Children in the Morning (43 page)

“He was just a wee little boy. Four years old, I think he was. The morning we arrived, he was standing inside the doorway, skinny and filthy, his shorts soiled from, well, lack of proper hygiene. There were tear tracks in the grime of his face. He was holding a fireplace poker in his hands, ready to defend himself, it seemed. I took a step towards him, and he pointed it at me as if it were a gun or a bayonet. I said:

‘You could hurt somebody. You don’t want to do that.’ ‘I do! I’m going to!’ he cried out, and he raised it up and started to bring it down on 279

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my head. But I got the poker out of his hands. He began to scream, and scream, and scream. Rage, fear, God only knows what else. I knelt down and took him in my arms. He went absolutely rigid.

“It took a long, long time to bring him around, to get him to the point where he could accept love and affection. I remember sitting in the parlour after we had fed the children. It was around Christmas-time and someone had brought us a box of Florida oranges. The children went crazy; you’d think they’d each been given a brand new bicycle. But Beau refused his. Wouldn’t even look at it. Anyway, I was sitting by myself, peeling my orange, and he wandered in. I ate a section of the orange and offered him one. He hesitated, then took it.

Tasted it. His eyes grew wide, and he gave me a great big smile. I leaned over and hugged him. He hugged me back. He began to sob and soon he was positively howling. With grief and desolation. Only now was he getting the love and attention he should have had all his life. He clung to me and wouldn’t let go. He was like that for the next little while. Always around, holding one or another of us by the hand, or by the leg. He suffered a setback when we had a little baby die here. Beau came into the room when Father McDevitt was giving the baby extreme unction. We were standing around the crib, me and some of the other sisters, while he gave the last rites.”

Was this what Normie had seen? People in black robes standing around a dying baby? And another child in the room, crying.

“Sister, what goes on during the last rites? What does the priest do?” I turned to Monsignor O’Flaherty. He gestured towards Sister Theodora to reply.

“This time, when the baby died — his name was Timmy — the ritual of extreme unction was burned into my mind because we all loved that poor little baby. The priest anointed his eyes, his ears, mouth, hands, and feet, and then we said goodbye and pulled his blanket up over his face.”

The man touching the baby under his blanket in Normie’s vision.

Not abuse, but the last rites of death.

“Beau wandered in and saw this, and began crying and screaming.

It took a long time for him to come around again. But eventually he did.

“He began to be a regular little helper about the place. Couldn’t 280

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do enough for us. He was adopted shortly after that, by the Delaneys.

A match made in heaven. How they doted on him! He blossomed under their care. He was a tiny, undersized little boy when he came to us. You wouldn’t know it, he’s such a big man now. Children don’t thrive when they’re neglected, when they’re not given love and affection. But we loved him when he came here! Then of course he was all set once he went with the Delaneys. And he grew to the size his genetic makeup intended for him! There are studies showing the same phenomenon over and over again. Anyway, Beau never gave the Delaneys a moment’s grief, at least not that I ever heard. They moved to Halifax just before he started school. Well, you know the rest. He buckled right down, became an A student, the perfect son. He went on to university and law school. Once in a while, his courtroom exploits make the news up here, and we love to read about him, especially when he’s defending the less fortunate, those who never get a break. It’s not surprising that Beau would have an affinity for the underdog. So there you have it. A life well lived, after a disastrous beginning.”

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Chapter 20

(Monty)

“You and I are going to talk about Robby Tompkins,” I told Beau on Monday when I had seated myself in his luxurious office overlooking Halifax Harbour. I could see him making a conscious effort not to react, but his eyes went to the door. Yes, it was firmly closed. He turned and gazed out the window at the magnificent view of the water. Then he took a deep breath and faced me.

“The whole time I was representing Adam Gower, I was barely able to stomach it. I couldn’t look the Hubley or Tompkins families in the eye. Gower just didn’t give a damn. Anything would have been better than that. ‘The other guy made me do it.’ ‘I didn’t mean to aim at her head.’ ‘I was drunk.’ Anything but ‘yeah, I did it, so what are you going to do for me?’ All those months of that insufferable little shit, leading up to the trial. Then sitting in court hearing about what became of the victims. Scott Hubley, of course, lost his life at the age of seventeen. Cathy Tompkins was a top student in high school. Her dream was to be a nurse at the IWK Children’s Hospital.

But she knew she’d have to earn some money before going for her 282

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nursing degree, because the family couldn’t afford it. So she was working every hour she could while attending school. After the shooting, she was in a coma for several days. Suffered paralysis and irreversible brain damage. Confined to a wheelchair. Pretty face twisted, like that of an old woman with a stroke. Her moods would swing from weeping depression to screaming rage. Life over. And everybody in the community hated my guts because I was helping the guy who did this to her. Well, you know what that’s like. It never used to bother me. I was on a crusade, I was the champion of the despised, I defended people other decent human beings wouldn’t be in the same room with. But it got to me this time. Anyway, as you know, I got him off. He went out west to look for work. And I couldn’t show my face in Blockhouse, Lunenburg County, again.

“Then, in November of the following year, I got a call from Gower.

He’d had enough of working construction in Fort McMurray; he was coming home. And he’d got himself into some kind of scrape out there in the oil patch, so he left in a hurry. Could I help him again?

He was here in Halifax, calling from a pay phone at the bus station on Almon Street. I didn’t want him in the office, didn’t want word to get out that he was back in the province. There were rumours that he might be returning, but that was nothing new; there had been rumours before. I didn’t know what to do about him but I said I’d pick him up, maybe drop him off at a youth hostel or something. I left the office and didn’t mention Gower’s name to anyone, just said I had to go out. So I pulled up outside the bus station and waited.

