Table Of ContentCONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
PART TWO
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
PART THREE
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
ERISICHTHON
ALSO BY WILLIAM DEVERELL
COPYRIGHT
To the Sierra Legal Defence Fund and
all defenders of our natural heritage…
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 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, and from Jan Kirkby, landscape
ecologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service. 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.”
–Two Gentlemen of Verona
1
M
ick 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 blond, 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
“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
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 locals call it. She says she is a jazz aficionada, pronouncing that
obscure word correctly, he assumes.
He explains bluntly, lest there be any confusion, that his girlfriend works in
that bar, Claudette, and she’ll be happy to know you met Nick Faloon and will
make you feel at home. As he describes how to get the water taxi and find her
way, Dr. Winters seems to be casing him, and this makes him uncomfortable.
Does she read his mind, does she know things are getting on him, that he’s been
sleepwalking, that two nights ago he woke up outside the lodge in his
underwear?
“How unfortunate that your friend, Claudette, isn’t with you tonight.”
He doesn’t know how to take that–is he seen as cheesy, he doesn’t take his
girlfriend to this expensive restaurant? Or is that an opener, she wants to analyze
their relationship. Maybe she divines it’s been rocky lately with him and
Claudette. He never should have made out with that logging-camp whore.
“Yeah, unhappily she works late on Fridays, and has to stay over in East
Bamfield.” Which has an upside, he won’t have to explain to Claudette he was
on a prowl tonight. “You go over there, you should introduce yourself, she’ll
protect you from the loggers that will be hitting on you.”
He hopes Eve Winters sees that as more a compliment than suggestive, and
apparently so, because she offers a smile with clean white teeth and thanks him.
