish I could take it back. I wish I had told the whole truth right from the beginning. But I panicked. I knew how bad it would look for me if I said I was there. I was afraid that fact alone — after all, I’ve been doing criminal law my whole adult life — I was afraid that fact alone would convict me. I’m standing there, a head taller and eighty pounds heavier; she ends up at the bottom of the stairs; there’s a pressure mark on her arm.”

He turned to face the jury, and spoke to them urgently. “I knew I was innocent, that I hadn’t killed Peggy, but I was afraid I looked guilty. I was terrified that I would be sent away for a murder I didn’t commit, and that my children would be all split up, some of them in foster homes, in group homes, back with violent and dysfunctional families, after all Peggy and I had done to forge a strong family life for them. For all of us. I couldn’t bear the thought of that, so I did what I could to try to avoid it. I have spent my entire career defending people who do illegal, evil, or stupid things and then lie about them. I always thought I would be more honest than that, or at least more clever. But no.

“It was stupid of me,” he said, “stupid and unprofessional. Morally and legally wrong. You can perhaps imagine how deeply I regret my actions in that respect. I am truly sorry.”

I waited a couple of seconds, then asked him: “What did you do then?”

“I took off in the car, went out driving on the highway, trying to come to grips with what had happened, and what I should do.”

“How long were you out driving?”

“An hour and a half, two hours, something like that.”

Long enough and far enough to burn off some fuel, and make a credible stop to top up his gas tank. I was thankful that we had not got to the point where I was going to submit the cherished midnight gas receipt as evidence. Nobody else need ever know about it, especially the Crown, the judge, and the jury!

“What time did you get home again?”

“Twelve thirty-five. That is probably when Mr. Gorman saw me. The second time he saw me, I should say. After the snow had started.”

“What happened then?”

“I went in and called for the ambulance.”

“Thank you, Mr. Delaney.”

Now it was time to hand him over for vivisection by the Crown. Gail Kirk rose to her feet. Delaney steeled himself for what was to come.

“Mr. Delaney, you lied to the police, did you not?” Gail wasn’t going to waste time on chit-chat.

“Yes, regrettably, I did.”

“You now expect us to believe that you are telling the truth today. That you didn’t kill your wife, even though you were right there, and the two of you were engaged in a heated argument, and you grabbed her arm. Why should we believe you stopped there? Why should we believe you when we know you lied?”

“I hope I will be believed, because it’s the truth. My actions were stupid and cowardly but, despite appearances, they were the actions of an innocent man.”

“If you were innocent, Mr. Delaney, why set up an elaborate ruse by leaving the house and staging a second coming? You are well known in this city. You’re a long-standing member of the bar. Surely, you would have thought, if you were innocent, people would believe you, or at least give you the benefit of the doubt pending the outcome of the investigation. Don’t you agree?”

“We never know how we’re going to react when we’re tested in a situation of incalculable stress. I failed the test. Miserably.”

“You weren’t going to tell us the difference, were you, Mr. Delaney?”

Silence.

“You fully intended to maintain that lie, didn’t you? You had no intention of coming clean with the court and the jury, until . . . what, Mr. Delaney?”

Silence again.

“Until certain events in this courtroom made it impossible for you to keep up the fiction any longer, starting with your daughter’s revelation about the Hells Angels conversation — of course that was a conversation, not a woman talking to herself! And, well, it just became impossible to keep the lie going, didn’t it, Mr. Delaney?”

“All I can say, Ms. Kirk, is that I loved Peggy, I didn’t kill her, I panicked when she died, and I have lived ever since with the terror of being wrongfully convicted of her death, and being sent away from my children, and seeing my family torn apart and dispersed.”

“What did you do when you went down the stairs immediately after Peggy fell?”

No reply.

“Mr. Delaney? Did you bend down, take her in your arms, say something to her?”

He hesitated, then replied: “I knew she was dead.”

“You made that decision instantly? She’s dead? No cradling her in your arms? No crying out her name? Nothing?”

“Objection, My Lord,” I said. “My learned friend is badgering the witness, and not letting him answer the questions.”

“Overruled. Carry on, Ms. Kirk.”

“Well? Mr. Delaney? What did you do in those first seconds after your wife’s fall?”

“I just stood there, in shock.”

“Did you touch her?”

Another long hesitation. Then: “No. I panicked and left.”

“You tell us you panicked, and yet you were calm enough to refrain from calling out ‘Peggy!’ or shaking her, or even checking her pulse. You made an apparently calm and collected decision, within seconds of her fall, that she was dead and nothing could be done for her.”

Beau said nothing.

“You’re a highly trained, very experienced criminal lawyer, aren’t you, Mr. Delaney?”

“I am a defence lawyer, yes.”

“Were you concerned about contaminating a crime scene, leaving traces of yourself —”

“No. I simply did not know what to do.”

It went on like that for two hours. Kirk proceeded to take Delaney through the events of that night, minute by minute, chipping away at his story, leaving no doubt in the jury’s mind that she considered his version of events — his Plan B version of events — unworthy of belief.

I got up on redirect, not that I had anything I wanted to do aside from give him another chance to proclaim his innocence to the court. We adjourned in the middle of the afternoon, and would return the next day for our summations and the judge’s charge to the jury.

The media were all over us when we left the courtroom, firing questions at Delaney and at me about his dramatic reversal on the stand. I tried to put a good face on it, but I was beyond caring at that point. I had no intention of watching, hearing, or reading any news about the day’s events. Beau did a better job. By turns humble and defiant, he pleaded his case as a wrong-headed but innocent man blown completely off course by the sudden death of his beloved wife.

I stayed away from my client that evening. Instead I went to the Midtown Tavern with Father Burke to lift a few pints and confess to the sins of anger and thinking ill of my fellow man. “I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment, and whoever says ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hellfire.” That sort of thing.