He got into the car, said he wanted to go back to Blockhouse. I reminded him there were death threats against him — and against me, for that matter — and I pleaded with him not to go there. Not that I really cared whether somebody shot him in the head. What I couldn’t stand was the thought of how painful it would be for Cathy and her family, and the family of Scott Hubley. But I started driving out of town anyway. I knew Gower had an aunt in Hebbville, farther out Highway 103, so maybe he could go there till he came to his senses. He just babbled on, as if he was a normal guy who hadn’t destroyed all these people’s lives.

“We were driving along and I was thinking how much I hated this guy. We were out on the 103, coming into Lunenburg County, and 283

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do you know what he said to me? ‘Wait till word gets around that Adam’s back in town. I’ll be front-page news!’ He was sitting there laughing about it! I turned and gave him a look of disgust and he said: ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!’ I could barely speak but I managed to ask him: ‘What the hell are you going to say to Cathy Tompkins if you see her in her wheelchair?’ This is what he said: ‘I don’t know. Maybe, like,
sucks to be you, babe!’
And he pulled the left side of his face down. Making fun of Cathy’s facial deformity!”

As I listened to Beau telling the story of what happened back in 1980, I realized this was not the story of Robby Tompkins taking revenge on the man who had destroyed his little sister’s life. As I struggled to grasp what I was hearing, Beau continued:

“I fucking lost it, Monty. I yanked the steering wheel to the right and screeched to a stop on the shoulder of the highway. Then I looked ahead and saw a turnoff to a dirt road, an old logging road or something. I gunned it and made a turn into that road. I nearly flipped the car over. I got it under control and parked. Adam started to freak out. I told him to get the fuck out of the car, and he fumbled with the door handle. He practically fell out onto the ground. I started to get out; then I thought of something. I grabbed a pair of old leather gloves from the glove compartment, pulled them on, got out, went around to the other side, and grabbed him. He was nearly shitting himself. With good reason. I shoved him in behind some trees. I went at him in a rage. I beat the crap out of him, and when he was down I kicked him, and kicked him, and kicked him. In the face, in the head, everywhere. I don’t think there was a bone in his body that wasn’t broken. I left him there and went back to the car.”

I stared at Delaney, but he was barely aware of my presence. He was back on the 103 Highway in November of 1980.

“I started to drive away, then figured I’d better take his wallet.

Believe me, there was no other way to identify him. Like everything else, his wallet was soaked with blood. I had a plastic grocery bag in the trunk, so I placed the wallet in that. There wasn’t much blood on me, except on the front of my jacket and on the gloves.

“I was terrified that I’d be spotted, but I drove back in the direction of Halifax, then took the long way around to the eastern shore.

Went all the way to our cottage at Lawrencetown Beach. Of course 284

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at that time of the year there was nobody around. I went inside and got myself cleaned up, wrapped the gloves for later disposal, called Peg to tell her where I was, and gave her some bogus reason why I was there. I pretended I got interrupted and asked her to call me back, so we’d have double phone records to show I was really there, if the need ever arose. But it never did. Anyway, once I got rid of all the traces of blood, and got over the shakes, I drove back to Halifax, approaching the city from the opposite direction from where the murder had taken place. But, as I say, I never needed to produce any evidence of my innocence. The body wasn’t found for several days, and nobody connected me with it. Ever. They arrested Robby Tompkins for it. I knew I had to do something to get him off the hook. When Edgar Lampman died, it all fell into place. I set up the Edgar Lampman story and planted the evidence in his yard. Then invited the Mounties along to find it. Murder solved, deceased habit-ual criminal framed, innocent brother set free.”

I was shell-shocked. I had no idea how to react.

Beau seemed to shake himself back to the present. “I’m going to give Father Burke the benefit of the doubt here, and assume he didn’t tell you anything about my confession.”

“Your confession!?”

“He didn’t tell you I went to see him on Friday?”

“No! Brennan Burke wouldn’t break the confessional seal if they had his feet to the flames.”

That’s what Normie had witnessed at the school: Delaney urging Burke to hear his confession. This was after I confronted Beau at my office, after I told him I “knew about Robby Tompkins.” I knew a hell of a lot more now than I did then. And I understood why Burke had been paying such close attention to the movie that had made Beau Delaney a household name all across Canada as a crusader for justice.

Then there was the documentary. Something had struck me a while back, something about the documentary that didn’t make sense when I had seen it the second time, on the night of the awards dinner. Now I had it. And maybe Brennan did too. Beau’s client Travis Bullard had been killed last spring. The rcmp gave a press conference outside the detachment in Truro. A reporter asked whether there was a Hells Angels link to the killing. The officer sidestepped 285

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the question and said only that Bullard had been shot with a handgun. More details would be released later. But they never were, presumably because the police weren’t yet able to make a case against their prime suspect, a member of the Hells Angels. Beau and the reporter talked about Bullard being a Hells Angels associate. Then Peggy chimed in and said that was the longest night of her life. And Beau cut her off.

That was the line that had bothered me when I heard it. And that was the line Brennan had been zeroing in on when I found him in Michael O’Flaherty’s room. Why would Peggy have described that as the longest night of her life? She would not have known about the killing that night. It happened in Truro, a town an hour north of Halifax. She would have heard about it the next day, perhaps, or the day after that. Unless Beau got a call about it at home. But then why was that a long night for her? Or maybe Beau was not home, and she was waiting for him to return.

I looked across the desk at Beau. He was a man lost in his own thoughts.

There was something else, too, I remembered: testimony at Beau’s trial. But I had not understood its significance at the time. Beau testified about his argument with Peggy at the top of the stairs. She said something about people being blown away in small town Nova Scotia, and that one of the victims was his own client. She was worried that the killers might come after Beau himself. And he had reassured her by saying that the killing had been an execution. The guy, Bullard, had been tied to a tree and shot.