I gave an impassioned summation on my client’s behalf the next morning. I stressed all the glowing references given by our character witnesses. I emphasized that there was no reason Mr. Delaney wanted his wife dead, and every reason for him to want her alive, to be with him and their ten children. True, they had an argument. But that argument had not ended in violence. If it had, there would have been signs of it. Such as blood at the top of the stairs if he had struck her on the back of the head. Significantly, there were no signs of a struggle apart from the pressure wound on Peggy’s arm. There was no skin or other material of any kind under her fingernails. And if Mr. Delaney had done this, how, in such a state of rage, did he manage to carry her body down the stairs and arrange it with absolute perfection on the rock at precisely the angle that would have caused the wound as it was measured in the autopsy?

Instead, Mr. Delaney panicked. And what did he do in his panic? Something he himself described as stupid and cowardly. He fled the scene, and then tried to cover up for himself later. He did not, calmly and precisely, arrange his wife’s body at the foot of the stairs. The Crown had presented no evidence that Mr. Delaney was, ever, a violent man. In fact, when attacked late at night by a client who was drunk and on drugs, Mr. Delaney defused the situation and did not react with violence, as Mr. Theriault so forthrightly testified. I mentioned the ten children as often as I decently could, to drive home the fact that he would not have wanted Peggy dead, and to remind the jury what was at stake if he were convicted. I did the best I could.

Unfortunately, when the defence calls witnesses, the Crown has the advantage of speaking last. Gail Kirk spoke with considerable eloquence, and barely restrained sarcasm, about the unlikely story Delaney was relying on to avoid conviction for murder. That was followed by Justice Palmer’s charge to the jury. The instructions were even-handed and fair; it would not be easy to find in them grounds of appeal. Then it was up to the jury. They retired at three thirty in the afternoon that Wednesday to begin their deliberations.

I was not at all confident of my client’s chances. Nor was I confident that I had heard everything I should have heard about him, Peggy, and the unwelcome new boy in town, Corbett Reeves.

(Normie)

“He’s going to bleed me of every cent I have! We’re going to wind up in the poorhouse! What do you mean, calm myself down? He wants to take my son out of the country, and he obviously hopes to bankrupt me so I’ll have to give up the fight. Money is no object in Giacomo’s family. The lawyer has come up with all these Charter of Rights challenges. They’re bogus, but they’ll drag things out and require endless court appearances and filings, and — Brennan, have you heard a word I’ve been saying?”

The poorhouse? What was that? Was it like an asylum? Were we going to have to live there? I was really scared when I came into the house Thursday after school, and heard Mum on the phone in the kitchen. I usually yell “Hi Mum!” when I get in, but I just tiptoed into the living room and sat down.

“His lawyer is here from Italy, and I met with them. I certainly wasn’t going to call Beau Delaney while he’s waiting for the jury’s verdict! He’s probably curled up in the fetal position on his bed. So I left the baby with my friend Fanny, and went by myself. The lawyer, Pacchini, was very cordial in the beginning, and is very knowledgeable about Canadian law.” (I had his name down in my diary as “Pakeenee,” but the real spelling is “Pacchini.” Anyway, Mum was still talking.) “You just have to spend two minutes in this guy’s presence and you know he’s brilliant. So the pressure is on: settle this now, give us the six months in Italy, or face months — years! — of soul-destroying, family-savings-draining litigation. I’ve seen this kind of thing, Brennan; it takes over your life, it —”

This was horrible! Mum was really, really upset. Father Burke must have been trying to make her feel better, but how could she? How could any of us ever feel better again? I went out to the porch and made a big noise with the front door, so she’d know I was home.

I heard her say: “Here’s Normie. Last thing I want is her hearing this. I have to go.” Click. “Hi, sweetie! How are you doing?”

“Fine, thanks, Mum. How about you?”

“Good, dear, good,” she said in this funny Cape Breton accent, which usually makes me laugh. “We’re going over to Fanny’s. She’s looking after Dominic today, because I had some errands to run. With any luck, she’s made some of her famous chocolate and almond cookies. If she hasn’t, we’ll plead with her to make them and we’ll hang around in the kitchen till she does. Sound like a plan?”

“Yep. Let’s go get Dominic and the cookies. Mum?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Do you think he’s there?”

“Who?”

“Dominic. At Fanny’s.”

“Of course he is! He’s too young to run away with the circus. Let’s go.”

(Monty)

We heard nothing from the jury on Thursday. On Friday I got the call at two o’clock in the afternoon. The jury was coming in. The tension while waiting for the verdict in a murder trial is almost unbearable. With any client. Here, we had a highly accomplished, well-respected lawyer with a family of ten motherless children, a family that would be ripped apart if their father was found guilty and sent to prison. I called him. He answered and then dropped the phone. I could hear footsteps pounding away in the opposite direction. I waited. A few minutes later, Beau spoke in a voice I barely recognized. “I’ll meet you there.”

Beau Delaney was grey and trembling when we met at the law courts. Everyone filed into the courtroom and waited for the jurors. They came in and took their seats. Had they reached a verdict? Yes, they had. The foreman stood, was asked for the verdict, and gave it: not guilty.

Beau slumped in his seat as if every bone in his body had turned to jelly. His family and supporters behind us loudly expressed their relief. I stood there, stunned. I had hardly dared hope for an acquittal. A wishy-washy manslaughter result, maybe. But, no. My client was a free man. He pulled himself together, rose from his seat, and put out his hand. I shook it. “Monty, thank you for a superb defence. Justice has been done. I’m overcome right now, and I can’t begin to express my thanks appropriately. But you can be sure I will, and I’ll be forever grateful.”